The New York Times
Although J. C. Beaglehole's Life of Captain James Cook (1974) is still indispensable for its scholarship and thoroughness, Nicholas Thomas's Cook will surely become established as one of the finest of the recent books that have a more anthropological focus. Deep in its research, broad in its sympathies, imaginative in its reconstruction of events and thought processes and graceful in its prose style, Cook presents a winning combination of qualities. In essence, it is a series of informative and sometimes inspired meditations on the various meanings an event might have had to its different participants. — Jonathan Dore
Publishers Weekly
Rich, vivid and deeply provocative, Thomas's work combines premiere adventure story with thorough history and intensive sociology. The University of London anthropology professor explains Cook's drive to find "the lands South" (in the 18th century, most presumed there was another continent at the south end of the world). Cook (1728-1779) made three harrowing trips in the 1770s in which he discovered Antarctica. In those travels, he explored worlds previously unknown to Europeans: the Pacific and its panoply of island nations. Cook first charted Australia, New Zealand and the entire southern hemisphere, and this aspect of his career is the book's most fascinating portion. Thomas explains that Cook was most interested in charting territories previously unheard of by Europeans; he was, like Lewis and Clark, at heart a geographer and cartographer. However, Cook didn't discover just longitude and latitude; he found whole new peoples. The results of explorations by Cook and his crews (which included an artist and diarist) informed European society of native cultures. How the elevation of some groups and devaluation of others evolved would, Thomas explains, influence centuries of perception about nonwhite, non-European societies and redefine words like "primitive," "savage" and "conqueror." Thomas diligently contextualizes Cook, who appears both heroic and demonic as he finds worlds where people had lived in thriving societies since the dawn of time and where his crews wreak havoc (e.g., bringing venereal disease) even as they attempt to "civilize" those they meet. Thomas displays sure, careful research and thoughtful interpretations, with a style matching the adventures detailed. He spent two decades on this work, and it shows. 8 color, 50 b&w illus.; 7 maps. (Nov.) Forecast: This significant addition to exploration history, sociology and geography will be a certain sell to the university market. But its readability makes it prime for those who enjoyed Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes and anyone-teens on up-interested in exploration and adventure. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
While chronicling Cook's extraordinary journeys, this book differs from other recent Cook offerings-Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes and Martin Dugard's Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook-in that Thomas (Oceanic Art; Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific) does not embark on a personal quest to retrace Cook's travels. Instead, he uses Cook's cultural encounters to move beyond traditional Cook biographies and focus on the anthropological and scientific research carried out during Cook's three voyages, as evidenced in Cook's and the other scientists' journals. When Cook met up with the diverse cultures in his three voyages to various South Pacific islands (including New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii), he was participating in a two-way cultural exchange that had serious implications for everyone involved. In his writings, he observed and theorized about many customs and rituals, such as the origins of the Maori practice of cannibalism, how different cultures worshiped their gods, and the rite of sacrifice. Thomas's mastery of this material is evident throughout as he draws on years of research that he and others have compiled. An insightful and engrossing book; recommended for all libraries.-Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville, IN Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A richly detailed life of perhaps the greatest maritime explorer in history. A partial life, that is: Thomas (Anthropology/Univ. of London; Colonialism’s Culture, not reviewed) shuns the "grandfather to grave" course of most biographies, beginning his study of the Yorkshire-born James Cook as he neared 40. By 1767, Cook was already an accomplished sailor and leader, driven by a keen desire to put points and lines on maps where none had existed before. As a surveyor, Thomas shows, Cook was nearly without peer, and his sea and coastal charts "produced a new kind of accurate knowledge that suddenly showed up his predecessors’ efforts for their amateurishness." As Cook voyaged ever farther from England, now aboard the Endeavour, he added ethnographic skills to his quiver, thanks in some measure to the influence of his shipmate Joseph Banks; Thomas considers both to have been "embodiments of Enlightenment inquiry," and both took care to record cultural, geographical, and natural-historical details in their journals and logs, even if they sometimes failed to record incidents that did not reflect well on the captain. We can only guess at those incidents, but some must have involved the deaths of native peoples. Though Cook had taken an interest in and even praised the lifeways of some of the indigenous peoples he encountered, he apparently had no qualms about raising his pistol; as Thomas notes, commenting on an account by a contemporary writer, "Cook’s excuse was, in effect, that you had to be there to see why this occurred . . . which was to beg the questions of whether civilized men were only civilized in civilized places, and whether their travels took them into situations beyond the scopeof ethical and moral principles that were surely supposed to apply universally." Thomas does well to sound that heart-of-darkness theme, which turns up at points throughout his narrative as Cook becomes ever gloomier about the enterprise of command and ever quicker to assert European, and his own, authority—behavior that surely contributed to his death at the hands of unimpressed Hawaiians in 1779. All in all, a well-paced, nuanced contribution to the history of exploration.
