Death caught up with the explorer on his third Pacific voyage
THE WIDE WIDE SEA The final, fatal adventure of Captain James Cook HAMPTON SIDES 432pp. Michael Joseph. £25.
ATTITUDES TO JAMES COOK have long served as proxies for attitudes to other things, and books about the explorer, of which there are many, tend to mirror the moment in which they are written: hagiographic in the age of empire, nuanced but anglocentric in the 1960s, withering in the postcolonial 1990s. In recent years the popular turn against Cook has been particularly sharp. Monuments have been toppled and defaced; artefacts from his voyages have been removed from collections; there is talk of renaming the Cook Islands. It is against this backdrop that The Wide Wide Sea, Hampton Sides’s new book about Cook’s third and final voyage, has been written.
The author steers a middle course, tipping his hat to the obvious issues (how can Cook be said to have “discovered” anything when there were people already there?) and acknowledging legitimate Indigenous resentment about everything that came in Cook’s wake: depopulation, language loss, physical dispossession. But The Wide Wide Sea is not about Cook as a symbol; it is about Cook as a man. A character study based primarily on his actions as reported by those around him, it concludes that he was “a hard person – hard to please, hard to fool, hard to reach, hard to know”, but also that he was a prodigious navigator, superhumanly cool under pressure, confident to the point of recklessness (at this stage of his life), daring, diligent and interestingly optimistic. It is a familiar portrait; most historians come away from a close study of Cook with a degree of admiration. But there is a sense in which it is harder these days to arrive at this view, given the significant cultural pressure to dislike him.
By the time he embarked on his fateful third voyage in 1776, Cook was famous. In two spectacular expeditions to the South Pacific he had fixed the location of all the major archipelagos, circumnavigated New Zealand, located the then still unknown east coast of Australia, debunked the idea of a southern continent and explored the Southern Ocean, becoming the first European to dip below the Antarctic Circle. His third voyage, for which he effectively came out of retirement, was to take him into the North Pacific for the first time.
Prosecuted at a tricky moment in England’s relationship with America, it was his most narrowly focused expedition, aimed primarily at finding the Northwest Passage, an imagined navigable route over the top of North America. As with all Cook’s voyages, though, this one had both major and minor objectives. He was charged with returning Mai, a Tahitian who had arrived in England on the Adventure,
