Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Cliff closed the Bible and gave a short sermon on the passage’s resonance. It spoke to the danger of Cook allowing himself to be treated as a god, and the missionaries’ belief that the captain had been struck down as a result. “It also speaks to the danger of us making Cook a god, of treating him with too much veneration,” Cliff concluded.

  He reached in his duffel again and brought out a volume of poetry, turning to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” William Wales, Cook’s astronomer on the second voyage, later taught mathematics at a school attended by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wales’s stories of the Resolution’s harsh journey through Antarctic ice and tropical doldrums, and the published accounts of Cook’s voyage, strongly influenced the young Romantic poet. Cliff had highlighted several verses from the “Rime” that seemed to echo Cook’s travels, and handed the book to Roger to read aloud.

  The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

  The furrow followed free;

  We were the first that ever burst

  Into that silent sea.

  …….

  Day after day, day after day,

  We stuck, nor breath nor motion:

  As idle as a painted ship,

  Upon a painted ocean.

  It was my turn to read. I’d brought excerpts from English diaries in which Cook’s men tried to explain their captain’s death. I read first from the journal of James King, perhaps Cook’s greatest admirer. He saw the captain as a tragic hero, blinded by his many triumphs: “A long course of success, which C Cook had in his intercourse with Indians, had taken away, as was natural, part of that wise distrust he formerly had.” Charles Clerke thought Cook put too much faith in musket fire’s power to frighten natives. Events, he concluded, “would not have proceeded thus had not Capt Cook first unfortunately fir’d.” Other diarists took note of the captain’s renowned temper and intolerance of theft. “He was not accustomed to having his intentions frustrated by any person,” wrote George Gilbert, “and had but little command over himself in his anger.”

  When I finished reading, Cliff shook his head. “Cook didn’t know how to go backwards, did he? He’d always been in control and for once he wasn’t in control of the situation, or of himself.”

  “He was blowing every fuse in his brain,” Roger said. “It wasn’t his greatest day. He doesn’t come out of it covered in stardust.”

  Cliff stared at the lava shoreline. “A bad day on black rock,” he concluded. “I’m fifty-two, a little older than Cook was. I have days like that, too.”

  He went to his duffel bag again and brought out a wreath. Procuring this had proved a challenge: most florists on the island were busy filling Valentine’s Day orders. Cliff had finally found a man making leaf hatbands and asked him to enlarge one to wreath size. Cliff had also affixed a certificate to the wreath: “In affectionate memory of Captain James Cook R.N. Died at Kealakekua Bay 14 February 1779. From members of the Captain Cook Society.” The certificate carried Cliff’s contact details and the society’s Web address.

  “We can always use more members,” he explained. Then he turned to Roger, fellow Englishman and a former soldier in Her Majesty’s Army. The two of them marched several paces from the monument, turned, stood erect, then solemnly approached the obelisk, as if laying a wreath at a military cenotaph.

  Roger raised the rum bottle. “To Cook!” he intoned, taking a deep pull and passing the bottle to Cliff, who stared at it uncertainly, having never tasted rum. “Think of it as communion wine,” Roger said. Cliff tossed a bit down and gasped, “That’s bloody awful!” Roger and I drained the rest. After our short night and long hike, the rum went straight to my head.

  Only one ritual remained. Cook’s men had honored the captain by firing the ships’ cannons. It seemed only proper that we attempt something similar. Roger had bought the rum and Cliff the wreath. Since I was the American representative, it naturally fell to me to purchase firearms. I’d trolled dozens of shops on the island, hoping to find one of the toy guns of my youth: a tin pistol with bubbly pink caps that you loaded one by one. But the only gun I could find was a plastic snub-nosed revolver that seemed to have been modeled on a Saturday night special. The caps came in rings that you slotted into the revolver’s retractable barrel. Apparently, no self-respecting youth in the twenty-first century would be caught dead reloading, as had happened to Cook’s marines.

  I raised the gun in the air and fired twenty-one shots in quick succession. The caps made a barely audible pop.

  “That was pathetic,” Roger said.

  Cliff patted my shoulder. “It’s the thought that counts.”

  He glanced at his watch. It was just after eight o’clock. I was reminded of William Bligh’s account of the fight on the shore: “The whole affair from the Opening to the End did not last 10 minutes.” I felt hollow and shocked, like the men aboard the Resolution and Discovery.

  The morning kayak and tourist-boat traffic had arrived in the course of our ceremony. Swimmers poked up all around us in blue flippers, lime-green snorkels, and fogged masks. A few people floated inside inner tubes. Several came over to gawk at the odd spectacle we presented: a clean-shaven man in a white shirt and Captain Cook tie, holding a Bible; a tall, shambling figure in shorts and T-shirt, cradling an empty rum bottle; and a third man, looking dazed, clutching a plastic revolver.

  “What’s going on?” a man called out, looking curious and a bit concerned.

  “Captain Cook died here exactly two hundred and twenty-two years ago,” Cliff said.

  “Oh.”

  Cliff, ever the missionary, walked to the end of the jetty and lectured the man about Cook’s death and the significance of his voyages. The tourist flippered off, and a gaggle approached in kayaks. “Is this something to do with Valentine’s Day?” a woman asked.

  “No. Different anniversary,” Cliff said. “Captain Cook’s death.”

  “Can we still eat chocolates?” she asked, laughing as she paddled away.

  Roger sprawled on the obelisk’s pedestal and fell asleep beneath the still faintly visible WHITEY GO HOME graffiti, the empty rum bottle at his feet. After a while Cliff gave up proselytizing, and I wandered with him along the shore, searching for a small tablet placed to mark the exact spot where Cook had fallen. Sailors visiting the bay in the decades following Cook’s death were invariably shown “the very rock on which the truly great man lost his life,” as a Russian captain put it in 1804. Natives also pointed out a nearby coconut tree damaged during the skirmish. The site became an early tourist trap where natives peddled rocks, coconuts, daggers, and other “relics” that they claimed had figured in the great navigator’s death, a number of which later ended up in museums around the world. The circus master P. T. Barnum even claimed to have the club that felled Cook in his collection of Native American curiosities.

  Visitors to Kealakekua also carried off chunks of the lava shelf. By the 1830s, very little of it remained. Then, in 1928, on the sesquicentennial of Cook’s “discovery” of Hawaii, the local historical society placed a tablet on what was left of the rock. The tablet was quickly stolen, and replaced by a new one. But as the lava shelf gradually subsided into the sea, this one had also disappeared, and yet another tablet was installed, on a rock shelf fifty feet back from the original. Cliff and I found it poking just above the shallow water. Part of the tablet was loose, as though someone had tried to dislodge it.

  Still, standing on the puckered rock ledge beside the tablet, I felt I could conjure the scene on February 14, 1779. The footing was tricky: water sluiced over the rocks and formed gullies between them. It was easy to see why the boats couldn’t come in close enough for Cook and his men to climb aboard. There was also ample ammunition lying around: handy chunks of lava, well formed for throwing.

  I gazed out at the bay, the sheer volcanic cliff, the long sloping ridge of Mauna Loa: a beautiful and exotic panorama. “So this is it, Cook’s final view of the world,” I said. “He must have felt a long, long way from home.�
�� I was tired, and still tipsy from the rum; the image of Cook’s last moment made my throat catch.

  “I doubt he had time to think about it,” Cliff said. “His last thought was probably ‘Come on, lads, get the boats in and let’s get out of here!’”

  Most likely, Cliff was right. Cook was a man of action and died that way. Then again, combat wasn’t his element. He’d rarely experienced it during his voyages, and had never seen crowded, chaotic fighting like that which unfolded here. “You can see how he was cornered,” Cliff said. “He probably couldn’t see the others well, and it was hard to keep his footing. It was every man for himself. He had nowhere to go but in the water.”

  Cliff looked at me and tilted his head in the direction of the bay. I nodded. We left our clothes on the rock and waded into the water. At the end of the rock shelf, the water became deep and clear, and parrotfish flitted all around. Cliff, whose pallid torso and legs looked as though they’d never been touched by sunlight, paddled uncertainly in the shallows, too close to the rocks. He emerged with ugly cuts all over his feet and shins.

  “Left my blood on the rocks,” he said. “A blood brother to Cook.”

  “You’ve already outlived the man,” I pointed out.

  Cliff smiled wanly. “I’ve just outswum him, too.”

  Once the shock of Cook’s death began to abate, the desire for revenge set in among his men. Even Charles Clerke, who was so wasted by tuberculosis that he could barely leave his bed, wrote a day after the melee: “I had some notion of taking a stout party onshore, making what distruction among them I could, then burn the Town, Canoes &c.”

  As if the death of Cook and the marines weren’t incitement enough, the Hawaiians gloated over their victory. The day after the fight, they began taunting the English, strutting on the beach in the uniforms of the dead marines and brandishing Cook’s sword. Several men also bared their backsides and slapped them. Worse still, the Hawaiians gave no sign of returning the bodies. They told the English that Cook’s corpse “was cut to pieces & carried a great way off,” King wrote. “They talk’d with unconcernedness & seeming Satisfaction of having thus dealt with it.”

  Then, on February 16, under the cover of dark, a priest who had always been friendly to the English came out in a canoe, carrying a bundle containing Cook’s thigh. The rest of the body, he said, had been burned “with some peculiar kind of ceremony,” Clerke wrote, “and the bones distributed among the king and chiefs.” James King believed the priest had brought Cook’s flesh as a friendly offering, and had defied the chiefs in so doing. But others on the ship didn’t react that way.

  “Distraction & madness,” one sailor wrote, “was in every mind, and revenge the result of all.” The next day, a native paddled out, twirled Cook’s hat, and flung stones at the ship while a crowd on shore laughed and jeered. “This was too gross an insult to bear,” wrote Clerke, who responded by firing the ships’ cannons into the crowd on the beach. He then sent an armed party ashore to collect water and issued the men ambiguous orders: Don’t provoke a fight unless provoked to do so.

  When islanders threw stones at the watering party, the English shot six of them dead. Later, when the stone-throwing resumed, sailors went berserk, setting fire to about 150 homes, including those of the priests. Then they shot at the fleeing inhabitants. “Others of the Natives who stayed in thier houses were run thro’ by Bayonets,” wrote the Discovery’s surgeon, John Law. “When they [the sailors] had Murdered these Defenceless people they severed the heads and stuck them on the boats as Trophies.” Crewmen put two of the decapitated heads atop poles and waved them at natives gathered on a nearby hill. They also seized and bound an elderly man, and taunted him with one of their ghastly trophies.

  This barbarous spasm certainly qualifies as the Kurtz-like behavior condemned by the anthropologist Obeyesekere. But the episode can also be read as a testimonial to Cook’s leadership, and as partial exculpation of the harsh discipline he doled out to his men. The sailors were a very rough lot, and so long as Cook was captain, their most violent and destructive impulses were kept in check: by unceasing labor, by the lash, and by Cook’s generally restrained and humane example. Charles Clerke, a more populist commander than Cook, and desperately ill, couldn’t keep a lid on his men’s brutality. Nor did he condemn it, although James King did. “Our people in this days transaction did many reprehensible things,” he wrote of the slaughter, which he blamed on the men’s desire for vengeance. “A common sailor with such a disposition & suffered to have its full operation, would soon equal the Cruelty of the most savage indian.”

  At midday, we began the long hike back from Cook’s monument, pausing a third of the way up to search for the last stop on our pilgrimage: the Puhina O Lono, or mortuary temple, where Cook’s body was taken after his death. Hawaiians believed that mana, or godly power, resided in hair and human bones, particularly the jaw, because of its association with speech. So islanders dissected Cook’s body on a large flat stone and roasted it to remove the organs and flesh. These parts were regarded as refuse and generally thrown in the sea. Hawaiian stories, collected decades later, told of two boys having eaten Cook’s heart and innards, thinking they belonged to a dog. One Cookhating Hawaiian historian, an early convert to Christianity, even claimed that Cook’s entrails were used to rope off a cockfight arena, while his hands became flyswatters. “Such is the end of the transgressor,” he wrote.

  Scholars differ as to whether the ceremonial baking of Cook’s body represented a symbolic sacrifice and offering of a potent enemy to their war god, or an instance of the reverential treatment that Hawaiians accorded their own high chiefs. What is clear is that Cook’s bones became revered objects, rather like saints’ relics. For years afterward, priests carried Cook’s remains from temple to temple in the annual Lono procession. In the early nineteenth century, a visiting missionary learned that Cook’s bones were kept in wickerwork and covered in red feathers, as were those of Hawaii’s most revered kings. Like royal remains, Cook’s were also hidden in various sacred places, such as the caves above Kealakekua Bay, the nearby temple to Lono, and other sites around the island associated with the god. Only a few priests would have known their precise location, and the secret probably died with them when the old religion was abandoned in the 1820s.

  Questions also shroud the precise disposition of the remains that Hawaiians returned to the English, in several bundles: part of Cook’s legs and arms; his hands and feet; and his skull, minus the jaw. King wrote only that these body parts “were put into a Coffin & thrown into the sea.” Sailors tolled bells and crossed the ships’ yards, setting them awry: a naval mourning custom, intended to give vessels a disheveled appearance. By committing Cook’s remains to the deep, the English unwittingly completed Hawaiian burial rites; they tossed body parts lacking mana into the sea.

  As Cliff had revealed to Roger and me during our visit to London, that wasn’t quite the end of the story. In 1824, the Hawaiian king Kamehameha II, a convert to Christianity, decided to sail to England with his queen aboard a whaling ship commanded by Valentine Starbuck. Cliff had discovered nineteenth-century documents mentioning that the king carried with him an arrow made from Cook’s shinbone, which Kamehameha hoped to present to the captain’s widow, or to the nation. But both the king and queen contracted measles and died soon after their arrival in London. Cliff was still trying to track down the whereabouts of the arrow, which apparently remained in England and had been mentioned in a letter as late as 1878.

  The bodies of Kamehameha and his wife were returned to Hawaii aboard a ship commanded by Anson Byron, cousin of the poet George. It was Anson Byron who first sought out the temple where Cook had been cut up and burned. He erected a ship’s capstan bar with an inscribed copper plate, which read, in part: “This humble monument is erected by his fellow countrymen, A.D. 1825.” Like other monuments to Cook at Kealakekua, it hadn’t fared well. Forty-one years after Byron’s visit, Mark Twain described the temple as “a large inclosu
re like an ample hogpen,” with the inscription on the capstan no longer legible. Twain added, “This [the temple] is not properly a monument, since it was erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to the circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him.”

  We’d seen the temple site marked on local maps, and spotted it fifty yards from the main trail on our return hike. “So that’s where Cook was cooked,” Roger declared, too tired to care. He continued up the steep path without us. Cliff and I scrambled over the rough lava for a closer look. The local historical society had restored the site in 1928, setting Byron’s oak post in concrete, laying a new plaque under glass, and adding a gate. The plaque was now gone, the gate rusted and almost off its hinges. But the post survived, a flagstaff with no flag.

  There wasn’t much else to see, just a tumbling rock enclosure with a few shrubs struggling through the rubble. Cliff pulled weeds from between boulders in a vain effort to tidy the site, but gave up after a few minutes, his shirt soaked with sweat, his hands black with lava. Since arriving in Hawaii ten days before, he had spent hours at museums and libraries in Honolulu, and on the Big Island, vainly searching for more clues about the fate of Cook’s remains. “I felt like I had a mission to lay him to rest,” he said, slumping on a rock. “Now I don’t know what else to do.” He looked toward the cliffs above the bay, filled with caves that once served as sacred graves. “If he’s up there somewhere, I’m content.”

  I sat down next to him and gazed out at the scene. Perched on a bluff, the temple site offered a commanding view of wide-open ocean and part of Kealakekua Bay, with a glimpse in the far distance of the sacred “place of refuge.” There were no snorkelers or kayakers cluttering the vista: almost no sign of humanity as far as the eye could see. I looked at the wooden post and thought back to all the Cook monuments I’d visited: imperial statues, ugly cairns, grandiosely inscribed obelisks. Somehow, this humble pillar of ship’s oak, sturdy and lone, seemed the most eloquent and appropriate memorial of all.