The Last Horizon
By Darrell Lee
To understand the sheer, terrifying scale of the Pacific Ocean in the 18th century, one must imagine a void so vast that it swallows time itself. It was a blue desert where wooden ships floated like specks of dust, isolated from the rest of humanity by months of silence. In his masterful narrative history, "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook," author Hampton Sides captures this isolation with intensity. He reconstructs the tragic, inevitable arc of Captain James Cook's third and final voyage, painting a portrait not of a mythical explorer, but of a brilliant, exhausted, and increasingly volatile man unraveling at the edge of the map. Yet, reading Sides' account in the 21st century, it is impossible not to see the reflection of our own era. Cook's wooden sloops were the starships of their day, and his venture into the Pacific offers a haunting blueprint for our current ambitions to explore Mars and the wider cosmos. The tools have changed, but the dangers—psychological, political, and moral—remain the same.
Sides begins his narrative on July 12, 1776, a date that resonates with American readers for obvious reasons. Still, for the British Admiralty, it marked the launch of a different kind of revolution. On that day, Cook sailed the HMS Resolution out of Plymouth, ostensibly to return a Polynesian named Mai to his homeland. However, his secret instructions—orders so sensitive they were not to be opened until he reached the Pacific—commanded him to solve one of the greatest geographical riddles of the age: the Northwest Passage. The British Empire sought a shortcut across the top of North America to link the Atlantic and Pacific, a trade route that would secure global dominance.
Sides excels at detailing the technological marvels that made this journey possible, and this is where the first parallel to modern spaceflight emerges. The Resolution and her sister ship, the Discovery, were the Apollo command modules of the Enlightenment. They were packed with the most advanced scientific instruments available. Foremost among them was the K1 chronometer, a watch of exquisite precision created by Larcum Kendall. This device enabled Cook to calculate longitude with unprecedented accuracy, solving the ancient navigation problem that had doomed countless sailors. Just as NASA engineers obsess over the guidance systems of the Orion capsule or the precision of the James Webb Space Telescope, Cook and his officers treated the K1 with a reverence bordering on religious worship. It was their lifeline, the only thing tethering them to a fixed point in a fluid world.
The voyage itself, as chronicled by Sides, was a grueling marathon of endurance. The ships traversed the Southern Ocean, stopping in Tasmania and New Zealand, before pushing deep into the central Pacific. On January 18, 1778, Cook made his most significant, and ultimately fatal, discovery: the Hawaiian archipelago. He named them the Sandwich Islands, after his patron, the Earl of Sandwich. Sides describes this moment of "First Contact" with a nuanced eye, stripping away the romanticism to reveal the immense cultural shockwave that occurred when two civilizations, separated by thousands of years of history, suddenly collided.
When we send rovers to Mars or contemplate manned missions to the Moon, we encounter sterile rock and ice. We worry about "planetary protection" in the microbial sense, fearing we might contaminate a pristine environment with Earth bacteria. Cook, however, was crashing into inhabited worlds. Sides does not shy away from the devastating biological and cultural contamination the British brought with them. Venereal disease, carried by the crew, ravaged the populations of the Pacific islands, a plague that Cook tried and failed to contain. This "biological imperialism," as historians call it, has no direct equivalent in our robotic exploration of the solar system. Still, it serves as a grim reminder of the unintended consequences of contact. If we ever do encounter extraterrestrial life, however microbial, the lessons of Cook's "feral commerce" in the Pacific will become terrifyingly relevant.
After his first brief stop in Hawaii, Cook pushed north, following his secret orders. The summer of 1778 saw the Resolution tracing the coast of what is now Oregon, British Columbia, and Alaska. Sides vividly renders the frustration of this leg of the journey. Cook was hunting for a phantom. The Northwest Passage did not exist, at least not in a form a wooden sailing ship could navigate. He pushed through the Bering Strait, crossing the Arctic Circle, only to be blocked by an impenetrable wall of ice at 70 degrees north latitude.
It is during this futile search in the frozen north that Sides identifies the shift in Cook's character. The Captain Cook of the first two voyages was known for his patience, his care for his crew's health (he famously conquered scurvy through dietary discipline), and his relative restraint in dealing with indigenous peoples. The Cook of the third voyage was different. He was older, physically ailing, and seemingly suffering from what we may now call burnout or a deeper psychological unraveling. He became prone to fits of irrational rage. He ordered severe floggings for minor infractions. He punished native thieves with disproportionate cruelty, famously ordering ears to be cut off in Tahiti.
This psychological deterioration offers a critical lesson for modern long-duration space travel. Cook was the absolute dictator of a tiny, wooden world, isolated from his superiors for years at a time. There was no "Mission Control" to monitor his vitals or offer psychological support. The sheer weight of command, combined with the sensory deprivation of the open ocean and the physical toll of the environment, broke him. As NASA plans a mission to Mars—a journey that will take nearly three years round-trip—the crew's psychological stability is a primary concern. Astronauts will face the same isolation Cook endured, the same "earth-out-of-view" phenomenon. Sides' depiction of Cook's unraveling serves as a case study in the dangers of unchecked authority and extreme isolation. In the vacuum of space, as on the vast Pacific, the greatest threat to the mission is often the commander's own mind.
Defeated by the ice, Cook turned south, returning to Hawaii in January 1779 to resupply and rest. He arrived at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island during the festival of Makahiki, a celebration of Lono, the god of peace and fertility. In a bizarre cosmic coincidence that Sides unpacks with fascinating detail, the Hawaiians seemingly interpreted Cook's arrival—his ship's sails resembling the tapas banners of the god—as the return of Lono himself. The British were treated with extraordinary reverence, fed, and feted.
But the timing of their departure and return would prove fatal. Cook left the bay in early February, but a violent gale snapped the Resolution's foremast. He was forced to limp back to Kealakekua Bay for repairs on February 11, 1779. The mood had changed. The season of Makahiki was over; it was now the season of Ku, the god of war. The Hawaiians, having exhausted their food stores feeding the "gods," were suspicious and hostile. The "divine" guests had overstayed their welcome.
Tensions boiled over after the Hawaiians stole a cutter (a small boat). Cook, reverting to a tactic that had worked elsewhere, went ashore to take the Hawaiian king hostage until the boat was returned. It was a colossal miscalculation. A massive crowd gathered. A stone was thrown. A shot was fired. In the ensuing melee in the surf, Cook was stabbed, clubbed, and held underwater. The "god" bled, and then he died.
Sides' treatment of Cook's death is balanced and unsparing. He does not present Cook as a martyr of science nor purely as a villain of empire, but as a man who pushed his luck one time too many. It was a failure of diplomacy and of reading the cultural room, driven by arrogance and exhaustion.
Comparing this violent end to the modern era, we see a shift in how we view the "heroes" of exploration. In Cook's time, and for centuries after, he was lionized as a paragon of Enlightenment virtues—civilization bringing light to the dark corners of the earth. Today, we scrutinize the costs. We ask who paid the price for that map. Similarly, in the modern space race, the "billionaire space era" dominated by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is often critiqued through the lens of hubris and inequality. Are these vanity projects, or are they the necessary next steps for our species? Just as Cook's voyage was driven by imperial competition and national prestige, our current race to the Moon and Mars is fueled by geopolitical rivalry between the US and China and the commercial ambitions of private entities. The "Wide Wide Sea" reminds us that exploration is never purely about science; it is always entangled with power, ego, and economics.
The scientific legacy of Cook's voyage remains undeniable, mirroring the scientific harvest of our space probes. Despite failing to find the Northwest Passage, Cook's team—including the brilliant illustrator John Webber, whose work Sides references frequently—cataloged thousands of plant species, mapped roughly one-third of the globe, and fundamentally changed European understanding of the planet. They brought back data. In the same way, a Mars rover might not find life, but it maps the geology, studies the atmosphere, and paves the way for future understanding. The "useless" data of one generation becomes the foundational knowledge of the next.
However, the most profound parallel between Cook's final voyage and our future in space lies in the concept of the "Unknown." Sides vividly describes the psychological impact of the Pacific on the sailors—the sense of being utterly untethered. When we look at the famous "Pale Blue Dot" photograph taken by Voyager 1, or the images from the Artemis missions looking back at a tiny Earth, we feel the same vertigo that Cook's men must have felt staring at the endless horizon. The Pacific was their space; the islands were their planets.
"The Wide Wide Sea" ultimately serves as a cautionary tale. Cook died because he believed his own myth. He thought he could bend the will of an entire people through the sheer force of his presence and the technological superiority of his muskets. He forgot that he was a guest in a complex, functioning society. As humanity looks to colonize Mars or establish bases on the Moon, we must carry this lesson with us. We are venturing into hostile, indifferent environments. We cannot conquer space in the way the British Empire sought to conquer the globe. We can only survive it through meticulous planning, respect for the environment, and a recognition of our own biological and psychological limits.
Sides concludes his book by reflecting on Cook's complex legacy. He is reviled by many in the Pacific today as the harbinger of colonialism and disease. Yet, he is also respected as a peerless navigator who connected the human family for the first time. His voyage closed the circle of the map. There were no more "wide wide seas" left on Earth after Cook; the world became finite.
In contrast, our current ocean of space remains infinite. The "final frontier" is truly final because it has no end. But the method of exploring it—sending frail vessels into the dark, crewed by flawed human beings carrying their hopes, fears, and microbes—remains unchanged. Hampton Sides' account of 1776-1779 is not just history; it is a mirror. It shows us that while we may build ships of titanium and gold instead of oak and canvas, the captain of the vessel is still the same: a fragile, ambitious, and deeply complicated animal, forever searching for a passage that may not exist.
Darrell Lee is the founder and editor of The Long Views, he has written two science fiction novels exploring themes of technological influence, science and religion, historical patterns, and the future of society. His essays draw on these long-standing interests and apply a similar analytical lens to politics, literature, artistic, societal, and historical events. He splits his time between rural east Texas and Florida’s west coast, where he spends his days performing variable star photometry, dabbling in astrophotography, thinking, napping, scuba diving, fishing, and writing, not necessarily in that order.