by Tony Horwitz
The next day, I woke up late to find Cliff composing an ode about Kealakekua Bay. “It’s not Coleridge,” he said, showing me the last stanza:
Whilst high above the sea-birds call
And o’er their leafy plain,
The cliffs maintain their silence
On what secrets lie within.
Cliff was scheduled to fly home the next day, a little ahead of us. Both he and Roger seemed content to lounge around the hotel. But there was one more person I wanted to see, a man I hoped could answer some of the questions about Cook’s death that still nagged at me. Herb Kawainui Kane was a noted painter of Hawaiian historical scenes and a one-man engine of the islands’ cultural renaissance. Among other things, he’d helped design and sail a lateen-rigged outrigger from Hawaii to Tahiti and back, to demonstrate how Polynesians had spread across the Pacific by celestial navigation. Best of all, he took a particular interest in Cook and lived in Captain Cook, on a bluff overlooking Kealakekua Bay.
“On a clear day, I can see the monument from here,” Herb said, as we settled on his verandah. On a foggy, voggy day like this one, the view was still spectacular. Beneath us spread Herb’s garden and orchards, a panorama of hibiscus, macadamia, avocado, coconut palm, and coffee. Brilliant saffron finches swooped from tree to tree. This was the edge of Kona’s coffee country, a twenty-mile slope where morning sun, afternoon cloud, and almost daily rain created a micro-climate ideal for producing mild, aromatic beans.
Herb didn’t look quite like anyone I’d met in Hawaii. Seventy-two, tall, with a full head of dark hair, he wore pressed white trousers, a white sweater, and deck shoes—almost formal attire in a place where most people went around in shorts and sandals, and donned a loud aloha shirt if they felt like dressing up. Herb’s features, Asian, yet large and rugged, were also unusual.
“I’m chop suey, like everyone else here,” he said, when I asked about his lineage. His father, part Hawaiian and part Chinese, had left the island as a young man and worked his way around the mainland, ending up in Wisconsin, where he met Herb’s Danish-American mother. This polyglot background, and Herb’s own time on the mainland—he’d attended the Art Institute of Chicago and worked in the city for many years as a graphic artist—informed his paintings of Hawaiian historical scenes.
“It’s a little like method acting,” he said. “I want to get inside the heads of Hawaiians and Europeans at the time of first contact, try to think like they did.” Herb found it relatively easy to do this with Cook and his men, thanks to their journals and artwork. Recapturing the mind-set of eighteenth-century Hawaiians was much harder, even though Herb had known many traditional folk during his childhood in a remote valley at the other end of the island.
“Every Polynesian village had what was called a wahanui, or big mouth,” he said. “They were adept at divining what an interviewer wanted to hear and feeding it to them. A lot of anthropologists have fallen for that, believing everything they’re told. And a lot of Hawaiians today want to sanctify anything that comes down through their own culture. But you can’t take everything at face value.”
English sources could be unreliable, too. Herb opened one of his many books on Cook to a famous watercolor by John Webber, the Resolution’s artist, showing Hawaiians paddling a sail-rigged canoe. What made the work so striking was the men’s attire: weird, medieval-looking helmets crafted from gourd, with eye holes and nose holes, fern crests poking out of the top, and beardlike strips of tapa hanging from the chin. None of these masks had survived to the present day, nor was there any record of them apart from Webber’s paintings and sketches.
Webber’s oft-reproduced image had spawned a contemporary, popularized imitation: cheap little helmets of the same design, made of coconut or plastic rather than gourd. I’d seen them for sale at souvenir shops and hanging from rearview mirrors. Herb said that Hawaiians regarded them as a generic symbol of their culture, and as a lucky charm.
While Herb regarded Webber’s work as an irreplaceable window into eighteenth-century Hawaii, he also brought an artist’s critical eye to bear on the painter. Influenced by the Classical revival in Europe, Webber and other artists tended to endow Polynesians with idealized Greco-Roman proportions. “Too lean, too long in the leg,” Herb said. Later engravings of the work magnified Webber’s distortion, making the men much too big in relation to the canoe’s hull and rigging.
Herb showed me his own rendition of the scene, one of a dozen paintings he’d done of Cook’s visit to Hawaii. He’d corrected the scale and detail of the canoe, reduced the number of men in it, and added bold, high-contrast coloring that was truer to the way Kealakekua Bay looked on a summer’s day. “I was curious,” Herb said, “to re-create what it was Webber really saw.”
Herb had gone to much more meticulous extremes while crafting his masterwork, The Death of Cook, February 14, 1779. Webber’s famed rendition of the same scene included obvious inaccuracies, such as placing the skirmish at the base of Kealakekua’s dramatic cliff rather than on the flat plain near Ka‘awaloa. Webber also substituted a sandy beach for the black lava shelf on which the fighting occurred.
Webber’s image became a model for many later works by artists who hadn’t witnessed the scene, and both painters and writers gradually mythologized Cook’s death into a heroic act of martyrdom. Several crewmen, for instance, later wrote that Cook had raised his arm at the end, not to call in the boats but to halt his men from firing on natives (no one had advanced this notion at the time of his death). One famous painting, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, showed Cook being carried into the heavens above the bay by the figures of Fame and Britannia.
In his own work, Herb stripped all this away like so much bad varnish. He depicted Cook in the canvas pants he’d probably worn, rather than the formal britches and hose shown in most paintings. Herb painted Cook’s dagger-wielding assailants in the brilliant red-and-yellow feathered dress of chiefly warriors. Herb had even contacted Hawaii’s Hydrographic Office to plot moon phases on a computer, so he could estimate the tide at eight A.M. on February 14, 1779. From geologists he learned that the lava shoreline had subsided precisely twenty-eight inches since then. So Herb snorkeled out to study the contour of the submerged lava shelf. Finally, because English diarists described the day as having been sunny, Herb painted Kealakekua with the sharp early-morning shadows it would have had at the instant of Cook’s death.
The result was a historical reconstruction that gave the scene a documentary quality, about as close to the original moment as it was possible to get. Losing myself in the painting’s detail, I felt the same time-travel thrill I’d often experienced when gazing at Civil War photographs. Herb had drawn together the past and present, art and science, the English and native perspective. It was a painterly version of what I’d been struggling to do in my own search for Cook.
Herb brought the same balance and precision to his writings about the captain in books and scholarly journals. On the debate over whether Hawaiians saw Cook as Lono or merely as a potent chief, Herb thought the problem was largely semantic. “There’s no word in Hawaiian for religion or for ‘god’ as we understand it today,” he said. Missionaries, who tried to make sense of Hawaiian belief in Christian terms, mistakenly took the word akua to mean “god,” when it actually conveyed a deeply non-Western concept more akin to “spirit.” Herb believed that precontact Hawaiians had no sense of a separate, supernatural sphere. Rather, akua represented ancestral spirits within nature whose powers were greater, but not wholly different, from those of ordinary men.
In Herb’s view, you didn’t need a Ph.D. in anthropology to understand what happened when Cook became wrathful and threatening toward the king on February 14. “He started the day by firing cannons at canoes and sending out armed boats,” Herb said. “That’s going to get people nervous.” Then, marching ashore with his marines and going up to the king’s house, “Cook does the unmentionable social blunder of all ages—waking someone up. And he sends his underling,
Phillips, in to do it. Very bad form.” Later, as tensions rose by the water, Cook blundered again by opening fire. “What he doesn’t seem to understand is that the people around the king are bodyguards, it’s their role to put themselves between the ruler and any potential danger.” The rest, as they say, is history.
This wasn’t a particularly ennobling vision of Cook’s death. But I found it satisfying, like Herb’s paintings. Stick to the facts. Consider both sides. Don’t embroider what’s already a good story. An homage, really, to Cook’s own way of seeing.
Herb brought out a bottle of wine and offered a final thought. In his efforts to get inside the heads of both sailors and Hawaiians in 1779, he’d begun to wonder if the two groups had had more in common with each other than they did with either Europeans or Polynesians today. “Your average sailor, your Jack Tar, was from a farming background, and from a very hierarchical society,” Herb said. “He did what other people told him to do, he lived in fear of his superiors, probably resented them too. He wasn’t a son of the Enlightenment, he was a superstitious, tradition-bound, often violent person.”
Sailors’ religious beliefs and material culture were obviously very different from those of Hawaiian commoners. But in broad human terms, their status and outlook had kinships. “Most of the big changes that define modern life, things like technology and democracy, have come since Cook’s day,” Herb said.
He therefore suspected that contact between the English and Hawaiians might have been richer and more nuanced than we tend to think. “The sex, for instance. I don’t believe it was simply prostitution. In a way, the women were doing sexually what the priests were doing ceremonially with Cook: bringing strangers into their society. And hoping, no doubt, that once the English felt at home they’d feel obliged to reciprocate.”
We watched the sun set over Kealakekua Bay. “To me, a lot of the story is about trying to break down walls, on both sides,” Herb concluded. “It’s a pity we don’t remember it that way.”
Late that night I woke in our hotel room at the King Kamehameha, though it took me a few moments to figure out where I was. I’d spent half my working life on the road and often awakened in unfamiliar places, feeling so dislocated that I’d reach for Geraldine, or walk into a wall thinking it was the door to my bathroom at home. This was an aspect of travel I found both unsettling and exhilarating, as though I’d drifted away from any real mooring in time or place and become a true wandering Jew.
Lying awake, listening to Roger’s rummy snores, I thought about Herb’s parting comments and the chord they’d struck in me. I’d been traveling the Pacific, on and off, for only eighteen months, during which I’d been tethered to home by telephone, e-mail, and hotel TV. I couldn’t even begin to grasp what it had been like to stay continuously at sea for twice that long—and, in Cook’s case, to make such a voyage three times—completely cut off from familiar surroundings, with the strong possibility that you’d never return home. Shipboard routine provided an anchor of sorts, with its bells and watches, dreary rations, and the claustrophobic companionship of other sailors. But there were no women on board, no old people, no children. For Cook and his men, the life they’d known in England must have come to seem very unreal.
I tried to imagine, then, how the men felt each time they came ashore in Hawaii or Tonga or Tahiti, however strange these societies may have first seemed to them. Fresh food, terra firma, and female flesh were, no doubt, the main attractions of land. But there must have been something else: a desperate need to connect, for lack of a better word. They must have felt it particularly after their long, brutal sail to the frigid, scantly settled Arctic. Pacific islands became a home away from home, however tentative. The friendships the English formed with islanders, their eagerness to learn the local language, their tattoos, and their fascination with native customs and rituals—all this spoke to a desire to feel at home and fit in.
Islanders, for the most part warm and hospitable and curious, reciprocated. Tahitians adopted individual crewmen as tiao, or friend, a complex relationship that included the exchanging of names (hence, chiefs became Toote while Cook assumed their names). The English didn’t completely understand this custom or the reciprocal obligations it implied. But as Herb said, the two peoples may have felt a kinship, or forged one, in a way that was hard to appreciate now, influenced as we are by the horrors that resulted from first contact, and by the prevailing notion that all viewpoints are “culturally determined,” creating an almost unbridgeable divide between Western and non-Western societies. “A sort of Intimacy & dependance on each other began to come on,” the astronomer William Wales wrote of the Resolution’s brief stay during the second voyage at the New Hebrides, where the English and islanders had initially exchanged only arrow shots and musket fire.
For all the violence and exploitation that occurred during Cook’s voyages, what struck me in the end was that the English, and those they encountered, had managed to communicate and, in most cases, to get along. The two groups came from opposite ends of the globe, usually knew nothing of each other, and often had not so much as a single word in common. Yet they almost always made themselves understood: with a smile, an embrace or nose-press, the presentation of a plant as a sign of peace, the offer of a gift. Hostile or derisive gestures—not just the brandishing of weapons, but the baring of buttocks and other taunts—also seemed to have universal meaning.
Among the many examples of this Esperanto, one encounter on the third voyage illustrated it best. Seeking a safe harbor in Nootka Sound, on the coast of today’s British Columbia, the English found themselves surrounded by natives in canoes who appeared more alien than any they’d ever confronted. “It will require the assistance of ones imagination to have an adequate Idea of the Wild, savage appearance & Action of these first Visitors,” wrote James King, the most charitable observer aboard the Resolution. The natives’ faces were “bedaub’d with red & black Paint & Grease, in no regular manner,” King wrote; they had “small black Eyes void of fire” and an “expression of the countenance unmeaning” and some wore “frightful” masks of distorted bird and animal faces. At the sight of the English, they worked themselves “into the highest frenzy,” King added, shaking rattles and “uttering something between a howl & a song.”
Cook calmly offered beads and medals to a man standing in one of the canoes. “He threw into the Ship in return some dried herrings,” King wrote. Then “a man repeated a few words in tune, & regulated the meaning by beating against the Canoe sides, after which they all join’d in a song, that was by no means unpleasant to the Ear.” Sensing that they’d gratified the English, the natives repeated the song.
“We judg’d they might like our musick, & we ordered the Fife & drum to play a tune,” King wrote, as dusk fell on Nootka Sound. “They Observed the Profoundest silence, & we were sorry that the Dark hind’red our seeing the effect of this musick on their countenances. Not to be outdone in Politeness, they gave us another song, & we then entertain’d them with French horns, to which they were equally attentive.”
The English ended up staying almost a month in Nootka Sound, with “no serious quarrels,” King wrote. They engaged in a lively trade with coastal dwellers, dined on wild garlic and spruce beer, and compiled a lexicon of several hundred words and phrases, including “What is your name?,” “friendship,” and “Admiration or applause.” King and other crewmen continued to enjoy natives’ music and came to admire their exceptional skill at wood carving, as well as the boldness and fierce “independency of spirit” that had initially struck the English as bellicose.
To the young lieutenant, on his first Pacific voyage, all this was noteworthy. Cook, who had witnessed many such scenes during almost a decade of exploration, didn’t bother to mention the first meeting at Nootka Sound in his journal. But his actions, and the words he wrote about many other such encounters, reveal the captain’s extraordinary confidence not only in himself, but in the commonality of man.
If there was an ov
erriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature—even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods. No matter how strange another society might at first appear, there were almost always grounds for mutual understanding and respect.
This was a radical notion in eighteenth-century Europe. And it seemed relevant to me more than two hundred years later, at a time when so much of the world appeared perilously divided along ethnic, religious, and ideological lines.
The next day, we drove to the airport to drop Cliff off for his flight back to London. I gave him an awkward hug while Roger joked that Cliff was now a world traveler, obliged to keep exploring. “Hell no,” he said, hoisting his duffel bag. “I’m going back to my secure little hole in England. I may never go anywhere again.”
Roger and I still had twenty-four hours on the island. It was our last day in Polynesia, the end of our long voyage in Cook’s wake. Some part of me still felt restless for new territory. So I cajoled Roger into forsaking a lazy day on the beach and driving to the north end of the island, to a place called the Waipi’o Valley. Herb Kane had spent much of his childhood there, and his paintings of Waipi’o depicted it as a wild and magical place. Waipi’o also had a connection to Cook that I wanted to explore.
We drove away from the sunny Kona coast and into arid, empty ranchland. Then, as we climbed the slope of Mauna Kea—Snowy Mountain, James King called it—the landscape turned wet and cool. Hawaii was really two islands, the leeward side dry and lava-covered, the windward flank fertile and soaked, one of the wettest places in America.