James Cook grocer and haberdasher William Sanderson. Historians have speculated that this is where Cook first felt the lure of the sea while gazing out of the shop window. After 18 months, not proving suitable for shop work, Cook travelled to the nearby port town of Whitby to be introduced to friends of Sanderson's, John and Henry Walker. The Walkers, who were Quakers, were prominent local ship-owners in the coal trade. Their house is now the Captain Cook Memorial Museum. Cook was taken on as a merchant navy apprentice in their small fleet of vessels, plying coal along the English coast. His
Captain Cook Birthplace Museum product of the Cleveland-wide Captain Cook Tourism Association. Captain Cook Birthplace Museum Captain Cook Birthplace Museum is a public museum located in Stewart Park in Marton, Middlesbrough within the borough of Middlesbrough and the ceremonial county of North Yorkshire, England. It is one of three institutions run by the "Middlesbrough Museum & Gallery Service" along with the Dorman Museum and the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima). The museum opened on 28 October 1978, the 250th anniversary of the birth in the same spot of British naval explorer and circumnavigator Captain James Cook. A biographical museum, it champions and surveys