Beyond the sea: Hampton Sides' newest goes deep into the ill-fated third voyage of Captain Cook

If you’re American, the month of July in the year 1776 no doubt holds special historical interest.

On July Fourth of that year the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the 13 American Colonies’ breakaway from Great Britain.

If you’re British, you may know that the month of July of the year 1776 is important for a different event: The British sloop HMS Resolution, led by the famous explorer-mapmaker Captain James Cook, left Plymouth Dockyard on July 12.

Beyond the sea: Hampton Sides' newest goes deep into the ill-fated third voyage of Captain Cook

It signaled the start of Cook’s third transoceanic expedition. He was headed for the Pacific Ocean where the Resolution (and a delayed companion ship HMS Discovery), were instructed to search North America’s Pacific coast to find the Northwest Passage, a believed open body of water connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.

It was to be Cook’s last — and unfinished — voyage.

A new book tells this epic tale in vivid, clear and rich detail, bringing out the many personalities and the events leading up to and including Cook’s 3½ years at sea.

The book, a compelling, dramatic read by bestselling historian Hampton Sides of Santa Fe, is titled “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.”

The Resolution and the Discovery met up in Cape Town before the ships struggled through Antarctica and into the southern Pacific Ocean.

In his author’s note, Sides makes several significant points concerning present-day Native reinterpretations of Cook and European empire building.

Sides declares that Cook was an explorer and a cartographer, not a colonizer nor a conqueror.

However, he notes, explorers and mapmakers have often been viewed by Indigenous people as the first step toward conquest.

After Cook, Sides writes, “came the occupiers, the guns, the pathogens, the alcohol, the problem with money, the whalers, the furriers, the seal hunters, the plantation owners, the missionaries.” Not to mention the sailors with venereal diseases.

For the many Indigenous people of the vast Pacific Ocean, from Tasmania and New Zealand north through Hawai’i and all the way to Alaska and the Bering Strait, Cook’s name has become a symbol of colonialism.

Even today, Cook’s name is offensive to many Polynesians.

Sides notes that in 2021 in Victoria, British Columbia, protestors knocked down a statue of Cook into the city’s harbor. And the residents of the Cook Islands have been discussing the possibility of changing the archipelago’s name, he writes.

On Cook’s third voyage, he did not survive an encounter with Natives on the Big Island of Hawai’i in January and February 1779. The islanders initially seemed to believe Cook himself was a local deity.

Sides spends many pages dramatically describing the Brits’ amicable farewell from the island, their unplanned, unwelcomed 180-degree return to the island’s Kealakekua Bay, and an extended shoreline confrontation concluding in a bloody fight in which Cook was killed.

As Sides writes, “The scene was one of unbelievable slaughter. Blood was smeared on the rocks, muskets strewn about, wounded Natives coughing on the ground, women wailing in the distance. In addition to Cook, four marines lay dead, and as many as 20 Hawaiian warriors.”

The author thinks his initial spark of interest in Capt. Cook was lit when he was a kid.

Sides said his parents had given him a set of “Classics Illustrated” comic books about historical figures such as Cook and famous fictional characters.

“I remember the imagery. (Cook) was fighting on the beach in the South Seas. I remember being into it. I’m sure it was nothing more than a lurid, youthful fascination,” Sides said in a phone interview.

Sides thinks of “The Wide Wide Sea” as part documentary history, part oral history, part biography and part travelogue.

This new book ranks high alongside Sides’ earlier acclaimed histories “On Desperate Ground,” “Blood and Thunder” and “Ghost Soldiers.”