Book Review: Hampton Sides revisits Captain James Cook, a divisive figure in the South Pacific

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In his fateful final Pacific voyage, Captain James Cook failed to find an ocean passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans but he did find Pacific islands, peoples and cultures unknown to Europeans. However, in recent years Cook has been presented as a villain for bringing diseases and opening these islands to colonization.

This book cover image released by Doubleday shows “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook” by Hampton Sides . This book cover image released by Doubleday shows “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook” by Hampton Sides .

Priests sometimes made human sacrifices. Warriors mutilated enemy corpses. People defeated in battle sometimes were enslaved. King Kamehameha, a revered figure in Hawaii, unified the Hawaiian Islands in 1810 at a cost of thousands of warriors’ lives. An obelisk in Hawaii marking where Cook was killed in 1779 had been doused with red paint when Sides visited as part of his research for this book. Over Cook’s name was written “You are on native land.”Sides draws deeply from Cook’s and other crew members’ diaries and supplements that with his own reporting in the South Pacific.

What may have ailed Cook on that final voyage we probably never will know, but we do know that his voyages opened the Pacific islands to the world, and as new arrivals always do, life is changed forever.Sides make a persuasive case in 387 pages of diligent, riveting reporting that Cook came as a navigator and mapmaker and in dramatically opening what was known about our world, made us all richer in knowledge.

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