It is also the story of George’s Prussian marriage, twelve years earlier, to Therese Heyne, a German woman who would go on to write the first novel with an Australian setting – based on George’s own best-selling account of his voyage. By now, however, the marriage is over. As marriage partners, Wilson tells us, George and Therese were ‘a pair of misplaced library books’: he belonged in Travel, she in Fiction.

Interweaving these stories is no small feat, as the trajectory of George’s stranger-than-fiction life takes him from the Russian Volga to the Antarctic Circle to Prussian Mainz to revolutionary Paris. A.N. Wilson’s narrative style veers between fiction and biography, which can be disconcerting, and his prose is clumsy at times – odd for such an experienced writer. But George is an endearingly humble character, and if the cascade of lands and decades and philosophies and civilisations is bewildering at times, it is clear that it was no less so for George himself. His life encompassed both a journey to the edge of the known world and the end, at the hands of revolutionaries, of civilisation as he had known it. As for Cook, he is never less than the hero George needs him to be: brave, strong, considerate of his men, and unfailingly courteous to the ‘primitive’ peoples whose lands he unhesitatingly claims for Britain ‘for ever’.