The Explorations of Captain James Cook in the Pacific

Book Description

Cook's three great voyages into the uncharted Pacific, told in his own words. Travel classic recounts exploration of the eastern coastline of Australia, mapping of New Zealand, discovery of Hawaiian Islands, much more.

Customer Reviews:

Remarkably accessable.......2002-05-20

This first hand account comprised of journal entries with commentary is a fascinating read and provides tremendous detail of Capt. Cook's voyages. I think that for the general reader with an interest in Cook I would recommend Hough's biography as a primary source with this volume as a supplementary text. The two together will provide an excellent view of the accomplishments and adventures of Cook and his crews.

Last Voyage of Captain Cook: The Collected Writings of John Ledyard (NG Adventure Classics)

Average customer rating:

Worth getting second-hand but only at these prices (at time of writing 18 cents)
intersting and insightful
Not worth your time

Last Voyage of Captain Cook: The Collected Writings of John Ledyard (NG Adventure Classics)
John Ledyard
Manufacturer: National Geographic
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0792293479
Release Date: 2005-03-01

Customer Reviews:

Worth getting second-hand but only at these prices (at time of writing 18 cents).......2007-10-10

Although I agree with the criticisms of the other two reviewers, I found Ledyard's journal on Cook's voyage interesting reading, and worth paying a few dollars postage for. But as there are only about 115 pages worth reading, I'd feel disappointed with this book if I'd bought it new, or paid more than a few dollars plus postage for it. Apparently, this is about the only chance you have of reading Ledyard's journal without going to antique book auctions. But more gifted writers may have covered this voyage better, and few readers will wade through the rest of the book in its entirety, letters and all. More interesting perhaps is the biography of Ledyard's life, written by James Zug. Just because a man led an exciting life doesn't mean he was a great writer.

intersting and insightful.......2006-06-23

This book can not be said to hold up to many of the writings about any of the voyages of Captain Cook. I also agree that the letters are of no worth. However, for anyone that has read other books about Captain Cook it is a very interesting book. There are many things that Ledyard writes, which differ with the accounts that Cook records, which makes it an interesting look at what some of the crew thought about the third voyage. If you have never read anything about Captain Cook, DO NOT start wiht this book. If you have read anyhting about Cook already then this book will please you.

Not worth your time.......2006-01-03

This book is not nearly as interesting, enriching, or well written as the other books in this series. (I highly recommend the Voyage of the Beagle by Darwin, for example.) Publishing a whole volume of Ledyard is really overkill, and misstates his importance as a writer and historian. While the 20-page account of Cook's murder and the, er, unpalatable aftermath of his death is riveting, the rest of Ledyard's journal is dull. The private letters that make up the latter half of the book have little of interest to the general reader. For much better travel adventure about the same regions that Ledyard covers here, read Darwin (see above), or the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy by Nordhoff and Hall, or Farley Mowat (especially The Siberians).

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific

Average customer rating:

Interesting but amazingly wrongheaded
Was Cook mistaken for Lono or Not?
See Sahlins for Rebuttal
Very interesting
The Great "Cook" Book Debate

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific
Gananath Obeyesekere
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0691057524

Amazon.com

According to many standard histories of the Pacific, when Captain James Cook landed on the island of Hawaii on January 17, 1779, he was received by the natives as an avatar of the god Lono and feted accordingly. In The Apotheosis of Captain Cook Sri Lankan scholar Gananath Obeyesekere questions this "fact" of history, arguing that it was the Europeans, and not the natives, who found a need to establish their colonization of new worlds on the notion of deities come home. Cook himself, Obeyesekere adds sympathetically, was a man caught between social classes, treated as an equal by Polynesian kings but shunned by members of the English nobility because of his lower-class background; he was a good man, but a god only in the imaginations of his compatriots. Obeyesekere devotes much of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook to arguing spiritedly with anthropologist Marshall Sahlins over matters of Hawaiian history.

Book Description

Here Gananath Obeyesekere debunks one of the most enduring myths of imperialism, civilization, and conquest: the notion that the Western civilizer is a god to savages. Using shipboard journals and logs kept by Captain James Cook and his officers, Obeyesekere reveals the captain as both the self-conscious civilizer and as the person who, his mission gone awry, becomes a "savage" himself.

In this new edition of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, the author addresses, in a lengthy afterword, Marshall Sahlins's 1994 book, How "Natives" Think, which was a direct response to this work.

Customer Reviews:

Interesting but amazingly wrongheaded.......2007-03-07

This book starts with a simple question and assertion. Most scholars claim Captain Cook was taken for a God when he arrived in Hawaii(much as Cortez in Mexico) but this book claims that this narrative is 'racist' and 'eurocentric' and a classic 'imperialistic myth'. The idea here is that the narrative assumed Cook was a god(not that he was mistakenly taken for one) because the racist Europeans of the 18th century beleived Europeans really were gods to the 'natives'.

But this argument falls apart when one realizing what it is based on. The book wants to be the new 'Orientalism' and the author claims that as a 'Sri Lankan' he is best placed to judge what Hawaaians a dozen generations ago thought of a European. How rediculous. THe difference between Sri Lanka in the 20th century and Hawaii in the 18th is as different as Captain Cook's culture in England in the 18th and the culture of the Hawaiians. The racist assertion that a Sri Lankan can better judge a Hawaiian than a European is unfounded, perhaps the best person to judge a Hawaiin is a Hawaiian but it doesnt logic that a Sri Lankan would be better than a British person.

Thus the idea presented her is simply wrong headed. It would have been better had this book re-examined how Polynesians and Hawaiians in particular viewed Cook, rather than claim that every piece of the Cook story is 'racist'. What was Cook supposed to do? Not sketch the people he encountered, not write about them, he was in fact being very forward thinking in bothering to learn about the cultures he visited.

Seth J. Frantzman

Was Cook mistaken for Lono or Not?.......2006-12-27

Was Captain Cook viewed by Hawaiian people as a diety, specifically the god Lono? The author says not. This book by Professor Gannath Obeyesekere at Princeton University was conceived as a counter-argument to a theory proposed by Marshall Sahlins (in his 1981 book "Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands"), "who used the apotheosis of Cook to advance a certain vision of structural history"(p52). This book, then, is a counter to that book written by Marhsall Sahlins, who has since written a counter to Obeyesekere's counter. Without having read Sahlins's original work that prompted this reaction from Obeyesekere, and having not read Sahlin's subsequent counter to Obeyesekere's criticisms, it was difficult for me to come to any conclusions about this controversy.

To the uninitiated on the Captain Cook controversy, this volume was similar to wading through the House of Representatives' 1979 Report that concluded on the Lee Harvey Oswald controversy on whether he shot and killed President Kennedy that there were "other shooters" that day in Dallas. Like the 1979 Congressional Report, Obeyesekere's book was a difficult work to make sense of unless you were already familiar with what was already being said.

Having said that, that doesn't mean this book was not interesting - it was! It deals with the murder in 1779 of Captain James Cook at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii. Sahlins has been saying that Hawaiians mistook Cook to be their god Lono because of the coincidental timing of his arrival at the time of their Makahiki festival. They believed Lono had returned in the flesh, in accordance with prophecy. Obeyesekere says that's all bunk! He says they knew he was a human - a chief of a sailing ship, and came to know him as a nasty, murderous servant of the British Empire, so they killed him to pretty much stop him. After he was dead, they gave him a burial fit for a king in accordance with custom.

Obeyesekere says the idea that Hawaiians believed Cook was Lono came from the European's own `we're better than you' mentality - they imagined themselves to be gods everywhere they were treated with South Pacific courtesy. The author chastises Sahlins for perpetuating the myth, saying "None of the new evidence substantiates Sahlins's thesis that the apotheosis of Cook is a Hawai'ian rather than a European phenonmenon; nor has he dealt adequately with the methodological criticisms that I made of his previous work, particulary those pertaining to source material" (p194).

Unfortunately, the reader can know no more of Sahlins and his theory from reading this book than what Obeyesekere is telling. That said, I did notice that the two authors could be talking cross-purposes to some extent. And on this point it may be helpful to think about Oswald and Kennedy again. Obeyesekere is stuck on the point of whether Cook was Lono or not. But Sahlins comes across as being more interested in structural cultural theory. By analogy again, probably Oswald did not shoot and kill JFK (it was likely a faction within the U.S. government that took him out - a faction that has evolved into the Bush Crime Community), but the fact that so many people continue to believe Oswald did it is a cultural phenomenon in itself. Likewise, the social construction of Cook's death on a Hawaiian level was the result of a " `structural crisis'" (p 182) in need of harmonious rendering to existing " `sociological category'" (p 183). Sahlins, as he is portrayed by the author, shows an interest in how culture and society clings to culturally-determined ideas such as my example of Oswald as JFK killer and his example of Cook as Lono because of structural determinism. This determinism is minimized and even partly dismissed by Obeyeskere when he appears to throw out the bath water with the tub.

In short, reading this book will require that you read two more by Sahlins. At times you may feel you were called to jury duty. But there is much more within these pages than the apotheosis of Captain Cook. There is also the lens of structural anthropology.

See Sahlins for Rebuttal.......2004-11-08

In addition to asking some very important theoretical questions relevant to the practice of history and anthropology, Obeyesekere takes aim at Marshall Sahlins in this book. Sahlins went on to write a blow by blow response in the book "How 'Natives' Think: About Captain Cook, For Example" which should probably be read along with Obeyesekere's.

While I have only read selections of both, my feeling is that Sahlins has probably defended his honor, revealed big flaws in his opponent's arguments, but done little to blunt the critique Obeyesekere launches against the structuralist approach to the apotheosis of captain Cook. Even if some of his specific claims are called into question, Obeyesekere's best contributions are 1) showing the importance of "myth models" not only for natives, but for modern Western cultures and 2) showing that cultural specificity does not rob the "natives" of their capacity to engage in a kind of "pragmatic rationality" and we must hold open the possibility that considerable irrationality can creep into the "civilized" characters such as Cook.

Sahlin and other reviewers of this book argue that Obeyesekere simply reverses things, making the natives "bourgeois rationalists" and the Westerners irrational savages. I find this totally unpersuasive. His conception of pragmatic reasoning is flawed, but doesn't ignore the importance of culture in configuring the parameters of possible action.

Very interesting.......2003-05-23

I bought this book because of a general interest in Hawaiian history and Captain Cook. I'm not a professional historian and don't have any comment on such matters as quality of footnotes. However, I thought this was an excellent, very readable book. Mr. Obeyesekere takes historical fragments - diaries, letters, and so forth, and re-constucts the last few days of Cook's life. It's done so cleverly, in such a readable style, that it reminds one of the end of a mystery novel, where Sherlock Holmes explains his reasoning to Dr. Watson. However, there's the similar suspicion that it's being too clever, and that the author is taking evidence to fit the conclusion, rather than the other way around.

Also of interest was the repeated theme of cultural imperialism, explaining how modern historians project their own cultural predjudices (in this case, the simple savage, and a view of religion that is decidedly rational and rooted in monotheism) onto foreign cultures, and the misunderstandings that naturally arise. There's a number of similar cases I can think of, where the common knowledge is so influenced - best example is the view that Cortez conquered Mexico as an unimpeded God, when a simple reading of Bernal Diaz shows that's not the case.

I do have to complain, though, that a overly large portion of the book is given to the academic refutation of fellow scholar Mr. Sahlins. The author is challenging common thought, and I appreciate being able to read the debate with a prestigious scholar who represents the status quo. However, I thought it should have been made more distinct from the rest of the book - much interesting information is revealed in the argument, but it's comparatively dry reading.

Still, overall, this book makes for a very interesting read, and encourages one to re-examine their historical and cultural assumptions. I definitely think it's worth reading.

The Great "Cook" Book Debate.......2002-12-22

You have to give Obeyesekere credit for looking beyond the Makahiki festival, which dominates Marshall Sahlins' study of the apotheosis of James Cook. Obeyesekere sparked a minor maelstrom when he challenged the renown scholar's thesis that Cook was personified as a god by the Hawaiians. Obeyesekere looks beyond bicameral minds, and insists that the Hawaiians were fully conscious of their actions.

Cook was not the great god Lono, nor did he pretend to be. While his second arrival at the Sandwich Islands did coincide with the Makahiki festival, the Hawaiians did not deify him, but rather invited the Captain and his crew to take part in the ritual. Unfortunately for the Captain things seem to devolve afterward, and the Hawaiians killed him and several members of his crew.

Many have tried to piece together the tattered remnants of this story. Several of his crew kept journals and attempts were made after the fact to collect oral history from Hawaiians who were part of the cannibalistic ritual. Unfortunately, few of these accounts jive. Marshall Sahlins has done the most to try to piece together the events, but he seems to discount the Hawaiians ability for cognitive thinking, which tarnishes his work.

Book Description

An informative look at the three great Pacific voyages of one of the world's greatest scientific explorers, with chapters detailing the human implications of Captain James Cook's 'discoveries', exploration, ship contruction and art.

Captain Cook's Pacific Explorations (Great Journeys)

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Captain Cook's Pacific Explorations (Great Journeys)

Manufacturer: Heinemann Library Hardbacks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0431191263

Average customer rating:

Last of the Greats
Another great bristish explorer - Excellent Biography
Honorable
Where did this book come from?
This is a very solid biography.

Captain James Cook
Richard Hough
Manufacturer: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Journals of Captain Cook (Penguin Classics)
Cook : The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook
The Explorations of Captain James Cook in the Pacific
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The Life of Captain James Cook

ASIN: 0340585986

Customer Reviews:

Last of the Greats.......2007-02-25

I personally tend to find high adventure all the more entertaining when it's real. That it can be informative is icing on the cake. The story of Captain James Cook, about the life of the title's namesake, is high adventure and informative, not only in subject matter but in the telling as well. Author Richard Hough's presentation makes clear the spirit of discovery and exploration that guided Cook's life and exploits in his early years and during his three major voyages as the captain of his own ship.

Cook was an inveterate explorer of the world's oceans and unknown lands, not only identifying them but also charting their coastlines with an accuracy that was sometimes not surpassed until well into the last century. Among his discoveries were islands in parts of the world most remote from European civilization, mostly in the pacific, and in all latitudes from the icy Antarctic sea to the sweltering tropics. His voyages saw the collection of botanical samples extraordinaire and the measuring of astronomical phenomena. He was a literal pioneer in the field of health maintenance among sailors through his attention to cleanliness and diet - the dread disease of scurvy made almost no appearance on his ships.

The text traces out all the major events of his three voyages, including his skills as a diplomat, such as diplomacy was, with countless native Polynesian groups. Likewise, his deteriorating mental condition during his final voyage is presented in a manner of such contrast to his earlier steady-mindedness that the reader has little need for the author to make the redundant observation that something was very wrong. The breakdown in discipline that led ultimately to his death on the Hawaiian shores is clear to all.

There can be no doubt that the synthesis of knowledge and entertainment has exists in its highest form between these two covers. To call it readable is an understatement. Aside from downplaying the various scientific achievements of the civilian passengers, which form a peripheral subject in the story, the informative content is equally valuable. There can be little lacking in a reader's appreciation for this excellent work.

Another great bristish explorer - Excellent Biography.......2006-05-13

I knew a few things about the three voyages of Captain Cook so I decided to read his biography. Well I think I chose right, the author vividly tells the fascinating story of a brave man and his explorations in the pacific and South seas that you just don't want to stop reading, full of adventure and totally enjoyable.
In each voyage they were away from home almost three years, exploring mostly the polynesian islands, tahiti, new zealand and the fatal Hawai. They were also in the east coast of Australia, Eastern Island, Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn. I wish I have the opportunity to meet all theses places.

Another great british explorer.

Honorable.......2005-02-22

Destiny. Some people possess an innate psyche as to what they want to do in life. James Cook would be one of those people. From his days as a youth working in an English seaside shop, Cook dreamed of sailing in a ship to discover other lands and people. He did it, becoming one of England's greatest navigators.
Richard Hough effects a daring read of this fascinating man. With firsthand quotes from the men who were on Cook's three voyages, the book is complete of adventure, misfortunes, perilous storms, native peoples with their ensuing customs and demeanor, geographical descriptions, disorientation, cannibalism, scurvy outbreaks, etc.
He joined the Royal Navy and worked his way up the ranks becoming surveyor in eastern Canada. With honor and distinction from these years of service, he accepts a position to captain an expedition to the South Pacific for exploration and to study the Transit of Venus for astronomical observations.
With accolades from this voyage, Cook is again asked to lead an expedition to the South Pacific in order to discover and survey the South Pole. Adventure after adventure follows.
His third and final voyage is to locate the mythical northwest passage by first journeying east around the Cape of Good Hope and then straight north through Hawaii to the northwest coast of North America. We see during this final expedition that due to a possible parasitic intestinal infection from his previous voyage, Cook's character and conduct is unbecoming of him and at times his behavior is unrestrained. He meets his final days at the hands of Hawaiian natives.
A discerning look into an accomplished and extraordinary man.

Where did this book come from?.......2004-10-22

When I read this book, I was fascinated by the story of Cook's life (who wouldn't be?) but I was sure this book was a reprint of some turn of the 19th/20th century author. But no, it was published in 1995. So where does this guy get that Australian aborigines are negrotoid and Inuits are mongoloid? Has he read any recent anthropology? Does he still believe in phrenology? He seems not to have read anything besides Beaglehole's biography and Beaglehole's editions of the journals, except for a few other journals by the crew. There is no historiography and no analysis. This book was originally a manuscript Hough found in a Victorian attic, I am sure of it!

This is a very solid biography........2003-06-05

We Aussies have a great deal of affection for dear old Captain Cook, who mapped our east coast whilst exploring the pacific. This book traces Cook's life and long career in an expert and readable fashion. Cook never advanced as rapidly as Lord Nelson, and traded in strictly military missions for other roles of importance to the Admiralty. But, as this fine biography shows, he stands alongside Nelson as a great British naval hero.

Captain James Cook: And the Explorers of the Pacific (World Explorers)

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Captain James Cook: And the Explorers of the Pacific (World Explorers)
David Haney
Manufacturer: Chelsea House Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

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