Background:
Prince William Sound is a sound of the Gulf of Alaska on the south coast of the U.S. state of Alaska. It is located on the east side of the Kenai Peninsula. Its largest port is Valdez, at the southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. Other settlements on the sound, which contains numerous small islands, include Cordova and Whittier plus the Alaska native villages of Chenega and Tatitlek.
James Cook entered Prince William Sound in 1778 and named it Sandwich Sound, after his patron the Earl of Sandwich. The Sound was named in 1778 to honour George III\'s third son Prince William Henry, then aged 13 and serving as a midshipman in the Royal Navy.

Norton Sound is an inlet of the Bering Sea on the western coast of the U.S. state of Alaska, south of the Seward Peninsula. It is about 240 km long and 200 km wide. The Yukon River delta forms a portion of the south shore and water from the Yukon influences this body of water. It is ice-free from June to October.
Norton Sound was explored by Captain James Cook in September 1778. He named the body of water after Sir Fletcher Norton, then Speaker of the British House of Commons.

Cook Third Voyage (1776–79)
On his last voyage, Cook again commanded HMS Resolution, while Captain Charles Clerke commanded HMS Discovery. The voyage was ostensibly planned to return the Pacific Islander, Omai to Tahiti, or so the public were led to believe. The trips principal goal was to locate a Northwest Passage around the American continent. After dropping Omai at Tahiti, Cook travelled north and in 1778 became the first European to begin formal contact with the Hawaiian Islands. After his initial landfall in January 1778 at Waimea harbour, Kauai, Cook named the archipelago the Sandwich Islands after the fourth Earl of Sandwich—the acting First Lord of the Admiralty.
From the Sandwich Islands Cook sailed north and then north-east to explore the west coast of North America north of the Spanish settlements in Alta California. He made landfall on the Oregon coast at approximately 44°30′ north latitude, naming his landing point Cape Foulweather. Bad weather forced his ships south to about 43° north before they could begin their exploration of the coast northward. He unknowingly sailed past the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and soon after entered Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. He anchored near the First Nations village of Yuquot. Cooks two ships remained in Nootka Sound from 29 March to 26 April 1778, in what Cook called Ship Cove, now Resolution Cove, at the south end of Bligh Island, about 5 miles (8 km) east across Nootka Sound from Yuquot, lay a Nuu-chah-nulth village (whose chief Cook did not identify but may have been Maquinna). Relations between Cooks crew and the people of Yuquot were cordial if sometimes strained. In trading, the people of Yuquot demanded much more valuable items than the usual trinkets that had worked in Hawaii. Metal objects were much desired, but the lead, pewter, and tin traded at first soon fell into disrepute. The most valuable items which the British received in trade were sea otter pelts. During the stay, the Yuquot hosts essentially controlled the trade with the British vessels; the natives usually visited the British vessels at Resolution Cove instead of the British visiting the village of Yuquot at Friendly Cove.
After leaving Nootka Sound, Cook explored and mapped the coast all the way to the Bering Strait, on the way identifying what came to be known as Cook Inlet in Alaska. In a single visit, Cook charted the majority of the North American north-west coastline on world maps for the first time, determined the extent of Alaska, and closed the gaps in Russian (from the West) and Spanish (from the South) exploratory probes of the Northern limits of the Pacific.
By the second week of August 1778 Cook was through the Bering Strait, sailing into the Chukchi Sea. He headed north-east up the coast of Alaska until he was blocked by sea ice. His furthest north was 70 degrees 44 minutes. Cook then sailed west to the Siberian coast, and then south-east down the Siberian coast back to the Bering Strait. By early September 1778 he was back in the Bering Sea to begin the trip to the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands. He became increasingly frustrated on this voyage, and perhaps began to suffer from a stomach ailment; it has been speculated that this led to irrational behaviour towards his crew, such as forcing them to eat walrus meat, which they had pronounced inedible.
Cook returned to Hawaii in 1779. After sailing around the archipelago for some eight weeks, he made landfall at Kealakekua Bay, on Hawaii Island, largest island in the Hawaiian Archipelago. Cooks arrival coincided with the Makahiki, a Hawaiian harvest festival of worship for the Polynesian god Lono. Coincidentally the form of Cooks ship, HMS Resolution, or more particularly the mast formation, sails and rigging, resembled certain significant artifacts that formed part of the season of worship. Similarly, Cook\\\\\\\'s clockwise route around the island of Hawaii before making landfall resembled the processions that took place in a clockwise direction around the island during the Lono festivals. It has been argued (most extensively by Marshall Sahlins) that such coincidences were the reasons for Cook\\\\\\\'s (and to a limited extent, his crews) initial deification by some Hawaiians who treated Cook as an incarnation of Lono. Though this view was first suggested by members of Cooks expedition, the idea that any Hawaiians understood Cook to be Lono, and the evidence presented in support of it, were challenged in 1992.
After a months stay, Cook attempted to resume his exploration of the Northern Pacific. Shortly after leaving Hawaii Island, however, the Resolution\\\\\\\'s foremast broke, so the ships returned to Kealakekua Bay for repairs.
Tensions rose, and a number of quarrels broke out between the Europeans and Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay. An unknown group of Hawaiians took one of Cooks small boats. The evening when the cutter was taken, the people had become insolent even with threats to fire upon them. Cook was forced into a wild goose chase that ended with his return to the ship frustrated. He attempted to kidnap and ransom the King of Hawaiʻi, Kalaniʻōpuʻu.
That following day, 14 February 1779, Cook marched through the village to retrieve the King. Cook took the King (aliʻi nui) by his own hand and led him willingly away. One of Kalaniʻōpuʻus favorite wives, Kanekapolei and two chiefs approached the group as they were heading to boats. They pleaded with the king not to go until he stopped and sat where he stood. An old kahuna (priest), chanting rapidly while holding out a coconut, attempted to distract Cook and his men as a large crowd began to form at the shore. The king began to understand that Cook was his enemy. As Cook turned his back to help launch the boats, he was struck on the head by the villagers and then stabbed to death as he fell on his face in the surf. He was first struck on the head with a club by a chief named Kalaimanokahoʻowaha or Kanaʻina (namesake of Charles Kana\\\\\\\'ina) and then stabbed by one of the king\\\\\\\'s attendants, Nuaa. The Hawaiians carried his body away towards the back of the town, still visible to the ship through their spyglass. Four marines, Corporal James Thomas, Private Theophilus Hinks, Private Thomas Fatchett and Private John Allen, were also killed and two others were wounded in the confrontation.
The esteem which the islanders nevertheless held for Cook caused them to retain his body. Following their practice of the time, they prepared his body with funerary rituals usually reserved for the chiefs and highest elders of the society. The body was disembowelled, baked to facilitate removal of the flesh, and the bones were carefully cleaned for preservation as religious icons in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of the treatment of European saints in the Middle Ages. Some of Cook\\\\\\\'s remains, thus preserved, were eventually returned to his crew for a formal burial at sea.
Clerke assumed leadership of the expedition, and made a final attempt to pass through the Bering Strait. He died from tuberculosis on 22 August 1779 and John Gore, a veteran of Cooks first voyage, took command of Resolution and of the expedition. James King replaced Gore in command of Discovery. The expedition returned home, reaching England in October 1780. After their arrival in England, King completed Cook\\\\\\\'s account of the voyage.
David Samwell, who sailed with Cook on Resolution, wrote of him: He was a modest man, and rather bashful; of an agreeable lively conversation, sensible and intelligent. In temper he was somewhat hasty, but of a disposition the most friendly, benevolent and humane. His person was above six feet high: and, though a good looking man, he was plain both in dress and appearance. His face was full of expression: his nose extremely well shaped: his eyes which were small and of a brown cast, were quick and piercing; his eyebrows prominent, which gave his countenance altogether an air of austerity.

Bankes, Thomas
Geographers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries recognized two great divisions of their discipline. These were General or Universal geography, which dealt with ‘the whole Earth in general, and explained its properties without regard to particular countries’; and ‘Special’ or ‘Particular’ geography, which dealt with ‘the Constitution and Situation of each single Country by itself. As the second great age of modern geographical exploration developed in the second half of the eighteenth century, ‘Particular’ geography, as here defined, became the dominant emphasis of English geographers, who now had a fifth great geographical region, the Pacific Ocean, to describe.
The geography books which appeared in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, by Salmon, Guthrie, Middleton, Millar, Bankes, Adams, and others, retain some signs of an earlier mathematical emphasis in their organization. Their titles customarily announce a ‘New System of Universal Geography’, and they contain a ‘Complete Guide to Geography, Astronomy, the Use of the Globes, Maps, &c’. These authors’ primary concern is with ‘Particular’ geography, however, and, as a consequence, these books are of considerable significance to students of the history of ideas, for the light they shed on English interest in geography and geographical exploration at the end of the eighteenth century.
One of the most imposing of these usually quite imposing books is Thomas Bankes, Edward Warren Blake, and Alexander Cook\\\'s A New, Royal and Authentic System of Universal Geography, Antient and Modern: All the late important Discoveries made by the English, and other celebrated Navigators of various Nations, in the different Hemispheres, from the Celebrated Columbus, the first Discoverer of America, to the Death of our no less celebrated Countryman Captain Cook, & c. and the Latest Accounts of the English Colony of Botany Bay. A massive folio volume of 990 double-columned pages, this was a popular work, running to six editions in the ten years from 1787 to 1797.
These editions have never been accurately described, however, and, since none of the titlepages is dated, much doubt persists about their dating and sequence. Bibliographers and bock-collectors have an abiding concern with dates and editions, of course; but there is another reason, too, for wanting to establish the dates of these editions. Bankes revised the text of his New Holland section at intervals in the 1790s, in the light of the latest accounts to hand of the English colony at Port Jackson. Even though quite brief summaries of substantial narratives, these successive accounts reflect English interest in the colony and the progress of English ideas about the colony. To give one example of the importance of having a date for a particular account. In one edition, and presumably with approval, Bankes repeats Watkin Tench\\\'s view that if taken in a commercial view, [the colony\\\'s] importance will not appear striking, as the New Zealand hemp, of which sanguine expectations were formed, is not a native of the soil; and an adjacent.
Many of the illustrations were derived from Cook\\\'s Voyages, and were the most generally available representations of the natives of the Pacific Northwest, Tasmania, New Zealand, Hawaii & the Pacific accessible to the public at the time. It is these contemporary images which make this work scarce as so many have been broken up.