Summary of The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

By GP SUMMARY

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Summary of The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

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"The Wide Wide Sea" by Hampton Sides tells the story of Captain James Cook's death in Hawaii, a pivotal voyage of the Age of Exploration. Cook's mercurial behavior, involving violence and exploitative treatment of native Hawaiians, led to devastating consequences for Indigenous people worldwide, highlighting the colonial sword's impact on indigenous communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Apr 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9783755475095

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Summary of

The Wide Wide Sea

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Summary of Hampton Sides’s book

Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

GP SUMMARY

Summary of The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

By GP SUMMARY© 2024, GP SUMMARY.

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NOTE

Captain James Cook's voyages have been under increasing attack as part of a larger reassessment of the legacy of empire. Cook was an explorer and mapmaker, not a conqueror or colonizer. His name has been vilified in many corners of the world for all the trouble that came after him, and because the Indigenous peoples he encountered were ignored for so long. Monuments to Cook's explorations have been splattered with paint, and artifacts and artworks stemming from his voyages have been radically reinterpreted or removed altogether from museum and gallery collections.

In some respects, Cook has become the Columbus of the Pacific. His three epic expeditions were once seen as worthwhile and noble projects undertaken in the service of the Enlightenment and the expansion of global knowledge. However, today, Cook's voyages are passionately contested, especially in Polynesia, viewed as the start of the systematic dismantling of traditional island cultures.

The author argues that the current resentment toward Cook may be due to something being wrong with him on his final voyage. Historians and forensic medical researchers speculate about what was ailing him, whether it was a physical or mental malady, perhaps even a spiritual one. Cook's personality had changed, possibly leading to his death.

Cook did not discover many of the places he's often mistakenly credited with having discovered, as most of the geographical features and life forms that Cook and his fellow expedition members named and described already had Indigenous names and contexts. He was also a preternaturally accurate mapmaker, aided by his use of the latest navigational technology and deep understanding of astronomy.

The concept of private property is a central issue in accounts of James Cook's voyages, particularly in Polynesia. Cook's crewmen and sailors had different ideas about property and ownership, with Polynesians viewing theft as a crime. Cook's ships had an abundance of iron, while their islands had none. This clash between cultures regarding the nature, meaning, and purpose of physical possessions was often difficult to understand.

Sexual mores also arises in the story of the voyage, with most of Cook's crewmen in their late teens and twenties fixating on the subject of sex. While Cook himself abstained from encounters with local women, his sailors did not. Their one-dimensional view of women as erotic playthings can make it difficult to read in the twenty-first century.

The author questions how young Polynesian women might have found Cook's men attractive, and whether powerful Native men orchestrated events behind the scenes to beguile them. Some anthropologists speculate that sex was a way for young women to defy a stratified, male-ruled society, while others suggest that it was about pleasure and little else.

The book is based on the journals, logs, and other writings of Cook and many other voyage participants, some of which were official accounts or written in secrecy without the authorization of the British government. The author has tried to bring in Indigenous points of view by employing oral history passed down through generations and collected by Native speakers.

This narrative history is not a biography but a narrative history with a large, diverse cast of characters moving over thousands of miles of oceanic expanse. It tells the story of James Cook and the men who accompanied him on his voyage to the Pacific, leaving lasting impacts on the world.

PROLOGUE

And Louder Grew the Shouting

A group of fishermen, including Mapua, were astonished by the appearance of two leviathans on the ocean. They were unsure of their purpose but were convinced they were floating heiaus, or temples of the gods. The villagers were captivated by the creatures and gathered on shore, shouting with fear and confusion. The ships appeared silent and ghostly, with their sails furling and fluttering. Canoes were sent to investigate, and they saw humanlike creatures walking on the decks. They mistakenly thought the strange heads were deformed and mistook their uniforms for epidermis. The paddlers imagined openings into the men's bodies, where they took valuable treasure. As the ships approached shore, the crowds on the beach grew larger, feeling a sense of ominous change and a sense of their island world about to change forever.

BOOK ONE

the First Navigator of Europe

Negative Discoverer

In 1776, James Cook became a significant figure in the scientific community, becoming the first navigator of Europe and the greatest voyager England had ever produced. He was nominated to the Royal Society and won its highest award, the Copley Medal. Cook's second circumnavigation of the globe had been a significant journey, with the main goal being to determine the existence or nonexistence of a hypothetical continent known as Terra Australis Incognita. Many scientists believed that there must exist an immense southern landmass to counterbalance the weighty preponderance of terrain in the northern hemisphere.

Cook's ship, HMS Resolution, left England in July 1772, and he made multiple dagger thrusts deep into the southern seas, reaching latitude 71º10' South. By November 1774, Cook had turned the Resolution north and threaded through the ice fields toward home. He pronounced the unknown continent a fiction, and his thoroughness and probity convinced the Admiralty that he was right.

Cook's larger aspiration was to go as far as he thought it possible for man to go. He had a taciturn personality, with a craggy forehead, reddish-brown hair, and an austere face. His large-boned frame, hawk's nose, strong chin, and intense eyes made him a formidable figure in the scientific community.

Cook, a merchant mariner, was a master of directness, simplicity, and directness, absorbing Quaker values from his apprenticeship. He favored drab fare like sauerkraut and peas but would also go along with unfamiliar Polynesian dishes. Cook's gastrointestinal tract was made of iron, and he viewed it almost as his duty to sample what was set before him. Cook lived with his wife, Elizabeth, in a throbbing middle-class neighborhood just east of London. They had five children, and Cook was at sea during most of their children's births and absent for the tragic early deaths of three of them.

Cook's interior life was a closed book, with most entries dealing with mundane minutiae like barometric pressure, wind direction, and the amount of seaweed in the water. Elizabeth destroyed nearly all her personal papers, including Cook's letters to her, late in her life. This obliterated the best chance historians might have had to glean deeper insights into his psyche or hers.

Cook's voyaging was a technical, cyborg, and navigational machine, living during a romantic age of exploration but not a romantic one. He traveled to some of the world's most gorgeous and pristine islands but rarely remarked upon their beauty, as a professional mapmaker with little regard for sentiment. As a result, Cook had no natural gift for rhapsody.

James Cook, a renowned English explorer, was known for his systematic approach to sailing and his meticulousness. He valued exactitude and was known for his balance in his mind for truth. Cook was a humble and self-deprecating individual who never named a landmark after himself or his family. He was also known for affixing Indigenous names to his charts, which was uncommon for European explorers.

Born in 1728, Cook was a farm manager's son with limited formal education. He moved to Whitby, a hamlet of shipbuilders, whalers, and fishermen, where he learned to manage collier ships, read mercurial storms, and use dead reckoning and trigonometry to plot his location along complicated shorelines. At the age of twenty-seven, Cook volunteered for the Royal Navy and displayed a genius as a surveyor, hydrographer, and mapmaker. His cartographic prowess, combined with his growing talent as an astronomer and mathematician, caught the attention of high officials within the Admiralty.

Cook's first round-the-world voyage, as commander of the HMS Endeavour, left England in 1768, bound for Tahiti. He was instructed to witness and document the transit of Venus, charting the east coast of Australia and both islands of New Zealand. Cook's second voyage, to search more definitively for the undiscovered continent, sealed his reputation and catapulted him into the pantheon of English explorers.

Proto-Anthropologist

Cook, an English naval officer, discovered the vast oceans filled with islands, some inhabited and some not. He visited many of