Captain Cook’s Pacific With Sam Neill, Sunday 29 September, 9pm, HISTORY^® HD (CH 270). Also available for 30 days in Catch Up > Channels > HISTORY

To some he’s a legendary voyager, to others a villainous agent of the British Empire. But who was the real Captain James Cook? And what is his true legacy?

In a new and exclusive six-part documentary series on HISTORY, actor, director and winemaker/vineyard proprietor Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, Peaky Blinders) aims to gain a greater understanding of the man behind the myth by retracing the famed explorer’s first journey across the Pacific.

Some 250 years after Cook set sail from Plymouth, 72-year-old Neill will take in the stunning landscapes of Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, the Antarctic, Tonga, Canada and Alaska, meet their inhabitants and discover what Cook means to them. By turns funny, awe inspiring and shocking, it’s a fresh – and often surprising – look at one of British history’s most polarising figures.

“The Pacific made Cook and it killed him too… they are forever bound together,” says the native New Zealander. “He stitched its islands, its continental borders and its indigenous peoples into the fabric of the global community we know today. Admire him or abhor him, James Cook cannot be banished from its history even now. As peoples of the modern Pacific, we make our own history.”

Here, Neill reveals more about this fascinating TV show, and his fascination with Cook…