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If, like me, you’re one of the many people who felt a sense of deflation after reading David Grann’s enthralling book The Wager last year, knowing that it would be nigh impossible to find a worthy follow-up, then I have good news for you. Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea (Knopf Doubleday, 432 pages), about Captain James Cook’s third and final expedition, is, like Grann’s book, an epic, magisterial, morally complex work about the Age of Sail that reads better than any thriller.
In 1776, around the time the Declaration of Independence was being signed by America’s colonies, 46-year-old Cook set off on the HMS Resolution in search of the Northwest Passage across Canada. Unlike previous expeditions, his would approach the fabled waterway – which England hoped would provide a shortcut to the lucrative markets of Asia – via Alaska and the Pacific. This would entail stops, some planned, some not, in Tasmania, Tahiti, Oregon and Hawaii, the latter then virtually unknown to Europeans.
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A central storyline here concerns a young Polynesian man named Mai, who, after his father was murdered and his family’s land seized by warriors from Bora Bora, hitched a ride to England, where he became a society sensation.
Cook was to drop Mai back home en route to the Arctic. What was to be a triumphant return, however, was complicated by the fact that Mai and the British were effectively using each other for their own cross-purposes. The British believed that having a loyal representative on the islands, one who would be loaded up with farm animals, fancy clothes and the latest tech gadgets, would help project their greatness: not just to islanders, but to any other colonial power that happened to stop by. Mai, for his part, was counting on the British, along with their guns, to help him avenge his family against the Bora-Borans.
Neither plan worked out. Cook, for one, had no interest in starting a regional war. And, rather than finding him impressive, the locals on the random Polynesian island where Cook initially deposited Mai disdainfully viewed the low-born young man as a peacock upstart who needed to be shown his place.
Cook’s reputation has, of late, suffered a fate similar to that of many major colonial-era figures. Sides pushes back on this a bit, noting that Cook was primarily an explorer and a map-maker, not a conqueror. Open-minded and inquisitive, he often admired and sought to learn from the Indigenous peoples he encountered. And many seem to have admired him as well. The Wide Wide Sea details how those qualities, and his diplomacy, often made Cook welcome wherever he landed (until, that is, an overextended stay and series of misunderstandings resulted in his violent death in Hawaii).
Sides, author of many other books, has a fabulous, transparent writing style, and the prose just sails along (pun obviously intended). He rarely relies on cliffhangers or other narrative tricks to drive things forward. He doesn’t have to. There’s adventure and hardship aplenty in The Wide Wide Sea, and yet it is the human and moral nuance that Sides brings to an already jaw-dropping storyline that makes it so eminently, deliciously readable.
Personal and political dynamics are also at the heart of Eric Jay Dolin’s Left for Dead (Norton, 320 pages), a Robinson Crusoe-level tale of survival shot through with mind-boggling, Russian-doll levels of treachery and betrayal. Massachusetts-based Dolin does an excellent job of bringing clarity to a story with permutations as complex as the coastline of the Falkland Islands, where the chance encounter that drives it takes place, shortly after the events of The Wide Wide Sea, in the early 19th century.
In 1813, an American sealing ship, the Nanina, came across the marooned crew and passengers of the British merchant vessel Isabella, which had wrecked on current day Speedwell Island in the Falklands. Though America and Britain were at war in what would be known to posterity as the War of 1812, both sides agreed to pretend they didn’t know this in order for the Americans to do what they viewed as their moral duty: to help and feed the desperate, hungry British castaways.
Morality was apparently not a motivator for William D’Aranda, dastardly commander of the British warship that arrived in the Falklands soon after the Nanina, having being fetched by crew members of the Isabella who managed to reach South America after a perilous, 1,000-kilometre open-boat voyage. Instead, D’Aranda saw in the situation an opportunity to enrich himself by taking the Nanina as a prize, and the Americans as prisoners of war and forced labour.
He then went on to abandon five men, two of them British, on a small island where they’d gone on a hunting trip to help feed the ship. Though they had virtually no means of survival, survive the men did, for a full year and half.
Shifting allegiances amongst the five would lead to further abandonments on various islands (the Falklands has a lot). One such abandonee was the American captain Charles Barnard, whose improbable survival in the islands’ stark, unforgiving climate and conditions seems to prove an adage about the era, that the ships were made of wood and the men of iron. (Whether it’s fashioning clothes from sealskin, developing penguin-hunting techniques or fashioning cooking implements from jetsam, the resourcefulness of the castaways makes all those survivalist reality shows on TV seem like a bit of a joke.)
The twists and turns keep coming among a memorable cast of castaways. Copious photos and illustrations of local flora, fauna, as well as sites and principal players, are a welcome enhancement to a tale that barely needs it.
Unlike the previous two books, David Gibbins’s informative A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (St. Martin’s Press, 304 pages) reads more like a straight work of history, the maritime archeologist using each wreck as a springboard into the civilization from which it hearkened.
Gibbins’s fascination with his subject is lifelong. Though he was born about as far from any ocean as you can get, in Saskatoon, he had circumnavigated the world (with his parents) by the age of 6, and got his diving qualifications as a teenager. His earliest dives were on British, War of 1812-era warships in the Great Lakes.
Wreck sites, writes Gibbins, are unique in that they all represent “a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated.” Among many other fascinating subjects, the wrecks in this book – more than half of which Gibbins was personally involved in exploring and researching – offer a portal, or rather porthole, into Bronze Age sea trading in Britain, the trade of wine and olive oil in ancient Greece and Rome, 18th-century piracy and the slave trade in Africa, and Viking voyages of discovery.
There are an estimated three million shipwrecks strewn about the globe, yet the practice of wreck-diving only began in earnest in the 1950s, with the invention of the aqualung. In those early days, archeologists would direct divers from above the water. Now, specialists like Gibbins can conduct their studies entirely underwater, much as a terrestrial archeologist would.
Though Gibbins is also a novelist, his series of bestselling archeological thrillers having sold in the millions of copies, here he takes a straightforward, sober approach, heavily reliant on dates, facts and mini-biographies. His knowledge is as impressive as it is vast, and he excels at giving us the bigger global picture around each wreck.
That said, what fascinates most are tiny details. Like the two archer’s wrist guards found on one of 27,831 dives made at the wreck site of Henry VIII’s warship Mary Rose bearing, alongside Henry’s royal coat of arms, the triple turret of Castile: a nod to the alliance created between England and Spain through Henry’s marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Alas, the marriage, like the ship, and England’s allegiance to the Church of Rome, did not last. But that’s a story you already knew.