The Wide Wide Sea, Hampton Sides

I love books like this.  A subject I’m not too familiar with (Captain James Cook, and his final voyage) and then have Hampton Sides telling it. Tremendous… a masterful work of narrative history. Drawing on extensive research, including the journals of Cook's crew and the oral histories of Indigenous peoples, Sides crafts an all-encompassing, high-stakes adventure. The book chronicles Cook's third voyage, launched in 1776, as he searched for the legendary Northwest Passage while charting vast, unknown expanses of the Pacific. The book vividly captures the terrifying beauty of the high seas, the harsh realities of 18th-century naval life, and the sheer strangeness of cross-cultural first contact. Sides excels, as always, at bringing to life the diverse cast of characters, from Cook himself… whose increasingly erratic behavior is a central mystery… to the Polynesian traveler Mai, whose experiences underscore the immense cultural difference between the Europeans and the islanders they encountered.

Its a complicated portrait of Captain Cook, moving beyond the simple heroic explorer versus colonial villain. He successfully frames Cook's mission as a scientific endeavor that transformed geographic knowledge, but also the British’s imperial ambition. The book methodically details the sequence of events that led to Cook's violent death in Hawaii in 1779, presenting it not as a simple misunderstanding but as the inevitable culmination of escalating tensions, cultural perplexity, and Cook's own declining judgment. A riveting and necessary read for those interested in the age of exploration.