Title: Bile from the bilges
Product review: Not the book to buy if you have any degree of admiration for the exploits of Captain Cook. A ready Australian chippiness pervades this anthropological work that seems to present Cook, Banks et al. as insensitive British blunderers impinging disastrously upon the noble savages they meet upon their voyages. An impressive knowledge of the cultures encountered on the voyages is offset by a surprising degree of ignorance about naval procedures coupled with jarring first person interventions and social speculation more appropriate to a Mills & Boon novelette. Throughout, judgements (of which there are many) are presented from the perspective of a 21st century anthropologist. Poor Cook he really should have more of a "New Labour" man - inclusiveness, social diversity, racial awareness should have been his watchwords. But then, endowed with such sensitivity, would he have ever have left Ushant on his port bow?
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