The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 540: The Killing of Captain Cook

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Hampton Sides, Brody Henderson, Randall Williams, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: Hampton's new book, The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook is now out; Hampton's oeuvre; Ep. 298: Cooking Captain Cook; where Captain Cook got killed in Hawaii; get our last "fresh set of eyes finds new beans" t-shirt before they're gone; the scientific paper from our Bison Butchery with Clovis Points video has been published--read the full paper here, as well as Steve's summary on our website; book your spot with MeatEater Experiences to join Steve and the crew on a fishing trip in Louisiana and a waterfowl hunting trip in Kansas; confusing Captain Cook with Captain Hook, Captain Kirk, and Captain Crunch; a skilled map maker; avoiding scurvy on the exploration by eating hunted and foraged foods; the Earl of Sandwich; the first written account of massage; an obsession with iron; eating cockroach excrement and a ton of turtle; body parts; and more.  Outro song by Wes Aikens Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-t-l-i-t-e.com today we're making good on a promise we have back in our studio historian and author hampton sides uh who joined us on a episode 298 what number are we on now? Five, five something. Five 30 something, five 40 something. Joined us a long time ago on an episode,

probably the best named episode we ever had. Cooking Captain Cook. And at that time we were, we kind of went through, Hampton, we went through your, what do you call one's collection of books? Your body of work, your oeuvre. Yeah, that's what I meant. Oeuvre.

Something like that. There's a couple extra letters in there. We went through his body of work. And toward the end of the interview, or kind of throughout the interview, we talked about what you're working, what you then were working on now. Which was a book about Captain Cook. And I think that even at the time I had shared with you that I had been. To Hawaii. Been to Hawaii and passed by where Captain Cook was killed,

where he ultimately met his end. Right. And I was there last week. Yeah. And showed my kids. Wow. You're so tan now. Yeah.

And I understand why. We had a laugh where I said to my kids, we're driving by fishing for Onos, the Wahoo, which they call Onos in Hawaii. And I yelled to my kids over the very loud boat engine of my friend's diesel boat engine and yelled, that's where Captain Cook got killed. And my kids half paying attention, one of them said, oh, awesome. And that became kind of the joke for the day but uh so we said we're going to come back uh that we're going to have you back when you finish your book and the book is now out and available publishes on april 9 um called the wide wide sea imperial ambition first contact and the fateful final voyage of

captain james cook and if you are interested in pre-contact contact era alaska hawaii which wind up being coupled together in unexpected ways still today i find so much cross-cultural exchange between alaska and hawaii they kind of have a pacific thing going on um this book explores it we're going to discuss it uh today i haven't i usually try to i do a pretty good job i usually try to read um read books before uh we talk about them, but I haven't gotten to it yet, but you have such a trusted track record. I'm just going to come out right now and say,

it's good. Well, that's good to hear. There's nothing worse than hosts who claim they've read it. And then you find out they haven't, you know, so your honesty is appreciated. No,

I can't, I can't lie to you, but I can just base off your, your body of work, your oeuvre, your oeuvre, base off your oeuvre. I can tell everybody that it's great. And, um, um we're gonna dig in on it and we're gonna discuss the conflicting reports of

of uh whether or not captain cook um was indeed consumed when we talked about cooking and i didn't know the did you tell us the details of it last time about the. I think we hinted at it, but I wasn't drawing to. A little heart detail. Yeah. Yeah. We may have mentioned it.

We'll get into it a little bit more. Conflicting accounts. Yes. Conflicting accounts. But I just want to just say, thank you for getting the name right. Captain Cook. So many people have said to me,

oh, you're writing a book about Captain Hook. Oh. You know, the pirate. We we'd had you on a long time ago the parrot on the shoulder you know the that's probably what steve's kids thought he was talking captain hook he was bad guy no captain james cook um you know i find it when we get into the heart story i'll touch on this more but i find no, I'll touch on it fully right now. We're going to tell a heart story in a little bit. We got a couple things to touch on first.

And then you're familiar with, who was it? Was it Gaul? After the battle of the Little Bighorn. I think it was Gaul, Un, Uncle Papa Sioux warrior. Um, after the battle, little Bighorn, I believe he claimed to, he told some people that he had eaten a bite of Tom Custer's heart. So, uh, George Armstrong Custer, uh, fought and died with his brother at the battle little bighorn and tom custer had once arrested like took into custody the sioux warrior gall

and pissed him off and he claimed at in the years after the battle he claimed to have taken a bite of tom custer's heart and then later maybe on second thought um said no i was just kidding so was he telling the truth when he said he's just kidding or was he telling the truth when he said he took a bite of custer's heart whenever i do something like that i mean not oftentimes if i change my story it's because i'm embarrassed by what i initially admitted to and i yeah and then just kidding you know i didn't really know how you're going to receive that so he had a gall had another uh quote we're not here to talk about battle a little bighorn but gall had another quote where uh hey man he said a bunch of things he's the one that said how long the battle took

that it took about as long as it takes a hungry man to eat his meal and then later a crow scout for custer later said no i was there but i got away and gall said to him you must have turned into a bird if you're saying you were there and you got away uh oh you know what this is the final so this is the final mention. There was a big debate about whether or not. See, I've made up this new saying. It's a new old saying. A fresh set of eyes will find more beans.

And we've talked about it a fair bit. I thought it had finance applications, but we heard from people who were applying it in the medical field, finance. I thought it was catching on. Law field. Yeah, law. Forensics. Yeah, I thought it was really catching on, and people were trying it out on their wives and pissing their wives off.

And we made this shirt, but the shirt didn't sell out, which makes me think it didn't catch on. Well, no, I think it was a timing issue. I think that if we would have had the shirt earlier. Can you see my shirt, Phil? Yeah. Oh, like the shirt, like the saying was a timing issue. I think that if we would have had the shirt earlier. Can you see my shirt, Phil? Yeah. Oh, like the shirt, like the saying had come and gone. Well, not.

I don't think old sayings do that. We can't see the bottom because your computer, they're going to shut your computer. There we go. That looks great. They, they've, I think they've like 60 something percent sold out. We didn't make that many. So go get them folks who maybe don't even know. I've been looking at that shirt and trying to

figure it out without reading any of it. And I was just thought it was a, like a political or revolutionary. Well, I thought it might be tiptoeing into like. It looks like you're calling for land reform. I thought it might be communist art. Yeah. Yeah.

Like it might be like a little revolutionary yep uh it was uh yeah other other areas there i was telling a story about being on a bus in memphis and someone said you always got to be careful when you're telling memphis bus stories but yeah that the fist you know yeah yeah um okay oh here's the interesting thing that's out this is cool you guys might remember um when we had a bunch of the anthropologists and archaeologists on after doing our bison clovis point experiment where we um worked with researchers from kent state for dead in Ohio. That's about Kent state. Uh, researchers from Kent state, Southern Methodist University, Oregon State University. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And they were doing, uh, we were doing research and we were the participants in the research where we butchered an entire, uhted butchered boned out an entire buffalo using ice age style stone points particularly using clovis points and other flakes and butchered the whole damn thing i thought we're gonna be there into the night i brought i brought like lighting i didn't think we'd ever get out of there. We were done in four hours. Pushered the whole thing out in order to, that the researchers

could then do the serious work of analyzing after they were cleaned up. Our friend John Hayes from Hayes Taxidermy Studio did the bone work on it. In order to help interpret Ice Age kill sites. Meaning when you go to an Ice Age kill site, 12,000 years go by and all that's left is chunks of bone and chunks of stone.

Nothing else is left. You can't talk to anybody. All the soft tissue is gone. Things have been gnawed on by animals. So we were providing, we were helping to create a sort of set of stone and a set of bone where they knew what happened to the stone and bone and you could take this information and help analyze ice age kill sites meaning when you see that mark on a bone what led to that mark on a bone when you see a stone when you see a chunk of stone flake maybe embedded in bone or a chunk of stone tool that had broke and was discarded and it's laying there and you're thinking, well, is that there because they used it to kill the animal and it's laying inside their rib cage? Or was that laying there because they use it to cut up an animal, meaning that they maybe find an animal and cut it up.

Did they kill an animal meaning that they maybe find an animal and cut it up did they kill an animal with projectile points when we see a clovis point we think that it was on a spear is there a chance that that clovis point was actually a knife these are all great mysteries and anyways the paper's out now i got excited for a minute when i got that form letter had me down as dr steve even seth it's just a form letter though and i and i made the mistake of insulting seth by saying how everybody is i already told seth this apologize to him i don't know what this means i said everybody was doctor even seth what the hell does that? I think the implication is somewhat obvious. Even Seth. I sent in a correction and I said, hey, just heads up.

You know, you got a lot of people down as doctors that ain't. And he said, no, that's just a form letter from the journal. Don't worry. You won't be credited as being a doctor. But Randall, you could actually be a doctor. Well, if they just threw you in for some reason yeah next time so the article's out where how do you find it corinne um we're gonna have a link to the article in the show notes and we're also gonna have it prominently uh on the

website got it so yeah study is massive over 20 000 words for you people that used to read the new yorker back in the 90s that would be a big that's like a that's like when they do like the history of dirt in the new yorker 20 000 words 31 figures 12 data tables and eight supplemental data files that's supposed to get people excited corinne that's corinne no that's supposed to get people fired up well a fair amount of this is from people at home like wow 31 figures ordinarily you only get three supplemental data files those are for all the nerds out there yeah cringe good job writing copy no 20 000 31 figures, 12 data tables, and 8 supplemental data files. Call now.

No, most of that is from Meton. I asked him to put in what he thought would be important to highlight. And that sums it up for people who speak the science language. So go read about that. It's fascinating. And I liked it. And I want to do more. And what we needed to do is i want to do more and we

what we needed to do is i wanted to do the one where we cut up a person because hey listen uh clata sent me an article the other day about out of prince will's island in the caves finding um uh 10 000 year old bare bones and i think he said something about some human remains that seemed to have been gnawed on. And I'm like, gnawed on? 10,000 years later? You sure it wasn't something else?

Live tour. Live tour kicks off April 23rd. What's it right now? 9th? 10th? 8th? Whatever the hell. Live tour kicks off April 23rd. What's it right now? 9th? 10th? 8th? 8th. Whatever the hell. Live Tour kicks off April 23rd in Mesa, Arizona.

From Mesa, Arizona, we go to, we do, April 23rd is Mesa, Arizona at Mesa Arts Center. From there, we do three shows in California. So we're creating a safe space for hunters and anglers in California where you can can come share your real lived experience about being a hunter or an angler um san diego anaheim sacramento go to salt lake city boise missoula portland tacoma am i missing anything mesa no you got it sp Spokane. Yeah. So it goes like this. Check me on this. Mesa, San Diego, Anaheim.

Mesa, San Diego, Anaheim. Sacramento. Salt Lake. Salt Lake City. Boise. Boise. Boise. Missoula.

Spokane. Spokane. Portland. Tacoma. Mr. Clay Newcomb will be there for all the shows. We got a lot of other people coming in and coming out, coming and going. Brody, you're going to come over for the Missoula show? Yeah, for sure.

Hell yeah. Every ticket gets a signed copy of the Meat Eater Outdoor Cookbook, which is a brand new release. Actually, the tour is during the release week week so every ticket comes with a signed copy we're gonna have uh you'll learn stuff you'll laugh you'll you have a potential to win some great stuff so looking forward to seeing everyone there also we got a new thing going meat eater experiences so this is kind of a long story i don't want to spend too much time on it. I've been spearfishing down out of Venice, Louisiana. I became friends with Rene Cross at Cypress Cove Marine and Lodge. And we hit on this idea.

We're going to take over his whole place and do a big fishing party. So that's kicking off in October. Me going to be down there. Jan's going to be down there. Clay's going to be down there. Jan's going to be down there. Clay's going to be down there. A bunch of other people coming and going. And we're filling up spots for that. You can go sign up to come down.

We're going to clean fish together, fish together, do stuff at night, have a lot of talks, a lot of laughs. Each setup is three days of fishing, offshore, inshore. April 15th, you can go check out those meat eater experiences at the meat eater.com and then we also have a waterfowl one coming up in the winter which you'll be able to check out as well uh pat durkin wrote in pat durkin remains the only man in the world who's wolf neutral so we like to check in with wolf neutral people now and then yeah they just don't have a real soapbox the wolf neutral person is it an agnosticism or an apathy

no no it's like uh no well not apathy because that would imply not staying up with the yeah pat durkin is the only guy in the world that can listen to wolf stuff from either side and be No, it's like, no, well, not apathy, because that would imply not staying up with the, yeah. Pat Durgin's the only guy in the world that can listen to wolf stuff from either side and be like, eh, it'll work out. He doesn't fly into a rage either way. Mm-hmm. He, uh, what Pat got wondered about, he says, at risk of annoying you with yet another wolf neutral column, this explains his column he's an outdoor columnist this one explains why how wisconsin's hunter trapper hunters and trappers killed 218 wolves in three days in february 21 but needed 10 weeks to kill 257 wolves in 2013 mystery being the the number of wolves on the landscape didn't change he says mostly though my

review springs from a conversation with al hofacker my first boss at deer and deer hunting magazine in the early 1990s who nearly died last year from the tick-borne disease which i have not heard of this is me editorializing i'm reading pat but i'm editorializing by me to have not heard of. This is me editorializing. I'm reading Pat, but I'm editorializing by me to have not heard of it. Babesiosis. Anyone heard of this? Babesiosis. Babesiosis.

I just looked it up. It infects red blood cells. No, I got, I got waylaid bad by, uh, trich, or no, I got waylaid bad by trichinosis, but I got waylaid, I got waylaid somewhat bad by trichinosis and waylaid bad by Lyme. And my boy got waylaid so bad by Lyme he developed Bell's palsy. His milk would run out the corner of his mouth.

Horrible. That was long editorialization. Back to Pat. Quote, he got me laughing when he said he'd rather die in a wolf attack because it would cause less suffering while making him famous as, get this, people, the first Wisconsinite in history killed by a wolf, meaning that's yet to happen. That inspired us. Pat's still talking. This is an interesting tidbit. That inspired me to dig into Wisconsin's costs, damages from tick-borne diseases versus wolf attacks on livestock, pets, and bear hounds. Guess what their costs and damages are from tick-borne diseases annually?

I'm going to beat the table. I'm going to beat this book on the table for this. 12 million annually. In ticks. Native wildlife. The tick. Costing Wisconsin. 12 billion annually.

Now. Take a stab at over the past five years. The average annual cost of wolves. You can't really beat the book about this. No, you can beat a book about how low something is, right? Yeah, yeah. $177,000. Wow.

I don't know what Pat's. And again, I started to feel like Pat's not wolf. I think Pat's a wolf apologist dressed up in sheep's clothing. He's masquerading as a wolf neutralist. 12 million in tick damage is 177 grand in wolf damages. Whatever, Pat. Whatever. Pat, Pat. Whatever. Pat, the last of the outdoor

columnists. We should be nice to Pat Durkin. Because when he dies, the old outdoor columnist, I don't even want to say it. Pat's far from death. He still runs marathons. Unless a tick

gets him. Unless a tick gets him. Unless a tick gets him. I shouldn't say that. Yeah, I should put a tick in his underwear or something and Wally would be like, how you like them ticks now, Pat? And he'd be like, did I say I didn't?

Did I say I like ticks? In episode 518, you were talking about old fur price lists that had Bobcat, Wildcat, Lynx, and Lynxcat pricing. And wondered why they had so many different names for Bobcats in those days. This is when we had a Lynx researcher on. Carmen Van Bianchi from Home Range Wildlife was on talking about a project in Washington State of collaring Lynx. Which I need to...

They caught four. They caught three males and a female. I need to announce the other two winners. Dang it. They caught four. They're all done for the year. They're very happy to get a female links. And this guy said,

this guy says he was talking to old fur buyer, third generation fur buyer. And he had an explanation for why all this crazy nomenclature. He told me that in the old days, Wildcat was the general name for any of the smaller wildcats, like Bobcat, Lynx, and Ocelot. So the sort of bucket term was a wildcat. Bobcat, Lynxx ocelot. Lynx was what was used in the old days. So we're talking about, you know, you go back to the twenties and thirties. Lynx was used for what

we still call lynx today. Bobcat was used for Western and coastal bobcats that tend to have dull colors and coarser fur. Lynx cat was used for the brighter colored with more silk-like fur found on Western bobcats, like high plains Western bobcats, the ones that are super valuable today. They did this because of very noticeable differences between Western bobcats and those Eastern coastal bobcats. So at the time they believe there are different species. Meaning if you look at a bobcat from Michigan,

all dull, no good spots and a bobcat from, you know, high elevations in Nevada, you'd be like, well, they can't be the same thing. They gotta be different.

So they just call them these different names. Now, people would catch them and get excited when they see bobcats or whatever listed for super high price. So they came up with this different name just to try to denote different fur qualities. He says the Idaho fur sale still lists Western and Eastern bobcats in different categories on their sale average price list this is so trappers can have a better idea what their bobcats should sell for since the eastern bobcats will be lower than the overall average results giving eastern trappers a false high expectation and western trappers a false low expectation of what it's all worth. Hence,

when you're looking at something, you're like, how did they have all these cats in those days that no one knows about anymore? I don't want to spend time on this, but Corinne thought this was interesting. This is pretty common. Did someone dies? You put their ashes in shotgun shells.

I didn't know that was common at all. Really? Real common. Real common among a small group of people meaning meaning two guys a year the first time we've ever talked about what i have heard of it before hunter thompson hunter s thompson had his loaded into like artillery shells sorry for my ignorance everybody oh dude where's that big shell behind is that still back there yes on the load we put all this in that yeah i feel like you've talked about ways that you'd like your remains to be used it changes post-mortem so that it's not included and you don't want to i thought

it was you want to become a piece of carrion well i did want to get scavenged by bears but i'm kind of thinking now i was looking at the prices to get scavenged by bears, but I'm kind of thinking now, I was looking at the prices to get buried in the Twin Lakes Cemetery where I grew up. You get in the ground there for 600 bucks, but if you want to get back out, you have to stay charged if you want to get out. 600 to get in, 1300 to get out. That's not bad. No.

To change your mind. I've paid a lot more for an exhumation. If someone changes their mind, they got to fork,300 to get you back out of the ground. I might do that. I'm going to go there and look next time I'm over there. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and

crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the

excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. A guy wrote in a big explanation of why we shouldn't be dogging on these monkey farms they're trying to put in down south. Getting everybody all worked up. People in Texas are worked up. People in Georgia are worked up.

About these giant monkey farms they're building to supply the research facilities turns out no one gets excited about a monkey farm in their neighborhood but he gets into some some of the things that are going on uh the u.s medical world is in critical need of rhesus macaws um china has uh halted he's talking about here's why this is going on china has halted a large number of exports of these primaries primates to the country in retaliation to the current trade wars with the U.S., which are going to get a lot worse next January 6th. When Trump's back in office, the trade wars are going to intensify when Trump's back in office.

I imagine it's going to lead to probably even fewer monkeys running around. And then there's another thing. What was the other thing you said? There's another thing leading to all this monkey problem. I don't know. Come on. Corinne, help me out here. You put it down.

The USDA is sitting out. Well, I'm not sure what's in your mind. Well, they're running low on monkeys Supply and demand We like to produce our monkeys right here Just like critical minerals Yeah there were some geopolitical things That led to this monkey crisis

So when you people are saying you don't want a monkey farm next door Keep in mind that there were geopolitical Constraints that have led to the Rhesus monkey shortage Right and here's the USDA sends inspectors who are vets at random times unannounced at least once a year. He was selling us on how safe these monkey farms are.

Right. Then he said, don't use my name. No, but it's not for that. He just doesn't want to be attacked by animal welfare. The rhesus macaws are vital for testing vaccine efficacy, novel cancer treatments, and various other life-saving research projects at most R1 universities and pharmaceutical companies. As someone who has worked in biomedical research for all of my career for T10 universities, I can tell you that the need for these primates is indeed very dire.

So, when they go to put a big monkey farm in your yard, keep that in mind. Humans versus monkeys, baby. They need to round up those wild ones running around in Florida. I did not pass judgment on the need for rhesus monkeys.

I just said, I just said, it sure seems like people don't want monkey farms down the road seems true too yep that's abundantly clear people freak the classic nimbism but he goes on to say i can tell you one thing that ain't gonna happen is these monkeys ain't gonna be getting out and biosecurity is taken very seriously with tons of oversight from the federal government so if you trust them folks at the federal government um this is not he's just saying this is not like a little like it's not like a hobby monkey farm going out and usda folks can go in and shut it down yeah it's a it's a highly regulated um tons of oversight meaning i don't think these

people should plan on being like oh god there's a monkey in the yard you never know never know um we put on hold we're gonna talk about this later probably about a dozen people wrote in with like here's how i neuter my own cat overall more than that actually yeah we're gonna put that on hold in order to talk more about cap and cook again if you forgot hamptonsides is your author of the brand new the wide wide sea first off why the wide wide sea the name um it is big it's a quote from coleridge who wrote this poem you know know, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Oh, yeah.

And scholars say that he was- Led Zeppelin followed that up, right? That sounds like something Zeppelin would do. No, it's- Coleridge was influenced by Cook's Three Voyages Around the World. And it's about a captain who's having an existential crisis, which Cook was on this third voyage. Because the book is about his third voyage. His final voyage. His final voyage, literally and figuratively.

And things do not go well, as you alluded to earlier. Near the end of his voyage, things go horribly wrong. And he is, you know, hacked to pieces on the beach in, on the big Island of Hawaii. So, um, so it's, it's a title just sort of getting at the psychology of a captain who's a little tired, who's having some problems, medical, medical, mental, physical, and maybe even spiritual, you know. Can you, can you explain this to set, just to set it up? Can you give me his, give us his timeframe and, and just quickly, um, what were the first two voyages? Yeah.

Like where, where he's from and when, and, and, and. Well, you know, so. What did he do? So Captain Cook, I, you know, mentioned earlier, uh, that I think a lot of Americans get him mixed up with a lot of other captains, sort of real and imaginary, whether it's Captain Kidd or Captain Hook. Captain Kirk. Captain Kirk of the – which is – you laugh, but in fact, Captain Kirk was influenced by – was influenced by – I mean, was actually based on Captain Cook. And so his first voyage was the Endeavor.

Instead of the HMS Endeavor, you know, it was the USS Enterprise. And Captain James Kirk, Captain James Cook. So, yeah, I mean, there is a direct correlation. What I thought you meant is you said you're writing a book. I thought you were having a problem where you're writing a book about Captain Cook. And people are like, oh, I love Star Trek. Right, right. And then there's, of course, there's Captain Crunch.

I got a bone to pick with that son of a bitch because when you eat Captain Crunch, the lacerations in the roof of your mouth. You can run through a box like that. I remember those days. A lot of sugar. So Captain Cook was probably the quintessential Enlightenment era explorer, one of the greatest explorers of all time. No matter what you think of his voyages or him as a man or, of course, he's very controversial today, especially indigenous people all over Polynesia have decided they hate him and that he's a symbol of colonialism and they rip down his statues everywhere um but back then and for well they did a little bit of exploring themselves they they were masters at it when you say back then what was his like time period his time period his voyages were in the 1760s in the 1770s um that's an era that me and randall are intimately

familiar with in Kentucky. Okay. That was the throat of the long hunters. Yeah. That's about the only place he didn't get to. That's why we focused there. We didn't want to overlap with your work. But he, I mean, what's great about him, what I love about him is that he came from virtually nothing. Unlike a lot of these captains who had money or influence or connections.

He got there by sheer hard work and intellect and genius and came up as he was a poor farmer who apprenticed to become a, to be part of the Merchant Marine. But British born. British, British and in Yorkshire. And he was really good at everything that to do with navigation, astronomy, cartography, and he ended up that really his true, uh, genius was maps. He made beautiful maps, maps that are like chillingly accurate, uh, often on the fly. Um, he mapped Nova Scotia. Um, and if you superimpose a satellite image of Nova scotia on the map that he made of nova scotia back then in the 1700s it's just exact it's like how did he do it just with celestial

navigation and handheld equipment right like right astrolabes and surveying tools and and um triangulation and and trigonometry you know but um but But so his first two voyages around the world were first to search for this great super continent that was, all these scientists believed there had to be this massive continent in the southern hemisphere. And they were wrong? To counterbalance all the land masses

that are predominantly in the northern hemisphere. To counter balance in weight. Yeah. They actually thought that the planet would spin off into outer space. It wasn't a good balance sphere. Yeah. It's a crazy idea now. It's like getting the leads on your tires right.

Yeah. Yeah. It was always like Terra Australis Incognita, which was the name of this mythic supercontinent that did not exist. But Cook was sent to find it. And he did find Australia. It had been spotted by another guy named Abel Tasman before, but he charted the entire east coast of. Yeah, that's where we get Tasmania. Hung his name on Tasmania.

Yeah. Okay. But he, uh, Cook, uh, mapped the entire east coast of Australia and, um, along the way, um, had all sorts of other adventures in Polynesia and, uh, uh, he ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef and nearly, nearly sank his ship, the Endeavor. Uh, that was his first voyage. The second voyage was another attempt to find this supercontinent and he he he uh nearly made it to antarctica and kind of intuited the existence of antarctica but even antarctica and australia combined would not be anywhere near as large as this supercontinent that was um it was just one of these crazy scientific ideas that the people in the royal society believed in you know

so he proved it didn't exist like kind of when had people more thoroughly given up even though they've picked it back up again when had they thoroughly given up on on flat earth well there's still people today well i know yeah it's like a new it's like a new goofy thing now yeah yeah um i don't know i probably a little earlier probably in, probably in the 1600s. Okay. So that was a dead idea at this time. Yeah. Their astronomy was amazing at that point. And Cook, that was his other great talent was he was an amazing astronomer. He also had this new tool by the second voyage that changed exploration dramatically. And this was a little thing called a chronometer. And,

um, the chronometer told that what was the time in Greenwich, England. Um, so, and that allowed people, uh, it's too complicated to explain,

but that allowed people just by looking at this clock, you could figure out, uh, figure out longitude. Um, and that was the hard thing that couldn't figure out the latitude. They could figure out easily, but longitude was this puzzle. And once't figure out the latitude. They could figure out easily, but longitude was this puzzle. And once you figure out the coordinates of a place, a cook was able to know exactly where

he was anywhere in the world and put that on a map and these maps were published. And then suddenly all these places, uh, that he discovered or rediscovered could never again hide from the eyes of the world um and so this is one of the reasons polynesians hate him so much is that they you know kind of had lived in splendid isolation for centuries and millennia and now you know he just posted the address yeah that's that's yeah it's an interesting point like it's it's obvious but i never thought about before that you could see something. Right. From then you could see something and very specifically say where it was rather than say, we sailed kind of West for two weeks and then you'll find this little thing.

Maybe. Yeah. Like Tasman, we mentioned Tasman earlier. He had, he's been a lot of these places, but he didn't know where he was and he couldn't report back in it with any confidence what he had seen or where these places were. So Captain Cook has the chronometer and that changes a lot. But he also – he was a scientist. He was interested in these people that he see in so many other explorers. He just described what they wore and what they looked like and, you know, what they ate and, you know, just was trying to get it down in a kind of objective,

neutral way. Is his writing, um, is clumsy to read as when you read the unedited journals of Lewis and Clark? Uh, he wasn't a writer, that's for sure. Uh, weird spellings. Yeah. And I did kind of do some light editing. I mentioned in the author's note that there's some, you know, I got rid of the ye's and the ampersands and the weird capitalizations and the, you know, strange spellings. There was no uniform spelling back then. So some of these things are very hard on the eye and on the ear to follow as you're reading them. But so, yes. But he was considering that he really was self-educated. He was quite a good writer.

And I quote a lot from him, but I also quote from, I mean, there were 180 people on this voyage in two ships. And anyone who was literate was writing down in their journals what they were seeing and uh experiencing including uh just massive amounts of sex i mean you know all these books that i've written my friends always say well you need to have more sex in your books and i uh you know death marches and you know explorations in siberia whatever now now i got a book that has more sex i mean orgies on the beach, orgies on the ship, down in the holds of the ship.

Really? These Polynesian women, and this is something I still... And who's describing this? Everyone. And they're not, they don't put that little puritanical cleanup on it? Not at all,

except for Cook himself, who is said to be, and I believe it's true, never did partake in this sort of thing. But I mean, all the officers and all the, I mean, most of the sailors on the ship were 16, 17, 18 years old. And they were horny. And they certainly, the Polynesians had very different ideas about sex. And they were very curious about these strange people that just washed up on their shores.

So they had to have left all kinds of progeny, huh? Yes. Although I never met anyone who directly claimed to be one. And I did go to almost as many of these places as I could go. Not a hardship research aspect to this. You had to go to warm places. Yeah. Warm places.

I mean, cool, interesting places. Yeah. Warm places. I mean, cool, interesting places, New Zealand, uh, both North and South Island. Um, you know, Tasmania, um, uh, French Polynesia, Hawaii, of course, Alaska, interesting places. And I mean, just, this is just the third voyage. Cook went just about everywhere. Was he, was he a celebrity in his own day? Like were people clamoring to be on these expeditions? By the time the first voyage was over and they came back, yes, he had become a celebrity. You know, he was sitting for the best painters in London and he was becoming a member of the Royal Society and going, you know, he met King George III. And, you know, he was becoming very much a celebrity and

he hated that. He was awkward around it. He was intrigued by it a little bit, but he just wanted to get right back out on the next voyage as quickly as he could. Before we get to number three, how long were these, how long were voyages one and two? Like he's gone, these are multi-year trips, correct? Yes. They were between three and four years. It just takes forever to get down there and get back. You know, all sorts of hardships happen along the way. The ship, you know, masts break and they have to repair and so forth. These ships took forever.

And the thing was back then, any kind of voyage that lasted longer than, you know, 100 or 200 days, usually people started dying of scurvy. Scurvy was the, you know, kind of like an occupational hazard of any long voyage. Cook seemed to have figured out scurvy. He didn't precisely know what food was doing the trick or what, you know, what in the diet was, was, was the, what was the secret, but, um, not a single person died on any one of his three voyages of scurvy. Because of, was it luck? He just was better about food or? It was, it was a little bit. Did he know it was a food thing? It was, yes, he understood that. And, um, there had been a Scottish scientist who had shown that,

um, lime juice, uh, or lemon juice could help, um, with scurvy. Uh, but it wasn't, it wasn't that so much. Cook's main idea was, you know, salt foods, salted meat, uh, salt, like pemmican and the salted pork, uh, and, um, uh, you know, vinegar and, um, just kind of all, all the, uh, food that they gave them that kept, kept on the ship. Um, he tried to get away from that as much as possible and make his men eat fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, uh, fresh meat. Uh, and, um, he just pounded that into the everyone's mind just stop eating the salt pork and start you know you know hunting go hunting go fishing get wild berries get wild celery you know wherever you can find it and uh i think that was the real secret got it

yeah so set up the third voyage. Well, the third voyage is. Like, and also include, like, who's bankrolling? Right, right. Good question. So the real sort of prime mover and architect behind many of these voyages was this dude named Sandwich. Lord Sandwich, the inventor, in fact. Earl. Earl. He was the inventor

Of the sandwich He was a really I've heard that Do you really buy that How do you invent the sandwich Well here's the deal He was very very busy And very very

He was a workaholic And he Didn't have time to eat So He would just stick A piece of meat Between two pieces of bread And

That was his meal and people somehow decided to start calling it the sandwich um he was the he was the first lord of the admiralty he was a very powerful guy he was also interested in the science and the exploration that was going on um and he's certainly one of the you know important people to know about in terms of who who was paying for this. The Admiralty paid for a lot of this. The Royal Society, which was a scientific society, also paid for a lot of the scientific work because there were scientists on board, botanists, you know, expedition artists. And, you know, these were, these were very well staffed, well manned, um, uh, expeditions.

Were they paying for these expeditions, like just out of like interest in knowing what's out there? Or was it more of like an angle, like let's find some stuff to take over? Both. You know, everything there, every chess move that they're making in the world is is calculated to to beat the French, to beat the Spanish, to beat the Dutch, to beat the Russians. And so that is, you know, there is an imperial chess game going on here that is certainly a big part of it. But they also are creatures of the Enlightenment. They believe in publishing all this stuff, uh, and to a wide audience, uh, the maps that are produced by these voyages are incredibly accurate. Whereas like the Russian expeditions were laughably, almost cartoonishly wrong, uh, you know, because they, they had their own interests they were trying to protect.

Um, so, um, so I'd say Cook kind of had a foot in both worlds. He understood that he was a creature. He was doing the bidding of empire, but he also was genuinely curious about these places and getting them accurately on the map and describing them accurately. And then, oh, my God, the published volumes, these giant folio-sized volumes of Cook's Third Voyage ended up with three of these volumes with beautiful engravings and maps and descriptions of animals and plants that had never been seen before by Europeans. It's amazing.

And so there is that scientific element that's pretty extraordinary. Well, he didn't have a sort of, uh, he didn't have as, as an overt desire to loot as say the Spanish coming into, um, the Spanish coming into Mexico. Uh, you know, there were a couple of places along the way where he was supposed to, um, come ashore and raise the British flag and, um, claim these lands for the crown for King George. And he hated this whole rigmarole. I mean, he, he understood that it was rather absurd when you're on the other side of the world to sort of say these people, uh, who are watching off and they'd be watching the ceremony, not knowing what the hell was going on. Um, he, um. There was a little clause in his instructions that said,

you're supposed to do this with the consent of the natives. You know, like, oh, yeah, you can take over our country, our continent, our island. It was rather absurd. He did, some might call it looting, but, mean, he did stop along the way, many places and he needed food, he needed water, he needed, um, timber, uh, and he got it one way or the other, either through trade or, or through, uh, um, bullying his way, you know, into, into getting the things he needed to keep going on the voyage. But, you know, when people say he was a colonizer, you know, he really wasn't a colonizer. He never left a single person behind. He was the, maybe you could say he was the leading edge of colonialism because the first act of colonialism,

I guess you've got to discover these places first or rediscover them. The word discovery is a very controversial word in this business because, of course, there are people there already. Discovered for his culture. Right, right. So you kind of have to say, you know, European, first European to discover. But, and the Polynesians were, of course, one of the greatest long distance voyagers of all time.

And, but you just got to be careful with the word discovery. Yeah. No, I understand all that. Um, yeah, but so, uh,

he, he was, uh, he, he, there was something a little off about captain cook in the third voyage. Um, and that's,

uh, getting back going into it, going into it. He wasn't the same captain. Um, he, people have wondered what was wrong with him. Uh, And that's getting back to- Going into it. Going into it. He wasn't the same captain. People wondered what was wrong with him, if he had a parasite from all the weird foods that he ate, if he had bipolarism. I mean, some of his actions on the third voyage have been described by some clinical psychologists as being classically bipolar.

What age? Well, he turns 50 on the voyage. He's 48, I think, when they leave London. And by the way, they leave England, Plymouth, actually, in July of 1776. Something else happened that summer. Yeah. A lot is going on in Boston. That July.

The empire is freaking out about this revolt in America, and they are sending their best explorer that same month to the other side of North America. The ultimate objective of this third voyage, I didn't even say it, is to find the Northwest Passage over Canada, over Alaska, because this is something the British have been looking for forever, usually from the Atlantic side. Now they're going to try it from the Pacific side, go up through the Bering Strait using these very murky Russian maps that had been produced by Bering, and try to find this Northwest Passage, this great fabled waterway that the British were always obsessed with. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet OnXMaps.com slash meet welcome to the OnX club y'all can you pause for a minute to help me understand uh the problem with it i mean it's

there it's just icy right right uh and of course so they would go you routinely go and be like just get locked in the ice right like exactly you get locked in the ice and you start eating boot leather and you know you know people starve and die. Yeah. And it's there, right? It was always there. And in fact, it is many summers now. You can. Yeah, I was going to say.

You can do it. It's all of a sudden a new object of interest. Yeah, those books be a lot different now. Yeah. They'd be like, oh yeah, no problem. Exactly. So it was looking for something that was there, but it was impractical and nearly impossible to get through during that time. These ships were nominally reinforced for the ice, but not, I mean, they couldn't withstand the pressure of the pack like an icebreaker could today. So he thought by coming in on the Pacific side off the Bering Sea, you might get funneled into the right route.

Somehow, I don't know that he actually believed any of this stuff. There were a bunch of scientists in the Royal Society who did. And they're trying to find a shortcut across North America to get to China for trade and also to avoid the Spanish who dominated South America. So they didn't want to go under and around South America. They wanted to go over North America to avoid the Spanish. So that's kind of what's going on. He had determined that this giant supercontinent did not exist in the southern hemisphere.

And now they're asking him to go solve this other huge puzzle. God, what a long, I mean, people got to stop and think about what a long way around. I know, I know. It's over a long, I mean, people got to stop and think about what a long way around. I know. I know. It's over a year to get there. And a lot of adventures. Going across the Atlantic, down to the, around the Southern tip, down around Patagonia, and then all the way back, or however the hell they did it.

Yeah. This time they did, they go, you know, he did that once as well, but the, on the third voyage, he went around, you know, Cape of he did that once as well, but the, on the third voyage, he went around, uh, you know, Cape of good hope and Cape town. Oh, okay. But still, I mean, it's, it's just, it's the entire, you're spanning the globe. Yeah. Oh, no kidding. He went, okay.

Just to be, get to the point where he began to look, uh, he starts mapping, um, North America. Um, it makes landfall at present dayregon and starts mapping or what we call oregon washington british columbia vancouver island uh all of alaska he maps he gives the first he gets the first map of alaska uh and it's amazingly accurate by the way do you know where where does he land what kind of places in alaska is he ground? Do you know? Well, the most famous place that he went to was Cook Inlet. You know, present day site of Anchorage. He goes all the way to the end of Cook Inlet.

It's called Cook Inlet. By the way, he never named a single place after himself. When you see Cook's name on something, it's because somebody back in England put it on a map. Why would he go way into Cook Inlet? Well, at first it's very wide. It starts to look like a, it sort of looks like a waterway. I mean, you know, and it was, it was early summer and it was gushing with glacial melt and snow melt. And he thought it communicated, maybe communicated with the north end of alaska and some of the natives

people that he met seemed to suggest that um so and then some of his officers were really excited that it's like this is it this is the holy grail we found it and of course it peters out it tapers you've been there probably right it tapers and then it just kind of becomes a couple of tributary rivers. But, um, so that's one famous place. Prince William Sound, um, uh, which he named. Um,

he also went to, uh, Unalaska. He went to, I don't know, the entire West Coast. Uh, he went all the way to what we now call Point Barrow,

Alaska. Damn. Yeah. And that's where he encountered ice. He nearly got stuck in the ice permanently. I mean, he would have died. Both ships would have been crushed. And he decided to turn around and go back to that wonderful little archipelago that he had stumbled upon earlier in the voyage that we know as Hawaii.

And how was he behaving? You were saying he's like a little off, but had he done things along the Alaska coast that were off? Well, the Alaska part of the trip is kind of classic Cook. He's back to doing what he loves to do, which is mapping and figuring out this enormous puzzle. And he was pretty happy and he was pretty, he was embroiled in puzzle solving.

You know, it was earlier in the voyage in Polynesia where he was acting very strange, using the lash in a way that was just cruel to his own men, being cruel to the indigenous people that he encountered, cutting people's ears off, and doing these really sadistic things that nothing like that had happened on his first two voyages like on his way to alaska in polynesia stopping at places and yeah doing this now when the obviously all these actions are being recorded by people on the ships are they hypothesizing that something's different about I mean or is it looking back now in hindsight there's more and more

speculation about his well-being but like were people on board writing something's very different no the the people on board are asking the same question what what the hell is wrong with the captain? Especially the ones that had been on the previous two voyages. They're like, I don't know if it's his celebrity had gone to his head. He's more arrogant. He was more peremptory and just like making decisions without explaining. He was not as collaborative. He was, and of course, the British Navy at that time.

I mean, you could say he's becoming more like a typical British Naval captain because, uh, these were, I mean, this was a cruel world that they operated in and most of them were like that. Um, yeah, you were like judge, jury and executioner, right? Master and commander. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so you could say that he was sort of becoming, he just, he just become another European naval, naval captain. Yeah. By the, by that point. But, um, he was also in pain. Uh, he had sciatica, uh, intense pain, uh, uh, you know, that is very interesting. He encountered for the first time Polynesian massage.

And this army of women descended on him and cured him of his sciatica. And he describes it beautifully. It's believed to be the first description of massage. And, you know, from his voyage, you get all these other things like you get the first description of, you know, the word taboo and what it means and tattooing. The first descriptions of surfing when they come to Hawaii, um, you know, all of this stuff emanates from his voyage. How does he describe surfing when they come? Well, you know, I don't know that he describes surfing very well, but one of his officers, a doctor, uh, the surgeon, uh, just, he tries, it's, it's almost laughable because he tries to break it down, like the body mechanics of it. Like, you know, then they get up on the board, you know, they get on the declivity of the wave.

And then they, you know, do. And by the way, the British are watching this. Can't believe it because they don't. Most of them don't know how to swim, let alone surf. This is one of the weirdest thing is that naval officers didn't by and large know how to swim they weren't taught to swim they weren't required to to learn to swim how is that possible but stay in the boat including including cook himself uh he could not swim which ends up being a problem for him uh later on wasn't that wild man yeah it just seems like it'd be like such a part of it.

Well, the, what I read was that they believe that, you know, you're going to die anyway. Why prolong the agony? Just sink. Oh. Just die. Get it over with. Like if you go in the water, that's it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's bizarre. It's a very, very strange mentality. Yeah. You think that attitude would change when they're sailing around seeing other people swimming. Oh yeah.

And they remark on how beautiful these swimmers are and women with, uh, you know, babies at their breast and they're still swimming out in these giant waves and just beautiful, strong swimmers. And, you know, they're amazed by it, but they're like describing waves that they would themselves and would never think of going into. Yeah.

Um, so. When he, when he's up in Northern Alaska and hits ice, is it, is it at that point, is it like, okay, the trip's over, let's start picking our way home. Or does he have a second thing on his to-do list? Yes. Well, his, and this says something about Captain Cook's sort of determination and stubbornness. He decided, well, I've got to go back and make one more attempt at finding the Northwest Passage. But we're getting long in the summer season.

I got to warm up for the winter. Why don't we come back for one more season and try it a little earlier in the season. Try it at a slightly different angle or a different place. Got it. Maybe this ice that I've just encountered is an aberration of one season or something. So he's just going back to Hawaii to warm up, to replenish his stores, to let his men have some R&R and turn around and go right back to Alaska. And not Oregon. And not Oregon.

Well, you know what it is, I think he, he had a brief stop in Hawaii. He made landfall in Kauai and he knew, he,

he understood these islands are very special. This is a major find. Got it. He called them the Sandwich Islands, naming,

naming them after his boss, of course, Lord Sandwich. I didn't know, I didn't know where they were, but I've heard Sandwich Islands. Yeah.

And, you know, I guess he was sort of brown nosy. He was just trying to, you know, gain favor of his boss, Lord Sandwich. And when they were along Alaska, are they running into Ruskies along there? They do run into a number of Russian fur, you know, interest. No hostility, so.

No, they got along very well. They don't No hostility. So no, they got along. They don't have shootouts. They got along actually very well. Um, in fact, at that point, England had a pretty good relationship with the Russian. When, when he goes on these three or four year expeditions, they just assume they're not going to hear from him until he gets back. Or is there some, like, does he ever send, like, is there a way for him to send messages home or?

Um, well, you know, the be me up Scotty, you know, they had that. Right. Captain Kirk. Uh, no. Um, but there's not like outposts that he's like. There are a few. Um, one of them, one of them is Batavia, which is, um, Jakarta, um, which was a Dutch colony and, uh, they were able to get messages to Europe that way.

Cape Town, South Africa was certainly one. When they encountered Russians in Alaska. But still those messages still need to be manually transported. All the way around the world. You're just catching other boats. It would take months and months and months. But they did encounter Russians in Alaska who promised to send some documents to St. Petersburg and then ultimately London. And, uh, they go, these documents would go all the way across Siberia.

All, I mean, you know, what is that? Eight, nine time zones to Europe and then finally London. Uh, and so some, some messages got, got to London that way, but it took forever i mean yeah you have to understand they're just once they leave plymouth they're they're gone for four years and in every sense of the word so he heads to hawaii and he's thinking um he's gonna check that place out more kick it yeah re uh resupply um resupply and and also um uh you know there's always stuff going wrong with the ship you know there's things breaking all the time it's just clattering lumber up there you know there there's great there's great forests in in um in hawaii and so there's that um his big worry uh was getting back to the sex thing was that that his men would spread venereal disease.

And he writes endlessly about it. He knew that his men were spreading venereal disease to these innocent people who didn't have gonorrhea or syphilis. But some of those diseases were in the New World, though. Some of those diseases were in North America. They were in North America by then, for sure. But not on the islands. No, there was a disease called yaws, which was a venereal disease, much more benign than syphilis.

But no, there's no question that his men and also the French explorers and Spanish explorers brought disease to Polynesia. But it was a real concern of Cook's. He mentions it just multiple times in his journal. Had he seen this happen before? He'd seen it happen before. He had his surgeon literally like, he would strip all the men and anyone who had any signs of venereal disease

were not allowed to go ashore. Was his concern out of like, just genuine concern for the locals or was it for the repercussions that would occur after it happened? Then it would spread back around to his own men, you mean? Well, no, that they might be like. Or the politics of it. Yeah, like, hey, you brought this disease. We're coming after you now.

Oh, perhaps that was a fear. But I mean, I think it was a genuine, you know, humane thing. You know, he just like, this is an island he would determine that was innocent of this disease. And he was, he abstained from sex the whole time. And he was married and had a family. You buy that? I buy it. I do buy it.

Because every officer just, even ones who hated him said, yeah, he wouldn't. And then. Like I'll give him one thing. And Hawaiian women would come after him. And, you know, the chiefs would bring some of their, you know, ladies to the ship. And the ladies would get really pissed off at him when he would refuse, refuse them. Uh, like what's wrong with you? Are you a man? You know, what is this? What is the story? And, uh, he, uh, you know, he was a pretty stodgy, uh, Quaker, um, trained, um, dour, um,

Yorkshireman. And, um, I, I, you know, it's possible somewhere along the way, something happened, including that time when all those masseuses descended on him. I think it was 12 or 14 women jumped, uh, just jumped on him. And cured him of sciatica. Uh,

but, but I don't think anything more than that happened. There was no happy ending. I don't think there, but, um. So, but he's worried about his man,

but he, but does he, does he not have the authority or is it just unrealistic for him to say no consorting yeah well here's the thing um these these women are literally crawling from their canoes into the ship at all times and one of the things that they're doing in some of the places is uh they're doing it for for for metal um that they're absolutely obsessed with iron and um they uh the men have found out that for the price of an they could have uh uh and get you know meet one of these women for the price of one nail. And what starts to happen is the ship, the hull of the ship is pounded with, there's copper sheathing and then they're pounded with nails. And the women were going underneath the ship because they're great swimmers and prying loose.

The ship was coming apart, basically. These nails were being ripped out of the hull of the ship by the hundreds and hundreds. And, uh, they began to worry, Cook began to worry that the ship was literally going to disintegrate, uh, from, from this iron that they were just obsessed with. And because they had never seen metal before and they understood how useful it was and how, what a powerful thing it was for scraping for for puncturing for um make hooks out of uh make all kinds of implements out of um that's what they were after more than anything was iron got it so there was a trade yeah there was a trade component yeah definitely

definitely so uh when he when he heads back he's worried about that and he's desirous of, uh, mapping the whole archipelago. Like he's going to go around it and lay some claim to it. Okay. So he was obsessed also with the, the question of whether the Spanish had been there because the Spanish for centuries had been doing this thing called the Manila galleon trade thing where they would bring spices from the Philippines and they would drop them in Acapulco. And then in Acapulco, they would get silver and all kinds of other things that had been mined in South America and Mexico and take them back to the Philippines.

So back and forth, back and forth over the Pacific for centuries, the Spanish, and they go right by Hawaii, very close, these sort of sea lanes that they were using. But, um, so the big question he thought was had the Spanish landed somewhere in the Hawaiian islands. And if so, you know, why hadn't we heard about it? And, uh, do they have, do they have their own maps of, of, of the Hawaiian islands? And if so, you know, why hadn't we heard about it? And, uh, do they have, do they have their own maps of, of, of the Hawaiian islands? And, um, to his satisfaction, he determined that they hadn't for some reason, almost miraculous, they had missed Hawaii after all those centuries.

And, uh, he was the first European almost certainly to, uh, certainly to land and describe these people. And, um, he was amazed by them for many, many reasons, but more especially that they were Polynesian. They were the same people he had encountered in New Zealand, the same people that he encountered in French Polynesia and Easter Island. We're talking about massive distances. distances and he began he was really beginning to piece together the idea that these people you know this Polynesian diaspora would they were them the only way it could have happened is that they were extraordinary voyagers you know they these weren't just accidental drifting these were migrations when geneticists now look at the the Polynesian diaspora um do they have any sense of when and where they became seafaring people like coming out of where yeah the best scholarship i've seen on it is you know the the

the main idea now is that they originated in taiwan okay which is i mean you know how far that is so taiwan um starting to sail eastward from taiwan uh through micronesia and melanesia and uh and finally landing probably in tonga is one of the certain early places that they landed and kind of created an empire and and then uh and then um tahiti and then finally hawaii and the very last arrivals to any of these islands was new zealand you know that was the farthest away oh no they found new zealand the polynesians found new zealand after they found hawaii probably yes i'm not absolutely sure on that but um i think yes i think that the theory is that the maori what we call the maori today are um were the last it was the last of the great lands of polynesia settled got it got it uh if the spanish had found it let's say the span let's say he found

the spanish had found it was there the idea that they would counter that that he would like counter that claim or was it just a was it just a curiosity he wouldn't have personally countered it i mean they were they had some weapons on board but they wouldn't have been able to do any kind of uh actual fighting you know he wouldn't have tried to expel them or something like that but he understood that he had to report back to uh the admiralty uh and uh you know that they would want to know all about whether the Spanish had been there or not. You know, he's constantly looking over his shoulder, wondering. Also, this is another thing is like, who knows, maybe back in Europe, we're at war with Spain again or we're at war with France.

And he had to wonder and worry that perhaps he was gonna have to get on a war footing all of a sudden uh here comes a ship a french ship are we at war again uh it's a crazy thing you know he's trying to explore and he's also got one foot in the kind of the military mindset at the same time how quickly does uh how quickly do things go South between him and the Hawaiians? Well, uh, so his first, uh, stop was Kauai and, um, he, uh, things went pretty poorly from the very beginning. He sent, um, and a young officer to look for water and look for a good landing place. And, uh, uh, the, the Kauaians are going crazy.

They, they don't know who these people are, what these ships are. They, they may think that they were gods. Um, they certainly, uh,

were curious about the metal, uh, because they had seen in driftwood little flex and specks of metal, but they'd never seen so much metal. From disintegrated whalers or whatever yeah now had they so did they know about europeans and ships but just hadn't seen them yet or they not even almost certainly they had never seen europeans but but had they heard had they heard tell you know i mean uh not that i've been able the scholars have been able to prove there seems like a full like a full-on just shock

yeah there is a there are rumors of possible uh dutch shipwreck and another spanish shipwreck that may have happened centuries earlier but um they were shocked and amazed. And there was kind of this weird feeling of celebration and rapture, like their world was about to change. And so they come, so this officer goes in to find water and immediately the, the Hawaiians gather around his rowboat. And this dude is a trigger happy, this officer, and he shoots a Hawaiian and kills him instantly, uh, shoots him right in the sternum, you know, right in the chest. He feels threatened for some reason. He feels threatened. I mean, you know, he, he thought they were trying to steal the boat, the boat or something, but in fact, they were trying to pull it in because the surf was so large, uh, and so heavy. Um, so within minutes of arrival, they've killed a Hawaiian.

And of course this freaks the Hawaiians out, the Kauaians, I should say. This is the island of Kauai. And they don't know what this implement is that just killed one of their countrymen. And they're amazed by it and shocked. And they all just run, run back to shore. But after that, Cook does come ashore and things go very peacefully and very well. And on the same, on this back to Kauai. Yeah. On the same day. Uh, and then, and the next day, uh, and, um, but then a bunch of, uh, and a bunch of men ultimately

do make it ashore and the, yes, there's sexual encounters and probably the spread of venereal disease. He goes to a heiau, a temple, and describes their ceremonies. He goes to their plantations where they're growing breadfruit and you know all kinds of uh you know elaborate um architecture to kind of hold in the water um you know he's describing all this stuff he knows that uh this is an amazing place and he's hearing from and by the way he can understand them because he's been some of his men were had become fluent in polynesian language by then. And this is the same language, essentially, with some variations that they were speaking in Tahiti. So he's hearing from these local people in Kauai that, hey, we're just one island. There's a bunch more over this way.

You know, Oahu and Maui and Hawaii and Lanai. So he's realizing this is a big discovery. This is a big find. And there's a, there's a lot here. And so, but he's still got his mind on, I gotta get to Alaska. You know, I, you know, there's a, I gotta, and I have to do it in the summertime. So he's got a timeline that he's trying to, a deadline that he's trying to follow. Where does he go from there?

From Kauai, he goes, he goes right across the Atlantic Ocean, excuse me, the Pacific Ocean to, to Oregon, you know, and make, and starts working his way up the coast. Again? No, no, no. This is the first. Oh, you're talking about this the first time around. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's very confusing because he, you know, he stumbles upon Kauai on his way. He didn't think, he thought he'd just be sailing across the giant bulge of the Pacific Ocean forever until he made landfall in North America. Okay, so this stop in Kauai when they kill the guy is on his way to the North America coast.

Correct. The U.S. Alaska coast. Correct. Then he does his adventures up there. Right. Runs out of coast. Correct. The U.S. Alaska coast. Correct. Then he does his adventures up there. Right. Runs out of time. Right. And he's getting, then he had, but then he decides to double back and he goes back to.

Yes. Hawaii. And he, and he makes land, the first island he sees on his way back is Maui. And he thinks he's going to go there and, you know, replenish his ship. But then another island, a bigger island, the big island of Hawaii, kind of shifts into his view. And he's like, wait a minute, I'm going over there. That's even bigger.

And there's snow, you know, there's snow on top of this mountain. It's one, you know, by some definitions, it's the tallest mountain in the world because it's, you know, if you start from, from the starts in the trench for the trench. Yeah. And, um, so he's amazed by this place and he's like, that's where I got to go. And, and that ends up being a place of his death.

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They brought from home. That's a good question. I don't know. Um, they're constantly filling the cast, you know, by, you know, like Cape town by the time, by the time they get to Cape town, they're running out of food. And that's one of, one of the things about Cape town is that it was a Dutch, uh, replenishing station that, you know, you could get everything you needed there, um, whether it was salt pork or, um, you know, uh, get everything you needed there, whether it was salt pork or, you know, hardtack biscuits or, you know, they had pretty much everything.

The Dutch were really good at not only replenishing Dutch vessels, but selling to the ships from other countries, European countries. But then they're always scrounging, right? Always scrounging. Everywhere they go. They're always scrounging and eating a lot of weird food. And Cook, again, is demanding that his men eat fresh food and fresh vegetables and anything that they can find. And, you know, so that's, yeah, that's a big part of it.

Plus, you know, a lot of them are, you know, they're out there. Why not put a line in the water, you know, they're out there. Why not put a line in the water? You know, they're constantly fishing. They're constantly, when they come ashore, they're constantly hunting. So, yeah. Do they even mention like, oh, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, what are the favorites? Because I think that's like with the Lewis and Clark expedition, there's always like, or any of these sort of stories, it's like, this is what they preferred.

Dog. Dog, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I put together this thing. there's always like or any of these sort of stories it's like this is what they preferred dog dog yeah I mean I I put together this thing I don't know if we want to go into this but a little bit hit us with a copy

I've been thinking about having a party to celebrate the the arrival of the new book and having some really weird food and then going through

the book and realizing some of the extremely weird food that they ate. And I put together a kind of a little menu. For sure. So yeah, everything on here is in the book, but I've arranged it as though it were some kind of gourmet banquet. But, you know, we start with aperitif and appetizers of like any good banquet, grog, spruce beer, pate of sea hare, which is, which is a slug that they encountered in Tasmania and puffin squab, young, young puffin.

That's a, uh, they're such cute little birds and apparently they ate a lot of puffin. Really? Uh, and then, uh, you know, amuse bouche, you gotta have something, um, just to get, really get going. And that was a tartar of Curie, uh, liver, the liver of the Curie, which was, um, the ancient dog of New Zealand. It's now extinct. It was often eaten by the Maori.

Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Um, uh, it's a weird looking dog. So, so we've seen. No doubt a dog that had arrived with. With the, with the Polynesians. And then when it became like a sort of went feral and then now it's gone. And now it's gone.

Although you can see it in some museums, uh, stuffed, you know. Huh. Uh, kind of like some of the things in this room. I mean, it's kind of strange looking, but, um. What I'm pulling up looks like a page out of the fucked up old taxidermy. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Yeah.

Kind of like a dingo almost. Yeah. It's, it's probably related in some way. But anyway, a little curry because they were eating dog fairly often on this trip. You mentioned Lewis and Clark. They didn't want to. It wasn't their first choice.

Yeah. But they did. Then you got to have some salad. So the salad I'm just, I'm suggesting in this light relish, you know, they're constantly worried about scurvy, uh, the scurvy as they called it. And, uh, so Cook had all these weird items that he thought could be anti-scorbutic or, you know, anti-scurvy. And they consisted of a carrot marmalade, wart of malt, rob of orange. I don't know what that is. Rabe of orange. Inspicated lemon juice, of course. Not peel of orange,

not the peel? Maybe it is. I don't know. And saloop, which is this root vegetable that they steeped for a long time. First course,

loggerhead sea turtle burgoo. They ate so much turtle. Is that right? Yeah. And of course, itgerhead sea turtle burgoo. They ate so much turtle. Is that right? Yeah. And of course it's very tasty. That's not, no one is suffering. You can probably stock up so quick when you're pulling into these places that aren't.

Yeah. When you're pulling into these places that aren't getting harvested. Right. Sea turtle, sea turtle is, is, is that, that was, that was, that was good eating. And. You could probably train, keep them alive for a while

and transport them well you read about when they would go to the galapagos and get the land ones um flipping them over yeah in the hold they'd stay alive for months yeah yeah they come with their own packaging basically and uh you know as long as they're alive they're still fresh um so yeah that was whenever they ran into turtle, they were, they were in seventh heaven. Australian ghost shark fins are a delicacy and they would like to fry those in seal grease. Seal, seal grease, they would render the blubber of seals that they went down to this island

called Kergulin, which is way down there, almost to Antarctica. And they would render this seal blubber which they described as no butter in england was ever thought half so good really uh it sounds disgusting making their own oil rendering oil they were which they cooked with they use it in their lamps um you know they had to be pretty resourceful they're you know as you said running out of food pretty early on. So they have to fill their lard or some other. Better than butter.

It's the bear grease of the Pacific. Better than butter. But this. That's a good way of putting it. This, uh, ghost shark looks like an insane creature. It is. Don't they call it goblin shark too? Or is that a different shark?

Sometimes they're called elephant fish. Let me see. Turn it toward me. It's like those, uh, what do we call them up at the shack? The little ones you catch? Oh, spiny dogfish. No, no, no.

The, what am I thinking of? Rat fish. They look like. Oh, yeah, like a rat fish. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. A rat fish. I don't know.

Second course, salted Hawaiian boar. Now, they ate a lot of pig. Great eating. Obviously, they ate a lot of pig. Great eating. Obviously, no complaints there. But everything on the ship was covered in cockroach excrement. So it was just, they could never deal. You always hear about the rats. The rats were a big problem.

But an even bigger problem was the cockroaches and their stuff, their shit. The Polynesians had spread pigs all over the place right they had they brought them with them everywhere they went uh except new zealand somehow the pig didn't make it to new zealand um until you know much later it was there now yeah the uh the cockroaches uh that a little bit surprises me that when you're starting out you can't just when it's, just clean that son of a bitch out. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, he's right.

I guess, man, because then you got all the foods. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's not like you clean your house and cockroaches are gone. Yeah. I got it. It's bad.

Okay. Then the main course is, they ate a ton of this walrus, but they called it sea beef. And they would eat it on kelp, bed of kelp, you know, good eating there. But the problem with the walrus was it really actually tasted horrible. And the, this, the chef, the galley chef, uh, described how you have to prepare it just to make it palatable because it's so, I don't know, greasy and.

Yeah. I've had some walrus. You've had some walrus? Yeah. Uh, what'd you think? Well, I had fermented walrus,

which I didn't like. Oh. Yeah. On that subject, dude, the whale blubber is legit. Like, that is delicious, man. Mm-hmm.

The bow, like, pieces of bowhead whale where you have the, it's like a French fry with a black tip on it. Yeah, that was pretty good. So it's a little bit of the skin. Imagine a French fry where most of it's white and on the ends like a black it's like a mat the same proportions as a matchstick right the size of a french fry the head of the match being skin and the wood of the match being blubber good eating huh oh my god it's good man yeah well i was just going to read the how they prepared it uh just real quick the walrus the walrus big walrus fam i'm sure i'd like it if I had it cooked right.

So they're up in Alaska and they're, you know, seeing a lot of walrus and they shoot the walrus and it's an unfair ordeal just getting them into the boat. But we let it hang up for one day that the blood might drain from it. After that, we tow it overboard for 12 hours. Then we boil it for four hours and the next day

cut it into chunks and cook it for several days. Even then, it is too rank and disgustful, both in smell and taste to make use of, except with plenty of pepper. It's funny that they toed it because your buddy, uh, Ron Layton says it pickles it. I like that they said even, even after that, it was. I like that they said even after that, it was bad. As if like, you know, we did everything we could. I don't think they were. Typically, I think when someone's preparing a food for several days and they're dragging it overboard, I'd be like, that might be one of your issues. I don't think they were trimming it good.

Yeah. I think if you'd got down in there. I think less is more. If you got down in there to the core of the meat, got down and like trimmed it, core of the meat, there's no way it's going to be bad. I don't know. I think they had a lot of surface fat in there, man. I had a whale steak. I'd let it go back in time.

That's what I would do. I'd go back in time to supervise that whale, that walrus. Well, the captain cook himself was famously able to eat just about anything. Yeah. He never complained. He drew the line. Well, you know what? To back him up, I couldn't get into it.

I didn't like it. Cal's like, oh, you just got to try another bite. I'm like, dude, I don't need another bite. I don't need another bite to tell you I don't like walrus meat. But at the end of the meal, we got dessert, moldy yams. There were a lot of yams. That's sweet.

They're the only kind of sweet thing they had. Or sweet and savory seagull pie. They ate a lot of seagulls. And you would pair that with a digestive, of course. Algae slimed cask water spiked with lemon juice and vinegar. Or this was all over Polynesia.

It was the kava. You know, they were drinking this viscous fluid called kava, which is a drug. But the way they would do it is a lowly servant of the local chief would chew it and chew it and chew it and chew it. And they spit it into this bowl with all his saliva. And then that's what you would drink. Um, and, uh, it, you got, you kind of buzzed and, uh, it was a good way to finish, finish off a good meal. Did they travel with rum?

Yes. Well, grog, which was like, uh, 50, 50 water and rum. Yeah. How much do you want to get into cook's death? I know, you know, you you gotta like there's two kinds of writers you got the ones who are worried about telling the end of the books i think people are not going to go get the book right i think those ones are wrong then you got writers who is like you know obviously it's it's hundreds of pages long we're only talking about a little bit there's

tons more to read and learn about i i um I, um, obviously it's not a spoiler, uh, to, to sit, to note that Cook died a horrible and violent death. We touched on that earlier. Uh,

I think it's what he's most famous for, honestly, is that, uh, he's famous for dying. He's famous for getting killed on the shores, uh, of,

of the big Island that you, you go to the spot where he was killed. You, you said you been by it. I hiked down to it. There's a monument there, uh, that is, um, that notes the exact spot where he, where he met his end. He was hacked to pieces. He was dismembered. Uh, his bones were spread all over the Island. Uh, and, um, the Hawaiians, both the ancient Hawaiians at the time and current Hawaiians, native Hawaiians insist that he was, obviously they say he was not eaten. Let's back up a minute. Yeah.

I got to call it basic questions. How long had he spent interacting with the, the, the group of Hawaiians that killed him? So the, the people that lived in and around that cove. Right. Was it, was it day one? Was he hanging out there for months on end? No, they were, they, they, first of all, they

circumnavigated the entire island of Hawaii and had all sorts of encounters out, out in the water, but they finally made landfall. I mean, uh, anchored in, uh in Kealakeukia Bay in January of 1779. And a month later, about a month later, he's actually on Valentine's Day. So he's having interactions. Yeah. And there's loads of debate among scholars about whether the Hawaiians thought he was the god Lano, who was a god of fertility.

And it was, he arrived during this festival of the Makahiki, which was to honor the god Lano. And here comes this guy in these two ships that like had never been seen before. And he was certainly treated like some kind of celebrity uh and probably they did at first think that he was kind of the reincarnation of lano and these early ceremonies where i mean they're they're worshiping him they bow down to him um you know thousands of people out in the out in on the lava flats are like bowing down to him. So, so that's an interesting part of the story. Kind of this, this festival is going on. It's the happiest time of their year. It's sort of like carnival. And, um, it's, uh, that's when they

arrive and they, Kilkenny's men have a wonderful couple of weeks there. just some of the very best times of their whole voyage tons of food you know beautiful women made they make all sorts of friends with uh with the local uh men and they go out they go hunting they go fishing they you know they're having the time of their lives but but then it's time to leave cook decides it's time to go they're going to go back to uh they're going to go back to alaska well a little bit of this um adulation has a fade because you got to have balls to put a knife into a god right right yes i mean so so they're after a while putting together that you know there's this there's this trilogy you ever see the highlands trilogy about about papa

new guinea no it's really interesting but they talk about a moment um it's it's a narrative about first contact which in the highlands was late like lately 1900s you're still having first contact with groups and they and uh eventually these these indigenous people from papa new guinea who they think these white guys are gods that show up. But they took a real interest in their excrement. And they're like, that ain't a god. Yeah. That's us.

Yeah. But that's a really good question about the boldness of putting, you know, deciding to kill a God or someone who might, they may have thought was a God. But what happened was they actually left Hawaii. And for two or three days were crawling up the coast of the big island on the way to Alaska when they encountered a storm. And the storm snapped the foremast.

And he has to put in somewhere and repair the ship and find a tree you know the large enough to repair the mast he can't go any further so he turns back around and goes back to that same bay and now there's realizing he he's not a god if he was a god exactly his boat is broken and um and why wouldn't he just fix it himself if he was a God? Um, so from the minute they arrived, returned, um, everything was different. They were not, they were not, um, you know, that they were not treated in any, anything like the same manner. Wasn't there, wasn't there one of his men who died when they return and they got, and they're like, clearly. Yes. This man is. There was a guy named Wattman who died of some

kind of disease and they buried him there, but, and the Wyans treated him with great respect, but, you know, and the burial and so forth. But they're like, hmm, these guys. This is suspicious. These white dudes aren't, they don't seem to be gods. They seem to be very much like us. And, uh, so clearly it had begun to dawn on, on everyone from the lowly servants all the way up to the chiefs and, and, and the kahunas

that these were not gods anymore. And, um, I, yeah, I don't like to talk about, you know, this precise circumstances that lead to the death because, you know, that's, um, I, yeah, I don't like to talk about, you know, this precise circumstances that lead to the death because, you know, that's, that's like the, it's escalation, the sort of rapid escalation of miscues and cultural misunderstandings and, you know, obviously the language barrier, uh, and things get out of hand real quickly. It's remarkable. Go ahead, sir. Is there different versions of what happened in British history and Hawaiian history? Yeah, there are. There are. And including, I mean, one of the stories, one of the Hawaiian versions, several of the

Hawaiian versions have Cook having sexual relations with Hawaiian princesses, both on Kauai and in Hawaii. And that may have contributed to some of the misunderstandings or, you know, but the English say that's just a story that comes from American missionaries who hated the British and wanted to make Cook look like a terrible guy. One question about it is how did they get their hands on the captain? Why is there not like a lot of layers of security? Yeah. Well, there were Marines that uh, that came ashore with him. Uh, he was, I won't go into all the details,

but he was trying to basically kidnap the king of Hawaii and get him on his ship, um, hold him for ransom so that he could get back a rowboat that some Hawaiian warrior had stolen. And he was dragging, not quite dragging, he was- And he himself, I know you don't want every single detail, but it's just so bizarre to me that he himself is there. He himself went ashore to do this.

He was roaring- He's like, I'll do it, damn it. Yep, and he was roaring mad he was roaring mad he was so mad at this yeah they're like they won't give us the boat back by god i'll get that boat back pretty much with a contingent of of royal marines who were not very good at their jobs by the way and uh uh things escalated real fast and um here here here's what i will say about his death is that uh almost certainly you lay all the nitty-gritty out in the book oh my god yeah it takes it's the last third of the book is really kind of what what happened on that in that on

that fateful day um but but one of the things that they had done third of the book well yeah that's hawaii the last third of the book i suppose it's the last 50 pages it's the real knife goes in real slowly chapter but chapter 19 the knife goes deeper but what's interesting is they, the blacksmiths had been churning out these crude knives as gifts to, to the Hawaiians, uh, cause they were so interested in metal and, you know, they were just,

just churning them out as fast as they could. And it's one of those knives, there's crude knives that the British gave them that ended up killing cook. So no to self, you know, don't give people you don't know very well a weapon a metal weapon um wow so um yeah so that's um and then of course there's a lot of debate about what happened to cook's body the only parts of him were returned to the british um there's a story that uh some, some young Hawaiian children, um, saw Cook's heart hanging up to dry.

And, um, this is a story that Mark Twain, um, tells when he visited Hawaii, uh, and, and that this heart was, uh, they thought it was a dog's heart and, uh, ate it. Um, so that's really the only possible known incidence of cannibalism here twain's getting the story a century later yeah yeah so it doesn't say like probably just shy of a century a century later yeah about a century later yeah take that so take it with a grain of salt take your take your heart and that story with a grain of salt man yeah yeah and some cockroach excrement when you said they gave parts of him back uh why how like you know i mean like well so the new captain whose name is captain clark he was number two now he's number one uh is demanding to demanding the hawaiians to give back his remains because the wines didn't quite quite understand the British, you know, that they wanted his whole body back.

They wanted to have a formal burial at sea. And they're like, we don't have his body. You know, we have some parts of his body. And they gave him a part of his thigh, some bones, his part of his body. Happy to give you a part. And they gave him a part of his thigh, some bones, part of his skull, but had been scalped, traditionally, I mean, this is what they did to their own revered chiefs is they would burn the body, uh, scrape away any remaining flesh, uh, and save the bones. That's where the mana was, the power of, of the body and the, and different chiefs would, you know, they would spread it all over the Island and, and, and, uh, hold onto these

bones as relics. And that's what they had planned to do with cook and did do, but some of the bones somehow got returned and they assumed that they were cooks and, you know, that they were telling the truth. Do you mess, mess the wrong.

How did that not escalate into a full on like that? That would be my next question. Like, were they, did, did the English just feel like they were outnumbered and it would be my next question. Like. Yeah. Were they, did, did the English just feel like they were outnumbered and it would be very dumb or like.

Yes. Well, it did escalate by the way, but they, they wanted those remains back. They also wanted, um, four different Marines also were killed in this confrontation. Oh, I didn't know that. And they wanted the remains of those Marines too.

And, uh, so they had a delicate. That's a weird deal. Like how come, who are those hosers? Do you know what I mean? Like when someone real famous, like, you know, like Cook, I never even heard about these other guys. Yeah. Yeah.

There's four that met their end. Those people's families are probably like, dude, come on. There's always some no names in Star Trek that get killed in Canada. Red shirts. Yeah. So four other guys yeah yeah and a bunch of hawaiians probably as many as 20 warriors were killed that day too that day yeah by the

marines who who were shooting constant fast but it took forever to reload these damn muskets gun fight yeah yeah muskets you know it takes forever to in my head this i'm glad you're telling in my head he was up there with just with him or some other guy, and it was just that. I didn't know it broke out into a... Yeah. But so they waited to escalate and retaliate because they wanted those remains back. And they figured, well, if they retaliate now, they'll never get the remains back. So they did get the remains back.

And then they turned the cannons on shore shore and a lot of people were killed. And we, I don't know that we ever know how many precisely, but probably hundreds were killed. Okay. Really? It'd be turned into a, a, a kind of a battle. Yeah. A pitch battle. Well, or just a.

Oh, I had no idea. Slot there. Yeah. Man, you'd think that, well well who knows what you think was that uh your response would have been like shit got a little sideways let's just pull out yeah and yeah re-approach this in the future yeah like we're pulling up killing our guy yeah over in kawaii over misunderstanding yeah um yes and that's certainly what the captain, Captain Clark wanted to do.

He didn't really want to retaliate, but some of the, uh, junior officers got extremely pissed off. And one of them is a very famous guy named, um, William Bly. Oh. You may, he becomes famous, uh, uh, with the mutiny on the bounty.

Bly was there? Bly was a master of Cook's ship. Uh, he learned, he learned from Cook, you know. Hmm. The other great, uh, officer on this ship was Bly was there? Bly was a master of Cook's ship. He learned from Cook, you know. The other great officer on this ship was Vancouver, who, you know, one of the greatest explorers of all time as well. So there's a cast of characters. Vancouver, Vancouver. Yeah, that Vancouver, yeah. So these young officers get really pissed off that their mentor, this man they love, Captain Cook.

And they just start cutting loose on them. They do. They do, i'm afraid it's true especially bligh he's he's he's a really uh severe guy um very very capable seaman but um uh kind of a badass uh take no prisoners kind of so we're learning more about blind the book you will you will he's all over the book he's, uh, he's an important part of the story. I forgot to mention him.

Dude, I can't wait to read the book, man. I'm excited. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me back. How many years did you work on the book? This one took me forever, partly because of COVID, uh, which. Oh, because it interrupted all your research.

Yeah. A lot of the trips and stuff, but it took me about five years to do and it's finally out. Can't believe it. What are you doing next? I'm coming back to the West. I'm writing about Colorado, Colorado territory. And during the civil war, I'm writing about the Sand Creek massacre. I'm writing about the civil war. I'm writing about the gold rush and the creation of Denver. Another kind of like blood and thunder.

How are you going to, how are you gonna how are you gonna bracket that out i'm working on it i haven't figured it all out yet but i'm but you got you narrowed in on like an era a bunch of big events but like you know blood and thunder was kit carson right right you gotta there's a character who was at sand Creek, an amazing guy named Silas Soul. I don't know if you've heard of him, but he's the officer that refused the orders to attack the Cheyenne and ended up testifying against his commander, Colonel Chivington. Yeah, I know that name. And we know about what really happened at sand creek because of this this young man who was 26 at the time uh it was very brave and then was he was ultimately murdered uh for his for his testimony so he's the main character uh silas soul is his name got it

but uh yeah what what you can you uh how do you bracket this in years? During the Civil War, basically 1860 to 1865. Oh, okay. So it'll be carried, whatever you're looking at will be carried within those years of the Civil War. Yeah, that's my idea. What's cool about that is it's just so, unless you're a fan of the good, the bad, and the ugly,

which I am, the the the west in the civil war is not widely understood i mean i don't even fully understand it like you're always surprised like oh that's right there was sort of like there's a there's a sort of theater of operations yeah in the west and desert southwest during the civil war and everybody's reading about antietam and gettysburg right but they're like they're like shooting it out in the desert you desert Southwest during the civil war. And everybody's reading about Antietam and Gettysburg. Right. But they're like, they're like shooting it out in the desert,

you know? Well, I live in Santa Fe and I'm, I, I, you know, very curious about what was going on during the civil war out here. And, um,

you know, there was a big battle near Santa Fe called the battle of glory at a pass. And, uh, this guy saw the soul was there. And, um, you know, and a lot of other

shenanigans going on out west you know it's just uh it's a part of the story i think most americans don't know about you know when they talk about the civil war uh so you just go from one to the next yep i'm pretty deep into this next one already you still do magazine reporting no not much anymore. Just books? Magazines aren't what they used to be. No, no. They're thinner and they're printed on cheaper paper and they're kind of sad shadow of what they used to be, it feels like.

But I occasionally write for some, yeah. And I still have an association with Outside Magazine, which is still great magazines, doing what it can. But no, I just focus on the books mainly. It keeps me pretty busy for years at a time. Has Hollywood come knocking about Cook? Not yet, but maybe after this wonderful podcast.

Maybe better. Trying to think who's going to. He was 50? He was 50. I might do my acting. Yeah, right. I might start to. I'll be like, I know a guy who's going to... He was 50? He was 50. I might do my acting. Yeah, right. I'll be like, I know a guy who's exactly that age. The timing is uncanny for you.

Blimey! No, this guy's exactly that age. He's exactly that age. Perfect. Oh, no, I wouldn't be because he was 50 when he left. By the time they make the movie i'll be the yeah yeah yeah i'll be 53 it takes a while for you know to get all that underway dude when i do my dying scene on the beach it's gonna blow you away man you could have

danny bolton be the guy that kills you i'm gonna give speeches i'm gonna borrow pull some lines from Shakespeare. It's going to be a long death scene. You'd look good in a tricorn hat and leggings. Chewing a walrus stick. I'm going to be like, suck it, Brody.

All right. Again, the very excellent writer who meticulous researcher, a great eye for the unusual Hampton sides and the wide, wide sea Imperial ambition. First contact in the fateful final voyage of captain James cook out. Now,

New York times, bestselling author of ghost soldiers up on top there. Um, thanks for coming, man. I appreciate it. Best of luck with the book. Yeah, I appreciate it. It's been really fun. I've enjoyed this.

All right, great. Thank you. See you next time. Yep. They're wild esperados when they're in care And if it runs over mountains or swims in the sea, they'll bag up a sockeye, a turkey or a bear. And then they'll kill it all over again.

And on the air, it's the Meat E eater podcast for me It's the meat eater podcast for me