In his new book, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, bestselling narrative historian Hampton Sides tells the story of one of the greatest explorers ever to live, James Cook.
Tales of Cook’s exploits have fallen out of favor. The once-celebrated explorer has become the “Columbus of the Pacific,” Sides observes. White, male, and European, he’s been canceled by a later generation that views his story as something to be ashamed of, not celebrated. As Sides noted, his memorial in Hawaii is routinely vandalized. In 2021, a statue of Cook in Victoria, British Columbia, was toppled. In recent years, there have been attempts to rebrand shopping centers, trophies, and streets named after the adventurer. The Captain Cook Birthplace Museum faces closure.
But Cook was a great man. As Sides put it: “Cook and his men sailed at a fascinating moment when there were still a few extremely large geographical mysteries left to solve, when there were few remaining swaths of our planet human eyes had never seen, and when it was still possible for radically different cultures from distant parts of the world to encounter one another for the first time.”
His voyages, many of them feats of unimaginable endurance, charted new-to-Westerners lands, including Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. And by the standards of his era and profession, which are the standards historians and those of us reading about history can reasonably apply, Cook even held some relatively enlightened views. Cook was not a “conqueror or colonizer,” Sides pointed out. He was not interested in the “gambits of the colonial chess game.” Rather, he was, in the truest sense, an explorer. “What animated him most,” Sides wrote, “were the moments of pure discovery, moments when he felt called upon to study, measure, and document something entirely new.”
Cook “sailed in an age of wonder, when explorer-scientists were encouraged to roam the world, describing, collecting unfamiliar species of plants and animals, recording landscapes and peoples unknown to Europe. In direct ways, Cook’s voyages influenced the Romantic movement. They benefited medical science, bolstered the fields of botany and anthropology, and inspired writers” ranging from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Herman Melville. His odysseys were turned into bestselling books and plays and inspired novels and comics. It is even thought that Captain James Kirk, the fictional hero of Star Trek, was based on Cook.
Born into humble beginnings, the eventual captain was a farm manager’s son and had limited education. As a teenager, he moved to Whitby, a small hamlet of shipbuilders. He began his maritime career as an apprentice, working his way up in the merchant marine. Early voyages took him to the Baltic coast and even St. Petersburg, Russia. But Cook aspired to more, later writing that he wanted to go not only “farther than any man has been before me” but “as far as I think it possible for man to go.”
The Royal Navy offered the best means to fulfill his ambitions. At the rather-advanced-to-enlist age of 27, Cook eschewed a promotion to command a merchant vessel, choosing instead to join the Navy. He started as an ordinary seaman, effectively having to climb the ladder all over again. Yet he advanced rapidly, aided by a preternatural skill at mapmaking. His talent for cartography led to an assignment charting the St. Lawrence River during the Seven Years’ War. His skills soon caught the attention of high officials within the Admiralty.
Cook’s first round-the-world voyage left England in 1768, bound for Tahiti. He commanded a ship called the HMS Endeavour, which reportedly served as the inspiration for the starship Enterprise. Cook charted the eastern coast of Australia and both islands of New Zealand and added more than 5,000 miles of shoreline to the map of the Pacific.
His next voyage met with similar success, earning him both fame and gravitas. Cook’s ships, one biographer would write, “seemed to be drawn to land as if by magnetic navigational attraction.” He was also widely respected by his men, who appreciated his understated style and aversion to theatrics. His instinct, Sides noted, “was to cast attention away from himself and to give others credit.” Indeed, in all his travels, he never named a landmark or feature after himself or any members of his family. Others would do so, but not by Cook’s suggestion. Cook would even affix places with indigenous names when he was aware of them, something that was hardly common during his time.
In addition to humility, Cook had another trait that was all too rare. He was genuinely curious about the cultures and people whom he encountered and exhibited both a level of respect for their traditions as well as self-awareness about his own role as a foreigner. Cook did his best to prevent those under his command from spreading diseases, particularly those of the sexually transmitted variety. This was no easy feat. Sailors who had spent months at sea often landed at port and engaged in sexual bartering with natives. Cook did his level best to limit it, and by all accounts, he remained faithful to his wife.
Nor was Cook cruel. It was said that the Royal Navy was “manned by violence and maintained by cruelty,” yet Cook had a reputation for being a benevolent leader and displayed a remarkable concern for the well-being of the men under his command. His efforts to promote hygiene and a healthy diet led to a dramatic decrease in deaths from scurvy. From 1600 to 1800, scurvy killed nearly 2 million European sailors. Yet on his second voyage, which lasted for three years, not even one of Cook’s men died from the disease. Cook, one historian wrote, had become “that blessed creature, a man to whom good luck had become a habit.”
Yet Cook’s cautious nature and keen judgment would falter on his third and final voyage. Cook left an early retirement, enticed by high-ranking figures in the Admiralty to set sail on a voyage to search for the fabled Northwest Passage, a navigable waterway connecting England to the markets of Asia. Advocates claimed the Northwest Passage would render obsolete the dangerous and time-consuming journey around the bottom of Africa or South America.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
But the trip would be ill-starred both for Cook and many under his command. Poor weather, delays, sickness, and fateful encounters with natives would plague the journey. Cook would meet an ignominious end, his final moments in a blood-soaked tide pool on a Hawaiian beach. But the spirit of Cook’s journey would live on. In 1971, silver oak taken from his final ship, the HMS Resolution, would be brought to the moon by Apollo 15.
The whole tale is ably told by Sides, who proves himself once again to be a master of narrative history. If inadvertently, he reminds us of a time long before cancel culture and wokeness, when brave men who journeyed into the unknown could expect to be celebrated and admired by the inhabitants of the world they discovered and shaped.
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.