Thank you for this article. I've read The Wide Wide Sea and found it tremendously entertaining and enlightening. Cook is a much more admirable person than I had expected him to be. Yes, I'd like to believe my behavior would be better than his, but I'd never have the nerve to do what he and his crew did: spending three years away from home exploring the vast expanse of a largely unknown world. Just looking at a chart of this third voyage is humbling. We are all too eager to judge historical figures by today's standards. A more beneficial practice might be to think about how people 200 years from now will judge our behaviors.