NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 23 number 2 - Winter 2003

By Mary Kate Keith, Friends of the Library

Tony Horwitz, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic, appeared at NC State's McKimmon Center on November 5, 2002, for a special reading sponsored by the Friends of the Library and Quail Ridge Books and Music of Raleigh. His talk explored his entertaining new book, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, a tale of high-seas adventure and a portrait of one of history's greatest navigators, Captain James Cook.

To research the book, Horwitz spent eighteen months retracing Cook's voyages across the Pacific. His travels took him to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, Hawaii, the Aleutian Islands, and Yorkshire, England. Horwitz even took a voyage on a replica of Cook's ship, the Endeavor, to get a feel for what sailors of the time experienced. He lived and worked as an eighteenth-century seaman. "I slept in a narrow hammock, fourteen-inches wide, in the ship's hold alongside forty others, and climbed the 127-foot main mast to furl sails in rolling seas. We're wimps compared to Cook and his men who did this for three years at a time."

Horwitz summed up Cook's adventures saying, "This is an experience we can't have today, no matter how far we travel. The only remotely similar experience would be if a spacecraft landed in our backyard and aliens stepped out to greet us. Except Hollywood has prepared us even for that. Cook was open, tolerant, and willing to learn from unfamiliar cultures."

Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, commenting that "Horwitz skillfully paces the book by intertwining his own often amusing adventures with tales of Cook and his men. Despite the historical focus, Horwitz doesn't stray too far from the encounters with everyday people that gave his previous books such zest."