“The Wide Wide Sea,” by Hampton Sides, recounts Cook’s search for the Northwest Passage
I’m grateful to the Santa Fe bookseller who put Hampton Sides’s “Blood and Thunder” into my hands some years ago. With Kit Carson’s death-defying exploits at its center, the book revolutionized my concept of America’s westward expansion. Sides’s latest effort, “The Wide Wide Sea,” is a gripping account of Captain James Cook’s final voyage.
In addition to Cook’s story, other narratives weave through the book. One particularly fascinating account is that of Mai, a native of Raiatea, a volcanic island 130 miles northwest of present-day Tahiti. When Mai was a boy, warriors from Bora Bora invaded Raiatea, murdered his father, seized his family’s land and enslaved much of the population, forcing his family to take refuge in Tahiti.
It isn’t possible in this short space to describe Sides’s hair-raising accounts of the journey, an itinerary that led from England to present day South Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, Hawaii, north to Alaska and beyond, and back to Hawaii. Just repairing and re-provisioning the ship required herculean efforts.
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