THE WIDE WIDE SEA: IMPERIAL
AMBITION, FIRST CONTACT AND THE FATEFUL FINAL VOYAGE OF CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
By Hampton Sides | Review by Carol Strametz
The Book Club’ s October read was Hampton Sides’ s The Wide Wide Sea, a very readable and deeply researched account of the last voyage of Captain James Cook, one of history’ s most iconic and controversial explorers. This book of narrative nonfiction is not a biography of Cook but rather a comprehensive account of his third and final voyage( 1776 – 1779) from England through the South Pacific to Alaska’ s frozen coastline in a search for the Northwest Passage, and finally back to Hawaii where Cook met his final fate. Sides relied on Cook’ s journals, as well as crew notebooks and later historical sources, but this is an almost insurmountable amount of material, and Sides was gratefully helped by present-day scholars and historians affiliated with the Captain Cook Society. Sides aimed to write a history, examining not just the perils and colonial wins but also the fraught relationships between the explorers and the indigenous people they encountered, with a more morally balanced understanding of exploration in the Age of Enlightenment than the ubiquitous derring-do accounts of naval history.
Cook, with 180 people aboard two ships— Discovery and Resolution— embarked on this final voyage on July 12, 1776, from Plymouth. On board, in addition to the crew and the many plants and farm animals marked to colonize foreign places, was a Tahitian man, Mai, who had managed to board one of Cook’ s ships on a previous voyage with the goal of getting to England to obtain weapons to kill his enemies back home. Mai is a case study for the promises and betrayals of early colonial contact. The English treated him well but viewed him as a curiosity and ultimately changed him in painful ways. While chauffeuring Mai back home, Cook retraced parts of his previous voyage and was confronted with the fact that his discoveries of indigenous groups were not universally positive. His sailors had introduced sexually transmitted diseases to the island populations, and the once-welcoming people had become ruthless bargainers.
Sides’ s portrayal of Cook neither lionizes nor vilifies him, but shows him as a brilliant but troubled human figure. Cook was disciplined, methodical, and astonishingly and extraordinarily skilled at navigation and map making. In contrast to his earlier voyages, where he showed great resilience, he became increasingly stubborn and irrational under pressure, and even indiscriminately brutal. The reader sees his compassion and respect for indigenous people but also how his entitlement and psychological instability influenced his judgement and led to his death, which is one of the most famous events in maritime history.
The Wide Wide Sea is a good read about exploration, misunderstanding, ambition, and the way cultures collide in a moment of history that helped shape the modern world.
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