Visitors to the island were shown bones they were told belonged to Cook, the legend being that they had been passed on to the man who inherited Kalani‘ōpu‘u’s throne, Kamehameha. And when George Vancouver – a midshipman on Cook’s final voyage – returned to the island in 1793 in command of his own voyage, one of his crew reported that Cook’s bones were revered and kept with Kalani‘ōpu‘u’s own remains at the Hikiau heiau.
The stories brought back to Europe were embellished further still; it was said that during the annual tribute to Lono, Cook’s bones were kept in a wickerwork basket covered in red feathers and carried around the island.
News of Cook’s death reached Tonga in the earliest years of the nineteenth century. The English sailor William Mariner, who had been spared by the Tongan chieftain, Finau, in his attack on the British privateer Port au Prince was told that the Hawaiians were shocked they had been able to kill Cook as they believed him to be superhuman.
WILLIAM MARINER (1791–1853), English Sailor
His bones . . . they devoutly hold sacred. They are deposited in a house consecrated to a god, and are annually carried in procession to many other sacred houses, before each of which they are laid on the ground, and the priest returns thanks to the gods for having sent them so great a man.
So were these stories about Cook’s posthumous veneration on the island of Hawai‘i fact or fiction? We’ll likely never know, but they must be considered in light of the fact that they coincide with the rise of Cook’s legend across the Pacific. And legends have a funny way of perpetuating themselves.
The veneration in which Cook was held in Hawai‘i was undermined and then completely demolished by the American Calvinist missionaries who arrived in the 1820s. As far as they were concerned, Cook’s death was inevitable because any man who had allowed himself to be worshipped as a heathen god would incur divine wrath. The missionaries were also less than keen about the extramarital fornication that had spread venereal diseases amongst the locals. Not to mention, in the wake of the American War of Independence, preaching the American gospel meant shunting aside any lingering attachment the locals might have had to England. Cook was an enduring symbol of Britain and her Empire and all the things the Revolutionaries had fought to drive away from the United States. Cook’s shade could not reside unchallenged on the Hawaiian Islands.
HIRAM BINGHAM (1789–1869), American Protestant Missionary, Hawai‘i
How vain, rebellious, and at the same time contemptible, for a work to presume to receive homage and sacrifices from the stupid and polluted worshippers of demons and of the vilest visible objects of creation.
Given what happened to the Hawaiians soon after Cook’s death, it’s little wonder that today they feel a great deal less positive about his influence on their lives than their ancestors may have.
LANAKILA MANGAUIL
In Hawai‘i he’s known as Captain Crook! We have quite a lot of bitterness towards him in Hawai‘i. There are many stories of how he knew the sicknesses of his crew, yet he allowed them amongst our people. In the fifty years after Cook arrived in the late 1700s, we lost 90 per cent of our population due to the diseases his men introduced.
The European diseases brought to the islands decimated the population, making it next to impossible for the Hawaiians to defend themselves against the colonial incursions that came later.
LILIKALĀ KAME‘ELEIHIWA
There are many bad feelings about Cook in Hawai‘i. Some people say that he didn’t know his men were going to give the natives venereal disease and tuberculosis so that wasn’t really his fault. But he did know what was going to happen when he allowed them to go ashore and stay overnight. When those sailors got on shore they weren’t just looking for water. He knew the diseases were going to be passed on to us. So by the time we get to 1893 when the American military invaded, there were only forty thousand Native Hawaiians left. The collapse of the population caused us to lose our sovereignty. Easy pickings, right? Now, we’ve been under American military occupation for over a hundred years.
It was the same story across the Pacific. Was it Cook’s fault? He has certainly become a symbol for a much bigger narrative of dispossession and loss in the region. But some indigenous people of the Pacific have a different way of looking at things.
NAINOA THOMPSON, Master Navigator Hōkūle‘a
As a sailor, as a captain and as a scientist, Cook was amazing. His record matters to us because Banks and the others on board were good observers, and they left us important records. So one part of me is grateful for that. I do think that unlike many of the other explorers, Cook did try to be more respectful than the others. The brutality of some of the other European explorers is just absolutely unbelievable. There’s no way that we can forgive that. But Cook was a different breed.
TRACY TAM SING
Personally, I have no bad feelings against Cook. If it wasn’t Cook, eventually someone else would have come here, so, I have nothing bad against the man. The only thing that bothers me is that people say he discovered Hawai‘i, but it’s hard to discover a place when there are people there already.
What’s certain is that Cook’s observations led him to reach conclusions about the Polynesian people that wouldn’t be acknowledged by European scientists for many years to come. By accommodating ideas that were inconceivable to many of his peers – that the Polynesians were accomplished navigators who were deliberately and effectively finding their way from island to island around the Pacific – Cook knew instinctively what the indigenous people of Polynesia never questioned. They were one people.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR MARK D. MCCOY
As an anthropologist I can’t divorce thinking about Cook from thinking about his impact on what otherwise was a rather insular society. It was like dropping a rock into a pond of still water. I find the Hawaiian reaction to him much more interesting than I do Cook himself. But he certainly was unparalleled in terms of his exploration of the Pacific and his keen observations. Cook looked at all these places in Polynesia, and he described them as a nation. It’s taken a long time for archaeology, cultural anthropology, historical linguistics and biology to put those puzzle pieces together and deduce where Polynesians came from. But, to his credit, Cook saw that right away.
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The treasure house of knowledge that Cook encountered in the Pacific is today being resurrected and celebrated across a broad and ever-growing segment of the population, beyond the domain of the indigenous people who were custodians of their culture during periods of brutal repression.
SAM NEILL
The centuries that followed Cook, I think it’s fair to say, were at best dismal for the Polynesian people. But everywhere I’ve been in the Pacific there’s been evidence of a vigorous revival of Polynesian culture.
A powerful symbol for the cultural renaissance that’s taking place within indigenous communities in Polynesia is the great voyaging canoe, the Hōkūle‘a.
NAINOA THOMPSON
The genesis of Hōkūle‘a began in the late 1950s. Academics and researchers here in Hawai‘i worked together to draw up a design of the canoe using all the historic information we had – it was launched on 8 March 1975 and it changed my life. It was the first voyaging canoe to be in Hawaiian waters for many hundreds of years. But there were no Native Hawaiian master navigators . . . or anywhere in Polynesia. So they set off in 1976 on the first voyage in six hundred years along the old road that’s paved on the ocean, and thirty-one days later they arrived in Papeete. Seventeen thousand met them on the beach – over half the population of the country.
Scuppering the theory of ‘accidental drift’ forever, the Hōkūle‘a was navigated from Hawai‘i to Tahiti using traditional techniques learnt from a master navigator from Micronesia. This voyage spawned the rebirth of Polynesian navigation and Nainoa Thompson would become the first Native Hawaiian to master traditional navigation in the modern era and sail from Hawai‘i to Tahiti and back.
SAM NEILL
I
think the first time I saw the Hōkūle‘a was on set one day for Paul Cox’s Molokai: The Story of Father Damien, when I was wearing a Victorian costume and I wasn’t needed so I walked down to the beach. There was no one else around . . . just cliffs, and no sign of any human habitation at all. then this beautiful craft with two red sails appeared, and I thought, ‘Have I slipped in time somehow, or am I having some kind of fantastical mental event?’ It was the most surreal thing that’s ever happened to me. And I just watched as the ship disappeared over the horizon towards Oahu.
It’s impossible to overstate how momentous this was for the indigenous people of Polynesia. As the Hōkūle‘a crisscrossed the Pacific, it brought together kin from all corners of the Polynesian triangle and celebrated their shared heritage.
MATAHI TUTAVAE, Tahitian Voyaging Society
Our ancestors got it right. That’s why they were one people, even though the ocean is so huge. We were able to communicate and go back and forth. Now, we need to reconnect to our cousins of the Pacific because we have common stories, even though we’re so far apart from each other. We were just one people back then. But unfortunately with colonisation we went in different directions. But thanks to the canoes and the voyaging societies and the Polynesian cultural renaissance, we’re coming together again.
The voyaging canoe is a tangible – and impressive – embodiment of Polynesian navigational superiority and cultural continuity.
NAINOA THOMPSON
Hōkūle‘a restored Native Hawaiian dignity and pride. We were on the edge of everything being lost. That’s extinction. We know what it feels like; we know what it smells like. The healing needs to come from us. This was an ocean country. The ocean is not what divides us – it connects us. Hōkūle‘a has helped us heal ourselves and helped us believe in ourselves. You see indications that we’re going to teach our children differently – that our culture does matter. All of a sudden there’s this new idea, which is also an ancient idea – we were the greatest voyagers and the greatest explorers of our time. This has changed everything. Today, there’s twenty-seven voyager canoes and 2500 active sailors in Polynesia. The restoration of Hawaiian culture is not just about honouring the past – it’s about shaping a better world for our children in the future. I owe almost everything to Hōkūle‘a.
LILIKALĀ KAME‘ELEIHIWA PhD
I’m optimistic that my students are not here because their parents tell them they have to be here, in fact most parents will say, ‘What are you going to do with a degree in Hawaiian studies?’ Well, our students go on to become professors, they go on to become lawyers and doctors and leaders of the nation. I feel like we’ve such wonderful young people, the ancestors are walking the earth again.
The Hōkūle‘a and a new generation of master navigators are dismantling and dismembering Cook’s legacy and unpicking the lines he drew across the map of the Pacific.
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Beyond the story of the repression and resurrection of Polynesian culture is the Pacific Ocean itself.
SAM NEILL
One of the things we’ve been talking about is the Pacific as an idea – as a place, yes, but also the importance of protecting that place because it continues to sustain us just as it’s sustained the people who were here for thousands of years, and the way it sustained Cook and his crew as they travelled around.
On voyages across the Pacific, the sailors on board the Hōkūle‘a are unwilling witnesses to the environmental damage being inflicted upon this great body of water by human activity.
NAINOA THOMPSON
This planet is an island and the ocean drives life. It drives our climate, our chemistry, our wildlife, our biology. It is a microcosm of what humanity is supposed to become. Our focus now is on the health of the oceans, because the oceans are a mirror of what happens to us on land, and what happens on land is a mirror of what happens in the ocean. This is a blue planet – it’s 70 per cent water, and it gives us life. If we change it too much, I think we’re in trouble.
In the far northern reaches of the ocean, the ice wall that hampered Cook’s efforts to find the North-West Passage is retreating, and with it the native flora and fauna that allowed indigenous populations to maintain a connection to a traditional lifestyle. As the region becomes more accessible, a tussle is underway in the Arctic – and, in the southernmost reaches of the Pacific, in the Antarctic – over control of the resources that can now be exploited.
The Great Barrier Reef, off Australia’s north-eastern coast – which had the honour of being the one natural hazard that came close to ending Cook’s career – is on its last legs. Rising water temperatures are responsible for bleaching thousands of kilometres of the reef, transforming the vivid colours of one of the great natural wonders of the world into a barren, bone-white graveyard of dead and dying coral.
Plastic pollution in the Pacific has reached catastrophic levels. Caught at the centre of the ocean’s vast circuit of rotating currents between Hawai‘i and California is a garbage patch of inconceivable scale. Its heart is estimated to measure one million square kilometres, with its outer edges covering a further three and a half million square kilometres. That’s a sodden rubbish dump that’s almost half as big in area as Australia. Add to this grim tally the nuclear material that has been leaching into the Pacific from Japan’s ruined Fukushima nuclear plant, and the environmental vandalism caused by the massive factory ships that scoop everything that moves out of the ocean to feed the world’s appetite for fresh fish, and it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the Pacific Ocean has entered a new, and perilous, stage of its evolution.
SAM NEILL
What I do know is we live in precarious times, and unless we start looking after this planet better – the only one that we have – this beautiful body of water will surely rise up and drown us all. So let us ensure for our grandchildren’s sake, and for their grandchildren, that this never happens.
Amongst the most vocal of all the activists fighting to save the Pacific are the Polynesian people who have called this ocean their home for many thousands of years. As they unite in this common cause, bonds of kinship are strengthened, and the idea of a Polynesian coalition of First Nations now seems possible.
LILIKALĀ KAME‘ELEIHIWA PhD
In the 1870s, our King wanted to make an alliance between Tahiti and Samoa and Hawai‘i so we could keep foreigners from taking over our countries. There were too many European and American interests in the Pacific that wanted to make sure they had control over those places . . . so they thought he was an uppity king. But it was a great idea and it’s still a good idea.
As the Cook scholar Nicholas Thomas has pointed out, the encounter between Cook and the people of the Pacific was a two-way exchange. As Cook was engaging with people and places that were unknown to Europeans, he was also introducing Europe and its ways to the people of the Pacific – for better or worse. The Enlightenment doctrine that prevailed in Cook’s day saw nature as subservient to humankind. Science provided a means for bringing the ocean and its custodians to heel to exploit the Pacific’s bountiful resources. This principle has done untold damage to the region. Hints in Cook’s journals suggest he had a sense of some of the dangers that were looming, though there was little he could have done about them. And as is so often observed, others were on the way regardless – the Pacific’s days of isolation from Western influence were at an end; Cook was just symptomatic of a bigger reality. But the fact remains that so many things Cook and his crew marvelled over disappeared in the years following his arrival in the Pacific.
Whether or not you hold Cook personally responsible for the social, cultural and environmental desecration that followed in his wake, there’s no denying the fact he has proved useful as a symbol of colonisation and subjugation for the movement that’s seeking to redress these wrongs.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR MARK D. MCCOY
Is it fair to hate Cook? He’s got a lot to answer for if we want to judge him by modern standards. But when we’re lookin
g at historical questions – do you use the morality of his own society or the societies that he’s visiting? I think that’s a very difficult question to answer.
Undermining Cook’s legacy is a way for the original inhabitants of the Pacific to overturn the status quo and reassert their own, ancient, claims over their lands while recalibrating relationships with the non-indigenous people who settled there.
If history teaches us one thing, it’s that revolutionaries need a common enemy.
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Cook has been widely acclaimed as the greatest European maritime explorer of all time. There’s no doubt he was at his most potent when he was on board one of his ships, and his many years at sea seemed to leave him floundering on dry land. He became addicted to the shifting landscapes, extreme climates and near-death experiences he encountered on a daily basis in the Pacific. For Cook, to stand still was to die – not for him a cushy and wellrenumerated retirement amongst other old sailors, sitting by the fire exchanging salty tales from a lifetime of adventures. It seems only fitting that his life ended in the place that came to define him.
Steeling themselves after the death of their commander, the men on board the Resolution and the Discovery headed north from Hawai‘i, determined to complete Cook’s mission and discover whether or not the North-West Passage existed.
Here, the amicable exchange they’d had with the Russian navigator on Unalaska, Gerasim Izmailov, paid off. The letters of introduction Izmailov had given Cook proved to be of vital importance. The two ships dropped anchor in Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka, where they remained from April to June 1779. The governor, Magnus von Behm, generously agreed to provision Clerke to the tune of 2256 rubles without expectation of payment. As a gesture of gratitude, Clerke gifted Behm a collection of cultural artefacts from Oceania and north-west America, and a map showing Cook’s new cartographic observations. This important ethnographic collection ultimately found its way from Kamchatka to St Petersburg; today it’s housed in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.
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