Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to
Speaker 1: you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging
Speaker 1: deer stands, or scouting for ELP. First Light has performance
Speaker 1: apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it
Speaker 1: out at first light dot com, f I R S
Speaker 1: T l I t e dot com. Today, we're making
Speaker 1: good on a promise we have back in our studio.
Speaker 1: Historian and author Hampton Sides, who joined us on an
Speaker 1: episode to ninety eight what number we on?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: Five five thirty something by forty something.
Speaker 1: Joined us a long time ago on an episode probably
Speaker 1: the best name to episode we ever had, cooking Captain Cook,
Speaker 1: and at that time we were we kind of went through, uh, Hampton.
Speaker 1: We went through your what do you call one's collection
Speaker 1: of books.
Speaker 3: Your body of work, you're that's something. There's a couple
Speaker 3: of extra.
Speaker 1: We went through his body of work, and towards the
Speaker 1: end of the interview, we're kind of Throughout the interview
Speaker 1: we talked about what you're working, what right, what you
Speaker 1: then were, what you then were working on now, which
Speaker 1: was a book about Captain Cook. And I think that
Speaker 1: even at the time I had shared with you that
Speaker 1: I had been to Hawaii, been to Hawaiian passed By
Speaker 1: where Captain Cook was killed, where he ultimately met his end,
Speaker 1: and I was there last week, and kids.
Speaker 3: Wow, you're so tan. Now now I understand why.
Speaker 1: We had a laugh where I said to my kids,
Speaker 1: were driving by fishing for on os the wahoo, which
Speaker 1: they call os in Hawaii, and I yelled to my
Speaker 1: kids over the very loud boat engine of my friend's
Speaker 1: diesel boat engine and yelled, that's where Captain Cook got killed.
Speaker 1: And my kids, half paying attention, one of them said,
Speaker 1: oh awesome, and that became kind of the joke for
Speaker 1: the day. But so we said we're going to come back,
Speaker 1: that we were going to have you back when you
Speaker 1: finished your book. And the book is now out and
Speaker 1: available publishes on April nine, called The Wide Wide Sea
Speaker 1: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of
Speaker 1: Captain James Cook. And if you are interested in pre
Speaker 1: contact contact era Alaska Hawaii, which wind up being coupled
Speaker 1: together in unexpected ways. Still today, I find so much
Speaker 1: cross cultural exchange between Alaska and Hawaii. They kind of
Speaker 1: have a Pacific thing going on. This book explores it.
Speaker 1: We're going to discus Austin UH today. I haven't. I
Speaker 1: usually try to. I do a pretty good job. I
Speaker 1: usually try to read read books before we talked about them.
Speaker 1: But I haven't gotten to it yet. But you have
Speaker 1: such a trusted track record, I'm just gonna come out
Speaker 1: right now and say it's good.
Speaker 3: Well, that's good to hear. There's nothing worse than those
Speaker 3: who claim they've read it and then you find out
Speaker 3: they haven't. You know, so your honesty is appreciated.
Speaker 1: No, I can't. I can't lie to you, but I
Speaker 1: can just based off your your body of work, your oo,
Speaker 1: based off your ouvoy, I can tell everybody it's great.
Speaker 1: And we're going to dig in on it, and we're
Speaker 1: going to discuss the conflicting reports of of uh, whether
Speaker 1: or not Captain Cook was indeed consumed. When we talked
Speaker 1: about Cook and I didn't know the did you tell
Speaker 1: us the details of it last time?
Speaker 3: About the I think we hinted at it, but I
Speaker 3: wasn't drawing.
Speaker 1: To a little heart detail.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we may have mentioned it. We'll get into
Speaker 3: it a little conflicting accounts, yes, conflicting accounts, But I
Speaker 3: just wanted to just say thank you for getting the
Speaker 3: name right, Captain Cook. So many people have said to me, oh,
Speaker 3: you're writing a book about Captain Hook.
Speaker 1: Oh, you know the pirate we'd had you on a
Speaker 1: long time ago.
Speaker 3: The parrot on his shoulder, you know, the that's probably
Speaker 3: Steve's kids thought he was talking Captain Hook.
Speaker 1: He was bad guy, Captain James Cook. You know, I
Speaker 1: find it when we get into the heart story, I'll
Speaker 1: touch on this more, but I find that I'll touch
Speaker 1: on it fully right now. We're gonna tell a heart
Speaker 1: story in a little bit. We got to a couple
Speaker 1: things to touch on first, and then, uh, you're familiar
Speaker 1: with who was it? Was it Gall after the Battle
Speaker 1: of a Little Big Horn? I think it was Gall.
Speaker 1: Papa Sue Warrior after the Battle a Little Big Horn.
Speaker 1: I believe he claimed to he told some people that
Speaker 1: he had eaten a bite of Tom Custer's heart. So
Speaker 1: George Armstrong Custer fought and died with his brother at
Speaker 1: the Battle a Little Big Horn, and Tom Custer had
Speaker 1: once arrested like took into custody. The Sioux warrior Gall
Speaker 1: and pissed him off, and he claimed in the years
Speaker 1: after the battle, he claimed to have taken a bite
Speaker 1: of Tom Custer's heart, and then later, maybe on second thought,
Speaker 1: said no, I was just kidding. So was he telling
Speaker 1: the truth when he said he's just kidding, or was
Speaker 1: he telling the truth when he said he took a
Speaker 1: bite of Custer's heart.
Speaker 4: Whenever I do something like that, I mean not Oftentimes,
Speaker 4: if I change my story, it's because I'm embarrassed by
Speaker 4: what I initially admitted to.
Speaker 1: And I, yeah, I'm just kidding. Yeah, I didn't really
Speaker 1: know how you're going to receive that. So he had
Speaker 1: a Gall had another quote, we're not here to talk
Speaker 1: about battle, little Egghorn. But Gall had another quote where, man,
Speaker 1: he said a bunch of things. He's the one that
Speaker 1: said how long the battle took? That it took about
Speaker 1: as long as it takes a hungry man to eat
Speaker 1: his meal. And then later a crow scout for Custer
Speaker 1: later said, no, I was there, but I got away,
Speaker 1: and Gall said to him, you must have turned into
Speaker 1: a bird if you're saying you were there and you
Speaker 1: got away. Oh, you know what, this is the final
Speaker 1: So this is the final mention. There was a big
Speaker 1: debate about whether or not see I made up this
Speaker 1: new saying. It's a new old saying. A fresh set
Speaker 1: of eyes will find more beans. And we've talked about
Speaker 1: it a fair bit. People have. I thought it had
Speaker 1: app you know, finance applications, but we heard from people
Speaker 1: who were playing it in the medical field finance. I
Speaker 1: thought it was catching on, yeah, law forensics. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: thought it was really catching on, and people were trying
Speaker 1: down on their wives and pissing their wives off. And
Speaker 1: we made the shirt, but the shirt didn't sell out,
Speaker 1: which makes me think this didn't catch on.
Speaker 2: Well, No, I think it was a timing issue. I
Speaker 2: think that if we would have had the shirt earlier.
Speaker 1: You see my shirt film. Yeah, oh like the shirt,
Speaker 1: like the saying had come and gone. Well not, I
Speaker 1: don't think old sayings do.
Speaker 3: We can't see the bottom of your computer. Yeah, that
Speaker 3: looks great.
Speaker 2: They they've I think they've like sixty something percent sold out.
Speaker 2: We didn't make that many, so go get them. Folks
Speaker 2: who maybe.
Speaker 4: Don't looking at that shirt and trying to figure it
Speaker 4: out without reading any of it.
Speaker 1: And I just thought it was like a political or
Speaker 1: rival might be tiptoe into like it looks like you're
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, yeah, like it might be like a little
Speaker 1: revolutionary yep, uh it was, uh yeah, other other areas there.
Speaker 1: I was telling a story about being out a bus
Speaker 1: in Memphis, and someone said, you always gotta be careful
Speaker 1: when you tell Memphis but stories. But yeah, the fist,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, yeah, okay, Oh, here's the interesting thing
Speaker 1: that's out. This is cool. You guys might remember when
Speaker 1: we had a bunch of the anthropologists and archaeologists on
Speaker 1: after doing our Bison Clovis point experiment where we worked
Speaker 1: with researchers from Kent State for that's about Kent State.
Speaker 1: Research was from Kent State, Southern Methodist University, Oregon State University,
Speaker 1: right yeah, and they were doing we were doing research,
Speaker 1: and we were the participants in the research where we
Speaker 1: butchered an entire gutted, butchered, boned out an entire buffalo
Speaker 1: using ice age style stone points, particularly using Clovis points
Speaker 1: and other flakes, and butchered the whole damn thing. I
Speaker 1: thought we were gonna be there into the night. I
Speaker 1: brought I brought like lighting. I think we'd ever get
Speaker 1: out of there dude, we're done in four hours. Pusher
Speaker 1: the whole thing out in order to that the researchers
Speaker 1: could then do the serious work of analyzing after they
Speaker 1: were cleaned up. Our friend John Hayes from Hayes tax
Speaker 1: at Deermy Studio did the bone work on it in
Speaker 1: order to help interpret ice age kill sites. Meaning when
Speaker 1: you go to an ice age kill site, twelve thousand
Speaker 1: years go by and all this left is chunks of
Speaker 1: bone and chunks of stone, nothing else is left. You
Speaker 1: can't talk to anybody, all the soft tissues gone, things
Speaker 1: have been gnawed on by animals. So we were providing.
Speaker 1: We were helping to create a sort of set of
Speaker 1: stone and a set of bone where they knew what
Speaker 1: happened to the stone and bone, and you could take
Speaker 1: this information and help analyze ice age kill sites. Meaning
Speaker 1: when you see that mark on a bone, what led
Speaker 1: to that mark on a bone? When you see a stone,
Speaker 1: when you see a chunk of stone flake maybe embedded
Speaker 1: in bone, or or a chunk of stone tool that
Speaker 1: had broke and was discarded and it's laying there and
Speaker 1: you're thinking, well is that there because they used it
Speaker 1: to kill the animal and it's laying inside their ribcage
Speaker 1: or was that laying there because they use it to
Speaker 1: cut up an animal? Meaning did they maybe find an
Speaker 1: animal and cut it up? Did they kill an animal
Speaker 1: with projectile points? When we see a Clovis point, we
Speaker 1: think that it was on a spear. Is there a
Speaker 1: chance that that Clovis point was actually a knife? These
Speaker 1: are all great mysteries, and anybody's the papers out now.
Speaker 1: I got excited for a minute when I got that
Speaker 1: form letter. It had me down as doctor. Steve even
Speaker 1: said it's just a form letter, though, and I made
Speaker 1: the mistake of insulting Seth by saying, how everybody is?
Speaker 1: I already told Seth this and apologize to him. I
Speaker 1: don't know what this means. I said, everybody was doctor,
Speaker 1: even Seth? The hell does that mean?
Speaker 4: I think the implication is somewhat obvious, even Seth.
Speaker 1: I sent it a craction and I said, hey, just
Speaker 1: heads up. You know you got a lot of people
Speaker 1: down as doctors that ain't. And he said, no, that's
Speaker 1: just a form letter from the journal. Don't worry. You
Speaker 1: won't be credited as being a doctor. But Randy, you
Speaker 1: could actually be a doctor. Well, if they just three
Speaker 1: years for some reason. Yeah, next time. So the article's out,
Speaker 1: we're how do you find it, Krin.
Speaker 2: We're going to have a link to the article in
Speaker 2: the show notes, and we're also gonna have it prominently
Speaker 2: on the website.
Speaker 1: So yeah, study is massive, over twenty thousand words. For
Speaker 1: you people that used to read The New Yorker bag
Speaker 1: in the nineties, that would be a big that's like
Speaker 1: a that's like when they do like the history of
Speaker 1: dirt in the New Yorker. Twenty thousand words, thirty one figures,
Speaker 1: twelve data tables and eight supplemental data files. That's supposed
Speaker 1: to get people excited, Krinn, that's supposed to get Google fires.
Speaker 1: This from people at home are like, wow, thirty one figures.
Speaker 4: Ordinarily only get three supplemental data files.
Speaker 2: Those are for all the nerds out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Chrins, you get a job writing copy.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Twenty thousand words, thirty one figures, twelve data tables and
Speaker 1: eight supplemental data files.
Speaker 2: Call now, now most of that, most of that is
Speaker 2: from Meton. I asked him to put in what he
Speaker 2: thought would be important to highlight and that I mean
Speaker 2: that that that sums it up for people who speak
Speaker 2: the science language.
Speaker 1: But uh so worried about that. It's fascinating and I
Speaker 1: liked it and I want to do more, and we slept.
Speaker 1: What we needed to do is I wanted to do
Speaker 1: the MOE where we caught up a person because hey, listen,
Speaker 1: Clayton sent me an article the other day about out
Speaker 1: of Prince Wales Island in the caves finding ten thousand
Speaker 1: year old bare bones, and I think you said something
Speaker 1: about some human remains that seemed to have been gnawed on,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, gnawd on ten thousand years later? You
Speaker 1: sure it wasn't something else? Live Tour. Live Tour kicks
Speaker 1: off April twenty third. What's it right now? Ninth, tenth, eighth, eighth,
Speaker 1: whatever the hell? Live Tour kicks off April twenty third, Mace, Arizona.
Speaker 1: From Mace, Arizona, we go to We do April twenty
Speaker 1: third is Masa, Arizona at Mesa Arts Center. From there,
Speaker 1: we do three shows in California. So we're creating a
Speaker 1: safe space for hunters and angers in California where you
Speaker 1: can come share your real lived experience about being a
Speaker 1: hunter or an angler. San Diego and Sacramento go to
Speaker 1: Salt Lake City, Boise, Missoula, Portland, Tacoma. I missed anything, Maca, Spokane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it goes like this, check me on this Mesa,
Speaker 1: San Diego, Anaheim, Masons, San Diego, Anaheim, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Boysey, Missoula, Spokane, Spokane, Portland, Tacoma.
Speaker 1: Mister Clay Nukeomb will be there for all the shows.
Speaker 1: We've got a lot of other people coming in and
Speaker 1: coming out, coming going, Bro, are you gonna make it
Speaker 1: for You're gonna come over for the Missoula show for sure.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah. Every ticket gets a signed copy of the
Speaker 1: Meat Eater Outdoor Cookbook, which is a brand new release.
Speaker 1: Actually the tour is during the release week, so every
Speaker 1: ticket comes with a signed copy. We're gonna have you'll
Speaker 1: learn stuff, you'll laugh, You'll you have a POTENTI to
Speaker 1: win some great stuff. So looking forward to seeing everyone there. Also,
Speaker 1: we got a new thing going me Eater Experiences. So
Speaker 1: this kuy of a long story. I don't want to
Speaker 1: spend too much time on it. I've been spearfishing down
Speaker 1: out of Venice, Louisiana, and I became friends with Renee
Speaker 1: Cross at Cypress Cove Marine and lodge and we hit
Speaker 1: on this idea we're gonna take over his whole place
Speaker 1: and do a big fishing party. So that's kicking off
Speaker 1: in October. Me He's gonna be down there, Yanskna be
Speaker 1: down there, Klay's gonna be down there, a bunch of
Speaker 1: other people coming and going, and we're filling up spots
Speaker 1: for that. You can go sign up to come down.
Speaker 1: We're gonna clean fish together, fish together, do stuff at night,
Speaker 1: have a lot of talks, a lot of laughs each
Speaker 1: Each setup is three days of fishing offshore inshore April fifteenth.
Speaker 1: You can go check out those me Eater experiences at
Speaker 1: the me Eater and then we also have a waterfoul
Speaker 1: one coming up in the winter which should be able
Speaker 1: to check out as well. Uh. Pad Dirkin wrote in
Speaker 1: pad Dirkin remains the only man in the world who's
Speaker 1: wolf neutral, so we like to check him with wolf
Speaker 1: neutral people now and then. Yeah, they just don't have
Speaker 1: a real soapbox the wolf neutral person. Is it an
Speaker 1: agnosticism or no? No, it's like, uh no, well not apathy,
Speaker 1: because that would imply not staying up with the Yeah,
Speaker 1: pad Dirkin is the only guy in the world that
Speaker 1: can listen to wolf stuff from either side and be like,
Speaker 1: it'll work out.
Speaker 5: He doesn't fly into a rage either way.
Speaker 1: He Uh, what what Pat got wanted by this is
Speaker 1: that risk of annoying you? Yet another wolf neutral column,
Speaker 1: This one explained his column He's out our columnist. This
Speaker 1: one explains why how Wisconsin's hunter trapper hunters and trappers
Speaker 1: killed two eighteen wolves in three days in February twenty one,
Speaker 1: but needed ten weeks to kill two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: seven wolves in twenty thirteen. Mystery being the number of
Speaker 1: wolves on the landscape didn't change, he says, mostly though,
Speaker 1: my review springs from a conversation with Al Hofacker, my
Speaker 1: first boss at Deer and Deer Hunting magazine in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen nineties, who nearly died last year from the
Speaker 1: tick born disease which I have not heard of. This
Speaker 1: is me editorializing. I'm reading Pat, but I'm editorializing by
Speaker 1: me to have not heard of it. Babe ciosis. Anyone
Speaker 1: heard of this? Babsiosis, babasiosis.
Speaker 5: I just looked it up and it infects red blood cells.
Speaker 1: Now I got I got waylaid bad by uh trick
Speaker 1: or no, I got bad by tricknoses. I got waylaid,
Speaker 1: I got waylaid somewhat bad by trickinnosis, and waylaid bad
Speaker 1: by lime. And my boy got waylaid so bad by
Speaker 1: lime he developed Bell's palsy, milk could run off the
Speaker 1: corner of his mouth.
Speaker 5: Horrible.
Speaker 1: Uh, that was long editorization. Back to Pat quote. He
Speaker 1: got me laughing when he said he'd rather die in
Speaker 1: a wolf attack because it would cause less suffering, while
Speaker 1: making him famous as get this, people, the first Wisconsin
Speaker 1: knight in history killed by a wolf, meaning that's yet
Speaker 1: to happen. That inspired us his pat still talking. This
Speaker 1: is an interesting tidbit that inspired me to dig into
Speaker 1: Wisconsin's costs damages from tickborn diseases versus wolf attacks on livestock, pets,
Speaker 1: and bearhounds. Guess what, Wisconsin. Guess what their costs and
Speaker 1: damages are from tickborn diseases annually. I'm gonna beat the table.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna beat this book on the table for this
Speaker 1: twelve million annually in ticks native wildlife. The tick costing
Speaker 1: Wisconsin twelve bill an Now, take a stab at over
Speaker 1: the past five years the average annual cost of wolves.
Speaker 1: I can't really beat the book about this. No, you
Speaker 1: can beat a book about how low something is? Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: one and seventy seven thousand dollars or I don't know
Speaker 1: what pats? And again I started to feel like Pat's
Speaker 1: not wolf. I think Pat's a wolf apologist dressed up
Speaker 1: in sheep's clothing, Cambell, He's masquerading as a wolf neutralist.
Speaker 1: Twelve million in tick damages one hundred and seventy seven
Speaker 1: grand and wolf damages whatever, Pat whatever? Pat the last
Speaker 1: of the outdoor columnists. We should be nice to Pat
Speaker 1: Durkin because when he dies the old outdoor columnists, I
Speaker 1: don't even want to say it. The pet's far from death.
Speaker 1: He still runs marathons, and I shouldn't say that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I should put a tick in his put put a
Speaker 1: tick in his underwear or something. And while it'd be
Speaker 1: like how you like them ticks? Now, Pat? Maybe like
Speaker 1: did I say I didn't? Did I say I like ticks?
Speaker 1: In episode five eighteen, you were talking about old fur
Speaker 1: price list that had bobcat wildcat links and links cat
Speaker 1: pricing and wondered why they had so many different names
Speaker 1: for bobcats in those days. This is when we had
Speaker 1: a links researcher on. Carmen van Bianki from Home Range
Speaker 1: Wildlife was on talking about a project in the Washington
Speaker 1: state of collaring links, which I need to They caught
Speaker 1: four mm. They caught three males and a female. I
Speaker 1: need to announce the other two winners have dang it.
Speaker 1: They caught four. They're all done for the year. They're
Speaker 1: very happy to get a female. Linx and this guy shed.
Speaker 1: This guy says he was talking to old fur buyer,
Speaker 1: third generation fur buyer, and he had an explanation for
Speaker 1: why all this crazy nomenclature. He told me that in
Speaker 1: the old days, wildcat was the general name for any
Speaker 1: of the smaller wildcats like bobcat, lynx, and oslot. So
Speaker 1: the sort of bucket term was a wildcat, bobcat, lynx,
Speaker 1: oslat Linx was what was used in the old days.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about, you know, you go back to
Speaker 1: the twenties and thirties. Lynx was used for what we
Speaker 1: still call links today. Bobcat was used for western and
Speaker 1: coastal bobcats that tend to have dull colors and coarser fur.
Speaker 1: Linx cat was used for the brighter colored with more
Speaker 1: silk like fur found on Western bobcats, like high planes.
Speaker 1: Western bobcats the ones that are super valuable today. They
Speaker 1: did this because of very noticeable differences between Western bobcats
Speaker 1: and those Eastern coastal bobcats. So at the time they
Speaker 1: believe there are different species. Meaning if you look at
Speaker 1: a bobcat from Michigan all dull, no good spots, and
Speaker 1: a bobcat from high elevations in Nevada, you'd be like, well,
Speaker 1: they can't be the same thing. They gotta be different,
Speaker 1: So they just call them these different names. Now people
Speaker 1: would catch them and get excited when they see bobcats
Speaker 1: or whatever listed for super high price, so they came
Speaker 1: up with this different name just to try to denote
Speaker 1: different fur qualities qualities, he says. The Idaho Fur Sale
Speaker 1: still lists Western and Eastern bobcats in different categories on
Speaker 1: their sale average price list. This is so trappers still
Speaker 1: can have a better idea what their bobcats should sell for,
Speaker 1: since the Eastern bobcats will be lower than the overall
Speaker 1: average results, giving Eastern trappers a false high expectation and
Speaker 1: Western trappers a false low expectation of what it's all worth. Hence,
Speaker 1: when you're looking at something You're like, how did they
Speaker 1: have all these cats in those days that no one
Speaker 1: knows about anymore. I don't want to spend time on this,
Speaker 1: but Krin thought this was interesting. This is pretty common
Speaker 1: that someone dies you put their ashes and shotgun shells.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that was.
Speaker 5: Common among a small group of people.
Speaker 3: Meaning.
Speaker 2: We've ever talked about it.
Speaker 1: But I have heard of it. Hunter Thompson, Hunter S.
Speaker 1: Thompson had his loaded in like artillery shows. Sorry, where's
Speaker 1: that big shell behind est?
Speaker 2: Back there?
Speaker 1: Yes, on the load we put all this in that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I feel like you've talked about ways that you'd like
Speaker 2: your remains to be used to change so that it's
Speaker 2: not included, and you don't want to.
Speaker 5: I thought it was you want to become a piece
Speaker 5: of carrion.
Speaker 1: Well, I did want to get scavenged by bears. But
Speaker 1: I'm kind of thinking now. I was looking at the
Speaker 1: prices to get buried in the Twin Lake Cemetery where
Speaker 1: I grew up. You get in the ground in for
Speaker 1: six hundred bucks. But if you want to get back out,
Speaker 1: guess they charge if you want to get out six
Speaker 1: hundred to get in thirteen hundred to get out. That's
Speaker 1: not bad. No, to change your mind a lot more
Speaker 1: for an exhamation. Someone changes their mind. I got to
Speaker 1: fork over thirteen hundred to get you back out of
Speaker 1: the ground. I might do that. I'm gonna go there
Speaker 1: and look next time I'm over there. A guy rode
Speaker 1: in a big explanation of why we shouldn't be dogging
Speaker 1: on these monkey farms are trying to put in down South,
Speaker 1: getting everybody all worked up. People in Texas are worked up,
Speaker 1: people in Georgia are worked up about these giant mo
Speaker 1: monkey farms they're building to supply the research facilities. Turns
Speaker 1: out no one gets excited about a monkey farm in
Speaker 1: their neighborhood, but he gets into some of the things
Speaker 1: that are going on. The US medical world is in
Speaker 1: critical need of Reeseius macause China has halted. He's talking
Speaker 1: about here's why this is going on. China has halted
Speaker 1: a large number of exports of these primaries primates to
Speaker 1: the country in retaliation of the current trade wars with
Speaker 1: the US, which are gonna get a lot worse. Next November,
Speaker 1: no next January, January sixth, when when Trump's back in office,
Speaker 1: is gonna get a lot. The trade wars are gonna
Speaker 1: not worse. The trade wars are going to intensify when
Speaker 1: Trump's back in office, and I imagine it's going to
Speaker 1: lead to probably even fewer monkeys running around. And then
Speaker 1: there's another thing that what was the earth thing? You said,
Speaker 1: there's another thing leaning to all this monkey problem. Come on,
Speaker 1: help me out here. You put it down.
Speaker 2: The USDA said, Now, well, I'm not sure what's in
Speaker 2: your mind that.
Speaker 1: Monkeys supplying demand.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like there's there was some producer and monkeys
Speaker 4: right here, the minerals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were some geopolitical things that led to this
Speaker 1: monkey crisis. So when you people are saying you don't
Speaker 1: want a monkey farm next door, keep in mind that
Speaker 1: there were geopolitical constraints that have led to the Reese's
Speaker 1: monkey shortage. Right.
Speaker 2: And here's the The USDA sends inspectors who are vets
Speaker 2: at random times, unannounced, at least once a year.
Speaker 1: He was selling us on how safe these monkey farms are.
Speaker 1: Right then he said, don't use my name, you know,
Speaker 1: but it's.
Speaker 2: Not it's not it's not for that. He just doesn't
Speaker 2: want to be attacked by you know, wealth.
Speaker 1: The reesis mccaus are vital for testing vaccine efficacy, novel
Speaker 1: cancer treatments, and various other life saving research projects that
Speaker 1: most are one universities and pharmaceutical companies. As someone who
Speaker 1: has worked in biomedical research for all of my career
Speaker 1: for t ten universities, I can tell you that the
Speaker 1: need for these primates is indeed very dire. So when
Speaker 1: they go to put a big monkey farm in your yard,
Speaker 1: keep that.
Speaker 2: In mind, humans versus monkeys.
Speaker 5: They need to round up those wild ones running around
Speaker 5: in Florida.
Speaker 1: I did not I did not pass judgment on the
Speaker 1: need for Reese's monkeys. I just said, and I just said,
Speaker 1: it sure seems like people don't want monkey farms down
Speaker 1: the road. Yep, that's abundantly clear. People freak the classic nimbiism.
Speaker 1: But he goes on to say, I can tell you
Speaker 1: one thing that ain't gonna happen is these monkeys ain't
Speaker 1: gonna be getting out. And biosecurity is taken in very
Speaker 1: seriously with tons of oversight from the federal government. So
Speaker 1: if you trust them folks at the federal government, this
Speaker 1: is not He's just saying, this is not like a
Speaker 1: little like it's not like a hobby monkey farm.
Speaker 5: Gone and shut it down.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it's a it's a highly regulated tons
Speaker 1: of oversight, meaning I don't think these people should plan
Speaker 1: on being like, oh God, there's a monkey in the yard.
Speaker 1: You never know, never know. We put on hold. We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk all this later. Probably about a dozen people
Speaker 1: wrote in with like, here's how I needed my own
Speaker 1: cat than that.
Speaker 3: Actually, yeah, we're.
Speaker 1: Gonna put that on hold in order to talk more
Speaker 1: about cap and Cook again. Ham, if you forgot Hamp
Speaker 1: the sides is your author of the brand new The
Speaker 1: Wide Wide Sea? First off, why the Wide Wide Sea?
Speaker 1: The name it is big it's.
Speaker 3: A quote from Coloradge who wrote this poem, you know,
Speaker 3: the rhyme of the ancient mariner and uh, scholars.
Speaker 2: That.
Speaker 3: Sounds like something's that one would do. No, it was
Speaker 3: just it's Uh. Colors was influenced by Cook's three voyages
Speaker 3: around the world. And uh uh it's about a captain
Speaker 3: who's got having an existential crisis, which Cook was on
Speaker 3: this third voyage. Because the book is about his third voyage.
Speaker 1: He had final voyage, his.
Speaker 3: Final voyage literally and figuratively, and uh, things do not
Speaker 3: go well, as you allude to earlier. Near the end
Speaker 3: of his voyage, things go horribly wrong and he is
Speaker 3: you know, hacked to pieces on the beach in on
Speaker 3: the big island of Hawaii. So so's it's a title
Speaker 3: just sort of getting that the psychology of a captain
Speaker 3: who's a little tired, who's having some problems medical, medical, mental, physical,
Speaker 3: and maybe even spiritual.
Speaker 1: You know, can you can you blained? This is set
Speaker 1: just to set it up, can you give me his
Speaker 1: give us his time frame? And and just quickly, what
Speaker 1: were the first two voyages? Yeah, like where where he's from?
Speaker 1: And when?
Speaker 3: And and well you know, so you do so Captain Cook.
Speaker 3: I mentioned earlier that I think a lot of Americans
Speaker 3: get him mixed up with a lot of other captains
Speaker 3: sort of real and imaginary, whether it's you know, Captain
Speaker 3: Kidd or Captain Hook, Uh, Captain Kirk, Captain Kirk of
Speaker 3: the of the of the what which is it's you laugh?
Speaker 3: But uh? In fact, Captain Kirk was influenced by was
Speaker 3: influenced by, I mean, was actually based on Captain Cook
Speaker 3: uh and real. So his first voyage was the Endeavor
Speaker 3: instead of the HMS Endeavor you know it was the
Speaker 3: US S Enterprise. Uh and Captain James Kirk Captain James Cook.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean there is there is a direct correlation.
Speaker 1: What I thought you said you're writing a book. I
Speaker 1: thought you were having a problem where you're writing a
Speaker 1: book about Captain Cook and people are like, oh, I
Speaker 1: love star start right right.
Speaker 3: And then there's, of course there's Captain Crunch.
Speaker 1: I got a bone to pick with that on bitch,
Speaker 1: because when you eat laceration, yeah, you can run through
Speaker 1: a box like that.
Speaker 3: I remember those days a lot of sugar. So Captain
Speaker 3: Cook was probably the quintessential Enlightenment era explorer, one of
Speaker 3: the greatest explorers of all time, no matter what you
Speaker 3: think of his voyages were, or him as a man
Speaker 3: or of course, he's very he's very controversial today, especially
Speaker 3: indigenous people all over Polynesia have decided they hate him
Speaker 3: and that he's a symbol of colonialism, and they ripped
Speaker 3: down his statues everywhere.
Speaker 1: But back then and for well, they did a little
Speaker 1: bit of exploring themselves.
Speaker 3: They were masters at it.
Speaker 5: When you say back then, what was his like time period?
Speaker 3: His time period was his voyages were in the seventeen sixties,
Speaker 3: in the seventeen seventies.
Speaker 1: That's an era that me and Randall are intimately familiar
Speaker 1: with in Tucky. Okay, Yeah, that was a thrill out
Speaker 1: of the Long Hunters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's about the only place he didn't get to, right,
Speaker 3: But that's.
Speaker 1: How we focused there. We didn't want to overlap with
Speaker 1: the work.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But he, I mean, what's great about him, what
Speaker 3: I love about him is that he came from virtually nothing,
Speaker 3: unlike a lot of these captains who had money or
Speaker 3: influence or connections. He got there by sheer hard work
Speaker 3: and intellect and genius and came up as he was
Speaker 3: a poor farmer who apprenticed to become a to be
Speaker 3: part of the Merchant Marine.
Speaker 6: But British born, British, British in Yorkshire, and he was
Speaker 6: really good at everything that to do with navigation, astronomy, cartography,
Speaker 6: and he ended up that's really his true genius was maps.
Speaker 3: He made beautiful maps, maps that are like chillingly accurate,
Speaker 3: often on the fly. He mapped Nova Scotia, and if
Speaker 3: you super impose a satellite image of Nova Scotia on
Speaker 3: the map that he made of Nova Scotia back then
Speaker 3: in the seventeen hundreds is just exact. It's like, how
Speaker 3: did he do it?
Speaker 1: Just with celestial navigation and handheld equipment right, like right, astrolabes.
Speaker 3: And surveying tools and triangulation and trigonometry, you know. But
Speaker 3: so his first two voyages around the world were first
Speaker 3: to search for this great super continent that was all
Speaker 3: these scientists believe there had to be this massive continent
Speaker 3: in the southern hemisphere to counter balance all the land
Speaker 3: masses that are predominantly in the Northern hemisphere.
Speaker 1: Counterbalance in weight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they actually thought that the planet would spin off
Speaker 3: in endo outer space.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a good balance sphere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was just it's a crazy idea.
Speaker 1: It's like getting the getting the leads on your tires, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, It's like Terra Australis incognita, which was the name
Speaker 3: of this mythic super continent that did not exist. But
Speaker 3: Cook was sent to show to find it, and he
Speaker 3: did find Australia. It had been spotted by another guy
Speaker 3: named Abel Tasman before, but he charted the entire east
Speaker 3: coast of Yeah, that's where we get Tasmania.
Speaker 1: Hung his name on Tasmania.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but he Cook mapped the entire east coast of Australia,
Speaker 3: and along the way had all sorts of other adventures
Speaker 3: in Polynesia and ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef
Speaker 3: and nearly nearly sank his ship. The endeavor that was
Speaker 3: his first voyage. The second voyage was another attempt to
Speaker 3: find this super continent, and he nearly made it to
Speaker 3: Antarctica and kind of intuited the existence of Antarctica. But
Speaker 3: even Antarctica and Australia combined would not be anywhere near
Speaker 3: as large as this super continent that was. It was
Speaker 3: just one of these crazy scientific ideas that the people
Speaker 3: in the Royal Society believe eved in, you know, So he.
Speaker 1: Proved it, like kind of when had people more thoroughly
Speaker 1: given up, even though they've picked it back up again,
Speaker 1: when had they thoroughly given up on flat Earth?
Speaker 3: Well, there's still people today.
Speaker 1: It's like a new goofy thing now.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I don't know, I probably a little earlier,
Speaker 3: probably in the probably in the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Okay, So that was that was a dead idea at
Speaker 1: this time.
Speaker 3: Now they their their astronomy was amazing at that point.
Speaker 3: And Cook that was his other great talent was he
Speaker 3: was an amazing astronomer. He also had this new tool
Speaker 3: by the second voyage that changed exploration dramatically, and this
Speaker 3: was a little thing called a chronometer. And uh, the
Speaker 3: chronometer told that what was the time in Greenwich, England,
Speaker 3: And that allowed people, Uh, it's too complicated to explain that.
Speaker 3: That allowed people just by looking at this clock, you
Speaker 3: could figure out figure out longitude and that was the
Speaker 3: hard thing. That couldn't figure out. They latitude they could
Speaker 3: figure out easily, but longitude was this puzzle. And once
Speaker 3: you figure out the coordinates of a place, a Cook
Speaker 3: was able to know exactly where he was anywhere in
Speaker 3: the world and put that on a map, and these
Speaker 3: maps were published and then suddenly all these places that
Speaker 3: he discovered or rediscovered could never again hide from the
Speaker 3: eyes of the world. And so this is one of
Speaker 3: the reasons Polynesians hate him so much, is that they,
Speaker 3: you know, kind of had lived in splendid isolation for
Speaker 3: centuries and millennia and now you know, he just posted
Speaker 3: the address.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's yeah, it's an interesting point, Like it's it's obvious,
Speaker 1: but I'd ever thought about before that you could see something, right,
Speaker 1: But from then you could see something and very specifically
Speaker 1: say where it was, rather than say, we sailed kind
Speaker 1: of west for two weeks and then you'll find this
Speaker 1: little thing maybe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like Tasmin. We mentioned Tasmin earlier. He had he's
Speaker 3: been a lot of these places, but he didn't know
Speaker 3: where he was and he couldn't report back in it
Speaker 3: with any confidence what he had seen or where these
Speaker 3: places were. So so Captain Cook has the chronometer and
Speaker 3: that change. That changes a lot. But he also, uh,
Speaker 3: he was a scientist. He was he was interested in
Speaker 3: these people that he encountered in the first two voyages.
Speaker 3: I mean his descriptions of Polynesians and uh Australian Aborigines
Speaker 3: are devoid of I mean the kind of you know,
Speaker 3: uh eurocentrism that you you see in so many other explorers.
Speaker 3: He he he just described what they wore and what
Speaker 3: what they looked like, and uh you know what they
Speaker 3: ate and uh, you know, just was trying to get
Speaker 3: it down in a kind of objective neutral way.
Speaker 1: Is his is his writing is clumsy to read, as
Speaker 1: when you read the unedited journals of Lewis and Clark.
Speaker 3: Uh, he wasn't a writer. That's for sure. But the
Speaker 3: weird spellings, yeah, there I and I did kind of
Speaker 3: do some light editing. I mentioned in the author's note
Speaker 3: that there's some you know, I got rid of the
Speaker 3: ye's and the ampersans, and the weird capitalizations and the
Speaker 3: you know, strange spellings. There was no uniform spelling back then,
Speaker 3: so some of these things are very hard on the
Speaker 3: eye and on the ear to follow as you're reading them.
Speaker 3: But so, yes, But but he was he was considering
Speaker 3: that he really was self educated. He was quite a
Speaker 3: good writer, and I quote a lot from him, but
Speaker 3: I also quote from I mean, there were one hundred
Speaker 3: and eighty people on this voyage in two ships, and
Speaker 3: anyone who was literate was writing down in their journals
Speaker 3: what they were seeing and experiencing, including just massive amounts
Speaker 3: of sex. I mean, you know, all these books that
Speaker 3: I've written, my friends always say, well, you need to
Speaker 3: have more sex in your books, and I you know,
Speaker 3: death marches and you know, explorations in Siberia, whatever. Now
Speaker 3: now I got a book that has more sex. I mean,
Speaker 3: orgies on the beach, orgies on the ship, down in
Speaker 3: the holes of the ship, these Polynesian women, and this
Speaker 3: is something I.
Speaker 1: Said, who's describing this?
Speaker 3: Everyone and they're not worried.
Speaker 1: They don't like, they don't put that little puritanical clean
Speaker 1: up on it.
Speaker 3: Not at all except for Cook himself, who was said
Speaker 3: is said to be and I believe it's true, never
Speaker 3: did partake in this sort of thing. But I mean
Speaker 3: all the officers and all the I mean most of
Speaker 3: the sailors on the ship were sixteen seventeen, eighteen years old,
Speaker 3: and they were they were horny, and they certainly the
Speaker 3: Polynesians had very different ideas about about sex, and they
Speaker 3: were very curious about these strange people that just washed
Speaker 3: up on their shores.
Speaker 1: So they had to have left all kinds of progeny.
Speaker 3: Uh yes, although I'm you know, I never met anyone
Speaker 3: who directly claimed to be one. And I did go
Speaker 3: to almost you know, as many of these places as
Speaker 3: I could go. Not a hardship research aspect to this.
Speaker 3: Warm places, yeah, warm places, I mean cool, interesting place
Speaker 3: this New Zealand, both North and South Island, you know, Tasmania,
Speaker 3: French Polynesia, Hawaii of course Alaska. Interesting places. And I
Speaker 3: mean just this is just the third voyage. Cook went
Speaker 3: just about everywhere was he was he.
Speaker 5: A celebrity in his own day, Like were people clamoring
Speaker 5: to be on these expeditions by this.
Speaker 3: Time the first voyage was over and they came back. Yes,
Speaker 3: he had become a celebrity. Uh, you know, he was
Speaker 3: sitting for the best painters in London and he was
Speaker 3: becoming becoming a member of the Royal Society and going,
Speaker 3: you know, he met King George the third, and you know,
Speaker 3: he was becoming very much a celebrity, and he hated that.
Speaker 3: He was awkward around it. He was intrigued by it
Speaker 3: a little bit, but uh, he just wanted to get
Speaker 3: right back out on the next voyage as quickly as
Speaker 3: he as he could.
Speaker 1: Before we get to number three, how long were these
Speaker 1: How long were voyages one and two? Like he's gone,
Speaker 1: these are multi year trips? Correct, Yes, they were between
Speaker 1: three and four years. They It just takes forever to
Speaker 1: get down there and get back.
Speaker 3: Uh. You know, all sorts of hardships happened along the way.
Speaker 3: The ship, you know, mass break and they have to
Speaker 3: repair and so forth. These ships took forever, and the
Speaker 3: thing was back then any kind of voyage that lasted
Speaker 3: longer than you know, one hundred or two hundred days,
Speaker 3: usually people started dying of scurvy. Scurvy was the you know,
Speaker 3: kind of like an occupational hazard of any long voyage.
Speaker 3: Cook seemed to have figured out scurvy. He didn't precisely
Speaker 3: know what food was doing the trick or what you know,
Speaker 3: what in the diet was was was the what was
Speaker 3: the secret? But not a single person died on any
Speaker 3: one of his three voyages of scurvy.
Speaker 1: Because of was it locke He just was better about
Speaker 1: food or it was it was a little did he
Speaker 1: know it was a food?
Speaker 3: It was, yes, he understood that. And there had been
Speaker 3: a sky to scientists who had shown that lime juice
Speaker 3: or lemon juice could help with scurvy. But it wasn't
Speaker 3: it wasn't that so much. Cook main idea was, you know,
Speaker 3: salt foods, salted meat, salt like pemmican and salted pork,
Speaker 3: uh and uh, you know, vinegar and just kind of
Speaker 3: all all the food that they gave them that kept
Speaker 3: kept on the ship. He tried to get away from
Speaker 3: that as much as possible and make his men eat
Speaker 3: fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, fresh meat. And he just pounded
Speaker 3: that into the everyone's mind to stop eating the salt
Speaker 3: pork and start you know, you know, hunting, go hunting,
Speaker 3: go fishing, get wild berries, get wild celery, you know,
Speaker 3: wherever you can find it. And uh, I think that
Speaker 3: was the real secret.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so set up the third voyage. Well, the third
Speaker 1: voyage is like and also included like who's.
Speaker 3: Who is right? Right? Good question. So the real sort
Speaker 3: of prime mover and architect behind many of these voyages
Speaker 3: was this dude named Sandwich, Lord Sandwich the inventor or.
Speaker 3: He was the inventor of the sandwich. He was really
Speaker 3: do you really buy that? How do you invent the sandwich? Well,
Speaker 3: here's the deal. He was very very busy and very
Speaker 3: very uh he was a workaholic and uh he uh
Speaker 3: didn't have time to eat, so he would just stick
Speaker 3: a piece of meat between two pieces of bread and
Speaker 3: that was his meal and people somehow decided to start
Speaker 3: calling it the sandwich. He was he was the first
Speaker 3: Lord of the Admiralty, was a very powerful guy. He
Speaker 3: was also interested in the science and the exploration that
Speaker 3: was going on, and he's certainly one of the you know,
Speaker 3: important people to about in terms of who was paying
Speaker 3: for this. The Admiralty paid for a lot of this.
Speaker 3: The Royal Society, which was a scientific society, also paid
Speaker 3: for a lot of the scientific work because there were
Speaker 3: scientists on board, botanists, you know, uh, expedition artists and uh,
Speaker 3: you know these were these were very well staffed, well
Speaker 3: manned expeditions. Were they paying.
Speaker 5: For these expeditions like just out of like interest in
Speaker 5: knowing what's out there? Or was it more of like
Speaker 5: an angle, like let's find some stuff to take over.
Speaker 3: Both you know, everything there. Every chess move that they're
Speaker 3: making in the world is calculated to to beat the French,
Speaker 3: to beat the Spanish, to beat the Dutch, to beat
Speaker 3: the Russians, and so that is, you know, there's an
Speaker 3: imperial chess game going on here. That is certainly a
Speaker 3: big part of it. But they also are Creek of
Speaker 3: the Enlightenment. They believe in publishing all this stuff and
Speaker 3: to a wide audience. The maps that are produced by
Speaker 3: these voyages are incredibly accurate, whereas like the Russian expeditions
Speaker 3: were laughably almost cartoonishly wrong, you know, because they had
Speaker 3: their own interests they were trying to protect. So I'd
Speaker 3: say Cook kind of had a foot in both worlds.
Speaker 3: He understood that he was a creature. He was doing
Speaker 3: the bidding of empire, but he also was genuinely curious
Speaker 3: about these places and getting them accurately on the map
Speaker 3: and describing them accurately. And then, oh my god, the
Speaker 3: published volumes, these giant folio sized volumes of Cook's third
Speaker 3: Voyage ended up with three of these volumes with beautiful
Speaker 3: engravings and maps and descriptions of animals and plants that
Speaker 3: had never been seen before by Europeans. It's amazing. And
Speaker 3: so there is that scientific element that's pretty extraordinary.
Speaker 1: But he didn't have a sort of he didn't have
Speaker 1: as an overt desire to loot, as say the Spanish
Speaker 1: coming into the Spanish coming into Mexico.
Speaker 3: You know, there were a couple of places along the
Speaker 3: way where he was supposed to come ashore and raise
Speaker 3: the British flag and claim these lands for the crown,
Speaker 3: for King George. And he hated this whole rigmarole. I mean,
Speaker 3: he understood that it was rather absurd when you're on the
Speaker 3: other side of the world to sort of say, these
Speaker 3: people who were watching off and they'd be watching the
Speaker 3: ceremony not knowing what the hell what's going on. There
Speaker 3: was a little clause in his instructions that said, you're
Speaker 3: supposed to do this with the consent of the natives,
Speaker 3: you know, you know, like, oh yeah, you can take
Speaker 3: over our country, our continent, our island. It was rather
Speaker 3: absurd he did. Some might call it looting, but I
Speaker 3: mean he did stop along the way many places, and
Speaker 3: he needed food, he needed water, he needed timber.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And he got it one way or the other, either
Speaker 3: through trade or or through uh bullying his way, you know,
Speaker 3: into into getting the things he needed to keep going
Speaker 3: on the voyage. But you know, when people say he
Speaker 3: was a colonizer, you know he really wasn't a colonizer.
Speaker 3: He never left a single person behind. Uh. He was
Speaker 3: the maybe you could say he was the leading edge
Speaker 3: of colonialism because the first act of colonialism, I guess
Speaker 3: you've you got to discover these places first, or rediscover them.
Speaker 3: The word discovery is a very controversial word in this
Speaker 3: in this business, because of course there were people there already.
Speaker 1: Who discovers discovered for his culture.
Speaker 3: Right right, so you kind of have to say, you know, European,
Speaker 3: first European to discover. But and and the Polynesians were
Speaker 3: of course one of the greatest long distance voyagers of
Speaker 3: all time. And but you just got to be careful
Speaker 3: with the word discovery. Yeah, I understand all that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: But so he was. There was something a little off
Speaker 3: about Captain Cook in the Third Voyage.
Speaker 1: And that's getting back going into it.
Speaker 3: Going into it, he wasn't the same captain. People have
Speaker 3: wondered what was wrong with him, If he had a
Speaker 3: parasite from all the weird foods that he ate, if
Speaker 3: he had bipolarism. I mean, some of his actions on
Speaker 3: the Third Voyage have been described by some clinical psychologists
Speaker 3: as being classically bipolar age. Well, he turns fifty on
Speaker 3: the voyage, he's forty eight, I think when they leave London,
Speaker 3: and by the way, they leave England at Plymouth. Actually
Speaker 3: in July of seventeen seventy.
Speaker 1: Six, something else happened that summer.
Speaker 3: A lot is going on in Boston that July. The
Speaker 3: Empire is freaking out about this revolt in America and
Speaker 3: they are sending their best explorer that same month to
Speaker 3: the other side of North America. The ultimate objective of
Speaker 3: this third Voyage, I didn't even say it is to
Speaker 3: find the Northwest Passage over Canada, over Alaska, and because
Speaker 3: this is something the British has been looking for forever,
Speaker 3: usually from the Atlantic side. Now they're going to try
Speaker 3: it from the Pacific side. Go up through the Bearing
Speaker 3: straight using these very murky Russian maps that had been
Speaker 3: produced by Bearing, and try to find this Northwest passage,
Speaker 3: this great, you know, fabled waterway that the British were
Speaker 3: always obsessed with.
Speaker 1: Ca can you pause from it to help you understand
Speaker 1: the problem with it. I mean, it's there, it's just icy.
Speaker 3: Right right.
Speaker 1: And of course, so they would go, you'd routinely go
Speaker 1: and be like, just get locked in the ice, right.
Speaker 3: Like exactly, you get locked in the ice and you
Speaker 3: start eating boot leather and you know, you know, people
Speaker 3: starve and die. Yeah, and it's there, right, It was
Speaker 3: always there, and in fact it is many summers now
Speaker 3: you can.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, it's all of a sudden a
Speaker 1: new object of interest. Yeah, those books be a lot
Speaker 1: different now.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They'd be like, oh, yeah, no problem exactly.
Speaker 3: So it was looking looking for something that was there,
Speaker 3: but it was impractical and nearly impossible to get through.
Speaker 3: And during that time these ships were nominally reinforced for
Speaker 3: the ice, but not I mean they couldn't withstand the
Speaker 3: pressure of the pack like an icebreaker could today.
Speaker 1: So he thought by coming in on the Pacific side,
Speaker 1: off the Bearing Sea, you might get funneled into the
Speaker 1: right route somehow.
Speaker 3: I don't know that he actually believed any of this stuff.
Speaker 3: There were a bunch of scientists in the Royal Society
Speaker 3: who did. And there see, they're trying to find a
Speaker 3: short cut across North America to get to China for trade,
Speaker 3: and also to avoid the Spanish, who dominated of South America.
Speaker 3: So they didn't want to go under and around South America.
Speaker 3: They wanted to go over North America to avoid the Spanish.
Speaker 3: So that's kind of what's going on. He had determined
Speaker 3: that this giant super continent did not exist in the
Speaker 3: southern hemisphere, and now they're asking him to go solve
Speaker 3: this other huge puzzle.
Speaker 1: What a long I mean, people got to stop and
Speaker 1: think about what a long way around.
Speaker 3: I know, I know it's over a year to get there, and.
Speaker 1: I mean across the Atlantic down to the around the
Speaker 1: Southern Tip, down around Patagonia and then well actually the
Speaker 1: way back. They did it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this time they did. They go You know, he
Speaker 3: did that once as well, but on the third voige,
Speaker 3: he went around uh, you know, Cape of Good Hope
Speaker 3: and Cape Town. But still, I mean, it's it's just
Speaker 3: it's the entire you're spanning the globe.
Speaker 1: Okay, And he went Okay, just to get to the.
Speaker 3: Point where he began to look. He starts mapping North America.
Speaker 3: It makes landfall at present day Oregon, and it starts
Speaker 3: mapping or what we call Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Vancouver Island,
Speaker 3: all of Alaska. He maps, He gives the first he
Speaker 3: gets the first map of Alaska, and it's amazingly accurate.
Speaker 1: And do you know where where does he land? What
Speaker 1: kind of places in Alaska's he touched and ground? You know?
Speaker 3: Well, the most famous place that he went to was
Speaker 3: cook Inlet, you know present day side of Anchorage. He
Speaker 3: goes all the way to the end of cook Inlet.
Speaker 3: It's called cook Inlet. By the way, he never named
Speaker 3: a single place after himself. When you see Cook's name
Speaker 3: on something, it's because somebody back in England put it
Speaker 3: on a map.
Speaker 1: Why would he go way into cook Inlet?
Speaker 3: Well, at first, it's very wide, it starts to look like, uh,
Speaker 3: it sort of looks like a waterway, I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: and it was. It was early summer and it was
Speaker 3: rushing with glacial melt and snow melt, and he thought
Speaker 3: it communicated, maybe communicated with the north end of Alaska,
Speaker 3: and some of the natives people that he met seemed
Speaker 3: to suggest that so, and then some of his officers
Speaker 3: were really excited. It's like, this is it, this is
Speaker 3: the holy Grail. We found it. And of course it
Speaker 3: peters out at tapers. You've been there probably right. It
Speaker 3: tapers and then it just kind of becomes a couple
Speaker 3: of tributary rivers. But so that's one famous place, Prince
Speaker 3: William Sound, which he named. He also went to un Alaska.
Speaker 3: He went to, I don't know, the entire west coast.
Speaker 3: He went all the way to what we now call
Speaker 3: Point Barrow, Alaska, and that's where he encountered ice. He
Speaker 3: nearly got stuck in the ice permanently. I mean, he
Speaker 3: would have died. They both ships would have been crushed.
Speaker 3: And he decided to turn around and go back to
Speaker 3: that wonderful little archipelago that he had stumbled upon earlier
Speaker 3: in the voyage that we know as Hawaii.
Speaker 1: And how is he behaving you're saying he's like a
Speaker 1: little off, but had he done things along the Alaska
Speaker 1: coasts that were off?
Speaker 3: Well, the Alaska part of the trip is kind of
Speaker 3: classic Cook. He's back to doing what he loves to do,
Speaker 3: which is mapping and figuring out this enormous puzzle, and
Speaker 3: he was pretty happy, and he was pretty It was
Speaker 3: embroiled in puzzle solving. You know, it was earlier in
Speaker 3: the voyage in Polynesia where he was acting very strange,
Speaker 3: using the lash in a way that was just cruel
Speaker 3: to his own man, and being cruel to the indigenous
Speaker 3: people that he encountered, cutting people's ears off and doing
Speaker 3: these really sadistic things that nothing like that had happened
Speaker 3: on his first two.
Speaker 1: Voids, like on his way to Alaska in Polynesia, stopping
Speaker 1: at places and yeap doing this.
Speaker 4: No, when the obviously all these actions are being recorded
Speaker 4: by people on the ships.
Speaker 3: Are they.
Speaker 4: Hypothesizing that something's different about I mean? Or is it
Speaker 4: looking back now in hindsight, there's more and more speculation
Speaker 4: about his well being. But like, were people on board
Speaker 4: writing something's very different?
Speaker 3: No, the people on board are asking the same question,
Speaker 3: what the hell is wrong with the captain, especially the
Speaker 3: ones that had been on the previous two voyages. They're
Speaker 3: like this, you know, I don't know if it's his
Speaker 3: celebrity had gone to his head. He's more arrogant, he
Speaker 3: was more peremptory and just like making decisions without explaining.
Speaker 3: He was not as collaborative he was. And of course
Speaker 3: the British Navy at that time, I mean you could
Speaker 3: say he's becoming more like a typical British naval captain
Speaker 3: because these were I mean, this was a cruel world
Speaker 3: that they operated in and most of them were like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you were like judge Jerry and executioner, right.
Speaker 3: Master and commandership yeah yeah, yeah, And so so you
Speaker 3: could say that he was sort of becoming he just
Speaker 3: he just become another European naval naval captain by that point.
Speaker 3: But it was also in pain.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: He had sciatica, the intense pain. Uh that It's very interesting.
Speaker 3: He encountered for the first time Polynesian massage and these
Speaker 3: this army of women descended on him and cured him
Speaker 3: of his sciatica, and he describes it beautifully. It's believed
Speaker 3: to be the first description of of of massage. And
Speaker 3: you know, from his voyage, you get all these other things,
Speaker 3: like you get the first description of you know, the
Speaker 3: word taboo and what it means and tattooing, the first
Speaker 3: descriptions of surfing when they come to Hawaii. You know,
Speaker 3: all of this stuff emanates from his voice.
Speaker 1: How does he describe surfing when they come Well, you know, I.
Speaker 3: Don't know that he describes surfing very well. But when
Speaker 3: or one of his officers, a doctor, the surgeon, just
Speaker 3: he tries. It's it's almost laughable because he tries to
Speaker 3: break it down, like the body mechanics of it, like
Speaker 3: you know, then they get up on the board, you know,
Speaker 3: they get on the declivity of the wave and then
Speaker 3: then they you know, do and and by the way,
Speaker 3: the British are watching this can't believe it because they
Speaker 3: don't Most of them don't know how to swim, let
Speaker 3: alone surf. Uh. This is one of the weirdest thing
Speaker 3: is that naval officers didn't buy and large know how
Speaker 3: to swim. They weren't taught to swim, They weren't required
Speaker 3: to learn to swim. How is that possible? But including
Speaker 3: Cook himself, he could not swim, which ends up being
Speaker 3: a problem for him later on.
Speaker 1: Isn't that wild man? Yeah, it just seems like could
Speaker 1: be like such.
Speaker 3: An art of it. Well, what I read was that
Speaker 3: they believe that, you know you're gonna die anyway, why
Speaker 3: plan prolong the agony? Uh, just sink, just die.
Speaker 1: I get it over with, Like if you go on
Speaker 1: the water, that's it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's bizarre. It's a very very strange mentality.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you think that attitude of a change when they're
Speaker 5: sailing around seeing other people swimming, Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: And they remark on how beautiful these swimmers are, and
Speaker 3: women with you know, babies at their breast and they're
Speaker 3: still swimming out in these giant waves and just beautiful,
Speaker 3: strong swimmers, and you know they're amazed by it. But
Speaker 3: they're like describing waves that they would themselves and would
Speaker 3: never think of going into.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when he when he's up in northern Alaska and
Speaker 1: hits ice, is it is it at that point like, Okay,
Speaker 1: the trip's over, let's start picking our way home. Or
Speaker 1: does he have a second thing on his to do list?
Speaker 3: Yes? Well his and this has something about Captain Cook's
Speaker 3: sort of determination and stubbornness. He decided, well, I've got
Speaker 3: to go back and make one more attempt at finding
Speaker 3: the Northwest passage. But we're getting along in the summer season.
Speaker 3: I got to warm up for the winter. Why don't
Speaker 3: we come back for one more season and try it
Speaker 3: a little earlier in the season, try it at a
Speaker 3: slightly different angle or a different place. Maybe this ice
Speaker 3: that I've just encountered is an aberration of one season
Speaker 3: or something. So he he's just going back to Hawaii
Speaker 3: to warm up, to replenish his stores, to let his
Speaker 3: men have some R and R and turn around and
Speaker 3: go right back to Alaska and not Oregon. Not in
Speaker 3: not Oregon for some well, you know what it is.
Speaker 3: I think he he had a brief stop in Hawaii.
Speaker 3: He made Landfall and Kawaii, and he knew, he understood,
Speaker 3: these islands are very special. This is a major fine.
Speaker 3: He called them the Sandwich Islands, naming naming them after
Speaker 3: his boss, of course, Lord Sandwich.
Speaker 1: I didn't know where they were, but I've heard the
Speaker 1: Sandwich Islands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, I guess he was sort of
Speaker 3: brown nosing. He was just trying to, you know, gain
Speaker 3: favor of his boss, Lord Sandwich.
Speaker 1: And when they were, when they were along Alaska, are
Speaker 1: they running into Ruskies along there?
Speaker 3: They do run into a number of Russian Russian for uh,
Speaker 3: you know, interest.
Speaker 1: No hostilities.
Speaker 3: No, they got along. They got along actually very well.
Speaker 3: In fact, at that point England had a pretty good
Speaker 3: relationship with Russian.
Speaker 5: When when he goes on these three or four year expeditions,
Speaker 5: they just assume they're not going to hear from him
Speaker 5: until he gets back, or is there some like does
Speaker 5: he ever send like is there a way for him
Speaker 5: to send messages home?
Speaker 3: Or well, you know the beam me up Scotty. You know,
Speaker 3: they had that right Captain.
Speaker 5: Kirk uh No, but there's not like outposts that he's like.
Speaker 3: There are a few one of them. One of them
Speaker 3: is Batavia, which is Jakarta, which was a Dutch colony,
Speaker 3: and they were able to get messages to Europe that way.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: Cape Town, South Africa was certainly one. When they encountered
Speaker 3: Russians in Alaska.
Speaker 1: Still those messages still need to be manually trans border
Speaker 1: just catching other boats.
Speaker 3: Yeah, taking months and months and months. But they did
Speaker 3: encounter Russians in Alaska who promised to send some documents
Speaker 3: to Saint Petersburg and then ultimately London and uh, they go,
Speaker 3: these documents would go all the way across Siberia all
Speaker 3: I mean, you know what is that eight nine time
Speaker 3: zones to Europe and then finally London. Uh, and so
Speaker 3: some some messages got got to London that way, but
Speaker 3: it took forever. I mean, yeah, you have to understand there.
Speaker 3: Just once they leave Plymouth there they're gone for four years.
Speaker 3: And in every sense of the word.
Speaker 1: So he heads to Hawaii and he's thinking he's gonna check
Speaker 1: that place out more kick it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, uh, resupply, uh, resupply. And and also, uh, you know,
Speaker 3: there's always stuff going wrong with the ship. You know,
Speaker 3: there's things breaking all the time. It's just clattering lumber
Speaker 3: up there, you know. And there there's great there's great forests,
Speaker 3: and and uh in a why and so there's that.
Speaker 3: His big worry was, getting back to the sex thing,
Speaker 3: was that his men would spread venereal disease. And he
Speaker 3: writes endlessly about it. He knew that his men were
Speaker 3: spreading venereal disease to these innocent people who didn't have
Speaker 3: gone rhea or syphilis.
Speaker 1: And but some of those diseases were some of those
Speaker 1: diseases were in the New World, though, some of those
Speaker 1: diseases were in North America.
Speaker 3: They were in North America by then, but not on
Speaker 3: the islands. Oh, there was a disease called yaws, which
Speaker 3: was a venereal disease, much more benign than syphilis. But no,
Speaker 3: there's no question that his men and also the French
Speaker 3: explorers and the Spanish explorers brought disease to Polynesia. But
Speaker 3: it was a real concern of Cooks. He mentions it
Speaker 3: just multiple times in his journal, like.
Speaker 1: And he had he seen this happen before.
Speaker 3: He's seen it happen before. He had his surgeon literally
Speaker 3: like you strip all the men and any who had
Speaker 3: any signs of venaria disease. Uh, we're not allowed to
Speaker 3: go ashore.
Speaker 5: Was his concern out of like just genuine concern for
Speaker 5: the locals, or was it for the repercussions that would
Speaker 5: occur after it happened.
Speaker 3: Then it would spread back around to his own men,
Speaker 3: You mean.
Speaker 5: Well know that they might be like, yeah, like, hey,
Speaker 5: you brought this disease, We're coming after you.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: Oh, perhaps that was a fear, but I mean I
Speaker 3: think it was a genuine, you know, uh humane thing.
Speaker 3: You know, he just like this is a this is
Speaker 3: an island. He would determine that was innocent of this disease. Uh.
Speaker 3: And he he was he abstained from sex the whole
Speaker 3: the whole time, and he was married and you know,
Speaker 3: had a family, and.
Speaker 1: Uh, you buy that.
Speaker 3: I buy it. I do buy it. Because every officer,
Speaker 3: just even ones who hated him, said, yeah, he he wouldn't.
Speaker 3: And then and I and Hawaiian women would come after him,
Speaker 3: and you know, the chiefs would bring some of their
Speaker 3: you know, ladies to the ship, and the ladies would
Speaker 3: get really pissed off at him when he would refuse
Speaker 3: refuse them, like, what's wrong with you? Are you a man?
Speaker 3: You know? What is this? What is the story? And
Speaker 3: he uh, you know, he was a pretty stodgy Quaker trained,
Speaker 3: dour Yorkshireman. And I you know, it's possible somewhere along
Speaker 3: the way something happened, including that time when all those
Speaker 3: massuses descended on him. Sure, I think it was twelve
Speaker 3: or fourteen women jumped just jumped on him. And but
Speaker 3: but I don't think anything more than that happened. There
Speaker 3: was no happy ending. I don't think there.
Speaker 1: But so but he's worried about his men. But he
Speaker 1: but does he does he not have the authority or
Speaker 1: is it just unrealistic for him to say no consorting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, here's the thing. The these women are literally
Speaker 3: crawling from their canoes into the ship at all times.
Speaker 3: And one of the things that they're doing in some
Speaker 3: of the places is they're doing it for for for
Speaker 3: metal that they're absolutely obsessed with iron, and they the
Speaker 3: men have found out that for the price of it,
Speaker 3: they could have and get, you know, meet one of
Speaker 3: these women for the price of one nail. And what
Speaker 3: starts to happen is the ship, the whole of the
Speaker 3: ship is is pounded with there's cop copper sheathing, and
Speaker 3: then there's they're pounded with nails. And the women were
Speaker 3: going underneath the ship because they're great swimmers and prying loose. Uh,
Speaker 3: the ship was coming apart. Basically, these nails were being
Speaker 3: ripped out of the whole of the ship by the
Speaker 3: hundreds and hundreds, and they began to worry. Cook began
Speaker 3: to worry that the ship was literally going to disintegrate
Speaker 3: from from this eye that they were just obsessed with.
Speaker 3: And because they had never seen metal before and they
Speaker 3: understood how useful it was and how what a powerful thing.
Speaker 3: It was for scraping, for for puncturing, for make hooks
Speaker 3: out of make all kinds of implements out of That's
Speaker 3: what they were after more than anything was iron.
Speaker 1: Got it. So there was a trade, Yeah, there was
Speaker 1: a trade component.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Speaker 1: So when he had when he heads back, he's worried
Speaker 1: about that, and he's desirous of mapping the whole archipelagal
Speaker 1: like he's gonna go around it and lay some claim
Speaker 1: to it.
Speaker 3: Okay. So he was obsessed also with the the question
Speaker 3: of whether the Spanish had been there, because the Spanish
Speaker 3: for centuries had been doing this thing called the Manila
Speaker 3: Galleon trade thing where they would bring spices from the
Speaker 3: Philippines and they would drop them in a Capulco and
Speaker 3: then in a Capulco they would they would get silver
Speaker 3: and all kinds of other things that had been mined
Speaker 3: in South America in Mexico and take them back to
Speaker 3: the Philippines. So back and forth, back and forth over
Speaker 3: the Pacific for centuries the Spanish, and they'd go right
Speaker 3: by Hawaii, very close these sort of sea lanes that
Speaker 3: they were using. But so the big question he thought
Speaker 3: was had the Spanish landed somewhere in the Hawaiian Islands.
Speaker 3: And if so, had you know, why hadn't we heard
Speaker 3: about it? And do they have do they have their
Speaker 3: own maps of the Hawaiian Islands? And to his satisfaction,
Speaker 3: he determined that they hadn't for some reason, almost miraculous,
Speaker 3: they had missed Hawaii after all those centuries. And he
Speaker 3: was the first European almost certainly, to certainly to land
Speaker 3: and describe these people. And he was amazed by them
Speaker 3: for many many reasons, but more especially that they were Polynesian.
Speaker 3: They were the same people he had encountered in New Zealand,
Speaker 3: the same people that he encountered in it in French
Speaker 3: Polynesia and Easter Island. Uh, we're talking about massive distances.
Speaker 3: And he began he was really beginning to piece together
Speaker 3: the idea that these people, you know, this Polynesian dias diaspora,
Speaker 3: they the only way it could have happened is that
Speaker 3: they were extraordinary voyagers, you know, they these weren't just
Speaker 3: accidental driftings, These were migrations.
Speaker 1: Would geneticists now look at the Polynesian diaspora, do they
Speaker 1: have any sense of when and where they became seafaring
Speaker 1: people like coming out of where.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the best scholarship I've seen on it is, you know,
Speaker 3: the main idea now is that they originated in Taiwan, Okay,
Speaker 3: which is I mean, you know how far that is.
Speaker 3: So Taiwan starting to sail eastward from Taiwan through Micronesia
Speaker 3: and Melanesia and uh and finally landing probably in Tonga
Speaker 3: is one of the certain early places that they landed
Speaker 3: and kind of created an empire, and then Uh and
Speaker 3: then Tahiti, uh and then finally Hawaii. And the very
Speaker 3: last arrivals to any of these islands was New Zealand.
Speaker 3: You know, that was the farthest away.
Speaker 1: They found New Zealand. The Polynesians found New Zealand after
Speaker 1: they found Hawaii.
Speaker 3: Probably, yes, I'm not absolutely sure on that, but I
Speaker 3: think yes, I think that the theory is that the
Speaker 3: Maori what we call the Maori today are were the
Speaker 3: last it was the last of the great lands of
Speaker 3: Polynesia settled.
Speaker 1: Got it uh if the Spanish had found it. Let's
Speaker 1: say the spanis let's say he found that the Spanish
Speaker 1: had found it. Was there the idea that they would
Speaker 1: counter that that he would like counter that claim or
Speaker 1: was it just a or was it just a curiosity.
Speaker 3: He wouldn't have personally countered it. I mean, they were
Speaker 3: they had some weapons on board, but they wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been able to do any kind of a actual fighting.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: He he wouldn't have tried to expel him or.
Speaker 3: Something like that, but he understood that he had to
Speaker 3: report back to the admiralty and you know that they
Speaker 3: would want to know all about whether the Spanish had
Speaker 3: been there or not. You know, he's constantly looking over
Speaker 3: his shoulder wondering. Also, this is another thing, is like,
Speaker 3: who knows maybe back in Europe we're at war with
Speaker 3: Spain again, or we're at war with France. And he
Speaker 3: had to wonder and worry that perhaps he was going
Speaker 3: to have to get on a war footing. All of
Speaker 3: a sudden, here comes a ship, the French ship. Are
Speaker 3: we at war again? It's a crazy thing. You know,
Speaker 3: he's trying to explore and he's also got one foot
Speaker 3: in the kind of the military mindset at the same time.
Speaker 1: How quickly does how quickly do things go south between
Speaker 1: him and the Hawaiians.
Speaker 3: Well, so his first stop was Kawhi and he things
Speaker 3: went pretty poorly from the very beginning. He sent a
Speaker 3: young officer to look for water and look for a
Speaker 3: good landing place. And uh, the the Koinans are going crazy.
Speaker 3: They don't know who these people are, what these ships are.
Speaker 3: They they may think that they were gods. They certainly
Speaker 3: were curious about the metal because they had seen in
Speaker 3: driftwood little flecks and specs of metal, but they'd never
Speaker 3: seen so much metal.
Speaker 1: From disintegrated whalers or whatever. Yeah, now had they? So
Speaker 1: did they know about Europeans and ships, but just hadn't
Speaker 1: seen him yet or they not even.
Speaker 3: Almost certainly they had never seen Europeans, but that the ships.
Speaker 1: Had they heard tell you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Uh, not that I've been able the scholars have been
Speaker 3: able to prove.
Speaker 1: There seemed like a full like a full on just shock.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a there are rumors of possible Dutch shipwreck
Speaker 3: and another Spanish shipwreck that may have happened centuries earlier.
Speaker 3: But they were shocked and amazed, and there was kind
Speaker 3: of this weird feeling of celebration and rapture, like their
Speaker 3: world was about to change. And so they come. So
Speaker 3: this officer goes into fine water and Immediately, the Hawaiians
Speaker 3: gather around his rowboat. And this dude is trigger happy,
Speaker 3: this officer, and he shoots a Hawaiian and kills him instantly,
Speaker 3: shoots him right in the sternum, you know, right.
Speaker 1: He feels threatened for some reason, he feels threatened.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, he thought they were trying to
Speaker 3: steal the boat, the boat or something, but in fact
Speaker 3: they were trying to pull it in because the surf
Speaker 3: was so large and so heavy. So within minutes of
Speaker 3: arrival they've killed Hawaiian. And of course this freaks the
Speaker 3: Hawaiians out. The Kawaiians, I should say, this is the
Speaker 3: island of Kawaii, and they don't know what this implement
Speaker 3: is that just killed one of their countrymen, and they're
Speaker 3: amazed by it and and and shocked, and they all
Speaker 3: just run run back to shore and uh. But after
Speaker 3: that cook does come ashore and things go very peacefully
Speaker 3: and very well, and the same on the yeah, on
Speaker 3: the same day, uh, and then and the next day uh.
Speaker 3: And but then a bunch of uh and a bunch
Speaker 3: of men ultimately do make it a shore and that yes,
Speaker 3: there's sexual encounters and probably the spread of UH of
Speaker 3: a venereal disease. He goes to a hayo a temple
Speaker 3: uh and and describes their ceremonies. He goes to their
Speaker 3: you know, their plantations where they're growing bread fruit, and
Speaker 3: you know, all kinds of u you know, elaborate architecture
Speaker 3: to kind of hold in the water. You know, he's
Speaker 3: describing all this stuff. He knows that, uh, this is
Speaker 3: an amazing place. And he's hearing from and by the way,
Speaker 3: he can understand them because he's been some of his
Speaker 3: men were had become fluent in Polynesian language by then,
Speaker 3: and this is the same language essentially with some variations
Speaker 3: that they were speaking in Tihiti. So he's he's hearing
Speaker 3: from these local people in Kawhi that hey, we're just
Speaker 3: one island. There's there's a bunch more over over this way,
Speaker 3: you know, Awahu and Maui and Hawaii and Lanai and so,
Speaker 3: so he's realizing this is a big discovery, this is
Speaker 3: a big find, and there's a there's a lot here
Speaker 3: and so but he's still got his mind on I
Speaker 3: got to get to Alaska, you know, you know, there's
Speaker 3: a I got it, and I have to do it.
Speaker 3: In the summertime. So he's got a timeline that he's
Speaker 3: trying to, a deadline that he's trying to follow.
Speaker 1: Where does he go from there?
Speaker 3: From Kawai, he goes he goes right across the Atlantic Ocean,
Speaker 3: I'm excuse me, the Pacific Ocean to to Oregon, you know,
Speaker 3: and make it starts working his way up the coast again. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: this is the first time, right, yeah, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 3: very confusing because he you know, he stumbles upon Kawhi
Speaker 3: on his way. He didn't you know, he didn't think.
Speaker 3: He thought he'd just be sailing across the giant bulge
Speaker 3: of the Pacific Ocean forever until he made landfall in
Speaker 3: North America.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this stop and Kawahi when they kill the
Speaker 1: guy is on his way to the to the the
Speaker 1: North America coast to the US Alaska coast.
Speaker 3: Correct.
Speaker 1: Then he does his adventures up there, runs out of time, right,
Speaker 1: and he's and then he had but then he decides
Speaker 1: to double back and he goes back to.
Speaker 3: Yes Hawaii and he and he makes land. The first
Speaker 3: island he sees on his way back is Maui, and
Speaker 3: he thinks he's gonna go there and you know, replenish
Speaker 3: his ship. But then another island, a bigger island, the
Speaker 3: big island of Hawaii kind of uh shifts into his
Speaker 3: his view and he's like, wait a minute, I'm going
Speaker 3: over there. That's that's even bigger. And there's snow. You know,
Speaker 3: there's snow on top of this mountain. It's one of
Speaker 3: you know, it's by some definitions, it's the tallest mountain
Speaker 3: in the world because it's you know, if you start
Speaker 3: from from the stars in for the trenchat and so
Speaker 3: he's amazed by this place and he's like, that's where
Speaker 3: I got to go, and and that ends up being, uh,
Speaker 3: the place of his death.
Speaker 1: At what point do they just flat out run out
Speaker 1: of food they brought from home.
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I don't know. They're constantly filling
Speaker 3: the cast you know by you know, like Cape Town.
Speaker 3: By the time by the time they get to Cape Town,
Speaker 3: they're running out of food. And but that's one of
Speaker 3: one of the things about Cape Town is that it
Speaker 3: was a Dutch uh replenishing station that you know, you
Speaker 3: could get everything you needed there, whether it was salt
Speaker 3: pork or you know, hard tack, biscuits, or you know,
Speaker 3: they had pretty much everything. The Dutch were really good
Speaker 3: at not only replenishing Dutch vessels, but selling to the
Speaker 3: ships from other countries, European countries.
Speaker 1: But then they're always scrounging, right, always scrounging they go,
Speaker 1: they're always scrounging and eating a lot of weird food.
Speaker 3: And cook again is demanding that his men eat fresh
Speaker 3: food and fresh vegetables and anything that they can find,
Speaker 3: and uh, you know, so that's yeah, that's a big
Speaker 3: part of it. Plus, you know, a lot of them
Speaker 3: are you know, they're out there. Why not to put
Speaker 3: a lot why not put a line in the water.
Speaker 3: You know, they are constantly fishing, They're constantly when they
Speaker 3: come ashore, they're constantly hunting. So uh yeah, they e mentioned.
Speaker 4: Like, oh sorry ahead, lets me say what are the favorites.
Speaker 4: So I think that's like with the Lewis and Clark expedition,
Speaker 4: there's always like we're any of these sort of stories,
Speaker 4: it's like this is what they prefer.
Speaker 1: Dog dog.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I I put together this thing. I
Speaker 3: don't know if we want to go into this, but
Speaker 3: a little bit. I've been thinking about having a party
Speaker 3: to celebrate the the arrival of the new book and
Speaker 3: having some really weird food, and then going through the
Speaker 3: book and realizing some of the extremely weird food that
Speaker 3: they ate. And I've put together a kind of a
Speaker 3: little menu for sure. Uh so, yeah, everything on here
Speaker 3: is in the book, but I've arranged it as as
Speaker 3: though it were some kind of gourmet banquet. But you know,
Speaker 3: we start with a paratiffe and appetizers of like any
Speaker 3: good banquet, grog, spruce beer, pete of sea hair which
Speaker 3: which is a slug that they encountered in Tasmania. And
Speaker 3: Puffin's squab, Young Young Puffin. That's a there's such cute
Speaker 3: little birds and apparently they ate a lot of puffin.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 3: Then uh you know, amuse boush. You've got to have
Speaker 3: something just to get really get going. And that was
Speaker 3: a tartar art of cury liver, the liver of the curry,
Speaker 3: which was the ancient dog of New Zealand. It's now extinct.
Speaker 3: It was often eaten by the Maori. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: weird looking dog.
Speaker 1: So we've seen out a dog that had arrived with
Speaker 1: with the with the Polynesians, and then when it became
Speaker 1: like a sort of went faral and then now it's.
Speaker 3: Gone, and now it's gone, although you can see it
Speaker 3: in some museums stuffed, you know, kind of like some
Speaker 3: of the things in this room. I mean, it's kind
Speaker 3: of strange looking, but.
Speaker 2: What I'm pulling up looks like a page out of
Speaker 2: the Fucked Up Old Taxidermy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they went like a dingo almost. Yeah, it's probably
Speaker 3: related in some way, but anyway, a little kurry because
Speaker 3: they were eating dog fairly often on this trip. You
Speaker 3: mentioned Lewis and Clark. They didn't want to. It wasn't
Speaker 3: their first choice, but they did. Then you gotta have
Speaker 3: some salad. Uh. So the salad, I'm just I'm suggesting
Speaker 3: in this light relish. You know, they're constantly worried scurvy,
Speaker 3: uh the scurvy as they called it. And so Cook
Speaker 3: had all these weird items that he thought could be
Speaker 3: anti scorbutic or you know, anti scurvy. And they consisted
Speaker 3: of a carrot, marmalade, wart of malt, rob of orange.
Speaker 3: I don't know what that is, rob of orange, inspissated
Speaker 3: lemon juice of course on the heel of or not
Speaker 3: the peel, and maybe it is I don't know, uh,
Speaker 3: and saloop, which is this root vegetable that they steeped
Speaker 3: for a long time. First course loggerhead sea turtle brigoo.
Speaker 3: They ate so much turtle and of course it's very tasty.
Speaker 3: That that's not no one is that you can press.
Speaker 1: Stock up so quick when you're pulling into these places
Speaker 1: that aren't Yeah, when you're pulling in these places that
Speaker 1: aren't getting harvested.
Speaker 3: Right, Sea turtle, sea turtle is is? Is that? That was?
Speaker 3: That was that was good eating and uh.
Speaker 5: You could probably train it, keep them alive for a
Speaker 5: while and transport.
Speaker 1: Well you read it. When they would go to the
Speaker 1: Glopagos and get the land ones flipping them over, yeah
Speaker 1: in the hole. They'd stay alive for months.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, they come with their own packaging basically, and
Speaker 3: you know, as long as they're alive, they're still fresh.
Speaker 3: So yeah, that was whenever they ran into turtle, they
Speaker 3: were they were in seventh Heaven. Australian ghost shark fins
Speaker 3: are a delicacy and they would like to fry those
Speaker 3: in seal grease. Seal grease. They would render the blubber
Speaker 3: of seals that they went down to this island called Kerguelan,
Speaker 3: which is way down there, almost to Antarctica, and they
Speaker 3: would render this seal blubber, which they described as no
Speaker 3: better in England was ever thought half so good. Really,
Speaker 3: it sounds disgusting.
Speaker 1: Making their own oil.
Speaker 3: They were which were they cooked with? They use it
Speaker 3: in their lamps. You know, they had to be pretty resourceful.
Speaker 3: They're you know, as you said, running out of food
Speaker 3: pretty early on, so they have to fill their or
Speaker 3: some of.
Speaker 1: It's the bear grease, the butter.
Speaker 3: That's a good way of putting in.
Speaker 2: The ghost shark looks like an insane.
Speaker 1: They called goblin shark too different.
Speaker 3: Sometimes they're called elephant fish.
Speaker 1: Let me see turned.
Speaker 5: Towards what do we call them up at the shack?
Speaker 5: The little ones you catch?
Speaker 1: Oh, spiny dog fish?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, the what am I thinking of? Rat fish?
Speaker 3: They look like like a rat fish? Yeah, I got it,
Speaker 3: a rat fish. I don't know. Second course salted Hawaiian boar.
Speaker 3: Now they ate a lot of pigat at great eating.
Speaker 3: Obviously no complaints there, but everything on the ship was
Speaker 3: was covered in cockroach excrement. So it was just that
Speaker 3: they can never deal. You know, you always hear about
Speaker 3: the rats the rats were a big problem, but and
Speaker 3: even bigger problem with the cockroaches. And there's stuff, there's ship.
Speaker 5: The Polynesians had spread pigs all over the place.
Speaker 3: They had they brought them with them everywhere they went
Speaker 3: except New Zealand. Somehow the pig didn't make it to
Speaker 3: New Zealand until you know, much later.
Speaker 1: It's there now. Yeah, the uh, the cockroaches. That a
Speaker 1: little bit surprises me that when you're starting out you
Speaker 1: can't just when it's empty just clean that some bitch out.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Yeah, I mean he's right.
Speaker 1: I guess you got all the foods. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: It's not like you clean your house and cockroa.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's bad. Okay. Then the main course is they
Speaker 3: a ton of this walrus, but they called it sea
Speaker 3: beef and they would eat it on kelp, bed of kelp.
Speaker 3: You know, good eating there. But the problem with the
Speaker 3: the problem with the walrus was they really actually tasted horrible.
Speaker 3: And this the chef, the galley chef, described how you
Speaker 3: have to prepare it just to make it palatable because
Speaker 3: it's so I don't know, greasy, And yeah, you'd waters would.
Speaker 1: You think, well, I had fermented waters, which I didn't like.
Speaker 1: Oh on that subject, dude. The whale blobber is legit
Speaker 1: like that is delicious, man. The boat like pieces of
Speaker 1: bowhead whale where you have the it's like a French
Speaker 1: fry with a black tip on it. Okay, so it's
Speaker 1: it's it's a little bit of the skin. Imagine a
Speaker 1: French fry where most of it's white and on the
Speaker 1: ends like a black. It's like at the same proportions
Speaker 1: as the match stick, the size of a French fry,
Speaker 1: the head of the match being skin and the wood
Speaker 1: of the match being blobber. Oh my god, it's good man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that I was just going to read how
Speaker 3: they prepared it, just real quick.
Speaker 1: A big Wallers fan. I'm sure i'd like it if
Speaker 1: I had it cooked.
Speaker 3: Right. So they're up in a lot and they're seeing
Speaker 3: a lot of walrus and they shoot the walrus and
Speaker 3: it's a fair ordeal just getting them into the boat.
Speaker 3: But we let it hang up for one day that
Speaker 3: the blood might drain from it. After that we tow
Speaker 3: it overboard for twelve hours. Then we boil it for
Speaker 3: four hours, and the next day cut it into chunks
Speaker 3: and cook it for several days. Even then it is
Speaker 3: too rank and disgustful, both in smell and taste to
Speaker 3: make use of except with plenty of pepper.
Speaker 5: It's funny that they towed it because your buddy uh.
Speaker 1: Lad says it pickles it. They said.
Speaker 4: Even after that it was bad as if, like, you know,
Speaker 4: we did everything we could.
Speaker 1: I don't think they're typically.
Speaker 4: I think when someone's preparing a food for several days
Speaker 4: and it's they're dragging it overboard, I'd be.
Speaker 1: Like, that might be one of your issues. I don't
Speaker 1: think they were trimming it good. Yeah, I think if
Speaker 1: you'd got down in there, I think less is more.
Speaker 1: If you got down in there to the core of
Speaker 1: the meat. God done, like, trimmed core of the meat,
Speaker 1: there's no way it's gonna be bad.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: They had a lot of surface fat in there, man,
Speaker 1: I had. That's what I would do. I'd go back
Speaker 1: in time to supervise that whale.
Speaker 3: Well, the captain cook himself was famously able to eat
Speaker 3: just about anything.
Speaker 1: He never well, you know what, to back them up.
Speaker 1: I couldn't get into it. I didn't like it. Cows like, oh,
Speaker 1: you just gotta try another bite. I'm like, I don't
Speaker 1: need to know the bike to tell you I don't
Speaker 1: like Walter's meat.
Speaker 3: But at the end of the meal we got dessert,
Speaker 3: moldy yams. There were a lot of yams that's sweet
Speaker 3: and the only kind of sweet thing they had, or
Speaker 3: sweet and savory seagull pie. They ate a lot of seagulls,
Speaker 3: and you would pair out with digestive of course, algae,
Speaker 3: slimed cask water spiked with lemon juice and vinegar or
Speaker 3: this was all for Polynesia. It was the kava. You know,
Speaker 3: they're drinking this viscous fluid called kava, which is as
Speaker 3: a drug. But the way they would do it is
Speaker 3: uh a lowly servant of the local chief would chew
Speaker 3: it and chew it and chew it and chew it
Speaker 3: and it spit it into this bowl with all his
Speaker 3: saliva and then that's what you would drink and uh
Speaker 3: it you got you kind of buzzed and uh it
Speaker 3: was a good way to finish finish off a good meal.
Speaker 3: Did they travel with rum? Yes, well, grog which was
Speaker 3: like fifty to fifty water and rum. Yeah.
Speaker 1: How much do you want to get into Cook's death?
Speaker 1: I know you know, you gotta like there's two kinds
Speaker 1: of writers. You got the ones who are worried about
Speaker 1: telling the end of the books. I think people are
Speaker 1: not going to go get the book right. I think
Speaker 1: those ones are wrong. Then you got writers who is like,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously it's it's hundreds of pages long. We're
Speaker 1: only talking about a little bit. There's tons more to
Speaker 1: read and learn about.
Speaker 3: I obviously it's not a spoiler. Uh to to to
Speaker 3: note that Cook died a horrible and violent death, and
Speaker 3: we touched on that earlier. I think it's what he's
Speaker 3: most famous for, honestly.
Speaker 1: Is that he's famous for dying.
Speaker 3: He's famous for getting killed on the shores of the
Speaker 3: Big Island. That you go to the spot where he
Speaker 3: was killed, you said you've been by it. I hiked
Speaker 3: down to it. There's a monument there that is that
Speaker 3: notes the exact spot where he where he met his end.
Speaker 3: He was hacked to pieces, he was just remembered. His
Speaker 3: bones were spread all over the island. Uh And the Hawaiians,
Speaker 3: both the ancient Hawaiians at the time and current Hawaiians.
Speaker 3: Native Hawaiians insists that he was Obviously they say he
Speaker 3: was not eaten, and yeah.
Speaker 1: I got called basic questions. How long had he spent
Speaker 1: interacting with the group of Hawaiians that killed him? So
Speaker 1: the people that lived in and around a cove, was
Speaker 1: it was it day one? Was he hanging out there
Speaker 1: for months on end?
Speaker 3: No, they were they First of all, they circumnavigated the
Speaker 3: entire island of Hawaii and had all sorts of en
Speaker 3: kind of encounters out out in the water. But they
Speaker 3: finally made landfall I mean, anchored in Kiala Kukia Bay
Speaker 3: in January of seventeen seventy nine, and a month later,
Speaker 3: about a month later actually on Valentine's Day, and so
Speaker 3: many and there there's loads of debate among scholars about
Speaker 3: whether the Hawaiians thought he was the god Lano, who
Speaker 3: was a god of fertility. And it was he arrived
Speaker 3: during this festival of the Makahiki, which was to honor
Speaker 3: the god Lano, and here comes this guy and these
Speaker 3: two ships that had never been seen before, and he
Speaker 3: was certainly treated like some kind of celebrity, and probably
Speaker 3: they did at first think that he was kind of
Speaker 3: the reincarnation of Lano. And these early ceremonies where I
Speaker 3: mean they're they're worshiping him. They bow down to him.
Speaker 3: You know, thousands of people out in the out on
Speaker 3: the lava flats are like bowing down to him. So
Speaker 3: so that's an interesting part of the story and kind
Speaker 3: of this this festival is going on. It's the happiest
Speaker 3: time of their year. It's sort of like Carnival and
Speaker 3: it's uh, that's when they arrive and they Cook and
Speaker 3: his men have a wonderful couple of weeks there just
Speaker 3: some of the very best times of their whole voyage.
Speaker 3: Tons of food, you know, beautiful women may they make
Speaker 3: all sorts of friends with with the local men. And
Speaker 3: they go up. They go hunting, they go fishing, they
Speaker 3: you know, they're having the time of their lives. But
Speaker 3: then it's time to leave. Cook decides it's time to go.
Speaker 3: They're going to go back to Uh, they're going to
Speaker 3: go back to Alaska.
Speaker 1: Well, a little bit of this adulation has a fade
Speaker 1: because you've got to have balls to put.
Speaker 3: A knife into a god, right, right, yes, I.
Speaker 1: Mean so, so there after a while putting together that,
Speaker 1: you know, there's this there's this trilogy. Do you ever
Speaker 1: see the Highlands trilogy about about Papa New Guinea. No,
Speaker 1: it's really interesting. But they talk about a moment's it's
Speaker 1: a narrative about first contact, which in the Highlands was late,
Speaker 1: like lately, nineteen hundreds, you're still having first contact with groups.
Speaker 1: And he and eventually these these indigenous people from Papua
Speaker 1: New Guinea, who they think these white guys are gods
Speaker 1: that show up, but they would they took a real
Speaker 1: interest in their excrement and they're like, that ain't a god.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that's it, that's us. Yeah, but that's a
Speaker 3: really good question about the bold the boldness of putting,
Speaker 3: you know, deciding to kill a god or someone who
Speaker 3: might they may have thought was a god. But what
Speaker 3: happened was they actually left Hawaii, uh, and for two
Speaker 3: or three days, we're crawling up the coasts of the
Speaker 3: Big Island on the way to Alaska when they encountered
Speaker 3: a storm and the storm snapped the foremast and he
Speaker 3: has to put in somewhere and repair the ship and
Speaker 3: find a tree, you know, large enough to repair the mast.
Speaker 3: He can't go any further, so he turns back around
Speaker 3: and goes back to that same day. And now there's
Speaker 3: realizing he's not a god if he was a god
Speaker 3: if he was exactly his boat is broken, and why
Speaker 3: wouldn't he just fix it himself if he was a god.
Speaker 3: So from the minute they arrived returned, everything was different.
Speaker 3: They were not They were not you know that they
Speaker 3: were not treated in any anything like the same man.
Speaker 4: Wasn't there wasn't there one of his men who died
Speaker 4: when they return and they got an They're like, clearly, yes,
Speaker 4: this man is.
Speaker 3: There was a guy named Watman who died of some
Speaker 3: kind of disease and they buried him there. But and
Speaker 3: the Wayans treated him with great respect. But you know,
Speaker 3: in the burial and so forth. But they're like, hmm,
Speaker 3: these guys suspicious His white dudes, aren't. They don't seem
Speaker 3: to be gods. They seem to be very much like us.
Speaker 3: And so clearly it had begun to dawn on on
Speaker 3: everyone from the lowly servants all the way up to
Speaker 3: the chiefs and and and the cahunas that these were
Speaker 3: not gods anymore. And yeah, I don't like to talk about,
Speaker 3: you know, this precise circumstances that leads to death, because
Speaker 3: you know, that's that's like it's escalation, the sort of
Speaker 3: rapid escalation of miscues and cultural misunderstandings, and you know,
Speaker 3: obviously the language barrier, uh, and things get out of
Speaker 3: hand real quickly.
Speaker 1: Remarkable.
Speaker 5: Is there different versions of what happened in British history
Speaker 5: and Hawaiian hist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there are there are, and including I mean
Speaker 3: one of the stories, one of the Hawaiian versions. Several
Speaker 3: of the Hawaiian versions have Cook having sexual relations with
Speaker 3: Hawaiian princesses both on Kawaii and in Hawaii, and that
Speaker 3: that may have contributed to some of the misunderstandings or
Speaker 3: you know, but the English say that's absolutely not true,
Speaker 3: and that that's just a story that comes from American
Speaker 3: missionaries who hated the British and uh, you know, I
Speaker 3: wanted to make Cook look like a terrible guy. You know.
Speaker 1: One question about it is how did they get their
Speaker 1: hands on the Captain Joey? Why is there not like
Speaker 1: a like a lot of layers of security.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, there were marines, uh that came ashore with him.
Speaker 3: He was I won't go into all the details, but
Speaker 3: he was trying to basically kidnap the King of Hawaii
Speaker 3: and get him on his ship, hold him for ransom
Speaker 3: so that he could get back a rowboat that some
Speaker 3: Hawaiian warrior had stolen. And uh, he was he was dragging,
Speaker 3: not quite dragging. He was he.
Speaker 1: Himself, Like I know, you know every single detail, but
Speaker 1: like it's just so bizarre to me, like that he
Speaker 1: himself is.
Speaker 3: There, He himself went ashore to do this. Uh he
Speaker 3: was roaring and he was roaring mad. He was roaring mad.
Speaker 3: He was so mad at this.
Speaker 1: They won't give us the boat back. By god, I'll
Speaker 1: get that.
Speaker 3: Boat pretty much with with a contingent of royal marines
Speaker 3: who were not very good at their jobs, by the way.
Speaker 3: And uh uh, things escalated real fast. And here here
Speaker 3: here's what I will say about his death. Is that
Speaker 3: almost certain?
Speaker 1: It all? You lay all the nitty gritty out in
Speaker 1: the book.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, yeah, it takes the last third of
Speaker 3: the book is really kind of what what happened that
Speaker 3: on that faithful day? But one of the things that
Speaker 3: they had done book, well, yeah, that's Hawaii. The last
Speaker 3: third of the book, I suppose it's the last fifty pages.
Speaker 1: It's the real The risk goes in real slowly, but
Speaker 1: chapter nineteen, the knife goes deeper.
Speaker 3: But what's interesting is they the blacksmiths had been churning
Speaker 3: out these crude knives as gifts to the Hawaiians because
Speaker 3: they were so interested in metal, and you know, they
Speaker 3: were just just churning them out as fast as they could.
Speaker 3: And it's one of those knives. There's crude knives that
Speaker 3: the British gave them that ended up killing Cook. So no,
Speaker 3: to self, you know, don't give people you don't know
Speaker 3: very well a weapon, and that a weapon. So yeah,
Speaker 3: so that's and then of course there's a lot of
Speaker 3: debate about what happened to Cook's body. The only parts
Speaker 3: of him were returned to the British. There's a story that, uh,
Speaker 3: some young Hawaiian children saw Cook's heart hanging up to dry.
Speaker 3: And this is a story that Mark Twain uh tells
Speaker 3: when he visited Hawaii, uh and and that this heart
Speaker 3: was they thought it was a dog's heart and ate it.
Speaker 3: So that's really the only possible known incidence of cannibalism here.
Speaker 1: Twain's getting the story.
Speaker 3: A century later.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it doesn't say like probably just shy of
Speaker 1: a century A century later.
Speaker 3: Yeah, about a century later. Yeah, So take it with
Speaker 3: a grain of.
Speaker 1: Salt, take your heart and that story with a grain of.
Speaker 3: Salt, Yeah, and some cockroach excrement.
Speaker 1: When he said they gave parts of him back, how
Speaker 1: like you know, I mean like, well, so.
Speaker 3: The new captain, whose name is Captain Clark, who was
Speaker 3: number two now he's number one, is demanding to demanding
Speaker 3: the Haleaands to give back his remains because the Wines
Speaker 3: didn't quite understand the British, you know, that they wanted
Speaker 3: his whole body back. They wanted to have a formal
Speaker 3: burial at sea.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 3: They're like, we don't have his body, you know, we
Speaker 3: have some parts of his body. And they gave him
Speaker 3: his part of his thigh, some bones, his part of
Speaker 3: his skull but had been scalped, part of his hat,
Speaker 3: a couple of items of his clothing. But they what
Speaker 3: they had done traditionally, I mean, this is what they
Speaker 3: did to their own revered chiefs. Is they would burn
Speaker 3: the body, uh, scrape away any remaining flesh, uh and
Speaker 3: save the bones. That's where the manna was the power
Speaker 3: of the body. And the different chiefs, would you know,
Speaker 3: they would spread it all over the island and and
Speaker 3: and hold onto these bones as relics. And that's what
Speaker 3: they had planned to do with Cook and did do,
Speaker 3: but some of the bones somehow got returned, and they
Speaker 3: assumed that they were Cooks and you know that they
Speaker 3: were telling the truth.
Speaker 1: Mess the wrong.
Speaker 5: How did that not escalate into a full on like
Speaker 5: my next question, like were they did did the English
Speaker 5: just feel like they were outnumbered and it would be
Speaker 5: very dumb or.
Speaker 3: Like, yes, well it did escalate, by the way, but
Speaker 3: they wanted those remains back. They also wanted four different
Speaker 3: Marines also were killed in this auditation, and they wanted
Speaker 3: the remains of those Marines too, and uh so they.
Speaker 1: Had a delicate that's a weird deal, likew who are
Speaker 1: those Holsers do you know? I mean like when someone
Speaker 1: real famous, like you know, yeah, like Cook, I've never
Speaker 1: even heard about these other guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there's four that met their end.
Speaker 5: Those people's families are probably there's always some no names
Speaker 5: in Star Trek that get killed Red Shirts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so four other guys, yeah, yeah, and a bunch
Speaker 3: of Hawaiians probably as many as twenty warriors were killed
Speaker 3: that day too. That day, yeah, by the Marines who
Speaker 3: were shooting constants fast. But it took forever to reload
Speaker 3: these muskets.
Speaker 1: A gunfight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, muskets. You know, it takes forever to.
Speaker 1: In my head. This is Glad to tell me. In
Speaker 1: my head he was up there, which is him or
Speaker 1: some other guy, and it was just that I didn't
Speaker 1: know that broke out into him.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But so they they waited to escalate and and
Speaker 3: retaliate because they wanted those remains back. And they figured, well,
Speaker 3: if they retaliate now, they'll never get the remains back.
Speaker 3: So they did get the remains back, and then they
Speaker 3: turned the cannons on on on shore and a lot
Speaker 3: of people were killed and we I don't know that
Speaker 3: we ever know how many precisely, but probably hundreds were killed.
Speaker 3: Really it turned into a kind of a battle, pitch battle.
Speaker 6: Or just.
Speaker 1: Man, do you think that well, who knows you think
Speaker 1: it was that your response would have been like, shit
Speaker 1: out a little sideways, let's just pull out, yeah, and
Speaker 1: reapproach this in the future. Yeah, like we're pulling up
Speaker 1: killing their guy, yeah, over in quhi, over misunderstanding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, And that's certainly what the captain, Captain Clark
Speaker 3: wanted to do. He didn't really want to retaliate, but
Speaker 3: some of the junior officers got extremely pissed off. And
Speaker 3: one of them is a very famous guy named William Bly
Speaker 3: you may he becomes famous, uh with the mutiny on
Speaker 3: the Bounty. I was the master of cook ship. He
Speaker 3: learned he learned from Cook.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: The other great officer on this ship was Vancouver, who
Speaker 3: you know, one of the greatest explorers of all time
Speaker 3: as well. So this is there's a cast of characters. Vancouver, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that Vancouver. Yeah. So these young officers get really pissed
Speaker 3: off that their mentor this man they love, Captain Cooking.
Speaker 3: They do they do them afraid. It's true, especially Blind.
Speaker 3: He's he's he's a really uh, severe guy, very very
Speaker 3: capable seamen, but uh, kind of a badass, take no
Speaker 3: prisoners kind of.
Speaker 1: So we'll learn more about Blind in the book.
Speaker 3: You Will, You Will. He's all over the book. He's
Speaker 3: he's uh, he's an important part of the story. I
Speaker 3: forgot to mention him.
Speaker 1: Dude, I can't wait to read the book. Man, I'm excited.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, thanks for having me back. This one
Speaker 3: took me forever, partly because of COVID, which interrupted research
Speaker 3: a lot of trips and stuff. But it took me
Speaker 3: about five years to do, and it's finally out. I
Speaker 3: can't believe it.
Speaker 1: What are you doing next?
Speaker 3: I'm coming back to the West. I'm writing about Colorado,
Speaker 3: Colorado Territory and during the Civil War. I'm riding about
Speaker 3: the Sand Creek massacre. I'm riding about the Civil War.
Speaker 3: I'm riding about the gold Rush and the creation of Denver.
Speaker 3: Uh another kind of like Blood and Thunder.
Speaker 1: How are you gonna how are you gonna bracket that out?
Speaker 3: I'm working on it. I haven't figured it all out yet,
Speaker 3: but I'm.
Speaker 1: But you got you narrowed in on like an air
Speaker 1: a bunch of big events. But like you know, Blood
Speaker 1: and Thunder was kick.
Speaker 3: Cars right right?
Speaker 1: You got it.
Speaker 3: There's a character who was at sand Creek, an amazing
Speaker 3: guy named Silas Soul. I don't know if you've heard
Speaker 3: of him, but he's the officer that refused the orders
Speaker 3: to attack the Cheyenne and uh uh ended up testifying
Speaker 3: against his commander, uh Colonel Chivington, and we and we
Speaker 3: know about what really happened at sand Creek because of
Speaker 3: this this young man who was twenty six at the time.
Speaker 3: It was very brave and then was he was ultimately
Speaker 3: murdered for his for his testimony. So he's the main character.
Speaker 3: Silas Soul is his name God.
Speaker 1: But uh yeah, what what can you how do you
Speaker 1: bracket this in years.
Speaker 3: During the Civil War basically eighteen sixty to eighteen sixty five.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, so you'll so it'll be it'll be carried.
Speaker 1: Whatever you're you're looking at would be carried within those
Speaker 1: years of the Civil War.
Speaker 3: And that's my idea.
Speaker 1: What's cool about that is it's just so unless you're
Speaker 1: a fan of the good, bad and the ugly, which
Speaker 1: I am, the the West in the Civil War is
Speaker 1: not widely understood. I mean, I don't even fully understand it.
Speaker 1: Like you are surprised to be like, oh, that's right.
Speaker 1: There was sort of like there's a there's a sort
Speaker 1: of theater of operations, yeah, in the West and desert
Speaker 1: Southwest during the Civil War. And everybody's reading about Antietam
Speaker 1: and Gettysburg, right, but they're like they're like shooting it
Speaker 1: out in the desert.
Speaker 3: You know, Well, I live in Santa Fe and I'm
Speaker 3: you know, I'm very curious about what was going on
Speaker 3: during the Civil War out here, and you know, there
Speaker 3: was a big battle near Santa Fe called the Battle
Speaker 3: of Glory out of pass and uh, this guy of
Speaker 3: the Soul was there, and you know, and a lot
Speaker 3: of other Shenanigan's going on out west. It's just, uh,
Speaker 3: it's a part of the story I think most Americans
Speaker 3: don't know about, you know, when they talk about the
Speaker 3: Civil War.
Speaker 1: Uh, you just go with one of the next Yep.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty deep into this next one already.
Speaker 1: You still do magazine reporting, not much anymore.
Speaker 3: Magazines aren't what they used to be. They're thinner, and
Speaker 3: they're printed on cheaper paper, and they're kind of sad
Speaker 3: shadow of what they used to be, it feels like.
Speaker 3: But I occasionally write for some Yeah, and I still
Speaker 3: have an association with Outside Magazine, which is uh still
Speaker 3: great magazines doing what it can. But no, I do.
Speaker 3: I just focus on the books mainly. It keeps me
Speaker 3: pretty busy for years at a time.
Speaker 1: So has Hollywood come knocking about Cook?
Speaker 3: Not yet, but maybe after this wonderful podcast any better.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think, who's gonna he was fifty, he's fifty,
Speaker 1: I might do my acting. Yeah, yeah, right, start too.
Speaker 1: I'll be like, I know guy, I know a guy
Speaker 1: who's exactly that for you blimey, like, no, this guy's
Speaker 1: exactly that age. He's exactly that age.
Speaker 3: Perfect.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I wouldn't because he was fifty when he left.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: By the time they make the movie, I'll be the Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll be fifty three. It takes a while for, you know,
Speaker 1: to get all that under way.
Speaker 3: Dude.
Speaker 1: When I do my dying scene on the beach, it's
Speaker 1: gonna blow you away.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 3: You can have Danny Bolten be the guy that kills you.
Speaker 1: Give speeches, borrow, pull some lines from Shakespeare. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be a long You.
Speaker 3: Look good in a tri corn hat and leggings.
Speaker 1: All right again.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: The very excellent writer who meticulous researcher, a great eye
Speaker 1: for the unusual Hampton sides and the wide wide see
Speaker 1: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of
Speaker 1: Captain James Cook Out now New York Times best selling
Speaker 1: author of Ghost Soldiers up on top there. Thanks for
Speaker 1: coming man, appreciate it. Best of luck with the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate it. It's been it's been really fun.
Speaker 3: I've enjoyed this. All right, great, thank you see you
Speaker 3: next time.
Speaker 1: Very well.
Speaker 7: Le'sperados. Larry okay, and if it runs or mauntains, swim
Speaker 7: in the scene, bill bag of a saka, a turkey
Speaker 7: whel bag and then a kill it all over again.
Speaker 3: On your hair.
Speaker 7: It's a media a padcast for me. It's a media
Speaker 7: a podcast
Speaker 3: For me.