It’s rare for serious nonfiction about the late eighteenth century to appear on The New York Times’ list of the Ten Best Books of the Year – but that’s exactly what Hampton Sides achieved in 2024 with The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.
In the introduction to The Wide Wide Sea, Sides writes that his aim is to recount, as objectively as possible, the events of Captain James Cook’s final voyage to the Pacific from 1776 to 1779, an epic that is widely believed to have inspired Star Trek’s Captain James Kirk of the USS Enterprise. The author insists that he will “neither lionize, demonize, nor defend him.” Yet Sides does, in fact, engage in considerable defense, arguing that “Cook was an explorer and a mapmaker, not a conqueror or colonizer,” and that he has been vilified “not so much for what he did, but for all the trouble that came after him.”
Few years were more momentous than 1776: the United States declared its independence; Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations; Edward Gibbon released The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and James Cook – “the first navigator of Europe” – set sail aboard HMS Discovery on his third expedition to the Pacific. To many, the launch of yet another exploratory expedition to the Pacific while the American colonies launched a rebellion against the mother country “seemed an extraneous luxury,” Sides writes, “a quaint mission from another age.”
Born in 1728 to a farm manager’s family and with little formal education, Cook rose from obscurity to become, by 1776, one of the most celebrated figures in the Western world – “a celebrity, a champion, a hero,” as Sides puts it. Cook was tall (6’3″), taciturn, fastidious, modest, secretive and exacting. He generally treated his men well, and even insisted that they maintain a relatively healthy and balanced diet – an innovation that dramatically reduced scurvy on Cook’s voyages. (An estimated two million European sailors died of scurvy between 1600 and 1800.)
Yet, as Sides observes, Cook was in many ways a hard man – “hard to please, hard to fool, hard to reach, hard to know.” In one crucial respect, however – his perception and treatment of the Indigenous peoples he encountered on his far-flung voyages – he was not hard at all, at least by the standard of his times. He showed no interest in converting the islanders to Christianity and made every effort to prevent his crew from spreading venereal disease – no easy task among the sexually open South Pacific populations eager to trade intimacy for European trinkets. Rather, Sides, again doing a bit of defending, describes Cook as “neutral, objective, agnostic.” For his part, Cook regarded himself as an explorer-scientist, more empirical than imperial, an anthropologist manque.
In 1774, a young commoner named Mai, from a small island about 130 miles from Tahiti, arrived in Britain aboard a ship returning from Cook’s second expedition to the South Pacific. He was the first Polynesian ever to set foot on English soil and became the most celebrated visitor from the New World since Pocahontas had come from Virginia in 1616. At the time, James Cook, then forty-six and in semi-retirement, was offered command of a third voyage to the Pacific with two primary objectives. The first, and publicly promoted mission of the trip, was to return Mai – along with a veritable barnyard of fifty European livestock – to Tahiti. The second, and more clandestine purpose, was to chart the icy northwestern reaches of North America in order to determine once and for all the existence of what Sides calls “the grail, the phantom, the will-o’-the-wisp” – the fabled Northwest Passage. Thus, Cook’s third voyage was much less about natural science, botany and biology than straightforward navigational quest to find a lucrative waterway short-cut to Orient.
Sides notes that British fascination with the Passage resurfaced roughly every thirty years, as each new generation of mariners sought to be the one to solve the enduring mystery. By the late eighteenth century, that fascination was rekindled by the theories of Daines Barrington, who argued that salt water could not freeze and that, therefore, the Arctic Ocean must be ice-free and easily navigable year-round. The HMS Discovery, with a crew of 70, including William Bligh and American John Ledyard, departed England on July 12, 1776 – exactly four years after Cook’s second expedition, which was viewed as a positive omen to all aboard. A sister ship, the HMS Resolution, was to rendezvous with the Discovery in Cape Town, South Africa, after its captain, Charles Clerke, was released from debtor’s prison, where he was consigned after his brother skipped out on a loan that Clerke had co-signed as a guarantor.
Almost immediately, the crew of the Resolution sensed a change in the temperament of their normally calm and capable commander. Perhaps due to lingering physical ailments – including sciatica, for which he relied on opiates to ease the pain – Captain Cook had grown noticeably more erratic, authoritarian, and distrustful. Yet after the expedition stopped in Tasmania in January 1777, Cook chose to overlook the earlier murder and possible cannibalization of a group of English sailors by Māori warriors in New Zealand – a gesture of clemency that, according to Sides, both the islanders and his own men largely interpreted as weakness. Cook may have been a stern disciplinarian, Sides writes, but he was “seldom moved by vengeance.”
Cook arrived in Tahiti in August to return both Mai and the menagerie of livestock that King George III had insisted on gifting to the Polynesians. Mai’s homecoming after a three-year absence – laden with a trove of trinkets, metals, and, most coveted of all, brightly colored feathers – disrupted the islands’ delicate political and economic balance. In Polynesia, known to the British as the Society Islands, wealth was measured in land and livestock, not in collections of inanimate objects. The sudden influx of baubles, beads, hatchets, mirrors, and red feathers that accompanied Mai’s return sparked jealousy and instability. Mai himself, who demanded special treatment and seemed to flaunt his new status, was viewed by the local aristocracy as an unworthy upstart – “despised for his obscure birth and impudent pretensions,” wrote crewman John Ledyard. The British had hoped to elevate Mai into Tahiti’s nobility, securing a friendly ally within the island’s leadership, but within a month they recognized that those ambitions were hopeless. “[Mai’s] journey served as an allegory of colonialism and its unintended consequences,” Sides glumly concludes.
A recurring theme in The Wide Wide Sea is the frequent theft of English goods by islanders and Captain Cook’s increasingly irrational responses. On the one hand, Cook generally respected the sharp cultural divide between Europeans and indigenous peoples. He never proselytized Christianity nor involved himself in local political disputes, as earlier European conquerors like Cortés, Pizarro, and Magellan had done. But something about petty theft seemed to unhinge him. In October 1777, on the small Polynesian island of Moorea, a native stole one of the expedition’s goats. Recovering the animal and punishing the culprit became, for Cook, a matter of principle—one that spiraled into a scorched-earth campaign. “Cook had taken leave of his senses,” Sides writes. “His lust for retaliation had grown into something terrifyingly toxic, with no sense of proportion.” No one was killed or seriously harmed, but Cook destroyed all of the natives’ canoes – their lifeline – and threatened to burn every structure on the island. Though the goat was eventually returned, the savagery of the episode remains, as Sides notes, “one of the more inexplicable moments in Cook’s long career.” Contemporary anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere has even compared Cook’s behavior to that of Colonel Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Up to this point, Cook had served largely as a “glorified chaperone and delivery man” for Mai. After depositing his charge on the small island of Huahine – where Mai would die just four years later, his memory quickly obliterated – Cook turned to the expedition’s true objective: the discovery of the Northwest Passage. En route, the Discovery stumbled upon a new world: Kaua‘i, the westernmost island in the Hawaiian archipelago. It was a remarkably advanced society, home to thousands of well-fed, healthy, and thriving villagers. For 250 years, Spanish galleons had crossed and recrossed the vast Pacific between Manila and Acapulco, yet had somehow missed these islands entirely. Cook was astonished to find that the Hawaiians, living 2,800 miles from Tahiti, spoke a Polynesian dialect. Like their distant relatives, they displayed an intense fascination with iron and a tendency toward petty theft. The Hawaiians seemed to possess some prior knowledge of the metal – perhaps from the wreckage of European ships that had washed ashore, or from Spanish vessels marooned there decades or even centuries earlier. Cook spent only a month on Kaua‘i and made no effort to explore the surrounding islands further.
Cook reached the Oregon coast in March 1778, just as British forces were occupying Philadelphia a continent away. Sides argues that the Admiralty regarded Cook’s voyage as a continuation of Sir Francis Drake’s enigmatic expedition to the same region two centuries earlier. “Cook would be picking up right where the last Englishman left off,” Sides writes. Yet much had changed in the intervening years. Drake had been, in essence, a pirate – sent to seize treasure, win glory, and return with tangible spoils for the Crown. Cook, by contrast, was an explorer and proto-anthropologist, charged with gathering data, soundings, charts, relics, and preserved specimens of unknown creatures.
Cook and his men somehow missed both the Columbia River and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, gateways to the Pacific Northwest’s great interior waterways. Instead, they spent a month exploring Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, where the crew discovered the luxuriously soft and valuable pelts of the sea otter – a revelation that, within decades, would lead to the animal’s near extinction. The Resolution and Discovery then continued north, pressing along the coast in search of “the slim needle of a Northwest Passage.” They followed numerous false leads, including the 180-mile inlet that now bears Cook’s name and ends at the site of modern-day Anchorage, Alaska. By August 1778, the expedition had reached the Bering Strait and entered the Arctic Ocean – “the high point of the expedition,” writes Sides, “literally, figuratively, even emotionally.” In venturing into waters untouched by any European before him, not even Vitus Bering, Cook had become, as Sides puts it, “history’s contested master of the Pacific.” The voyage also shattered the prevailing theories of Daines Barrington, who had argued that sea ice and icebergs originated from great Arctic rivers; Cook’s observations decisively disproved that claim. “The idea of a reliable trade route over Canada was a fantasy of the armchair geographers,” Sides says. Cook decided to spend the winter in the recently discovered Hawaiian islands.
The Discovery and Resolution reached the Kona Coast of Hawaii in January 1779. For six weeks, Cook circled the island clockwise without landing, but eventually his ships and crew needed timber and fresh water. They entered Kealakekua Bay just as nearby villages were celebrating the festival of Makahiki, held in honor of the Hawaiian god Lono. Cook’s arrival was interpreted by the islanders as the long-anticipated return of Lono to Hawaii. According to Sides, it is likely that the Hawaiians initially believed Cook to be the god Lono incarnate – an interpretation that has long been debated and became a cause célèbre within the field of anthropology, sparking a bitter feud between the University of Chicago’s Marshall Sahlins and Princeton’s Gananath Obeyesekere. Sahlins maintained that the evidence for the Hawaiians’ belief in Cook’s divinity was “overwhelming and irrefutable,” while Obeyesekere countered that Sahlins’s view was racist, imperialistic, paternalistic, and emblematic of a stereotypical Western “god complex.”
Sides writes that the natives of Kealakekua Bay regarded Cook and his men as something akin to aliens – “creatures, quite literally, from outer space.” Sex was freely offered, and the first month ashore was a golden interlude. “Cook’s men were having the time of their lives,” Sides says. But when the Makahiki festival ended and the island’s paramount chief, Kalaniʻōpuʻu – revered as an omnipotent demigod and ruler of the entire Big Island – returned from a campaign against neighboring Maui, the mood shifted. It soon became clear that Cook and his men had outstayed their welcome. Though Kalaniʻōpuʻu remained cordial, he began to ask when Cook intended to depart. Around this time, one of Cook’s men died unexpectedly – a moment Sides suggests revealed to the Hawaiians that these visitors were mortal after all. Perhaps Cook was not Lono, either
When Kalaniʻōpuʻu approached Cook about acquiring Lieutenant King – one of the explorer’s closest and most trusted aides – as a permanent member of his retinue of male lovers, known as aikāne, and seemed unwilling to take “no” for an answer, it was clearly time to depart. The Discovery and Resolution hastily prepared for their return voyage to Alaska and left Kealakekua Bay on February 4, 1779. But just four days later, a violent gust split the Resolution’s foremast, forcing the expedition to turn back. The sudden and unwelcome return of Cook and his men would soon have tragic consequences for all involved.
The first morning back the crew of the Discovery awoke to find that a large cutter that had buoyed to the side of the ship had been cut free and stolen by the natives. Much like with the stolen goat on Moorea six months, Cook went berserk when he found out. But the native response in Kealakekua Bay to Cook’s truculence would be much different. The crew had noticed that the emotional valence had flipped upon their unexpected return.
Cook’s plan for recovering the stolen cutter was to blockade the bay and seize King Kalaniʻōpuʻu, holding him aboard the Resolution until the missing boat was returned. When Cook and a small detachment went ashore to invite the king to a “meeting” on the ship, word reached the village that a member of the British blockading party had fired on and killed a Hawaiian chief. The Hawaiians quickly spirited Kalaniʻōpuʻu to safety and turned on Cook and his men. Sides suggests that Cook, overconfident in the combined power of British firearms and his own quasi-divine status, believed he could easily overawe the islanders. He paid for that hubris with his life. Cook and six marines were bludgeoned to death in the surf – within sight of the British ships and a nearby support boat commanded by a pusillanimous lieutenant named John Williamson, whose cowardice and inaction was, according to Sides, “beyond contempt,” and would make him the ultimate villain of the tragedy. The British regrouped and stormed ashore, unleashing the full fury of European artillery, musketry, and steel upon the native warriors – who, believing water-soaked mats would shield them from the British “fire weapons,” stood little chance against the onslaught and quickly sued for peace.
The Discovery and Resolution both returned to England in October 1780. They had been away for four years (1,548 days). It was the longest exploratory voyage – both in terms of days and miles – in history up to that time. In 1971, a sliver of wood from the Resolution was carried to the moon by the crew of Apollo 15.
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