Captain James Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific in the late 1700s exemplify the law of unintended consequences. He set out to find a westward sea route from Europe to Asia but instead, with his maps and his reports, Cook revealed the Pacific Islands and their people to the world.
In recent decades, Cook has been vilified by some scholars and cultural revisionists for bringing European diseases, guns, and colonialism. But Hampton Sides’ new book, “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Last Voyage of Captain James Cook,” details that Polynesian island life and cultures weren’t always pretty.
Priests sometimes performed human sacrifices. The fighters mutilated the bodies of the enemy. People lost in war were sometimes enslaved. King Kamehameha, a revered Hawaiian figure, united the Hawaiian Islands in 1810 at the cost of thousands of warriors.
Sides’ book is sure to anger some indigenous groups in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands, who say Cook initiated the destruction of Pacific island cultures.
An obelisk in Hawaii where Cook was killed in 1779 was covered in red paint when Sides visited as part of his research for the book. Above Cook’s name was written “You are on Homeland.”
But Cook, Sides says, did not come to conquer.
Sides draws heavily from the diaries and supplements of Cook and other crew members along with their own reporting in the South Pacific.
Cook emerges from the book as an excellent seaman and civilized man, encouraging the crew to sail with him. However, on a voyage in the late 1770s, crew members noted that Cook seemed agitated, not his usual self.
What Cook must have suffered on that last voyage we may never know, but we do know that his voyage opened up the Pacific Islands to the world, and, as newcomers always do, life always changes to
Was Cook a villain for his quest?
In 387 pages of diligent, engaging reporting, the parties make a convincing case that Cook came as a navigator and mapmaker and dramatically added to what was known about our world. Made rich.
When his journals and maps arrived in England after his death, it was electric news. No, there was no sea route from North America to the Pacific, but Europeans now knew that the Pacific islands were home to numerous cultures. The parties’ reporting is clear that Cook treated them all with respect.
Although he and his fellow British sailors lacked a skill that seemed essential to sailors and would have better connected British sailors to the peoples of the Pacific, whose cultures and livelihoods were closely tied to the sea. : Neither Cook nor any of his fellow officers could swim.
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