The bicentennial celebrations for Captain Cook's arrival in New Zealand in 1769 involved Larry Pruden being commissioned by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation to write an extended orchestral work. This was the overture Captain Cook, which was only only partially completed.

Pruden failed to complete the work in 1969 and stopped composing the work. A decade later, however, he engaged actively in resuscitating it by applying to the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council for a grant in mid-September 1977.

Captain Cook seems in Pruden's mind to have been devised as a companion to Taranaki Overture, but whereas Taranaki explores the mythos of poineer settlement, Captain Cook evokes a voyage of discovery. In each, Pruden takes an iconic figure from the past (settler/navigator) to project a vision of endurance in the face of historical change. If Taranaki opens with the depiction of a panoramic rural landscape but then dramatizes conflict as the result of encroaching settlement, then we can suppose that through the same structure Pruden would have portrayed a luminous seascape only to disrupt it by depicting Cook in the face of hostility. Only the vividly coloured opening paragraphs of Captain Cook have survived, but with Taranaki as our guide and David Samwell's testament (Samwell witnessed Cook's death) prefacing the holograph score, we can assume that pruden would have engaged his listeners by quite radical and sometimes unsettling emotional discords, while expecting them to finally understand that historical losses can be richly redeemed.