As I mentioned in another post, I have been reading a lot more lately. It all started a while ago when I began picking up the physical books in the Orphan X series. Then for my 50th birthday, my wife got me a Kindle Paperwhite to read books on. Since then, I have had both a digital book and a physical book in the process of being read at the same time.
Currently, I am reading a book called Nemesis on my Kindle and a physical copy of the book Slow Horses.
This post isn't about either of those though.
I'm trying to write this post in the @scrobble front end, but it seems to be having issues with images today, so I am probably going to have to publish it then go back and edit it with @peakd.
"The Wide Wide Sea" by Hampton Sides is a book that I picked up from the Amazon digital store for something like $.99 or $1.99. I subscribe to a couple email newsletters called BookBub, and Pixel of Ink. Those newsletters send me a daily email with different "deals" on books.
Some of them are old, some of them are newer, but when you can get a book for less than $2 or $3 who really cares.
"The Wide Wide Sea" was first published in 2024 and it is a narrative retelling of the third and final voyage of Captain Cook. The book was created using various sources including the journals of Cook himself, members of his crew, and other historical documents.
The full title of the book is actually "The Wide Wide Seas, First contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook". You can probably see why I shortened it now.
There is a really good foreword in the book that talks a bit about Captain Cook and gives you some background on him. With that in mind, you start to realize that he wasn't necessarily the villian that the woke world has tried to make him out to be.
Sure, he made mistakes, but in the grand pantheon of historic explorers, he was actually pretty chill and in some respects quite cautious in his dealings with other cultures.
In fact, rumor has it that Captain James T Kirk was loosely based on Captain Cook, and if you are familiar with Star Trek, the idea of the prime directive stays at the front of your mind as you read about Cooks adventures.
This final voyage was commissioned by the British government and had Cook sailing to the West coast of the United States to find access to the Northwest Passage from the Western end versus the Eastern end as they had tried to discover in the past.
I think the two things that stand out to me the most about the voyages of Captain Cook are first off how slow it actually was. Don't get me wrong, I know that vessels back then couldn't travel that fast, but it seems they spent a lot of time just island hopping around the Pacific. To their detriment at some points if you bother to read the book.
In addition to that, and this was covered in the foreword, but I was struck by the attitudes towards sex among the island inhabitants like the Tahitians and Hawaiians. While you might expect that the crew of the ships simply forced their will upon the islanders, it becomes evident through the journals that the ladies were literally throwing themselves at the sailors.
The fact that there are multiple accounts of this leads me to believe that it wasn't just some lone sailor seeing the world through rose colored glasses while behind the scenes he was committing atrocities.
As I said in my description, this was a slow read for me. The fact that the journals were converted into a narrative format definitely helped the flow of the book, but there was still a ton of information to absorb.
If you are a fan of history, and you want to learn a bit more about the early exploration days of the areas around New Zealand, Tahiti, the Hawaiian Islands, the West coast of the US, Canada, and Alaska, and the Eastern coast of the former Soviet Union, I highly encourage you to read this book!
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Originally posted through scrobble.life/books.
