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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook's death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?
Hampton Sides' bravura account of Cook's last journey both wrestles with Cook's legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.
Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain's imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook's intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook's overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.
At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, The Wide Wide Sea is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.
Excerpt
The Wide Wide Sea
In recent years, the voyages of Captain James Cook have come under increasing attack as part of a larger reassessment of the legacy of empire. Cook was an explorer and a mapmaker, not a conqueror or a colonizer. Yet throughout history, exploration and the making of maps have usually served as the first phase of conquest. In Cook's long wake came the occupiers, the guns, the pathogens, the alcohol, the problem of money, the whalers, the furriers, the seal hunters, the plantation owners, the missionaries.
And so for many Native people across the Pacific, from New Zealand to Alaska, Cook has become a symbol of colonialism and of the ravages that came with European arrival. In many corners of the world, his name has been vilified—not so much for what he did, but for all the trouble that came after him. And also because the Indigenous peoples he encountered were ignored for so long, their voices rarely heard, their perspectives and cultural significance scarcely considered.
Over the past few years, monuments to Cook's explorations have been splattered with paint. Artifacts and artworks stemming from his voyages, once considered priceless treasures, have been radically reinterpreted or removed altogether from museum and gallery collections (in some cases, rightly returning to the lands from which they originated). The people of the Cook Islands have been talking seriously of changing the archipelago's name. In 2021, in Victoria, British Columbia, protesters toppled a statue of Cook into the city harbor. Cook, in some respects, has become the Columbus of the Pacific.
There was a time when Cook's three epic expeditions were seen by many as swashbuckling adventures—worthwhile and perhaps even noble projects undertaken in the service of the Enlightenment and the expansion of global knowledge. Cook sailed in an age of wonder, when explorer-scientists were encouraged to roam the world, measuring and describing, collecting unfamiliar species of plants and animals, documenting landscapes and peoples unknown to Europe. In direct ways, Cook's voyages influenced the Romantic movement, benefited medical science, bolstered the fields of botany and anthropology, and inspired writers ranging from Coleridge to Melville. The journals from Cook's odysseys were turned into best-selling books and became the impetus behind popular plays, poems, operas, novels, comics, even one TV show set in outer space. (Captain James Kirk of the USS Enterprise is widely thought to have been inspired by Captain James Cook.)
Yet today, Cook's voyages are passionately contested, especially in Polynesia, viewed as the start of the systematic dismantling of traditional island cultures that historian Alan Moorehead famously called "the fatal impact." Moorehead said he was interested in "that fateful moment when a social capsule is broken into," and Cook's expeditions certainly provided an excellent case study of the phenomenon. Taken together, his voyages form a morally complicated tale that has left a lot for modern sensibilities to unravel and critique. Eurocentrism, patriarchy, entitlement, toxic masculinity, cultural appropriation, the role of invasive species in destroying island biodiversity: Cook's voyages contain the historical seeds of these and many other current debates.
It was in the midst of this gathering antipathy toward Cook that I began to research the story of his third voyage—the most dramatic of his journeys, as well as his longest, both in terms of duration and nautical miles. It seemed a good time to try to reckon with this man whose rovings have stirred so much acrimony and dissension. It was curious to me: Other early European mariners who had crisscrossed the Pacific—Magellan, Tasman, Cabrillo, and Bougainville, to name a few—don't seem to generate so much heat or attention. What is it about Cook that has singled him out?
I don't have an easy answer for that—more likely there are many not-so-easy...
Excerpted from The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. Copyright © 2024 by Hampton Sides. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and had earned a comfortable retirement. The Admiralty gave him a plum position: an honorary post at Greenwich Hospital near London, where his only responsibility was to "keep a paternal eye on the thousand or so Navy pensioners" who lived there. He quickly became bored, however, and longed to be back on the open ocean. His restlessness was exacerbated when he learned that the Admiralty was planning an expedition to look for the fabled Northwest Passage from the Pacific side—something that had never been attempted—and had assigned his former ship, the HMS Resolution, to the task. The powers that be, too, felt that Cook was the only man who could pull off such a journey, and so manipulated him into asking for the commission (which doesn't appear to have been much of a challenge). In July 1776 Cook left England on his final—and fatal—voyage. It's this tale of exploration and tragedy that Hampton Sides relays in his nonfiction account, The Wide Wide Sea.
The author tidily sums up his task: "This is not a biography but a narrative history with a large, diverse cast of characters…It's the story not only of James Cook but of the men who accompanied him on his swan-song voyage to the Pacific. They took part in a monumental enterprise that left lasting impacts, good and bad, on the world." It would seem like an enormous task to describe all that occurred on the expedition—over three years, Cook sailed from England to New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawai'i and the Bering Strait. But in The Wide Wide Sea, Sides does what he does best: condenses a complex subject into an eminently readable, compelling story—a true account that reads like a novel. Although he doesn't break new ground—Cook and his voyages have been the subjects of many books—he does approach his topic with fresh eyes, acknowledging Cook's tale is a "morally complicated" one and allowing current debates about the explorer's cultural impact to inform the narrative.
It's unfortunate that there are so few records of Cook's actions from the perspective of the residents of the lands he "discovered," but many of Cook's men left behind journals. Sides laboriously combed through an extensive trove of documents squirreled away across the globe, combining the many sources to paint a nuanced picture of the captain and events that transpired on the journey. He's an expert in providing enough detail to get readers hooked on a story without allowing it to bog down the book's flow, and his skill is on full display here.
Also quite interesting is the author's attempt to understand Cook's increasingly erratic behavior as the journey wore on. I've read a number of books about Cook's expeditions, but I don't recall conjecture as to why he became so irrational toward the end of his life. Sides clearly draws the line between fact and speculation on this matter and others throughout, something I appreciate in works of narrative nonfiction.
The author claims not to "lionize, demonize nor defend" Cook, but I still found the portrayal fairly sympathetic. The captain and crew certainly had a negative impact on the people and cultures they met, but nevertheless Sides claims that Cook was one of the more socially enlightened navigators of the age. The author sees him as an anthropological observer, interested in understanding the cultures of those he met rather than dismissing them as inferior. He also excuses some of the side effects of European contact (e.g., venereal diseases, rats) as happening regardless of this specific voyage; the ills likely would have been introduced by the first European vessel to land, and that ship just happened to be Cook's. Although I understand the points he makes, I found I wasn't completely convinced by them, at least not enough to overcome my discomfort with the interactions between the explorers and the Indigenous populations they encountered. That said, the account is a factual one, and Sides makes no attempt to ignore the expedition's misdeeds, even though he might try to rationalize them.
The Wide Wide Sea's subject matter is challenging from a 21st-century perspective; statues of Cook have been torn down worldwide, viewed as symbols of European exploitation. But we should keep in mind that the book is, at its core, history, and as such the events portrayed here need to be understood and remembered. And readers can't go wrong with a book by Hampton Sides, a master at penning marvelously readable history. I highly recommend it for a wide audience, including those who don't usually read nonfiction.
Reviewed by Kim Kovacs
Caroline Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The Endurance and The Bounty
Douglas Preston, #1 bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God and Cities of Gold
Peter Heller, New York Times bestselling author of The Dog Stars, The River, and The Guide
Hampton Sides' book The Wide Wide Sea records the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook and relays some of the exploits of his crew aboard the HMS Resolution. One of Cook's key decisions concerned an alcoholic drink known as "grog."
During the Age of Exploration—the 15th to 18th centuries—Royal Navy ships would leave English harbors to sail to unknown lands. No one knew how long ships might be at sea before they would reach a location where they might re-stock their provisions. The food situation was quickly figured out; the vessels were outfitted with items that wouldn't spoil quickly (like hardtack, a sort of dense biscuit), supplemented with animals brought along for the purpose.
Water was more of an issue. They couldn't drink salt water, so they had to bring along many casks of liquid for the crew—a ration of one gallon per day per crewman. (For reference, Cook's Resolution set sail with 118 men on board). Originally regular water was stocked, but it became apparent that this wouldn't work for longer voyages, as over time algae made the beverage slimy and unpalatable. Cutting the water with a bit of weak beer didn't work much better because the concoction went sour. They eventually settled on combining the water with brandy or wine.
All this changed in 1655, when William Penn Sr. (father of the William Penn who founded Philadelphia) captured Jamaica from the Spanish. The island's alcohol was rum (fermented sugarcane); with no brandy or other spirit available, Penn's crew used rum to supplement the ship's stores. Unfortunately, it was much stronger than the mixtures the mariners had become accustomed to, and disciplinary problems ensued.
In 1740, Vice Admiral Edward Vernon issued Captain's Order No. 349, which advised those in command of Royal Navy vessels to cut their rum with water (why it took nearly 100 years to regulate this, no one knows). He also had sugar and lime added to the mix; the lime improved taste but also helped with scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency that, left untreated, could lead to death. Vernon's nickname was "Old Grog" because he often wore a coat of grogam—a heavy silk/mohair/wool blend—and so the new drink was christened "grog."
The mix quickly caught on throughout the Royal Navy, although each ship had its own version. Generally the ratio was four parts water to one part rum, but some did 3:1 or 5:1. Mariners referred to the combination by compass points, where North meant pure rum, West pure water—so WNW meant a 50/50 blend. Officers were permitted to take their rum "neat"—i.e., with no water mixed in. By regulation grog was doled out twice a day with great ceremony, and each sailor had to drink it immediately and under supervision. It was a punishable offence to save up one's ration or sell it to another. If a man didn't want his grog he was compensated three pence per day.
In 1805 grog also became known as "Nelson's Blood." After Lord Nelson was killed at Trafalgar, his body was preserved in a barrel of the stuff. Legend has it the sailors actually drank the rum in tribute once Nelson's body was removed.
The United States Navy had its own version of the alcoholic ration, made from rye whiskey rather than rum and named "Bob Smith" (after Robert Smith, the Secretary of the Navy at the time the custom was established). The US ended the practice in 1862, though the Royal Navy held onto the tradition until 1970.
In 1979, an American sailor named Charles Tobias convinced the Admiralty to give him the formula for grog and grant permission for him to bottle it. The product, called Prusser's Rum, is still available today, and royalties from each case sold go to the Royal Navy Sailor's Fund.
Grog Recipe:
Learning to Smoke and Drink Grog, etching by Thomas Rowlandson, 1815, courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art
Filed under Cultural Curiosities
By Kim Kovacs
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