Through A Child’s Eyes

In Sailing the Unknown: Around the World With Captain Cook, American poet Michael J. Rosen imagines the journal of the real-life 11-year-old Nicholas Young, the youngest sailor aboard Captain Cook’s Endeavour. “We know very little of the real Young, a delinquent forced into service aboard the ship, where one of his jobs was to care for a milk goat,” New York Times’ reviewer Pamela Paul writes. “But we do know, tantalizingly, that he was the first on board to spot the coast of New Zealand. Nicholas’s imagined journals may offer only one tiny window into this great adventure tale, but young readers’ interest will almost certainly be piqued.”