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 Hotel building is still based on the 1875 pair of terraces and has not been demolished. Reworking old pubs was a common practice after the Great Depression and it appears that this was also the case for the Captain Cook. For some reason the external ground floor walls were not tiled, as was the common practice. The Captain Cook was a favourite of members of the Waterside Workers Federation in the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1986 the remaining stub of Millers Road was renamed High Lane and a section of the site was resumed for road widening in