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
18th century in literature Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan". This was the first English translation directly from the Arabic original. Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. Horace Walpole was born on 24 September 1717. Daniel Defoe was another political pamphleteer turned novelist like Jonathan Swift and was publishing in the early 18th century. In 1719, he published "Robinson Crusoe". Alexander Smith was a biographer who authored "A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen" (1719) which includes heavily fictionalised accounts of English criminals from the medieval period to