The Wide Wide Sea Quotes

“As he had once written, "I believe that he who learns only how to obey orders can never be a great explorer.”
― Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

“It was one of Cook's strengths to try to salvage something from defeat, and that seems to have been his thinking here...His men admired this trait in their commander. "If he could no longer pursue his first great object," wrote Midshipman James Trevenen, "he immediately began to consider how he might be the most useful in prosecuting some inferior one.”
― Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

“...as (Cook) had once written, "I believe that he who learns only how to obey orders can never be a great explorer.”
― Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

“People were astounded by how calm Captain Cook remained during this uncertain and tempestuous stretch—he spent most of his time lodged in his cabin and displayed not a concern in the world. "On the unknown coast of America," wrote Zimmermann, "the ships ran on foggy nights under full sail, and the captain slept peacefully all the while. In the moment of greatest danger, he was at once the most merry, the most serene, and the most steady. His main object was to establish a calm state of mind on the ship, and in this he succeeded so well that all eyes were usually turned toward toward him.”
― Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

“There was a charisma bound up in the discretion of his command style—in what he didn't say, what he didn't do, how he didn't react. He believed in minimal exertion of energy or explanation: Make the tiny correction and leave it alone. He had a refined sense for judging gradations of imminent calamity.”
― Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

“(Cook) was, said Samwell, "cool and intrepid among dangers, patient and firm under difficulties and distress, fertile in expedients, and...original in all his designs.”
― Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

“made of wood and whalebone. They sliced Private John Harrison”
― Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea