THAT REALLY HAPPENED?!

The true story behind the stories you love are often not only stranger than fiction, they're also sometimes funnier-or scarier!

- BY Jacopo della Quercia

Star Trek (1966-1969)

The USS Enterprise was not the first vessel to embark on a five-year mission to explore new worlds, seek out new life and “boldly go where no man has gone before. ” The voyage of the Enterprise and its captain, James Kirk, closely resembles the real-life adventures of Capt. James Cook, the 18th-century British explorer. Both Kirk and Cook were raised on farms but ultimately explored the farthest edges of their horizons: Kirk in space aboard the Enterprise and Cook in the Pacific and Southern oceans aboard the Endeavour. Mr. Spock served as an equivalent to Cook’s science officer Joseph Banks, and Kirk’s stated mission before every show closely mirrors Cook’s stated ambition to go “farther than any other man has been before me.”

Even some of the more fantastic aspects to Star Trek have antecedents in Cook’s voyages. According to D.K. Abbass of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, some of the technologies employed aboard the Enterprise dramatize how some of Cook's own equipment was “state of the art in the 18th century,” like the Harrison chronometer, a mechanical timepiece. Another key component to Star Trek lore draws inspiration from Cook’s famous circumnavigation of New Zealand and encountering the indigenous people there.

“Cook met the Maoris,” Abbass says, “and Kirk met the Klingons.”

John E. Fahey of the Naval History and Heritage Command writes that these and other adventures on Star Trek “hearken back to the Golden Age of Sail and turn-of-the-century naval voyages of exploration, contact and colonization.” However, as demonstrated both in history and on the series, these ventures are not without consequence. Historian Alice L. George points out that