Northcote College

3,091 pages read and 243 team points

SamP

432 pts
(432 pages read)
  • The Wide Wide Sea

    By Hampton Sides
    5 stars

    A gripping look at a complicated character in the history of the Modern Era. Cook's third voyage into the Pacific Ocean was markedly different from his first and second, as was the man himself. At times we see the hero of an enlightened age making positive first European contacts with indigenous peoples of the Pacific and those that skirt the Bering Sea. At other times and at others, we see a tyrant, brutalising his men, and razing an island over a stolen goat. This book didn't solve for me which of these two categories the man fits in more. Perhaps deifying a man as representative of the Enlightenment, or demonising him for the disruptive consequences it eventually brought about obfuscates the simple fact that he was just a man, capable of greatness, and of great viciousness.

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