Hampton Sides Brings His New Novel To Sonoma Valley Authors Festival

Hampton Sides arrives at the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival this month with a fascinating new book about the controversial Captain John Cook.

New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides

New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides (hamptonsides.com) lands in wine country later this month as part of the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival (April 26-28, svauthorsfest.org). The three-day event features writers like Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club), Anita Gail Jones (Peach Seed), Colm Tóibín (Brooklyn) and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin (Lincoln), among many other accomplished writers. Sides’ latest book, The Wide Wide Sea, is an epic account of Captain John Cook and his momentous voyage in the Age of Exploration. We caught up with the author to hear about his new work.

What are the themes conveyed in The Wide Wide Sea?

The larger theme that hovers over Cook’s third and final voyage [concerns] the phenomenon of ‘first contact’ and the enormous gulf separating cultures from distant parts of the globe.

Cook was constantly struggling, and often failing, to bridge that cultural gap, and it was this struggle that defined his last voyage, including the circumstances that led to his death in Hawaii. In his last years, I think Cook was starting to realize that these epic voyages weren’t necessarily good for people—not for the visitors, and especially not for the people being visited. He was just starting to understand the adverse effects that European ideas, tools, germs and lifeways could have on traditional island cultures.

The setting for the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival remains intimate, allowing guests to interact with writers and their topics.

What inspired you to explore this topic?

I’ve been interested in Cook since I was a little boy. But I got even more interested in recent years when I started to understand just how controversial he’s become, especially among Indigenous people.

From New Zealand to Alaska, he’s become a symbol of colonialism and the ravages of European arrival. His memorials have been vandalized, and his statues have been torn down from Melbourne to Victoria, British Columbia, where protesters recently toppled a Cook monument into the harbor. The people of the Cook Islands are discussing changing their country’s name. For me, all of this controversy is a live wire. It means this old tale still has a pulse. When you can find a historical subject that still agitates and animates people hundreds of years later, then I say, run toward it!

How did you conduct your research, and what surprised you?

First, I did a lot of travel, far more than I’ve done for any of my other books. I tried to get to as many places Cook visited as possible. It wasn’t easy, especially during a global pandemic, but I had some unforgettable research trips to places like New Zealand, French Polynesia, Hawaii, Vancouver Island, Alaska and England.

Then, of course, I spent a lot of time in archives, museums, art galleries and the like. I was surprised to find that there are Cook aficionados—Cook nerds, basically— spread all over the world, a whole subculture of people who know every nook and cranny of Cook’s life and voyages. I became a card-carrying member of the Captain Cook Society and relied a lot on this curious fraternity of buffs and scholars. They were a godsend.

Amy Tan is part of this year’s exciting festival.

What were some of the challenges when researching?

Cook’s journal stops the day he steps ashore in Hawaii, a few weeks before his death. No one seems to know why his log goes silent at this most pregnant moment in Cook’s life, but it does, and there are many conspiracy theories about why. We lose Cook’s perspective at the exact time and place we need it most.

Also, many decades later, Cook’s widow, Elizabeth, inexplicably decided to burn her papers, including all the letters he ever wrote her. I had to find other primary sources that helped fill in the gaps. Luckily, every halfway literate person on the voyage kept a journal and had something interesting to say about Cook.

Were there any additional revelatory moments when doing your research?

When I was in Yorkshire researching Cook’s early life, I climbed a little mountain in the North Moors called Roseberry Topping. Cook roamed over this same escarpment when he was a young boy. It was just high enough to provide him, at a very impressionable age, his first glimpse of the ocean, some 10 miles away. Here he was, the son of a poor farmer, hemmed in by land, destined for a narrow agricultural life, when he first saw the North Sea. It changed his life completely.

In this one electric moment, he saw a new future for himself and never looked back. He soon apprenticed to a Quaker shipping company on the coast, worked his way up in the merchant marine and eventually became one of the greatest seafarers ever. It was small, but taking in the view from the top of that craggy hill was somehow a revelation for me.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

We’ve come to fully recognize the devastating effects of colonialism and the racism that fueled the whole imperial mindset. We’ve begun to appreciate how completely Indigenous perspectives were dismissed and ignored.

The Wide Wide Sea is a direct product of this larger reckoning and has much to say about how we view this historical clashing of cultures. In writing the book, I constantly questioned the underlying goals and assumptions of Cook’s voyage. I used a lot of Indigenous oral history to make it a three-dimensional account. Cook’s voyage contains the historical seeds of so many current debates—Eurocentrism, entitlement, toxic masculinity, cultural appropriation and the role of invasive species in destroying island biodiversity. It’s a tale nearly 250 years old yet feels extremely modern.