THE SWEET REFRESH 2: THE TRIUMPH OF THE WIDE WIDE SEA

 Before embarking on Novel 2, there was still more to do.

Nala Sinephro's Endlessness had given me the musical refresh of the heart.

Now I wanted the mental refresh of adventure.

I wanted to go somewhere.

And so I took the journey found in Hampton Sides' extraordinary The Wide Wide Sea.

In many ways, this is why Audible exists.

Really.

Alexander Pope, in his preface to his own translation of the Iliad, famously observed of Homer and Virgil:

“Homer makes us hearers, and Virgil leaves us readers.”

I disagree with Pope's judgment of Virgil, by the way, but his distinction can be usefully dragooned into this discussion.

Because The Wide Wide Sea, especially as rendered here, does double duty.

We hear and we see.

Peter Noble's voice is in our ears, but Hampton Sides switches on that inner projector in the mind.

Suddenly there is sweep.

Grandeur.

White-knuckle, edge-of-the-seat adventure.

And terror.

This is the fateful final voyage of Captain James Cook, navigational genius and now controversial figure, and the crew that followed him across impossible distances into places that, to Europeans of the 1770s, might as well have been another world.

And what a head-clearing adventure it is.

Sides possesses that wonderful gift found in the best popular historians and biographers: the ability to bring the skills of the novelist to the telling of history without sacrificing the history itself.

Think Shelby Foote. Antony Beevor. Lynne Olson. Simon Sebag Montefiore. Max Hastings. Doris Kearns Goodwin. Ron Chernow. Andrew Roberts. Anne Applebaum. Adam Zamoyski.

Different writers. Different subjects. But they understand a secret Tolstoy certainly understood in War and Peace:

Transportation is everything.

Put me there.

Make me see it.

Make me feel the distance.

Sides does.

Cook and his men traverse thousands upon thousands of miles—in ships built in the 1770s!

Stop and think about that for a moment.

After completing my own novel, I wanted the chance to disappear into somebody else's great quest for a while.

The Wide Wide Sea gave me exactly that.

The dangers are real. In Sides' hands, you begin thinking alongside the crew.

Who are those people gathering on the shoreline?

Are they friendly?

Are they preparing to attack?

How in the world are we going to communicate?

You feel the trepidation of encounters with Māori, Hawaiians, and the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Again and again, I found myself marveling that Cook and his crew were able to communicate across such enormous cultural and linguistic distances at all.

Somehow...

they found a way.

Then comes the voyage toward the Arctic Ocean.

Strap in.

Sides makes the sheer geographical scale almost overwhelming. The cold. The ice. The uncertainty. The realization that these men are sailing farther and farther into a world for which no reliable map can offer salvation.

But one of the moments that stopped me cold occurs in Hawaiʻi.

Tensions are rising. Hawaiians gather in enormous numbers. Violence seems frighteningly possible.

Then a crewman with some knowledge of Tahitian calls out a few words...

and the Hawaiians understand him.

Think about that.

Tahiti lies roughly 2,700 miles away.

For Cook and his men, the moment must have bordered on the uncanny.

Sides then opens another door: Hawaiians and Tahitians share Polynesian ancestry, and their ancestors had crossed astonishing expanses of the Pacific long before Europeans appeared there. Voyages over distances that seem almost impossible even when you're sitting comfortably at home looking at them on a map.

Suddenly Cook's extraordinary voyage exists alongside another tradition of extraordinary voyaging that had been taking place across the Pacific for centuries.

That's history doing what I love most.

The world gets bigger.

And your assumptions get smaller.

Everyone knows that Cook's final voyage ends in tragedy.

That doesn't diminish the suspense.

It intensifies it.

Sides' storytelling became so effective that, near the end, I actually stopped listening for a few hours.

I wasn't ready.

Somewhere along those thousands of miles, Sides had pulled off the historian's greatest trick.

I had joined the crew.

Like Tolstoy putting you amid the smoke and confusion of Austerlitz, Sides had somehow suited me up and put me to work.

I was aboard.

And I knew what was coming.

The Wide Wide Sea is beautifully served by Peter Noble's excellent narration. Noble gives this immense journey room to breathe without ever losing its urgency.

Sides makes us see.

Noble makes us hear.

Together, they make us travel.

And when the voyage finally ended, I reluctantly returned to those first pages of my next novel.

The journey was over.

My head was clear.

I was a little wiser.

And I was ready to get back to work.

More Sweet Refresh: The Sweet Refresh 1: Nala Sinephro's Endlessness

I'd love to hear your thoughts, so speak your mind. Leave me a comment or feel free to hit me up at: fromandromedaandback@gmail.com. And thank you!