About Today’s Title

It’s almost Christmas. Millions of Americans are on the road back home to family, or off to a well-deserved vacation. Others are looking forward to a quiet day off from work to rest their weary bones before heading back out there. Still others are snuggling with a good book to take their mind off of the frazzle-inducing preparations for the big day.

So how could I not find a Christmas song with a line appropriate for today’s book review? Today’s title, if you haven’t already guessed, is a line from the old Christmas tune Mele Kalikimaka, which Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters recorded in 1950. This Hawaiian Christmas song fits the bill for today’s book, with it’s tragic ending on the shores of the Big Island.

While the song didn’t hit number 1, and gets less play these days, it still pops up enough to be a familiar tune for many. Of course, for late baby boomers like me it might be most familiar from its appearance in the 1989 movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Here’s the video of the official, remastered recording by Bing and the Andrews sisters, and, for your Christmas pleasure, here’s a short video of the Vacation movie scene where Clark Griswold dreams of summer by the pool (and other things).

Captain James Cook is one of the most famous explorers from the vaunted Age of Exploration. Most people know he was English, and that he circumnavigated the world, and perhaps they even know that he was not only a leading explorer of his day but also an excellent cartographer, making maps of far flung and newly discovered lands that proved a great boon to sailors who came after him. Some will know of Cook as his “voyages have come under attack as part of a larger reassessment of the legacy of empire,” as the author notes at the start of this book.

In The Wide Wide Sea Hampton Sides takes us back to the 1770s and right into the life of James Cook and the events of his final voyage, with its tragic ending. Sides is excellent at what many call “narrative nonfiction”, i.e. true stories that “read like a novel”.

While I wouldn’t say that this book reads like a novel it is highly readable, with great pacing and real depth of character. You feel yourself drawn into the world in the Age of Sail to accompany Cook as the Resolution and the Discovery set off on his final expedition.

The book begins with events between Cook’s second and third expeditions You get to know Mai, a young Polynesian man from the island of Raiatea who accompanied Cook back to England at the end of his second voyage. He quickly became a celebrity and a “human pet” to Joseph Banks, who became his sponsor. Mai ends up setting out with Cook on the third voyage hoping to return home with English weapons to wage war on his enemies from Bora Bora.

Cook’s third voyage took him from the far south around Cape Horn up to Arctic waters, as his task from the English government was to seek the elusive “Northwest Passage”. It was before his first unsuccessful attempt at finding the passage that Cook and his crew became the first Europeans to set eyes on the Hawaiian Islands. And it was after that unsuccessful attempt that he and his crew returned to Hawaii’s big island where Cook, his country’s master of first contact met his violent death.

Sides is a talented journalist an author who has turned in an engaging read that will keep you interested to the end.

RATING: Three and a Half Stars ⭐⭐⭐🌠

RATING COMMENTS: Hampton Sides has delivered an engaging and highly readable account of Captain James Cook’s third and final voyage.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I purchased the ebook from the Kobo Store.