This is John Batchel, continuing my conversation with Hampton Sides, the author of the spectacular new book on Captain Cook's third voyage, The Wide Wide Sea, Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.

Cook discovers the Hawaiian Islands, but he's not content to just putting him on the excellent maps he leaves for the Admiralty.

He goes ashore. He turns into an anthropologist, a reporter. He goes to the villages. He goes to the earthworks, to the elaborate agriculture that the Hawaiian people have made of their islands and reports it all.

Here's Hampton Sides to describe it.

The detail.

The tragedy, of course, comes soon enough.

Much more of this tonight.

Yeah, he did.

You know, this is another thing about Cook.

I mean, he comes ashore and investigates. A lot of people, a lot of these explorers, or captains, just wanted to exploit resources and get the heck out of there. He wanted to observe. And so he came ashore, pretty much by himself, unarmed, surrounded by thousands and thousands of Kauaiian people,

and they go up into the hills.

They see the aqueducts and the plantations, breadfruit farms.

He starts to realize that this is unbelievable earthworks that had taken probably centuries to build with these huge lava rocks.

And he jots all this stuff down in his journal and gives us our very first written description of Hawaiian civilization.

And it's actually quite profound.