Capt. Cook's Cruelty, 1777

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 173-174:

Several months earlier, when Cook was passing through islands in the Tonga group, he had shown a taste for cruelty that some of his officers found both surprising and alarming. In the face of what he called the “repeated insolence” of the Natives—jackets, shoes, and a pewter basin had gone missing, as had daggers, bayonets, and muskets—Cook’s fury smoldered. On Tongatapu and its nearby atolls, he took to flogging Natives far past the daily limit of twelve lashes per man allowed by navy rules; in one instance, he had a Native whipped a sadistic seventy-two times. He cut off the ears of some of the most egregious thieves, and in at least one case, on his orders, a cross was carved into a Native man’s shoulder, all the way to the bone.

Yet Cook had never visited on anyone the kind of widespread retribution that he was now unleashing on the people of Moorea—punishing the many for the misdeeds of an individual. It seemed Cook had taken leave of his senses. The wanton destruction of the homes of people he had no proof were actually connected to the theft—this was a first. Although some of his men threw themselves into the vandalistic acts with gusto, most were appalled by the harshness of their captain’s orders. They understood Cook’s initial frustration over the theft, but his lust for retaliation had grown into something terrifyingly toxic, with no sense of proportion.

“I doubt not,” thought one lieutenant, “but Captain Cook had good reasons for carrying his punishment to these people to so great a length, but what his reasons were are yet a secret.” It was “all about such a trifle as a small goat,” wrote Midshipman George Gilbert. Cook’s reprisals “were so different from his conduct in like cases in former voyages.”

Later in the day, for good measure, Cook had members of his party stalk down to the water’s edge and rip apart every canoe they could find. This was much more than a passing insult. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of a canoe in Polynesian society—the labor and craftsmanship it entailed, the utility it provided, the livelihood it advanced. Canoes were transportation, but they were also art. What the horse was to the American West, the canoe was to the Society Islands. To destroy canoes was to strike at the people’s independence, their means of sustenance and of getting about, their sense of aesthetics—and, to some extent, their sense of identity, too.

Cook, who surely understood this, persisted through the day, and the day after that: He sent teams of men along the coast to smash up every outrigger they encountered. Some Mooreans filled their beloved vessels with heavy rocks and sunk them in the lagoon shallows, thinking this might deter Cook. It didn’t. “The Captain,” wrote Lieutenant John Rickman in horror, “ordered the canoes that were sunk to be weighed up and destroyed.”

It is extraordinary that the islanders didn’t rise in defiance and kill these white-skinned invaders. The Native weapons may have been no match for muskets, but the Mooreans outnumbered Cook’s small party by a thousandfold. They could have made quick work of the Englishmen, but for some reason they remained pacific, even as parts of their island were consumed in flames.

Capt. Cook's Tasmanians Unimpressed

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 100-101, 103-104:

This was probably the first time these particular people had encountered Europeans, or, for that matter, members of any other race. The Palawa, the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, had been separated from the mainland of Australia for at least ten thousand years—with the flooding of the Bassian Land Bridge that occurred at the end of the last ice age. And all Indigenous people of Australia, in turn, had been isolated from the rest of the world for at least fifty thousand years, reaching back to the fogs of the Dreamtime and the primordial days of their earliest myths. Yet, judging by the stolid expressions on the faces of these tribesmen, their first encounter with a people so dramatically different from them appeared to be a nonevent. In his published account, Cook adopted a neutral anthropological tone, evenhanded and remarkably devoid of judgment or religiosity, jingoism or national pride:

They approached us from the woods, without betraying any marks of fear, with the greatest confidence imaginable. None of them had weapons except one who held in his hand a stick about 2 feet long and pointed at one end. They were naked and wore no ornaments except some large punctures or ridges raised on different parts of their bodies, some in straight, and others in curved lines. They were of common stature and rather slender. Their skin was black and also their hair. Most of them had their hair and beards smeared with a red ointment and some of their faces were painted with the same composition. They received every present we made without the least appearance of satisfaction. They seemed to set no value on iron or iron tools. When some bread was given, as soon as they understood that it was to be eaten, they either returned it or threw it away without even tasting it. They also refused some fish, both raw and dressed, which we offered them. But upon giving some birds to them they did not return these and easily made us comprehend that they were fond of such foods.

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THE NEXT MORNING, Cook took heart: A group of about twenty inhabitants were seen congregating on the beach, clearly hoping to interact again with the white-skinned visitors. The Natives seemed to have recovered from Mai’s ballistics display the day before. “They were convinced that we intended them no mischief,” thought Cook, “and were desirous of renewing the intercourse.”

Cook promptly went out to meet and mingle again with the Palawa, this time much more freely than the previous day. Though he was outnumbered, he seemed to have no fear and took no precautions; he walked unarmed among them and engaged in the cryptic, often awkward, and sometimes comical effort of trying to understand an utterly unfamiliar people—bartering and gesturing, smiling and pointing, occasionally making grunts and other strange sounds. The cerebral Cook was far from being a gregarious or voluble man, but he had a knack for these sorts of rough-and-tumble interactions.

This forthright curiosity was an admirable trait, one he’d shown during his previous voyages. Many navigators during the Age of Exploration were content to exploit whatever resources they could quickly locate and move on. Far too many first encounters between Europeans and isolated tribes transpired without the feeblest attempt at cultural understanding—and, sadly, they too often ended in bloodshed.

But Cook’s inquisitiveness was genuine. He wanted to know who the Palawa were, what they ate, how they thought and talked and dressed, how they worshipped their gods. One senses that of all the different roles his voyages required him to carry out, Cook derived the most pleasure and satisfaction from playing the part of anthropological observer.

It was strange to Cook how little acquainted the Palawa appeared to be with the sea. Unlike Polynesians, they didn’t seem to like to swim, and Cook noted that he did not see a single “canoe or any vessel in which they could go upon the water.” They ate mussels and other mollusks but showed no interest in other kinds of seafood; they ran away in seeming horror several times when Cook’s men presented fish as a gift. When shown a fishhook, they appeared to have no idea what it was. They seemed curious about, but also fearful of, Cook’s small boats moored beside the beach, and though some of the Englishmen tried to coax the Natives out for a short ride in the bay, the Palawa couldn’t be persuaded to come aboard. “With all our dumb oratory we could not prevail [upon] any of them to accompany us,” wrote Samwell, “though it was easily perceived that one of them was very desirous of going and had a long struggle between his fears and his inclinations.”

A Polynesian in England, 1775

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 38-39:

PEOPLE WHO ENCOUNTERED Mai grew to love his playful and curious manner of speech. He freely invented his own words and expressions. A bull was a “man-cow.” Snow was “white rain.” At a country estate where he stayed, he referred to the butler as “king of the bottles.” He called ice “stone water.”

One morning he was stung by a wasp. When asked what had bitten him and caused his hand to swell, he replied that it was a “soldier bird.” Later, a member of the local gentry pinched him a bit of snuff to snort. “No thank you,” he replied. “The nose not hungry.”

His hosts were pleased to learn that he was an excellent cook. Banks asked Mai to roast an assortment of fowl in a traditional Polynesian style. Mai constructed an umu, an earth oven. He dug a hole, built a fire there, then partially filled it with stones. He laid the birds in the pit, wrapping them in butter-smeared paper, for want of his usual plantain leaves. He covered it all with dirt and let the mess of fowl smolder for hours. The result was scrumptious. “Nothing could be better dressed, or more savory,” gushed a critic. “The smoldering pebble-stones and embers…had given a certain flavor to the fowls, a soupçon of smokiness, which made them taste as if a ham accompanied them.”

And so it could be said that barbecue—or at least a South Seas strain of it—had arrived in Great Britain.

At the estates he visited, Mai liked to practice his marksmanship and became a devoted hunter, especially during grouse season. Much to the chagrin of the local groundskeepers, the trigger-happy Mai “popped at all the feathered creation which came in his way”—not only grouse but chickens, geese, even ducks haplessly playing in a pond. “His slaughter of domestic birds,” the observer lamented, “was by no means inconsiderable.”

Guns lay at the heart of why Mai had volunteered to travel to England in the first place. He knew he had to master firearms, to collect them, to understand their inner workings and the ammunition that made them lethal. “He had a sense of mission,” wrote historian Michael Alexander in his book Omai: Noble Savage, and he knew that “these people he had come amongst held the key to his intrinsic purpose, the avenging of his father.”

Other times, Mai would set aside his fowling piece and revert to the hunting techniques he’d learned as a boy. A friend later recalled how Mai crouched in a stubble field and crept up on his prey. “His eye sparkled,” the friend reminisced, when “on a sudden, he darted forward like a cat, and sprang upon a covey of partridges, one of which he caught and took home alive, in great triumph.”

Capt. Cook & the Earl of Sandwich

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 33-34:

IN EARLY FEBRUARY of 1776, Cook received an invitation to have dinner at the London home of one of the most powerful men in England: John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty. It must have been clear by the nature and timing of the invitation that something very important was to be discussed. Cook promptly accepted and a date was set.

Lord Sandwich was a shrewd, cynical, and sometimes ruthless politician, adroit in the power games of London. He and his fellow lords presided over an institution that was the largest organization in Britain and indeed in all of Europe. But Sandwich was much more than a Machiavellian bureaucrat; he was an intellectual of sorts, interested in the science of the day, and an advocate for exploration—probably the staunchest advocate, in fact, behind Cook’s second voyage of discovery.

Sandwich was lanky and tall, with such an odd, shambling, lopsided gait that people liked to say he could walk down both sides of the street at the same time. When at the Admiralty, he was known to be a workaholic. He was, one critic said, a man of “limitless ambition to which he has sacrificed everything,” and he kept such fiendish hours that he would often forsake his meals, opting instead to place a piece of beef between slices of toasted bread, which is how he came to be known as the “inventor” of the sandwich. He was a competitive card player and gambler, and the handy snack he had devised is said to have sustained him through many a long night at the gaming table. Lord Sandwich was a man in a hurry, in other words, and so perhaps it’s fitting that he should be known for a food architecture that can be gobbled quickly—for, through his relentless advocacy of exploration and global cross-pollination, he had accelerated many a timeline.

To find relief from the general toil of his job, Lord Sandwich had cultivated a deep affection for the voyages of exploration that the Admiralty periodically supported. He was perhaps the country’s greatest admirer of James Cook, and everything that had emanated from Cook’s two expeditions to date. Sandwich had been a catalyst, a patron, a sponsor. As far as he was concerned, Cook could do no wrong.

Politically, Sandwich was the gray eminence behind the proposed expedition to North America’s “backside.” In advocating for the voyage, he had confronted considerable resistance within government circles. Mounting tensions in the American colonies had caused the Royal Navy to shift its already strained resources. In a time of imminent war, yet another expedition to the far side of the world seemed a luxury England could not afford. Yet the ever crafty Sandwich had managed to circumvent the naysayers to win official approval.

This was the voyage in which Cook "discovered" the Hawaiian Islands and named them after his sponsor. 

Capt. Cook's Shipboard Hygiene

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 15-17:

DURING HIS TWO voyages, Cook had shown himself to be a benevolent though strict leader of his own men—sparing with the lash and solicitous of his crew’s happiness, comfort, and health. These should be attributes for any good naval officer, but so many ship captains of the era could be unimaginably brutal in their punishments, tyrannical in their command style, and indifferent to conditions belowdecks. The Royal Navy, it was famously said, was “manned by violence and maintained by cruelty.”

Cook, however, was a different sort of captain. He constantly experimented with schemes for shipboard hygiene and diet. He knew that prolonged dampness and darkness were eternal enemies that worked in concert and must be mercilessly fought. Many diseases killed sailors on long voyages, but most of them, Cook found, could be prevented by maintaining strict cleanliness, especially in the galley.

Germ theory was only a nascent and controversial concept among medical scientists at the time, but Cook intuitively seemed to grasp its essence. Ever at war against grime, he kept his men scrubbing the decks with soap and vinegar, and often ordered smoking fires, set in pots, to be lit deep within the ship. His perpetual campaign against cockroaches, rats, weevils, and other vermin was resourceful, almost scientific, in its approach. “To cleanliness, as well in the ship as amongst the people, enough attention cannot be paid,” Cook insisted. “The least neglect occasions a putrid and disagreeable smell below.”

Then there was the most dreaded maritime disease of all: scurvy, a ghastly disorder that was considered an almost inevitable occupational hazard of long ocean voyages. During the Age of Sail, it was generally assumed that scurvy would kill off half the crew members on any lengthy expedition. The malady’s progression was all too well known: spongy gums, fetid breath, protuberant eyes, scaly skin, a breakdown in the tissues and cells of the body, convulsions, and, eventually, death.

But amazingly, during his two odysseys, it seemed that Cook had beaten scurvy. On his second voyage, the Resolution was at sea for three years, but not a single one of his men died of the disease—or even, it seems, developed advanced symptoms. This was a historic breakthrough. He didn’t understand scurvy’s true cause, its etiology; that it resulted from a deficiency of vitamin C would not be determined until the 1930s, when scientists deduced the compound’s chemical structure.

But Cook, following his own hunches while building on a host of older theories, had put in place an astoundingly efficacious system of prevention. A Scottish surgeon named James Lind had demonstrated as far back as the 1750s that scurvy could be treated by consuming citrus fruit, but it took decades before his ideas were aggressively adopted. Building on Lind’s findings, Cook insisted that whenever possible, his sailors—accustomed to a diet of salted meat and stale biscuits—consume fresh fruits, vegetables, and greens. On the Resolution he kept some strange-sounding supplementary items on the menu as well, such as carrot marmalade, wort of malt, rob of orange, inspissated lemon juice, and a concoction known as saloop, which was steeped from the root of a common meadow plant, Orchis mascula.

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Cook hadn’t really conquered scurvy, though—the particular lessons he’d learned through hard and patient experimentation would be unlearned and then learned again, dismissed and revived in piecemeal fashion, over the next several decades. But for now, the Admiralty viewed Cook’s apparent mastery over the disease as possibly an even more consequential achievement than proving the Southern Continent’s nonexistence. So many sons of England, so many sons of so many countries, had died of this horrible malady. It has been estimated that nearly two million European sailors perished from scurvy between 1600 and 1800. The notion that a thousand-day voyage could be undertaken without the disease’s appearance represented a radical shifting of the possibilities; it meant that His Majesty’s ships could range wider and longer, extending the reach of the Crown to the world’s most distant nooks and corners, to complete the maps of the globe.

Kauaʻi, 1778: Aliens Arrive

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 3-4:

On the night the ships appeared, some fishermen were out on the ocean, working by torchlight. One of them, a man named Mapua, was bewildered by what he saw: An enormous silhouette approached, rising high above the surf, fire burning at its top. It had holes on its side, Mapua noticed, and a long spear in front like the sharp nose of a swordfish. Then a second creature appeared, much like the first. Mapua had no idea what they were, but he was sure they were something malevolent.

Mapua and his fellow fishermen paddled hurriedly to shore. According to oral accounts assembled by the Hawaiian historian Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau, they were “trembling and frightened by this wonderful apparition.” When they reached the village, Mapua immediately informed the high chief, Kaeo, about this strange and disturbing sight.

By the next morning the two leviathans had drawn closer to shore. What were they? Where had they come from? What did they want? An onlooker, thoroughly astonished by them, is said to have wondered, “What are those branching things?” (Probably the ships’ masts, sprits, and spars.) Another replied, “They are trees moving about on the sea.”

No, the local priest countered, they were the floating heiaus, or temples, of the gods. “This is not an ordinary thing,” the kāhuna insisted. He said the branches must be steps reaching toward heaven.

As the vessels moved still closer, wrote Kamakau, the villagers were captivated by this “marvelous monster,” and “great wonder came to the people.” A large crowd began to assemble on shore, “shouting with fear and confused thought.” Judging by the way the ships had appeared, silent and ghostly, the edges of their sails furling and fluttering, backing and filling, they seemed to some like giant stingrays that had emerged from the sea.

A few canoes were dispatched to investigate, and the brave paddlers crept just close enough to catch glimpses of humanlike creatures walking upon the decks of the ships. Never having seen tricorne hats before, they thought these strangers’ heads must be deformed. They mistook the odd, close-fitting uniforms for an epidermis. “Their skin is loose and folding,” one said. Unacquainted with pockets, the paddlers imagined they were little doors that opened into the men’s bodies. “Into these openings they thrust their hands, and take many valuable things—their bodies are full of treasure!”

As the ships edged closer to shore, the watching crowds on the beach grew larger and larger, the anticipation building to a frenzy. The people were full of fear and dread, but also a kind of rapture. They sensed something ominous was happening, that their island world was about to change forever.

“The harbor resounded with noise,” wrote Kamakau. “And louder grew the shouting.”

Indentured Servitude vs. Slavery

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 214-215:

As the 17th century drew to a close, English and French colonists were no longer able to justify investments in indentured servitude, even as temporary chattel, on economic grounds. They were, however, able to promote the institution on social and political grounds. The policy decision to pull white women from field gangs because they were better placed to serve the colonial enterprise in the field of reproduction exemplifies the significance of social forces in determining the shape of the labor system. Importantly, it shows that the planters’ efforts to reinvent servitude as slavery received some pushback for social and political purposes. In addition, there was the matter of sustaining militia regiments to assist in the suppression of enslaved Africans. To these ends colonial governments, rather than planters, sought to ramp up the demand for male servants.

Given the harshness of Caribbean work and epidemiological environments, for many servants the plantation experience amounted to lifelong enslavement. The legal requirement of fixed-time servitude and the social reality of lifelong labor were offset by mortality trends and management policy. To suggest, as one scholar does, that it “was, of course, inconceivable that any of the [white] labor pools mentioned (convicts, prisoners of war, or vagrants) could have been converted into chattel slaves” is to ignore what was taking place on the ground in the colonies (Eltis 2000, 70).

The conversion of servitude into slavery was conceived by planters of cotton, tobacco, and sugar. If these planters failed at this conversion, it was not because of weak managerial resolve, but because of the multiple internal and external forces that militated against them, including servants’ unrelenting ambition to participate in colonialism as independent wealth makers.

From the beginning, those Barbadian planters who received large grants of land calculated the benefits of importing African labor to work them. Pre-sugar Barbadian planters, such as James Drax, were directly involved in sponsoring slave voyages to the African coast; the Drax family later became sugar barons in Barbados and Jamaica. Other English merchants with investment interests in Barbados were known slave traders. The Earl of Warwick, who claimed in 1629 that Barbados was granted him by the monarch, and Maurice Thompson, a large landowner, were involved in the supply of enslaved Africans directly to Barbados before the “sugar revolution.”

The contrast with smaller landholders is sharp. Before the [Dutch] Brazilian political crisis of 1645 wrecked that country’s sugar industry, the Dutch West India Company was selling slaves on easy terms to creditable planters in Barbados and Guadeloupe. Strapped for cash and alienated from credit, the “small holders did not take to sugar,” says Blackburn, “because it was a new and unfamiliar crop, and because it could not be harvested for at least eighteen months after the first planting” (Blackburn 1997, 231). They did not attract Dutch or English credit, had no access to core funding for slave purchase, and thus remained in the servant market. In this way they drove the demand for servants despite the potential availability of slaves.

“Slavery and cotton,” then, was as established in Barbados and Guadeloupe in 1640 as would be “sugar and servitude” in 1650 and “sugar and slavery” in 1660. Between 1645 and 1650, the midpoint of the transition, the mixed-labor regime was at its peak. As big investors in cotton production, planters with financial access did two things that prepared them for sugar: they consolidated small plantations into large ones, and they made substantive purchases of enslaved Africans. Economies of scale in cotton production enabled many of these planters to access larger external credit instruments that enabled the expansion of both the servant trade and the slave trade. In addition, the planters sped up the land consolidation process that facilitated the sugar industry.

These investors became industry leaders who championed the charge into sugar production and plantation expansion after 1645. In effect, they were deepening rather than creating the reliance upon enslaved Africans. Capital was scarce and expensive; risks were high. In pursuit of profits, planters fully exploited whatever labor was within their reach. Alongside “sugar and black slavery” there was “sugar and white slavery.” Plantation agriculture before, during, and after the sugar revolution generally meant disciplined, coerced labor—and, as Williams so aptly concluded, “at times that labor has been slave, at other times nominally free; at times black, at other times white or brown or yellow” (Williams 1944, 29).