Fall 2024
“The Wide Wide Sea”
by Hampton Sides. Doubleday. 2024; 408 pps. $20.49.
Reviewed by Robert Beringer
As I began reading Hampton Sides’ latest offering, “The Wide Wide Sea,” which vividly captures the third voyage of Captain James Cook, I couldn’t help but admire the man who achieved so much before his unfortunate death on a Hawaiian beach in 1779. Over three voyages Cook wandered the globe, finding and mapping new lands between the Arctic and Antarctica, all of which were eagerly added to the British Empire. He was a sailor’s sailor, and there is no doubt that these incredible accomplishments were directly attributable to his leadership, navigation and map making skills. At least that’s what they taught us in history class.
But through extensive research, Sides demonstrates that the third voyage left a complex and disturbing legacy that’s not easily ignored. Almost every place Cook “discovered” already had people living there, with an established culture, history and religion. And you could argue that almost no place benefited from the contact; they were soon ravaged by European diseases, and introduced to alcohol, modern weapons and consumerism. Cook himself knew this to be true, writing of New Zealand’s Maori population in his journal, “We debauch their morals, and we introduce among them wants and diseases which they never before knew.”
Nor does he mince words about Cook’s mercurial behavior. In one instance Cook chooses to forgive a Maori chief who killed and ate 10 British sailors, while in another he vindictively destroys much of Moorea in retribution over a stolen goat and deliberately infests the island with rats. And after his death Cook was always portrayed as the heroic victim and lionized to the world. But, the reader learns, that’s not necessarily how it happened.
Two of the primary objectives of the third voyage were to return Mai, a young Polynesian, back to his native Tahiti, and to map the fabled Northwest Passage from the Pacific to Atlantic. Neither task went well. Mai, who had been the toast of England and showered with gifts from the country’s aristocratic elite, returned home expecting to become a prince. Instead, he discovered that his erstwhile friends and family now only regarded him with envy. And though the ships made it as far as northern Alaska, the shortcut to Asia remained elusive until the 20th century.
It was during this third voyage that Cook first sighted the Hawaiian islands, while his ships Resolution and Discovery were headed for the west coast of North America from the South Pacific. At first contact, the British sailors aboard the ships were awed at the lush beauty of the land and impressed by its welcoming inhabitants. Cook himself was initially revered as a god. On Cook’s second visit, however, the islanders tired of the expedition’s endless demands for food, water and land, and made it known that they wished him to leave. “They had been oppressed and were weary of our prostituted alliance,” wrote John Ledyard, a marine on Resolution. “It was evident from the looks of the natives, as well as every other appearance, that our friendship was now at an end.” The disagreements intensified, Cook made a fatal error, and eventually he was killed on a beach.
With gripping, well-researched narrative and historical context, Sides brings Cook’s glorious and tragic final act to life. The “Wide Wide Sea” is a must read for anyone who loves high-sea adventure and seeks to better understand the complicated and tragic legacy of the Age of Exploration.
Robert Beringer is a Florida-based marine journalist and photographer who writes for many national sailing and boating magazines and is a member of Boating Writers International. He learned to sail on the Great Lakes in a Hobie 16 and is the holder of a USCG 100-ton Merchant Mariner Credential, logging over 28,000-miles under sail. His first book, “Waterpower!” a collection of marine short stories, is available at Barnes & Noble.
