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Photo: Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The first abbey was founded in 657 AD, one of its monks being Caedmon, England's earliest known poet. In 664 the Synod of Whitby codified many religious practices such as the date of Easter, bringing Celtic Christianity in line with Rome. The abbey was wrecked by Viking raids but revived and rebuilt from the 13th century, becoming a great Benedictine centre. It fell again in the Dissolution under Henry VIII; the ruin became government-owned in 1920. It's still an imposing shell, visited by Dracula (according to Bram Stoker) in the guise of a large black dog. In 1914 it was further damaged by shelling from two German battlecruisers.
Whitby Abbey was a 7th-century Christian monastery that later became a Benedictine abbey. The abbey church was situated overlooking the North Sea on the East Cliff above Whitby in North Yorkshire, England, a centre of the medieval Northumbrian kingdom. The abbey and its possessions were confiscated by the crown under Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1545.
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Captain James Cook was born in 1728 at Marton, now part of Middlesbrough. In 1747/8 he came to Whitby and met the local ship-owners whose house is now this museum. He learnt his seafaring on coastal merchant ships then joined the Royal Navy in the run-up to the Seven Years' War; his shore life thereafter was in London. In 1779 he was killed in a brawl with the native inhabitants of Hawaii.
Museum of mostly Victorian curios: natural history, local shipping and so on. It incorporates an art gallery.