captain cook's last voyage

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Capt. Cook's Final Voyage

"A lot of things started going wrong from the very beginning," historian Hampton Sides says of Cook's last voyage, which ended in the British explorer's violent death on the island of Hawaii in 1779. His book is The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. Ken Tucker reviews Beyoncé's album Cowboy Carter .

“A General Chart: Exhibiting the Discoveries Made by Captn. James Cook in This and His Two Preceeding Voyages, with Tracks of the Ships under His Command.” Copperplate map, 36 × 57 cm. From the atlas volume of Cook’s A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean . . . (London, 1784). [Rare Books Division]

Cook’s legacy: a revealed world. His world map was the most accurate at its time. During his life, he had explored farther north (70°44′ N) and farther south (71°10′ S) in the Pacific than any previous human being.

Captain James Cook - His Third Voyage

His achievements over the past seven years were immense. He had made two tremendous journeys across the Pacific sweeping clear the imaginings of academics, pinned down Antarctica, defeated Cape Horn twice, established sailing routes to Australia and New Zealand, and set up excellent relations with the "noble savages" of the South Seas, the Polynesians. He had accurately mapped the locations of Australia and New Zealand, either achievement would have been a sufficient life's work. He had discovered or rediscovered almost every island group of importance in the South Seas and precisely charted them. He had lead crews of ordinary seamen through shipwreck and hazards in little ships twice around the Earth sailing a total of over 120,000 miles, loosing not one man to scurvy.

James Cook was promoted post Captain, a notable achievement for the ex-mate of a Whitby cat, but long overdue. He was again presented to King George III, and read accounts of his voyages to the Royal Society. For a paper written on the preservation of health for long voyage seamen he was awarded the Society's Copley Gold Medal. Cook and his wife dined with some of England's most prominent citizens. He was recognized across Europe as one of the great discoverers of the age. He had also proven that the Harrison chronometer was the answer to accurately calculating longitude.

A World Map Not Yet Completed

But there remained one great unknown, this time in the North Pacific. Could it be that there were a passage north of or through North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific? A more direct passageway from Europe to China and the East had been sought after from the Atlantic side. No effort had been made to discover such a route starting from the Pacific except by John Byron, who had discovered much of nothing.

In James Cook, however, admiralty saw a man who not only carried out his orders but used his judgment to better them. His ordered goals were to find a Northwest Passage around North America and if this route did not exist, look for a Northeast Passage around Siberia and back to Europe from the Pacific side.

In England at this time, knowledge of the west coast of the Americas started at the southern end of South America and ended at Drake's New Albion, which today was officially recognized by the United States Department of the Interior in October 2012 as Point Reyes, California. But in 1775 nobody quite knew where this was. James Cook would have to find Drake's Bay first, and start from there.

James Cook accepted the assignment from Admiralty. He was 47 years old, had been at sea for most of the past 30 years and deserved a longer leave, if not retirement. But there was no one better suited for the task than him.

It was 1775 and the 462 ton Resolution had been back in England for less than six weeks when Admiralty ordered that she be reconditioned for yet another “voyage to remote parts.” There was great demand on the shipyards as a consequence of war in American. The Resolution received a hasty retrofit even though Cook had returned her in good condition, considering what she had been through. The ship was indifferently caulked and poorly rigged but when the time for departure came she was well manned and stored, Cook made sure of this.

On this voyage Cook was to be his own astronomer and scientist, while William Anderson would serve as botanist and naturalist. The role of Executive Officer was filled by John Gore, a good fit as he had also served aboard the Endeavour for Cook’s first voyage. The crew included six midshipmen, a cook and his assistant, six quartermasters, twenty marines, and forty-five seamen. Another ship named Discovery , a 300 ton Whitby collier, would serve as the expeditions sister ship, commanded by Charles Clerke.

The Resolution was about 111 ft long, 30 ft wide, with a draught of 13 ft . She carried 112 crew including 20 marines along with 24 cannons. The Discovery was a bit smaller, 91 ft long, 27 ft wide, with a draught of 11 ft , and carried a complement of 70 seamen and 8 cannons.

On July 12, 1776, almost 1 year from his return from the second voyage, James Cook took the Resolution out to sea from Plymouth, England. They sailed through a channel filled with ships bound for the American Revolutionary War. Many thought the voyage to seek new discoveries on the west coast of North America was a little odd, since the east coast was battling for independence from those same discoverers.

But no one knew anything about the American west coast as of yet except for a few brave Spanish explorers and maybe an isolated Russian fur trader or two. And the longitude of the area had yet to be determined acurately. Cook's orders were to first sail to the South Indian Ocean to check on certain discoveries made by the French and assess their value as possible naval bases. Then he was to make way to the familiar islands of Tahiti. After that he was to sail into the North Pacific and explore everything north of Drakes Bay (northern California) until he found a sea passage to the North Atlantic.

This would take at least two summers with winter refuge anchored in Kamchatka (Russia) or elsewhere. If he were to find the Northwest Passage he was to sail back to the Atlantic by that means, making detailed surveys along the way. All this added up to the toughest and longest voyage Cook had ever made: Sailing down both Atlantics, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, crossing almost the entire length and breadth of the Pacific from sub Antarctic to Arctic and then back to England.

A Rough Start

As soon as they were off into the Atlantic the Resolution began to leak terribly. The crew could see the chaulker's shoddy work as the ship lifted and plunged through the sea. All the crew's quarters were soaked and the spare sails became sodden and moldy. Water seeped down through ceilings, not seriously but miserable none the less.

The crew aired the sails, reworked the rigging, and set charcoal fires wherever they could inside the ship as she made her way south. This was especially annoying for the crew since they had returned the ship to port in such good condition.

Cook blamed himself for the state of the Resolution . A ship in the dockyard has to be looked after even more carefully than when on voyage. And Cook had tried to enjoy his appointment at Greenwich Hospital as much as he could. With all of his duties it was not easy to get from his home to the dockyard. And Mrs. Cook knew nothing of the voyage until it was nearly time to leave. Its seems James Cook tried to enjoy the year at home to its fullest extent.

The crew did what they could to sustain the ship. There is evidence that Cook was not himself during this voyage. His digestive system was still strained and his iron will not quite as strong as it was. Before they reached the Cape of Good Hope the mizzen topmast was found to be cracked and not able to bear sail. A ship on such a long journey needs all of her masts. At the Cape Cook bought a replacement. Both the Resolution and the Discovery were recaulked at port.

On November 30, 1776, both ships sailed on to almost 50° S. They passed Tasmania and Cook's favorite, Queen Charlotte's Sound in New Zealand. A shift of wind threw the ship and the mizzen mast came down, thankfully clearing the decks. On January 19 near 45° S the fore topmast came down and brought the topgallant mast with it. This was a mess but the crew worked tirelessly to rebuild the ship as she rolled violently through the sea. She was fitted with enough sail for the Roaring Forties.

Cook diverted towards Adventure Bay on the southeast of Tasmania to find trees for new masts and fresh food. This was his only visit to Tasmania, a beautiful island with excellent harbors and some of the best ship building timber in the world. Cook notes that there were very few natives to the island, and that they did not have any kind of sea transport, not even canoes for fishing. He was in a hurry, hoping to reach the northern coasts of North America by summer. The crew caught an abundance of fish, cut a few spars, harvested grass and firewood and sailed on.

It was near the end of February when the ships passed New Zealand. This time Cook made a northeasterly course which brought him to Hervey Islands (now the Cook islands), which offered no anchorages and little refreshments. Cook now accepted that he could not reach North America that summer and made for the nearby Friendly Islands.

Here they received good reception from the locals. There was however the immense problem of thievery. Even the local chiefs were not above bold faced robbery and having caught one Cook fined him one hog and gave him a dozen lashes which he accepted stoically and fairly due. The stealing became so bad that Cook began to shave the heads of those who were caught. They hated to lose their long locks, but they still stole.

In spite of the thievery, their time in the Friendly islands was rather good. A private house was given to Cook. The natives were giving seeds for all types of new vegetables as was customary. The two ships sailed on for Tahiti, where two crewmen from the Discovery deserted. Cook knew that any successful desertion could start an exodus, as a casual life in Tahiti was more appealing than life in Victorian England. Cook seized canoes, houses, and chiefs, demanding the crewmen be returned. Armed searches were performed and the two men were finally found in Bora Bora and returned.

In the meantime Cook made a discovery in another field. He had been suffering badly from rheumatism, especially from his hips to his feet. A friendly chief offered to help and Surgeon Anderson approved. Twelve women, the chief's relatives, were paddled out ceremoniously to the Resolution and descended into the great cabin. Cook was told to lie down on a mattress whereby the women began pummeling, squeezing, and massaging his entire body unmercifully, especially the rheumatic joints. After about 15 minutes Cook stood up and to his astonishment felt much better. Two more treatments cured him. The rheumatism went away and did not return.

North Across the Pacific

Now it was time to leave familiar islands. Cook's plan was to sail north with the southeast trade wind on the starboard beam, make their way through the doldrums as best they could, then pick up the northeast trades and sail north out of them running eastward from there on. It was futile to sail against the trade winds, better to use them for latitude.

On Christmas Eve of 1777, Cook sighted the island named Christmas. They pressed on until they saw three high mountain islands. It was January, 1778. They approached the island and managed to get an anchor down. Canoes were sent out by unarmed natives who spoke Tahitian. The crew wondered how the Tahitians could have sailed over such great distances. Cook and his seamen had encountered these same people over an enormous area, from Bora Bora to New Zealand to Tahiti and now to this island called Atui by to locals. This island is now called Kauai, in the Hawaiian Islands. The site of their landing is near the present day town of Waimea, Kauai, Hawaii. This marks the first contact with ancient Hawaiians by a European.

Islanders brought out pigs, potatoes, sugar cane, and traded them for whatever they were offered. The sight of strange men from Europe and enormous sailing ships was like nothing they had ever seen and could hardly believe. When Cook landed all the natives in sight fell upon their faces "and remained in that very humble posture till, by expressive signs I prevailed upon them to rise," wrote the captain.

A long speech was made, presents exchanged, and friendships pledged. As Cook and his party moved about the island, never far from the beach, the locals "fell prostrate on the ground and remained in that position until we passed." The crew thought the practice was only a way of paying respect. It dawned on none of them that it could be something more than that.

With fresh supplies the two ships set sail once again. On 40° N in February of 1778, the west winds found the ships. A month later the coast of a great continent came in sight, North America. Beautiful distant snowcapped mountains were seen. Cook turned north and made a running survey of the land as they went.

The discovery of a sailing route across what is now Canada and the northern United States was now obviously impossible to Cook, as he could see great mountains blocking the way. It could hardly matter what bays, inlets, or gulfs might be found as these majestic mountains could be seen far inland. He was now well aware of the immense stretch of land in place of where this open water was hoped to be. He had previously surveyed the eastern side of the continent, Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He now knew the longitude of the west coast as well.

From Cape Race in Newfoundland to the coast of Oregon, 70° of longitude, over 4,000 miles! What a magnificent country! As they trekked north the coast trended westward. And the wind was west, always forcing towards land. There were intense squalls and fogs. The coast of Washington and Oregon were notorious in the sailing ship era and Cape Flattery (named by Cook) was rated then with Hatteras, the Horn, and Good Hope as the four most dangerous headlands in the world.

Cook took the ships into Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The natives traded fish and furs and practiced even more thievery. Sailing on, it was now April of 1778 and the Resolution began to leak badly again. Water could be heard and seen entering the ship but it appeared the gaps were all above the waterline. Water was pumped and bailed overboard as the ship rocked violently through the rough weather.

This was a bad shape for the Resolution to approach the Arctic in. Cook was in desperate need of a good harbor to make repairs. He was now well inside Alaskan waters and had already sailed past the sheltered and beautiful bays of the Puget Sound. He kept well out to sea as this was a north-south passage. The coast was sheltered by offshore islands at the base of picturesque mountains and fed by glaciers. This was a beautiful place in the summer but futile towards any hope of a Northwest Passage.

It is a shame that here Cook missed Valdez off of Prince Williams Sound, as it would make for a good location for repairs and is ice free year round. They were above 60° N now off the coast of British Colombia and northwest Alaska. From here the Alaskan mainland turned south, to Cook's surprise. The hazy weather made finding a suitable harbor difficult. Off of Prince William Sound, not far from Valdez, Cook found a sheltered spot he named Snug Corner Bay, north of Montague Island. Making anchor they found all the oakum gone below the wooden sheathing. This was repaired while Eskimos came out in kayaks and canoes in an attempt to seize the Discovery , armed with knives. Cook demonstrated that they could kill at range and the Eskimos turned away. None were killed, Cook wanted no one murdered.

Observations showed the ships to be over 1,500 miles west of any part of Hudson's Bay. Despite the appearance of many arms leading off from the Sound, the behavior of the tides showed that it was a waste of time to seek a Northwest Passage there. It was now May. Cook must push north somehow. To do this he must first go southwest along the Alaskan coast. The more promising gulfs were inspected by boat, but they were all useless.

The two ships had not gone far to the southwest before coming to a headland that swung around to the north. Could this be the passage they had been looking for? It was at least the best lead Cook had seen so far. Passage or not it was a considerable discovery. Before long it was observed that their newly discovered waterway was fed only by rivers. Its waters became shallow and almost fresh water, abundant signs that they were in a large river. Today it is called Cook Inlet, famous mountain lined broad waters that lead to the city of Anchorage, Alaska.

Sailing on down the Alaskan coast they met with natives to discuss their knowledge of the local geography and to trade iron for salmon. At Unalaska, they met a party of Russian fur traders. They showed the Englishmen their charts of the area between Kamchatka and Alaska, but had no knowledge of a Northwest Passage. The English and Russians got along wonderfully.

Beyond Unalaska and the Aleutian Islands were the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait. Beyond these was the Chuckchee Sea and the impassible ice jam of the Arctic. Cook sailed on, noting the outflow of the Yukon River. They sailed around Alaska and right up to the Arctic ice, huge impregnable fields of it, not far from Point Barrow. If a sea passage reached the Atlantic from here, which it did, it was ice jammed even in the summer and was therefore useless.

Cook reached nearly 71° N and sailed east between the mainland and crushing sea ice to just beyond Point Barrow, Alaska, about 1,000 miles south of the North Pole. The ice could be heard moving and appeared as an endless line of gnashing teeth waiting to wreck the two ships. Cook turns back west towards the Asian continent, looking for a northeast passage instead. But he runs into the same ice wall.

Cook does what he can to chart the northern coasts of North America and Asia. The crew survive on walrus steak, excellent fish, and berries picked from ashore, all washed down with Cook's own spruce "beer." They now pass south, back through the Bering Strait and by October are in Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. They are now 12,000 miles from home and had been at sea for two years.

Onward Home

The two ships were once again badly in need of major repairs. A good base was needed where the ships could be refitted and the crew refreshed. His loose orders were for him to make for Petropavlovsk on the east coast of Russia and at the end of the Aleutian Islands. This meant the ships would spend another winter in the Arctic, and one could only guess if they would ever see England again after that.

So Cook looked over his charts in search of something better. With a number of his crew suffering from tuberculosis, he decided instead to make for those pleasurable Sandwich Islands where Kauai and Niihau he had visited on their way north. They offered refreshment, pleasurable natives, and sunshine, which they all badly needed.

"I had other reasons for not going to Petropaulowska," wrote Cook. "The first ... was the great dislike I had to lying idle six or seven months which would be the consequence of wintering in any of these northern parts. No place was so conveniently within our reach, where we could expect to have our wants supplied, as the Sandwich Islands." He also held the opinion that these were an important discovery, and he could make better use of the winter by exploring and charting them further.

In hindsight, it is a shame that he did not have a better look at Vancouver Island. Or find the Strait of Juan de Fuca and sail into some lovely bay to refit in the Puget Sound of present day Washington State.

The Hawaiian Islands

Even today the Hawaiian Islands provide not much in the way of good harbor for ships the size of the Resolution and Discovery . After sailing down from the Arctic, Cook sailed for many days from Maui to Hawaii, to Oahu, Molokai, and back against the wind to the big island which he called Owhyee. He found no good harbor. The two ships were kept out at sea for 8 weeks, trading for fruit by means of canoes.

At last, on the western side of the big island, he noted a shallow bay. Two miles wide and a mile deep it was wide open to the southwest storms, but otherwise easy to sail into and simple to leave.

As soon as they made anchor canoes came out by the hundreds. It seems most of the islands population came out, thousands of them. The sight of so many smiling faces with the volcanic Mauna Loa in the background almost made the weary sailors glad they had not found a Northwest Passage across the top of the world and back to England.

It was January 17, 1779. The Hawaiians said their bay was called Kealakakua. All these islands from Kauai to Hawaii were new discoveries. Hogs, greens, coconuts, and fruits were abundandt and fairly traded with the English explorers or brought out as gifts. Sails were patched and rigging was refitted. An observatory was set up ashore.

The supreme chief of the island, Kalaniopu'u was rowed around the ships in ceremony and visited aboard. Cook was presented with magnificent red-feather cloaks and expensive helmets. Now ashore the natives praised Cook wherever he went. He gathered he had been named "Orono," and thought of this as a prestiegeous Hawaiian title. Senior priests went with him wherever he visited.

Exactly what was an Orono ? Or who was the Orono? "Some of these ceremonies," said Lieutenant King, "seem to border on adoration." The Orono was in fact Lono the god, a cheerful earthly Hawaiian of long ago who had been exiled and who was prophecized to return in a large island, with trees, bringing gifts including swine and dogs. Well here were the "islands" (ships) complete with "trees" (masts). Here too was a tall, comanding but friendly reincarnation of Lono in the form of Captain Cook.

The very day before his arrival off of Mauai, chief Kalaniopu'u had been victorious in a battle there, obviously because the great Lono was coming to celebrate his victory. Honaunau, on Kealakua Bay, is a much revered place in old Hawaii. Time and setting were right for the return of a god. The sailors and their "islands" were no ordinary men. The astonished Hawaiians noted them carrying fires burning in their mouths (pipes), when they needed anything they reached into their skins (jackets) and pulled them out, some had heads horned like the moon (officer's felt hats), they could take off the tops of their heads (wigs), and whipe their faces with a cloth of impossible softness (linen handkerchiefs). Where could they have come from but the home of the gods?

Perhaps. The sailors also had some distasteful traits and they consumed an aweful lot of food. The priests and chiefs had to constantly take from the locals to supply these sailors. In time this could become irritating. But the ammount of food and gifts brought to the ships was none of Cook's asking. He had no idea it was forecefully taken from the people by the priests for the god Lono's happiness.

The priests, chiefs, and everyone else were happy when at last the Resolution and Discovery took up their anchors and left those shores. Lono spread his white banners high on his trees and moved out of the bay. It had been a wonderful visit but the island was now significantly depleted of resources.

Cook was happy with his visit to Kealakekua and writing in his journal, delighted "to enrich our voyage with a discovery which, though the last, seemed in many respects to be the most important that had hitherto been made by Europeans throughout the extent of the Pacific Ocean."

It was now kona season, the time of storms. And the Resolution had not sailed far before her topmast began to roll more than it should. Serious damage was quickly done to the rigging. Cook looked upward from the deck and could see the fore lower mast was split again, the tenth time of the voyage. The topmast had been repaired with splints but closer inspection showed damage enough that it could not be repaired at sea.

The ship must be repaired again. But where? They were now down to six sails from the usual twelve. Cook was against returning to Kealakekua, but there was no other known place for anchorage in the Hawaiian Islands.

Back Again in Kealakekua Bay

The sailors received no warm welcome this time. The islanders were in no place to supply more sustinance for the two ships, much less themselves. Lono's first visit had been a tremendous strain. Cook wasted no time floating the mast ashore for repair. How long would he and his 200 followers stay? The priests offered welcome, the citizens threw stones.

Cook tried his best to explain why they were there and how they intened to leave quickly. The people seemed to understand, but there were "incidents." Thieving became bold and serious. Some retaliation was made.

There was increased awareness that whoever Lono Cook might be, these seamen were no gods. When a seaman named William Watman died, he was buried ashore. The natives watched with some shock and now saw that these men were mortal, they could die.

Thieving grew worse. The natives began diving under the two ships and prying out nails from their outer sheathing. This was intollerable. It was difficult to defend the ships when so many of the men were ashore repairing the mast. Cook refused to use the ship's superior firepower against the locals.

One night a large boat, the Discovery 's cutter, was stolen. The cutter was vital and could not be replaced. Cook had a regular drill for such instances, take a local high chief hostage until the item was returned. Armed boats were sent to prevent canoes from leaving the bay until the cutter was returned.

In full uniform Cook rowed ashore, carrying his double barrel shotgun along with an armed guard of nine marines under Lieutenant Phillips. King Kalaniopu'u was ashore and told of the theft, agreed to come as a hostage. He began to walk with Cook very calmly towards the beach.

They were within 25 yards of the boats when a large crowd began to form. A woman stood between the beach and the king, she was his favorite wife. With tears she begged him not to go any farther. Several local chiefs joined the crowd which was now growing closer. Lieutenant Phillips noted some of the crowd gathering stones. Others darted into houses, returning with spears and clubs and fastening breast plates.

Two young chiefs pushed the king down to a sitting position such that he could not walk any further. The marines drew up in line along the beach, at the ready.

The crowd grew angry. Cook left the king, telling Phillips that he and the marines must go back to prevent serious bloodshed. A warrior rushed up to Captain Cook with a stone in one hand and a dagger in the other.

"Put those things down!" ordered the captain. The warrior made ready to fling the stone. Cook fired at once. One barrel of his shotgun was loaded with small shot, which he used. The pellets bounced off of the warrior's breastplate. He laughed and came at Cook with his dagger. This time Cook fired his other barrel, loaded with ball. The warrior dropped to the ground.

A general attack with stones began at once. The marines fired, but the warriors had only noticed the captains first shot and believed the muskets to be nothing more than a brief flash and flame. Warriors were killed but there were too many to resist. The marines were rushed before they could reload and four of them were struck down. Now the seamen came in the boats, opening fire.

For a moment Cook stood there, facing the crowd of blood thirsty Hawaiians. He did not reload. He turned to the boats, raising a hand to command a cease-fire. He had reached the water's edge but his commands could not be heard.

A warrior rushed him from behind, clubbing him violently. He sank to his knees, half in the water. The warrior stabbed again and again. A roar erupted from the crowd and men rushed into the sea, stabbing, clubbing, and holding James Cook under water. Once he raised his head and looked at them. They dragged his body ashore and all began stabbing him in a frenzy. Seizing the dagger from each other's hands as if each one must assure they had a part in the act.

This all took only seconds. The unpremeditated, gastly, unnecessary murder was done. Now no one could stop the sailors and surviving marines. Warriors now saw their breast plates were not armor as many were mowed down by musket fire. The beach cleared at once.

The boats pulled back with their incredible news. When it was told, a great silence filled the ships and a great sorrow filled Kealakekua Bay. It was February 14, 1779, and Captain James Cook R.N., aged 50, had met his end on that Hawaiian beach.

Some of the Hawaiians later took his body back to their village and prepared it with funerary rituals usually reserved for the chiefs and highest elders of their society. He was buried by his crew at Kealakekua Bay. Today, above the bluff, a town has been settled and aptly named: Captain Cook, Hawaii.

Continuing without James Cook

The crew finishes the repairs to the Resolution in harbor. The locals are now not allowed anywhere near the beach or the ships. Lieutenant Clerke takes over as acting captain of the Resolution and the voyage as a whole, but he is slowly dying of tuberculosis.

Lieutenant James King is promoted First Lieutenant of the Discovery and takes the task of completing the narrative portion of Cook's journals. It is here that King devotes two full pages describing surfboard riding as practiced by the locals in Kealakekua Bay. Thus in 1779, Lieutenant James King records in the ship's logs the first written description of Hawaiian surfing by a European.

The repairs are made quickly and the expedition heads for the Arctic for one last shot at finding a Northwest Passage. There is no use. The ice fields of 1779 were larger and farther south than they had been the previous year.

The ships continued to deteriorate. One day some wood floated by, it was part of the Resolution 's own sheathing. The Discovery suffered minor hull damage from ice, but nothing that could not be repaired. Captain Clerke succumbs to his tuberculosis and dies at the age of 38. Lieutenant Gore takes command of the Resolution with Lieutenant King commanding the Discovery .

They were now offshore of Petropavlovsk, Russia. It is now October of 1799 and the two ships decide the expedition’s goals are completed, and begin their trek back home to England. Gore sends a letter overland containing copies of Cook's reports along with his own account of Cook's death. The letters were carried by dog sleds across Siberia, then by horse and finally by coastal shipping across the North Sea to England.

Six months later the letters arrived in London, bringing dismay to the whole nation. Another six months after that, in early October of 1780, the expedition returned at last to England after a voyage of 4 years and 3 months.

Gore made a careful journey back, as they heard tales of one American naval commander named John Paul Jones. He sailed around the west coast of Ireland and down the North Sea before entering the Thames. Now in port, the Resolution would be refitted as an armed transport, sent to the East Indies, and would later disappear from the records.

Mrs. Cook was awarded £200 per year plus £25 a year for each of their three children. She was also awarded half of the profits from books on her husband's voyages. She retired to Clapham, London. She lived there into the steam age and passed in 1835 at the age of 93, surviving her husband by 56 years.

Sir Walter Besant (1836-1901) wrote an account of Mrs. Cook in a biography of her husband. Like many ship captain's wives, she could not sleep on nights of high winds, thinking of her husband out at sea. She read from her husband's Bible daily. On Thursdays she entertained her friends with dinner at her home.

Sadly, she destroyed all private letrers from her husband, as she thought they should remain only between the two. Mrs. Cook is buried in Cambridge at St. Andrews Church. She left money to erect a memorial to her husband in the church.

In 1878 a Memorial to Cook was erected at his place of death in Hawaii. Today the Hawaiian flag has the Union Jack (Flag of England) as the principle emblem. A statue of Cook has also been erected at the site of his landing in Waimea, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

The Effects of Cook's Voyages

To the average Englishman, the discoveries and explorations of James Cook were so remote that they almost belonged to another world. Before these discoveries, even Americans knew nothing of the west coast of the continent to which there new country was established.

Three volumes of Cook's voyages are published. They accurately describe with latitude and longitude the locations and coastlines of Australia, New Zealand, the Hawaiian Islands, the west coast of North America as well as the north coast of Alaska, the east and north coasts of Asia, and countless islands in the South Pacific.

We know very little about James Cook the man. He was of Scottish and Yorkshire ancestry. He was raised to work hard, on a Yorkshire farm. He served for years on Whitby colliers. His hard upbringing surely contributed to his qualities of leadership and competence. His seamen and officers knew him well and many came back with him voyage after voyage, some to their death.

Apart from his character, James Cook can be described as a loyal Englishman who became one of Western Civilization's great contributors. The best description of him is left on the map of the globe. The names of his brave ships stand in the history books: Endeavour, Resolution, Discovery, and the Adventure. During his life, he had explored farther north (70°44′ N) and farther south (71°10′ S) in the Pacific Ocean than any previous human being. The farmer's son from Yorkshire who became Captain R.N. and gold medalist of the Royal Society can easily be seen as one of the greatest explorers the world has ever known.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. Psalm 119:105

Other Classic History articles on the voyages of Captain James Cook include: Captain James Cook - His First Voyage Captain James Cook - His Second Voyage

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Cook's Third Voyage To The Pacific

James Cook was appointed to command a ship called Resolution , which left Plymouth on 12 July, 1776. Charles Clerke commanded the ship Discovery , which left on 1 August, and caught up with Resolution at Cape Town . A list of what Cook was up to preparing for this voyage and during the voyage can be found in Paul Capper's list of Third Voyage dates . Links to information about the ship, the people, and what happened during the voyage can be found below.

Resolution Cook sailed in her twice, but with different escort vessels

Discovery the support vessel on the third voyage. the smallest of cook's pacific ships, cook, drake, new albion and juan de fuca the influence of francis drake and juan de fuca on cook's search for new albion, unhealthiness of batavia two voyages for which visiting batavia was unhealthy, captain cook's last banquet in 1776 a sumptuous banquet that james cook enjoyed in june 1776, whilst resolution was moored in long reach, river thames, where is the “annexed drawing” of 1778 what happened to the drawing that captain cook referred to in his journal entry of august 27, 1778, king kamehameha's arrow - how a mystery was uncovered is an arrow brought to england one of the small leg-bones of captain cook, king kamehameha's arrow - how a mystery was solved the results of a dna analysis of the arrow thought to be made from one of the small leg-bones of captain cook, muster records for the royal navy ships of james cook the crew of the ships in which james cook sailed, where did cook land on the island of kaua`i in january 1778, cook landed on the hawaiian island of kaua`i. there is historical confusion as to where it took place., january - march 1776 cook was volunteering for his third voyage., april - june 1776 cook was preparing for his third voyage , this time sailing in resolution and discovery, july - september 1776 cook was sailing south in the atlantic ocean ., october - december 1776 cook was at cape town and then kerguelen island ., january - march 1777 cook was at tasmania and new zealand on his third voyage., april - june 1777 cook was among the tongan islands , where he was nearly killed ., july - september 1777 cook went from tonga to tahiti ., october - december 1777 cook was in the society islands and discovered christmas island ., january - march 1778 cook was at the western hawaiian islands and sailed to america ., april - june 1778 cook was searching the coasts of british columbia and alaska for a passage to the atlantic ., july - september 1778 cook was searching the coasts of asia and america for a passage to the atlantic ., october - december 1778 cook was sailing south from america to the hawaiian islands ., january - march 1779 cook was at the eastern hawaiian islands , where he was killed ., april - june 1779 cook's ships sailed to kamchatka on the east coast of russia ., july - september 1779 captain charles clerke in the resolution and captain john gore in the discovery were sailing northward from kamchatka seeking to find the north west passage ., october - december 1779 cook's ships were sailing home from kamchatka , passing japan , and visiting macao ., january 1780 news of cook's death in february 1779 reaches london in january 1780., january - march 1780 cook's ships were sailing from macao to the cape of good hope ., april - june 1780 cook's ships were at the cape of good hope being repaired and refitted, july - september 1780 cook's ships were sailing home. adverse winds meant they coudldn't sail along the south coast of england , but had to sail west of ireland , call in at the orkney islands , and then sail south down the east coasts of scotland and england ., october 1780 cook's ships arrived home to the river thames..

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The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

A Brief History

On July 12, 1776, famous explorer English Captain James Cook set sail from Plymouth on what was to be his final voyage. The premier English explorer of the Pacific, Cook had taken voyages from 1768-1771 and 1772-1775, greatly expanding British knowledge of the Pacific, its islands, aits people. Cook’s third voyage would take the route around Africa to the Indian Ocean and on to the Pacific.

Digging Deeper

Captain Cook was given the task of returning a young man named Omai (Mai in his native language) to his homeland of the island of Raiatea, one of the Society Islands near Tahiti. The British expedition included the HMS Resolution under the command of Captain Cook, and the HMS Discovery under the command of Captain Charles Clerke, with Cook in overall command. Returning Omai to his native island was the public reason for the trip, though the main reason Cook and his ships had been sent to the Pacific was to search for a Northwest passage, a navigable water route across the top (North) of North America which would provide a greatly abbreviated route to the Pacific from Europe rather than going around the Southernmost tip of South America or the Southernmost tip of Africa.

Captain Cooks first Pacific voyage (he was just Lieutenant Cook then) took him 3 years and circled the globe. He became the first European to visit what is now New Zealand since Abel Tasman went ashore there an astounding 127 years earlier! That visit did not go well for the native Maori people, with the British leaving at least 5 of the natives dead. The purpose of this voyage was to chart the path of the planet Venus and to ascertain if there was indeed a large land mass in the area of what we now know as Australia, and indeed, Cook and his crew became the first known Europeans to land at Australia. His ship for that first voyage was a converted collier (coal hauler) renamed the Endeavor . The ship was tiny by modern standards only 106 feet long and 28 feet wide, with a displacement of only 368 tons. She was armed with a dozen swivel guns and 10 four pound cannons. Intended for exploration and landing on exotic shores, the ship was also equipped with 3 boats and provisioned with the necessities of a sea voyage, namely 17 barrels of rum, 44 barrels of brandy and 250 barrels of beer! Cook and friends returned to England to a heroes’ welcome 3 years later, with rumors of the ship and men having been lost at sea or sunk by the French giving the English folk a nice surprise when Endeavor showed up with its crew intact.

Cook’s second voyage also circumnavigated the globe, taking him around New Zealand and the East coast of Australia where he charted the lands down under. Another notable achievement of Cook’s second voyage was his sailing past the Antarctic circle, the first known Europeans to have gone South of that latitude. This second voyage was a 2 ship affair, with the Resolution and the Adventure making up the little fleet. Resolution was slightly bigger than Endeavor and marginally better armed, with 6 pounder guns instead of Endeavor’s 4 pounders. A main goal of this second voyage was to determine the presence or absence of a fabled land called Terra Australis Incognita, not to be confused with what we call Australia. (There was no such land found.) Another accomplishment of the second voyage was navigational advances using a new type of chronometer. The success of the second voyage earned Cook a promotion to Captain.

Now a renowned explorer, Cook was dispatched on his third voyage to explore more of the Pacific and hopefully discover a Northwest Passage around the Northern coast of North America. Unfortunately for James Cook, not only was the search for the Northwest Passage a failure, but the Captain was also killed in a battle with native Hawaiians on the Big Island of Hawaii in February of 1779. His crew returned to England via the Westerly route through the Indian Ocean and around Africa back to Great Britain, arriving home in October of 1780, almost 3 and a half years after the voyage began. Upon the death of Captain Cook, Charles Clerke assumed command, but he also died during the voyage in August of 1779, from the insidious enemy, tuberculosis. Command then reverted to John Gore, a British naval officer from the Virginia Colony in North America. Gore stayed loyal to the Crown when the American colonies, including Virginia, declared independence in 1776. (Gore died in 1790 having circumnavigated the globe a total of 4 times during his naval career.)

The encounter that led to the death of Captain Cook concerned the Hawaiians stealing one of Cook’s small boats, a not uncommon occurrence when dealing with Pacific Islanders during the 18 th Century voyages of discovery. Normally, the British would take natives and hold them hostage under the British property was returned, but this time Cook made the mistake of seizing the Hawaiian king as his hostage, evoking a violent response by the natives. Hawaiian legend has it that Cook was killed personally by a chieftain named Kalanimanokahoowaha. (Say that 3 times fast!)

When the Resolution and Discovery made it back to the British Isles in October of 1780, they were blown past England and ended up in the Orkney Islands of Northern Scotland! News of the deaths of Cook and Clerke had preceded the arrival of the ships, and this time the welcome was somewhat restrained.

The voyages of James Cook and his intrepid sailors and the journals compiled by Cook and others expanded the European knowledge of the Pacific and its lands and peoples. James Cook goes down in history as one of the great explorers in the Age of Discovery.

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Historical Evidence

For more information, please see…

Dugard, Martin. Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook . Washington Square Press, 2002.

Hough, Richard. Captain James Cook: A Biography . W. W. Norton & Company

The featured image in this article, the Death of Captain Cook by John Webber (–1793), is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer .

Major Daniel Zar is a retired veteran of the United States Marine Corps. He served during the Cold War and has traveled to many countries around the world. Prior to his military service, he graduated from Cleveland State University, having majored in sociology. Following his military service, he worked as a police officer eventually earning the rank of captain prior to his retirement.

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Captain Cook’s 1768 Voyage to the South Pacific Included a Secret Mission

The explorer traveled to Tahiti under the auspices of science 250 years ago, but his secret orders were to continue Britain’s colonial project

Lorraine Boissoneault

It was 1768, and the European battle for dominance of the oceans was on. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands had already spent several centuries traversing the globe in search of new land to conquer and resources to exploit, but the Pacific—and specifically, the South Seas—remained largely unknown. In their race to be the first to lay claim to new territory, the British government and the Royal Navy came up with a secret plan: Send a naval officer on a supposedly scientific voyage, then direct him to undertake a voyage of conquest for the fabled Southern Continent. The man chosen for the job was one James Cook, a Navy captain who also had training in cartography and other sciences.

Europeans already knew the Pacific had its share of islands, and some of them held the potential for enormous wealth. After all, Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to cross the Pacific Ocean way back in 1519, and by then it was already known that the “Spice Islands,” (in modern-day Indonesia) were located in the Pacific. Magellan was followed by a dozen other Europeans—especially Dutch and Spanish captains—over the next two centuries, some of them sighting the western shores of Australia, others identifying New Zealand. But the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, combined with the unreliability of maps, meant no one was sure whether the Southern Continent existed or had been discovered.

Even among the British, Cook wasn’t the first to set his sights on the South Pacific. Just a year earlier, Captain Samuel Wallis piloted the ship Dolphin to make first landing on Tahiti, which he christened George III Island. As for the British government, they had publicized their interest in the region since 1745, when Parliament passed an act offering any British subject a reward of £20,000 if they found the fabled northwest passage from Hudson Bay in North America to the Pacific. The British government wasn’t alone in its imperialist interests; the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had already sighted an island off the south coast of Australia that would later be named after Tasmania him, and the Spanish had built fortifications on the Juan Fernández Islands off the west coast of Chile.

“For the Spaniards to fortify and garrison Juan Fernández meant that they intended to try to keep the Pacific closed,” writes historian J. Holland Rose . “The British Admiralty was resolved to break down the Spanish claim.”

But to do so without drawing undue attention to their goals, the Admiralty needed another reason to send ships to the Pacific. The Royal Society presented the perfect opportunity for just such a ruse. Founded in 1660 , the scientific group was at first little more than a collection of gentlemen with the inclination and resources to undertake scientific projects. As historian Andrew S. Cook (no apparent relation) writes , “The Society was in essence a useful vehicle for government to utilize the scientific interests of individual fellows, and for fellows to turn their scientific interests into formal applications for government assistance.” When the Royal Society approached the Navy, requesting they send a ship to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus that would occur in 1769, it probably seemed like the perfect cover, Cook the scholar says.

Captain Cook’s 1768 Voyage to the South Pacific Included a Secret Mission

The 1769 transit of Venus was the mid-18th-century version of the mania surrounding last year’s solar eclipse. It was one of the most massive international undertakings to date. Captain Cook’s crew, complete with astronomers, illustrators and botanists, was one of 76 European expeditions sent to different points around the globe to observe Venus crossing the sun. Scientists hoped that these measurements would help them quantify Earth’s distance from the sun and extrapolate the size of the solar system. The rare event was deemed so important that the French government, fresh off fighting the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War) with England, issued an instruction to its war ships not to harass Cook. It wasn’t an undue precaution; French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil traveled to India to observe the 1761 transit of Venus but ultimately missed the event because his ship had to outrun English men-of-wars, according to historian Charles Herdendorf .

Captaining the Endeavour , Cook departed from Plymouth 250 years ago on August 26, 1768, in order to arrive in Tahiti on time for the transit, which would happen on June 3, 1769. His path carried him across the Atlantic and around the difficult-to-traverse Cape Horn in South America toward the south Pacific. He carried with him sealed secret instructions from the Admiralty, which he’d been ordered not to open until after completing the astronomical work. Unfortunately for the scientists, the actual observations of the transit at points around the world were mostly useless. Telescopes of the period caused blurring around the planet that skewed the recorded timing of Venus passing across the sun.

But for Cook, the adventure was just beginning. “Cook left no record of when he opened the sealed packet of secret orders he’d been given by the Admiralty,” writes Tony Horwitz in Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before . “But on August 9, 1769, as he left Bora-Bora and the other Society Isles behind, Cook put his instructions into action. ‘Made sail to the southward,’ he wrote, with customary brevity.”

The gist of those instructions was for Cook to travel south and west in search of new land—especially the legendary “Terra Australis,” an unknown continent first proposed by Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who believed a large southern continent was needed to balance out the weight of northern continents. In their instructions, the Royal Navy told Cook not only to map the coastline of any new land, but also “to observe the genius, temper, disposition and number of the natives, if there be any, and endeavor by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with them… You are also with the consent of the natives to take possession of convenient situations in the country, in the name of the King of Great Britain.”

Cook went on to follow those instructions over the next year, spending a total of 1,052 days at sea on this mission. He became the first European to circumnavigate and meticulously chart the coastline of New Zealand’s two islands, and repeatedly made contact with the indigenous Maori living there. He also traveled along the east coast of Australia, again becoming the first European to do so. By the time he and his crew (those who survived, anyway) returned to England in 1771, they had expanded the British Empire’s reach to an almost incomprehensible degree. But he hadn’t always followed his secret instructions exactly as they were written—he took possession of those new territories without the consent of its inhabitants, and continued to do so on his next two expeditions.

Even as he took control of their land, Cook seemed to recognize the indigenous groups as actual humans. On his first trip to New Zealand, he wrote , “The Natives … are a strong, well made, active people as any we have seen yet, and all of them paint their bod[ie]s with red oker and oil from head to foot, a thing we have not seen before. Their canoes are large, well built and ornamented with carved work.”

“It would be as wrong to regard Cook as an unwitting agent of British imperialism as [it would be] to fall into the trap of ‘judging him according to how we judge what happened afterwards,’” writes Glyndwr Williams . “His command of successive voyages indicated both his professional commitment, and his patriotic belief that if a European nation should dominate the waters and lands of the Pacific, then it must be Britain.”

But the toll of that decision would be heavy. Cook estimated the native population on Tahiti to be 204,000 in 1774. By the time the French took control of the territory and held a census in 1865, they found only 7,169 people of native descent . And as for the British Empire, the 1871 census found 234 million people lived in it—but only 13 percent were in Great Britain and Ireland, writes Jessica Ratcliff in The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain . From the Caribbean and South America to Africa to South Asia to now, thanks to Cook, Australia, the aphorism “the sun never sets on the British Empire” was borne. Cook’s expedition to conquer inhabited territory had repercussions for millions of people who would never actually see the nation who had claimed their homes.

For centuries, the myth of Cook’s voyage as an essentially scientific undertaking persisted, although plenty of people had already surmised the government's hand in Cook's journeys. Still, a full copy of the Admiralty’s “Secret Instructions” weren't made public until 1928. Today, Cook’s legacy is recognized more for what it was: an empire-building project dressed with the trappings of science.

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Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle's Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/

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How Captain James Cook Got Away with Murder

Portrait of James Cook overlaid by a map of Hawaii.

On Valentine’s Day, 1779, Captain James Cook invited Hawaii’s King Kalani‘ōpu‘u to visit his ship, the Resolution. Cook and the King were on friendly terms, but, on this particular day, Cook planned to take Kalani‘ōpu‘u hostage. Some of the King’s subjects had stolen a small boat from Cook’s fleet, and the captain intended to hold Kalani‘ōpu‘u until it was returned. The plan quickly went awry, however, and Cook ended up face down in a tidal pool.

At the time of his death, Cook was Britain’s most celebrated explorer. In the course of three epic voyages—the last one, admittedly, unfinished—he had mapped the east coast of Australia, circumnavigated New Zealand, made the first documented crossing of the Antarctic Circle, “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands, paid the first known visit to South Georgia Island, and attached names to places as varied as New Caledonia and Bristol Bay. Wherever Cook went, he claimed land for the Crown. When King George III learned of Cook’s demise, he reportedly wept. An obituary that ran in the London Gazette mourned an “irreparable Loss to the Public.” A popular poet named Anna Seward published an elegy in which the Muses, apprised of Cook’s passing, shed “drops of Pity’s holy dew.” (The work sold briskly and was often reprinted without the poet’s permission.)

“While on each wind of heav’n his fame shall rise, / In endless incense to the smiling skies,” Seward wrote. Artists competed to depict Cook’s final moments; in their paintings and engravings, they, too, tended to represent the captain Heaven-bound. An account of Cook’s life which ran in a London magazine declared that he had “discovered more countries in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans than all the other navigators together.” The anonymous author of this account opined that, among mariners, none would be “more entitled to the admiration and gratitude of posterity.”

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Posterity, of course, has a mind of its own. In 2019, the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Cook’s landing in New Zealand, a replica of the ship he’d sailed made an official tour around the country. According to New Zealand’s government, the tour was intended as an opportunity to reflect on the nation’s complex history. Some Māori groups banned the boat from their docks, on the ground that they’d already reflected enough.

Cook “was a barbarian,” the then chief executive of the Ngāti Kahu iwi told a reporter. Two years ago, an obelisk erected in 1874 to mark the spot where Cook was killed, on Kealakekua Bay, was vandalized. “You are on native land,” someone painted on the monument. In January, on the eve of Australia Day, an antipodean version of the Fourth of July, a bronze statue of Cook that had stood in Melbourne for more than a century was sawed off at the ankles. When a member of the community council proposed that area residents be consulted on whether to restore the statue, a furor erupted. At a meeting delayed by protest, the council narrowly voted against consultation and in favor of repair. A council member on the losing side expressed shock at the way the debate had played out, saying it had devolved into an “absolutely crazy mess.”

Into these roiling waters wades “ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook ” (Doubleday), a new biography by Hampton Sides. Sides, a journalist whose previous books include the best-selling “ Ghost Soldiers ,” about a 1945 mission to rescue Allied prisoners of war, acknowledges the hazards of the enterprise. “Eurocentrism, patriarchy, entitlement, toxic masculinity,” and “cultural appropriation” are, he writes, just a few of the charged issues raised by Cook’s legacy. It’s precisely the risks, Sides adds, that drew him to the subject.

Cook, the second of eight children, was born in 1728 in Yorkshire. His father was a farm laborer, and Cook would likely have followed the same path had he not shown early promise in school. His parents apprenticed him to a merchant, but Cook was bored by dry goods. In 1747, he joined the crew of the Freelove, a boat that, despite its name, was designed for the distinctly unerotic task of ferrying coal to London.

After working his way up in the Merchant Navy, Cook jumped ship, as it were. At the age of twenty-six, he enlisted in the Royal Navy, and one of his commanders, recognizing Cook’s talents, encouraged him to take up surveying. A chart that Cook helped draft of the St. Lawrence River proved crucial to the British victory in the French and Indian War.

In 1768, Cook was given command of his own ship, H.M.S. Endeavour, a boxy, square-sterned boat that, like the Freelove, had been built for hauling coal. The Navy was sending the Endeavour to the South Pacific, ostensibly for scientific purposes. A transit of Venus was approaching, and it was believed that careful observation of the event could be used to determine the distance between the Earth and the sun. Cook and his men were supposed to watch the transit from Tahiti, which the British had recently claimed. Then, and only then, was the captain to open a set of sealed orders from the Admiralty which would provide further instructions.

The Endeavour departed from Plymouth, made its way to Rio, and from there sailed around the tip of South America. Arriving in Tahiti, where British and French sailors had already infected many of the women with syphilis, Cook drew up rules to govern his crew’s dealings with the island’s inhabitants. The men were not to trade items from the boat “in exchange for any thing but provisions.” (That rule appears to have been flagrantly flouted.)

The day of the transit—June 3, 1769—dawned clear, or, as Cook put it, “as favourable to our purposes as we could wish.” But the observers’ measurements differed so much that it was evident—or should have been—that something had gone wrong. (The whole plan, it later became clear, was fundamentally flawed.) Whether Cook had indeed waited until this point to open his secret instructions is unknown; in any event, they pointed to the true purpose of the trip. From Tahiti, the Endeavour was to seek out a great continent—Terra Australis Incognita—theorized to lie somewhere to the south. If Cook located this continent, he was to track its coast, and “with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain.” If he didn’t locate it, he was to head to New Zealand, which the British knew of only vaguely, from the Dutch.

The Endeavour spent several weeks searching for the continent. Nothing much happened during this period except that a crew member drank himself to death. As per the Admiralty’s instructions, Cook next headed west. The ship landed on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island on October 8, 1769. Within the first day, Cook’s men had killed at least four Māori and wounded several others.

A ship like the Endeavour was its own floating world, its commander an absolute ruler. A Royal Navy captain was described as a “King at Sea” and could mete out punishment—typically flogging—as he saw fit. At the same time, in the vastness of the ocean, a ship’s captain had no one to turn to for help. He had to be ever mindful that he was outnumbered.

Cook was known as a stickler for order. A crew member recorded that Cook once performed an inspection of his men’s hands; those with dirty fingers forfeited the day’s allowance of grog. He seemed to have a sixth sense for the approach of land; another crew member claimed that Cook could intuit it even in the dead of night. Although in the seventeen-seventies no one knew what caused scurvy, Cook insisted that his men eat fresh fruit whenever possible and that they consume sauerkraut, a good source of Vitamin C.

Of Cook’s inner life, few traces remain. When he set off for Tahiti, he had a wife and three children. Before she died, Elizabeth Cook burned her personal papers, including her correspondence with her husband. Letters from Cook that have been preserved mostly read like this one, to the Navy Board: “Please to order his Majesty’s Bark the Endeavour to be supply’d with eight Tonns of Iron Ballast.” Cook left behind voluminous logs and journals; the entries in these, too, are generally bloodless.

“Punished Richard Hutchins, seaman, with 12 lashes for disobeying commands,” he wrote, on April 16, 1769, when the Endeavour was anchored off Tahiti. “Most part of these 24 hours Cloudy, with frequent Showers of Rain,” he observed, from the same spot, on May 25th. The captain, as one of his biographers has put it, had “no natural gift for rhapsody.” Sides writes, “It could be said that he lived during a romantic age of exploration, but he was decidedly not a romantic.”

Still, feelings and opinions do sometimes creep into Cook’s writing. He is by turns charmed and appalled by the novel customs he encounters. A group of Tahitians cook a dog for him; he finds it very tasty and resolves “for the future never to dispise Dog’s flesh.” He sees some islanders eat the lice that they have picked out of their hair and declares this highly “disagreeable.”

Many of the Indigenous people Cook met had never before seen a European. Cook recognized it was in his interest to convince them that he came in friendship; he also saw that, in case persuasion failed, the main advantage he possessed was guns.

In a journal entry devoted to the Endeavour’s first landing in New Zealand, near present-day Gisborne, Cook treats the killing of the Māori as regrettable but justified. The British had attempted to take some Māori men on board their ship to demonstrate that their intentions were peaceful. But this gesture was—understandably—misinterpreted. The Māori hurled their canoe paddles at the British, who responded by firing at them. Cook acknowledges “that most Humane men” will condemn the killings. But, he declares, “I was not to stand still and suffer either myself or those that were with me to be knocked on the head.”

After mapping both New Zealand’s North and South Islands, Cook headed to Australia, then known as New Holland. The Endeavour worked its way to the country’s northernmost point, which Cook named York Cape (and which is now called Cape York). The inhabitants of the coast made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the British. Cook left gifts onshore, but they remained untouched.

Cook’s response to the Aboriginal Australians is one of the most often cited passages from his journals. In it, he seems to foresee—and regret—the destruction of Indigenous cultures which his own expeditions will facilitate. “From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched People upon Earth; but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans,” he writes.

The earth and Sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for Life. They covet not Magnificient Houses, Household-stuff, etc.; they live in a Warm and fine Climate, and enjoy every wholesome Air. . . . They seem’d to set no Value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one Article we could offer them. This, in my opinion, Argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life, and that they have no Superfluities.

If Cook’s first voyage failed to turn up the missing continent or to calculate the Earth’s distance from the sun, imperially speaking it was a resounding success: the captain had claimed both New Zealand and the east coast of Australia for Britain. (In neither case had Cook sought or secured the “Consent of the Natives,” but this lapse doesn’t seem to have troubled the Admiralty.) The very next year, Cook was dispatched again, this time in command of two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure. Navy brass continued to insist that Terra Australis Incognita was out there somewhere—presumably farther south than the Endeavour had ventured—and on his second voyage Cook was supposed to keep sailing until he found it. He crossed and recrossed the Antarctic Circle, at one point getting as far as seventy-one degrees south. Conditions on the Southern Ocean were generally terrible—frigid and foggy. Still, there was no sign of a continent. Cook ventured that if there were any land nearer to the pole it would be so hemmed in by ice that it would “never be explored.” (Antarctica would not be sighted for almost fifty years.)

Once more, Cook hadn’t found what he was seeking, but upon his return he was again hailed as a hero. Britain’s leading scientific institution, the Royal Society, granted him its highest honor, the Copley Medal, and the Navy rewarded him with a cushy desk job. The expectation was that he would settle down, enjoy his sinecure, and finally spend some time with his family. Instead, he set out on yet another expedition.

Two traffic cones think about the fire and spiders they are surrounding.

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“The Wide Wide Sea” focusses almost exclusively on Cook’s third—and for him fatal—voyage. Sides portrays Cook’s decision to undertake it as an act of hubris; the captain, he writes, “could scarcely imagine failure.” The journey got off to an inauspicious start. Cook’s second-in-command, Charles Clerke, was to captain a ship called the Discovery, while Cook, once again, sailed on the Resolution. When both vessels were scheduled to depart, in July, 1776, Clerke was nowhere to be found. (Thanks to the improvidence of a brother, he’d been tossed in debtors’ prison.) Cook set off without him. A few weeks later, the Resolution nearly crashed into one of the Cape Verde Islands, a mishap that Sides sees as a portent. The ship, it turned out, also leaked terribly—another bad sign.

The plan for the third voyage was more or less the inverse of the second’s. Cook’s instructions were to head north and to look not for land but for its absence. The Admiralty wanted him to find a seaway around Canada—the fabled Northwest Passage. Generations of sailors had sought the passage from the Atlantic and been blocked by ice. Cook was to probe from the opposite direction.

The expedition also had a secondary aim involving a Polynesian named Mai. Mai came from the Society Islands, and in 1773 he had talked his way on board the Adventure. Arriving in London the following year, he entranced the British aristocracy. He sat in on sessions of Parliament, learned to hunt grouse, met the King, and, according to Sides, became “something of a card sharp.” But, after two years of entertaining toffs, Mai wanted to go home. It fell to Cook to take him, along with a barnyard’s worth of livestock that King George III was sending as a gift.

Clerke, on the Discovery, finally caught up to Cook in Cape Town, where the Resolution was docked for provisioning and repairs. Together, the two ships sailed away from Africa and stopped off in Tasmania. In February, 1777, they pulled into Queen Charlotte Sound, a long, narrow inlet in the northeast corner of New Zealand’s South Island. There, more trouble awaited.

Cook had visited Queen Charlotte Sound (which he had named) four times before. During his second voyage, it had been the site of a singularly gruesome disaster. Ten of Cook’s men—sailors on the Adventure—had gone ashore to gather provisions. The Māori had slain and, it was said, eaten them.

Cook wasn’t in New Zealand when the slaughter took place; the Adventure and the Resolution had been separated in a fog. But, on his way back to England, he heard rumblings about it from the crew of a Dutch vessel that the Resolution encountered at sea. Cook was reluctant to credit the rumors. He wrote that he would withhold judgment on the “Melancholy affair” until he had learned more. “I must however observe in favour of the New Zealanders that I have allways found them of a Brave, Noble, Open and benevolent disposition,” he added.

By the time of the third voyage, Cook knew the stories he’d heard were, broadly speaking, accurate. Why, then, did he return to the scene of the carnage? Sides argues that Cook was still searching for answers. The captain, he writes, thought the massacre “demanded an inquiry and a reckoning, however long overdue.”

In his investigation, Cook was aided by Mai, whose native language was similar to Māori. The sequence of events that Mai helped piece together began with the theft of some bread. The leader of the British crew had reacted to this petty crime by shooting not only the thief but also a second Māori man. In retaliation, the Māori had killed all ten British sailors and chopped up their bodies. Eventually, Cook learned who had led the retaliatory raid—a pugnacious local chief named Kahura. One day, Mai pointed him out to Cook. The following day, the captain invited Kahura on board the Resolution and ushered him down into his private cabin. Instead of shooting Kahura, Cook had his draftsman draw a portrait of him.

Mai found Cook’s conduct unfathomable. “Why do you not kill him?” he cried. Cook’s men, too, were infuriated. They made fun of his forbearance by staging a mock trial. One of the sailors had adopted a Polynesian dog known as a kurī. (The breed is now extinct.) The men accused the dog of cannibalism, found it guilty as charged, then killed and ate it.

Sides doesn’t think that Cook knew about the cannibal burlesque, but the captain, he says, sensed his crew’s disaffection. And this, Sides argues, caused something in Cook to snap. For Cook, he writes, the “visit to Queen Charlotte Sound became a sharp turning point.” It would be the last time that the captain would be accused of leniency.

As evidence of Cook’s changed outlook, Sides relates an incident that occurred eight months after the trial of the dog, this one featuring a pregnant goat. The Resolution had anchored off Moorea, one of the Society Islands, and animals from the ship’s travelling menagerie had been left to graze onshore. One day, a goat went missing. Cook was told that the animal had been taken to a village on the opposite end of the island. With three dozen men, he marched to the village and torched it. (Most of the villagers had fled before he arrived.) The next day, the goat still had not been returned, and the British continued their rampage. Such was the level of destruction, one of Cook’s men noted in his journal, that it “could scarcely be repaired in a century.” Another crew member expressed shock at the captain’s “precipitate proceeding,” which, he said, violated “any principle one can form of justice.”

Having wrecked much of Moorea, Cook couldn’t leave Mai there, so he installed him and his livestock on the nearby island of Huahine. A few years later, Mai died, apparently from a virus introduced by yet another boatload of European sailors.

Cook spent several months searching fruitlessly along the coast of Alaska for the Northwest Passage. But, on the journey north from Huahine, he had stumbled upon something arguably better—the Hawaiian Islands. In January, 1778, the Resolution and the Discovery stopped in Kauai. The following January, they landed at Kealakekua Bay, on the Big Island.

What the Hawaiians thought of the strange men who appeared on strange ships has been much debated in academic circles. (Two prominent anthropologists, Marshall Sahlins, of the University of Chicago, and Gananath Obeyesekere, of Princeton, engaged in a high-profile feud on the subject which spanned decades.) Cook and his men happened to have landed on the Big Island at the height of an important festival. The captain was greeted by thousands of people invoking Lono, a god associated with peace and fertility. According to some scholars, the Hawaiians gathered for the festival saw Cook as the embodiment of Lono. According to others, they saw him as someone playacting Lono, and, according to still others, the whole Cook-as-Lono story is a myth created by Europeans. What Cook himself thought is unknown, because no logs or journal entries from the last few weeks of his life survive. It is possible that he just let his record-keeping slide, and it is also possible that the entries contained compromising information and were destroyed by the Admiralty.

After Cook had been on the Big Island for several days, King Kalani‘ōpu‘u appeared with a fleet of war canoes. (He had, it seems, been off fighting on another island.) At first, Kalani‘ōpu‘u welcomed the British—he presented Cook with a magnificent cloak made of feathers, and he dined several times on the Resolution—then he indicated that it was time for them to go. It’s unclear whether the King’s impatience reflected the religious calendar—the festival associated with Lono had concluded—or more mundane concerns, such as feeding so many hungry sailors, but Cook got the message. The expedition soon departed, only to suffer another mishap. The foremast of the Resolution snapped. There was no way for it to go forward, so both ships made their way back to Kealakekua Bay.

It was while the British were trying to repair the Resolution that someone made off with the small boat and Cook decided to take the King hostage. The captain had often resorted to this tactic to get—or get back—what he wanted; it had usually worked well for him, but never before had he dealt with someone as powerful as Kalani‘ōpu‘u. Cook was leading the King down to the beach—Kalani‘ōpu‘u seems to have been convinced he was being invited for another friendly meal—when warriors started to emerge from the trees. Sides argues that Cook could have saved himself had he simply turned and run, but, as one of his men put it, “he too wrongly thought that the flash of a musket would disperse the whole island.” In the fighting that ensued, Cook, four of his men, and as many as thirty Hawaiians were killed. As was customary on the island, Cook’s body was burned. Some of his singed bones were returned to the British; those that remained in Hawaii, according to Sides, were later paraded around as part of the festival associated with Lono.

Though Sides says he wants to “reckon anew” with Cook, it’s not exactly clear what this would entail at a time when the captain has already been—figuratively, at least—sawed off at the ankles. “The Wide Wide Sea” portrays Cook as a complicated figure, driven by instincts and motives that often seem to have been opaque even to him. Although it’s no hagiography, the book is also not likely to rattle teacups at the Captain Cook Society, members of which receive a quarterly publication devoted entirely to Cook-related topics.

Like all biographies, “The Wide Wide Sea” emphasizes agency. Cook may be an ambivalent, even self-contradictory figure; still, it’s his actions and decisions that drive the narrative forward. But, as Cook himself seemed to have realized, and on occasion lamented, he was but an instrument in a much, much larger scheme. The whole reason the British sent him off to seek Terra Australis Incognita was that they feared a rival power would reach it first. If Cook hadn’t hoisted what he called the “English Colours” on what’s still known as Possession Island, in northern Queensland, it seems fair to assume that another captain would have claimed Australia for England or for some other European nation. Similarly, if Cook’s men hadn’t brought sexually transmitted diseases to the Hawaiian Islands, then sailors from a different ship would have done so. Colonialism and its attendant ills were destined to reach the many paradisaical places Cook visited and mapped, although, without his undeniable navigational skills, that might have taken a few years more. ♦

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The Ages of Exploration

Cook’s voyages map.

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The map shows the three voyages of Captain James Cook. The first voyage is in red, the second voyage is in green and the third voyage is in blue. Following Cook’s death, the route his crew took is in the blue dashed line. (Credit: Andre Engels)

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James Cook North-West Passage expedition 1776–78

What prompted Cook out of retirement for one last expedition?

Captain James Cook came out of retirement to look for the North-West Passage in 1776. It was to be his last expedition and he never returned home.

Captain James Cook is one of the most celebrated navigators and explorers in British history. By 1775 he had retired but was lured back to sea by the possibility of discovering the North-West Passage – the seaway across the Arctic, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Cook’s journey was, in many ways, one of the greatest journeys of exploration ever made. During it he discovered the Hawaiian Islands and charted swathes of the North American Pacific coastline, but the North-West Passage was not to be found and Cook himself would never see England again.

Exploration from the west coast

Before 1776, all the explorers searching for the North-West Passage had been attempting to find it from the Atlantic (east) coast. Cook’s plan was to find it from the Pacific (west) coast. Explorer Samuel Hearne’s overland journey from Hudson Bay to the Arctic and back in 1770–72 had established that a passage could not lie through the North American continent, but it might lie around it. Added to that, the publication of a Russian map by Jacob von Stählin showed Alaska as an island, with a wide strait between it and America, through which ships could sail north.

No strait to be found

Hoping to find the strait shown on the Russian map, Cook, along with Captain Charles Clerke, took the ships Discovery and Resolution up the Pacific coast of North America. But the strait could not be found. In his journal Cook wondered what could have made von Stählin publish such an inaccurate map. He wrote: ‘Indeed, it is a map to which the most illiterate of his illiterate seafaring countrymen would have been ashamed to set his name.’

Cook's death

The expedition carried the ships round the Alaskan peninsula and through the Bering Strait where they turned east, the crew optimistic they would sail from here to the Atlantic. It was not to be. In mid-August they were halted by impenetrable ice and were forced to turn back. By October, they had reached Hawaii where Cook was killed on 14 February 1779.

Captain Clerke took command of the Discovery and Resolution and returned to the Arctic to continue the search for the passage. He too would never see England again: he died of consumption (tuberculosis) and was buried at Vladivostock, Siberia. Lieutenant John Gore finally brought the ships home.

George Vancouver's voyage, 1791–95

One of the men on Cook’s final voyage, George Vancouver, would lead later attempts to find the North-West Passage, approaching from the Pacific. On a voyage lasting from 1791 to 1795, Vancouver surveyed many channels and inlets on the west coast of today’s Canada. Finding no navigable waterways he was forced to conclude that if any passage did exist it must be much further north. If it were, he considered it would be impossible to pass through owing to the polar ice.

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Captain James Cook's life

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Alone and defenceless: the tragic death of Captain Cook

Striding ashore unarmed showed courage that bordered on recklessness. but it was a kind of theatre cook relished on his travels - and, famously, it didn’t always work.

From magazine issue: 27 April 2024

Wynn Wheldon

The Wide Wide Sea: The Final, Fatal Voyage of Captain James Cook

Hampton Sides

Michael Joseph, pp. 432, £25

The principal purpose of Captain James Cook’s last voyage, which began in Plymouth on 12 July 1776, was to discover the elusive Northwest Passage. Attempts had been made before, in vain, from the Atlantic, but this time it would be from the west, from the Pacific.

On the way, Cook was to return an Anglicised Polynesian named Mai to Raiatea, ‘a ragged volcanic island’ about 130 miles north west of Tahiti. Mai takes up much of Hampton Sides’s narrative, offering ‘a poignant allegory of first contact’, before being deposited home with his cargo of English domestic farm animals and his suits.

Prior to that, Cook had investigated, in New Zealand, the massacre of ten crew members of the Adventure , the Resolution ’s sister ship on his previous voyage. His attitude to this tells us much about him. He was neither vengeful nor judgmental. One of his powering characteristics was a profound curiosity. He wanted to know what had happened. In the event, he decided that the Maoris had been provoked. Despite the victims having been eaten, Cook knew anthropophagy was a Maori warrior ritual. The custom, he wrote, has ‘undoubtedly been handed down to them from the earliest times’. He saw no reason to impose Christian morality or English ethics.

Cook’s moods on this third voyage were regarded by those who knew him as more friable than before. He lost his temper easily and had crew members thrashed frequently for minor misdemeanours. Errors of judgment crept in where once he had always seemed right. Explanations for his caprices have ranged from a parasitic infection after eating bad fish to sciatica and consequent opioid addiction, and vitamin B deficiency. Or he may just have been getting old and crotchety, having spent so much of his life at sea.

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Patrick o’flynn, can robert jenrick save the tories.

The Maoris found Cook lacking in the principle of utu , which required him to exact revenge for the killing of his men. His refusal to do so was taken as a sign of weakness. A later, progressive historian regarded Cook’s leniency as a ‘trait of authoritarianism’. Sometimes there’s no winning. Sides detects a further change in Cook after this visit when he wrote of the Maoris:

We debauch their morals and we introduce among them wants and diseases which they never before knew… [serving] only to disturb that tranquillity they and their forefathers enjoyed.

It nonetheless remained the case that what gave Cook most pleasure was the observation of newly contacted indigenous peoples. Anthropology, in other words. He was fascinated by the Tasman aborigines, the Palawa, who lived by the sea but did not swim or eat fish and had no boats. By contrast, he was astounded by the expert seamanship of people so far distant from one another as the Hawaiians and the Maoris, who spoke the same language.

During his second voyage, Cook had proclaimed that he wanted to go not only ‘farther than any man has been before me… but also as far as I think it possible for man to go’. Two centuries later, Gene Roddenberry split that final infinitive with the adverb ‘boldly’, and Captain James T. Kirk was on his way ‘to explore strange new worlds’.

Cook liked to stride ashore to such strange new places alone and unarmed. Sides writes:

It was a kind of theatre of first contact. On one level, it involved a bravery and a confidence that bordered on recklessness. Behind it, though, was an optimism. He believed cultures could be made to understand one another: if he used the right tone and body language, if he looked them in the eye and showed proper respect, the chasm between radically different peoples could be bridged.

Famously, it didn’t always work. Cook was clubbed to death on the beach at Kealakakua on the island of Hawaii. He had been incensed by the theft, for its iron parts, of the largest boat he had, a cutter, an ‘indispensable workhorse which in certain situations could spell the difference between life and death for his crew’. He hatched a plan to kidnap the local king, whom he would then swap for his boat. It went wrong. Be not too bold.

In the past few decades, Cook has been seen as the symbolic villain of European colonialism in the Pacific. Judging from this book, his critics have very much got the wrong man. It is difficult to imagine progressive voices now tolerating the patriarchy, cannibalism, human sacrifice and internecine violence that Cook observed and refused to condemn or interfere with. He was as broad-minded a man as could possibly be imagined in the 18th century. He also happened to be an exceptional mariner and a cartographer of genius.

Sides has written a riveting book, deeply researched, light of touch and always judicious and full-sailed about an exceptional man’s final extraordinary journey.

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The Adventure of a Lifetime: John Ledyard and Captain Cook’s Last Voyage

A View of Snug Corner Cove, in Prince William’s Sound . Engraving after a drawing by John Webber, published 1783. Captain Cook and his crew explored Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska in 1778 - Connecticut Historical Society , Daniel Wadsworth 1848.16.3.28

By Ben Gammell

In 1783, as Americans adjusted to peace time following the Revolutionary War , a young man’s incredible adventure story was published in Hartford . John Ledyard’s Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage recounted Ledyard’s travels with the world-famous British explorer on his third and last exploration of the Pacific Ocean. Between 1776 and 1780, while most Americans were fighting against British soldiers and seamen, John Ledyard , born in Groton , Connecticut, was aboard Captain Cook’s ship, the Resolution , encountering new lands and new peoples in the northern and southern Pacific, the Arctic Ocean, and along the coast of Alaska.

Ledyard was a unique and independent character, an adventurer at heart with great ambitions and a deep interest in indigenous people and cultures. At the age of 20 he quit Dartmouth College by building his own dugout canoe and fleeing down the Connecticut River to Hartford. He became a sailor, was coerced into joining the British Navy, sailed with Captain Cook, traversed Russia and Siberia by himself without any money (until he was arrested and thrown out of the country), and began an exploration of Africa before dying of an intestinal ailment in Cairo at the age of 37.

His tale of Captain Cook’s voyage was a best-seller in Connecticut and the newly-independent United States, and it led to some fame but little fortune. The book’s success was eclipsed by Cook’s own three-volume A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean , published posthumously less than a year after Ledyard’s account. (Cook was killed during the voyage in a confrontation with native Hawaiians.) Cook’s “official” account included a series of 87 engraved maps, charts, and illustrations. Ledyard’s book had no illustrations except for one map.

In 1783, the same year both books were published, Jeremiah Wadsworth, a successful merchant from Hartford, purchased Cook’s volume in London; it’s possible he sought it out after reading Ledyard’s book. The engravings that came with the volume were unbound, and Wadsworth framed and displayed many of them in his home. In 1848 his son, Daniel Wadsworth, founder of the Wadsworth Atheneum , willed the engravings to the Connecticut Historical Society. Today, the engravings are accessible in the CHS Research Center. These vivid illustrations complement the adventurous narrative of Connecticut’s own world explorer, John Ledyard.

Ben Gammell is Coordinator of Interpretive and Education Projects at the Connecticut Historical Society .

Note: ConnecticutHistory.org does not edit content originally published on another platform and therefore does not update any instances of outdated content or language.

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'The Wide Wide Sea' revisits Capt. James Cook's fateful final voyage

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies.

You may remember the story of the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, when an explosion in the spacecraft of three astronauts forced them to summon the courage, focus and ingenuity to rescue the situation and return home safely. That story came to me often as I read the latest book by our guest, historian Hampton Sides. It's about an 18th-century sea voyage around the world, led by Captain James Cook, an explorer so accomplished that in the 1770s his was a household name in England.

Sides' book is an account of what it took for a ship full of men to sail for months in uncharted waters with only what they had on board to survive, how they coped with hunger, thirst, disease and weather so fierce it could snap a ship's mast in two and still found ways to keep going. It's a tale of fearless exploration, which greatly expanded our understanding of the world's geography. And it's a story of remarkable encounters with Indigenous people, some of whom had never seen Europeans before. All such encounters were unique and most friendly, but one rooted in deep cultural gaps and misunderstandings would lead to a tragic outcome remembered for centuries.

Hampton Sides is a contributing editor to Outside magazine and a historian who's written five previous books on subjects ranging from the exploration of the American West to the Korean War. His latest is "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact And The Fateful Final Voyage Of Captain James Cook."

Hampton Sides, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

HAMPTON SIDES: Yeah, it's a real pleasure to be back with you.

DAVIES: Let's just begin by giving you a bit of a thumbnail profile of James Cook. What was he known for back in the 1770s?

SIDES: Captain Cook was arguably one of the greatest explorers of all time - you know, the quality of his observations, the sheer number of nautical miles that he traveled, the incredible volumes that emanated from his voyages with beautiful art and descriptions of flora and fauna never before seen by Europeans. He had three voyages around the world, any one of which would have put him on the map and put him in the pantheon of great explorers like Magellan. But there was just a kind of a probity and a kind of almost scientific approach that he applied to his voyages that was unusual for his time.

And, you know, I think you would describe him as a product of the Enlightenment, someone who - yes, of course he understood he was working for the empire. He was working to advance the aims of the crown of England and the admiralty. But he also was a citizen of the world who knew that he was supposed to publish. He was supposed to describe objectively what he saw. And he was supposed to contribute to the global knowledge of the makeup of the planet - what does it look like? How does it look on a map? Who are these people that he was encountering? - and to try to describe them fairly and fully and without a lot of, you know, the typical stuff that you would see prior to his generation where it's like, they're savages. They're heathens. He was - he really approached it in a very different manner.

DAVIES: And what was his style as a commander?

SIDES: His style?

DAVIES: His personality...

SIDES: OK. So this was an age...

DAVIES: ....His approach - you know, we think of these...

SIDES: Yeah.

DAVIES: ...You know, commanding a ship - tough guys, right?

SIDES: Especially in his age. I mean, they were tyrants. They were - it was master and commander. They were absolutely in control of their ships. And so many of the British captains - and, for that matter, almost all the other European captains - were brutal tyrants. Cook, in that context, was quite - at least during his first two voyages, quite lenient, quite tolerant, quite concerned about ship conditions and hygiene and diet, very worried about scurvy and other diseases and had a kind of scientific approach to how to deal with diseases. He seemed to kind of have an almost intuitive understanding of germ theory, cleanliness, all these kinds of things.

Now, I'm not trying to say that he was a soft guy. He was stern and dour and tough and, you know, it was not - you know, he would dole out the discipline. But he was also mindful of the morale of his men. And for those first two voyages, you see a very different captain from his generation.

The third voyage, he begins to change, and you start to see a temper come out and a - just an absolute inflexibility. He starts to apply the lash to his own men and to treat some of the Native folks that he encounters along the way with increasing severity and cruelty. And so it's caused a lot of people to wonder, well, what's up with Cook in this third voyage? What - does he have a parasite? Is there some kind of mental or even spiritual problem that he's dealing with? Is he just simply exhausted from all the hundreds of thousands of miles he's traveled? It's one of the kind of forensic questions that comes up repeatedly in my book - is what's ailing the captain?

DAVIES: You mentioned scurvy. You know, scurvy was a disease, which is caused by a lack of vitamin C, I guess, which could kill up to half of - you know, a half of a crew on many voyages. He had a remarkable record on this - right? - by - I think on his last voyage, which was more than four years, not a single sailor died from scurvy.

SIDES: Yeah, and this was unheard of. Any voyage over a couple of hundred days, men started to drop like flies from scurvy. It was just kind of considered an occupational hazard of long-distance voyaging that most European navies seemed to be willing to tolerate, even though it was so horrendous, such a horrific way to die. Cook seemed to have figured it out, but he didn't really know precisely what was doing the trick. He had all kinds of weird things on board his ship that were supposed to be anti-scorbutic, meaning, you know, combating scurvy.

But what he fundamentally did understand was that eating fresh vegetables, fresh fruit and even fresh meat as opposed to just the constant typical diet of salt, pork and hardtack biscuits - that something in that was the trick, you know, that fresh stuff that he always had his men out hunting and fishing and gathering vegetables and berries and things like that. And that was a major factor. You know, it was only - you know, it was, what, a couple hundred years later before we definitively understood that it was actually vitamin C - a lack of vitamin C.

So when he comes back from his first and then his second voyage without anyone dying of scurvy, people at the admiralty - people at the Royal Society in London - think he's conquered this horrible malady. He hasn't exactly conquered it. He has figured something out. It will take generations before they absolutely figure it out. But - so he's hailed as a hero for this accomplishment.

DAVIES: There are so many writings from not just Captain Cook - he kept journals - but from other members of the crew. Some of them were quite literate. It's sort of remarkable that was - they wrote - a lot to draw on here, wasn't there?

SIDES: Yeah. You know, I think that by the time Cook went out on his third voyage, you know, so many people wanted to be a part of these voyages. They understood that this was a great captain and something interesting was going to happen. And so a lot of really interesting officers came aboard the ship, and they all kept journals. They wrote very well. Captain Cook wrote well but in a kind of stodgy, very emotionless way. But there were some other officers on board who just wrote beautiful, beautiful accounts of things, like, you know, our first detailed description of tattooing, of surfing, of a human sacrifice that was performed on Tahiti - these sorts of things. And I definitely view this story as an ensemble story, not just Cook's account but all these officers on board who wrote their own journals. Sometimes they were approved journals. Other times they were kind of done under the table and published without the approval of the admiralty. But it's a kind of an embarrassment of riches, all the different accounts that I had to draw from and to sort of triangulate them and to come up with this three-dimensional account.

DAVIES: You know, it's interesting - Cook's third voyage, which is the subject of your book, begins in July of 1776, which, you know, Americans will note coincides with another big moment on this side of the Atlantic, right? That's when the colonies declared independence from Great Britain. And a lot of attention was focused on the war in America, which, as you write it, meant that his ship didn't get quite the care it should have when they were preparing it for the voyage. The kind of caulking and reinforcing of the ship was done poorly. What impact did that have?

SIDES: It had a huge impact, because the Resolution was leaking like a sieve much of the voyage. It seemed like - this is a ship that had just returned from Cook's second voyage, so it was a tired ship, captained by a tired captain, and it seemed like a lot of things started going wrong from the very beginning because of - the shipwrights at Deptford had been focused much more on this war that's brewing in the colonies. And they leave.

And as you mentioned, in July of 1776, just as the American Revolution is getting started, it's interesting that, although this is very much a British story with a British captain, it's also very much an American tale, because so much of the action ends up in the present-day United States, whether you're talking about Hawaii or Oregon, Washington, Alaska. They're exploring the Northwest coast of North America just as the revolution is getting started. And by the time they return to England, the revolution is basically over, and it's a whole new world.

DAVIES: So Cook was a famous mapmaker and seaman. He'd done two around-the-world voyages. He didn't want to do another one, but he was kind of talked into it. King George III wanted it. And the Earl of Sandwich - the guy known for inventing the sandwich, who was...

DAVIES: ...In the Admiralty, wanted him to - Cook to command another expedition. What were the goals? What did they want him to do in this round-the-world trek?

SIDES: Well, the British had been obsessed for a long time with the idea of finding the - what they called the Northwest Passage - a shortcut over North America between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean - for trade reasons, for reasons of commerce. But at a certain point, it had become kind of a geographical obsession. And every time they poked into the pinched geography of Canada, they found ice, right?

So this time, the idea was go around to the other side, to the Pacific side, go up through the Bering Strait - which we had some very vague ideas about because of Bering's voyages - and to try to find that Northwest Passage from the Pacific side - the backside of America, as the English called it. It was one of the holy grails of British geography and exploration. And if Cook could have found this elusive Northwest Passage, it would have been the crowning achievement of his career. This was such a tantalizing voyage, with such huge ambitions and rewards behind it, that he decided, oh, I'll go back out.

DAVIES: Let's take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Hampton Sides. His book is "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact And The Fateful Final Voyage Of Captain James Cook." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF GOGOL BORDELLO SONG, “NOT A CRIME”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with historian Hampton Sides, whose new book is a gripping account of an 18th-century round-the-world sea voyage led by British Captain James Cook. You know, many of the fascinating stories in this book - and there are a lot of them - involve these two ships in Cook's expedition, you know, dropping anchor on an island and interacting with Indigenous people. You open the book with one of them. This was in January 1778, where he visits Kauai, which is in the Hawaiian Island chain. And there's some - you know, some accounts from Hawaiian historians about what the people ashore thought when these two, you know, tall, masted ships showed up. How did they react? What did they think when they saw this?

SIDES: They worried that their world was forever changed. There was a sense of exhilaration and terror and rapture. They talked about maybe these are manta rays that have emerged from the sea. Maybe they are gods. That does come up, even at Kauai, that idea that these may be manifestations of the god Lono, which will come up later in the story. They could tell instantly that these were very different people.

And what they most were fascinated by was all the metal that was on board the ship. They could see it gleaming in the sunlight. It was a substance that they had a very, very faint knowledge of only because some pieces of driftwood had landed on Kauai with - you know, sometimes with nails in it. And they understood this was a magical substance. And they wanted a piece of it and very quickly started to tear the ship apart, trying to get at the nails and any other piece of metal they could find. But they understood this was a new world. This was a new people. And it was very - the initial greeting was quite peaceful, but things escalated in a hurry. A hothead officer fired a musket and killed a Hawaiian man. And things went downhill very quickly.

DAVIES: Now, you write in that case that these were not people who had seen Europeans before, and they mistook their garments for their skin and the tricorn hats for their - for the shape of their heads.

SIDES: Yeah. They thought they had deformed heads that - you know, three-point heads. And they had never seen pockets before and thought, you know, look, they stick their hands into their bodies and they come out with treasure. And there's a lot of really bizarre and wonderful oral history that was done by some Hawaiian - Native Hawaiian historians about these reactions. They didn't understand smoking, and when they saw these white men smoking, they thought they were - they called them the volcano people because they seemed to just be constantly seething smoke.

DAVIES: Yeah. You know, it's kind of as close as you could get to imagining what it would be like for Martians landing on Earth, I guess, if you see someone that - with no preparation...

DAVIES: ...And no context, to see something in these vessels with those garments and all that. You know, you write that Cook's attitude towards and descriptions of the Indigenous folks he encountered was very different from other European explorers, right? More tolerant...

SIDES: I think, you know...

DAVIES: ...More curious?

SIDES: ...I call him a proto-anthropologist. He certainly had no training in that regard, but he was interested in getting it down in a very level and kind of agnostic treatment of just, like, this is what they wear. This is how they converse. This is what the rituals look like. He never tries to convert them to Christian faith, never uses the word heathen or savage, to my recollection, so yeah, he's unique in that regard, and some of that he had learned from his first voyage. A famous scientist, Joseph Banks, was on that ship, and he had learned a little of the language of, you know, science, I guess you would say, and language of the enlightenment. But he was quite fair in his assessment of these people, I think.

DAVIES: And what would be his approach when first going ashore? I mean, you know, one might think, I better bring, you know, he had a platoon of marines onboard with - who were armed with muskets. Do you bring them? Do you bring one or two? Do you go by yourself? Did he have a standard approach?

SIDES: Most of the time, he would march ashore unarmed. He liked to be the first one ashore. He had this kind of, what I call, a minuet of first contact, this sort of dance that he did with the locals, where he, you know, yes, it's probably dangerous, but if I look them in the eye and, you know, present myself in - as a peaceful person, maybe they won't kill me. And it was a dangerous and, some people thought, reckless way of going about things, but he would - yes, there would be marines waiting in the wings, but he would usually be the first one ashore. And so I guess you could say that's very brave, or you could say it's perhaps hubristic and reckless.

DAVIES: Right. And he would sometimes have someone who spoke some Polynesian languages onboard, so there might be some basis for communication. It seems, You know, and it's interesting, because there are so many of these accounts in the books, including tribes that are up in the Arctic. There's the Hawaiian islands, there's, you know, around Tahiti and Tasmania and New Zealand, and it seems that in every case, the Indigenous folks are quickly ready to engage in commerce, barter, trade. They want some things, and not always the same things.

SIDES: Not always the same things, but, there's, you know, that was always the first question was what Cook was interested in when he landed on an island was, can I get some water? Can I get some timber? Can I get some food? And so what am I going to trade with? And one of the things they would trade with, the blacksmiths would generate crude tools and chisels and knives, and they would give these as gifts. Another time, they accumulated a bunch of red feathers on Tonga, the island of Tonga, and found that in some of the islands, red feathers were like gold, considered as valuable as gold. So - but, you know, the native people were also very intrigued by Cook's instruments, partly 'cause they were made out of metal, but things like sextants and quadrants and astronomical gear, and would often be tempted to steal this stuff, not knowing precisely what it did, but perhaps thinking that it had something to do with the heavens and perhaps the gods. So every island, the economy, the barter trade was a little bit different from the next one.

DAVIES: Let's take another break here and we'll talk some more.

We are speaking with Hampton Sides. His new book is "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, The First Contact And The Fateful Final Voyage Of Captain James Cook" (ph). He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LEAVING OF LIVERPOOL")

SHANE MACGOWAN: (Singing) Fare thee well to Prince's Landing Stage. There were many fare thee wells. I am bound for California, a place I know right well. So fare thee well, my own true love. When I return, united we will be. It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me, but, my darling, when I think of thee. Oh, and I have shipped upon it once before. I think I know it well. The captain's name is Burgess, and I've...

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're speaking with historian Hampton Sides, whose new book is a gripping account of an 18th century round-the-world sea voyage led by British captain James Cook. The journey took him and his crew above the Arctic Circle north of Alaska looking for a water passage through North America, and they explored many islands in Hawaii in the South Pacific, having memorable encounters with Indigenous people, including one that would prove deadly for the explorers. Sides' book is "The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact And The Fateful Final Voyage Of Captain James Cook."

So let's talk a bit about what an overseas voyage was like in the, you know, 1750s or 1770s when this happened. The main ship he was on was called the Resolution. There was a companionship, the Discovery. The Resolution was 110ft long. That's 37 yards long. About, you know, a middling pass in the NFL. That's the distance. And roughly a hundred men aboard. They might go months without landfall. They had to carry all the water. I mean, well, what kinds of supplies would you have to pack to know that you could go exploring uncharted waters and stay alive?

SIDES: Yeah. It certainly wasn't a Carnival cruise. People were suffering and, you know, living in cramped quarters and swinging in hammocks and dealing with bad food, dealing with the discipline of the ship, obviously and the closeness, the claustrophobic closeness of being with the same group of guys for so long.

DAVIES: How did cook, and his sailors, for that matter, communicate with the locals?

SIDES: A lot of grunting. A lot of gesticulating. A lot of pidgin Polynesian, which many of the men did learn along the way because the language, although it varied from island to island, was largely the same throughout the South Seas, at least. And they communicated mainly through bartering and expressions on their face. It was, you know, certainly true that whatever the men were understanding was only a fraction of what was really going on. And that's a big part of when you're dealing with the documents, you're trying to sift through all this and try to realize well, only getting, you know, sort of the unreliable narrator thing. We're only getting a part of the real story. But, you know, you just try to do the best you can with the documents that you have to work with.

DAVIES: You know, there's one fascinating figure here who was on Cook's voyage, or much of it, who was not an Englishman. He was a Polynesian man named Mai, who had joined Cook's second voyage, was interested in joining the Navy, did so, became a seaman, and then goes to England, where he becomes kind of a celebrity, this Polynesian guy. Tells us something about his experience.

SIDES: Mai was amazing. He was the first Polynesian man to set foot on English soil, and he very quickly became a celebrity. He learned English. He hung out at the estates of the aristocracy. He learned to hunt and, you know, he learned to play backgammon and chess. And he met with the Royal Society. He met with King George. He met with Samuel Johnson and all the sort of intelligentsia of the times. And England just fell in love with this guy. He was the personification of, as they put it, the noble savage. He had a wonderful smile. He had a wonderful - he was a very handsome guy that - quite popular with the ladies. And he had a two-year period of London where they really rolled out the red carpet for him.

And - but then the king, King George, said, we're going to take you home. We've got to find a way to get you home. And that ended up being errand number one on Captain Cook's third voyage, which is to bring him home, bring Mai home to Tahiti with his belongings and with a bunch of animals, and ensconce him back in his home island, partly for his own good, but also because they wanted to sort of show Tahitian society how great England was and all these belongings that they had given him. They wanted to impress the Tahitian society that, you know, England was the best, better than Spain, better than France. So that's a big part of the voyage and a big part of the - really, a big part of the book.

DAVIES: Yeah. Like infusing stem cells of British culture in Tahiti.

SIDES: That's a great way to put it. Yeah.

DAVIES: You know, it is interesting because Mai spent two years in England and was a big hit and learned to speak English pretty well and met all these notables. When he left to go on the voyage, he wasn't traveling light, was he? I mean, tell us some of the stuff he brought with him to impress his Tahitian friends when he got back.

SIDES: Well, they - he had been given lots of muskets. He had been given, like, all kinds of trinkets and completely, for the most part, useless things, toys and all kinds of things that, you know, were really kind of meant to impress people but weren't exactly useful.

DAVIES: Well, and also a full suit of armor, right?

SIDES: Oh, he was given also - he was also given - yeah, a full suit of armor. What are you going to do with chainmail and a, you know, full suit of armor in a tropical Tahiti? I'm not really sure. But there was an ulterior motive going on the whole time, which was that he wanted guns. He wanted ammunition because he - his father had been murdered by the warriors from Bora Bora, and he wanted to reclaim his home island from the Bora Bora. And so he wanted - he ventured to England, really, to get guns. And he did get guns. And that's a whole nother part of after Cook leaves and deposits Mai in the Society Islands. Unfortunately, Mai's story is sad and tragic and, you know, kind of an example of what happens, I think, when you cross-pollinate cultures, you know, it was like he was a man without a country.

He wasn't really English and he wasn't really Tahitian anymore. He was something else. He had all these belongings, but he didn't really know what to do with them. And he immediately started using his guns to cook up a battle with the Bora Borans. And things do not go well for him, tragically, in the end.

DAVIES: It was interesting because they, you know, Cook wanted to integrate him into Tahitian society. But he goes and he meets with the chief and, you know, he was a little station when he left. Now he thinks he's big stuff. He goes riding on the beach on a horse in a full suit of armor. They are less than impressed. They kind of just did not ingratiate him with Tahitian culture. The British end up building him a house with a lock on it, which was a new thing. Just didn't...

SIDES: Right.

DAVIES: ...Work at all, did it?

SIDES: It's just like a completely grafted from England trying to make it work in a completely different society. The thing is, Mai came from basically nothing. He was a commoner, and apparently, no amount of possessions or guns or suit of armor could change that. You know, Tahitian society was very stratified. The kings and chiefs were all powerful. And here comes this impostor - this poser - trying to now say, oh, I'm powerful, and I'm well-connected, so you should treat me differently. Well, they didn't treat him differently. They're just like, you're still Mai.

DAVIES: We're going to take another break here.

We are speaking with Hampton Sides. His new book is "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact And The Fateful Final Voyage Of Captain James Cook." We'll talk more after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAN AUERBACH SONG, "HEARTBROKEN, IN DISREPAIR")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with historian Hampton Sides. His new book is a gripping account of an 18th-century, round-the-world sea voyage led by British Captain James Cook.

After he spent time in the South Pacific with - near islands around Tahiti, he actually "discovers," quote-unquote, I mean, the islands in the chain that includes Hawaii, that we now know as our - the state of Hawaii. I mean, I say discovered, because obviously people had been living there for centuries, but Europeans somehow didn't know about this. But then he goes on to explore the west coast of North America, looking for this long-sought water passage that would allow, you know, Europeans to go through North America to the Pacific Ocean. So he's trying to do it from the backside - plenty of encounters with local communities, plenty of times he had to stop and repair his ship, explores all kinds of inlets and rivers and estuaries, does not find this passage.

So he does try to go north up to the Arctic Circle to see if - is there a chance you can sail, you know, over the north - over the top of the world, bypass Greenland and go to Great Britain. This was in the summer. And there were some thinking that this might be possible. A guy named Daines Barrington you write about had opinions about Arctic sea travel. Tell us - what were the expectations here?

SIDES: There was a lot of weird ideas back then and pieces of kind of pseudoscience and rumor that - for example, one of the ideas was that sea ice cannot freeze. And so if you can get far enough from land, the only ice is along the shore coming from rivers. So the idea was, you know, if you can find a big, wide passage somewhere up there that's just in the broad ocean, it will not freeze, and you'll find your way over Canada. This is obviously very flawed science. And a lot of science - a lot of explorers had to suffer and die to try to disprove it. But Cook was willing to give it a try. And he also understood that this whole part of the world was - it was not known at all. It was terra incognita. Yeah, it was a mystery what was up there. The Russians had been there, but they didn't really share their information.

And we do see Cook, during this phase of the voyage, at his very best. He's back to what he does best, which is mapping and charting and exploring something entirely new and trying to understand the lay of the land. He was a brilliant cartographer. And he was an amazing captain in these kinds of dicey sailing situations. So he goes, I mean, he basically gives us the outline of the entire northwest part of the continent, you know, Oregon to Alaska. And he goes up and over Alaska. And he's heading toward what we now call Point Barrow, Alaska, when he finally encounters an impenetrable wall of ice. And he understands immediately, not only is this not going to lead to the Atlantic but we've got to get the hell out of here, because we're going to get trapped in this ice. And he nearly does get trapped. And if that had happened, we'd never hear - heard from him again.

And so most people, at that point, would have said, well, time to go home. But he decided, no, we're going to try it one more season. We're going to come back during the next summer in the hope that we'll - maybe the ice will have shifted, and we can find that way through. But in the meantime, winter's coming. I got to go somewhere to replenish the ships and let the men have some R&R. So why don't we go back to that amazing archipelago we stumbled upon, Hawaii - the Hawaiian chain. And so that's what they do. They head back to Hawaii to thaw out and relax for a short while.

DAVIES: Yeah. This is just an amazing moment in the book. Like, OK, you've, like, you've given it a shot. There is no northwest passage. The Arctic is frozen. Go home. But no, no. And he's going to extend the voyage by another full year. He's going to wait and go back the next summer. Captain Cook would not make it home from this voyage. He would be killed on the island of Hawaii. The circumstances are a little too intricate for us to cover here, and it's frankly a fascinating story that I think folks, along with other great stories, will get when they read the book.

You know, Cook is revered by many as, you know, one of the greatest explorers and sailors ever. And, you know, a man of the enlightenment who cared about expanding knowledge and being precise. He's also reviled as, you know, an agent of European imperialism. I mean, his - monuments to him in the islands have been, you know, desecrated. And I noticed that the copy in the jacket to your book says Cook's scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword. From his writings, did he care deeply about colonial conquest and rivalries with, you know, Spain, which was really active in the Pacific?

SIDES: Yes. He - you know, he wasn't naive. He knew that he was doing the work of Empire. He certainly was a devoted, you know, follower of the Crown and was a dutiful employee, if you want to call it, of the Admiralty. And he understood that this enormous chess game that was going on between the European powers, particularly the Spanish and the French and the English and the Dutch, was happening all around, and that he was working in the service of all that. He wasn't naive. But you get the feeling when you read his journals that the places places where he's most animated, when he's most excited, when he's most interested is when he's describing something totally new, when he's playing the role of even an anthropologist or a, you know, ethnographer or when he's mapping something that's never been seen by Europeans before.

I say in the book that he's more empirical than imperial and that he's more inquisitive than acquisitive, and I think that's true. I do think that he was operating in a very, very unique time when there was still this kind of ethic of the Enlightenment. But there's no question that exploration is the first phase of colonial conquest. You know, these explorers come, they describe the bays and places where you can anchor and where the food is, and then here come the occupiers, and here comes the alcohol and the diseases and, you know, just the entire dismantling of these fragile island communities. So that's why he's hated so much, I think. He was - it's not really so much what he did. It's what came immediately after him as a consequence of his voyages.

DAVIES: Yeah. It's interesting. You know, he didn't claim lands for the crown, and he didn't conquer and subjugate and exploit the locals. I mean, he made a point of not getting into local wars with them. They would want him to kind of help them. He wouldn't get involved in that. But the interactions in some way undermined the traditional societies in ways that were not helpful.

SIDES: You know, he did claim some lands for England occasionally, especially in his first two voyages, because it was required by the admiralty, but by the third voyage, you can tell he's rolling his eyes at the whole thing. In fact, he would have his younger officers, junior officers, go out and raise the flag and, you know, have a little ceremony 'cause he thought it was absurd. But, you know, he understood that these were new lands that probably one of the European powers was going to try to take over, and he was consciously writing notes to the admiralty saying, you know, the Spanish are probably going to come here next, or, you know, what are the French going to do? So, you know, this imperial game is still going on in the background, and it still has reverberations to this day.

DAVIES: Hampton Sides, thanks so much for speaking with us.

SIDES: It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

DAVIES: Hampton Sides' book is "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact And The Fateful Final Voyage Of Captain James Cook." Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews Beyonce's new album, "Cowboy Carter." This is FRESH AIR.

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Book review: The ‘elusive’ Northwest Passage is reconsidered in this exhaustive history of efforts to navigate between oceans

“Discovering Nothing: In Pursuit of an Elusive Northwest Passage”

By David L. Nicandri; UBC Press, 2024; 328 pages; $37.95.

The search for a northern sea passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is legendary. Numerous expeditions from both sides of the continent ended in failure, some in disastrous frozen-in-ice situations. David Nicandri, a respected historian based in Washington state and the author of several books, including “Captain Cook Rediscovered,” now has taken on an exhaustive examination of the explorers and schemers who sought or promoted a link between oceans, along with the global competitions that influenced the search.

Nicandri also shows how the search led to further explorations across the continent, including that of Lewis and Clark. He expands the meaning of a northwest passage from one by sea across the top of the continent to theories of an inland (“mediterranean”) sea that would mirror Hudson Bay in the east, a network of lakes and rivers that would cross the continent with easy portages and, finally, transcontinental railroads. For a very long time, no one understood how wide North America was and how formidable its mountain ranges were. What the author calls “a geography of hope” prevailed.

“Discovering Nothing” is organized thematically, not chronologically, which can be confusing and repetitious at times, but the author has thoughtfully included a cast of characters, a chronology, maps, and end notes to help readers find their way. Nicandri draws upon extensive research about four primary explorations — those of James Cook, Alexander Mackenzie, George Vancouver, and Lewis and Clark — and surrounds them with the personages and geopolitics of others with significant roles related to the quest for both scientific knowledge and the control of territory and resources. Although there’s very little note of contact with Indigenous people, the author makes clear that there was really nothing to “discover” about places where people already lived, traveled and traded.

In 1778, on Cook’s third (and final) voyage, with instructions to find a northwest passage if there was one, Cook roughly charted the West Coast of North America and sailed all the way through the Bering Strait to Icy Cape on the Chukchi Sea, where thick ice stopped him. On his way, he looked for openings that might lead inland. The one that became known as Cook’s River seemed promising but shallowed out (hence our Turnagain Arm). It was Vancouver, in 1794, who put to rest the idea that Cook’s River ran inland to connect to lakes and more rivers that could constitute a passage to the east; he confirmed that the waterway was an inlet with a couple of glacier-fed arms.

Meanwhile, Russian, Spanish and French explorers were similarly adventuring, leaving their names all over islands, capes and inlets while looking for glory and riches. One pleasure of this book for Alaskans is gaining a greater appreciation for connections between history and our named geography. Kotzebue and Malaspina, Valdes, Bligh, Portlock and Dixon, Gore, Delong and many lesser-known individuals all appear here in respect to their travels along Alaska’s coast.

Once it was generally understood that there was no northwest passage to be traversed (despite the continuing wishfulness of many), interests of the Western world shifted to other concerns. A second wave of Arctic enthusiasm, less of discovery and more of romanticism, followed through the 1800s and included the ill-fated Franklin Expedition and the 50 rescue missions that searched for survivors. No ships made it through the ice until Norway’s Roald Amundsen completed the transit in 1905, only after his ship was locked in the ice for two winters.

An epilogue, “The New North,” brings the entire question of a northwest passage and its “elusiveness” up to date with tremendous relevance. Here, Nicandri discusses the retreat of Arctic ice in recent decades and the increase in commercial ship traffic both across the top of North America and the top of Russia (called the Northern Sea Route.) He points out that Russia has 36 large icebreakers that accompany more than 1,000 ships per year along its northern coast and that China (which has declared itself “a near-Arctic state” for political purposes) is building a fleet of its own. (The United States has two operable icebreakers, only one of which visits the Arctic.) Moreover, extensive open ocean makes oil, gas and minerals newly available for exploitation, and no international agreements sufficiently regulate claims to the seabed.

“In terms of the practical adaptation to this circumstance,” Nicandri writes, “it seems as if the clock has been turned back to the last third of the eighteenth century and the era of James Cook ... assessing prospects for reducing shipping distances between Europe and Asia.” The “travel window” for passage is now eight months long, and ships are carrying natural gas between Russia and China, saving 5,000 miles and two weeks of time.

Curiously, the book makes only a three-sentence mention, in an earlier chapter, of the 1969 voyage of the oil supertanker Manhattan, which succeeded in reaching Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay in a test of whether oil transport by sea was practical. (The trans-Alaska pipeline was constructed instead.)

Anyone with an interest in northern or exploration history will discover in “Discovering Nothing” a studious critique and sometimes reinterpretation of a significant part of Alaska, American and global history.

Nancy Lord is a Homer-based writer and former Alaska writer laureate. Her books include "Fishcamp," "Beluga Days," and "Early Warming." Her latest book is "pH: A Novel."

COMMENTS

Third voyage of James Cook
The route of Cook's third voyage shown in red; blue shows the return route after his death. James Cook's third and final voyage (12 July 1776 - 4 October 1780) took the route from Plymouth via Tenerife and Cape Town to New Zealand and the Hawaiian Islands, and along the North American coast to the Bering Strait.. Its ostensible purpose was to return Omai, a young man from Raiatea, to his ...
'The Wide Wide Sea' revisits Capt. James Cook's fateful final voyage
"A lot of things started going wrong from the very beginning," historian Hampton Sides says of Cook's last voyage, which ended in the British explorer's violent death on the island of Hawaii in 1779.
Capt. Cook's Final Voyage : Fresh Air : NPR
Capt. Cook's Final Voyage. "A lot of things started going wrong from the very beginning," historian Hampton Sides says of Cook's last voyage, which ended in the British explorer's violent death on ...
James Cook: Third Voyage
Book: Cook, James. A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. Undertaken, by the Command of His Majesty, for Making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere, to Determine the Position and Extent of the West Side of North America; Its Distance from Asia; and the Practicability of a Northern Passage to Europe. Performed under the Direction of Captains Cook ...
Captain James Cook's Fatal Third Voyage
A fatal encounter. Cook's ships were forced to return just four days later because the Resolution needed repairs to her mast. This time the mood had changed. When Cook tried to take the king hostage after the theft of a ship's boat, the inhabitants became alarmed and during a struggle Cook was stabbed and killed on 14 February 1779. Captain ...
James Cook
Captain James Cook FRS (7 November [O.S. 27 October] 1728 - 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, cartographer and naval officer famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean and to New Zealand and Australia in particular. He made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific, during which he achieved the first recorded European ...
Captain James Cook
Captain James Cook - His Third Voyage. Upon returning from his second voyage in July of 1775, Captain James Cook was granted a captain's berth at the historic Greenwich Hospital, a much sought after position that assured a reasonable income with no excess of duties for the rest of his life. Here at last Cook might have finally settled down, and ...
An enthralling account of Captain Cook's final, fatal voyage
An excellent new book draws on Cook's letters and notebooks to tell the story of his third and final trip. Cook was almost 50 when he set off on HMS Resolution in July 1776. Among the crew he ...
The Third Voyage
Wed. Anchors in Bay. 14. Sun. Cook along with Marines, Corporal Thomas, Privates Hinks, Allen and Fatchett are killed ashore near village of Kaawaloa, about 9 a.m. There had been ill feeling, menaces and theft - particularly Discovery's cutter - and Cook had gone ashore to settle the matter.
Captain Cook Society > Cook's Voyages > Third Pacific Voyage
James Cook was appointed to command a ship called Resolution, which left Plymouth on 12 July, 1776. Charles Clerke commanded the ship Discovery, which left on 1 August, and caught up with Resolution at Cape Town. A list of what Cook was up to preparing for this voyage and during the voyage can be found in Paul Capper's list of Third Voyage dates.
The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook
A Brief History. On July 12, 1776, famous explorer English Captain James Cook set sail from Plymouth on what was to be his final voyage. The premier English explorer of the Pacific, Cook had taken voyages from 1768-1771 and 1772-1775, greatly expanding British knowledge of the Pacific, its islands, aits people.
Captain Cook's 1768 Voyage to the South Pacific Included a Secret
Lorraine Boissoneault. August 24, 2018. Captain James Cook set out on a voyage across the Pacific 250 years ago, seemingly on a scientific voyage. But he carried secret instructions from the Navy ...
How Captain James Cook Got Away with Murder
Illustration by Julie Benbassat. On Valentine's Day, 1779, Captain James Cook invited Hawaii's King Kalani'ōpu'u to visit his ship, the Resolution. Cook and the King were on friendly ...
Captain Cook's final voyage : the journal of midshipman George Gilbert
Captain Cook's final voyage : the journal of midshipman George Gilbert by Gilbert, George, -1781; Holmes, Christine. ... 1982 Topics Historical - General, Biography / Autobiography, Gilbert, George, Cook, James, 1728-1779, Voyages around the world Publisher Honolulu : University Press of Hawaii Collection internetarchivebooks ... (last updated ...
Cook's Voyages Map
Quick Facts: The map shows the three voyages of Captain James Cook. The first voyage is in red, the second voyage is in green and the third voyage is in blue. Following Cook's death, the route his crew took is in the blue dashed line. (Credit: Andre Engels) The map shows the three voyages of Captain James Cook. The first voyage is in red, the ...
James Cook North-West Passage expedition 1776-78
Captain James Cook came out of retirement to look for the North-West Passage in 1776. It was to be his last expedition and he never returned home. Captain James Cook is one of the most celebrated navigators and explorers in British history. By 1775 he had retired but was lured back to sea by the possibility of discovering the North-West Passage ...
Death of James Cook
Deaths. Dozens (including Cook) On 14 February 1779, English explorer Captain James Cook attempted to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, the ruling chief ( aliʻi nui) of the island of Hawaii, after the native Hawaiians had stolen a longboat from Cook's expedition. As Cook attempted to take the chief to his ship, they were confronted by a crowd of ...
Alone and defenceless: the tragic death of Captain Cook
The principal purpose of Captain James Cook's last voyage, which began in Plymouth on 12 July 1776, was to discover the elusive Northwest Passage. Attempts had been made before, in vain, from ...
The Adventure of a Lifetime: John Ledyard and Captain Cook's Last Voyage
By Ben Gammell. In 1783, as Americans adjusted to peace time following the Revolutionary War, a young man's incredible adventure story was published in Hartford.John Ledyard's Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage recounted Ledyard's travels with the world-famous British explorer on his third and last exploration of the Pacific Ocean. Between 1776 and 1780, while most Americans were ...
'The Wide Wide Sea' revisits Capt. James Cook's fateful final voyage
Sides' book is "The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact And The Fateful Final Voyage Of Captain James Cook." So let's talk a bit about what an overseas voyage was like in the, you know, 1750s or 1770s when this happened. The main ship he was on was called the Resolution. There was a companionship, the Discovery.
Journal of Captain Cook's last voyage.
Reprint of the author's A journal of Captain Cook's last voyage to the Pacific Ocean and in quest of a North-west passage between Asia & America, performed in the years 1776,1777,1778, and 1779 Bibliography: p. 247-252 Notes. This book contains cut of text due to tight binding. Obscured text.
A journal of Captain Cook's last voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and in
A journal of Captain Cook's last voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and in quest of a North-west passage, between Asia & America [microform] : performed in the years 1776, 1777, 1778, and 1779 ... by Ledyard, John, 1751-1789
Second voyage of James Cook
The second voyage of James Cook, from 1772 to 1775, commissioned by the British government with advice from the Royal Society, was designed to circumnavigate the globe as far south as possible to finally determine whether there was any great southern landmass, or Terra Australis.On his first voyage, Cook had demonstrated by circumnavigating New Zealand that it was not attached to a larger ...
Book review: The 'elusive' Northwest Passage is reconsidered in this
In 1778, on Cook's third (and final) voyage, with instructions to find a northwest passage if there was one, Cook roughly charted the West Coast of North America and sailed all the way through ...