captain cook book reviews

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• Personal Finance
• AP Investigations
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Shopping
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Election Results
• Delegate Tracker
• AP & Elections
• Auto Racing
• 2024 Paris Olympic Games
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Personal finance
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

Book Review: Hampton Sides revisits Captain James Cook, a divisive figure in the South Pacific

This book cover image released by Doubleday shows “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook” by Hampton Sides. (Doubleday via AP)

• Copy Link copied

Captain James Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific in the late 1700s exemplify the law of unintended consequences. He set out to find a westward ocean passage from Europe to Asia but instead, with the maps he created and his reports, Cook revealed the Pacific islands and their people to the world.

In recent decades, Cook has been vilified by some scholars and cultural revisionists for bringing European diseases, guns and colonization. But Hampton Sides’ new book, “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook,” details that Polynesian island life and cultures were not always idyllic.

Priests sometimes made human sacrifices. Warriors mutilated enemy corpses. People defeated in battle sometimes were enslaved. King Kamehameha, a revered figure in Hawaii, unified the Hawaiian Islands in 1810 at a cost of thousands of warriors’ lives.

Sides’ book is sure to rile some Indigenous groups in Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific Islands, who contend Cook ushered in the destruction of Pacific Island cultures.

An obelisk in Hawaii marking where Cook was killed in 1779 had been doused with red paint when Sides visited as part of his research for this book. Over Cook’s name was written “You are on native land.”

But Cook, Sides argues, didn’t come to conquer.

Sides draws deeply from Cook’s and other crew members’ diaries and supplements that with his own reporting in the South Pacific.

Cook emerges from the book as an excellent mariner and decent human being, inspiring the crew to want to sail with him. However, on the voyage of the late 1770s, crew members noted that Cook seemed agitated, not his usual self.

What may have ailed Cook on that final voyage we probably never will know, but we do know that his voyages opened the Pacific islands to the world, and as new arrivals always do, life is changed forever.

Was Cook a villain for his explorations?

Sides make a persuasive case in 387 pages of diligent, riveting reporting that Cook came as a navigator and mapmaker and in dramatically opening what was known about our world, made us all richer in knowledge.

When his journals and maps reached England after his death, it was electrifying news. No, an ocean passage across North America to the Pacific did not exist, but Europeans now knew that islands in the Pacific were populated by myriad cultures; Sides’ reporting is clear that Cook treated them all with respect.

He and his fellow British mariners, though, did lack one skill that would seem vital for sailors and would have better connected the British sailors to the peoples of the Pacific, whose cultures and livelihoods were closely connected to the ocean: Neither Cook nor any of his fellow officers could swim.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

A gripping account of Captain Cook’s final voyage

‘the wide wide sea,’ by hampton sides, recounts cook’s search for the northwest passage.

I’m grateful to the Santa Fe bookseller who put Hampton Sides’s “Blood and Thunder” into my hands some years ago. With Kit Carson’s death-defying exploits at its center, the book revolutionized my concept of America’s westward expansion. Sides’s latest effort, “ The Wide Wide Sea ,” is a gripping account of Captain James Cook’s final voyage.

Cook is a controversial historical figure, especially in light of increasing consciousness about the evils of colonialism. Yet he continues to evoke curiosity and attention. As recently as last month, Popular Mechanics published an article about the rediscovery of his curated shell collection.

Sides does not skirt the rapacious appetites of the British and other European monarchies. The magic of this book, however, is in the details of the explorer’s life at sea. Sides relies on Cook’s writings as well those of other sailors on the voyage. Based on the selected bibliography he includes, Sides’s research was voluminous.

Cook had made two world voyages by the time the book opens. He was a celebrity, having “risen from virtually nothing.” At sea, he’d bucked the Royal Navy’s tradition of violence and cruelty. He’d figured out how to avoid scurvy and brought home information of incomparable value, had mastered new nautical instruments and served as an expert scientist, anthropologist and navigator. His mapmaking skills were superlative.

After only six months at home, he took off again, in search of the elusive Northwest Passage . His third expedition consisted of 180 people in two wooden ships, the Resolution and the Discovery. They left England in July 1776.

In addition to Cook’s story, other narratives weave through the book. One particularly fascinating account is that of Mai, a native of Raiatea, a volcanic island 130 miles northwest of present-day Tahiti. When Mai was a boy, warriors from Bora Bora invaded Raiatea, murdered his father, seized his family’s land and enslaved much of the population, forcing his family to take refuge in Tahiti. In 1767, a teenage Mai witnessed the English navy’s firepower when Samuel Wallis, a British navigator, arrived in the HMS Dolphin and fought the Tahitians. Vowing to avenge his people against Bora Bora, Mai concluded that English guns were the way to go. When Cook sailed in seven years later on his second Pacific voyage, Mai requested passage, becoming the first Polynesian to set foot on English soil.

Mai’s story reads as metaphor for colonialism. He learned English and was wined and dined as a celebrity. Although horrified by London’s grinding poverty, unthinkable in his homeland, he wore the local dress and adopted the manners of a foppish English gentleman. He met King George, who provided Mai and Cook with a large assortment of farm animals and domesticated birds, to cement the king’s footprint around the globe. No surprise — the animals were hell to care for. Mai had been in search of heavy artillery from King George, but for the voyage was given only an “arsenal of muskets [and] broadswords,” as well as gifts that would have been unimaginable to the Polynesians — cut-glass bowls, laced hats, crockery and telescopes. If not the cache Mai hoped for, it does reflect the English royalty’s strategy for winning friends.

It isn’t possible in this short space to describe Sides’s hair-raising accounts of the journey, an itinerary that led from England to present-day South Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, Hawaii, north to Alaska and beyond, and back to Hawaii. Just repairing and re-provisioning the ship required herculean efforts. The physical threats included days-long ocean storms, fog so thick it wasn’t possible to see from stern to bow and cold temperatures against which no garment could protect.

By the time Cook reached Polynesia in October 1777, the rat infestation was so great that “the vermin had all but taken over the holds, gangways, and lower decks.” At Moorea, 12 miles from Tahiti, Cook created a “swinging bridge” from ropes to lure the rats on land. A few made it to the beaches, introducing Polynesia to the European black rats, which remain a “scourge” today.

Cook understood that his men were vectors for infection. An ascetic, he occasionally stopped his men from going ashore to prevent the spread of venereal disease. At times he restrained his crew from violence; at other times, his temper was uncontrollable. After a series of petty thefts from the ship by Tongo natives, Cook ordered brutal floggings and had a villager’s ears cut off. In punishment for one Moorea person stealing a goat, Cook had the village and its cropland torched, along with its canoes. Sides suggests that over the course of this final voyage, Cook may have been suffering declining mental faculties.

By August 1778, the two ships were in the Arctic Ocean sailing toward Siberia. Cook was careful, “zagging outward if the pincers of ice began to close in on his vessels.” When he finally concluded there was no Northwest Passage, he decided to salvage his “defeat,” by doing “reconnaissance work in Hawai’i.” A man onboard wrote, “Those who have been amongst ice, in the dread of being enclosed in it, and in so late a season, can be the best judge of the general joy this news gave.”

People tend to know Cook was killed by native people in Hawaii. The events leading up to his death are gruesome and upsetting, including “cannibalism” made more explicable in Sides’s measured account.

This book captures a time when Europeans were finding unfathomable new worlds. Armed with extensive research and terrific writing, Sides re-creates the newness of the experience, the vast differences in and among Indigenous cultures, and natural phenomena that were as terrifying as they were wondrous.

Martha Anne Toll’s prizewinning debut novel, “Three Muses,” was published in 2022. Her second novel, “Duet for One,” is forthcoming in early 2025.

The Wide Wide Sea

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

By Hampton Sides

Doubleday. 432 pp. $35

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

What Happened When Captain Cook Went Crazy

In “The Wide Wide Sea,” Hampton Sides offers a fuller picture of the British explorer’s final voyage to the Pacific islands.

The English explorer James Cook, circa 1765. Credit... Stock Montage/Getty Images

Supported by

• Share full article

By Doug Bock Clark

Doug Bock Clark is the author of “The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life.”

• Published April 9, 2024 Updated April 12, 2024
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

THE WIDE WIDE SEA: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides

In January 1779, when the British explorer James Cook sailed into a volcanic bay known by Hawaiians as “the Pathway of the Gods,” he beheld thousands of people seemingly waiting for him on shore. Once he came on land, people prostrated themselves and chanted “Lono,” the name of a Hawaiian deity. Cook was bewildered.

It was as though the European mariner “had stepped into an ancient script for a cosmic pageant he knew nothing about,” Hampton Sides writes in “The Wide Wide Sea,” his propulsive and vivid history of Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe .

As Sides describes the encounter, Cook happened to arrive during a festival honoring Lono, sailing around the island in the same clockwise fashion favored by the god, possibly causing him to be mistaken as the divinity.

Sides, the author of several books on war and exploration, makes a symbolic pageant of his own of Cook’s last voyage, finding in it “a morally complicated tale that has left a lot for modern sensibilities to unravel and critique,” including the “historical seeds” of debates about “Eurocentrism,” “toxic masculinity” and “cultural appropriation.”

Cook’s two earlier global expeditions focused on scientific goals — first to observe the transit of Venus from the Pacific Ocean and then to make sure there was no extra continent in the middle of it. His final voyage, however, was inextricably bound up in colonialism: During the explorer’s second expedition, a young Polynesian man named Mai had persuaded the captain of one of Cook’s ships to bring him to London in the hope of acquiring guns to kill his Pacific islander enemies.

A few years later, George III commissioned Cook to return Mai to Polynesia on the way to searching for an Arctic passage to connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Mai brought along a menagerie of plants and livestock given to him by the king, who hoped that Mai would convert his native islands into simulacra of the English countryside.

“The Wide Wide Sea” is not so much a story of “first contact” as one of Cook reckoning with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power. Retracing parts of his previous voyages while chauffeuring Mai, Cook is forced to confront the fact that his influence on groups he helped “discover” has not been universally positive. Sexually transmitted diseases introduced by his sailors on earlier expeditions have spread. Some Indigenous groups that once welcomed him have become hard bargainers, seeming primarily interested in the Europeans for their iron and trinkets.

Sides writes that Cook “saw himself as an explorer-scientist,” who “tried to follow an ethic of impartial observation born of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution” and whose “descriptions of Indigenous peoples were tolerant and often quite sympathetic” by “the standards of his time.”

In Hawaii, he had been circling the island in a vain attempt to keep his crew from disembarking, finding lovers and spreading more gonorrhea. And despite the fact that he was ferrying Mai and his guns back to the Pacific, Cook also thought it generally better to avoid “political squabbles” among the civilizations he encountered.

But Cook’s actions on this final journey raised questions about his adherence to impartial observation. He responded to the theft of a single goat by sending his mariners on a multiday rampage to burn whole villages to force its return. His men worried that their captain’s “judgment — and his legendary equanimity — had begun to falter,” Sides writes. As the voyage progressed, Cook became startlingly free with the disciplinary whip on his crew.

“The Wide Wide Sea” presents Cook’s moral collapse as an enigma. Sides cites other historians’ arguments that lingering physical ailments — one suggests he picked up a parasite from some bad fish — might have darkened Cook’s mood. But his journals and ship logs, which dedicate hundreds of thousands of words to oceanic data, offer little to resolve the mystery. “In all those pages we rarely get a glimpse of Cook’s emotional world,” Sides notes, describing the explorer as “a technician, a cyborg, a navigational machine.”

The gaps in Cook’s interior journey stand out because of the incredible job Sides does in bringing to life Cook’s physical journey. New Zealand, Tahiti, Kamchatka, Hawaii and London come alive with you-are-there descriptions of gales, crushing ice packs and gun smoke, the set pieces of exploration and endurance that made these tales so hypnotizing when they first appeared. The earliest major account of Cook’s first Pacific expedition was one of the most popular publications of the 18th century.

But Sides isn’t just interested in retelling an adventure tale. He also wants to present it from a 21st-century point of view. “The Wide Wide Sea” fits neatly into a growing genre that includes David Grann’s “ The Wager ” and Candice Millard’s “ River of the Gods ,” in which famous expeditions, once told as swashbuckling stories of adventure, are recast within the tragic history of colonialism . Sides weaves in oral histories to show how Hawaiians and other Indigenous groups perceived Cook, and strives to bring to life ancient Polynesian cultures just as much as imperial England.

And yet, such modern retellings also force us to ask how different they really are from their predecessors, especially if much of their appeal lies in exactly the same derring-do that enthralled prior audiences. Parts of “The Wide Wide Sea” inevitably echo the storytelling of previous yarns, even if Sides self-consciously critiques them. Just as Cook, in retracing his earlier voyages, became enmeshed in the dubious consequences of his previous expeditions, so, too, does this newest retracing of his story becomes tangled in the historical ironies it seeks to transcend.

In the end, Mai got his guns home and shot his enemies, and the Hawaiians eventually realized that Cook was not a god. After straining their resources to outfit his ships, Cook tried to kidnap the king of Hawaii to force the return of a stolen boat. A confrontation ensued and the explorer was clubbed and stabbed to death, perhaps with a dagger made of a swordfish bill.

The British massacred many Hawaiians with firearms, put heads on poles and burned homes. Once accounts of these exploits reached England, they were multiplied by printing presses and spread across their world-spanning empire. The Hawaiians committed their losses to memory. And though the newest version of Cook’s story includes theirs, it’s still Cook’s story that we are retelling with each new age.

THE WIDE WIDE SEA : Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, | By Hampton Sides | Doubleday | 408 pp. | $35

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

How did fan culture take over? And why is it so scary? Justin Taylor’s novel “Reboot” examines the convergence of entertainment , online arcana and conspiracy theory.

Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker unearth botany’s buried history  to figure out how our gardens grow.

A new photo book reorients dusty notions of a classic American pastime with  a stunning visual celebration of black rodeo.

Two hundred years after his death, this Romantic poet is still worth reading . Here’s what made Lord Byron so great.

Harvard’s recent decision to remove the binding of a notorious volume  in its library has thrown fresh light on a shadowy corner of the rare book world.

Bus stations. Traffic stops. Beaches. There’s no telling where you’ll find the next story based in Accra, Ghana’s capital . Peace Adzo Medie shares some of her favorites.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement

Find anything you save across the site in your account

How Captain James Cook Got Away with Murder

By Elizabeth Kolbert

On Valentine’s Day, 1779, Captain James Cook invited Hawaii’s King Kalani‘ōpu‘u to visit his ship, the Resolution. Cook and the King were on friendly terms, but, on this particular day, Cook planned to take Kalani‘ōpu‘u hostage. Some of the King’s subjects had stolen a small boat from Cook’s fleet, and the captain intended to hold Kalani‘ōpu‘u until it was returned. The plan quickly went awry, however, and Cook ended up face down in a tidal pool.

At the time of his death, Cook was Britain’s most celebrated explorer. In the course of three epic voyages—the last one, admittedly, unfinished—he had mapped the east coast of Australia, circumnavigated New Zealand, made the first documented crossing of the Antarctic Circle, “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands, paid the first known visit to South Georgia Island, and attached names to places as varied as New Caledonia and Bristol Bay. Wherever Cook went, he claimed land for the Crown. When King George III learned of Cook’s demise, he reportedly wept. An obituary that ran in the London Gazette mourned an “irreparable Loss to the Public.” A popular poet named Anna Seward published an elegy in which the Muses, apprised of Cook’s passing, shed “drops of Pity’s holy dew.” (The work sold briskly and was often reprinted without the poet’s permission.)

“While on each wind of heav’n his fame shall rise, / In endless incense to the smiling skies,” Seward wrote. Artists competed to depict Cook’s final moments; in their paintings and engravings, they, too, tended to represent the captain Heaven-bound. An account of Cook’s life which ran in a London magazine declared that he had “discovered more countries in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans than all the other navigators together.” The anonymous author of this account opined that, among mariners, none would be “more entitled to the admiration and gratitude of posterity.”

The Best Books of 2024

Read our reviews of the year’s notable new fiction and nonfiction.

Posterity, of course, has a mind of its own. In 2019, the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Cook’s landing in New Zealand, a replica of the ship he’d sailed made an official tour around the country. According to New Zealand’s government, the tour was intended as an opportunity to reflect on the nation’s complex history. Some Māori groups banned the boat from their docks, on the ground that they’d already reflected enough.

Cook “was a barbarian,” the then chief executive of the Ngāti Kahu iwi told a reporter. Two years ago, an obelisk erected in 1874 to mark the spot where Cook was killed, on Kealakekua Bay, was vandalized. “You are on native land,” someone painted on the monument. In January, on the eve of Australia Day, an antipodean version of the Fourth of July, a bronze statue of Cook that had stood in Melbourne for more than a century was sawed off at the ankles. When a member of the community council proposed that area residents be consulted on whether to restore the statue, a furor erupted. At a meeting delayed by protest, the council narrowly voted against consultation and in favor of repair. A council member on the losing side expressed shock at the way the debate had played out, saying it had devolved into an “absolutely crazy mess.”

Into these roiling waters wades “ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook ” (Doubleday), a new biography by Hampton Sides. Sides, a journalist whose previous books include the best-selling “ Ghost Soldiers ,” about a 1945 mission to rescue Allied prisoners of war, acknowledges the hazards of the enterprise. “Eurocentrism, patriarchy, entitlement, toxic masculinity,” and “cultural appropriation” are, he writes, just a few of the charged issues raised by Cook’s legacy. It’s precisely the risks, Sides adds, that drew him to the subject.

Cook, the second of eight children, was born in 1728 in Yorkshire. His father was a farm laborer, and Cook would likely have followed the same path had he not shown early promise in school. His parents apprenticed him to a merchant, but Cook was bored by dry goods. In 1747, he joined the crew of the Freelove, a boat that, despite its name, was designed for the distinctly unerotic task of ferrying coal to London.

After working his way up in the Merchant Navy, Cook jumped ship, as it were. At the age of twenty-six, he enlisted in the Royal Navy, and one of his commanders, recognizing Cook’s talents, encouraged him to take up surveying. A chart that Cook helped draft of the St. Lawrence River proved crucial to the British victory in the French and Indian War.

In 1768, Cook was given command of his own ship, H.M.S. Endeavour, a boxy, square-sterned boat that, like the Freelove, had been built for hauling coal. The Navy was sending the Endeavour to the South Pacific, ostensibly for scientific purposes. A transit of Venus was approaching, and it was believed that careful observation of the event could be used to determine the distance between the Earth and the sun. Cook and his men were supposed to watch the transit from Tahiti, which the British had recently claimed. Then, and only then, was the captain to open a set of sealed orders from the Admiralty which would provide further instructions.

The Endeavour departed from Plymouth, made its way to Rio, and from there sailed around the tip of South America. Arriving in Tahiti, where British and French sailors had already infected many of the women with syphilis, Cook drew up rules to govern his crew’s dealings with the island’s inhabitants. The men were not to trade items from the boat “in exchange for any thing but provisions.” (That rule appears to have been flagrantly flouted.)

The day of the transit—June 3, 1769—dawned clear, or, as Cook put it, “as favourable to our purposes as we could wish.” But the observers’ measurements differed so much that it was evident—or should have been—that something had gone wrong. (The whole plan, it later became clear, was fundamentally flawed.) Whether Cook had indeed waited until this point to open his secret instructions is unknown; in any event, they pointed to the true purpose of the trip. From Tahiti, the Endeavour was to seek out a great continent—Terra Australis Incognita—theorized to lie somewhere to the south. If Cook located this continent, he was to track its coast, and “with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain.” If he didn’t locate it, he was to head to New Zealand, which the British knew of only vaguely, from the Dutch.

The Endeavour spent several weeks searching for the continent. Nothing much happened during this period except that a crew member drank himself to death. As per the Admiralty’s instructions, Cook next headed west. The ship landed on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island on October 8, 1769. Within the first day, Cook’s men had killed at least four Māori and wounded several others.

A ship like the Endeavour was its own floating world, its commander an absolute ruler. A Royal Navy captain was described as a “King at Sea” and could mete out punishment—typically flogging—as he saw fit. At the same time, in the vastness of the ocean, a ship’s captain had no one to turn to for help. He had to be ever mindful that he was outnumbered.

Cook was known as a stickler for order. A crew member recorded that Cook once performed an inspection of his men’s hands; those with dirty fingers forfeited the day’s allowance of grog. He seemed to have a sixth sense for the approach of land; another crew member claimed that Cook could intuit it even in the dead of night. Although in the seventeen-seventies no one knew what caused scurvy, Cook insisted that his men eat fresh fruit whenever possible and that they consume sauerkraut, a good source of Vitamin C.

Of Cook’s inner life, few traces remain. When he set off for Tahiti, he had a wife and three children. Before she died, Elizabeth Cook burned her personal papers, including her correspondence with her husband. Letters from Cook that have been preserved mostly read like this one, to the Navy Board: “Please to order his Majesty’s Bark the Endeavour to be supply’d with eight Tonns of Iron Ballast.” Cook left behind voluminous logs and journals; the entries in these, too, are generally bloodless.

“Punished Richard Hutchins, seaman, with 12 lashes for disobeying commands,” he wrote, on April 16, 1769, when the Endeavour was anchored off Tahiti. “Most part of these 24 hours Cloudy, with frequent Showers of Rain,” he observed, from the same spot, on May 25th. The captain, as one of his biographers has put it, had “no natural gift for rhapsody.” Sides writes, “It could be said that he lived during a romantic age of exploration, but he was decidedly not a romantic.”

Still, feelings and opinions do sometimes creep into Cook’s writing. He is by turns charmed and appalled by the novel customs he encounters. A group of Tahitians cook a dog for him; he finds it very tasty and resolves “for the future never to dispise Dog’s flesh.” He sees some islanders eat the lice that they have picked out of their hair and declares this highly “disagreeable.”

Many of the Indigenous people Cook met had never before seen a European. Cook recognized it was in his interest to convince them that he came in friendship; he also saw that, in case persuasion failed, the main advantage he possessed was guns.

In a journal entry devoted to the Endeavour’s first landing in New Zealand, near present-day Gisborne, Cook treats the killing of the Māori as regrettable but justified. The British had attempted to take some Māori men on board their ship to demonstrate that their intentions were peaceful. But this gesture was—understandably—misinterpreted. The Māori hurled their canoe paddles at the British, who responded by firing at them. Cook acknowledges “that most Humane men” will condemn the killings. But, he declares, “I was not to stand still and suffer either myself or those that were with me to be knocked on the head.”

After mapping both New Zealand’s North and South Islands, Cook headed to Australia, then known as New Holland. The Endeavour worked its way to the country’s northernmost point, which Cook named York Cape (and which is now called Cape York). The inhabitants of the coast made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the British. Cook left gifts onshore, but they remained untouched.

Cook’s response to the Aboriginal Australians is one of the most often cited passages from his journals. In it, he seems to foresee—and regret—the destruction of Indigenous cultures which his own expeditions will facilitate. “From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched People upon Earth; but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans,” he writes.

The earth and Sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for Life. They covet not Magnificient Houses, Household-stuff, etc.; they live in a Warm and fine Climate, and enjoy every wholesome Air. . . . They seem’d to set no Value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one Article we could offer them. This, in my opinion, Argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life, and that they have no Superfluities.

If Cook’s first voyage failed to turn up the missing continent or to calculate the Earth’s distance from the sun, imperially speaking it was a resounding success: the captain had claimed both New Zealand and the east coast of Australia for Britain. (In neither case had Cook sought or secured the “Consent of the Natives,” but this lapse doesn’t seem to have troubled the Admiralty.) The very next year, Cook was dispatched again, this time in command of two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure. Navy brass continued to insist that Terra Australis Incognita was out there somewhere—presumably farther south than the Endeavour had ventured—and on his second voyage Cook was supposed to keep sailing until he found it. He crossed and recrossed the Antarctic Circle, at one point getting as far as seventy-one degrees south. Conditions on the Southern Ocean were generally terrible—frigid and foggy. Still, there was no sign of a continent. Cook ventured that if there were any land nearer to the pole it would be so hemmed in by ice that it would “never be explored.” (Antarctica would not be sighted for almost fifty years.)

Once more, Cook hadn’t found what he was seeking, but upon his return he was again hailed as a hero. Britain’s leading scientific institution, the Royal Society, granted him its highest honor, the Copley Medal, and the Navy rewarded him with a cushy desk job. The expectation was that he would settle down, enjoy his sinecure, and finally spend some time with his family. Instead, he set out on yet another expedition.

Link copied

“The Wide Wide Sea” focusses almost exclusively on Cook’s third—and for him fatal—voyage. Sides portrays Cook’s decision to undertake it as an act of hubris; the captain, he writes, “could scarcely imagine failure.” The journey got off to an inauspicious start. Cook’s second-in-command, Charles Clerke, was to captain a ship called the Discovery, while Cook, once again, sailed on the Resolution. When both vessels were scheduled to depart, in July, 1776, Clerke was nowhere to be found. (Thanks to the improvidence of a brother, he’d been tossed in debtors’ prison.) Cook set off without him. A few weeks later, the Resolution nearly crashed into one of the Cape Verde Islands, a mishap that Sides sees as a portent. The ship, it turned out, also leaked terribly—another bad sign.

The plan for the third voyage was more or less the inverse of the second’s. Cook’s instructions were to head north and to look not for land but for its absence. The Admiralty wanted him to find a seaway around Canada—the fabled Northwest Passage. Generations of sailors had sought the passage from the Atlantic and been blocked by ice. Cook was to probe from the opposite direction.

The expedition also had a secondary aim involving a Polynesian named Mai. Mai came from the Society Islands, and in 1773 he had talked his way on board the Adventure. Arriving in London the following year, he entranced the British aristocracy. He sat in on sessions of Parliament, learned to hunt grouse, met the King, and, according to Sides, became “something of a card sharp.” But, after two years of entertaining toffs, Mai wanted to go home. It fell to Cook to take him, along with a barnyard’s worth of livestock that King George III was sending as a gift.

Clerke, on the Discovery, finally caught up to Cook in Cape Town, where the Resolution was docked for provisioning and repairs. Together, the two ships sailed away from Africa and stopped off in Tasmania. In February, 1777, they pulled into Queen Charlotte Sound, a long, narrow inlet in the northeast corner of New Zealand’s South Island. There, more trouble awaited.

Cook had visited Queen Charlotte Sound (which he had named) four times before. During his second voyage, it had been the site of a singularly gruesome disaster. Ten of Cook’s men—sailors on the Adventure—had gone ashore to gather provisions. The Māori had slain and, it was said, eaten them.

Cook wasn’t in New Zealand when the slaughter took place; the Adventure and the Resolution had been separated in a fog. But, on his way back to England, he heard rumblings about it from the crew of a Dutch vessel that the Resolution encountered at sea. Cook was reluctant to credit the rumors. He wrote that he would withhold judgment on the “Melancholy affair” until he had learned more. “I must however observe in favour of the New Zealanders that I have allways found them of a Brave, Noble, Open and benevolent disposition,” he added.

By the time of the third voyage, Cook knew the stories he’d heard were, broadly speaking, accurate. Why, then, did he return to the scene of the carnage? Sides argues that Cook was still searching for answers. The captain, he writes, thought the massacre “demanded an inquiry and a reckoning, however long overdue.”

In his investigation, Cook was aided by Mai, whose native language was similar to Māori. The sequence of events that Mai helped piece together began with the theft of some bread. The leader of the British crew had reacted to this petty crime by shooting not only the thief but also a second Māori man. In retaliation, the Māori had killed all ten British sailors and chopped up their bodies. Eventually, Cook learned who had led the retaliatory raid—a pugnacious local chief named Kahura. One day, Mai pointed him out to Cook. The following day, the captain invited Kahura on board the Resolution and ushered him down into his private cabin. Instead of shooting Kahura, Cook had his draftsman draw a portrait of him.

Mai found Cook’s conduct unfathomable. “Why do you not kill him?” he cried. Cook’s men, too, were infuriated. They made fun of his forbearance by staging a mock trial. One of the sailors had adopted a Polynesian dog known as a kurī. (The breed is now extinct.) The men accused the dog of cannibalism, found it guilty as charged, then killed and ate it.

Sides doesn’t think that Cook knew about the cannibal burlesque, but the captain, he says, sensed his crew’s disaffection. And this, Sides argues, caused something in Cook to snap. For Cook, he writes, the “visit to Queen Charlotte Sound became a sharp turning point.” It would be the last time that the captain would be accused of leniency.

As evidence of Cook’s changed outlook, Sides relates an incident that occurred eight months after the trial of the dog, this one featuring a pregnant goat. The Resolution had anchored off Moorea, one of the Society Islands, and animals from the ship’s travelling menagerie had been left to graze onshore. One day, a goat went missing. Cook was told that the animal had been taken to a village on the opposite end of the island. With three dozen men, he marched to the village and torched it. (Most of the villagers had fled before he arrived.) The next day, the goat still had not been returned, and the British continued their rampage. Such was the level of destruction, one of Cook’s men noted in his journal, that it “could scarcely be repaired in a century.” Another crew member expressed shock at the captain’s “precipitate proceeding,” which, he said, violated “any principle one can form of justice.”

Having wrecked much of Moorea, Cook couldn’t leave Mai there, so he installed him and his livestock on the nearby island of Huahine. A few years later, Mai died, apparently from a virus introduced by yet another boatload of European sailors.

Cook spent several months searching fruitlessly along the coast of Alaska for the Northwest Passage. But, on the journey north from Huahine, he had stumbled upon something arguably better—the Hawaiian Islands. In January, 1778, the Resolution and the Discovery stopped in Kauai. The following January, they landed at Kealakekua Bay, on the Big Island.

What the Hawaiians thought of the strange men who appeared on strange ships has been much debated in academic circles. (Two prominent anthropologists, Marshall Sahlins, of the University of Chicago, and Gananath Obeyesekere, of Princeton, engaged in a high-profile feud on the subject which spanned decades.) Cook and his men happened to have landed on the Big Island at the height of an important festival. The captain was greeted by thousands of people invoking Lono, a god associated with peace and fertility. According to some scholars, the Hawaiians gathered for the festival saw Cook as the embodiment of Lono. According to others, they saw him as someone playacting Lono, and, according to still others, the whole Cook-as-Lono story is a myth created by Europeans. What Cook himself thought is unknown, because no logs or journal entries from the last few weeks of his life survive. It is possible that he just let his record-keeping slide, and it is also possible that the entries contained compromising information and were destroyed by the Admiralty.

After Cook had been on the Big Island for several days, King Kalani‘ōpu‘u appeared with a fleet of war canoes. (He had, it seems, been off fighting on another island.) At first, Kalani‘ōpu‘u welcomed the British—he presented Cook with a magnificent cloak made of feathers, and he dined several times on the Resolution—then he indicated that it was time for them to go. It’s unclear whether the King’s impatience reflected the religious calendar—the festival associated with Lono had concluded—or more mundane concerns, such as feeding so many hungry sailors, but Cook got the message. The expedition soon departed, only to suffer another mishap. The foremast of the Resolution snapped. There was no way for it to go forward, so both ships made their way back to Kealakekua Bay.

It was while the British were trying to repair the Resolution that someone made off with the small boat and Cook decided to take the King hostage. The captain had often resorted to this tactic to get—or get back—what he wanted; it had usually worked well for him, but never before had he dealt with someone as powerful as Kalani‘ōpu‘u. Cook was leading the King down to the beach—Kalani‘ōpu‘u seems to have been convinced he was being invited for another friendly meal—when warriors started to emerge from the trees. Sides argues that Cook could have saved himself had he simply turned and run, but, as one of his men put it, “he too wrongly thought that the flash of a musket would disperse the whole island.” In the fighting that ensued, Cook, four of his men, and as many as thirty Hawaiians were killed. As was customary on the island, Cook’s body was burned. Some of his singed bones were returned to the British; those that remained in Hawaii, according to Sides, were later paraded around as part of the festival associated with Lono.

Though Sides says he wants to “reckon anew” with Cook, it’s not exactly clear what this would entail at a time when the captain has already been—figuratively, at least—sawed off at the ankles. “The Wide Wide Sea” portrays Cook as a complicated figure, driven by instincts and motives that often seem to have been opaque even to him. Although it’s no hagiography, the book is also not likely to rattle teacups at the Captain Cook Society, members of which receive a quarterly publication devoted entirely to Cook-related topics.

Like all biographies, “The Wide Wide Sea” emphasizes agency. Cook may be an ambivalent, even self-contradictory figure; still, it’s his actions and decisions that drive the narrative forward. But, as Cook himself seemed to have realized, and on occasion lamented, he was but an instrument in a much, much larger scheme. The whole reason the British sent him off to seek Terra Australis Incognita was that they feared a rival power would reach it first. If Cook hadn’t hoisted what he called the “English Colours” on what’s still known as Possession Island, in northern Queensland, it seems fair to assume that another captain would have claimed Australia for England or for some other European nation. Similarly, if Cook’s men hadn’t brought sexually transmitted diseases to the Hawaiian Islands, then sailors from a different ship would have done so. Colonialism and its attendant ills were destined to reach the many paradisaical places Cook visited and mapped, although, without his undeniable navigational skills, that might have taken a few years more. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

A Harvard undergrad took her roommate’s life, then her own. She left behind her diary.

Ricky Jay’s magical secrets .

A thirty-one-year-old who still goes on spring break .

How the greatest American actor lost his way .

What should happen when patients reject their diagnosis ?

The reason an Addams Family painting wound up hidden in a university library .

Fiction by Kristen Roupenian: “Cat Person”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

By David Remnick

By Kelefa Sanneh

The canonized and vilified Capt. James Cook is ready for a reassessment

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Book Review

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

By Hampton Sides Doubleday: 432 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

The story of Capt. James Cook’s third voyage has all the elements of a Greek tragedy — hubris, good intentions gone awry, fatal error. The English sea captain, an old man by 18th century standards, had already made two worldwide voyages of discovery when he was coaxed by his admirers into one more journey. Though his expedition touched down in some of the world’s most pristine, magical places, it set in motion their decay by introducing lethal diseases and invasive species. And finally and fatally, Cook, a brilliant leader with the mind of a strategist and the sensibilities of an anthropologist, made a huge strategic misstep that led to his gruesome death on the Big Island of Hawaii in 1779.

Since his death, countless writers and scholars have minutely examined the improbable life of Cook, who for better or worse opened the lands of the Pacific Ocean to the Western world. As the perspective on Cook’s record has shifted, evaluations have turned from eulogies to reassessments to sharp critiques of his role as advance man for the all-consuming English empire.

Now Hampton Sides, an acclaimed master of the nonfiction narrative, has taken on Cook’s story and retells it for the 21st century. In his new book, “The Wide Wide Sea,” Sides examines every aspect of Cook’s superhuman accomplishments, re-creates the largely untouched world he witnessed and weighs the strengths and frailties of both Cook and his all-too-human crew.

Sides, author of “Ghost Soldiers,” “Hellhound on His Trail” and “On Desperate Ground,” tapped a vast amount of source material, including the journals of Cook, his officers and his crew, and did some epic travel of his own. The result is a work that will enthrall Cook’s admirers, inform his critics and entertain everyone in between.

The purpose of Cook’s final trip — to find a sea passage through North America that would link England to the riches of Asia — was considered critical to English ambitions for empire, and on July 12, 1776, Cook, 47, set sail, just as England was becoming embroiled in war with its American colonies. His two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, did not just maneuver around storms and shoals — they evaded Spanish and French ships determined to stop them. With Cook was Mai, a Tahitian whom Cook had picked up on a previous trip and transported to England. After several years in England as a guest of the king and object of curiosity, Mai wanted to go home.

The voyage had a rocky beginning. Shoddy repairs caused the boat to leak, the many farm animals the king had sent along as gifts to the Tahitians had to be tended to, and a disorienting fog enveloped the ships for weeks on end. But there was something more. From the beginning, Cook’s crew sensed that something was amiss about their leader. “He seemed restless and preoccupied,” Sides writes. “There was a peremptory tone, a raw edge in some of his dealings. Perhaps he had started to believe his own celebrity. Or perhaps, showing his age and the long toll of so many rough miles at sea, he had become less tolerant of the hardships and drudgeries of transoceanic sailing.”

The ships managed to get around the Cape of Good Hope to New Zealand, where Cook took on the role of homicide detective, investigating an incident during a previous voyage in which English crew members who clashed with the Maoris were killed and eaten. Cook’s dispassionate response — that the Maoris were following their own traditions of ingesting their enemies after battle — provoked a restive response in his own crew after Cook decided against any retribution.

The expedition proceeded to Tahiti, where the crew received a relatively warm welcome, witnessed impressive displays of expert seamanship by the Tahitians and reveled in their paradisiacal surroundings. But the sailors passed sexually transmitted infections to the population, and rats jumped ship and set about decimating many of the islands’ native species. Ominously, Cook’s skills as a diplomat seemed to desert him. After Tahitians on the island of Mo‘orea stole a goat, Cook grossly overreacted, looting their food and razing their villages to the ground. The crew was aghast. Sides speculates that some unnamed physical ailment was wearing Cook down.

By the time Cook’s crew left, the Tahitians were glad to see them go. With supplies restored and ships repaired, the English left Mai on an island with a country-style cottage, a few animals and a trove of useless artifacts. Then the expedition headed northwest into more uncharted territory, mapping the west coast of North America as it searched for a western entry to the Northwest Passage.

Sailing close to the top of the world, the crew basked in the summer Arctic sun and kept company with whales, seals and dolphins. “We all feel this morning as though we were risen in a new world,” wrote one officer. But they finally confronted an unnavigable Arctic ice shelf, and Cook, swallowing the bitterest of pills, knew he had failed. He turned his ships west to eastern Russia, then sailed south to Hawaii’s Big Island, where an argument over the theft of one of the expedition’s longboats escalated into Cook’s decision to take the local king hostage. It was there that Cook’s life ended and arguments over his place in history began.

Captain Cook’s story is the apotheosis of the adventure stories Sides tells so well. Humans will never lose their yearning for exploration, and Cook was the master. From the perspective of his crews, they were sailing into a void of space and time, completely cut off from the world they knew, and Cook led them successfully through the direst conditions. He was a ruthless strategist who did not hesitate to use violence to achieve his aims, and he embodied an age of colonization that eventually brought uncountable horrors. Sides has retold a story worthy of an ancient hero, that of a man of awesome power undone by his own ambitions. We know his fate, but we cannot look away.

Mary Ann Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.

More to Read

James Bond’s creator lived a life to rival the spy’s

April 4, 2024

What became of Marlon Brando’s ecological wonderland on the sea? I visited to find out

March 20, 2024

How explorers found Amelia Earhart’s watery grave. Or did they?

March 13, 2024

A cure for the common opinion

Get thought-provoking perspectives with our weekly newsletter.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Time travel and surveillance state paranoia collide in a witty, thought-provoking romance novel

April 29, 2024

‘Disability Intimacy’ starts a long-overdue conversation

April 26, 2024

A disorienting, masterful, shape-shifting novel about multiracial identity

April 22, 2024

In Jane Smiley’s rock ’n’ roll novel, does good sense make good fiction?

April 19, 2024

Watch CBS News

Book excerpt: "The Wide Wide Sea" by Hampton Sides

Updated on: April 7, 2024 / 11:05 AM EDT / CBS News

We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article.

Hampton Sides, the bestselling author of "Ghost Soldiers," "In the Kingdom of Ice" and "On Desperate Ground," returns with "The Wide Wide Sea"  (Doubleday), the story of Captain James Cook, and an account of his final, fatal voyage of exploration.

Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Ben Tracy's interview with Hampton Sides on "CBS News Sunday Morning" April 7!

"The Wide Wide Sea" by Hampton Sides

Prefer to listen?  Audible  has a 30-day free trial available right now.

In recent years, the voyages of Captain James Cook have come under increasing attack as part of a larger reassessment of the legacy of empire. Cook was an explorer and a mapmaker, not a conqueror or a colonizer. Yet throughout history, exploration and the making of maps have usually served as the first phase of conquest. In Cook's long wake came the occupiers, the guns, the pathogens, the alcohol, the problem of money, the whalers, the furriers, the seal hunters, the plantation owners, the missionaries.

And so for many Native people across the Pacific, from New Zealand to Alaska, Cook has become a symbol of colonialism and of the ravages that came with European arrival. In many corners of the world, his name has been vilified—not so much for what he did, but for all the trouble that came after him. And also because the Indigenous peoples he encountered were ignored for so long, their voices rarely heard, their perspectives and cultural significance scarcely considered.

Over the past few years, monuments to Cook's explorations have been splattered with paint. Artifacts and artworks stemming from his voyages, once considered priceless treasures, have been radically reinterpreted or removed altogether from museum and gallery collections (in some cases, rightly returning to the lands from which they originated). The people of the Cook Islands have been talking seriously of changing the archipelago's name. In 2021, in Victoria, British Columbia, protesters toppled a statue of Cook into the city harbor. Cook, in some respects, has become the Columbus of the Pacific.

There was a time when Cook's three epic expeditions were seen by many as swashbuckling adventures—worthwhile and perhaps even noble projects undertaken in the service of the Enlightenment and the expansion of global knowledge. Cook sailed in an age of wonder, when explorer-scientists were encouraged to roam the world, measuring and describing, collecting unfamiliar species of plants and animals, documenting landscapes and peoples unknown to Europe. In direct ways, Cook's voyages influenced the Romantic movement, benefited medical science, bolstered the fields of botany and anthropology, and inspired writers ranging from Coleridge to Melville. The journals from Cook's odysseys were turned into best-selling books and became the impetus behind popular plays, poems, operas, novels, comics, even one TV show set in outer space. (Captain James Kirk of the USS Enterprise is widely thought to have been inspired by Captain James Cook.)

Yet today, Cook's voyages are passionately contested, especially in Polynesia, viewed as the start of the systematic dismantling of traditional island cultures that historian Alan Moorehead famously called "the fatal impact." Moorehead said he was interested in "that fateful moment when a social capsule is broken into," and Cook's expeditions certainly provided an excellent case study of the phenomenon. Taken together, his voyages form a morally complicated tale that has left a lot for modern sensibilities to unravel and critique. Eurocentrism, patriarchy, entitlement, toxic masculinity, cultural appropriation, the role of invasive species in destroying island biodiversity: Cook's voyages contain the historical seeds of these and many other current debates.

It was in the midst of this gathering antipathy toward Cook that I began to research the story of his third voyage—the most dramatic of his journeys, as well as his longest, both in terms of duration and nautical miles. It seemed a good time to try to reckon with this man whose rovings have stirred so much acrimony and dissension. It was curious to me: Other early European mariners who had crisscrossed the Pacific—Magellan, Tasman, Cabrillo, and Bougainville, to name a few—don't seem to generate so much heat or attention. What is it about Cook that has singled him out?

I don't have an easy answer for that—more likely there are many not-so-easy ones—but I hope this book will lead readers toward some broader understanding. Perhaps part of the current resentment toward Cook has to do with the fact that on his final voyage something wasn't quite right with the formidable captain. Historians and forensic medical researchers have speculated about what was ailing him, whether it was a physical or mental malady, perhaps even a spiritual one. Whatever the root cause, his personality had definitely changed. Something was affecting his behavior and his judgment that marred the conduct of his last voyage. It may have even led to his death.

Whenever it has seemed relevant and interesting, I've let present-day controversies infuse and inform this book. I've tried to present the captain, and the goals and assumptions behind his third voyage, in all their flawed complexity. I neither lionize, demonize, nor defend him. I've simply tried to describe what happened during his consequential, ambitious, and ultimately tragic final voyage.

       Excerpted from "The Wide Wide Sea" by Hampton Sides. Copyright © 2024 by Hampton Sides. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 

Get the book here:

Buy locally from  Bookshop.org

For more info:

• "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook"  by Hampton Sides (Doubleday), in Hardcover, Large Print Trade Paperback, eBook and Audio formats, available April 9
• hamptonsides.com

      See also: 

More from CBS News

Book excerpt: "Table for Two" by Amor Towles

Book excerpt: Judi Dench's love letter to Shakespeare

Book excerpt: "I Cheerfully Refuse" by Leif Enger

Dan Rather, at 92, on a life in news

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

A biography.

by Richard Hough ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1995

A vivid and well-documented account of the life and voyages of the famous 18th-century English navigator. James Cook discovered and charted coastlines from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the east of Australia to Alaska, and hundreds of islands in between. Here Hough (Edward and Alexandra, 1993, etc.) tells the story of this remarkable man, the son of a land laborer, who managed to rise through the ranks of the Royal Navy to become a member of the Royal Society (the oldest scientific society in Great Britain) and one of the most celebrated men of his time. Hough concentrates on the three lengthy Pacific voyages that occupied the last 11 years of Cook's life before his death at the hands of Hawaiian cannibals in 1779 at the age of 51. His first great voyage involved an expedition to Tahiti in order to measure planetary distances by parallax observations of the passage of Venus across the sun that took place in 1769. He was then commissioned to claim for Britain the Great Southern Continent (which he proved did not exist) and West Holland (Australia), and charged with opening the much-sought-after Northwest Passage. Hough's narrative is based on his extensive reading of the copious logs and scientific records made by Cook himself and the astronomers and botanists who sailed with him. We learn of Cook's sure instinct for governing his men, how he imposed a vitamin C regimen, which virtually eliminated scurvy, and of his unusual gentleness and understanding in his dealings with Polynesian and Maori natives who had never before seen a European. Hough has a keen eye for the pathos and absurdity of human nature, which enhances descriptions both of the high and mighty with whom Cook had to contend in England and of the natives whom he encountered in his amazing journeys. A rich taste of 18th-century life and its spirit of scientific and human daring.

Pub Date: March 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-393-03680-4

Page Count: 500

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

Share your opinion of this book

More by Richard Hough

BOOK REVIEW

by Richard Hough

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

Book Review: Hampton Sides revisits Captain James Cook, a divisive figure in the South Pacific

The Associated Press

April 8, 2024, 11:53 AM

• Share This:
• share on facebook
• share on threads
• share on linkedin
• share on email

Captain James Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific in the late 1700s exemplify the law of unintended consequences. He set out to find a westward ocean passage from Europe to Asia but instead, with the maps he created and his reports, Cook revealed the Pacific islands and their people to the world.

In recent decades, Cook has been vilified by some scholars and cultural revisionists for bringing European diseases, guns and colonization. But Hampton Sides’ new book, “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook,” details that Polynesian island life and cultures were not always idyllic.

Priests sometimes made human sacrifices. Warriors mutilated enemy corpses. People defeated in battle sometimes were enslaved. King Kamehameha, a revered figure in Hawaii, unified the Hawaiian Islands in 1810 at a cost of thousands of warriors’ lives.

Sides’ book is sure to rile some Indigenous groups in Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific Islands, who contend Cook ushered in the destruction of Pacific Island cultures.

An obelisk in Hawaii marking where Cook was killed in 1779 had been doused with red paint when Sides visited as part of his research for this book. Over Cook’s name was written “You are on native land.”

But Cook, Sides argues, didn’t come to conquer.

Sides draws deeply from Cook’s and other crew members’ diaries and supplements that with his own reporting in the South Pacific.

Cook emerges from the book as an excellent mariner and decent human being, inspiring the crew to want to sail with him. However, on the voyage of the late 1770s, crew members noted that Cook seemed agitated, not his usual self.

What may have ailed Cook on that final voyage we probably never will know, but we do know that his voyages opened the Pacific islands to the world, and as new arrivals always do, life is changed forever.

Was Cook a villain for his explorations?

Sides make a persuasive case in 387 pages of diligent, riveting reporting that Cook came as a navigator and mapmaker and in dramatically opening what was known about our world, made us all richer in knowledge.

When his journals and maps reached England after his death, it was electrifying news. No, an ocean passage across North America to the Pacific did not exist, but Europeans now knew that islands in the Pacific were populated by myriad cultures; Sides’ reporting is clear that Cook treated them all with respect.

He and his fellow British mariners, though, did lack one skill that would seem vital for sailors and would have better connected the British sailors to the peoples of the Pacific, whose cultures and livelihoods were closely connected to the ocean: Neither Cook nor any of his fellow officers could swim.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

Copyright © 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

Related News

Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ hits No. 1, with songs claiming the top 14 spots

Chevy Chase resident presents Daddying Film Festival, including Sundance hit about DC Jail

Billie Eilish announces ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ arena world tour

Recommended.

2 teens arrested in Greenbelt ‘senior skip day’ shooting; new video released

High tech mobile restrooms appear in DC, but could their days be numbered?

Woman sentenced to over 2 years in prison for 'egregious' embezzlement case at Va. Hank’s Oyster Bar

Related categories:.

• Biographies & Memoirs
• Professionals & Academics

Buy new: .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } -8% $25.75 $ 25 . 75 $4.25 delivery May 7 - 13 Ships from: OK Stuff, LLC Sold by: OK Stuff, LLC

Save with used - good .savingpriceoverride { color:#cc0c39important; font-weight: 300important; } .reinventmobileheaderprice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricesavingspercentagemargin, #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricepricetopaymargin { margin-right: 4px; } $13.99 $ 13 . 99 free delivery wednesday, may 8 on orders shipped by amazon over $35 ships from: amazon sold by: ts oddz n endz, return this item for free.

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select the return method

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Cook : The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook Hardcover – September 1, 2004

Purchase options and add-ons.

Commonly regarded as the greatest sea explorer of all time, James Cook made his three world-changing voyages during the 1770s, at a time when ships were routinely lost around the English coast. He made history by making geography-- sailing through previously unknown southern seas, charting the eastern Australian coast and circumnavigating New Zealand, putting many Pacific islands on the map, and exploring both the Arctic and Antarctic. His men suffered near shipwreck, were ravaged by tropical diseases, and survived frozen oceans; his lieutenants-- including George Vancouver and William Bligh-- became celebrated captains in their own right. Exploits among native peoples combined to make Cook a celebrity and a legend.

Cook is not, however, viewed by all as a heroic figure. Some Hawaiians demonize him as a syphilitic rascist who had a catastrophic effect on local health. Indigenous Australians often see him as the violent dispossessor of their lands. Nicholas Thomas explores Cook's contradictory character as never before, by reconstructing the many sides of encounters that were curious and unusual for Europeans and natives alike. The result of twenty years' research, Thomas's magnificently rich portrait overturns the familiar images of Cook and reveals the fascinating and far more ambiguous figure beneath.

• Print length 468 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Walker Books
• Publication date September 1, 2004
• Dimensions 9.5 x 1.75 x 9.75 inches
• ISBN-10 0802714129
• ISBN-13 978-0802714121
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

From publishers weekly, from booklist, about the author.

Nicholas Thomas is a professor of anthropology at the University of London. A native of Sydney, Australia, he has traveled extensively in the course of his Pacific research and has curated several exhibitions on the history, art, and culture of Oceania.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Walker Books; First Edition (September 1, 2004)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 468 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802714129
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802714121
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.5 x 1.75 x 9.75 inches
• #320 in Oceania History
• #1,434 in Culinary Biographies & Memoirs
• #6,248 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies

About the author

Nicholas thomas.

Nicholas Thomas, who grew up in Sydney, visited the Pacific Islands first in 1984. He has written many acclaimed books about art, history and cross-cultural encounter, and collaborated in exhibition and book experiments with artists including John Pule and Mark Adams.

His books include Entangled Objects (1991), a celebrated exploration of the changing lives of things in the Pacific; Discoveries: the voyages of Captain Cook (2003); Islanders: the Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010) which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize; The Return of Curiosity (2016), about what museums offer today, and most recently Voyagers: the settlement of the Pacific (2021).

Thomas co-curated, with Peter Brunt and Adrian Locke, the landmark exhibition Oceania, shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris over 2018-19.

Nicholas Thomas lives in the Corbières, in the south of France and in London with his partner Annie Coombes, and their son.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Captain Hook

Location & Hours

Suggest an edit

10785 Florida Blvd

Baton Rouge, LA 70815

You Might Also Consider

6.3 miles away from Captain Hook

Charlotte J. said "Traveling through town and happened to see this place and decided to try it out. The place wasn't very full, but the food was great and the server Jacob was awesome. He was very attentive and polite but not too intrusive. We had the…" read more

in Sushi Bars, Japanese

Mulberry Market

6.0 miles away from Captain Hook

Emily P. said "From the moment I stepped in Mulberry Market, I knew I was going to love it. Greeted by Marianne, who chatted with me about the different options for sandwiches (bread, meat, cheese, diff aioli). I got the turkey sandwich on a…" read more

in Beer, Wine & Spirits, Sandwiches, Bagels

Amenities and More

About the business.

Serving up Baton Rouge LA, with favorites and classic dishes. From our top picks of fried Catfish, Perch, Jack Salmon, Tilapia. You can have your Catfish, Steaked, Nuggets, Fillets, or Tails. Do our crispy Chicken, from wings, to tenders, to legs and thighs and gizzards. All topped with our one of a kind Lemon Pepper Seasoning and your choices of the hometown favorite, "Mild Sauce" or the classic Louisiana Hot Sauce. If that's not what you came here for, we've always got the Grill on, flaming up Philly Steaks, Gyros, Italian Beefs, and we're proud to now serve Grilled Chicken & Shrimp Dinners. With a variety of drinks, like our frozen lemonades, and our desserts, the options are endless and the flavor is sure to hit the spot! …

Recommended Reviews

• 1 star rating Not good
• 2 star rating Could’ve been better
• 3 star rating OK
• 4 star rating Good
• 5 star rating Great

Select your rating

Overall rating

This restaurant opened a couple months ago and I tried it for the 1st time with my family we ordered 3 double cheeseburgers with shrimp and fries and a cheese burger with fries while waiting for our order they gave my wife a fried jumbo shrimp and it was really delicious. The food was really good, the owners working there were courteous, polite, funny and very informative. The atmosphere was very comfortable and the clean I would highly recommend this restaurant is your in the area. We are definitely going back to try other items on the menu.

I had the best cheesiest burger from here. The food was hot & fresh and the French fries were so crispy & delicious. The man at the window was so nice too. I will be returning

overpriced for the quality, they use soft buns for poboy, not poboy bread, shrimp was just okay, won't be back, but now I know.

OEC Japanese Express

3.6 miles away from Captain Hook

We just opened up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We serve hibachi, sushi, juicy seafood, Chinese food and many more. We hope to see y’all there! read more

in Japanese, Seafood, Chinese

LongHorn Steakhouse

4.9 miles away from Captain Hook

Katelyn B. said "We attended this restaurant for my fiancé's birthday on a Saturday night. I expected to wait, being it was a Saturday, so when they told me it would be 45 minutes it didn't phase me. At the 45 minute mark I walked up to the hostess…" read more

in Barbeque, Steakhouses

People Also Viewed

Bull Chicks

Midnight Munchies

Downtown Seafood

Burger Plus

Sherwood Poboy

Top Notch Seafood & More

Just Wingin It

Baton Rouge Poboy

Kajun Seafood & Wings

Best of Baton Rouge

Things to do in Baton Rouge

Other Places Nearby

Find more Chicken Wings near Captain Hook

Find more Seafood Restaurants near Captain Hook

Browse Nearby

Restaurants

Things to Do

Steakhouses

Dining in Baton Rouge

Search for Reservations

Book a Table in Baton Rouge

Retired captain of first U.S. nuclear submarine celebrates turning 100 in Spokane

Frank Fogarty knew nothing about nuclear physics on ships when he got pulled from his Korean War submarine duty to interview for a fledgling U.S. Navy program.

Fogarty, who just turned 100 years old in Spokane, has never forgotten meeting Hyman Rickover, known as the father of the world’s first atomic-powered submarines that began with the USS Nautilus in 1954. Its advantages meant speed and prolonged submersions.

He initially joined an officers’ team to develop Nautilus’ sister craft, the USS Seawolf, which launched in 1955. But by 1957, Fogarty had joined the Nautilus crew – first as an engineering officer, and then during 1963-67 as the Nautilus’ fifth commanding officer.

“I was in this position of being qualified for command, so Rickover picked from the younger submarine officers who were qualified, and he interviewed them all,” Fogarty said.

“He was the first to apply nuclear practically to something besides bombs. In my case, they flew me back from Korea to Washington for an interview with him, and it was an all-day deal. You interviewed with his staff; they all came up with their opinion of each interviewee.

“The last thing was you interviewed with the KOG – (what) Rickover was called for ‘Kindly old gentleman.’ He was not kindly; he was old,” Fogarty said.

Rickover was famous for his stress interviews, seeing if an officer entering the program could maintain composure and still think clearly if rattled. The program’s leader also drilled officers about any actions “that weren’t so great,” Fogarty said. “So it wasn’t the most pleasant thing.”

Fogarty thought that ended it.

“About three months later, we came back in from patrol and tied up to the pier in Japan with other submarines, and the captain of the submarine that was tied up where we came alongside of said, ‘I hear you have a Rickover guy on your boat.’ ”

He soon joined a Navy team working with General Electric to develop the Seawolf in Schenectady, New York. Simultaneously, he and other officers trained in reactor technology and nuclear physics at Union College.

“We were sent there to be with the construction, to see it and then train in nuclear power, which we didn’t know what that was,” he said. “We also had a crew of 20 enlisted people.

Fogarty was one of four officers in upstate New York at the Seawolf plant.

“One of the common names of another fellow is Jimmy Carter; he was the senior naval officer of the four of us. He was a class ahead of me at the Naval Academy.”

The future president was set to become Seawolf’s top engineering officer. But in July 1953 when his father died, Carter resigned from the Navy to take care of the family’s business. Fogarty recalls Carter’s mother also didn’t want to deal with his brother, who was “a little hard to handle.”

Another officer was assigned to replace Carter. The Fogartys traded Christmas cards with the Carters for a few years but lost connection before he got into politics. Meanwhile, Westinghouse already had built the Nautilus prototype plant outside of Idaho Falls, Fogarty said, and the Nautilus was a year ahead of the Seawolf.

“They had two land-based plants that mimicked a submarine, built in a submarine hull on land,” he said. “Both of them, one in New York and one in Idaho.

A big advantage for submarines is staying submerged. They are most vulnerable when surfacing, Fogarty said. “Diesel submarines had to surface to recharge batteries, but with these, you could stay down forever.”

That gave the U.S. an advantage that held, he added. Fogarty spent time with the Seawolf as part of the crew taking it out for trial runs. They eventually found a problem with the different reactor design being “sodium-cooled,” versus water-cooled like the Nautilus, he said.

“Technically, the sodium potassium turned out to be corrosive material. When heated up, it ended up eating the pipes. We got an alarm that the pipes were leaking, which was down in a compartment with thick shielding above it. The medical doctor who was a nuclear-trained physician, he and I went down to see what was wrong; that’s where I got my highest dose of radiation.”

By then, Rickover had decided to remake the Seawolf with the Nautilus design, so it had to go back to port for a retrofit. Fogarty and another nuclear-trained officer from the Seawolf got transferred then to the Nautilus, which had been fully operational for over a year.

He was on the Nautilus in 1957 when it made its first unsuccessful attempt to cross the North Pole from the Atlantic side, seeking to pass the Arctic sea basin between Greenland and the Norwegian island Spitsbergen, but the sub’s periscope was damaged in an ice collision, and the gyrocompass became erratic, forcing the boat to turn back.

“We learned a few lessons about icebergs, how deep they go down, and when you bump into an iceberg, it’s not very mobile,” Fogarty added. “It’s stronger than you are, so it bent over the periscope.

“We had to wade our way out of there and back into the ocean without any idea where we were other than dead reckoning. We didn’t have any of our navigation stuff. We could tell how deep the water was, but not how high.”

After repairs, “they sent us through the (Panama) canal over the Pacific side,” but before the second North Pole attempt, Fogarty got assigned to the USS Skipjack, a smaller class of nuclear-powered submarines with a single big propeller and a more streamlined design.

“That hull incidentally was based on the prototype that was here in Idaho at the Navy test lab at Farragut,” he said.

He remained with the Skipjack for a while and earned promotions.

On the Nautilus, he was the fifth commanding officer for a crew with typically 11 officers and 105 enlisted members. Fogarty said memorable events occurred under his watch, but he doesn’t think he can share a lot. The Cold War against Russia was in full force.

“The most significant is probably still classified,” he said, smiling. “I’ve never been told I could release it, other than it involved being in water heavily foreign and against their submarines.

“We were still way ahead of the rest of our enemies. We were kept in patrol, and the Russians tried to stay in track of us, but we were able to know where they were and stay tracking distance with them wherever they went.

“But most of the time, we spent operating with the fleet, with surface ships, to teach the U.S. Navy what they were up against with the nuclear submarines, in simulated attacks.”

He also recalls the two nuclear submarines lost to accidents at sea, and he knew crew members killed on both the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. The Thresher sank in April 1963 during deep-diving tests east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and an investigation found a ‘most likely’ cause was a piping system failure that allowed flooding of the engine room.

The source of the May 1968 tragedy on the Scorpion is uncertain, he said.

Early in his career, Fogarty served on two diesel-powered subs: Tiru and Queenfish. He also did a tour much later on the USS John Marshall. His final duty was in the Pentagon as operations officer in the Submarine Warfare Division. He earned a master’s degree in administration from George Washington University before retiring from the Navy in 1970.

After his Navy retirement, Fogarty returned west to the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls that stretched more than 22 years and took him to brief stints in Butte, Montana, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Raised in Great Falls, Montana, he married high school girlfriend Dorothy Reilly after graduation from the Naval Academy in 1948. They were together 67 years until her death in 2015. They have 10 children, 21 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. Fogarty moved to Spokane in 2015 to be near family.

Fogarty has never been idle. In his retirement, he ran a 40-acre ranch in Idaho Falls and created pheasant habitat, raised cows and built a model train museum in a barn, inviting school groups. He later donated his train collection to the Cheyenne Depot Museum. He also liked to hike and do outdoors activities while being active in the Catholic community.

More than 65,000 Spokane-area workers soon will begin building WA Cares benefits

In every community across Washington, families are facing the challenge of accessing and affording long-term care.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

How 'SalviSoul,' first Salvadoran cookbook from a major U.S. publisher, came together

Alice Woelfle

Karla Vasquez, author of The SalviSoul Cookbook. Ren Fuller hide caption

Karla Vasquez, author of The SalviSoul Cookbook.

About a decade ago, Karla Tatiana Vasquez tried learning how to make her favorite dish: salpicón salvadoreño, a beef salad with radishes, mint, lime and salt.

Vasquez, a trained chef and food writer, was born in El Salvador, moved to Los Angeles as an infant, and grew up eating food from her homeland. She thought it would be easy to find recipes.

"I went to the internet and I did a Google search and I found two books, which I thought immediately I was like, 'Wow, this is absurdo,'" Vasquez said.

It felt absurd to her because there are more than two and a half million Salvadoran people living in the U.S. Many fled the small Central American country during a brutal civil war that lasted more than a decade and ended in 1992. Others left to escape extreme poverty and political instability in the aftermath of the war. That history of mass migration got Vasquez thinking that she needed to do something to safeguard Salvadoran culture.

Her idea became SalviSoul , a platform launched in 2015 dedicated to preserving her traditional food culture through stories, cooking classes, recipes. And now, that mission has turned into The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and The Women Who Preserve Them . Publishing April 30, it's the first U.S. cookbook focused on Salvadoran food from a major publishing house.

The SalviSoul Cookbook, Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them Ten Speed Press hide caption

The SalviSoul Cookbook, Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them

One of the recipes she collected is a Salvadoran version of the spiced grain-based beverage horchata. On a sunny day in the Adams-Normandie neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, Vasquez walked NPR's A Martinez through how the drink is prepped.

"We will toast this medley of seeds. And after they've been toasted, we put them in the blender. We strain it, and then we sweeten it." she said, "Almost everything in life is better toasted, I think."

As Vasquez darted back and forth in her kitchen, she said that the book started coming together through her desire to interview the women in her family and learn their recipes.

But when friends heard about her project, they were excited to share recipes and stories from their families. She started seeking stories and recipes from her community and got responses from around the world.

"I wasn't expecting to get people calling me from like Minnesota writing me emails from Paris." she said. "Like there were people as close as like Crenshaw District, as far away as people in Abu Dhabi."

Karla Tatiana Vasquez (left), interviewed by Morning Edition host A Martinez in Los Angeles. Alice Woelfle/NPR hide caption

She always knew there were a lot of Salvadorans in Los Angeles, but this was the first time she got an idea of how far-flung the diaspora extended beyond the city. The interviews she collected became The SalviSoul Cookbook , with 80 recipes from 25 matriarchs.

"The way that I absorbed the culture was through the women in my family and they fed me." They also shared lessons on life and love." So there was the food that nourished my physical form. And as I was at the table, these stories were nourishing the part of my soul that longed to connect, that longed to belong."

Vasquez toasted a mixture of Moro, sesame and squash seeds with cinnamon and cacao pods in a pan on the stove as she recounted to NPR stories she heard around her family's dinner table.

The smell around her was almost like popcorn, but with a deeper richness.

Vasquez struggled to convince agents and publishers her project was worthwhile. They told her they didn't think there was interest among the wider American public.

"There were other agents I wrote to who said, 'Well, Karla, who are you? Do you have a restaurant? Do you have a very big Instagram page or a very big YouTube presence?'" She also faced pushback in her own community. "I had some Salvadorans themselves say, "Girl, don't bother. Like all we have is pupusas. All Americanos want are our pupusas."

But it was the words of her grandmother Lucy that cemented her resolve: "Esto se trata del legado de la mujer Salvadoreña."

"She said 'This is about the legacy of Salvadoran women.' And she set the standard then and there and there was no going back," Vasquez said.

Carrying the burden of that legacy involved a lot of tears, she continued, and unpacking the trauma of the Salvadoran community.

"We've been so busy surviving, we haven't had a moment to assess what we've survived sometimes. And I think that's why these storytelling sessions happen at the table."

She says for her the roots of healing from that trauma are also tied to food.

"When you have a plate of food in front of you at the table, it's a promise of satisfaction, it's a promise of safety."

She eventually secured a contract for The SalviSoul Cookbook from Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Vasquez hopes the book will serve as a document of her immigrant culture, and also add context to the history and culture of food in Los Angeles. But she says the prestige of her publisher doesn't add legitimacy to the legacy she is preserving.

"It's not about acceptance. It's about holding on to the sazón (seasoning) that the women have cared for. It's about making sure that what cost a lot to learn isn't forgotten."

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Paige Waterhouse. The digital was edited by Obed Manuel.