Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in World War II,

Abstract

temporary criticisms of Cook’s decisions or behavior on the third voyage need to be set into a context of broad approval of his leadership. Cook’s polar accomplishments are Nicandri’s main focus; Cook applied what he learned on the second voyage about the phenomenon of ice blink, discerning when impassable ice lay ahead, and was, thus, able to keep his crews alive and his ships intact for an extensive mapping of the little-known northwest coast of North America. In our own era, as we contemplate shrinking ice caps and changing navigational conditions, especially in Arctic seas, paying more attention to Cook’s observations is important. These general lines of argument are convincing, although Nicandi overstates their originality. The business of Juan de Fuca Strait is a good example. Nicandri rails against those who have interpreted this as a blunder; it was bad weather, not tiredness, that prevented Cook from recognizing Cape Flattery as marking the entrance to the strait, resulting in his failure to realize that Vancouver Island was separate from the mainland. Nicandri cites Barry Gough’s The Northwest Coast (University of British Columbia Press 1992) as evidence for the unfair disparagement of Cook by historians, but Gough actually prefigured Nicandri’s exoneration by stating that any navigator would have missed the strait’s entrance under similar conditions. Cook’s death in Hawai’i, the focus of so much recent academic interest, is the topic of only a single subsection, titled “Intimations of Mortality,” and, because of his disapproval of postcolonial anthropology, Nicandri does not take his own stand on the famous Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate about Hawaiian motives. He also disdains the “palm tree paradigm” (10) that has bogged down so many Cook historians in the tropics. Instead, he concentrates on absolving Cook of assumptions concerning declining health or impaired judgement on the third voyage. Finally, “Sequels” includes an extended analysis of the post–Cook expeditions activities at Kamchatka and of the final attempts to discover a northwest passage through the Arctic ice. A final section, “Seeding the Fur Trade on the Voyage Home,” discusses the trade in sea otter fur, spurred on to unprecedented heights after the publication of the third voyage and, thus, reshaping the economic and political history of North America. Of these sections, the Kamchatka material will probably be the most unfamiliar to readers since, as Nicandri notes, the mini-expedition there “falls as far outside the palm-tree paradigm” as any other over the three voyages, and “For that reason, it is little known” (331). Much recent work on Cook has been interdisciplinary, combining insights from history, anthropology, literary studies, material culture, and other fields. Nicandri’s approach is also interdisciplinary, but only up to a point. He approves of the literary analysis of explorations texts by Ian MacLaren, for example, but denounces postcolonial anthropologists repeatedly for their single-minded focus on the tropical islands, the circumstances of Cook’s death, or both. Is this really fair? Nicandri frequently quotes postcolonial anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, crediting him with identifying the source of so many assumptions about Cook’s tiredness and possible illness: Cook’s first biographer, J. C. Beaglehole, and Beaglehole’s rhetorical question, “Is it possible that, just as unsuspected strain on his mind was beginning to affect his attitude to the human situation, so, in relation to unexpected geographic possibilities, he was beginning to experience a certain tiredness?” (quoted on p. 9). Nicandri builds on this to good effect, even suggesting that speculation about the reason for Cook’s death is akin to conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. However, he is working in a revisionist tradition whose trajectory was already set by, among others, the postcolonial anthropologists he frequently denounces. His historiographical critique could have been much more helpfully directed toward specific scholars and theories. More valuable is the way that Nicandri draws together various critiques of the “remarkably orthodox” (7) consistency of Cook historiography with regard to the third voyage. There are three points that he decisively refutes: the idea that Cook’s ability to deal constructively with Indigenous groups deteriorated on the third voyage; that he was a more demanding, less professional captain than in the past; and that exhaustion and poor health meant that he displayed less than his usual drive and geographical curiosity. Numerous maps and illustrations will enhance this book’s appeal for general readers, and its historiographical intervention will be of interest to graduate students and specialists.