Riding in the rental car shuttle bus to the Kona Airport, we met a couple who had stayed in the town of Capt. Cook and had kayaked across the bay to his Memorial. They made some comment about how nice it was that a town had been named in Cook’s honor and a memorial constructed to him after he was done in so wrongly by the locals. I joked that they must not have cared too much about him if they still won’t build a road to his Memorial. Back home I wondered about what really had happened to Cook and found that his was indeed a bad luck bad timing story. The following is an excerpt from wikipedia:
“Cook returned to Hawaii in 1779….Cook’s arrival coincided with the Makahiki, a Hawaiian harvest festival of worship for the Polynesian god Lono. Coincidentally the form of Cook’s ship, HMS Resolution, or more particularly the mast formation, sails and rigging, resembled certain significant artifacts that formed part of the season of worship. Similarly, Cook’s clockwise route around the island of Hawaii before making landfall resembled the processions that took place in a clockwise direction around the island during the Lono festivals. It has been argued… that such coincidences were the reasons for Cook’s (and to a limited extent, his crew’s) initial deification by some Hawaiians who treated Cook as an incarnation of Lono….
After a month’s stay, Cook got under sail again to resume his exploration of the Northern Pacific. However, shortly after leaving Hawaii Island, the foremast of the Resolution broke and the ships returned … for repairs. It has been hypothesised that the return to the islands by Cook’s expedition was not just unexpected by the Hawaiians, but also unwelcome because the season of Lono had recently ended…. In any case, tensions rose and a number of quarrels broke out between the Europeans and Hawaiians. On 14 February at Kealakekua Bay, some Hawaiians took one of Cook’s small boats. Normally, as thefts were quite common in Tahiti and the other islands, Cook would have taken hostages until the stolen articles were returned. Indeed, he attempted to take hostage the King of Hawaii, Kalaniʻōpuʻu. The Hawaiians prevented this, and Cook’s men had to retreat to the beach. As Cook turned his back to help launch the boats, he was struck on the head by the villagers and then stabbed to death as he fell on his face in the surf. Hawaiian tradition says that he was killed by a chief named Kalanimanokahoowaha. The Hawaiians dragged his body away. Four of the Marines with Cook were also killed and two wounded in the confrontation.”
So Cook rolls in and rolls out as a god but when he’s forced to return due to a boating accident, suddenly he’s a no clothes emperor and they do him in. Moral of the story – sometimes it’s better not to be considered a god. That and trying to take someone’s king as a hostage is never a good idea either.
