“The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.” By Hampton Sides, New York: Doubleday, 2024, 496 pages, $30.00 Hardcover.

Meticulously researched and detailed, this prizewinner is a welcome addition to voyage-of-discovery literature. Concentrating on the experiences of Captain James Cook, expert navigator and cartographer and England’s greatest naval explorer since Sir Francis Drake, Sides recounts some of Europe’s earliest contacts with the peoples of the South Pacific.

Well before his last voyage, Cook was England’s premier seaman. He began his naval career fighting the French in North America and accurately charting the Saint Lawrence seaway and the coast of Newfoundland. This invaluable map work led to a 1768 voyage around the Horn of Africa to Tahiti, where he observed the transit of Venus and mapped New Zealand and the east coast of Australia.

On his second voyage (1772), Cook tried to confirm that a massive continent – the mythical Terra Australis – covered the South Pole. However, he was stymied by the southern ice and turned instead to the South Pacific where he explored and charted a score of new sightings, including Easter Island and New Caledonia.

Cook’s third and final voyage sent him east again, with two ships under his command and a new objective: to find a northern passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. By this time, 1780, a century of expeditions had bumbled about in dangerous latitudes looking for a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic side. Cook was the first to attack the problem from the Pacific end.

Sides takes us onboard as Cook’s Resolution and its companion ship Discovery weather storms, mountainous swells, tattered sails, dangerous leaks, bedbugs, rats, floggings, doldrums, contaminated stores and cantankerous shipmen. But he also describes the ships’ adventures amid beautiful dawns, technicolor sunsets, blue seas, turquoise lagoons, and the towering, green heights of the Pacific’s tropical islands.

On their way out, the ships made lengthy stops at Tahiti and Kaua’i in the previously unknown Hawaiian Islands. Remarkably self-aware for his time, Cook clearly recognized the destructive side of European contact with the Polynesians. “We debauch their morals,” he wrote, “and we introduce among them wants and diseases which they never knew before.”

Fretting in particular about sexually transmitted diseases, he tried to limit dalliance between his company and native girls, but it was a losing battle. The girls besieged the sailors on land and aboard ship. Sides wonders what the attraction might have been.

How could these young Polynesian women have possibly found Cook’s men attractive – these aliens with rancid teeth and shabby clothes rank with the stench of long months at sea?

A bit later he answers his own question. At first, the girls may have been just curious: “Are these really men? Let’s find out!” Later they turned mercenary, selling themselves or being sold by male relatives for bits of iron, a rare and therefore precious commodity among the islands.

Sides goes on to describe the expedition’s far north excursions. Bedeviled by freezing weather in uncharted waters, Cook’s ships poked into each promising inlet from Washington state up and around Alaska until ice shelves stopped him again. Not put off, he nosed farther along the ice until he found himself in Russia, far above the Bering Strait. He’d sailed north too late, he thought. Earlier in the year he might have found an open passage.

He decided to winter in Hawaii and have another go the following year. But he never got the chance. After circling and mapping the island chain, he anchored in Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island, where he met a less awed and increasingly belligerent set of islanders who, following a tragic series of omens Cook was too cocksure to credit, clubbed him to death in a tide pool, dragged him onto the beach and dismembered and burned his corpse.

Although Sides describes Cook’s adventures brilliantly, the captain himself remains a bit of an enigma, perhaps, the author speculates, because of some progressing illness. Cook grew more bullheaded and secretive as the voyage went on, ordered far more floggings than on his earlier voyages, and delighted in keeping his officers in the dark about the ship’s orders. His increasing impatience and imperious treatment of the Polynesians played a major role in his death.

While Sides makes the most of Cook’s story, he also masterfully juggles a number of other themes and characters. Cook voyaged against the backdrop of the eighteenth century’s struggle between England, France, and Spain for global mastery. His impact on Polynesian cultures illustrated Europeans’ destructive influence on native civilizations everywhere. Cook’s emphasis on fresh vegetables moved shipping a step closer to eliminating scurvy, the vitamin C deficiency that once haunted long voyages. The new-design chronometer he carried allowed the expedition to determine its latitude with unprecedented accuracy.

Sharing the stage with Cook is a cast of memorable characters, notably Mai, a displaced Hawaiian Cook met on his second voyage and conveyed to England as a curiosity. Caught between worlds, Mai serves as a firsthand example of the cultural dislocation Polynesia suffered as a result of its “discovery.” Equally notable are Captain Charles Clerke, commander of the Discovery, who continued Cook’s mission at the cost of his own life; a pre-Mutiny on the Bounty William Bligh, who brought the expedition home after both its captains perished; and John Ledyard, a supremely literate young Connecticut Yankee observer of everything onboard.

Anyone intrigued by the age of sail, nautical adventure, or the South Pacific will love “The Wide Wide Sea.”

– Reviewed by Joe Glaser, WKU English Department.