Steve West’s Reviews > The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook > Status Update

"Grog was a sacred fluid, the one indulgence mariners could count on, the staple that fueled long journeys. It was part rum to four parts water."
pg. 145

"Cook was an explorer and a mapmaker, not a conqueror or a colonizer."
page xv

"Cook, in some respects, has become the Columbus of the Pacific."
page xvi

"Cook was a hard person–hard to please, hard to fool, hard to reach, hard to know."
page 11

"He had no training in this regard, yet he became a kind of proto-anthropologist and ethnographer"
page 14