Let’s start this post off with a book review. Or at least part of one.

I say part because I’m still in the process of listening to the audiobook version of Hampton Sides’ historical study “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.” As of this writing, I have just three hours and 23 minutes left of the book’s 15-hour-and-41-minute running time.

I’m at the part in which Cook makes landfall for a single day on the coast of Siberia, his only Asian stop, and ingratiates himself to one of the tribes of Chukchi who lived there. Cook apparently strode ashore alone to meet the tribal members who, fearful of strangers, had gathered on the beach, weapons in hand.

Cook, as author Sides wrote, was trusting that “if he looked them in the eye and showed the proper respect, the chasm between radically different people could be bridged.”

In this case, Cook was successful, and a round of peaceful bartering followed. Of course as we know, circumstances turned out quite differently a few months later on a beach when Cook and his crew returned to Hawaii – visiting the Big Island for the first time – which became the site of Cook’s death on Feb. 14, 1779.

To his credit, the author Sides – a Yale-educated historian and author of several other books and articles – doesn’t simply repeat the traditional tale of Cook discovering unknown territory. Such spots as the islands of the South Pacific, Hawaii, the coasts of Oregon, Washington and Alaska were inhabited by native peoples – and had been for, in some cases, a millennia.

Many of these places and peoples were unknown to Europeans. And much of the view of them passed down through the centuries has been told mainly from a Eurocentric point of view. This POV, though, minimizes the role of indigenous peoples and largely avoids the harsher effects of the harm, especially in spreading diseases and engaging in slavery, brought about by European exploration.

In recent years, however, other views have become more prominent – and Sides includes what indigenous stories he has garnered from the oral histories and anthropological studies that have been passed down. The result is a view of Cook and his voyages that both credits the man not only for his courage but also, as the above quote indicates, lauds him for being a man of understanding in an era when the vast majority of Europeans considered indigenous peoples as being little more than savages.

Concurrent with this, Sides’ book offers a fuller view of those peoples than has been popularly portrayed.

At this point, I want to refer specifically to the visit that Cook made to Cape Town, South Africa, in October 1776. This section of Sides’ book holds special meaning to me because of the trip to Cape Town that my wife and I took in December 2022.

In our stay, we stayed several nights in Cape Town itself. One of the apartments we rented offered a spectacular view of the city’s most scenic geographical landmark: Table Mountain. That view surpassed even what Sides described as the view presented to Cook and his crew: “Table Mountain,” he wrote, “loomed over the bay. A blunt slab of sandstone, roiled in mist.”

In an earlier section of his book, Sides recounts the first visit that Cook made to Cape Town, which was known at the time as the “Tavern of the Seas.” Cook had described Cape Town as place where the inhabitants “are in general well bred and extremely civil and polite to all strangers.” Indeed, he added, “it is their interest to do so for the whole town may be consider’d as one great inn fited up for the reception of all comers and goers.”

Those “comers and goers” were all the ships, mostly European, that sailed from their home ports intent on, Sides wrote, “plying the spice route between Holland and the East Indies.” His mention of Holland is apt since it was The Netherlands, in the guise of the Dutch East India Company, that had built a facility there in 1652. (In 1814, after a series of struggles, the British would take control of the city, making it a UK colony).

The later history of Cape Town, and indeed the whole of South Africa, is too detailed and involved to go into here. There are any number of books that can relate the whole story, including the long period of apartheid. But I can talk a bit more about Table Mountain.

Going up Table Mountain is as easy as buying tickets on the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway. Though the lines can be long, the wait is usually short because the two “rotating state-of-the-art” cars take only five minutes to go up and back, with waits between rides taking only between 10 to 15 minutes.

Or it can be as hard hiking up to the summit, which depending on the route taken can last anywhere from 90 minutes (for those in good shape) to six hours for those interested in a more complete experience. As one website states, “trails like the Devil’s Peak via Mowbray Ridge offer up to 6 hours of challenging terrain and stunning views.”

Nothing, though, beats the view of the mountain itself. During his 27-year incarceration, the late South African president Nelson Mandela spent 18 years at the prison on Robben Island, which sits in the ocean some six miles north of Cape Town.

“During the many years of incarceration on Robben Island, we often looked across Table Mountain at its magnificent silhouette,” Mandela once wrote. “To us on Robben Island, Table Mountain was a beacon of hope. It represented the mainland to which we knew we would one day return.”

Standing on the summit of the mountain, you can just make out the shape of Robben Island through the shifting clouds.

If you have an active imagination, you might be able to picture Captain Cook and his crew coming into view as well.