HEY, PISTOLERO

At certain moments in Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, one feels that one has stepped into the middle of a barfight that’s been running for decades and shows no sign of stopping.

This barfight has a number of different sub-fights (Captain Cook: heroic scientific explorer or wicked vanguard of British imperialism?), but because this book is focused on Captain Cook’s final voyage, it deals most prominently with one question: did the Hawaiians actually believe that Cook was a god?

Arguing for the affirmative: Hawaiians had a well-established cultural tradition of men who were also gods. Their own high kings were considered gods, so it would not have been a stretch to look at the leader of an expedition from overseas and go, “Hmm, maybe this guy is also a god.” When Hawaiian historian Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau gathered evidence from Hawaiian elders in the mid-1800s, they did indeed tell him that they had all believed (at first) that Cook was Lono. Mark Twain learned the same thing when he visited in the 1860s. The crews of Cook’s two ships also believed that Cook had been acclaimed as a god.

Arguing against: saying the Hawaiians believed Cook was a god makes them look gullible and naive, and plays right into paternalistic, racist, imperialist beliefs about “primitive natives.”

Readers, I would like to suggest a third way. What if Cook was Lono?

When he walked into that ceremony in Kealakekua Bay, accepted the homage of the Hawaiian people, and ascended the tower where the priests spoke to the gods, he became Lono. He stepped into the role of Lono; he was inhabited by Lono. One may quibble about the exact mechanism, but the basic fact remains that the Hawaiians were right.

But in becoming Lono, Cook stepped directly on the path to his own destruction. In his own cultural terms, he had committed blasphemy, broken the first commandment: thou shalt have no other gods before me. In inhabiting the role of a man who was also a god, he had committed a crime against the One True God.

But, at the same time, he was stepping into a role that every Christian child knows. In Cook’s belief system, there was once a man who was God, and He died a violent death.

(In fact, one of Cook’s men argued that Cook died a genuine martyr, accepting his death - “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” - but he was almost certainly trying to cover his own ass for cowardice. He was in a boat just offshore when Cook died, and rowed away rather than rowing in to help.)

In the Hawaiian belief system, meanwhile, Cook’s identity of Lono did not make his death inevitable - yet. As long as he inhabited Lono’s role properly, he was safe.

But first, Cook outstayed Lono’s season, which lasts for four months and then departs. But Cook did not depart punctually. Great tension had grown up before he left.

And once he left, storms forced him back to Kealakekua. He arrived months before the time for Lono’s return, at which point the Hawaiians began to wonder: was this man Lono after all? Now both cultures were aligned, and Cook’s death became inevitable. The theft of one of Cook’s launches led to a confrontation on the beach at Kealakekua, which ended with Cook’s violent death.