This program was made possible by the Owsley Brown II Family Foundation, LDG Development, University of Louisville, and the James Graham Brown Foundation.

Today, on Great Conversations: Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke talks with narrative historian Hampton Sides ambition, consequence, and deciphering history through storytelling.

Sides' latest book is The Wide Wides Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.

[APPLAUSE] What a terrific honor to be with you all here tonight and to be in Louisville.

This is my first time visiting this community.

It is absolutely beautiful.

And I want to come back many, many times [APPLAUSE] going forward.

And an even greater honor to have this opportunity to interview one of my literary and historical figures and heroes, Hampton Sides.

And I want to tell you a little bit about him.

He's the author- Well first applaud Hampton Sides.

[APPLAUSE] He's the author of the acclaimed bestselling narrative histories, including Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground.

The Wide Wide Sea, which we're going to be talking about tonight, was in New York Times' ten best books of the year, and Barack Obama featured it on his coveted summer reading list.

That's big time.

That's big time.

[APPLAUSE] You may or may not know this, but he's also been a contributor to Outside, National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications.

He has won the PEN USA Award for nonfiction and his journalistic work, collected innumerous published anthologies, and has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing.

Hampton Sides, welcome to the Kentucky Author Forum.

It's great to be with you.

Yeah.

[APPLAUSE] SIDES: Thank you.

What a pleasure to be here in lovely Louisville and to be interrogated [LAUGHTER] by a true gentleman, an amazing politician, amazing guy.

We have, it turns out I've learned, a lot of similarities and a lot of loves about the American West.

He lives just down river from me, basically, in El Paso, Texas.

And, I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

just down the Rio Grande a ways.

So... So, yeah, this book was, for me as well, just captivating.

And, you know, I thought I knew something about Captain Cook and 18th century exploration.

But reading your book, I learned so much.

Tell us how you picked Captain James Cook as a subject for this, and why you chose his final journey versus other important periods in his life.

Yeah, well, I think that Captain Cook, although he's extremely well known in England, New Zealand, Australia, he's not as well known in the United States.

I think people get him mixed up often with other captains, real and imaginary.

[LAUGHTER] You know, Captain Kidd.

There's, of course, Captain Crunch.

[LAUGHTER] There is Captain Bligh, another British captain who's well known.

There's also Captain Kirk, [LAUGHTER] and that's actually only partly facetious or comical because, in fact, the creator of Star Trek was apparently deliberately and directly patterned Captain Kirk after Captain Cook.

James Kirk, James Cook.

The Enterprise, the Endeavour which was Cook's first vessel.

"Going where no man has will go- boldly going where no man will go before" is a paraphrase of something Captain Cook wrote.

So I realized going into this, first of all, that Americans had a gap in their understanding of who this captain was.

A true, you know- truly one of the- one of the great nautical explorers of all time, in the pantheon with Magellan and a handful of others.

He had three around the world's voyages, each one as big and ambitious and as consequential as the others.

I didn't want to do all three of them, because that would have taken me 20 years.

And it would have, I think, in narrative terms, just been rather complicated.

And I realized that this third voyage of his- I am an American writer with an American readership, primarily, and an American publisher.

And this voyage has a very, very American feel to it.

Much of the action takes place in Hawai'i, Alaska, off the coast of Oregon, Washington.

There are Americans on the ships.

There are American-born people on the ships, including the captain who brings the ships home.

Spoiler alert: Captain Cook does not make it home.

He dies.

He dies.

I think- if they know anything, Americans, about Captain Cook, it is that he died a very graphic, a very violent death on the Big Island of Hawai'i.

But the other American quality that this thing has is that they leave Plymouth in July of 1776, and they didn't really get the memo.

[LAUGHTER] For the four years that they're out, the 100,000 nautical miles that they travel, they didn't know what was happening.

As they're exploring the northwest coast of North America, they didn't know what was happening in Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere.

So that gives it an interesting American feel.

Cook has a couple of missions that he's been assigned by the Empire.

One of which is to see if he can find the Northwest Passage.

Instead of coming east to west, go west to east, and maybe go over Canada.

Or maybe there's a transcontinental river that they're looking for that will take you across the landmass of North America.

How does it strike you that- obviously they met the sea ice.

They couldn't get over Canada at the time.

Now that's a passable voyage in 2026.

As you were writing and researching this, did that irony strike you at all?

Of course, of course.

I mean he very quickly, as he passes through the Bering Strait and over the top of Alaska, gets nearly trapped and, actually, would have been crushed by this impenetrable wall of ice.

And ironically, you know, if he did it now he probably would have made it all the way to England.

You know, going through those, through what is no longer an ice field, and he would have won his 20,000 pound reward from Parliament.

So it's not that he, you know- the science at the time was a little crazy.

There was a lot of thoughts that, you know, somehow or another, you'll find your way through this ice.

It was one of these obsessions of the British Empire, was to find this, this thing that, you know, technically it exists, but it was always trapped in ice for much of the year, if not all the year.

And, you know, the British had this, you know, obsession with it because they really wanted to figure out a way to make a shortcut through or over Canada to get to India, to get to China, to avoid the Spanish and the Portuguese, who largely controlled the southern waters around South America.

And the more they invested in this obsession, with blood and treasure- the more stories, horrible stories of scurvy, and mutiny, and, you know, all the, you know- they always go north and everything goes south, right?

[LAUGHTER] That certainly had happened over and over and over again.

But somehow or another, they thought if we get our greatest explorer, James Cook, and try it from the other direction, try it from Alaska, so technically you're talking about a northeast passage, maybe he'll find the way.

And of course, he didn't.

What he did find was Hawai'i, and a number of other places along the way.

O'ROURKE: Right.

The themes in this book: colonialism, exploration, great power rivalry, first contact, all of that is riveting enough.

But in addition, there's a lot of sex [LAUGHTER] in this book, which I wasn't expecting.

[LAUGHTER] You talk a little bit about it in the preface, where you're trying to perhaps explain the various theories for why that happened in Tahiti, why that happened in Hawai'i.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

That really struck me again, not expecting to see that happen.

And this is a ship full of men, only men who are who are locked in together for many, many years, many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of miles.

And all of a sudden they're on Tahiti and it is triple X rated.

[LAUGHTER] SIDES: Yes, yes, yes.

It is!

You know, my editor kept wanting to take the sex out, for some reason, maybe he- O'ROURKE: Doesn't want to sell books.

[LAUGHTER] SIDES: I know, I know.

My wife kept wanting me to put it back in.

[LAUGHTER] And part of it is, you know, that my fascination with just what was the attraction of these women, these young women in Tahiti and elsewhere in Polynesia, to these stinky, smelly, hairy, but also horny, young men who were, you know, most of them were like 16, 17, 18.

They had heard something about Tahiti from Cook's prior voyages, and I would say half of them had signed up for this voyage just to find out if the rumors were true.

[LAUGHTER] Yeah.

You know, you get- it's very complicated about whether the women were really as willing as the journals of the young men suggest.

I think they were, but, they were after something.

And usually what it was was metal.

The Polynesians were absolutely fascinated by metal, and wanted to get as much of it as they could.

Literally, for the price of a nail you could have a rendezvous with a Polynesian woman.

Now, sometimes they would go on to have a true relationship.

Sometimes, in fact, a number of times the men would try to desert with their girlfriends and go up into the mountains, and Captain Cook would have to track them down.

So there's that aspect, but, it was in the journals.

It was everywhere.

Everyone talked about it, and I had to sort of turn an X-rated story into a PG-13.

And, maybe I'll do a sort of an unexpurgated version later.

[LAUGHTER] That's what our imaginations are for.

You almost wonder if the ships are going to fall apart because the sailors are pulling out the bolts and the nails- SIDES: They literally are.

[LAUGHTER] O'ROURKE: to go trade for sex.

SIDES: Captain Cook worried that his ship was going to disintegrate before he got home.

O'ROURKE: Yeah, it was wild.

There's a character who's central to the story, named Mai, who is picked up on another journey captained by another captain, brought back to England.

And then part of Cook's brief or mission is to return him to the Society Islands- SIDES: Right.

O'ROURKE: with all this finery, and these weapons, and the trappings of modern English life.

You really spend a lot of time, and he's a fascinating character, on this guy.

Tell me why you chose to do that.

And also, perhaps what you take from that experience, which, like so much in this book, ends tragically.

Yeah.

Well, mainly I was interested in focusing on him just because he's so interesting.

Not just him but this whole sort of exercise that- they brought him back to England to sort of see how he would do, you know, like- The noble savage they would call him.

He did really well.

In fact, he was a celebrity.

They rolled out the red carpet for him.

He, you know, he meets King George, he meets all the sort of the intelligentsia of England.

O'ROURKE: He meets a lot of ladies.

SIDES: More sex.

O'ROURKE: More sex.

[LAUGHTER] SIDES: Because he's, you know, he's so exotic and he's so different.

And he is the first Polynesian ever to set foot on British soil.

But they're also curious, and they're sort of poking him and prodding him to see how his manners are, how he does with a fork and a knife at table.

He goes to the Royal Society, meets all these scientists who are, like, measuring him.

And, you know, it's really, you know, wonderful, but also a kind of patronizing experience for him, where he has to kind of deal with these stodgy and, I would say, arrogant scientists.

Who love him, by the way, he charms everybody.

And he's not just this useful idiot.

He's also on a mission because he's got vengeance that he's seeking back in this Society Islands.

So most people didn't realize that Mai, this character Mai, is- he's someone who- they think he's a prince, you know, like somebody who represents the highest levels of a very stratified society back in Tahiti.

In fact, he's kind of a refugee, kind of a nobody who, had- his home island, which is called Raiatea, had been attacked by the Bora Bora warriors.

He had lost his family land, and he had really spent the rest of his life trying to figure out how to get back at these warriors to win his family's land back.

His father had been murdered.

And he was fascinated by guns.

He was fascinated by muskets, and ammunition, and metal, metal swords.

So his whole idea, his long game that he was playing, was to go to London and get as many guns and as much ammunition as possible, go all the way back to the other side of the world and kick some butt, basically, against these- his family's enemies.

And he does just that.

Actually succeeds in going to war with the Bora Borans.

And so it's, you know- people dismissed him as this goofy guy who didn't know what he was doing.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

King George sends him, not just with the guns and the swords, maybe a suit of armor as well, but horses, and goats, and animals, and trees, and different plants that he wants to, you know- so that Mai can be successful.

When they finally find where they're going to set Mai up for success, the people on the island tell Captain Cook, look, you're the big boss.

You can have any parcel that you want.

And Cook, and I think this is telling of his character, says, no, I'm going to buy this from you.

And I forget what he trades for the parcel land.

But they then build him a British house with an attic, and a basement, and a front door with a lock on it.

SIDES: With a lock on it.

Yeah, that's the key.

O'ROURKE: And when Mai leaves the house each day he locks the door.

The only door in all of Tahiti or the Society Islands with a lock on it.

SIDES: Yeah, but he needs it because he's brought all these relics and artifacts from England, including a jack-in-the-box, and a Bible, and a globe of the earth, and- O'ROURKE: Some kind of musical, like a, barrel organ.

SIDES: Yeah, a thing that you kind of crank like this, and this little thing that makes it makes a shock, kind of a shocking kind of machine, and all these other things, and he's worried they're all going to get stolen.

So hence the lock and the key.

O'ROURKE: So you just- I know you are not a moralist, and you do such a good job of not moralizing in your books, but it's hard not to take the moral from that story, that despite King George's best intentions, despite all the care that Cook took in settling Mai, because, you know, after Mai helps to defeat the Bora Borans using all this technology brought from England, he dies within a couple of years.

His possessions are dispersed among all the inhabitants of the island.

The house is broken down.

The goats are dead.

That despite those best of intentions, it's really hard to make this thing work, and maybe even- And Cook, it seems like throughout this book, has a sinking suspicion that all these people that I'm coming into contact with, and all of the help that I'm providing, it might be hurting them.

Was that your sense?

Did you read that in his journals?

SIDES: Absolutely.

He writes about it repeatedly as he goes from island to island.

He's beginning to wonder whether these voyages are really good for these people and even whether they're good for his own men.

You know, he has some doubts about this cross-pollination experiment that is going on.

He's particularly saw that in New Zealand with the Maori who, by this point he'd been there something like 4 or 5 times, and he began to say, these people have changed.

They have these- they have new diseases that we brought them.

They have different ideas about economy and about political structure.

These voyages were dislocating to these sort of, what turned out to be, pretty fragile island societies, many of them.

And he begins to have second doubts, you know, second thoughts about all of this and, you know, I think that's one of the many ways in which Cook is very rare and unusual for captains of his day, of his station, is that he could be reflective.

You know, he wasn't just going to these islands to get water, and wood, and move on.

He was a bit of an anthropologist, and he was interested in their welfare.

He was interested in their- describing, you know, what they wore, and how they celebrated, their, you know, their holidays, and, you know, the architecture, and the design of their canoes.

You know, he's like- he has no training as an anthropologist, of course, but he's writing all this stuff down because he- this is what fascinates him about being an explorer.

He does know, of course, that he is playing this larger game, this geopolitical game of colonialism that, you know, that's going on.

There are so many scenes that you describe of encounters.

You mentioned, Cook's ships and men in New Zealand, in Tahiti and Bora Bora, in other places along the way, including up in Siberia and Alaska.

My favorite scene that you describe, takes place- They've been kind of bouncing around against the Oregon coast.

He finally is able to put in at this place called Nootka Sound, which I think is on Vancouver- SIDES: Vancouver Island.

O'ROURKE: Vancouver Island today.

And I just I found the scene to be just so powerful and so beautiful.

And I wondered if you wouldn't mind reading that scene for us.

Right here.

I've marked it on this page.

Oh, yeah.

So, you know, Vancouver Island is named after George Vancouver, who was on this voyage, was a young midshipman who was sort of studying and learning at the knee of the master, Cook himself.

So he will come back to this place multiple times as an explorer of the Pacific Northwest.

But, so, yeah, this passage is when- is the moment of first contact.

And what's I think so amazing about Captain Cook is that, you know, all these explorers during this period had moments of first contact, 1 or 2, maybe three.

Cook had like 40 of them, you know, really those electric moments when anything can happen, when it might erupt in warfare, or they may trade with each other and have a peaceful encounter, or they might have sex as you have pointed out.

[LAUGHTER] There's something so powerful and so moving and sort of electric about that moment of first contact.

And this is the moment where they meet the Mowachaht people of Nootka Sound.

Which I spent a week there with my wife.

Very beautiful, very interesting, a little spooky place, on Vancouver Island.

"At dusk, the two ships were treated to a more formal greeting ceremony, led by a shaman who scattered bird feathers upon the water and began to work up a song.

As the canoes made a slow, deliberate circuit around the ships, this dignitary stood in his vessel, stretched out his arms, and shook rattles made of clamshells and deer hooves.

He began to sing an incantation, plaintive and ethereal.

The natives kept the beat of his serenade by tapping their paddles on the sides of the canoes.

The song was so charming and sincere that Cook's sailors decided they had to reply.

Presently, two musicians broke out their French horns and blew a soft, slow tune.

As the music resounded over the cove, the Mowachaht stayed silent in their canoes, seemingly dumbstruck.

After the horns men breathed their last notes, the Mowachaht answered with another song just as beautiful as the first.

In this way, the two cultures put each other to sleep.

The evening ended and many of the natives paddled off into the dark, but just as many remained for the night, falling asleep as they bobbed on the tides of the cove, their canoes gathered in a cluster."

First of all, that passage is just beautiful.

I can see it, I can hear it almost, the rattle of the deer hooves, the Mowachaht keeping time with their paddles on the side of their canoes.

The French horns that break out on the discovery and resolution.

Oh, it's just- it just really got me.

And then it got me thinking, could first contact be like that?

Where we're not taking possession.

We're not fighting.

We're not even screwing, as was happening in Tahiti.

And Hawai'i and everything.

[LAUGHTER] But we're playing our songs for each other.

SIDES: Yeah.

O'ROURKE: Just this connection through music, I just found to be so profoundly beautiful and kind of the counter story to how colonialism, and exploration, and first contact actually took place throughout so much of the world.

And you just have to wonder, I don't know that you'll have the answer to this, but why couldn't that be the way that this played out?

Yeah, that's a great question.

And I know you're very much attuned to music.

I think you used to be in a punk band.

[LAUGHTER] Is that right?

O'ROURKE: Yeah.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah.

SIDES: And traveled around the country, before you became a great politician and a great civic leader- you were in a punk band.

[LAUGHTER] So, I don't know if we played punk music- if Cooke's men had played punk music, it might have scared the Mowachaht off.

O'ROURKE: Definitely.

Yes.

Yeah.

SIDES: But no, you know, it's interesting that you focus on that scene because it is one of the beautiful first contact experiences.

And there are many like that in this book and in his career.

But sometimes they weren't so beautiful, including when we get to Hawai'i.

But, I like to think about, like, you know, we can celebrate this sort of inquisitive part of exploration.

You know, I think it's so deeply embedded in our DNA to ask questions.

What's over the next hill?

What's over the next- over the horizon?

O'ROURKE: It's inevitable that contact was going to happen.

That's just the way we're wired.

SIDES: Right.

But we can sort of celebrate the inquisitive, but have very different thoughts about this sort of acquisitive part of exploration, which is "I want that, I want this country, I declare it for my king."

O'ROURKE: Yeah.

SIDES: Plant the flag.

And Cook did a little of both.

And so I celebrate the- his curiosity and his, you know, that part of him that was a true and pure discoverer, or explorer.

The other part of it, not so much.

And don't forget, this place where we- this passage took place became British Columbia.

So, you know, there is that.

But I like to think of kind of this alternate scenario, which is, you know, the Polynesians were among the greatest navigators of world history.

And when the British were in the Stone Age, you know- O'ROURKE: Right.

SIDES: What would have happened if the Polynesians had discovered England first?

[LAUGHTER] How would history be different?

And maybe they'd be playing songs.

O'ROURKE: Which isn't so far fetched when- I'm going to ask you one more question about this book, because I think everyone's going to want to know more about you, Hampton Sides, the person.

But just on this issue of the Polynesians, I learned from this book that the Hawaiians were part of the Polynesian diaspora, and you'll know the mileage, but it is inconceivably distant.

It takes Cook weeks, right?

To go from Tahiti and the Society Islands all the way until he, you know, discovers, quote unquote, Hawai'i.

SIDES: Right.

O'ROURKE: And you tell me in this book that they are the same people, and that the Polynesians had figured out how to navigate these vast distances, and that they had settled Hawai'i so long ago that, over time, they had lost contact with Hawai'i and had become an isolated population that still spoke a similar language to those in Tahiti.

So when Cook's men greet the people in Hawai'i in that language, the people in Hawai'i can understand them, and they can have these conversations.

Absolutely dumbstruck by just how sophisticated the Polynesians were and just how far reaching their empire was, if we want to call it that.

But let me allow that to bring us to the last question about The Wide Wide Sea and Captain Cook.

You keep intimating, maybe outright saying throughout the book, that something has changed for Cook, and those on his ships think maybe something has changed.

Maybe he's lost his step.

Maybe something's not right with the guy.

There are displays of cruelty; cutting off the ears of the Bora Boran who had stolen something on the ship.

Things that just don't add up, don't make sense.

Maybe some of the geographical features of North America that he missed and maybe would have found on a previous journey.

Tell us a little bit about that, and then take us into a different first contact story, which is how Cook lost his life in Hawai'i.

And I know I just asked you a really big question there and that wind up, but I want to- I want you to be able to answer that.

And then I want to talk a little bit about, you know, where you come from, what made you and what led you to writing these extraordinary narrative histories like The Wide Wide Sea.

Well, it is one of the questions that people have wondered about for a long time, including his own officers and men on the ship, was, like, what was wrong with the captain?

He was different from voyages one and two.

A violent temper that you hadn't seen before.

Using the lash on his own men- yet at a time when, of course, captains were doing that all the time.

What do they say?

Morale will improve- Beatings will continue until morale improves.

And Cook is meeting out greater punishment to the men on this sh than Captain Bligh did before th SIDES: That's right.

So something's up with this guy.

And he's also much more cruel to the native people that he's encountering along the way.

So, what is it?

A lot of theories out there.

The leading theory is that he had a parasite, or parasites, plural, from all the weird foods that he'd been eating over these- the course of the first two voyages.

And that it had depleted, because of the sort of depletion of critical vitamins and minerals over time, and really caused brain damage of some sort.

And we know that's true.

It definitely happens.

I mean, look at RFK Jr.

O'ROURKE: Wow.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE] It alters behavior.

[LAUGHTER] That's the leading theory.

Another theory is, you know, while I've been on book tour people have come up to me, psychiatrists, and said, you are describing exactly, almost to the exact level of detail, what we would diagnose is bipolar disorder.

And I started thinking about that and I'm like, yeah, well, he did almost, on this voyage, get to Antarctica.

He got deep into the Arctic.

So he was bipolar.

[LAUGHTER] So there's that.

Other theories that he had syphilis, and other- and still other theories just that this whole game of being a captain of these long voyages was taking its toll on his mind, and body, and his spirit.

And that he was starting to see, as I alluded to earlier, you know, starting to have some misgivings about these voyages and what they were doing to the people he was encountering.

But when he gets to Hawai'i, we kind of see it in full force.

He has good days and bad days.

He is the old explorer at various times.

But when he gets to Hawai'i, we see the worst of it, and that is that he loses his temper.

One of his vessels has been stolen by the native Hawaiians.

He wants it back.

This is like a rowboat.

And instead of negotiating quietly and calmly, using his junior officers or something, he marches ashore, on the Big Island, and tries to kidnap the king of Hawai'i and hold him for ransom until he can get his vessel back.

O'ROURKE: Almost pulls it off.

SIDES: He almost pulls it off.

He gets to the shore, kind of tugging and grabbing the king and- who he's just woken up from his sleep in the morning, and all these bodyguards and all these warriors descend on the scene, and- I guess I'm giving away the end of the book.

Probably shouldn't be talking about this, but- it is a bloody and very dynamic collision of cultures that takes place there.

How did this most disciplined of explorers, someone who knew and understood, at least he thought he did, Polynesian culture end up in this situation where he was essentially bashed and slashed to death, on the shore there in this very violent way?

That's the kind of the question of the last 60 pages of the book, I would say.

And, you know, it's a scene that has been painted.

It's been the subject of poems and operas and, you know, it's been studied and analyzed by anthropologists.

And it is one of those sort of classic and enduring symbols of what can go wrong with these first contact experiences.

O'ROURKE: Yeah.

Really, really powerful- and that the last photo in this book, at least in the hardcopy, is the picture of the obelisk, the monument that I believe is still maintained by the British people- SIDES: On the Big Island.

O'ROURKE: Yeah, on the Big Island.

Splattered in blood red paint, and scrawled across it in graffiti is "you were on native land" or something- SIDES: That's right.

O'ROURKE: to that effect.

You know that that's part of his legacy.

You talk about it in the preface to the book.

It's a complicated legacy, and we've touched on some of the reasons why it is so complicated.

Was that a struggle for you to balance the, you know, nearly 250 years of hero worship?

This swashbuckling, heroic figure of the British Empire, with the reality of the consequences of his actions, and the consequences of empire and colonialism.

By the way, I think you did an excellent job of striking that balance and acknowledging perspectives, including from the indigenous people who were affected.

But that had to have been very difficult to balance all those contending issues and facts.

SIDES: Yeah.

I mean, when I was researching the book and writing the book, he was in the news- every couple of months there would be another statue coming down.

There would be another statue being yanked into the sea, all over Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Polynesia.

They were talking about changing the name of the Cook Islands to something else.

And so I thought, you know, this antipathy toward this captain from 250 years ago, first of all, I wasn't sure if this is good or bad for my project.

[LAUGHTER] And I decided it was actually good because it meant that this stodgy captain, who sometimes wore a wig and had a tricorn hat, was contemporary.

There was something current there.

There was a pulse.

And I needed to kind of figure out where it was coming from, what it was about.

And, you know, exploration is the first phase of conquest.

You know, you've got to find these places first, then come everything else.

And I do think that, in a sense, he's sort of being blamed for all the things that came after him as a consequence of his voyages.

And particularly as a consequence of the extraordinarily accurate maps that he produced.

Of all his skills, his greatest skill was as a cartographer.

And these maps pinpointed these islands all over the Pacific, that had been blessedly isolated for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and suddenly he broadcast to the world in these published maps, and these beautiful folio sized volumes that were produced from his- from his voyages, he broadcast the exact location of these places.

And so then come the whalers and the seal hunters and- O'ROURKE: Beaver pelt traders.

SIDES: Yeah.

And the missionaries, and the navies, and the, you know, the alcohol- O'ROURKE: The exploitation, the damage, the, all that stuff.

SIDES: The fatal impact.

O'ROURKE: He knows that's coming.

SIDES: Yeah.

O'ROURKE: At least that's what I got.

SIDES: Yes, he does, he does.

And he, you know, he- so that is kind of why the statues are coming down.

The other thing is that the British erected a lot of statues.

[LAUGHTER] They love doing that.

And, they would depict Cook as the sort of macho conqueror, you know, when in fact, you know, they probably should have- it would have been a much more boring statue, but, you know, with him with a compass and a sextant and, you know, working on his maps, because that's essentially what he was.

And then this sort of reckoning, this sort of reassessment, began to take place, everywhere, not just in Polynesia, but all over the Pacific.

And I had to bring all that into the story as much as I could, including using as much oral history as I could to try to understand the indigenous point of view, which is very important because all those early books, they just told you what Cook said, and did, and thought, and felt, and, you know, forgot about the other people.

O'ROURKE: You brought them in.

By my count, this is your sixth work of narrative history.

And I want to know how you write something like this, and whether over these six books going back to- is it 2002 was Ghost Soldiers?

SIDES: 2001.

O'ROURKE: 2001.

What you have learned that has changed how you do something like this- they're such different books, such different subjects, such different parts of the world.

So all those will be different in that way.

But is there something about how you research and write that has changed, gotten better, over time?

Tell us about writing this and what that was like.

SIDES: Yeah.

Well, you know, first of all, just how I got into this.

I grew up in Memphis, just downriver from here.

And I- the first writer that I ever met growing up was a narrative historian.

It turned out he was like one of the best.

His name was Shelby Foote.

[CHATTER] You know, the star of the Ken Burns- [LIGHT APPLAUSE] Yeah, shout out to Shelby Foote for sure.

He was, you know, he had this beautiful beard.

He had the beautiful Delta- Mississippi Delta accent.

And he had a pipe.

And you know, he was this exotic creature in Memphis.

His son and I were in a rock band together.

[LAUGHTER] Not a punk band, but a rock band.

[LAUGHTER] O'ROURKE: Tell us what you were playing.

SIDES: I was playing a Fender Rhodes electric piano in a band called Argus.

Have you ever heard of Argus?

[LAUGHTER] We were really big in Japan.

O'ROURKE: I like the early stuff.

[LAUGHTER] Early stuff is good.

So his son Hugie and I were in this rock band together, and we- O'ROURKE: Hugie Foote.

SIDES: Hugie Foote.

Yeah.

[LAUGHTER] Yes, indeed.

The names are a little strange in the south, and, [LAUGHTER] so we were cranking up the Hendrix and, you know, the Pink Floyd and, there may or may not have been smoke in the room, when Shelby would come up and, you know, rap on the door, and he'd say like, [IN ACCENT] "Hugie.

oh, Hugie, you gotta turn that racket down.

I'm working on Antietam."

[LAUGHTER] And so we didn't appreciate- I certainly didn't appreciate what he was doing until much later.

And when I got to interview him for my first job at Memphis Magazine and, you know, I just thought it was so fascinating that he gets to sort of get in a time machine, go back in time, and do this kind of narrative history that is readable and, you know, it's deeply researched, but it is also, you know, it's literary, it's a story.

And, so I began, I think, to sort of size that up and think maybe this is something I could do one day, even though I knew I could never grow a beard like that.

[LAUGHTER] O'ROURKE: Have you tried?

SIDES: Yeah, I tried.

Yeah, it looks terrible.

It's just not good.

So I think that's, in an interesting way, set me on a course that, as I sort of look backward, that was quite important.

And spent 20 years or more as a journalist, magazine journalist mostly, in Washington and Chicago.

I now live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And I started doing these books, which, you know, I love my job.

It is just an incredible kind of- I feel incredibly lucky that I found this thing that I'm decent at, and that I- that allows me to kind of leave this world, and go back in time, and commune with dead people, [LAUGHTER] and piece together these stories that I hope are greater than the sum of their parts.

And that acquaint readers with a big swath of history, but in a readable and immersive way.

So that's how I kind of got into this world.

O'ROURKE: It's, like, 4 or 5 years between each of these books.

How much of that time is spent casting for the subject?

How much is spent doing the research and the travel?

And how much is spent writing?

SIDES: Yeah, well, I'd say, you know, it's most of it is the research.

You know, first of all, I like to travel to the place- to places I'm going to as much as possible.

Because why not?

You know.

[LAUGHTER] Number one: it's the fun part.

Number two: it gives you a, in ways large and small, a confidence in your subject when you're writing those passages that take place at a certain place, like Nootka Sound in Vancouver Island, that if you hadn't gone there, you could probably piece it together.

You could probably fake it.

But, you know, by looking at photographs, and maps, and so forth.

But, there's something about it, you know, if I haven't been there, I feel kind of like a phony, you know, like, I'm guessing what it's like, but I- I don't really know.

So that's that's a big part of the time that it takes to do these books.

Also going to the archives, which is less important as it used to be, because it used to be you really had to go to the archives.

O'ROURKE: It was the only place you could find it.

It wasn't online.

SIDES: Wasn't digitized, it wasn't scanned.

So, but there is something very special about the archives, which is holding in your hand a piece of history.

You know, you put on the white gloves, and you go in there, and you- you're smelling, and you're, you know, feeling this, in this tactile way, a piece of history that is a hard- it's hard to duplicate that feeling.

And that's really the main reason I love going to the archives.

And then, of course, then you, you know, get all this material, and then you sort of have to mine it.

It takes a while to kind of figure out, what do I have?

And what are the themes, what are the through lines, what's the structure?

What's the aperture that I'm going to really- what's sort of hard focus, soft focus?

And that takes another year or so.

So actually the writing is the part that I do fast.

I write pretty fast.

And I think that's partly because I worked in magazines for so long with a crushing deadline.

And also because my editor will finally call me and say, you know, it's time to write dude.

[LAUGHTER] This is a contract.

And so I go to a coffee shop in Santa Fe and do most of my writing in this coffee shop.

And I'm there all the time.

One time they forgot about me.

I was between two ferns somewhere in the back, and [LAUGHTER] it was the end of the day.

And they locked up, locked me in there.

[LAUGHTER] And, you know, there I was all night.

So... You grew up in Memphis, you went to Yale, you work at all these amazing magazines, or write for all these different publications.

You moved to Santa Fe.

Incredibly successful.

Your first book, Ghost Soldiers, has sold more than a million copies worldwide.

But, you told me in an earlier conversation that you wanted to find some way to come back and connect with your hometown of Memphis, and you went there and you were looking for a subject.

I don't know if you wanted to write about Memphis, the city itself.

Tell us what you ended up writing about.

It seems like a little bit of a departure from so much of the other stories that you have written.

SIDES: Well, yeah.

I mean, I think it's normal- most writers at some point feel like they need to go back to the place they came from, and try to understand it, and try to understand the structure of the, I don't know, of their home.

And I decided to go back to kind of the seismic moment the pivotal moment of my time growing up in Memphis, and that was the Martin Luther King assassination.

And I wanted to sort of write a book about Memphis, a kind of a biography of Memphis or something, but use- do it against the backdrop of the King assassination.

And so I did go home, and I did start that project, but then it sort of morphed into a very different book.

It became the story of the assassination, and the manhunt that led to the capture of James Earl Ray.

But it still has a lot of Memphis in it.

And, you know, it's- there's no Shelby Foote in there, but there is- O'ROURKE: No Hugie either.

SIDES: No Hugie either.

But it was, you know, it was a powerful experience to go back and try to understand this thing that, you know, I was only six years old when it happened.

I did go on Colbert, The Colbert Report, talking about it, his old show.

And he tried to somehow imply that I was involved in the assassination even though I was six, [LAUGHTER] you know.

So, I was not involved, but I do remember my father was a lawyer, and he worked for the law firm that represented King when he came to Memphis on behalf of the sanitation workers who went on strike.

And so I remember the energy.

I remember the curfews.

I remember the tanks, you know, and the National Guard, and the feeling that my home town was in this national news and sort of was coming apart at the seams.

And I try to capture all that in the book, but it became a very different story, really, about James Earl Ray, and his movements, both before and after the assassination.

I think I read somewhere, when I was preparing for this and kind of finding out what you were up to, that you had spoken at the Explorers Club?

SIDES: Yes.

O'ROURKE: Do I have that right?

Is that the club in London?

SIDES: No, no, it's in New York City.

O'ROURKE: This is New York City.

SIDES: Yeah.

O'ROURKE: Is this the one Teddy Roosevelt had been a member of?

SIDES: Yes.

Lots of taxidermy there, lots of taxidermy.

[LAUGHTER] O'ROURKE: Yes.

Lots of what he killed.

There is some club, you may or may not remember the name of it offhand, that Cook belonged to in London, where the great physicists, and explorers, and cartographers, and botanists, and, you know, evolution- SIDES: The Royal Society.

O'ROURKE: Royal Society, maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

I kind of wondered if maybe you were part of our Royal Society here, and I like that idea that something like that exists where it's not just, you know, physicists hanging with physicists, but it's people really mixing- SIDES: Across disciplines, right?

O'ROURKE: Yeah.

The arts and the sciences need to be together.

Everything's so hyper-specialized right now and narrowly focused it seems to me.

SIDES: I agree with you.

Who do you love to read?

Like who- you mentioned Shelby Foote as well, but who do you- who did you aspire- Now, you're beyond aspiring, you're there.

SIDES: Well, thank you, I don't know.

I'm always trying to get better and learn from the best people out there.

You know, it's kind of interesting.

Okay.

So, like, academic history, academic history books, I think, have a very well-deserved reputation for being, kind of, deadly dull, right?

You know, people spend millions of dollars a year on, like, gummies, to fall asleep.

You know, all you need is an academic book [LAUGHTER] O'ROURKE: Right, right.

SIDES: by your bedside.

But this other thing that I do, and that I learned from people like Shelby Foote, narrative history is a different kind of animal.

You know, we're really aspiring to write something that is entertaining, it's immersive, that, you know, the pages turn.

We actually want people to buy the books and read them.

[LAUGHTER] And so, where does that come from?

You know, going back to, like, Barbara Tuchman maybe, you know, Stephen Ambrose, David McCullough.

Those were kind of the, you know- that was the pantheon when I was coming up through the ranks.

I was also really interested in the New Journalism, as they called it, when I was in college, you know, like Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion, and, sort of, applying some of those techniques of the New Journalism to history, and seeing how you can sort of restructure history, maybe, you know, use more techniques that we might associate with novels, and apply them to history.

The one last thing I might say about this is, like, there's still some kind of argument about what we should call this genre, you know, like, I've heard it called literary, you know, journalism, or literary history, which seems pretentious.

Creative writing, which implies you're just making stuff up.

[LAUGHTER] You know, narrative history seems to be the term that is being used, meaning that story is key to the whole process.

One of the highest criteria of the book is that it needs to have all the attributes of a good story.

But what bothers me is that I work in a genre, maybe the only one, maybe the only profession, that has a negative in front of it.

You know, think about like, nonfiction.

[LAUGHTER] You know, sort of like Derek Jeter is a non basketball player, you know, like- [LAUGHTER] What other- it's kind of weird, and it kind of implies, when you think about it, that making stuff up is the default position of the human condition.

Like, unless we hear otherwise, you're just making this crap up, right?

[LAUGHTER] And so it makes me realize that maybe, you know, the bestseller list, the New York Times' list, you know, should change its names.

You know, it should be, fact and fiction, or, you know, truth and bull****.

[LAUGHTER] You know, and, you know, it's just, you know, it's just kind of weird that we assume that you're lying unless we hear otherwise, so... What I do read, when I have- read for purely for pleasure is mostly fiction, literary fiction.

It, you know, there's something about a great novelist who can get into what people are feeling and thinking, and get into areas of human expression that, I think, a lot of us historians are, unfortunately, can't do because we don't have the documents, or we don't have the- we can't make that leap sometimes, so... O'ROURKE: I heard you once say that you chose Kit Carson and wrote the book Thunder and Blood to have this- SIDES: Blood and Thunder.

Blood and Thunder.

O'ROURKE: Sorry.

Blood and Thunder, to have this character, and this story, and this narrative history, that explains these larger themes like Manifest Destiny, and the American West.

100 years from now, you know, your great-great-granddaughter is looking for someone in 2026 to explain some concept, or are there global figures today, American or otherwise, that you think will be bestsellers in the year, you know, 2126?

SIDES: Well, I don't know what you're going to do in the next few years, but you might be one of those characters.

[LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] O'ROURKE: No.

You know, I think that, certainly, our president will be studied and analyzed for centuries.

[LAUGHTER] And no one, I think, still will be able to figure him out [LAUGHTER] or why- how this all happened.

There's so many interesting people to think about in our current times.

And this is a problem I think that I have as a historian.

I love getting in that time machine and going back in time, but it means that I am leaving this world, and there's so many people now that I, you know, sometimes I feel like as a good citizen of the world, I should be focused- I should be doing journalism.

I should be doing current events, and not jumping back 100 years, 200 years.

O'ROURKE: Don't you think this stuff helps us understand what's happening right now?

Like, I thought about Captain Cook, and despite his best intentions, really setting the scene for massive destruction, and suffering, and death.

Made me think about these wars of choice in the Middle East.

We're going to bring democracy to Iraq.

This is the gift of the American people.

What we did for the the people of Afghanistan.

And I really do like to believe, despite the cynicism that lurks behind, you know, all these thoughts, that there's part of America that really is trying to do good around the world, but then then look what happens.

And so it almost makes me think this is just part of who we are.

And I'm hoping there's some way to escape it.

Last question: What's next?

What are we going to read next from you?

SIDES: Well, yeah, I mean, I do think it's true that history resonates, and gives an understanding of present events.

As Mark Twain famously said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes."

[LAUGHTER] And, you know, there are lessons embedded in history, all sorts of lessons, and that might be true with the current book that I'm working on now, which is a return to the American West.

It is a book about the Colorado Territory during the Civil War.

It follows a cast of characters through the creation of Denver, the Gold Rush, the demise of the buffalo herds and the lifestyle of the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians.

And it focuses on an event called the Sand Creek massacre, which is a seismic- another seismic event here in the American West that we're still feeling today, and in many ways.

So, I'm in the middle of it.

I got a ways to go and, you know, maybe we'll be here together talking with each other in a couple of years.

I hope so, that would be great.

O'ROURKE: I can't wait to read it.

And it's been such a pleasure to be able to talk with you tonight.

Thank you, Hampton Sides.

SIDES: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE] This program was made possible by the Owsley Brown II Family Foundation, LDG Development, University of Louisville, and the James Graham Brown Foundation.