However, because the Reverend is vicious, Nick runs away from the school, making his father deeply disappointed in his son. Nick grows up in a lower middle-class family, but, unusually, he learns to read and write at Reverend Smythe's school. Hesse uses these details to imagine a rich inner life for Nick. Little is actually known about him, but it is a matter of historical record that Captain Cook commissioned him into the Royal Navy and made him assistant to the ship's surgeon, that he was the first person on the ship to sight New Zealand, and that he grew up to become an Antarctic explorer. A few weeks after the ship left port, eleven-year-old Nicholas Young was discovered stowing away. In the course of three years, the Endeavour would cross the Atlantic Ocean, round the southern tip of South America, go around Australia, chart the South Pacific, round the southern tip of Africa, and then return to England. The goal of the journey was a secret mission to find and claim a heretofore-unknown continent around the South Pole. The real Captain Cook sailed from England in the summer of 1768 on his ship, the H.M.S Endeavour. The novel features ink-wash drawings by Robert Andrew Parker that add to the sea adventure mood with their watery quality. Intended for a middle-grades readership, the novel relies on the journals kept by the ship’s naturalist Joseph Banks and those kept by Cook himself to describe the three-year voyage through the eyes of a young runaway who would eventually go on to captain his own ship several decades later. Newbery Prize winner Karen Hesse’s 2002 historical novel, Stowaway, uses the small real-life detail that a preteen boy stowed away on Captain James Cook’s eighteenth-century voyage around the world, imagining the life of that boy through a fictional diary.
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