08-12-25 *INTERVIEW* Best-Selling Author Hampton Sides Latest Book 'The Wide Wide Sea'

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thank you for spending little time with us here on Kaway.
You may recall that a few weeks ago I had
a friend of mine and friend of the show on
as a guest again, Admiral James Stevritas, a man who
knows a little and has written a little, and by

(00:20):
a little, I mean a lot about about being a sailor,
about history, about all kinds of things. One of the
truly great military men of our age, Admiral Steve Ritas.
And when he was on the show, we were talking
about books, of course, and he said on the air,
he said, I would like to come in to you

(00:42):
and your listeners a book called The Wide Wide c
by Hampton Sides. And I said, well, if Admiral Stavritas
tells me to read a book, then I say yes, sir,
and I read the book, especially if it's something to
do with with the ocean. And so I got the book.

(01:04):
I read the whole book, and joining us to talk
about his incredible bestseller, which the New York Times listed
as one of the ten best books of last year. Again,
the book is called The Wide Wide see the author himself,
Hampton Sides, thank you so much for making time for us.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
Thank you. It's great to be with you. And I
guess I owe my friend. Admiral Stravite is a you know,
some sort of I don't know, a bottle of wine
or something. He's a great guy and a deep reader. Yes,
so that's nice to get that he liked the book.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, A deep reader, a deep thinker, a really really
interesting guy.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
All right. So when I.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
When I first visited Australia, which was for a two
week long first date with a girl who's now my wife. Uh,
we went to Cooktown. Believe it or not, you know
which is which isn't. And I'm sure you've probably been
the Cooktown multiple times. It's quite it's quite a location.
Even now, I cannot imagine being the first European ever
to land in such a place.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Let's just start with, right, a gut reaction to that.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
Yeah, I think with Captain James Cook, you you have
to peel back the layers of what we know to
be true about the world now, of course, and go
back two centuries ago when there were still these great
swaths of the world that had never been encountered by
by Europeans at least, and In many cases he encountered

(02:31):
uninhabited islands that it's where man had never set foot.

Speaker 4 (02:34):
And just imagine what that was like.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
The wonder, the awe, the mystery of it he had.
You know, a lot of these commanders, a lot of
these captains in that golden age of exploration, had one
or two or three of these kinds of encounters. Captain
Cook had like twenty or thirty of them.

Speaker 4 (02:56):
I don't think.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
There is another captain another not will explore who can
compare to Cook's kind of kind of the breadth and
depth and extent of his exploration accomplishments. And so just
imagine going a place like Tasmania for the first time
and encountering the Aboriginal people there, or Easter Island or

(03:20):
the Maori of New Zealand. You don't know how's it
going to go, or are they going to be friendly?
Are they going to kill you as soon as you land?
He had so many of these extraordinary experiences. And I
hope that the book, I've been told that the book
taps into that sense of wonder and awe and and

(03:41):
you know, takes you back to those times. That said
he is controversial today. His monuments have been destroyed and vandalized.
People have started to view him, Captain Cook as kind
of the ultimate symbol of imperialism and colonialism, which I
think is largely unfair because what they're really what the critic,

(04:04):
the critique is is about those things that came after Cook.
Cook was the explorer, found these places, put them on
the map, described them sort of scientifically and objectively, and
then others came to, you know, exploit the resources, rape
and pillage and bring the germs, and that, you know,

(04:25):
all the things that unraveled many of these quite fragile
island societies. So anyway, that's kind of the background on
Cook in terms of that golden age of exploration.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
And I think for listeners, I think I didn't properly
introduce the book, right. So I told you the book
is called The Wide Wide c But that doesn't tell
you enough. The sub the subtitle of the book is
Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Of Captain James Cook.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
So that that's really what this is about, is Captain
Cook's final voyage, and I think I didn't make that
clear at the beginning.

Speaker 4 (05:01):
So it's confusing.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
It's confusing because he had three of these Rock and
World voyages, each one equally consequential and ambitious, And so
I had to figure out, well, I can't.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Tell ma Al, I'm going to pick them on.

Speaker 4 (05:15):
And I picked the last one for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
I was I was telling my wife the other day
about your book, and she'll read the she'll read the
book next, and she said, they sure don't make them
like that anymore.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
And my and my thinking is.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Of course, you think back to the age of exploration,
and Captain Cook, being around the time of the American Revolution,
was really kind of on the the later end of
what we think of as this big age of exploration
with Magellan and Columbus and all these people like that.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
He was quite a bit after them.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
But and so there were a lot of people doing
crazy exploration. But still some part of me, due to
reading your book, thinks, not only do they not make
them like that anymore, I'm not even sure they made
them like that then, So I would like you to
tell us a little bit about what makes Captain Cook
so special even among the kind of people who, at

(06:08):
least on the surface, were doing basically what he did.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
Yeah, well, you know, I think first and foremost, he
had this unusual for his times and for his for his.

Speaker 4 (06:21):
Profession, this very unusual.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
Sympathy I guess you would call he was sympathetic and
genuinely interested in the people that he encountered, and writes
about them in his journals quite neutrally, you know, like
he's not trying to convert them to Christianity. He's not
trying to make some kind of argument that English society
is is vastly superior, although I do believe he believed

(06:50):
that English society was technologically superior. But he also, you know,
he kind of had this almost agnostic anthrop anthro apology
kind of outlook. He's like a proto anthropologist when he
describes the aboriginities of Australia, or the Tahitians, or the

(07:10):
Hawaiians when he stumbles upon the archipelago of Hawaii, which
is really fascinating, you know, to think that, you know,
at a time when most of the captains of his
day were where, you know, it was very Eurocentric and
it was very condescending of these people. They were called savages,
they were called heathens. You know, Cook's not doing that.

(07:33):
He's got this kind of rigor to him that is
pretty unusual. Secondly, unlike those other folks like Magellan and
other ones that you mentioned, Cook just so happened to
be trained as a cartographer.

Speaker 4 (07:53):
His real skill.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
I mean, he had a lot of skills, and he
had to wear a lot of hats on his expeditions,
but his skill was as a map maker, and the
kind of meticulousness and the kind of you know, working
carefully and closely with complicated instruments and knowing the stars
and knowing how to chart a coastline, knowing how to

(08:20):
render a beautiful and accurate map.

Speaker 4 (08:22):
Those kinds of skills set him.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
Apart from a lot of the other explorers of his
day very unusual. His maps are just phenomenally accurate. And
that kind of rigor is what he brought to every
other aspect of his expeditions, like, for example, diet. He
was really intrigued by diet, experimenting with different foods with

(08:47):
his sailors, because the terrible malady of scurvy, which was
so common in long voyages, as many as half the
sailors would die of this horrible, horrible disease. Not a
single man died on any of Cook's three voyages of scurvy.
So not that he had really conquered scurvy, but he
understood intuitively that it had something to do with eating

(09:10):
fresh food regularly. And so these are some of the
things that set him apart, I think. But you know,
although I put those other explorers certainly in the pantheon,
Magellan is someone that Cooked very much admired realizing that
Magellan was the first to circum navigate the world, although

(09:30):
he didn't himself make it home, but he did that
with cruder tools. It's, you know, one thing cook does.
He honors the previous explorers. He recognizes their accomplishments. Really
quite a modest guy who was a very laconic, modest

(09:54):
guy from Yorkshire, who came up from absolute poverty, worked
his way up through the ranks of the Merchant Marine
and then the Royal Navy, and you know, to be
master and commander and absolute sort of commander of the ship,
but also to be so modest and sort of always
giving the credit to other people. That's also an unusual

(10:15):
trait for the For the Times, we're.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
Talking with Hampton Sides.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
His book is called The Wide Wide Sea, named by
the New York Times as one of the ten best
books of last year. The subtitle of the book Imperial Ambition,
First Contact and the Faithful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.
So let me tell you just a very quick story, Hampton. So,
I used to collect tribal art, mostly New Guinea, Indonesia,

(10:40):
some Solomon Islands, stuff like stuff like that. By the way,
I don't know what's still there, but the collection of
Captain Cook's stuff that he collected at the museum in
Auckland is one of the greatest things I've ever seen
in my entire life. And I don't know if any
of that stuff is being sort of redistributed back to
the places he took it from. I saw a few

(11:00):
years ago. It was just absolutely incredible. But one of
the things that one of the great experiences of my
life was I was on the Sipic River in New
Guinea and I made friends with one of the guys
who worked on the boat that I was on, who
was from a local village that we happened to be
docked near.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
So he came to get me like.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Eleven PM one night, came knocked on my door like
ross come with me. And so he and a couple
of his friends from the village. They had they had
rowed a little canoe over to the boat. I got
in the canoe with them, canoed over to and walked
into the village just me right, and I spent the
night sitting in what they call the men's hut, a

(11:42):
pretty big kind of like a longhouse, around the fire,
with these elders telling me stories through a translator. And
the guy who kind of befriended me said, we'd never
done this with a white person before. We just we
can tell how interested you are in our culture, because
I was asking them all kinds of questions and that

(12:03):
I don't know that that experience maybe exists anywhere anymore,
even New Guinea, Like it's just everything is opening these days,
and and and thinking about Captain Cook, who did this
kind of thing every day, every other day for years
and for voyages, and and and even me like, yeah, okay,
I'm a white dude talking with the elders. But they'd
seen lots of white dudes, they'd never seen a white

(12:24):
dude before him. I just cannot imagine what an incredible
historical I don't even know.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
What words to apply to it. Well, yeah, he had.

Speaker 3 (12:33):
Kind of perfected what I call a theater of first contact,
you know, a way of approaching an island, coming ashore unarmed, uh,
trying to convince people hey, you know, just by looking
in the face and demonstrating through body language and gesticulations
and grunts, Hey, I'm I'm interested in you. I I'm not.

(12:56):
I come in peace. I don't We're not here to
harm you. It's extraordinary to me how many times that worked.
You know, he didn't he didn't get killed, he didn't
get surrounded, he didn't get imprisoned by numerically superior group
of people, you know, when he marched ashore on an island,

(13:17):
from island to island to island, until the end.

Speaker 4 (13:21):
When it didn't work.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
When he gets to Hawaii, and I think most people
it's not really a spoiler to tell listeners that Captain
Cook dies a very violent and very graphic death on
the island of Hawaii, the Big Island, on Valentine's Day,
seventeen seventy nine, where this theater of first contact methodology.

(13:50):
I guess that he used. It didn't work and it
backfired on him, and things escalated very.

Speaker 4 (13:56):
Quickly, and he was to pieces on the lava flats there.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
So you know, it's a lot of you know, i'd
say the last you know, fourth of the book really
is about that, how that that happened, What went wrong,
what were his maybe his diplomatic skills had failed him,
what led to this horrible miscalculation or a series of
miscalculations that led to his death.

Speaker 4 (14:24):
So you know, that's that's a large part of what
the book's about.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, and then the last part of the book talk
you know, where you almost feel like you're watching a
movie of Captain Cook's last hours on Earth, and and
and in parts of it because of how you write
the story, Hampton, you're kind of like you want to
yell out to Captain Kirk, Captain Cook, Captain Kirk, you
want to yell out to Captain Cook, like, don't do that.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
Don't talk to.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
Them that way, Like you're you could be fine, right,
this is all so unnecessary.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
Yeah, it's like, uh, it's like slow down, Negotia eight.

Speaker 4 (15:00):
Uh, go back to your ship, rethink this.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
Don't be so odd headed, go back to being the
old Captain Cook that you used to be. You you
inadvertently said Captain Kirk and uh, in fact, Star Trek's
Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise was directly patterned after
Captain James Cook.

Speaker 4 (15:21):
James Kirk, James.

Speaker 3 (15:22):
Cook and Uh, the creators of the show were just
fascinated with with the story of.

Speaker 4 (15:28):
Cook and in many ways.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
You know, there's so many similarities, like when when they
left England and went often to the other side of
the world, it was as though they were going out
into the galaxies, you know, out into the heavens, uh,
going from planet to planet, not knowing who they would encounter,
trying to describe and document these people. That there are

(15:51):
a lot of kind of at least superficial similarities between
Captain Cook's narratives and Star Trek. So maybe that wasn't
maybe you know, maybe it was a subconscious thing that
you mentioned Kirk.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
All right, we got about three minutes left. We got
about three minutes left.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
And I want to ask you two questions about minor
characters in the book. Yeah, and again for those just joining,
we're talking with Hampton Sides. His brilliant must read book
is called The Wide Wide Sea. Just go buy it
and go read it. You can thank him later, No
need to thank me. Thank Hampton for writing this unbelievable book.
I want to ask you about two people. I love
the fact that there's a dude named George Vancouver. Tell

(16:30):
me a little about George Vancouver.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, it's really important for
me to emphasize that this is not a biography of
Captain Cook. It's really a biography, if you will, of
an expedition of a voyage. And there are all these
great characters apart from Cook, on the voyage, and one
of them is George Vancouver, this young.

Speaker 4 (16:49):
Explorer who's learning.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
He's learning at the sort of at the knee of
the great Captain Cook.

Speaker 4 (16:55):
He will go on to become one of the.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
Great explorers of the Pacific Northwestvancouver. Of course, the town,
the city is named after him, the island. And so
you get the sense of these young midshipmen who are
just you know, drinking this up, learning how to run
an expedition from the master himself. Also, William Bligh is
another one on the vote who will go who learns

(17:20):
from Captain Cook and is an is like Cook, a
brilliant sailor and chart maker of charts and so forth.
But he also has this horrible insufferable personality that gets
him into trouble.

Speaker 4 (17:33):
People hate him, and of course he will go on
to be.

Speaker 3 (17:37):
On the Bounty, which of course has the.

Speaker 4 (17:40):
Most notorious mutiny of all times.

Speaker 3 (17:43):
So those are just two characters that Cook has with
him on board the ship.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
One one more question about one more character. We got
about a minute left. There were uh, I think two
or three Americans with Captain Cook.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Tell me a little bit about John Ledyard.

Speaker 4 (18:00):
Yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
Was fascinated by this story for many reasons, but one
is because it left England in July of seventeen seventy six,
just as the American Revolution is really getting going.

Speaker 4 (18:11):
And the Declaration of Independence.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
They didn't get the memo on that declaration, by the way,
They left and are gone for four years and one
hundred thousand nautical miles, so no one understood what was
happening in America. But yeah, there are a number of
American board born sailors on board the ship, and one
of them, the most interesting to me, is a guy

(18:35):
named John Ledgard who somehow got on this voyage as
a Royal marine and he's observing all of this, writing
all this stuff down. He ultimately publishes a book, an
account of Cook's voyage that becomes the very first book

(18:56):
copyrighted in the United States, which is kind of stordinary.
He's very critical of Captain Cook. I quote from Ledyard
a lot. He's a really good, very keen observer and
quite critical of Cook. And you know, he gets back
to England four years after leaving Plymouth, and he.

Speaker 4 (19:14):
Realizes that he's, hey, he's.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
An American now, He's not British, He's not a British
citizen anymore. He wants to go back to Connecticut where
he was worn and live out the rest of the
revolution and fight for his new fledgling country. So yeah,
that's a very interesting little subplot to the story, is
the American Revolution going on at the same time Ledyard's great.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yeah, and where and when Ledyard dies is interesting too,
But don't tell that part.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
People can read the book.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Folks, go by and read the wide wide see Imperial Ambition,
First Contact and The Faithful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook,
one of the ten best books of the year according
to The New York Times last year. The author Hampton
sides Hampton, thank you so much for making time to
join us. I'm sure you probably thought you were done
with publicity for this book, so I am.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
I appreciate you, No that at all.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
We've just come out and paperback a few months ago,
so it's kind of a whole new tour. We're getting
the word out for the new publication and really excited
to be on your show.

Speaker 4 (20:16):
Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, thanks for doing it. I appreciate it.