Literate Matters: Captain Cook mystery resurfaces in 'The Wide Wide Sea'

I recall a few years ago when friends explained they were planning a vacation to the Cook Islands. This faraway location sounded inviting if mysterious.

While it still sounds inviting, there’s less mystery since then, and less again thanks to “The Wide, Wide Sea,” the new James Cook history from Hampton Sides.

Subtitled “Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook,” this new look catches up with Cook on his third and final voyage, started in July 1776, after he’d been welcomed home to England a hero twice already.

In the service of the Admiralty, at the urging of King George, Cook was lured back to sea for this last time primarily to “explore the so-called backside of North America, to chart the continent’s icy northwest extremities, probe its scalloped coastlines, and hunt for a passage leading all the way across Canada, eastward, toward the Atlantic Ocean.” This was a search for the mythical Northwest Passage, but done in reverse.

There was a secondary purpose, however, which came first. Cook was to return to Raiatea, near Bora Bora, to repatriate Mai, “a young man in his early twenties, with copper skin and a winsome smile” who had been spirited away from home in the south Pacific on Cook’s second voyage. Mai had been living in London, where though a celebrity because he was exotic, “his life story offered a poignant allegory of first contact between England and the people of Oceania.”

As part of Mai’s return, King George also wished Cook to introduce a menagerie of English flora and fauna to Oceania. So it is that Cook took on board his vessels a veritable Noah’s Ark of animals, including peacocks, pigs, horses, and many many more. He had plants too and all were to be left behind after Cook once again retreated from what Europeans had taken to calling “the Society Islands.”

Once at sea, captaining again “The Resolution,” sailing alongside Charles Clerke at the helm of “The Discovery,” Cook is driven and compassionate, but also peripatetic, inscrutable, explosive. Sailors are lashed for simple transgressions. He sails nearby but right past Tahiti, as well as several of the Hawaiian islands, consumed it seems by his orders to a degree that mutes his earlier curiosity. On this voyage he “was a taciturn man” who still “drank sparingly,” but with “a thunderous temper.” He also remained chaste, something his crew were unable — or unwilling — to do in the intoxicating spots they anchored.

1776 was certainly a tremulous time for England. And while “(Cook’s) voyage was the exploratory offshoot of an empire that looked restlessly outward in quest of new lands, markets, resources, and trade routes,” everyone also understood, “The troubles in America created an undertow of doubt within London society. Was Great Britain expanding, or was she in decline? Or more likely, were both things happening at the same time?”

It was into this divide that Cook steered toward Raiatea first, then New Zealand, Tonga, and later Hawaii on their way to Alaska and the American West coast. Nearly everywhere they stopped, the indigenous populations indulged Cook even if they didn’t always appreciate his presence, or what it foretold for their future. Meanwhile, Cook’s men, whether they revered or reviled him, left an unerasable mark on the islands, typically introducing syphilis along with suspicion in their wake.

Cook eventually landed in Hawaii, but soon after left, before traversing the coast of North America, though here too he missed out on remarkable but not unreachable locales, like Puget Sound as well as the mouth of the Columbia River.

Leaving North America, Cook went back to Hawaii, and Sides lays out plausible explanations for what happened next, though even with a lens that extends almost 250 years, the images remain blurred.

It’s easy to see Cook as a conduit of the bad behavior of imperialists, and this is not likely wrong. Still, in “The Wide Wide Sea” we meet a sailor driven by ambition and ambiguity, always a captivating combination.

Good reading.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Literate Matters: Captain Cook mystery resurfaces in 'The Wide Wide Sea'