Capt. Cook & the Earl of Sandwich

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 33-34:

IN EARLY FEBRUARY of 1776, Cook received an invitation to have dinner at the London home of one of the most powerful men in England: John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty. It must have been clear by the nature and timing of the invitation that something very important was to be discussed. Cook promptly accepted and a date was set.

Lord Sandwich was a shrewd, cynical, and sometimes ruthless politician, adroit in the power games of London. He and his fellow lords presided over an institution that was the largest organization in Britain and indeed in all of Europe. But Sandwich was much more than a Machiavellian bureaucrat; he was an intellectual of sorts, interested in the science of the day, and an advocate for exploration—probably the staunchest advocate, in fact, behind Cook’s second voyage of discovery.

Sandwich was lanky and tall, with such an odd, shambling, lopsided gait that people liked to say he could walk down both sides of the street at the same time. When at the Admiralty, he was known to be a workaholic. He was, one critic said, a man of “limitless ambition to which he has sacrificed everything,” and he kept such fiendish hours that he would often forsake his meals, opting instead to place a piece of beef between slices of toasted bread, which is how he came to be known as the “inventor” of the sandwich. He was a competitive card player and gambler, and the handy snack he had devised is said to have sustained him through many a long night at the gaming table. Lord Sandwich was a man in a hurry, in other words, and so perhaps it’s fitting that he should be known for a food architecture that can be gobbled quickly—for, through his relentless advocacy of exploration and global cross-pollination, he had accelerated many a timeline.

To find relief from the general toil of his job, Lord Sandwich had cultivated a deep affection for the voyages of exploration that the Admiralty periodically supported. He was perhaps the country’s greatest admirer of James Cook, and everything that had emanated from Cook’s two expeditions to date. Sandwich had been a catalyst, a patron, a sponsor. As far as he was concerned, Cook could do no wrong.

Politically, Sandwich was the gray eminence behind the proposed expedition to North America’s “backside.” In advocating for the voyage, he had confronted considerable resistance within government circles. Mounting tensions in the American colonies had caused the Royal Navy to shift its already strained resources. In a time of imminent war, yet another expedition to the far side of the world seemed a luxury England could not afford. Yet the ever crafty Sandwich had managed to circumvent the naysayers to win official approval.

This was the voyage in which Cook "discovered" the Hawaiian Islands and named them after his sponsor.