Sea Control - Sea Control 527 - The Wide Wide Sea with Hampton Sides

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Links1. The Wide Wide Sea - Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides, Penguin Random House, April 9, 2024.2. In the Kingdom of Ice - The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides, Penguin Random House, May 26, 2015.3. Hampton Sides website.

Hey folks, as shared, my guest today is best-selling author Hampton Sides. We're discussing his new book, The Wide White Sea. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn

how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's Man. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is a New York Times bestselling author and historian, Hampton Sides. Today, we're going to be discussing his latest book, The Wide, Wide Sea, Imperial Ambition's First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. Hampton, welcome. Anything else that you'd like to add for us about your background? I hesitate to call myself a nautical historian or a maritime historian, but I have

now written several of these books and looming over any nautical tale practically that you can think of is the presence of this amazing captain, Captain James Cook, who went everywhere, seemingly did everything, particularly in the Pacific. He's cropped up many times during my research for other stories. And I finally got around to writing about him and so excited that I did. There's a lot to chew on there, to say the least. Yeah, there's a lot. We're going to talk about your intro too, because that was one of more of the thoughtful theses I've seen on this subject of Captain Cook. As far as I'm aware, this is your second foray into maritime history after In the Kingdom of Vice, or maybe others that I'm not aware of. And feel free to plug those as we

go along here. Third, if we count the Marines and On Desperate Ground, which I'm a Navy officer, I'm sure we do talk a lot with the Marines on this program, but what is your own relationship with the sea? Not much. I grew up in Memphis on the banks, not far from the banks of the Mississippi River. I've lived in some maritime kind of communities, but I cannot say that I'm a sailor. I'm not. My wife grew up sailing.

One thing I've become quite well aware of about Navy stories and nautical stories is that. The intense readers, the nerds and the geeks are not very forgiving. If you make a mistake, especially something to do with ship architecture or sailing terminology, oh my gosh, they pounce on you. He called it a sprit and obviously it was a spar. I mean, how can we trust anything this writer has to say? So I became well aware of that when I did a bunch of journalism pieces that touched on nautical subjects. So with this book about Captain Cook, I had an amazing maritime expert read the whole thing and tell me where I was making egregious errors. This is a gentleman who ran the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, and he knows his stuff, particularly from the age

of sail and the kind of golden age of exploration. So hopefully, you're a Navy guy. I hope you didn't catch too many uh errors no i didn't catch anything what i would tell you is that when we're talking about age of sales stuff you know my expertise quote-unquote expertise is definitely confined to modern warships and uh what they do so the way that i approach those things that you talk about and i remember having this exact discussion when i was trying to get through some of patrick o'brien's novels was like anytime i hit those sections where he starts describing sails and different pieces of the mast my brain just kind of shuts down for two paragraphs until we re-engage with a character piece again because that's really what i'm reading it for i'm reading

it less for uh how of you're moving the vessel from point a to point b so that's how i was tracking it it's definitely not solely a nautical phenomenon i see that all the time uh anything history related um probably the feedback on the most recent napoleon movie being like the most recent example that I can think of is every historian I know is smashing it. But it's even harder when you're dealing with a historical subject because the terminology changes over time. And Patrick O'Brien novels, they're so complicated with so many weird words that a friend and a colleague of mine actually worked for years and years and put out a Patrick O'Brien dictionary called Sea of Words, just so you can have this reference because these are

such obscure terms. Many of them are French terms. And so anyway, we digress. But it is the subject that I waded into with some trepidations, fearing that I might get it wrong. No, I think it was great. It was a gripping read, just as In the Kingdom of Ice was. But in substance, there are a number of thematic similarities between The Wide, Wide Sea and In the Kingdom of Ice. You find you're more interested in the subject of exploration, or is it the romance of the sea? What draws you back to these nautical stories? I think it's a combination of things. Most of my books, I didn't consciously think about this when I started out writing, but looking back on it, I can now see that most of my books have a common

theme of, seems to be mostly men in extreme situations, extreme environments, either at war or in exploration, stories that become survival stories. And the men in extreme scenarios that require leadership to get to the other side, to hopefully survive this, whatever the ordeal might be. So there's something about a grand and ambitious tale of exploration that really deals with many of those same things. It's like things do not go well. It's like a rule of just about any voyage and they have to be innovative and resourceful and all back on all kinds of reserves that maybe they didn't even know they had to get through the situation. Kingdom of Ice, especially so. That was truly a survival tale. It was about men trapped in the ice and finally,

their ship sinks in the middle of the Arctic Ocean and they have to make their way home by way of Siberia. Some live, some don't, but it is one of those classic, I call it kind of the American Shackleton story. Captain Cook's voyages were a little bit unique in that regard in the sense that all three of his voyages were, I'll put this in quotes, successful. They went out And they came back. They didn't get scurvy. They didn't have mutinies. They didn't have cannibalism. Well, actually, there was some of his own men were eaten by indigenous Maori warriors in New Zealand. So except for the fact that Cook himself was killed, and I know this isn't a spoiler alert, most people know that Kevin Cook was killed in Hawaii on his third and final voyage. Except for that fact, it's interesting that all three of his voyages returned home with most of the men, very few tragedies. And they came back to tell the tale and to publish great volumes, contributing to science, contributing to our understanding of botany and beautiful artwork, renderings of places that had never been seen before by Europeans. So you could say they were successful voyages. However, there were many near misses and near collisions and extremely dangerous situations and storms and diseases that they had to overcome along the way, as they did during this third voyage. The book, it was really difficult for me because all three of Cook's voyages are amazing. I mean, they're massive undertakings, monumental, involving hundreds of men.

I decided to write only about the third because to me, it's the most dramatic of his three voyages. It is tragic in the end. It is also the most American of his three voyages in the sense that, okay, this is a British explorer, but he left England in July of 1776, just as the American Revolution was getting underway. And he was commissioned with this task of finding the Northwest Passage over Canada or Alaska by way of going all the way around the world, up the Pacific Ocean, up the West Coast of North America. And so it's a story that largely takes place in modern day United States, Oregon, Washington, Alaska. And then along the way, of course, they stumbled upon this extraordinary archipelago, Hawaii, also now part of the US. So it's a British voyage, but it's an American story. There's also a bunch of American-born people on board. So by the time the expedition is over and they make it back to London, the American Revolution is basically over, and it's a whole new world. How did you approach the task of reckoning with Cook's legacy? We touched on this very briefly earlier, but that was one of the more thoughtful treatises that I've read about the subject of reconciling sort of the romantic vision of exploration with what immediately follows exploration, which is colonization. Yeah, I mean, I guess it'd be one thing if Cook just explored these places and published these wonderful accounts and life went on just as it was. But we all know that exploration is the first phase of conquest. And, you know, the European powers, particularly France, Spain, and the Dutch,

and then the English were, you know, they were playing this giant imperial chess game, vying for resources and exploiting those resources. And so as soon as these places were placed on the map, And that's another thing about Cook, because his maps were unbelievably accurate. And he had the benefit of the chronometer, which allowed him to pinpoint with incredible accuracy where he was, where these places were. Then these places could never hide again from the eyes of Europe. And so next came the, you know, occupiers and all the diseases and the alcohol and economic dislocations that came with the concept of money and furriers and whalers and sealers. And a lot of these places, especially these island cultures, are very vulnerable. They seem to be very healthy, thriving cultures, and yet they unraveled very quickly after Cook and some of his other generation of explorers found these places. So consequently, he's widely criticized today in Polynesia as the kind of first wave of colonialism, even though he himself was not a colonialist per se. He was really more of a scientist. He was really more interested in mapping these places. He was also interested in describing these cultures that he encountered. He was quite sympathetic, actually, to most of the, let's say, Polynesian islanders that he met. But he was first in many of these places. He was actually first European anyway. So consequently, those statues that were erected by the British Empire all over the place, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, have been coming down. Those statues have been yanked down and toppled into the sea and splattered with red paint and so forth, which to me makes him more interesting as a subject.

I guess I gravitate towards controversial figures because they're in the news still. There's a resonance and a contemporary interest there that makes, it's not just some boring, stodgy, flat character that no one should care about today. So the controversy, you know, in my author's note, I just tried to kind of weigh all these different things that are going on. Yes, he was a great explorer, arguably one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, but the consequences of exploration are very complicated and far reaching. And we're still in some ways dealing with the shockwaves of Cook and his age of exploration. What was Cook's reputation as he started this third voyage? And then you mentioned throughout that he behaved differently on this third voyage. What were the kind of differences? On his first two voyages, I think Cook really cultivated a reputation as a fair-minded, enlightened captain in so many senses of the word. He cared about his men and their health. He knew how to run a ship with great economy, very stern but fair, sparing with the lash. He was also genuinely curious about these islands and these people. He was a very, I would say, brilliant observer of these places. In an age when a lot of these European explorers would call them heathens and savages and just flex their imperial muscles and show how European society is so much better, Cook didn't really do that. He was like, well, this is what they eat. This is how they think. This is what their rituals look like. They seem pretty happy. There's a lot here to this society. He was very, at the very least, objective in the way he looked at all these, quote unquote, primitive societies. By the third voyage, he was a different man. Something had begun to plague him, whether it was a physical malady, mental, spiritual, psychological. It's really hard to say, and there's a whole body of literature of people who speculate about what it was, whether he had a parasite that was limiting his absorption of critical vitamins. He was famous for eating anything. He had an iron stomach and all these voyages, he probably ingested all kinds of weird parasites.

But on the third voyage, he became very temperamental, really hot temper. He started using the lash on his own men increasingly. He became much crueler to indigenous people too. If anyone swiped a little thing, an artifact, a piece of metal or something, he would do increasingly violent things like cut their ears off. And he didn't kill anybody, but he was increasingly violent. And the men who had been on his first two voyages noticed this difference. They said, there's something different about the captain. They couldn't really put their finger on it. But he was, you know, perhaps he'd become, well, he had been on these voyages, he was exhausted, he was tired, he was spent. These voyages had a way of aging you. He turned 50 years old on this voyage, but that was like being 70 probably in those times. and so you know that's part of it too he was just tired he was exhausted and maybe he was beginning to believe his own celebrity you know he realized he was a big deal by that point in London everyone everyone wanted a piece of him he was famous he was world famous by that point so maybe that was a factor too but that is a theme throughout the book I'm not sure I ever came to a definitive conclusion but this was a different captain from the captain of the first two voyages Well, I just found it very interesting that he seems so put off by so much of what was going on around him because he actually fought to get command of this voyage. It wasn't initially supposed to be him leading this voyage. It was supposed to be someone else. I forget that part of the story, but if you want to touch on that at all, too. He was set up basically for life if he had just wanted to stay and stay where he was.

he had been given a post at the Greenwich Naval Hospital, which was a sinecure. It was going to just allow him to write his books and be a thinker and have a safe retirement, be with his wife some more, who he barely knew, seemed like. The guy who was going to do it was kind of his number two, had been on his other two voyages. And somewhere along the line, he got jealous. He realized this was a big expedition, probably was also bored. A lot of these guys, they go on these giant voyages and you think the last thing they would want to do is get back on a ship. But they're sadomasochists, man. They just love the punishment, I guess. He got bored hanging out in London and heard more and more about this expedition. And he kind of was like, actually, I think I want to do that.

And so unfortunately, this number two guy remained his number two guy, unfortunately for him. His name was Captain Clark, which is a little confusing. There's Captain Cook and Captain Clark, best friends, but Cook somehow ended up muscling his way back in command of this, what ended up being his final voyage. People have speculated. This was kind of hubris on his part. He'd taken massive risks to do one of these voyages and then to do two. Now you're going to do a third? Maybe not so smart, but he did it. To go back to your point about why people go to sea over and over again, as someone who spent the first 13 years of his career just going to sea again and again and It is a little addictive as punishing it is. You get to see new places and experience new things all the time. It's kind of hard to go back to land. Regardless of how good what it is on land that's waiting for you is, the sea does call you.

But the subject of risk you mentioned there, because it came up in the book several times, is that he seemed much more risk averse on the first two of voyages than he was on the third, willing to take a lot more chances. And that seemed like something that his crew commented on quite a bit as well, too, because they were used to sort of him never hazarding his vessels where he didn't need to. And now he was making a lot more risky decisions with vessels that, as you explained, the crew who was doing the work to restore the ships did not do the best job. His main ship, the flagship, the Resolution, had been on his second voyage. So it was already, as some have said, it was like a tired vessel, captain by a tired captain. It had been through hell and back, and it was not properly caulked and refurbished for this third voyage. And they found that out the hard way. It was leaking like a sieve and there was a lot of problems along the way. And they're constantly stopping in various harbors to figure out how to fix the ship. In terms of risk, part of it is he was very well aware of a timetable that the Admiralty had given him and he was getting behind schedule. And he knew that where he needed to be was Alaska. To go from England to Alaska around South Africa and to do all these other things that were part of the expedition involving all these islands, Kerguelen Island, New Zealand, Ponga, Tahiti, he was getting behind, behind, behind schedule. And he's impatient to get to the place where he can finally begin to prosecute his mission.

So he's like extremely impatient and he's willing to, I guess, to take more and more risks in fog and stormy seas and to really push the vessels to their limits in order to get there, you know, to get to Alaska. It's literally the other side of the world. So that accounts for some of his recklessness, I think. You know, he just wants to get there so he can start doing his job, which is to start mapping and charting the northwest coast of North America and hopefully to find this elusive northwest passage that would link the two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific. So his final visit to the Hawaiian Islands was actually Cook's second visit there. Why was it so much more contentious the second time than it was the first? In a way, he went to Hawaii three times. Because on the way, crawling across the Pacific Ocean from Tahiti, heading towards what we now call Oregon, he encounters this amazing archipelago, the Hawaiian Islands, which he calls the Sandwich Islands, after his boss, Lord Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty. Also, incidentally, the inventor of the sandwich, supposedly. And he's amazed by this archipelago. He makes landfall at Kauai, one of the westernmost of the islands. He has a very good experience there overall. Short, but sweet. For the most part, everything goes pretty well. He realizes that this is an extremely valuable discovery, although I use the word discovery with an asterisk because obviously the Polynesians had already discovered it, but Europeans didn't seem to know anything about it. And he heard from the Hawaiians, hey, there's all these other islands, too. It's not just this island. There's like five, six, seven other islands.

So he realized this was a huge thing that the admiralty would want to know a lot more about. But he also had this timetable, like, I got to get to Alaska. I got to get to Alaska. So he doesn't stay very long. He goes to Alaska and nearly gets trapped in the ice, does not find the Northwest Passage. Typical of Cook, though, he's like, well, maybe it's just the season. It's just the year. There's something about the ice this time around.

Why don't we come back next summer and do it again? But we got to go somewhere for the winter to thaw out and replenish our ships. So why don't we go back to that amazing archipelago that we found? And so that's when he goes back. And this time he lands on the big island of Hawaii. He has an amazing experience for two, three weeks. And in fact, they treat him like a god. They may have actually thought he was a god.

They have their fill of just amazing, you know, food and drink and they resupply the ships and then they head out with the idea of going back to Alaska and they encounter a storm and the storm snaps the foremast of Cook's ship, the Resolution. So then he's got to turn around and go back to Hawaii. Now we're saying the third visit. It's something about the third time, you know, the third time's a charm, but it's also sometimes it's a curse. He goes back and this time the Hawaiians don't want him there. He has overstayed his welcome. He's certainly not a god if his ship is broken. And everything goes to hell in a handbasket in a hurry because they don't want him and his men there. They start stealing stuff. They make fun of Cook's men. They clearly don't think he's a god anymore, that's for sure. And I don't want to give away too much for the end of the book, but I'm sure everyone knows that things do not go well for the captain. Things escalate in a hurry. That's kind of the final part of the book. It's kind of like a murder mystery. How did this most disciplined of captains, this scientist explorer, get into a situation where he ended up dead on the beach in Hawaii, hacked to pieces, just like his predecessor that he was obsessed with, Magellan? I mean, the same breath of cook, people mentioned Magellan, the Portuguese explorer who ended up hacked to pieces on the beach in the Philippines. So it becomes a story of what did he do wrong? And what was this great leader who was very cerebral and very logical and very calm in most situations? How did this happen? How did he unravel? And what led to his end? That's kind of how the book, everything funnels down to that. Well, I won't spoil the last third of the book for the readers. I strongly recommend it here. The book's The Wide, Wide Sea, Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and The Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. Hampton, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can we find you online and what are you working on next? my website is just hamptonsides.com very simple i'm now very much terrestrial my next book is set in the american west and it's about the civil war mostly set in the colorado territory it involves

the indian wars and the gold rush in colorado it's another kind of sprawling western i did one of those earlier called blood and thunder and i'm kind of i've been at sea for a while i need to i need to come inland it's okay as discussed the sea is going to draw you back i promise you you're and I want to get back out there. But thank you again for joining us. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Put it on the shimbo now.

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