Captain Cook was cooked, but not eaten

A remarkable new book about the navigator, ‘Wide, Wide Sea’ by Hampton Sides, traces the adventurer’s third voyage and its fateful conclusion
JACINTO ANTÓN / NOV 28, 2025 

I’ve spent the last few intense days immersed in the final adventure of Captain James Cook, the great British navigator and explorer (1728-1779). I visited the exhibition Voices of the Pacific at CaixaForum Barcelona, where he is mentioned several times — generally in a negative light: one work by a Polynesian artist satirizes him, and another depicts his first ship, the HMS Endeavour, upside down — and above all, I read an extraordinary book about his third and fateful final voyage, The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Doubleday, 2024), full of new research. As an aperitif — and the word is apt — Sides argues that Cook was indeed cooked, but not eaten, by Hawaiians after they killed him on the beach at Kealakekua Bay.

Cook — whom Michel Le Bris, in his Dictionnaire amoreaux des explorateurs (Plon, 2010), points out inaugurated a long fascination that, despite Bougainville and La Pérouse (or Magellan and Álvaro de Saavedra), made the South Seas a space of the Anglo-American imaginary (Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Donovan’s Reef) —is sensationally revived by Sides, who dissects his legend and masterfully traces the steps of the third voyage, many of the places in which he has visited. The American author explains that Cook — already immensely famous after his two previous expeditions, in which he had circumnavigated the globe and reached further south than anyone else (with the mistaken conclusion that Antarctica didn’t exist; nobody’s perfect) — agreed to take command of HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery with the mission of discovering the Northwest Passage, that Arctic holy grail that obsessed the British. Along the way, the expedition, which would reach the northernmost tip of the American continent from the Pacific, via Alaska, and visit icy landscapes, not only the breathtaking South Seas (and Tenerife), was meant to return a young Polynesian man whom Cook had taken with him on the previous voyage back to his home.

During his third voyage, the most dramatic and the longest, his swan song, Cook reached Hawaii, and it was there that the natives killed the captain in an unfortunate incident. I mistakenly believed that after killing him, they had eaten him, at least in part, given that the Hawaiians returned a charred piece of his leg, weighing about three kilos, which is at the very least suspicious. In a second delivery there were more pieces of his legs (without feet), part of his skull, fragments of scalp, and his hands, which had been salted. Sides recalls that, unlike other Polynesian cultures, especially the Maori (who ate 10 of Cook’s sailors on his second voyage), the native Hawaiians were not traditionally cannibals. “My opinion is that I don’t think he was eaten, but he was certainly cooked,” he explained to me on October 20 in an interesting (I was going to say succulent) telephone conversation from his home in New Mexico. Cook — one can only imagine what a great pair he made with Lord Sandwich — was roasted, not for culinary reasons, but as part of a ceremony to remove the meat clinging to the bones, which the locals believed was where the deceased’s spiritual power resided. In fact, Sides points out, what the Hawaiians did was treat Cook as a significant figure in their own culture and turn his remains (those parts not returned) into relics: those befitting a man considered high-ranking and very powerful.

Sides recalls that to this day, Hawaiian elders, despite the many morbid and grotesque stories that have circulated, have always vehemently insisted that no one ate any part of Cook’s body and that the captain’s remains were treated with the same dignity and respect accorded to great chiefs. That said, the bones did circulate widely around the island.

Captain James Cook.

Sides was unable to provide me with any information about the supposed arrow made from a piece of Cook’s tibia, which Tony Horwitz mentions in his splendid Blue Latitudes (2002) and which he traced to an Australian museum (taking the opportunity to reflect on the possibility of cloning the captain). Sides, incidentally, knew Horwitz and informed me of the sad news that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author died of a heart attack in 2019.

Regarding what happened on the Hawaiian beach on that fateful day, Sides says the captain lost his composure and “didn’t act with his usual diplomacy.” The Hawaiians, who had a different concept of private property than Europeans, had stolen a boat from the expedition, and Cook seemed to lose his mind: he went to find King Kalaniopu’u and took him hostage to force the return of the stolen item. “He wasn’t reasonable and misread the situation; there was a violent escalation, and the warriors protecting the monarch attacked the captain and his men as they tried to return to the ships.” Cook, who fired his pistol, killing one warrior, was then struck on the head with a mace by another (some very telling examples are on display at CaixaForum), and as he fell, a third plunged a pahoa — a traditional dagger often adorned with shark teeth or a swordfish bill — into his neck and continued to stab him savagely. Finally, his skull was split open with a stone. It’s curious that Cook met a similar end to Magellan.

Sides believes that the experienced Cook had developed overconfidence and thought he could handle any situation. “He committed a sin of hubris, as the Greeks would say.” It is possible that Cook also suffered from some illness or mental disorder, he adds. He seems to have been different from his earlier voyages, and there are accounts that he had become stricter and even crueler, using the whip — an unusual punishment for him — with a frequency worthy of Captain William Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (incidentally, Bligh, who years later would command HMS Bounty, was part of Cook’s third expedition, as was another future star, George Vancouver). “We will never know what was happening to Cook; it has been speculated that the physical effect of so much travel was taking its toll — he seemed exhausted.” Sides can’t resist the joke that Cook — who had been to extreme northern and southern latitudes, crossing both the Antarctic and Arctic Circles — was obviously bipolar.

The author points out that Cook is currently viewed quite negatively in Hawaii and other parts of the South Seas, where he is attacked as a symbol of colonialism and a figure whose arrival marked the “fatal impact,” the beginning of the destruction of traditional cultures: a “Christopher Columbus of the Pacific.” Sides’ judgment is different: “You can vilify him, but he is undoubtedly one of the greatest captains and navigators of all time. He is actually blamed for what came after. Cook, a self-made man, austere, fair, and sincere, was above all an explorer; his interest was in knowing the world and drawing maps, at which he was a true genius. His objective was primarily scientific. I admire him for his abilities. He was very interested in other cultures and showed an unusual respect for them, to the point that one could say his perspective was that of a proto-anthropologist. He showed no prejudice, he didn’t moralize, and he never tried to convert the natives.” He even witnessed a human sacrifice. It is true that the victim had already been killed when Cook arrived at the lively ceremony, but he saw a chieftain eating the left eye of the sacrificed man.

It’s curious that there isn’t a memorable film about Cook. “Yes, it’s strange, because his adventures are very cinematic.” Sides was very fond of Master and Commander, the adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, whose protagonists, Aubrey and Maturin, in some ways mirror the relationship between Cook and the naturalist on his first voyage, Joseph Banks, of whom Sides, incidentally, doesn’t have a very high opinion.

An inhabitant of Easter Island in a ritual during the Pacific Leaders Summit in 2024.ELVIS GONZÁLEZ (EFE)

In The Wide Wide Sea there is a fair amount of sex, reminiscent of Irwin Wallace’s The Three Sirens. “In many places in the Pacific, such as Tahiti, European sailors could openly have sex with the uninhibited local women,” the author notes. It seemed like paradise to them; even more so because of the local women’s mastery of their bodies, whose skill in moving their hips with a rotating motion was praised. In contrast, the Polynesian women found kissing repulsive. “There has been much debate about what drove them to these unions. In part, it was curiosity, a desire to break taboos, and a genuine longing for different men, most of whom were very young. Perhaps there was a natural impulse to escape the islands’ inbreeding, and gifts also played a role. There appear to have been sincere romantic relationships. The dark side was the massive spread of venereal diseases by the Europeans.”

Would we have liked Cook? Probably not very much. Sides emphasizes that he was “a sailing machine” (although curiously he couldn’t swim), circumspect, and not at all romantic. He valued precision and lacked social skills. He had started in the Royal Navy from the bottom, as a seaman, and as a captain, he cared for his men. He could eat anything and felt at home in the Pacific. His worst nightmare was having his sextant stolen. He seems to have practiced strict chastity despite the erotic atmosphere in Polynesia. Perhaps that had something to do with his bad temper in his later years.

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