The late 1700s South Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook demonstrate the law of unintended consequences. Cook discovered the Pacific islands and their people through his charts and reports while searching for a westward ocean passage from Europe to Asia.
Some academicians and cultural revisionists have blamed Cook for bringing European diseases, weapons, and colonization in recent decades. However, Hampton Sides' latest book, “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook,” shows that Polynesian island life and civilizations were not always wonderful
Priests sometimes sacrificed people. Warriors mangled corpses. Sometimes defeated warriors were enslaved. Hawaii reveres King Kamehameha, who unified the islands in 1810 at the sacrifice of thousands of warriors.
Some Hawaiian and Pacific Island Indigenous groups believe Cook destroyed their customs, therefore Sides' book will enrage them. Sides went Hawaii researching this work and found an obelisk where Cook was slain in 1779 painted red. You are on native land was put over Cook's name.
According to Sides, Cook didn't come to conquer. He relies on Cook's and other crew members' diaries and his own South Pacific reports. The novel portrays Cook as a good seaman and person, urging the crew to sail with him. The late 1770s trip crew remarked that Cook seemed anxious, unlike usual.
We may never know what happened to Cook on his final expedition, but his voyages opened the Pacific islands to the globe, changing life forever. Did Cook's explorations make him evil? Sides argue in 387 pages of meticulous, fascinating reporting that Cook was a navigator and mapmaker who substantially expanded our understanding of the planet.
His journals and maps reaching England after his death were sensational. There was no ocean passage from North America to the Pacific, but Europeans recognized that Pacific islands were home to several cultures, and Sides reports that Cook respected them all.
However, neither Cook nor his fellow British mariners could swim, which would have better connected them to the Pacific peoples, whose cultures and livelihoods were closely tied to the ocean.
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