The wide, wide sea: Imperial ambition, first contact and the fateful final voyage of Captain James Cook By HamptonSides. 2024. New York: Doubleday. 432 pp.

As I was attending school in the United States, from the elementary level through graduate school, the name “Captain Cook” frequently popped up, most often in the same breath as Leif Erikson, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and other European seafarers. James Cook (1728–1779) would always be characterized as a daring explorer and a gifted cartographer but never, to the best of my recollection, as an anthropologist, though the term was not unknown during his lifetime.1 However, judging from Hampton Sides's new work The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook (2024), Cook deserves to be viewed as an early anthropologist—and a humanistic one, as well. The work chronicles Cook's third major voyage which began in 1776, paused at the captain's death in Hawaii in 1779, and finally ended in 1780 when his replacement pulled his ship, the Resolution, into port at London. It had taken him and his crew down to Australia, through Oceania and up to Alaska. As interpreted by Sides in this propulsive account, Cook's detailed, nonjudgmental accounts of the, for him, unfamiliar peoples he encountered in his travels would seem to qualify him as an eighteenth-century ethnographer. And as one who, as Sides demonstrates, was more interested in understanding other peoples than in merely using them to serve his or his nation's ends. Sides acknowledges in his first pages that Cook's voyages have “come under increasing attack as part of a larger reassessment of the legacy of empire” (2024, xv). He states clearly that his own intent is “to present the captain and the goals and assumptions behind his third voyage, in all their flawed complexity,” and to “neither lionize, demonize nor defend him” (2024, xvii), but he takes pains throughout the work to underscore Cook's desire for cross-cultural study and understanding. His chief sources of data for this work are Captain Cook's own travel journals and those that many of his crew kept during that 1776 voyage, which was intended to find a Northwest Passage that would facilitate trade between Europe and the Far East and also to donate domesticated livestock to people in other cultures (a “pet” project of King George III). Judging by their sheer copiousness and the regularity of their entries, these journals and the observations they contain appear to have been taken very seriously by their authors as documents which would one day educate their patrons at court and the general public about vast portions of the world that had never before been mapped, and whose denizens had never been described. While none of the writers were formally trained in anthropology, the rich empirical details, nonjudgmental tone, and wide-ranging curiosity found in their journals all make these sailors appear also to qualify as ethnographers of their era (see Barnett, 2017; Beaglehole, 1967). Cook's own notes, in particular, strike Sides (and me!) as anthropological in approach. In describing Cook's and his crew's first encounter with the Palawa of Tasmania, for example, he finds that “of all the different roles his voyages required him to carry out, Cook derived the most pleasure and satisfaction from playing the part of anthropological observer” (2024, 104). The practical strategy Cook and his men adopted when first encountering an unfamiliar group like the Chukchi of Alaska was not at all unlike a modern researcher's approach to new subjects of research: Cook assumed a “forthright demeanor” (2024, 275), he and his crew presented and accepted gifts, and they joined their hosts in local activities—both a dance and lunch. Later, the captain “wrote up his observations with a verve and a level of anthropological detail that was reminiscent of his earlier voyages” (2024, 276). Among the entries Sides cites, one can also find examples of times when Cook and/or his men express values consistent with the definition of humanism as beliefs which “attach prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters … (and) stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems” (Knowles, 2005). As for adopting a “rational way of solving human problems,” Cook reacts with a marked lack of ethnocentrism when first approached by naked Palawa covered with decorative scars: “Cook adopted a neutral anthropological tone, even handed and remarkably devoid of judgment or religiosity, jingoism or national pride”, (2024, 100). On another occasion, when he learned that some fellow Englishmen had been cannibalized by Maori at Grass Cove in New Zealand, he went there himself, stating, “I shall make no reflection on this melancholy affair until I hear more about it” (2024, 113). After interviewing a number of Maori who had been present at the event, he concluded that the custom stemmed from the “Hobbesian violence” (2024, 122) that characterized longstanding tribal conflicts in the region: “This custom of eating their enemies slain in battle… has undoubtedly been handed down to them from the earliest times and we know that it is not an easy matter to break a nation of its ancient customs” (2024, 124). While the custom of cannibalism was unacceptable to him, he refrained from intervening in those tribal conflicts. Similarly, when invited by Tahitians to witness a ritual human sacrifice, he “was curious about these sorts of rites and rituals, however cruel they may have seemed—he viewed it as his responsibility to document the mores of people he encountered on his voyages” (2024, 152). With respect to showing appreciation for another people's “value and goodness,” Cook stated, with regard to the Maori, “I have always found them of a brave, noble, open, and benevolent disposition” (2024, 113). Similarly, despite the fact that he regretted that Mai, a young Polynesian man who had traveled to England with him (see Connaughton, 2005), was “short-circuiting ancient traditions and mores,” Cook still felt “like a father” to him (2024, 158), while later, on the island of Kaua'i, he characterized its population as “an open, candid, active people” (2024, 165). Encountering Alaska's Chukchi for the first time, he praised their great “ingenuity,” while his crewman, David Samwell (see Thomas et al., 2007) marveled at how they were able to use every part of the walruses they hunted, even carving “beautiful, intricate ivory figurines from their tusks” (Sides, 2024, 276). As for “emphasizing common human needs,” Sides documents ways in which, during their stay in Tahiti, “in both superficial and meaningful ways, the English and the Tahitians had mingled their customs and cultures and had influenced one another” (2024, 165). Far from regarding the local culture as “primitive” or “inferior,” crew members got tattooed, loved the native foods and dances, learned enough of the language to bond with local men in an important brotherly bond called “taio,” and regularly joined them in their fishing and kite-flying (2024, 165). Cook, along with ship's surgeon William Anderson and artist John Webber, all expressed admiration for how the Kaua'i islanders had managed to build houses, make tapa cloth and forge implements of war out of “nothing more than rock, wood, coral, shell, and bone” (2024, 213). And in their first visit to the Chukchi, Cook and his men paid attention to “their dwellings, their kayaks, their dog sledgehammers, their hunting implements” (2024, 275). In other words, the distinctive ways they fulfilled their “common human needs.” As a humanist anthropologist myself, my main take-away from Sides's work is confirmation that not all early explorers and ethnographers were “in it” for political domination or economic exploitation, as some have contended (see Gough, 1968), for if we are to believe his account, Cook and the men he chose for his crew were certainly not. Why was that the case? Perhaps because Cook, as leader of the expedition, was not a religious man, so was less susceptible to colonialist tropes like the Doctrine of Discovery (see Field, 2024, 48; Jones, 2023) or the tale of Cain's or Ham's dark skin as excuses to pillage, enslave, and kill “Third World” peoples. Perhaps, also, the fact that he treated his crew with a social egalitarianism unique for its time made him more open to viewing other cultures in relativistic ways. But the fact that so many of his crewmen seemed to share his approach cannot be explained by Cook's traits alone, but instead suggest that those qualities were more widely held at the time, at least in navigators' circles. All this is not to suggest that Cook's third voyage was free of ethnocentrism, colonialist projects, or violence against indigenous people. Some members of his crew were “aghast” at the Hawaiians' acceptance of male homosexuality (2024, 313), showing ethnocentric bias. Ganath Obeyesekere (1992) has argued that George III's project to introduce British livestock to people in other parts of the world was not charitable but rather was an attempt to “Anglicize” them, in order to make them easier to colonize (though Marshall Sahlins (1995) has challenged that position). And Sides does not back away from recounting those occasions when violence erupted between Indigenous peoples and their visitors, including the harrowing massacre of Hawaiians that followed Cook's own violent death at their hands. But it does suggest that an anthropological approach predates anthropology's ascendance as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, and that such an approach sometimes manifested itself in a humanistic manner long before any journal called Anthropology and Humanism was founded. Hopefully, together, we can ensure that Cook's and his crewmen's legacy in that area will be carried forward to many generations yet to come. It is my usual practice, when writing a book review, to conduct a brief written Question and Answer with the book's author, in order to give readers insight into the author's intentions in writing the book, how he or she first became interested in the book's topic, etc., so that the review provides readers with a personal glimpse into the author's goals rather than simply a judgment on what is “good” or “bad,” “useful” or “extraneous,” in the work. Unfortunately, when I approached Mr. Sides's representative with a request for such a Q&A, I was told that he was unavailable. One of the questions I had wished to ask him was, “how does a historian manage to characterize the motives, reactions, and feelings of the main characters in the story, when those characters are all deceased and therefore unavailable for interviews?” Luckily, he had answered a similar question when interviewed about an earlier historical work, Blood and Thunder (Sides, 2007). During its writing, he said, there wasn't a way to just pick up the telephone. There wasn't a lifeline, or a way to quickly and independently verify facts, which is very lonely. You're just stuck with these documents in a room and trying to make sense out of these things. On the other hand, it's also easier because you don't have to reconcile different facts from 25 different sources. It is both helpful and hurtful when all those people are alive and competing in their interpretations of an event … Oh my God, you're stuck in a room, just guessing and doing your best … to try to capture the essence of an event. So you make up for it by doing other things. You travel as much as you can, you go to the physical landscapes of the story, you try to drink up the essence of it in other ways, … You have to psych yourself up every day to believe in this very arrogant, vain way that you are the guy. You're the guy who was meant to tell this story. This is the most important story there ever was and you have to almost just grotesquely inflate the importance of the endeavor…. In the morning, you got to pump yourself up again … It's a little bit of self-brainwashing that you have to do every day during those low moments (Sides, quoted in Ehisen, 2016). Also, a podcast of an oral interview with Sides speaking about The Wide, Wide Sea to Jamie McGrath Morris (2024) is available through Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and is highly recommended for those interested in Sides's own perspective on his work.