The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
by Hampton Sides (Doubleday, $35)
“Until recently Captain James Cook was not a particularly controversial figure,” said The Economist. Britain’s most celebrated 18th-century explorer was, after all, “neither a slave trader nor much of an imperialist.” When he encountered indigenous peoples in lands that Europeans had never before seen, he often showed a sincere interest in protecting them from disease and exploitation. At the same time, he was no saint. Hampton Sides’ “excellent” new book, which focuses on Cook’s fatal third voyage, is a current U.S. best-seller that gently pushes back on a recent wave of villainizations of Cook. “As the author makes clear, there is a balance to be struck between admiration for Cook’s seamanship and a resentment of the colonialism that followed Indigenous peoples’ first contact with Europeans.”
Sides’ “superbly crafted” book picks up Cook’s story in 1776, said Andrew Graybill in The Wall Street Journal. Following earlier voyages in which he’d claimed New Zealand and the east coast of Australia for Britain, Cook, at 47, happily ended a brief retirement to lead an attempt at locate the fabled Northwest Passage. By design, Cook took a circuitous route, stopping in new destinations and old, giving Sides a chance to display his “special talent for rendering the natural world” and his feel for “the unrelenting misery of life at sea during the Age of Sail.” At the same time, Sides excels at capturing “the sheer strangeness” of the encounters between native peoples and the uninvited Europeans.
Stumbling upon the Hawaiian Islands proved Cook’s undoing, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. Though welcomed when his ships anchored there in both 1778 and 1779, Cook overstayed his welcome, and when a small boat was stolen and he tried to recover it by taking King Kalani’opu’u hostage, the resulting melee left Cook dead in a tidal pool. A fitting end? Perhaps. “But, as Cook himself seemed to have realized, and on occasion lamented, he was but an instrument in a much, much larger scheme.” Colonialism was destined to happen, with or without his contributions.