‘The Ship’ shuffles the deck as it revisits Cook’s voyage

Capt. James Cook, who embarked on his historic Pacific voyage more than 200 years ago, has never been forgotten, yet the British explorer is undergoing something of a rediscovery.

Two recent books retrace Cook’s journey into uncharted waters and reexamine his story. Now the History Channel chimes in with “The Ship,” a six-hour, three-part documentary airing tonight through Wednesday at 9 p.m.

Forty men and women were picked to relive the 18th century odyssey aboard a replica of Cook’s ship, the Endeavor, in an adventure billed as “experiential history” rather than reality TV. Over six weeks last fall, the modern crew sailed from Australia to Indonesia, retracing one of the roughest legs of Cook’s 1768-71 voyage.

This miniseries lacks the chilling suspense of last year’s documentary “The Endurance,” which recounted Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1914, but it stokes the imagination. In its unusual way, it lives up to the network’s slogan “Where the Past Comes Alive.”

This trip is not quite the parallel test of courage filmmaker Chris Terrill envisions -- the modern crew, for example, reenters the Great Barrier Reef not through the dicey waters Cook dubbed Providential Channel but through a wider route. Still, the contrasts prompt us all the more to consider what the experience must have been like, and to think about how much the world has changed.

Cook was celebrated in his day for redrawing the world’s map, but the indigenous peoples affected by his “discoveries” see him differently, and so do many historians. Indeed, Aborigines who protest the new Endeavor’s launch get a sympathetic hearing.

As this film makes clear, Cook was a brilliant sailor who changed the world--”for better or worse.”