Recent Reading: The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

I will get right to the point. After sailing from London to Tasmania, to New Zealand, Tonga, Tahiti, Kaua’i, mapping the Western coast of Alaska, Captain James Cook returned to the island of Hawaii (or the big island) where he was violently murdered by the locals:

When one thought about it, what was perhaps more surprising than Cook’s violent death was that it hadn’t happened earlier, at some other island. For how many times had he landed upon unfamiliar shores -- alone or nearly alone -- a stranger, surrounded by thousands of understandably suspicious Indigenous people who could not know his true intentions? Over the years, across hundreds of thousands of oceanic miles, how many opportunities had there been for disagreements to erupt? Cook had cheated death so many times, at so many of his anchorages, that it was a wonder he had lived this long (p. 335).

My short opinion of Sides’ book is that it is a short book (350 pages of text compared to other much longer history books) that is worth your time  

I spotted several passages of note while I was reading Sides’ book:

In addition to New Zealand, Tasmania, and Tahiti, Cook was the first European to traverse and map the entire Western Alaskan coast:

Cook had reached a headland that he guessed -- correctly --, it turned out -- must be the westernmost point of Alaska. He named it cape Prince of Wales, yet another his toponyms still in use today. Having reached mainland Alaska’s western extremity and marked his coordinates with precision, he had accomplished something even more substantial, giving cartographers a measurement that would inform and refine all future maps and atlases of the world: He had determined, down to the minute, the width of North America (pp 272-273).

Cook was a great leader who knew what to do in a crisis:

Perhaps this was the most impressive quality Cook possessed: In clutch situations, he always seemed to know what to do -- Cook the master mariner, who in 1770, on his first voyage around the world, had crashed into an underwater projection of the Great Barrier Reef. The collision caused what was surely a mortal gash; his Endeavor would have sunk but for some fast thinking on his part. He ordered the crew to hurl cannons, casks, and stone ballast overboard so he could float the ship and employed a spare sail to essentially wrap the hull’s would -- a technique known as “fathering.” Then he limped the Endeavor into a river mouth on the Australian coast to repair her injuries (p. 247).

I do not think I realized that Cook was responsible for much more than just leading a crew to a new location:

In those days, an explorer was expected to capture loot, win glory, and bring home something hard and tangible for the Crown -- and that’s what Drake had done. For him, the exploring part was a collateral enterprise. But in Cook’s time, the imperatives of modern exploration required a voyager not only to pursue nationalistic ends but also to document, measure, chart, collect, and eventually publish, in order to advance, more generally, the cause of science. A captain had to come back with data, soundings, relics, narratives, artist renderings, barometric readings, and carcasses of unknown species swimming in alcohol (p. 229).

The Pacific is a vast ocean with very few islands. Yet Cook was quite good at finding those islands:

What was it about Cook’s voyages? Time and time again, he had shown an uncanny serendipity for intersecting with islands in the oceanic vastness. ... Whether is was dumb luck or a sixth sense he was able to summon, to have struck this lonesome encrustation of land in the middle of the world’s largest ocean was a feat (p. 195).

To be sure, Cook was very much a person of his time who thought like others of the enlightenment era:

Modern critics of Cook, such as Princeton anthropologist Gananth Obeyesekere, have viewed King George’s agricultural scheme, well intentioned though it may have been, as indicative of something far larger and more sinister -- imperial England’s attempt to “civilize” Native peoples by insisting they adopt a distinctly British way of life. Wherever Cook landed, he planted tidy English gardens. “The act,” argues Obeyesekere, “is primarily symbolic, supplanting the disorderly way of savage peoples with ordered landscapes on the English model. Pairs of animals are carefully set loose .. to domesticate a savage land.” In Obeyesekere’s view, Cook had taken on a role very much like that of Prosperous in Shakespeare’s The Tempest -- that is, an authoritarian “civilized” who systematically colonizes a remote island and dismisses Natives as savages “given to prelogical or mystical though that [is] fundamentally opposed to the logical and rational ways of modern man” (p. 164).

On some level, it seems that Cook thought of himself as primarily a scientist who was helping to discover new knowledge. At least new to Europeans:

Cook wasn’t naive; he knew very well that he was doing the work of empire, that his voyaging advanced the brazen and sometimes ruthless strategic goals of a nation jealously competing against other European nations to claim new lands and exploit resources in faraway places. But in reading his journals, one senses he was not deeply engaged, on a more personal level, with the gambits of the larger colonial chess game; his interest was more inquisitive than acquisitive, more empirical than imperial. He was an English patriot, to be sure, and a loyal subject of the Crown, but he was also a citizen of the world -- a world that through his own peregrinations, he had done much to thread together.

Cook saw himself as an explorer-scientist, and he tried to follow an ethic of impartial observation born of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. What seemed to animate him most were the moments of pure discovery, moments when he felt called upon to study, measure, and document something entirely new (p. 15).