From Baird Online:
This is a totally new approach to the life of Captain James Cook. Conventional wisdom has him as the heroic explorer, one of the greatest of all time, killed by savages in the Sandwich Islands. Williams re-examined the evidence and presents another side to the story. Here Cook is seen as a destructive invader, more of an anti-hero.
This does, of course, depend on your point of view. The traditional indigenous inhabitants of many of the places Cook discovered would mostly have regretted Cook's arrival. Certainly, many of their descendants still do. A modern European citizen of Australia or New Zealand would generally feel the opposite. In short, the author shows that Cook had an enormous influence on the subsequent development of those parts of the world he touched. Some of that influence was good, some bad.
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