
The Wide Wide Sea
Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
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Narrated by:
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Peter Noble
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By:
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Hampton Sides
About this listen
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “thrilling and superbly crafted” (The Wall Street Journal) account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day.
One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, THE ECONOMIST, NPR, THE NEW YORKER, THE SMITHSONIAN, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS
“In this masterly history, Sides tracks the 18th-century English naval officer James Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait."—The New York Times Book Review
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?
Hampton Sides’ bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.
Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.
At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.
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Critic reviews
“Gripping . . . It isn’t possible in this short space to describe Side’s hair-raising accounts of the journey . . . Sides recreates the newness of the experience, the vast differences in and among Indigenous cultures, and natural phenomena that were as terrifying as they were wondrous."—The Washington Post
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Story
The name Captain James Cook is one of the most recognisable in Australian history - an almost mythic figure who is often discussed, celebrated, reviled and debated. But who was the real James Cook? This Yorkshire farm boy would go on to become the foremost mariner, scientist, navigator and cartographer of his era, and to personally map a third of the globe. His great voyages of discovery were incredible feats of seamanship and navigation.
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Great. But...
- By Cedric on 05-01-21
By: Peter FitzSimons
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Ghost Soldiers
- The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission
- By: Hampton Sides
- Narrated by: James Naughton
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Abridged
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At once a gripping depiction of men at war and a compelling story of redemption, Ghost Soldiers joins such landmark works as Flags of Our Fathers and The Greatest Generation Speaks in preserving the legacy of World War II for future generations.
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Ghost soldiers
- By Zach on 09-07-03
By: Hampton Sides
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Mutiny on the Bounty
- By: Peter FitzSimons
- Narrated by: Michael Carman
- Length: 22 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.
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You don't know the whole story.
- By Justin Sluyter on 05-01-19
By: Peter FitzSimons
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Americana
- Dispatches from the New Frontier
- By: Hampton Sides
- Narrated by: Kris Koscheski
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than 15 years, best-selling author and historian Hampton Sides has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture. In these two dozen pieces, collected here for the first time, Sides gives us a fresh, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else. Following Sides, we crash the redwood retreat of a cabal of powerful military-industrialists, and more.
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Boring stories about sad and uninteresting people.
- By Pegan on 02-10-23
By: Hampton Sides
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Hellhound on His Trail
- The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
- By: Hampton Sides
- Narrated by: Hampton Sides
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, escaped in a breadbox. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man - whose real name was James Earl Ray -drifted through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where he was galvanized by George Wallace's racist presidential campaign. With relentless storytelling drive, Sides follows Galt and King as they crisscross the country, one stalking the other, until the crushing moment at the Lorraine Motel.
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History Comes Alive
- By L. Lyter on 06-29-10
By: Hampton Sides
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Left for Dead
- Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World
- By: Eric Jay Dolin
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The best-selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters tells the story of a wild encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig, and a British warship in the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812. Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard abandoned in the Falklands for eighteen months.
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Great history
- By Pullman on 07-31-24
By: Eric Jay Dolin
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The Wager
- A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
- By: David Grann
- Narrated by: Dion Graham, David Grann
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia.
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Gasping for Air
- By Jean Engle on 04-19-23
By: David Grann
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The Demon of Unrest
- A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
- By: Erik Larson
- Narrated by: Will Patton, Erik Larson
- Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.
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Vividly Told History of the Start of the Civil War
- By WLC on 05-01-24
By: Erik Larson
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Realm of Ice and Sky
- Triumph, Tragedy, and History's Greatest Arctic Rescue
- By: Buddy Levy
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole—which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship.
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a great book, read by a good naratator
- By Amazon Customer on 02-27-25
By: Buddy Levy
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Over the Edge of the World
- Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
- By: Laurence Bergreen
- Narrated by: Laurence Bergreen
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Abridged
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In 1519 Magellan and his fleet of five ships set sail from Seville, Spain, to discover a water route to the fabled Spice Islands in Indonesia, where the most sought-after commodities (cloves, pepper, and nutmeg) flourished. Three years later, a handful of survivors returned with an abundance of spices from their intended destination, but with just one ship carrying 18 emaciated men. During their remarkable voyage around the world the crew endured starvation, disease, mutiny, and torture. Many men died, including Magellan, who was violently killed in a fierce battle.
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The Reading IS an Issue
- By mcbeene on 12-26-05
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Farther Than Any Man
- The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook
- By: Martin Dugard
- Narrated by: Jack Chekijian
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In the annals of seafaring and exploration, there is one name that immediately evokes visions of the open ocean, billowing sails, visiting strange, exotic lands previously uncharted, and civilizations never before encountered - Captain James Cook. Full of realistic action, lush descriptions of places and events, and fascinating historical characters such as King George III and the soon-to-be-notorious Master William Bligh, Dugard's gripping account of the life and death of Captain James Cook is a thrilling story of a discoverer hell-bent on going farther than any man.
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Sloppy History
- By Kyle P. Dalton on 04-06-18
By: Martin Dugard
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Captain James Cook
- By: Rob Mundle
- Narrated by: Paul English
- Length: 15 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Captain James Cook is one of the greatest maritime explorers of all time. Over three remarkable voyages of discovery into the Pacific in the latter part of the 18th century, Cook unravelled the oldest mystery surrounding the existence of Terra Australis Incognita - the Great South Land. He became the first explorer to circumnavigate New Zealand and establish that it was two main islands; discover the Hawaiian Islands for the British Empire; and left an enduring legacy.
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High school history text?
- By peter on 08-31-22
By: Rob Mundle
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Batavia
- By: Peter FitzSimons
- Narrated by: Richard Aspel
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland. The magnificent ship is already boiling over with a mutinous plot that is just about to break into the open when, just off the coast of Western Australia, it strikes an unseen reef in the middle of the night.
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Disaster, Mutiny, Murder, Survival
- By Todd on 02-07-13
By: Peter FitzSimons
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Island of the Lost
- Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
- By: Joan Druett
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death. In 1864, Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave inspires his men to take action.
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One of the Best Stories Ever Told!
- By Tiffany on 04-10-16
By: Joan Druett
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Endurance
- Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
- By: Alfred Lansing
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world. Lansing describes how the men survived a 1,000-mile voyage in an open boat across the stormiest ocean on the globe and an overland trek through forbidding glaciers and mountains.
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The best book I've had
- By Thomas Allen on 09-17-08
By: Alfred Lansing
Outstanding story read like a novel
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This was a fair portrayal of the life of Captain Cook.
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Amazing
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Wonderful
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Thoughtful Swashbuckler
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The vastness of the undertaking
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Masterpiece!
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I could tell that the author must have done a ton of research possibly all around the world to write this historical narrative.
I want more!
Terrific!
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Interesting and insightful
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Favorite book in a while
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