In 1776, Great Britain’s King George sent his Navy to put down a rebellion fomented by British colonists on the eastern shore of North America. Simultaneously, he sponsored Captain James Cook to explore the unknown west coast of North America. Great Britain was especially interested in the northern reaches of the continent, hoping Cook could locate the Northwest Passage across the top of Canada. For 300 years explorers had looked from the east. Why they thought a poke from the west would emerge in the Atlantic when no one had located an opening is one of those flaws in logic that comes with a 300-year quest.
Cook was one of the most famous explorers of his era. He had already completed two global expeditions. His crewmen knew of his fame and kept detailed journals. His own notes were published. For more than two centuries, journalists and authors have chronicled Captain Cook’s life. Hampton Sides does the remarkable. He has read all the accounts and then written this book as if it were being reported in the newspapers. As readers, we live each day’s storms, make first contact with Polynesians, suffer the trials of monotonous food and freezing arctic temperatures, and the relief (if you’re a sailor) of landing on a tropical isle with luscious fruits and curvaceous females. Each event appears to happen in real time
All the while, Sides overlays a 21st century perspective on the hazards and racism of colonization with the 18th century toughness needed to spend years at sea away from land, family, and home, instead living in tight quarters with the same handful of unwashed crewmen.
At the end of the nineteenth century, because no one had ever been there, the virtual consensus among geographers was that the North Pole resided in a warm, open sea. One needed only to sail a ship through the ice surrounding it to reach the open ocean. In 1879, Captain George DeLong and a crew of 30-plus sailors set off for the North Pole. At end of the their first year, their ship, having failed to find open water, was instead frozen in place, where they remained out of communication with the rest of the world for three years. Half of their time was in near total darkness and nearly all of their days and nights were below freezing. Finally, sheets of ice crushed and sank the U.S.S. Jeannette. The crew walked and sailed for hundreds of days across ice floes and freezing oceans with hopes of reaching the coldest landmass on earth, the north coast of Siberia. The test of human physical and psychological endurance is simultaneously contemporary and otherworldly. The relationship of European and American men to the environment, native people of the Arctic, to women, and stoicism is history not to be overlooked.
