Best book of 2024 traces Captain Cook’s fateful journey

Don’t, please, be irritated by someone who calls something the “best”, but here it is, the best book of 2024 that this column prepares for review around this time every year, a book whose penetrative grasp of its subject matter the columnist — an unrepentant bibliophile — believes engages the life of the mind, fosters cultural discourse among readers and, heck, yes, at once entertains, enthralls and beguiles.

My choice, one I’ve this time made without hesitation, is The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Journey of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides.

Countless books have already been written about Captain Cook and his legacy as an explorer has been debated ad nauseam over the years, as evidenced by the popularity of the journal Cook Log, published by the Cook Society, an international organisation founded in 1975. Surely, you say, there’s nothing new to add to the tale.

Not so, Sides, who has taken an era and its culture for his verbal canvas, demonstrating how his protagonist was by temperament made for it, demonstrates convincingly in his book. There’s a lot to say about the man.

Hampton Sides is a historian and writer who has authored several best-selling narrative histories as theoretically diverse as Ghost Soldiers (2001), about the rescue by the Second World War Allied forces of Bataan Death March survivors in the Philippines; Blood and Thunder (2006) — my favourite — about the transformation of the American West, a book that upended Americans’ understanding of their nation’s westward march; and The Kingdom of Ice (2014), the epic story of the 1779-1881 Arctic voyage of the USS Jeanette and the crew’s struggle to survive after having had to abandon their ship in the polar ice.

Siden’s Wide Wide Sea is a vivid, albeit interpretive retelling of the third — and final — voyage across the globe taken by the renowned British explorer and mariner at a time in 1774 when the imperial ambitions of the European powers, in particular those of Great Britain, were at their peak, and when, in the words of Arnold Toynbee, the “encounters between civilisations” proved fateful for peoples inhabiting regions “discovered” by Europeans.

Cook’s last voyage, as Sides writes, is a “morally complicated” tale that still leaves a lot for our modern sensibilities to untangle and ponder over.

The old wives tale about Captain Cook is that he was not an explorer expanding the imperial map of the nation that funded his voyages but an “explorer-scientist” who was respectful of and sympathetic to indigenous cultures, but his actions — and there are plenty of them described here — put the lie to that claim.

Consider his encounter with the people of Hawaii, which takes up the bulk of the book. In one instant, for example, after one of his crew’s goats was reportedly stolen by the islanders, he sent his mariners on a rampage, during which they torched whole villages, along with the villagers’ cropland and canoes — all to force the goat’s return. And for other petty theft he ordered severe floggings.

Though clearly The Wide Wide Sea does not fit into the growing genre of descriptive narrative of famous explorers and the swashbuckling mariners who join them (it is too cerebral a tome for that) you can still read it as a well-paced bravura account of an adventure on the high seas. After all, Captain Cook’s expedition, which consisted of 180 men and two wooden ships, The Resolute and The Discovery, had sailed from England (on July 12, 1776) to South Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, then to North Alaska and finally back to Hawaii — which, as we say, was the island where the action was. Sides writes of Captain Cook: “Action was life to him and repose was a sort of death”.

On Feb. 14, 1779, not too long after his return to Hawaii, he convinced himself that Haitians were becoming, as he put it, too “insolent” for his liking after a small boat that belonged to his crew was reportedly stolen by the locals. Captain Cook responded to the theft by attempting to kidnap and hold hostage on the ship Kalanipu’u, the alii nui, or the supreme monarch, of Hawaii.

After he, accompanied by several of his lieutenants, began to drag his captive to the Kealakekua Bay, on the west coast of the island, a large crowd of islanders began to form on the shore, and now as he turned to board a row boat that had awaited his arrival, he was struck on the head by a club and then stabbed to death, finally falling on his face in the surf. (Four of his men were killed and two others wounded in the melee.)

While on tour promoting his book, Sides told an NPR interviewer that he was out “neither to lionise nor to demonise” his protagonist, but it is clear from the tone of The Wide Wide Sea that he shares the view of many people today of Captain James Cook, namely that the man had tops in his mind the furthering of Britain’s colonial enterprise — which doesn’t make him an altogether simpatico character, as would attest the toppling of his statue in 2000 in places in the Commonwealth as far apart as Melbourne, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada.

Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.