by Tony Horwitz
“I didn’t come to see whales,” he said, still gazing back at Kealakekua. “I can see them on the telly.”
On January 17, 1779, the day of Cook’s last journal entry, Lieutenant James King described in detail the extraordinary scene that unfolded when the captain went ashore. On the beach stood men carrying wands tipped with dog hair, intoning the word Erono, or Lono, while islanders fell to their hands and knees, bowing their heads to the ground. Cook and a few of his men were escorted to a waterside temple, a raised stone platform with a wooden railing that supported twenty human skulls. A priest named Koah then led Cook through a series of rituals, during which the captain remained “quite passive, & sufferd Koah to do with him as he chose,” King wrote.
Cook ascended a rickety scaffold, where the priest wrapped the captain in red cloth. The captain also followed Koah’s lead by prostrating himself before carved images and kissing them. Then Koah held up one of Cook’s arms while King supported the other, as more prayers were said and a crowd continued to chant “Lono.” Processions of men presented the captain with sugarcane, coconuts, sweet potatoes, and other food; a putrid hog also figured prominently throughout, and was repeatedly handled by Koah.
The ceremony ended with another priest anointing Cook’s face, head, hands, and arms with masticated coconut. During the feast that followed, the priests “insist’d upon Cramming us with hog,” King wrote. For once, the omnivorous Cook lost his appetite. “The Captn recollecting what offices Koah had officiated when he handled the Putrid hog,” King wrote, “could not get a morsel down, not even when the old fellow very Politely chew’d it for him.”
The English had learned a rudimentary Polynesian vocabulary, and the Hawaiian language was similar enough to that of Tahiti for crewmen to communicate with their hosts. Even so, after watching the “long & rather tiresome ceremony” at the temple, King admitted that he “could only guess at its Object & Meaning, only that it was highly respectful on their parts.”
Scholars have been debating the ceremony’s significance ever since. Most believe that Hawaiians regarded Cook as a manifestation of Lono, a potent fertility god and also an ancient, divine king who had exiled himself after killing his wife in a jealous fit. Each year, during a season known as Makahiki, Hawaiians celebrated Lono’s symbolic return to seed the ground with winter rain. As part of this fertility rite, priests circled the island carrying an icon of Lono: a tall crosspiece draped with bark cloth.
The Hawaiians’ deification of Cook may therefore have resulted from an extraordinary coincidence between island belief and the timing and nature of the captain’s arrival. The English ships, with their masts and spars and sailcloth, resembled the native image of Lono. The ships arrived off Hawaii during the Makahiki season and circled the island in a clockwise direction, mirroring the Lono procession. Finally, the ships dropped anchor in Kealakekua Bay, Lono’s onetime home and site of a temple, or heiau, honoring him. It was there that Cook was greeted as the returned god; hence the moment when King and the priest held out the captain’s arms, duplicating the Lono icon.
In the view of the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, the principal champion of the Cook-as-Lono school, Cook’s reception, and all that followed, can be understood in ritualistic terms. It was a “cosmic drama,” Sahlins writes, in which “Cook obliged the Hawaiians by playing the part of Lono to its fatal end.”
This thesis has sparked one of the most famous and vitriolic debates in recent academic history, pitting Sahlins, a renowned scholar at the University of Chicago, against Gananath Obeyesekere, an esteemed anthropologist at Princeton. In a book-length broadside, the Sri Lanka–born Obeyesekere attacks Sahlins’s thesis as imperialist nonsense. Hawaiians were far too rational to mistake a white, foreign-tongued sea captain for a Polynesian god, Obeyesekere argues. Rather, they regarded Cook as a figure akin to their own high chiefs, and treated him with the same respect—in part because they wanted to enlist the English in their internecine wars, as many Polynesians had tried to do before. It was Cook’s own actions, rather than island cosmology, that led to his eventual death.
Both men’s arguments are so intricate and compelling that it is difficult to judge who is right. But it seems clear that Hawaiians treated Cook with exceptional awe, and in what James King called a “very Abject & slavish manner.” The question is why. Kealakekua Bay appears to have been split between two somewhat competitive communities. At one end, near the temple, lived members of the priestly class. At the other dwelled the island’s king and his chiefs. The priests may have genuinely believed Cook was an incarnation of Lono—or judged it in their interest to declare that a god had arrived. The king and chiefs, who didn’t always trust the priests, may have seen it in their interest to flatter and placate the potent English with gifts and honors.
Tellingly, the Hawaiians initially treated the Discovery’s captain, Charles Clerke, with almost as much ceremony as they accorded Cook. But the everyman Clerke wrote that he “disliked exceedingly putting so many people to such a confounded inconvenience,” and asked the priests to stop all the “singing and fuss.” Clerke also seemed oblivious to the sacredness of royal flesh, at one point clapping a chief on the shoulder until one of the man’s retainers “gently took away my hand, and beg’d I wou’d not touch him.”
Clerke survived this faux pas, but Hawaiian commoners could not. They were subject to the harsh Hawaiian system of taboo, or kapu, which dictated that touching a chief, or even walking on his shadow, was punishable by death. “Equality in condition,” King observed, “was not the happiness of this Island.” Commoners bore the added burden of supplying almost two hundred hungry sailors with vast quantities of hogs, fruit, and other provisions.
“We live now in the greatest Luxury,” David Samwell wrote, on the ships’ second day in the bay, “and as to the Choice & number of fine women there is hardly one among us that may not vie with the Grand Turk himself.” The currency of sex, as at Tahiti, was the nail. “Our Men pull as many [nails] as they can,” Samwell wrote, and Hawaiians yanked them out as well. “Was there not a strict Eye kept over them we should have the Ships pulled to pieces at this place.”
More seems to have been at work than metal lust. Even by Polynesian standards, Hawaii was a highly eroticized culture. Sexual initiation occurred very young, and the hula was often designed to arouse the gods or to praise a chief’s genitals. Samwell recorded the words of a song accompanying one dance. They translated as: “A penis, a penis to be enjoyed/Don’t stand still, come gently/That way, all will be well here/Shoot off your arrow.”
Marshall Sahlins calls Hawaiian culture “Aphrodisian,” and cites as evidence a nineteenth-century missionary who complained that islanders practiced twenty forms of intercourse—and had as many words for coitus. “If any one term were selected to translate the Seventh Commandment,” Sahlins writes, “it was bound to leave the impression that the other nineteen activities were still permitted.”
The island’s king at the time of Cook’s visit was an emaciated, palsied man of about sixty who nonetheless kept innumerable wives and concubines, as well as young male retainers known as aikane. Their “business is to commit the sin of Onan upon the old King,” Samwell wrote. “It is an office that is esteemed honourable among them & they have frequently asked us on seeing a handsome young fellow if he was not an Ikany to some of us.” Samwell also surmised that Hawaiians freely practiced “That Unnatural Crime which ought never to be mentioned,” namely sodomy. And even he was shocked by their carved figures. “The leud postures and actions in which these are represented,” he wrote, “would offend the Ear of Modesty to recount.”
The English had also arrived at the lustiest moment in the Hawaiian calendar. The Makahiki season celebrated the fertility of the land, and Lono’s return in search of his bride. So there may have been a ritualistic aspect to islanders’ frantic coupling with sailors, particularly if Hawaiians saw Cook and his ships as divine. The English noticed women stuffing the umbilical
cords of newborns between the ships’ boards, perhaps believing the vessels would carry their infants’ spirits to the heavens.
Given all this—Hawaiians’ lavish hospitality, the homage they paid Cook, and the sexual ardor displayed by native women—it isn’t surprising that the English were quickly lulled into a false sense of security. “Their behavior,” concluded Samwell, “is so obliging and friendly that no quarrels could possibly arise in our intercourse with them.”
The day after our boat ride, we drove down the coastal road from the King Kamehameha to Kealakekua Bay, paralleling the route we’d taken by sea. I’d known before coming to Hawaii that it wasn’t an unspoiled paradise, but the island’s snarled traffic surprised me. So did the haze, which I at first mistook for smog. It was actually what locals called vog, a high-level drift of sulfur dioxide–bearing clouds from an active volcano at the island’s south end. The island newspaper even carried a daily “vog index” on its weather page.
It took us an hour to crawl the twenty miles from Kailua to Keauhou to Kainaliu to a community just above Kealakekua Bay called Captain Cook. “I’m surprised they don’t spell it Kaptain Kook,” Roger said. The town lay atop the thousand-foot shelf overlooking Cook’s death site, though its name was only indirectly tied to the captain. A century ago, a local coffee company called Captain Cook maintained a small post office. The company had since gone, but the post office stayed, even though Captain Cook wasn’t an incorporated township.
Like the other coastal towns we’d passed through, Captain Cook seemed a curious hybrid of old businesses run by Japanese-Americans (who were once the majority population on the island) and more recent establishments of a distinctly New Age cast. Near a shiatsu massage clinic, I saw a business card in the window of a whole-foods bakery that read: “I am Dolphins. Dolphin swimmer. Cetacean ambassador. Gemini communicator. Cyberspacialist.” Also striking were the wanted posters at the post office, which identified suspects as “Portuguese-Filipino-Hawaiian” or “Japanese-Korean” or some other mélange. Hawaii was the sort of place where you felt conspicuous being just the one thing, particularly if that happened to be a bland haole.
Estimates of the Hawaiian Islands’ population at the time of Cook’s arrival range from 250,000 to a million. By the mid-nineteenth century, disease had made that number dwindle to about seventy thousand. Immigration from China, Japan, and other countries, as well as intermarriage and outmigration by Hawaiians, diluted the native presence still further. Today, only nine thousand “pure” Hawaiians remain; they constitute less than one percent of the state’s 1.2 million people. Another 200,000, or 18 percent, are classified as part Hawaiian.
Near Captain Cook, we turned off the main highway and onto a frangipani-fringed, breadfruit-splattered road that wound around the cliff above Kealakekua and down to the bay. We passed a macadamia nut mill and a fragrant coffee-roasting factory, then entered the k-free but still tongue-twisting village of Napo’opo’o. At its edge stood the temple, or heiau, where Cook had been escorted by the priests on his first day ashore. The temple still stood, but all we could see was the outer wall of its high stone platform. A rope blocked the steps leading up to it, with a handwritten sign saying “KAPU. Sacred site. No Trespassing.” On the steps lay various offerings: stalks, fruit, rocks wrapped in fronds.
On the black sand beach in front of the heiau, several heavily pierced young haoles were building a shrine of their own out of pebbles and shells. A short way back from the water, near where priests had once bathed in a sacred pool (now a brackish swamp), we found dreamcatchers hanging from trees and a throne-shaped stone adorned with corals and crystals.
While Roger and Cliff lingered on the beach, I walked over to a parking lot that appeared to double as Napo’opo’o’s social center. A half dozen people sat drinking beer around tables made from telephone cable spools, with tattered beach umbrellas perched on top. A man wiggled his thumb and pinkie at me—the Hawaiian wave, or shaka, similar to the one I’d seen in Tahiti and New Zealand—and then pointed to a folding chair beside him.
“Want a nut, brah?” he asked, cracking a macadamia. The man had long black hair; a red bandanna was tied around his head. He looked like a cross between an aging rock star and a Zero pilot. His name was Cornell Shimamoto. “Mostly Japanese and who knows what else,” he said, when I asked about his background. The others were of indeterminate ethnicity, appearing to range from mostly Hawaiian to mostly New Age haole. After we’d sat silently for some time, I asked about the temple and the kapu sign.
“It used to be, like, a sacred site,” one man said. “Then haoles started walking all over it and putting towels down to dry. They closed it.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You know, they.” He lit a joint and passed it around. I’d noticed a “Sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii” license plate tacked to a tree in the parking lot. I’d read that some Hawaiian radicals had declared a provisional government, seeking return of native land and sovereignty, and symbolically seceding from the United States. I asked if that had something to do with they.
“Oh yeah, we’re the sovereign kingdom right here,” the man with the joint said, giggling.
“I’m chancellor of the exchequer,” Cornell added.
“I’m queen!” a woman in his lap said, before convulsing in stoned laughter. I tried another tack. It was Makahiki season, just as it had been when Cook arrived. Maybe that explained the offerings at the heiau, and the kapu sign. I asked Cornell whether Hawaiians still celebrated Makahiki.
“Sort of. You party down. Music, beer, dope, dancing.” He passed me the joint. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Why was I here, smoking pot in a parking lot at eleven A.M.? “I’m looking into Captain Cook. Know much about him?”
“The one who invaded Hawaii?” the woman said. “He was a rich man, one of the Big Five.” This referred to the five agribusiness companies that had effectively ruled Hawaii for much of the twentieth century.
“Not exactly,” I said. “He was killed just over there across the bay. I’m trying to find out more about that.”
The woman shrugged. “All the famous people get killed. JFK. Martin Luther King. Captain Cook.”
I was starting to feel a little like Cook’s lieutenant, James King, struggling vainly to divine the “object and meaning” of the ceremony he’d witnessed at the temple a hundred yards away. Then, as I got up to go, a legless old man in a motorized cart tugged at my arm. “Few people you need to see,” he said. “Arthur Kukua, down the road in Ke’ei. He’s got one of Cook’s bombs. And Henry Leslie, lives up in Captain Cook. He works for the British, looking after that monument.” Before I could ask the man a question, he motored off in his cart.
Ke’ei lay at the end of a rough, unpaved road a few miles south of Napo’opo’o. We found Arthur Kukua at a picnic table beside his small bungalow. A wiry old man, he sat drinking beer with his daughter, Leinora, a pretty woman of about forty with a flower in her hair. Neither of them seemed the least surprised to find three haoles wandering up and asking about Cook’s “bomb.”
“It’s inside, I’ll get it,” Arthur said, returning a moment later with a cannonball, about the size of a large coconut. Cliff studied it for a moment and raised his eyebrows. He said it looked identical to the sort of ammunition once carried by British ships. Arthur led us down to the shore and pointed at the shallow water. “Right there’s where I found it,” he said. “I was spearfishing one day and there it was on the sand. It is unusual for me to see a cannonball. I like old things, so I keep it ever since.”
That was all Arthur knew about it. We sat on the lava shelf for a while. Coconuts swayed in the breeze, and water lapped gently against the shore. Beneath the trees lay outrigger canoes covered in fronds. Leinora said she had a farm up the hill, where she grew coffee and macadamias. Like a lot of Hawaiians, she’d tried working in Honolulu and on the mainland, but came home in the end. “I didn’t like the life,” she sa
id, “it was only about work.”
Some of the homes in Ke’ei still had no electricity or running water, she told us. Most appeared ramshackle, with the same indoor/outdoor living area as Arthur’s: a table, a few chairs, some corrugated metal to keep off the rain. “In this climate you don’t need much,” Leinora said. Though it was winter in Hawaii, she wore flip-flops and board shorts, as did most of the people we’d met. There was a dreamy, laid-back air to Ke’ei that reminded me of Tahiti outside Papeete, and Tongatapu beyond Nuku’alofa. For all that had changed, Polynesia still offered glimpses of the pleasing simplicity that appealed to Cook and his men.
But Hawaii was starting to remind me of Tahiti and Tonga in another, less pleasing way. The island’s traditional culture and belief system had been so ravaged by disease, colonialism, and missionaries that it was almost impossible to reconstruct. Arthur pointed out a carving in the lava shelf that appeared to be an ancient petroglyph. When I asked him what it signified, he shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “Anyone can make up a story. People that does know aren’t here anymore, are they?” He hoisted his cannonball and headed back to the house. “It’s up to you, what you believe.”
In the first weeks after their arrival in Kealakekua Bay, the English enjoyed an idyll reminiscent of their first contact with Tahitians a decade before. While women were the main attraction, crewmen occasionally lifted their heads from their hammocks to admire other aspects of island society. They judged the chiefly cloaks—made from as many as half a million bird feathers apiece—the finest garments in the Pacific. They were also astonished by Hawaiians’ skill and joy in swimming through heavy surf. “Young boys & Girls about 8 or ten years of age play amid such tempestuous Waves that the hardiest of our seamen would have trembled to face,” Samwell wrote. James King considered islanders “to be almost amphibious.”