Book Review: “The Wide Wide Sea,” by Hampton Sides

I have lost track of what led me to buy and read Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea. Perhaps it was the stellar book reviews it got when it was published earlier this year. Though I certainly do remember how fascinated I was with my own study of these voyages of discovery as an eleven-year-old in grammar school. In any case, when Sides’ 350-page tome hit the bookstores, I was ready for it.

This is a marvelous book about a monumental undertaking. It is a recapitulation of the third world voyage of Captain James Cook, the great British seafaring explorer of the eighteenth century.

On July 12, 1776 Cook set off on his third world voyage in the Resolution. He would die in mortal combat in 1779 after establishing the best sea route east through the Atlantic Ocean, through the Cape of Good Hope, Tasmania, New Zealand bound for a passage through the North Pole. On his way north he stopped at Kaua’i, then moved along the coast of North America and through the Bering Strait to Alaska.

Worth noting are the details that Sides assembles to establish Cook’s character. From the references relied on here — Cook’s written and spoken word — we have the portrait of a solemn, upright and stoic Englishman. He was a no-nonsense kind of guy.

Many of Cook’s officers and men were convinced that the crowd assembled to celebrate their commander’s arrival in Hawai’i regarded him as a living god. Was Cook mistaken for the god Lono by the Hawaiians? Or was he simply playing a part? According to Sides, the influential American missionary Hiram Bingham would denounce Cook decades later for his “direct encouragement of idolatry.”

Sides skill at recapitulating the final scenes that led to Cook’s death are worth several reads. The careful manner in which Sides imagines the final hours that ended Cook’s life are without equal. Of interest to me was the fact that entering the water never presented itself as a potential salvation for Cook. It is not until this point in the text that Sides mentions that Cook could not swim.

Reading The Wide Wide Sea encouraged me to order Sides’ earlier study, Ghost Soldiers. That book is about the World War II Allied prison camp raid at Cabanatuan in the Philippines.