Sailing with my dad on our vintage 35 foot boat for two weeks at a time brought us some harrowing situations: high winds, scary waves, broken rigging, cold nights, grounding, and occasional sick stomachs. But none of that comes close to what Captain James Cook or other sailors faced in the late 1700s (see my previous post on The Wager) as they explored the world facing gale force winds, shredded sails, 100 foot waves, dense fog, broken masts, rats, spoiled food, frigid temperatures, and much more. As far as navigation, they had a compass, a quadrant (to determine latitude), and the recently invented chronometer (to measure longitude). To find a sister ship in the fog, they resorted to firing cannon blasts. 

The Wide Wide Sea is an undertaking for the reader, but I cannot even imagine the number of months and years Hampton Sides put into his research to write this account of Cook’s third and final voyage, beginning in 1776. The sheer number of books, sea logs, charts, historical documents, journals, letters, artifacts, artwork, and interviews Sides pored over is mind boggling (depicted in 40+ pages of notes)–and the info pertains to well over 20 countries/islands/oceans/unnamed coastal areas that Cook passed through or paused in. 

Cook’s primary mission was to seek out the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of finding a quicker way to get from the UK to Asia by crossing above North America. But instead of seeking it out going East to West: England toward Greenland and Newfoundland and beyond, Cook had to drop off a passenger in Tahiti; thus, he sailed south around Africa then East through the Southern Ocean toward Australia and New Zealand then Northeast to the Society Islands (Tahiti) then North to Hawaii and finally to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska where they poked around as much as possible before getting shut out by pack ice in the Arctic Ocean never even reaching the northernmost part of Alaska. And though the mission failed in finding the coveted way to cross above North America, Cook was successful in mapping islands and shorelines never charted or inaccurately charted before. That was his real love: discovery and data. 

The two ships, the HMS Resolution, and the sister ship HMS Discovery finally arrived back in England 1,548 days (over 4 years) later. But Cook died in Hawaii two and a half years into the voyage; his friend and captain of HMS Discovery, Charles Clerke, died later that year.

Much of the beauty in this book is the description of the areas where they land, from the orchards and vineyards of Cape Town to the bays and Fjords of New Zealand to the coves of blue water and plentiful sea life in Tahiti and Hawaii–and in each place, Cook tries to respect the native people and their customs (at least in part because he usually needs food, water, and materials for repair) and to not spread European diseases. But abstaining from sex becomes too challenging to force upon his crew, especially with many natives who welcomed it; thus they spread gonorrhea, among other maladies. 

Cook dies in a battle with natives in Hawaii–a confusing encounter since he had mostly managed–in all other places–to avoid escalating conflict. And like all European explorers, Cook is a controversial figure. He’s a master navigator, a stalwart captain, and a prolific cartographer. But can anyone land on indigenous soil and not do damage? Can an outsider ever truly respect native customs? Can any European vessel not be biased and imperialistic? Those are the questions that we can’t help but ponder as we follow Cook and his crew from ocean to ocean, wondering how on earth they survived and how much they contributed to later colonialism.

Fun fact: not one person died of scurvy on any of his voyages. Though the science was not yet clear, he knew in his gut the importance of fresh food and cleanliness, insisting on both.

A rollicking good book. If you read like I do, be prepared to flip to the maps inside the front and back cover a hundred+ times.