Review

Captain Cook. The mere mention of his name conjures up images of far-away islands, small boats braving the high seas, and death at the hands of angry Natives. So much for the images, but from them springs the reality, which is a brilliant seaman, a genius navigator, an imaginative leader who kept his men free from scurvy, who rued the negative impact of the White world his cruises carried to the Indigenous, a loyal subject who died trying to fulfill his royal mission. That, too, was Captain James Cook, a man so revered that more than a few crew members volunteered for each of his three circumnavigations of the globe. As Hampton Sides skillfully demonstrates, Cook was a man of parts: an early anthropologist, "Cook never attempted to convert Native people to Christianity and rarely moralized on the supposed shortcomings of their customs and beliefs." Further, Sides reports, "his interest was more inquisitive than acquisitive, more empirical than imperial...[Cook] tried to follow an ethic of impartial observation born of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution." The concern Cook showed for the Indigenous was a reflection of the concern he showed for his crew: roughly two million European sailors died from scurvy between 1600 and 1800, Sides states, but Cook's awareness of the importance of diet kept his men alive, and when the ship returned to England after a voyage of three years, not a single man had been lost to that dread disease, an unprecedented feat. Cook's third voyage, the subject of Sides' book, was to find the Northwest Passage that sailors had been seeking for years. From the sybaritic South Sea islands across the vast Pacific to Alaska, through the Bering Sea and right into the polar ice cap, Cook sailed on, owing it to King and country to do his best. Even his best could not produce a route that didn't exist, so he and his men repaired to what they had named the Sandwich Islands (better known now as Hawaii) to refuel and refurbish over the winter prior to their next attempt in Alaska. It was during this long lay-over in the winter of 1778-1779 that Cook and his men overstayed their welcome. Following the disappearance of a supply boat that the Natives had taken, Cook's choleric rage overtook him and cost him his life, clubbed to death in a totally unnecessary brawl. It was an inglorious end to a life well lived by a man who was in many respects way ahead of his time.

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