Captain James Cook, Homicide Detective: A Conversation with "The Wide Wide Sea" Author Hampton Sides

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[00:03:02] Content warning. This episode contains discussion of murder, violence, colonialism,

[00:03:09] and imperialism. The massacre by the bay started with an attempted abduction.

[00:03:18] The kidnappers arrived by water. They had a plot in mind. They were to trick their would-be victim

[00:03:24] into coming along with them. Once they'd lured him out, they would hold him as a hostage.

[00:03:31] They wanted a specific ransom. The kidnappers went ashore and entered their would-be victim's

[00:03:36] residence. They asked him to come with them. The would-be victim complied. The kidnappers

[00:03:42] hustled him along, eager to abscond without raising any alarms. But they never made it.

[00:03:49] Some members of the victim's entourage became suspicious. They implored the would-be victim

[00:03:54] to not trust his kidnappers. Words were exchanged, then shouts. Weapons were drawn.

[00:04:01] The kidnappers didn't de-escalate. Soon they were surrounded. Soon violence erupted.

[00:04:08] Soon many, many people lay dead along the bay. That's not some recent abduction turned

[00:04:14] self-defense story. This all occurred way back on February 14, 1779 by Kalakakua Bay

[00:04:23] on the island of Hawaii. The would-be victim was Kalani Opu'u, the ruling chief of the entire

[00:04:29] island. The ransom was a missing longboat. The kidnappers were led by famed explorer,

[00:04:37] Captain James Cook. We recently had the privilege of interviewing Hampton Sides. He's a historian

[00:04:44] who has written about all kinds of fascinating tales from the Old West to World War II. His latest

[00:04:50] book is The Wide, Wide Sea, Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of

[00:04:56] Captain James Cook. It covers Captain Cook's third voyage around the world.

[00:05:02] History is the story of crimes, those acknowledged and those obscured. On the surface, this is a tale

[00:05:10] about law and order, about violence and kidnapping, about theft and punishment, about self-defense

[00:05:18] and multiple homicides. Hampton will share with us the pertinent true crime stories from this history,

[00:05:25] namely instances of harsh punitive measures from the voyage,

[00:05:29] the clashes over differing views of law and order and property, Captain Cook's stint as a homicide

[00:05:35] detective, and of course, the disastrous attempted abduction that led to his shocking death.

[00:05:42] My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist. And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney.

[00:05:48] And this is The Murder Sheet. We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting,

[00:05:53] interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're The Murder Sheet. And this is Captain

[00:06:00] James Cook, Homicide Detective, a conversation with the Wide, Wide Sea author Hampton Sides.

[00:06:51] Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, sort of what got you into writing

[00:06:56] about history? So I'm a narrative historian. I've been doing these big sprawling historical tales now

[00:07:04] for about 25 years. And I have a ball doing it. I get to basically get into a time machine and go

[00:07:12] back in time and try to figure out what's going on and kind of piece it together. I spend usually

[00:07:19] three or four years on these projects. I do a lot of research, which I love. Try to do a lot of

[00:07:26] travel to go to these places to be able to experience the landscapes and try to make

[00:07:33] landscape a character in my books whenever I can. And I write for a popular audience.

[00:07:42] I was a history major in college. I went to Yale, but I'm not an academic historian by any means,

[00:07:47] although I do, I think, every bit as much research as most academics do.

[00:07:52] The other thing is I kind of jump around in time period and geographical location. My books are,

[00:07:59] one of them is set in the Korean War. One was set back in World War II. Another one was about

[00:08:03] the American West and a controversial frontiersman named Kit Carson. I wrote about the assassination

[00:08:09] of Martin Luther King, a book that grew out of my upbringing because I was born and raised in

[00:08:14] Memphis. But now I live here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I keep doing these narratives. And

[00:08:20] I just finished the Wide, Wide Sea, a project that took me five years and took me all over the

[00:08:25] world trying to just go to as many of the places as I possibly could where Captain Cook touched on

[00:08:31] his final voyage around the world. So that's sort of my background. I should mention prior to that,

[00:08:37] I spent about 25 years, 20 years as a journalist. And I think that training as a journalist,

[00:08:42] both for magazines and newspapers was a great education to become a narrative historian because

[00:08:51] I learned how to ask a lot of questions and try to find the points of conflict or controversy in

[00:08:58] a story. Even though I'm writing about historical events, I try to make it seem modern and

[00:09:03] contemporary and have resonance with modern audiences. So I think that's an important part

[00:09:08] of sort of my background. And when I was doing journalism, periodically I would stumble upon

[00:09:14] true crime stories. And I do have some grounding in that that I think paid off in writing the Wide,

[00:09:19] Wide Sea. My next question would just be, what drew you to the story of Captain James Cook,

[00:09:28] specifically his final voyage? I've been interested in Captain Cook for a long time. He's certainly

[00:09:34] somebody who I've done a number of exploration stories and everywhere you go in the world,

[00:09:40] he pops up. Where didn't he go? What didn't he do? He's almost like a jack-in-the-box. He's just,

[00:09:49] he was there too. He was in Canada. He's in Alaska. Okay. It was all over the South Pacific, Hawaii.

[00:09:56] But I began to think, all right, seriously, if I do a book on Captain Cook,

[00:10:01] I just can't in narrative terms, see how you would do his all three of his voyages because

[00:10:06] they're massive undertakings. They're very complicated, monumental enterprises with

[00:10:12] hundreds of other, just in narrative terms, he goes out, he comes back, he goes out,

[00:10:17] he comes back, he goes out again. Third time, he doesn't come back, but his ships do.

[00:10:26] So I said, all right, I got to pick one of the voyages. What's the most dramatic of his voyages?

[00:10:32] What's the most impactful of his voyages? And also what is the most American of his voyages? He was

[00:10:40] a British navigator, obviously, but it was his third voyage that took place. They left Plymouth

[00:10:47] in July of 1776, just as the American revolution is getting started.

[00:10:52] And they're headed for the Northwest coast of North America, present day Oregon, Washington,

[00:10:59] Alaska to chart the entire coast in search of the fabled Northwest passage. And so it's a story that

[00:11:07] takes place on US soil, chiefly and most importantly, Hawaii, this archipelago that

[00:11:14] he stumbles upon on his way to Alaska. So it's an American story in many ways, even though it's a

[00:11:22] British voyage. So those are the things that drew me to it. And when I say is the most dramatic of

[00:11:27] his voyages, I mean that on many levels, but particularly how everything kind of funnels down

[00:11:33] to the story of his very dramatic and very, very violent death on the shores of the big island of

[00:11:41] Hawaii. It's a murder tale or it's a story of a violent death and trying to kind of in forensic

[00:11:50] terms, break that down and figure out where did it go wrong? What decisions did he make, or maybe he

[00:11:56] didn't make that led to his own death? This otherwise most disciplined of explorers who

[00:12:02] had shown great judgment prior to this, everything unraveled for him. And to me, that's a very

[00:12:08] interesting tale. I think it's the last hundred pages of the book or so is all about Hawaii and

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[00:14:52] your comfy place. And the whole book is wonderful. It's all frankly just absolutely fascinating.

[00:15:01] I think most people have probably heard the name Captain Cook but they may not be fully aware of

[00:15:07] who this guy was, what he was like and what he did. Can you just give us a little bit of a primer

[00:15:13] on Captain Cook? Yeah, yeah. I mean I think everyone in the United Kingdom probably knows

[00:15:20] at least a rudimentary set of facts about Captain Cook. Also true in Australia and New Zealand

[00:15:26] where he's kind of viewed as a complicated but nonetheless a kind of founding father.

[00:15:32] Here in America, honestly at the time people have thought, oh you're writing about Captain Hook.

[00:15:43] The pirate dude with the parrot on the eye patch and the peg leg. And you know I love the

[00:15:50] piracy stories. They're so great. You know I have to explain, no it's Captain Cook. He was one of

[00:15:56] the greatest explorers of all time. Whatever you may think of him as a man, he went everywhere.

[00:16:04] It's the sheer number of nautical miles that he traveled. You know the quality of his observations

[00:16:09] and reports that he brought back and that were published in these enormous volumes.

[00:16:14] The incredible and beautiful artwork that came out of his expeditions. The scientists who were

[00:16:20] on board who described animals and plants that had never been seen before by Europeans.

[00:16:27] These were enormous undertakings that had a scientific quality to them. For the most part

[00:16:34] their encounters with native peoples were peaceful and fascinating. I mean we're talking about

[00:16:40] first contact with island after island after island. His voyages were a direct influence on

[00:16:46] the creation of the character Captain James Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Supposedly the show was

[00:16:55] based in part on Captain James Cook. He was a Yorkshireman who had worked his way up through

[00:17:01] the merchant marine and then through the Royal Navy by virtue of just a ferocious work ethic

[00:17:07] and a certain genius at geography, cartography and astronomy. He was a brilliant navigator.

[00:17:15] I'd say his greatest skill was map making and the precision of his maps is almost chilling.

[00:17:23] How did this dude make these incredibly accurate maps with the kind of tools they had back then?

[00:17:29] He did an entire circumnavigation of New Zealand's both North and South Island and created this map

[00:17:36] that if you superimpose a satellite image of New Zealand up over his map it's just identical.

[00:17:44] How did he do it? I don't know. It's truly a genius that he had. His first two voyages were

[00:17:51] amazing undertakings and by that point had become a huge celebrity back in London.

[00:17:58] Met King George, he was well on his way to becoming an admiral. He joined the Royal Society

[00:18:03] which was the preeminent scientific kind of fraternity of that day. This was who he was at

[00:18:09] the start of his third voyage. A guy in his prime of life, he could have just stayed home

[00:18:16] with his wife and children and written books and been on the lecture circuit and been a star.

[00:18:25] As is true with many of these navigators, they get restless when they're on land. He had to

[00:18:31] get back out there. He found out about this voyage and he wanted to lead it.

[00:18:39] They always say the third time's the charm, but in this situation, the third time was a tragic end

[00:18:46] for him. I guess another theme in the book is just trying to understand the hubris behind this. Why

[00:18:53] wasn't two voyages around the world good enough? Why did he have to venture out one last time?

[00:18:59] One thing that's really you write eloquently about in the book is how Captain Cook's legacy

[00:19:05] more recently has become more complicated or contentious. It's fascinating reading the book

[00:19:11] because I think there were things that surprised me about how maybe in some ways,

[00:19:15] some of his interactions with the indigenous people that he met were more progressive than

[00:19:20] you would think when you consider the role of imperialism and all this. At the same time then,

[00:19:26] also this third voyage further complicates that because he seemed to be acting out of character at

[00:19:30] certain times. I guess for you at this time, can you speak to maybe some of the more contentious

[00:19:36] aspects of his legacy and how that is being currently unpacked as we have a greater

[00:19:42] understanding of imperialism and colonialism? Yeah, of course. I think within the context of

[00:19:50] his times, he really was quite sympathetic and objective observer of these indigenous cultures

[00:20:00] that he encountered. Remarkably so actually. Most of these captains back then, these explorers were

[00:20:07] all they want to do is exploit the resources often at gunpoint and get the hell out of there.

[00:20:11] They had no curiosity for the actual inhabitants. Cook was different that way. He really viewed

[00:20:17] himself as a product of and a creature of the enlightenment and that it was part of his job

[00:20:24] to spread knowledge of the world and these people and these cultures. But yes, on his third voyage

[00:20:31] especially, something was different about Captain Cook. There was something wrong with him. Those

[00:20:38] who had traveled with him on his first two, who were with him on his third, noticed this. They

[00:20:43] were like, well, what's wrong with him? What's wrong with the captain? He's hot-tempered. He's

[00:20:49] quick to use the lash on his own men. He's becoming more and more cruel toward

[00:20:55] indigenous people. If anyone steals an object, no matter how trivial it might be,

[00:21:01] he would just go ballistic. He was cutting people's ears off. He didn't kill anybody, but he certainly

[00:21:09] was quick to dole out, mete out the punishment. He was also just weird. He would not

[00:21:19] communicate with his officers much. Perhaps his own celebrity had begun to go to his head. He was

[00:21:26] much more arrogant in his decision-making, less collaborative, more lonely. He'd just be in his

[00:21:32] cabin all the time by himself, eating by himself. Something was wrong with him and some people have

[00:21:38] speculated that it was a medical malady, that he had a parasite. He did eat a lot of extremely

[00:21:46] weird foods. Perhaps he had this parasite that was preventing the absorption of critical vitamins.

[00:21:52] Some people have said he was bipolar. Others have said he had some kind of almost spiritual

[00:21:59] existential crisis going on by the time of his third voyage, because he was just a very different

[00:22:05] guy. Indigenous people around the world have been much more outspoken about Captain Cook.

[00:22:15] Not so much really, when you break it down, it's not so much what he did. It's that he put

[00:22:21] these places on the map and that led to the full-scale onslaught of colonialism.

[00:22:30] Here come the navies and the armies and the occupiers and the guns and the diseases and

[00:22:38] the dislocations that came from the Western economic system. Then the missionaries who

[00:22:43] tried to rewire these societies, it all came after Cook. In some ways, it came because of Cook,

[00:22:50] because he fixed these islands on the maps with exact coordinates. It's much easier to blame one

[00:22:57] guy than thousands of people or an entire system, the imperial system, the colonial system. It's

[00:23:04] much easier to just say, oh, it's Captain Cook. That's the guy we hate. That's why the statues

[00:23:09] are coming down, being splattered with paint and sawed off at the ankles. This has been true.

[00:23:17] In Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, this massive statue of Cook was ripped down.

[00:23:24] Also in British Columbia, in Vancouver Island, another statue. He is viewed as

[00:23:32] the leading edge, the sharp edge of the sword of colonialism. Even though he really, when you boil

[00:23:38] it down, he was an explorer. That's primarily what he was, a maker of maps. I want to talk

[00:23:45] and unpack about some of the true crime themes that come out in this story. One that's

[00:23:53] stuck out to me is what you mentioned, how he was much more punitive with his own crew members on

[00:23:58] this final voyage. I was wondering if you could speak to that and also the role of Captain and

[00:24:05] specifically Captain Cook in this voyage as a judge and a leader and someone who's supposed

[00:24:12] to enforce discipline and law and order on his ship, on his voyage. Can you speak to that and

[00:24:19] what people were seeing on this specific voyage? Yes. As soon as the ship left the shores of

[00:24:26] Plymouth, the captain was master and commander. He had the authority to do just about anything

[00:24:36] to his own men. That included floggings, the use of the lash or the bread and water treatment or

[00:24:44] putting people down in the furthest, deepest holds of the ship and imprison them. He could

[00:24:52] send, if he stopped at a port where there were other ships that could take him back to England,

[00:24:56] he could drop off men, just kick them off the ship, which he did actually in South Africa

[00:25:02] at one point. Back to England, we don't want you even on board this ship anymore.

[00:25:06] Yeah. He had absolute authority to do practically whatever he wanted. He lived in an age, the

[00:25:13] Georgian Navy, a lot of these captains were unbelievably harsh and unbelievably cruel.

[00:25:21] That was also true of the French Navy and probably all the other navy navies of the world.

[00:25:25] Captain Cook had a reputation for at least his first two voyages being very different.

[00:25:29] He really genuinely cared about ship conditions, the health of his men, the hygiene of the ship.

[00:25:37] He was scientific about how he tried to deal with the cockroach problems and the rat problems and

[00:25:44] the diet and making sure that his men didn't get scurvy, which was the very common disease of

[00:25:50] these long distance voyages. Amazingly, not a single man on any of his voyages died of scurvy,

[00:25:58] which was considered an unbelievable conquest of a disease that had killed millions of people.

[00:26:05] He didn't precisely know what he was doing right or what was in the diet that was doing the trick,

[00:26:10] but he had some ideas. He applied this regimen very carefully and almost scientifically,

[00:26:18] insisting that his men eat fresh foods, vegetables and fruits and even fresh meat.

[00:26:23] And that saved the lives of these guys. But on this third voyage, yes, he becomes more

[00:26:30] perimetry, quick to use the lash. Probably one of the most famous frual captains in the

[00:26:37] literature of the British is Captain William Bly. The mutiny on the bounty,

[00:26:43] supposedly it was so cruel that these men mutinied and kicked them off the ship.

[00:26:49] In fact, that's a misconception because Captain Cook, there's actually some

[00:26:56] Captain Cook nautical geeks out there who've literally counted the number of floggings that he

[00:27:01] issued on his voyage and compared them to the number of floggings that Captain Bly issued on

[00:27:06] his bounty. And Captain Cook was much crueler. He was much more willing to apply the lash and even

[00:27:15] apply the lash and even exceed the... The Admiralty had a certain number of lashes that you

[00:27:21] could use per day on your own men. And he exceeded that at times on this third voyage. So, ouch, yikes.

[00:27:29] This guy was... He seemed to have a sadistic streak in him on this third voyage, which is really hard

[00:27:36] to understand. Interestingly, William Bly was on this voyage and learning from Cook, he was the

[00:27:44] master of the Resolution, Cook's ship. And it's an ensemble story. There's a lot of amazing

[00:27:49] characters on the ship besides Cook. One of them is William Bly, just an insufferable personality.

[00:27:56] Everyone hated the guy, but he was an extraordinary seaman and navigator. There's also the young

[00:28:03] George Vancouver, another amazing career that's ahead of him, but he's just a young officer on

[00:28:10] board the ship. A lot of other explorers and interesting writers and people on board the ship.

[00:28:16] And they're all writing in their journals and they're observing their captain and seeing how

[00:28:21] he's meting out this punishment and really wondering what the heck is wrong with this guy.

[00:28:26] It's a big theme of the book. Yeah, can we really set up this third voyage? What was at stake in it?

[00:28:33] The goal of the mission, the goal of the expedition was to go around Africa, get into

[00:28:40] the Pacific Ocean, go all the way up to Alaska and to try to find this holy grail of British

[00:28:47] exploration, the Northwest Passage, which is basically a shortcut over Canada. The British

[00:28:55] wanted to figure out a way to get through that labyrinth of channels and islands north of Canada

[00:29:03] and get to the Pacific Ocean so they could trade directly with China and avoid the Southern Oceans

[00:29:11] and avoid South America, which were controlled by the Portuguese and the Spanish.

[00:29:16] So there's this big imperial chess game going on for resources and for trade and for access to

[00:29:21] the Orient. And the British had been exploring for centuries figuring out, is there a way to get

[00:29:28] from the Atlantic to the Pacific over or through Canada? It had always been from the Atlantic side

[00:29:34] they'd explored and it had never gone well. I mean, the new generation would poke into these

[00:29:41] places around Baffin Island and Greenland and a couple of weeks later, they're eating their boots,

[00:29:48] you know, they're eating shoes and starving to death and getting scurvy. But this voyage,

[00:29:54] the idea was to reverse the search and look for the Northwest Passage from the Pacific side.

[00:30:00] That is to go somewhere along Alaska, a place that was terra incognita, really no one but

[00:30:07] the Russians had done any exploration up there. Go through the Bering Strait, perhaps go over Canada,

[00:30:14] hopefully not finding the ice and find this Northwest Passage from the Pacific side.

[00:30:20] So that's what was at stake. It was an enormous geopolitical and even scientific

[00:30:26] kind of obsession that the British had had for a long time.

[00:30:30] Many people had died, a lot of blood and treasure had been expended to find this thing.

[00:30:35] We now know, you know, yes, there is a Northwest Passage. It exists. It's just that

[00:30:43] it was locked in ice. It was an impractical and extremely dangerous

[00:30:48] thing to try to find. Nowadays, with the ice pack melting, we can do the Northwest Passage.

[00:30:56] It's done quite often over the summer months. There's, you know, there's like pleasure cruises

[00:31:02] now that go over Canada. So he was looking for something that exists but really was just

[00:31:08] completely impractical, if not impossible in his day.

[00:31:13] I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about some of the interactions with Indigenous peoples

[00:31:18] over the course of this third voyage. And specifically, there's actually one sort of

[00:31:23] figure in the book who has a very interesting sort of revenge tale who sort of serves as some kind of

[00:31:29] like in-between figure between the English and the Indigenous folks. Can you speak about him?

[00:31:36] Yes. After Cook, I suppose you would say that the next most important protagonist in the story

[00:31:44] is this guy named Mai. Mai is a young man from Tahiti who had been picked up on Cook's second

[00:31:51] voyage. He had been brought back to London. He had become a celebrity in England. He learned English.

[00:31:58] They gave him fancy clothes and he lived on these estates of various aristocrats. And he

[00:32:07] learned to play backgammon and chess. And he was popular with the ladies. He was a really good

[00:32:12] looking guy, very popular, very handsome. He learned to hunt, was paraded around London as

[00:32:18] kind of an example of the noble savage, as they called it. He went to the Royal Society. He met

[00:32:24] King George III. He met Samuel Johnson and Boswell and all the thinkers and writers of the time.

[00:32:32] But the real reason that Mai volunteered to come on board this ship and go to England is because he

[00:32:40] had seen the power of English firearms. He was fascinated by muskets and cannons.

[00:32:52] And Mai, as a young boy, the Bora Bora warriors from the island of Bora Bora had invaded his

[00:33:01] home island of Raiatea and had killed his father and had wrecked his island and dispossessed his

[00:33:09] people of their land. And this all happened when he was a young boy. And for the rest of his life,

[00:33:15] he festered with this determination to strike back at the Bora Borans and win back his land and

[00:33:29] defend the honor of his murdered father. So he's like, I'm going to go to England and I'm

[00:33:34] going to learn about guns and I'm going to get guns. And I'm going to come back home with all

[00:33:40] this weapons and all this knowledge of how to use them. And I'm going to make war on the Bora

[00:33:44] Borans. And he's underneath this sort of facade of just this happy-go-lucky guy who loves to fish

[00:33:52] and hunt and play around with the aristocratic ladies in England. He's actually nursing this

[00:34:00] revenge strategy. And it's a long game he's playing. And in fact, so on Cook's third voyage,

[00:34:10] one of the very first things Cook has to do before getting to Alaska is drop Mai off in Tahiti or one

[00:34:17] of its sister islands with his guns and with all of his other belongings he's accumulated in England,

[00:34:24] including a suit of armor and horses and lots of other animals and all these little gadgets and

[00:34:33] trinkets and things that people have given him. So he goes back to Tahiti. He's eventually

[00:34:38] ensconced in an island called Huahini. And he does, as soon as Cook leaves, almost immediately,

[00:34:45] he acts out his plan, which is to exact revenge on his enemies, the Bora Borans. And there's a

[00:34:54] battle and he uses his guns and he actually wins this battle. He doesn't win the war, but he wins

[00:35:02] the battle. Unfortunately, it's a sad tale after that. He eventually contracts some kind of European

[00:35:08] pathogen. There's a Spanish ship that arrives with some kind of flu, kills a lot of people on

[00:35:15] the island. And he only lives a few years after all this. But Mai's a very important figure in the

[00:35:22] book because not only is he a significant Polynesian character, but he goes to England and sort of sees

[00:35:29] England from the Polynesian point of view. I kind of use him like he's a GoPro camera or something.

[00:35:34] And it was like, oh, there's King George. Oh, he's in parliament now. And they're talking about the

[00:35:38] American Revolution. And it's like he's paraded around everywhere in England. And it gives me a

[00:35:46] way to show you what England looked like back then from a native point of view, an indigenous point of

[00:35:54] view. That's the story of Mai. Yeah, it's fascinating. I thought it was interesting that

[00:36:00] he kind of ended up sort of teaming up with Cook on some of the more controversial escapades in

[00:36:06] this in terms of doling out punishment to other indigenous groups. It's just a fascinating story.

[00:36:12] Yes, I forgot to mention, along the way, because he was obviously fluent in Tahitian,

[00:36:18] he could speak with people from other Polynesian islands. The language is very similar from island

[00:36:24] to island. And so Captain Cook used him as a translator and as a kind of an ambassador

[00:36:32] to get what he wanted or to negotiate or to trade. So he's a very important figure aboard the ship

[00:36:39] in that sense. He's also, interestingly enough, he's still a celebrity to this day.

[00:36:45] A couple of months ago, it was reported in The New York Times and other newspapers that

[00:36:50] this painting that was painted of Mai, a famous, famous portrait by Joshua Reynolds,

[00:36:55] who was the most famous painter in England at that time, had done a portrait of Mai.

[00:37:01] And it was his favorite of all of his paintings. He kept it in his personal house and

[00:37:08] in the family for generations. But it was recently purchased by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for

[00:37:15] $62 million. And it is going to Los Angeles, Portrait of Mai. It's like an eight-foot tall,

[00:37:22] massive painting of this beautiful Polynesian man. So he's still famous today. Go check him

[00:37:27] out at the Getty sometime. Pretty cool. Earlier, you mentioned that Cook served as a homicide

[00:37:34] detective at one point. And I think our listeners would be very upset if I didn't ask you to

[00:37:40] elaborate on that. Yeah, this is a... It takes a little while to set this up. But on Cook's second

[00:37:46] voyage, there were two ships and they became separated from each other. And Cook's consort

[00:37:53] ship was called The Adventure. And it was captained by a guy named Tobias Furneau.

[00:37:59] And they went to New Zealand to a kind of agreed-upon rendezvous point, hoping they would

[00:38:06] reconnect with Cook. But they never did. They never saw Cook again on this voyage.

[00:38:10] But when they went to this rendezvous point, it's a place called Queen Charlotte Sound on the South

[00:38:15] Island of New Zealand, and a place that he called Ship Cove. They were there for some number of

[00:38:21] weeks. Everything went pretty well until near the end when he sent some men out to go cut some grass

[00:38:30] for his animals, the few animals that were on board the ship. This detail went to cut the grass,

[00:38:36] but they never returned to the ship. And Captain Furneau said, all right, well, I'm going to send

[00:38:42] out another detail to go find them. And this other detail stumbled upon a absolutely grotesque

[00:38:50] and gruesome scene. 10 of their countrymen had been clearly in some kind of battle and had been

[00:38:57] killed and had been butchered, dismembered, and were in the process of being cooked and eaten

[00:39:05] by the Maori warriors not very far from the ship location. And they saw definitive proof of the

[00:39:14] cannibalism. I mean, they saw hands that had tattoos on them that they recognized as their

[00:39:19] countrymen. Body parts were boiling in these great vats. It was just, you know, I mean,

[00:39:27] throughout the literature of British exploration, there's all sorts of tales of cannibalism or

[00:39:32] rumors of cannibalism or exaggerated tall tales that turned out not to be true. But in this case,

[00:39:39] it was true. And yes, the Maori had a long tradition and battle of consuming

[00:39:45] the flesh of their enemies and imbibed the spirit of the warriors they had killed. It's a fact.

[00:39:51] It happened. Okay. So flash forward, what is it? Four years later, Captain Cook returns

[00:39:57] to the scene of this crime in New Zealand and all of the local people believe, oh, he's come back

[00:40:04] to retaliate. He's come back to exact revenge on the people. But you know what? He really hasn't.

[00:40:12] He's come back to try to play the role of a detective essentially to find out for himself

[00:40:18] what happened as best he could. He goes about it in a real dispassionate way. He's sort of like

[00:40:23] Columbo, you know, it's like he puts on the trench coat and, you know, he asked a lot of

[00:40:31] dispassionate questions like, you know, did you eat my countrymen? Which parts did you eat?

[00:40:37] He didn't ask, did it taste good? But anyway, he, you know, is able rather systematically to figure

[00:40:45] out what happened. And to a lot of people's surprise, he decides, you know what? It was

[00:40:50] my own man's fault. They started the conflagration, the confrontation was really their fault. They

[00:40:57] were quick to use their weapons. These warriors had every right to attack them out of self-defense

[00:41:04] and then, you know, then they killed them. And by the way, the Maori were famous for just being

[00:41:09] extremely ferocious warriors and very adept in warfare. And so these 10 men were killed

[00:41:20] and Cook was also very dispassionate about the cannibalism part of it. He's like, we all know

[00:41:25] that's what they do. This is part of their culture in war. What difference does it make what happened

[00:41:30] to them after they were dead? That was widely in England considered the ultimate taboo, you know,

[00:41:37] eating another human being. But Cook didn't seem to be that upset about that. And he even meets the

[00:41:44] guy who is the ringleader of the whole attack and a guy named Kahura, a local chief. And he lets

[00:41:53] him off the hook basically says, you know, they even got the expedition artist to come over and

[00:41:59] paint his painting, you know, do a portrait. That's his curious reaction to the whole thing.

[00:42:05] He's like, I'm not going to do anything to retaliate. It was four years ago anyway.

[00:42:10] It was my own man's fault. Well, his men on this third voyage are outraged by this

[00:42:16] tolerance and leniency that he's showing. They can't believe it. It's like, why don't you kill

[00:42:23] this guy? Why don't you kill these people? At least kill 10 people because, you know, an eye for

[00:42:30] an eye. And foremost among those people wanting Cook to kill some of the Maori was Mai, the

[00:42:39] Polynesian translator. He's like, in our culture, there would be a retaliation and it needs to

[00:42:45] happen. You need to do this. And Cook just simply wouldn't raise a finger to hurt any of the Maori.

[00:42:51] The Maori themselves were outraged almost, not outraged, but just deeply puzzled. Like,

[00:42:58] why isn't he retaliating? In their culture, there was an expectation of retaliation,

[00:43:05] kind of to make the world right. There was one act required a counteract of equal

[00:43:14] ferocity or weight. And so it was just a weird kind of cultural thing that he came up against.

[00:43:22] But it was really the last time on the voyage that Captain Cook showed that kind of leniency.

[00:43:27] Elsewhere, farther, deeper into the voyage, he's quick to retaliate and he's not afraid to

[00:43:34] use violence to make his points. But that's the story of Ship Cove, Queen Charlotte Sound,

[00:43:41] New Zealand. I went to that place. It is kind of an eerie place. You can go to the exact spot where

[00:43:46] the attack happened and where the cannibalism happened. It's beautiful, but just a strange

[00:43:52] kind of eerie place knowing all that went down there 250 years ago.

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[00:45:34] One of the central mysteries in your book is sort of Cook himself because he has so many

[00:45:40] contradictions where he's, you know, very harsh on his men at times, but really more understanding

[00:45:46] and more dispassionate as you said about the incident with the Maori. And I'm wondering,

[00:45:52] you know, and then of course, I'd love to talk about the incident with the goats where he kind

[00:45:57] of completely goes in an opposite direction. And I guess, can you tell us about what happened with

[00:46:02] the goats and his reaction to that? And in addition to that, I'd love to know your opinions

[00:46:08] about why he was acting so strange and why his behavior was seemingly so all over the place on

[00:46:15] this final voyage. Yeah, okay. So they finally get to Tahiti and are trying to figure out where

[00:46:23] precisely in that archipelago to leave Mai with his belongings. And they go to this island called

[00:46:29] Morea, which is a sister island of Tahiti. Beautiful place. Actually my favorite of all

[00:46:36] the islands in this society, islands. And a couple of days after he arrives there,

[00:46:43] a goat is stolen by some of the locals. Not only a goat, but a pregnant goat.

[00:46:50] They'd never seen goats before. I mean, there's something about goats. I don't know.

[00:46:55] They're cute and weird looking and fuzzy and soft and I don't know, lovable. But they'd never seen

[00:47:02] one before and it was irresistible, I guess. And somebody stole this goat and Cook's reaction is

[00:47:10] just like, he just goes ballistic. He goes postal. And he starts burning all the huts of all the

[00:47:19] villagers. He starts destroying all their canoes, which is the most important possession a Polynesian

[00:47:25] has. He threatens to kill people. He doesn't actually kill anyone, but he threatens to torture

[00:47:31] people. And Mai is right there at his side saying, yes, you should kill this man or use your muskets.

[00:47:39] And it's a little shocking the extent to which Mai is wanting to, you know, these are his countrymen,

[00:47:48] his own people really. And yet he's saying kill them. It's like a scorched earth policy,

[00:47:56] you know, they just go across the island burning things and burning huts. And, you know, until you

[00:48:03] give up the goat, we're just going to keep doing this. And for like two days they do.

[00:48:09] Finally, the goat is returned. It's not harmed. But his men, his young officers especially are

[00:48:17] writing in their journals like what is going on? You know, like we have made enemies forever on

[00:48:21] this island. There's no way Mai could ever live on this island. The reaction, Cook's reaction was just

[00:48:27] so far out of proportion to the crime. And, you know, it was just a goat. Okay. He had other goats.

[00:48:34] So anyway, it's a weird thing. And, you know, why did he go on that rampage? Even in his journal,

[00:48:43] you know, he says some things that indicate he realizes he went over the edge. You know,

[00:48:49] he went too far. And, you know, did he do it out of kind of pride or, you know, just like

[00:48:59] once you start down that path, you can't back up? I don't know. And so it gets to that larger

[00:49:06] question that you're asking, which is really what is wrong with him? Is it a medical problem?

[00:49:13] Is it some kind of mental disorder? I don't know. I don't know. I do think that part of

[00:49:20] what happened on Moria was that Cook was seeing and Mai too was seeing what Mai's future looked

[00:49:28] like. Mai had come back to these islands with all these possessions. He was rich in stuff, but he

[00:49:37] was actually kind of a lowly commoner in a very highly stratified society. And it was an open

[00:49:44] question whether all this wealth meant anything in terms of his status. And what they realized is

[00:49:53] that wherever they put Mai, they were going to start stealing his stuff, whether it's goats or

[00:49:59] horses or armor or muskets or any of his belongings that they would, you know,

[00:50:05] they were not going to tolerate this commoner having all these possessions. And so perhaps

[00:50:10] Cook thought, I have to make a special kind of draconian point here. It's like you steal this

[00:50:17] guy's stuff and you got the vengeance of Great Britain coming down on you. Overkill. The reaction

[00:50:23] was clearly overkill, but perhaps that's what he was thinking. Like, you got to remember the enormous

[00:50:31] trouble and the horrible stink of all these animals on board these ships for hundreds and

[00:50:37] hundreds of days, trying to keep them alive. I'm talking about horses and goats, but also like they

[00:50:45] had hens and peacocks and they even had a monkey on board. It was like a Noah's Ark full of animals.

[00:50:51] And Cook had been trying to be an explorer, but also being like Noah's Ark, keeping these animals

[00:51:00] alive. And when you consider the enormous distances that these animals had traveled to get to Morea

[00:51:07] and then have someone steal his goat, I think it was kind of like the final straw. Like you have

[00:51:12] no idea what a hassle it was to have these animals on board. None of this is an excuse.

[00:51:19] There's no really excuse for it. These are just partial explanations for what may have been going

[00:51:24] through his mind there at that place. One thing I was really struck by is I was a history major

[00:51:31] too. One of my real interests in college was Jamestown. And some of the incidents sort of

[00:51:36] struck me as similar because in Jamestown, you also had a lot of incidents around the English

[00:51:42] accusing the local Palatine of stealing items and not seeming to realize first of all,

[00:51:49] that the indigenous people had a different sense of property, is more communal.

[00:51:53] And in addition to that, the fact that well, they're kind of keeping you alive by giving you

[00:51:59] corn this whole time and letting you stay on this land and all these other things that

[00:52:04] kind of would be like, this is probably rent for them to some extent. And so I was wondering if

[00:52:10] you could speak of that and sort of the different cultural clashes around property and sort of law

[00:52:15] and order that they saw here, because I want to set up for the sort of final confrontation.

[00:52:19] Most of these Islanders had very different ideas about property, the chiefs and the kings and the

[00:52:26] priests in this very stratified society. They had possessions and they had an ability to sort of

[00:52:32] defend those possessions or protect them because they wielded so much political power. But everyone

[00:52:39] else basically property was communal. There were no doors on their sleeping quarters, let alone

[00:52:48] locks on those doors. They use natural substances as their implements, whether bones or plants.

[00:52:59] They drank out of gourds and they didn't have this notion of like things, like private possessions

[00:53:07] that you accumulate in your home. That concept just wasn't there. So here come the British and

[00:53:13] they have all these possessions. And the most interesting of all the possessions to the Islanders

[00:53:19] was metal, anything with metal, because metal was a substance they did not have. In some cases,

[00:53:26] perhaps a board would, a drift piece of driftwood would wash up on shore and there'd be a nail in it.

[00:53:32] They'd seen flecks and specks of metal, but they didn't, you know, nothing like what was aboard

[00:53:39] these ships. And they wanted that stuff, man, they wanted it. So they were stealing implements,

[00:53:46] you know, quadrants and sextants and hammers and awls and anything that was made out of metal.

[00:53:51] They were even stealing, you know, like prizing loose the nails that were tacked onto the ship

[00:53:57] to hold the sheathing, the copper sheathing. So much so that Captain Cook began to worry that the

[00:54:04] ship was going to fall apart from all the nails being pried loose. But they also kind of felt

[00:54:09] like, well, this is a natural substance. You've got a lot of it. We don't have any of it. You're

[00:54:15] being stingy. Why not share the stuff? I think that was kind of going through their heads. You

[00:54:20] seem to have a lot of this metal stuff. We want some. Not only that, but meanwhile, the British

[00:54:26] were taking enormous amounts of timber, water, hogs and all kinds of food. You could say they

[00:54:33] were stealing it. So perhaps it's a fair payment. You know, you give me nails and we'll give you

[00:54:39] hogs and other things to eat. But that's going on from island to island to island.

[00:54:45] Some islands are more generous than others. In some places, there's a lot more of these

[00:54:52] thefts going on. I mean, I even have to be careful when I call it a theft. In some cases,

[00:54:58] I say they're just, you know, things go missing. And, you know, I'm not really sure. I mean,

[00:55:04] they didn't know when a quadrant was missing. They didn't obviously know quite what to do

[00:55:11] with a quadrant. It was some kind of important implement, but they didn't know, you know,

[00:55:16] they hadn't been trained in how to use it for astronomical purposes. But it's a constant theme.

[00:55:21] And I think it's another factor in Cook's temper as he moves from island to island. He's just,

[00:55:27] he's so fed up with it. He's like, ah, we try it. You know, he's fed up also with his Marines who,

[00:55:34] you know, seem to be falling asleep when these things are stolen. And, you know, he's,

[00:55:40] you know, he realizes I've got to get all the way to Alaska and I got to hold on to these things.

[00:55:45] I need that quadrant. I need that, you know, I need that for survival. So, you know, he's getting

[00:55:52] increasingly exasperated and frustrated with this whole thing of not only the theft, but then how do

[00:56:01] you police the theft or get the thing back? You know, do you take people hostage? Do you make

[00:56:07] threats? Do you burn down huts and steal canoes? How do you get the thing back? He obviously was

[00:56:15] a part of his job that he hated and it was getting worse and worse as the voyage progressed.

[00:56:22] Absolutely. And then they go up towards Alaska and they do not find a way through.

[00:56:28] And I imagine that's also probably not the ideal scenario for someone like Captain Cook.

[00:56:35] Yeah, it's failure. I guess you could say he failed to find it. Although we know now that

[00:56:41] it wasn't failure. It was in fact, and you know, they call it negative discovery. You know,

[00:56:48] not finding the thing that is assumed to be there. It's an important part of discovery.

[00:56:54] Like, no, it's not there. It was an impenetrable wall of ice that he encountered. He was nearly

[00:57:00] crushed by the ice. He barely got out of there alive. Most explorers at that point would have

[00:57:04] said, all right, we tried. We did our job. We did what the Admiralty required of us.

[00:57:09] We're going home. But he did not do that. He said, you know what? Maybe we got here a little

[00:57:14] too late in the season. Why don't we come back next summer and try all over again? So in other

[00:57:19] words, extend the voyage by at least another year. Meanwhile, he's got to figure out what to

[00:57:24] do with his men and his ships for the winter. He didn't want to be up in Alaska. He said,

[00:57:30] why don't we go back to that cool archipelago that we stumbled upon earlier in the voyage,

[00:57:35] a place called Hawaii and winter there because they've, you know, friendly people and warm

[00:57:43] climate and plenty of pigs and lots of fish and lots of timber because they're constantly

[00:57:49] repairing the ship. So they go back all the way back to Hawaii. He makes landfall initially at

[00:57:56] Maui, but then he sees the big island of Hawaii. He says, that's actually where we're going.

[00:58:01] He circumnavigates the island and finally puts in at a port a bay called Kealakukia Bay. That's

[00:58:09] where the next phase of the story starts. Yes, absolutely. This is sort of where the climax of

[00:58:15] this tale kind of comes together. I'm wondering, can you set up this sort of very violent end?

[00:58:22] I'll tell you from my perspective, what ultimately happens ends up looking a bit like,

[00:58:28] you know, an attempted abduction that leads to multiple homicides on both sides.

[00:58:34] But I guess, can you walk us through how this conflict ends up coming about?

[00:58:40] Well, so when he comes into that bay, it's a very curious thing. He's gotten lots of

[00:58:47] interesting receptions and greetings from islands in the past, but nothing like this.

[00:58:54] There are thousands of canoes out in the bay and thousands of Native Hawaiians on shore

[00:59:02] shouting and screaming and crying. And there's this incredible sort of rapture.

[00:59:06] They're in the middle of this festival. It's called the Makahiki that is there to celebrate

[00:59:11] the god Lano, who was the god of fertility and the god of peace. And this was, you know,

[00:59:17] the happiest time of the year. And when he comes ashore, to his surprise and his confusion, I guess,

[00:59:29] they're bowing down to him. They are prostrating themselves and making a pathway for him

[00:59:35] to proceed up to the temple. They are calling out the name Lano, Lano, Lano. They're calling him

[00:59:42] Lano. Of course, at this point, didn't know who Lano was. So the king, the various chiefs greet

[00:59:51] him and are calling him Lano. They bring him up to the Heiau, which is the temple, the sacred temple.

[00:59:57] And he's in part of this ritual, some sort of ceremony where he is the guest of honor.

[01:00:04] And they're calling him by the name of this god. So, you know, a lot of anthropologists over

[01:00:10] the years have debated this point of like, did the Hawaiians really think he was Lano?

[01:00:17] Or did they just, they weren't sure who he was and they figured we better treat him really,

[01:00:22] really well. Because they got guns and they've got metal and these ships are like nothing we

[01:00:28] have seen before. And these people look so different. But I mean, there's this old tradition

[01:00:33] that Lano, this god had gone off sort of the edge of the world in this giant canoe, giant sails,

[01:00:42] and that he vowed that he would return one day. And that he would return to that very bay,

[01:00:49] which is where the temple is dedicated to the god Lano. So it was at the very least

[01:00:57] an incredible set of circumstances and coincidences that Cook arrived when he did

[01:01:03] and how he did. And certainly something weird was going on. And they treated him like a god.

[01:01:11] They treated his men unbelievably well. They rolled out the red carpet. And for about two,

[01:01:16] three weeks, they, man, they just, they were having the time of their lives.

[01:01:21] They were making friends. They were having sexual relationships with the women on a big scale.

[01:01:30] The men couldn't believe their good luck. Cook was greeted by the king and they got everything

[01:01:36] they wanted. And everything went just about perfectly. Cook began to sense it was time

[01:01:42] to leave and he got ready to leave. Just before he left, however, something bad happened, which is

[01:01:48] one of his men died of natural causes. I'm not really sure what it was, but he died. And

[01:01:56] if the Hawaiians had had any doubts about whether these guys were gods or not,

[01:02:01] they were beginning to suspect, oh, maybe they're just human. This guy died. They buried him on

[01:02:07] the shore. They had a nice ceremony for him. You could begin to tell that the Hawaiians were going,

[01:02:13] you know, gods don't die. You know, this is just a mere mortal. But they said their goodbyes and

[01:02:23] Cook left and very quickly upon leaving encountered a storm, a very fierce storm. And the foremast of

[01:02:32] the resolution, his ship snapped in half. And he decided to turn right around because he couldn't

[01:02:41] venture to Alaska. He couldn't continue the voyage to go back to the bay and repair the ship.

[01:02:49] So I think the two ships coast right back into the bay. And from then on,

[01:02:53] the situation is completely different. The Hawaiians are like, what are you doing here?

[01:03:00] We said goodbye. You're a god out of season. You know, you shouldn't be here. Lano's time is over.

[01:03:07] The Makahiki is over. It's now the time of war and politics, not peace and revelry. And furthermore,

[01:03:15] you know, if you're a god, like your boat broke, like, that's not right. And even if it had,

[01:03:25] you would have fixed it, you know, through your own powers and magic and supernatural,

[01:03:29] whatever talents you have. And so they knew something was different and they treated Cook

[01:03:34] very differently. And the thefts that we talked about, stealing things, I mean, that just escalated.

[01:03:41] All kinds of things were stolen. Cook is roaring mad. They do get a detail ashore to cut a tree to

[01:03:49] repair the mast. But, you know, it's just a different world and they are not welcome. They

[01:03:55] can tell they are not welcome there. When some of the warriors at night, in the middle of the night,

[01:04:03] steal one of Cook's rowboats. You know, he had a number of smaller boats that were important to

[01:04:10] get into shore. And the most important of all was, well, he had a pennis and he had

[01:04:17] a boat called a cutter and he had to launch these different boats. But one of the boats was stolen

[01:04:22] in the middle of the night. And this just was the final straw for Cook. He's like roaring mad and he

[01:04:30] goes ashore personally. You know, instead of sending a detail of his own man to go

[01:04:35] negotiate for the return of the boat, he just storms ashore with this crazy idea.

[01:04:42] And by this point, his good judgment has completely left him. This crazy idea to grab

[01:04:48] the king of Hawaii, a man who's considered a deity there, Kalani Opu'u, the king of Hawaii,

[01:04:56] all powerful, omnipotent, who's got thousands of warriors there to protect him. But he goes

[01:05:03] with this idea, Cook does, of convincing the king to come onto the resolution where they're going

[01:05:10] to hold him hostage. They're going to essentially hold him for ransom until I get my rowboat back.

[01:05:18] I'm going to hold the king. And he doesn't exactly grab the king, but he's like kind of clutching the

[01:05:24] king and holding his hand. He does convince him to come on board the resolution. He says,

[01:05:31] we're going to have a meal. And he's using some subterfuge. He's trying to ingratiate himself

[01:05:38] and get him onto the ship. But some of the bodyguards start to sense that something is up

[01:05:45] and they don't trust this scenario. And they are telling the king, you can't leave. We need to

[01:05:51] protect you. And Cook is like grabbing him a little tighter, like, yeah, we're coming on the

[01:05:57] ship. And the bodyguards are saying, no, you're not. And things begin to escalate and then some

[01:06:04] rocks are thrown and then more and more warriors show up. And there is a small contingent of royal

[01:06:09] Marines there who begin to load their muskets. And then some more rocks are thrown and everything is

[01:06:15] escalating fast. They don't have Mai with them anymore to help translate. Obviously, there's a

[01:06:22] language barrier too that's contributing to the misconceptions and miscues. And some of the women

[01:06:29] that are around the king started to scream and cry. And they're all worried that something

[01:06:35] terrible is going to happen to him. And yeah, even more rocks are thrown and then some spears and

[01:06:44] the royal Marines start to shoot into the crowd. Some men are killed. Meanwhile, Cook is just

[01:06:52] standing there at the edge of the water on the lava flats. At this point, he's like, I don't know

[01:06:58] what to do. He's looking out in the water. He can't jump into the water because guess what? He

[01:07:05] can't swim. Almost like all officers, all men of the Royal Navy, weirdly, they weren't required to

[01:07:11] learn how to swim. So he couldn't jump into the water. So he just stands there. He has a firearm.

[01:07:17] His royal Marines are right there firing away, but it escalates in a real hurry. And I suppose it's

[01:07:23] not a spoiler to tell your listeners generally what happened near the end. I think it's pretty

[01:07:30] well known that the site where he was killed, basically these warriors descend upon him.

[01:07:38] And so many of them are lashing out at him and striking him that no one really knows who

[01:07:44] delivered the final blow. One of the daggers was made out of the bill from a swordfish.

[01:07:51] One of the daggers, unfortunately, was made by Cook's own men because they had been churning

[01:07:56] out, their blacksmiths had been churning out these crude chisels, these crude knives, almost like

[01:08:03] shivs, as gifts to give to the Hawaiians. Hey, you like metal? We'll give you these cheap kind

[01:08:09] of knives. Well, apparently one of them ended up in Cook's back. By this point, all the Marines

[01:08:14] either have been killed or have retreated. And that's a whole thing that is debated a lot. It's

[01:08:21] like, did they discharge their responsibilities or were they just cowards? So the rest of the men are

[01:08:28] on board the big ships, watching through their glasses, this horrific scene taking place

[01:08:34] with this backdrop of these cliffs of the bay, which it's almost like an amphitheater.

[01:08:40] And they're watching their captain just get slaughtered and just hacked to pieces and

[01:08:46] bludgeoned to death. And they can't really do anything about it. It's a horrific thing to watch

[01:08:52] for them to have watched. His body is dragged back inland and his body is dismembered and

[01:09:01] burned and his bones are distributed among the chiefs of the island. And that's a whole

[01:09:08] big story, is like what happened to all his different body parts? And it gets to be pretty

[01:09:12] gruesome because the British at the very least won his body back so they can do a proper burial at sea.

[01:09:18] And the Hawaiians are like, well, we don't have his body anymore. It's all over the place.

[01:09:25] And it's a very awkward situation, but some of his remains are returned, including part of his hat

[01:09:32] and part of his skull and part of his thigh and some other... It's really pretty gruesome.

[01:09:38] And they do have the burial at sea eventually. But I don't know if you call it a murder story

[01:09:46] or you call it just a melee that erupted. And in the midst of all this, at least 20 of the

[01:09:52] Hawaiian warriors were killed as well, maybe more. You go down to this site where this happened.

[01:09:58] It's a pilgrimage site. A lot of people who like Captain Cook want to go see the site. And a lot

[01:10:02] of people who hate Captain Cook want to go down to the site. There's a plaque marking the exact

[01:10:07] spot where he fell. It's a long hike down there and there's all these feral goats and you go

[01:10:14] through these thickets and all this sort of lava rubble and you finally get down there.

[01:10:20] And there's a big obelisk as well, marking the location. And that obelisk is periodically

[01:10:28] vandalized and sprayed with paint. It's a controversial place and you can still kind

[01:10:34] of feel the shockwaves of this incident all these years later. It's got some weird juju down there

[01:10:40] for sure. I've spent a good bit of time down there, kind of soaking up the vibe there.

[01:10:45] I was curious, just before we wrap up our interview, for you as an author and as a

[01:10:51] researcher, did you ever eureka moment when you were digging into all the papers, all the

[01:10:57] documents, all the visits to the various places that Cook went? Was there any moment in time that

[01:11:04] sticks out to you as a moment that something really came together?

[01:11:07] I read every word of everything Captain Cook wrote during this voyage. He's a pretty good

[01:11:12] writer for someone who's self-educated and not a literary person. But by and large, his writing is

[01:11:19] pretty stodgy and it's the kind of stuff that you'll note, like the viscosity of the mud in the

[01:11:31] bay or the barometric pressure or the temperature. There's a lot of that kind of detail, the kind

[01:11:38] of detail you'd expect and minutiae you would expect from a captain who's also a mapmaker.

[01:11:44] The eureka moment for me would be digging into the journals of lesser known people on board

[01:11:52] these ships. People who are freer, I think, to write what they really felt and saw and knew to

[01:11:58] be true. Many of these were diaries that were written without the approval of the admiralty.

[01:12:07] There's one writer named David Samwell, who was a Welshman who wrote beautifully and just had

[01:12:12] just amazing, colorful, detailed descriptions of everything going on, including the incident of

[01:12:19] Cook's death. He has this beautiful thing where he describes this thing that he's not even sure

[01:12:24] what to call it. It's the very first description of surfing. He goes on and on about, you're not

[01:12:28] going to believe what they do. They get on these boards and they stand up and they

[01:12:33] tangle with waves that we British sailors would never even think about because they don't know

[01:12:37] how to swim. He has descriptions of episode of human sacrifice that they witnessed in Tahiti.

[01:12:45] Samwell is one of the things. I just can't believe how colorful and wonderful. He was a surgeon,

[01:12:53] but he was also a poet. There's Samwell, there's another journal by a guy named John

[01:12:59] Ledgerd, there's another one by a guy named Rickman. You begin to add up all these secondary

[01:13:04] sources. That for me is kind of—it's not a eureka moment, but it is the way for me to get at

[01:13:13] the truth and get at the real—what was it like to be alive on these ships? What were the conditions

[01:13:20] like? The smells and the food they were eating. It enabled me to put you there, to really make it

[01:13:31] come alive. When you add that to Cook's journals, you get a real three-dimensional account.

[01:13:39] I had a ball doing that stuff. Just reading this stuff and trying to get into the way they wrote

[01:13:44] back then and the way they thought and the way they talked, it was a real joy to try to

[01:13:50] recreate the voyage and have all these other voices to work with.

[01:13:57] Yeah. I think you said earlier, it's an ensemble story, but it's also a very vivid one in your

[01:14:02] retelling of—you do feel like some of the gruesome stuff, but also some of the beautiful things.

[01:14:08] You really can almost see it in your mind's eye when reading this. I thought that was definitely

[01:14:14] accomplished. It's a poignant story, but it's also one about hubris. It's obviously awful what

[01:14:22] ended up happening with Captain Cook, but it's also really hard to reconcile the person who was

[01:14:27] able to so elegantly handle a volatile situation in New Zealand with the man who escalated stuff

[01:14:35] so much over a rowboat that he ended up getting himself and several others killed. How do you

[01:14:43] reckon that? Yeah. I mean, let me say something about just how tough these voyages were. To go

[01:14:49] through three of them, it wears on the mind, it wears on the psyche. He wasn't his best self by

[01:14:56] that point. He was tired. He may have been sick. He may have had parasites. He just wasn't the

[01:15:03] same captain. There's two what should be great sources that might have given us insights into

[01:15:12] some of this stuff that unfortunately are not available to us. His journal

[01:15:19] stops on the day he came ashore in Hawaii. He wrote every single day, every single day,

[01:15:25] voluminous stuff. Why did it stop on the day he came ashore? That's it. We don't ever hear from

[01:15:35] the captain again. It's led to conspiracy theories that perhaps the admiralty found something

[01:15:41] compromising in there and censored, ripped those pages out or who knows, they were lost.

[01:15:50] But it's like one of the things historians have really regretted is that this most fraught moment

[01:15:59] in his life, his final days, we don't know what he was thinking or doing or feeling except through

[01:16:05] accounts from other officers. The other thing is, this is more speaks to just his general psyche

[01:16:12] and motives and what was going on in his interior life. His wife lived into her 90s.

[01:16:22] Elizabeth was her name. And near the end of her life, for reasons that we do not understand,

[01:16:28] she burned all of her papers, including all of the letters that he ever wrote her

[01:16:34] throughout his life, letters that he wrote from sea, letters that he wrote on various voyages.

[01:16:41] So what a great source of insight that might have been. And why did she do that? It's just

[01:16:47] another source of frustration for historians because this buttoned up captain who didn't

[01:16:53] really tell us much about himself, that was our one opportunity. And she didn't just destroy them,

[01:17:00] she burned them. I mean, I don't know. It's very weird. It's like she was flipping the bird to

[01:17:07] future historians. You will never know what the real captain was like. So there you go.

[01:17:15] A very strange thing. Yeah, two sort of remaining mysteries. Maybe she wanted

[01:17:20] people to remember him as he was portrayed popularly rather than whatever sort of messy

[01:17:27] you know, real person he was in real life. But she's doing PR for him.

[01:17:35] So this has been wonderful, Hampton. Thank you so much. I know we've gone over so I want to

[01:17:40] give you an opportunity to, you know, is there anything we didn't get into? We didn't ask about

[01:17:46] that you think it's important for our audience to understand about Captain Cook, his death,

[01:17:52] his final voyage, all of that? Or just the story in general?

[01:17:57] No, I think we've covered a lot of ground. And your questions were great. And I hope my answers

[01:18:02] were halfway articulate. And I hope it kind of fits into the theme of your show. And in a way

[01:18:10] that's I mean, it's probably a little bit of a departure for you. But maybe that makes it more

[01:18:14] interesting. I don't know. Our audience gives us a lot of leeway to do random historical things.

[01:18:20] And I think this actually does fit in because it's about law and order. It's about death. It's

[01:18:23] about homicide. And it's about sort of some resounding mysteries throughout history. And

[01:18:29] we're so grateful. I'm so glad you said we covered a lot of ground because that makes us kind of like

[01:18:33] the final voyage of Captain Cook. We want to sincerely thank Hampton Sides for coming on

[01:18:39] the show to talk with us. We appreciated his time and insights. Check out his book, The Wide, Wide

[01:18:44] Sea, Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.

[01:18:50] It's a great read. We'll include a link in our show notes. Thanks so much for listening to The

[01:18:54] Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at

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