It's hard to imagine a time when there were still mysteries just beyond the blue horizon, even as Eleanor Nordyke holds the proof in her hands — a weathered journal from one of history's most celebrated explorers, Capt. James Cook.

When Cook sailed into the Pacific in 1776, he and his crew encountered people and places previously unknown to Europeans, including Hawai'i. Cook's descriptions of the cultures he found were first published in 1784 and thrilled readers, as did the drawings of expedition artist John Webber.

But the exotic eventually gave way to the commonplace and then to the realm of the forgotten. When Nordyke first saw one of Cook's original published journals in the 1970s, the three-volume set was in a rare bookstore in San Francisco.

For the Manoa grandmother, Cook's descriptions loomed fresh and large and would launch her on her own voyage of discovery. A career demographer, Nordyke wanted to rekindle the wonder of the original expedition. After years of painstaking effort, the result was "Pacific Images," a book published in 1999 that paired Cook's journal entries with Webber's drawings.

"What right did I have to have these wonderful books and not share them broadly?" Nordyke said, as she sat in her living room with one of Cook's original published journals in her lap.

"Pacific Images" took almost two decades to create and just four years to go out of print. In the years since, it has become a coveted collector's edition in its own right — a $45 book that has sold for up to $1,500.

Still driven to share, Nordyke has now produced a second edition, paying for the $60,000 printing cost out of her own pocket. It's been in bookstores since February.

"I'm providing it for a different generation," she said.

Cook's original work, "A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean," is one of Nordyke's most beloved treasures, but she treats it as casually as an old friend. The pages that inspired "Pacific Images" are more than 200 years old, have brown spots, and sticky notes. The worn covers are sheathed in plastic, but Nordyke turns its pages with ungloved fingers.

Two years after Nordyke bought Cook's journal, the San Francisco bookstore called — it also had a copy of the original engravings made from Webber's drawings. The 61 drawings in the Cook expedition's official atlas folio were large and beautiful, but each one bore only the briefest description, and nothing to link it to the well-detailed journals.

More troubling was the rarity of the published volumes. Owning a complete set of original journals and engravings could cost as much as $30,000, while their age meant no library could ever loan them to the public.

"I thought, I really need to write about these engravings," Nordyke said. "I felt by making a book, the world would have a chance to see the entire collection. You will see these pictures in many books, but never together."

Coincidence stepped in to help Nordyke in 1981, when a friend of her husband came to visit from the Mainland. Not only was James Mattison Jr. a huge fan of Cook's explorations and Webber's drawings, he was also a photographer who had once studied with Ansel Adams.

They became partners in the effort: Mattison would photograph the original engravings and Nordyke would comb the detailed journal entries to find a passage that best described the print.

The demographer, whose job as a research fellow at the East-West Center kept her busy all day, would wake up at 1 a.m. to work on the project. At times, she thought it might never get done.

"Any writing is a lonely process," said Nordyke, who also published "The Peopling of Hawai'i" in 1977. "You have to push yourself to do that instead of something else that would be more fun."

She organized the journal entries chronologically and included a passage about Cook's death on the Big Island in 1779 that was written by one of the other expedition captains.

"You are just riding along with Cook on the trip and seeing what he saw," she said.

Photographing the engravings became an obsession for Mattison, a surgeon from Salinas, Calif. Initially, he made several trips to Honolulu and would set up cameras on Nordyke's dining room table.

"He was so interested he went out and found another set of three books and a folio, and he used his own picture sometimes," Nordyke said. "He was a perfectionist."

Mattison died last November from Alzheimer's. He was 82. His fascination with Cook spanned four decades.

His family takes pride in the photos he took of Webber's drawings. He even took his family on vacations mirroring the explorer's travels.

"My dad was so enthralled with the images that he wanted to get them out and have greater detail available," said his son, Richard Mattison, of Elk Horn, Calif. "He wanted to share these with the world."

The elder Mattison tried several cameras before settling on a Graflex that produced an 8-by-10-inch negative. It provided images with enormous detail.

"The process of getting those prints was very long-winded," said the 57-year-old younger Mattison, who is also a photographer. "It took years to find the right combination."

ON AN EXPLORATION

The first printing of "Pacific Images" was done by the Hawaiian Historical Society. Barbara Dunn, administrative director of the organization, said it is a unique book because Nordyke put the engravings in context.

The end product transports the reader to the moment of first contact.

"I think there is always an interest in the moment of a discovery formerly unknown to you," Dunn said. "The Pacific islanders and the Alaskan tribes, they didn't need to be discovered. They knew they were there all the time. But for the voyagers in this time period, they had the thrill of discovery of new worlds."

The second edition of "Pacific Images" will fill a void.

"The book is a magnificent publication and will be greatly welcomed by those who missed the first edition, which now commands a high price," said Alwyn Peel, secretary of the Captain Cook Society, an international organization with 500 members. He called the book "magnificent."

"As the early editions of Cook's journals of his third voyage are well beyond the pocket of most and are only available in major libraries, Ellie Nordyke's book gives Cook enthusiasts and others the opportunity to have the engravings, to view them in their own homes," he said.

Nordyke grew up in Hawai'i, just a few doors away from the home where she has lived since 1960. Her parents collected books about Hawai'i, a habit that Nordyke has also maintained throughout her adult life. Every time she traveled with her husband, physician Robert Nordyke, who died in 1997, she would visit rare bookstores.

Now she has a small library, although it's somewhat hidden. In her cluttered home, her love of history outweighs more domestic details.

Nordyke's hope for "Pacific Images" was always to recreate the experience of discovery. To her surprise it reminded her of her own adventure. From 1952 to 1953, Nordyke and her husband traveled around the world.

"I was impressed that we were all alike," she said. "We love. We eat. We have families. Cultures impose some differences, but the basic elements of all people are love, kindness and goodness. In seeing the many different cultures Cook was able to visit, you find basically the same things."