Captain James Cook encountered the Polynesian islands on his travels around the word to discover a northwest passage. He hopped around the islands a bit, only to depart pretty quickly after his first encounters. His men were tantalized by the islands and asked Cook to return to the islands for an extened stay in te winter of 1778.
They landed for their extended stay in Kealakekua Bay, near the modern-day town named, of course, Captain Cook, on the western side of the Big Island.
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| Captain James Cook |
Cook happened to arrive on Hawaii on the first day of the season of the deity Lono. Lono is the deity of, among other things, fertility, agriculture, and peace. His time is thus dedicated to such things. It occurs during the wet season and is therefore a time of plenty of food, and of ali'i tax collection. It is a time when the warriors retire to the mountains, so as to completely negate the possibility of warfare. It is a time of hula and procreation and feasts.
The Hawaiians that encountered Cook did not think that his arrival in his grand ships on the first day of Lono's time was incidental. They believed that he was a manifestation of Lono. So, clearly, it was a grand time for Cook to first land on the idyllic Hawaiian Islands: he was taken to be a deity, and thus respected as such, and he and his men lived out their first months on the island during a time of feasts and sex without warriors hanging around.
Cook was aware that in other places that they had visited, his men had spread syphilis amongst the native populations through copulating with the native women. He thus ordered his men to not have sex with any of the native women on Hawaii; he was very much struck by the beauty and serenity of Hawaii and the generosity of its people and didn't want to sabotage such a place through such a nasty disease. To ensure that his men did not sleep with native women during the night he ordered them to sleep on the ships during the nights. However, his men, wildly seduced by the beauty of the Hawaiian women and their sensuous hula dancing often snuck off of the boat at night to join the luaus on shore and fulfill their lustful desires.
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| Common artistic depiction of Lono (usually in tiki form) |
As it was, the Hawaiians were not happy to see Cook return. His second arrival at Kealakekua Bay occurred at a time that was no longer marked by Lono, but instead his brother Ku. Ku is the god of war and politics, and during his time the warriors are definitely in occupance in the villages. Furthermore, the people of Kealakekua Bay were confused by the return of Lono during the time of Ku. They took it as a bad sign. They did not want him there.
Furthermore, during Cook's short absence from the area the symptoms of the syphilis that spread from Cook's men to the Hawaiian women began to manifest; another really bad sign to the Hawaiians that Cook's presence was not good news.
There were a series of scuffles between Cook's men and the Hawaiians. At one point some Hawaiians made it onto the Discovery and took some pieces of the ship. There is an argument that the Hawaiians would not have necessarily seen such an act as aggressive or wrong. Sharing was a common practice amongst the Hawaiian commoners, and so the idea of theft was largely unknown. Nonetheless, Cook decided that the appropriate reaction would be to attempt to kidnap a powerful chief of the area as hostage for the missing pieces of the ship.
This did not go over well with the Hawaiians, and they fought back. This skirmish is what led to Cook's death. Although Cook only incurred small injuries from the fighting, it disabled his ability to walk in the water, and he drowned. He was only in three feet of water. The great explorer James Cook did not know how to swim.
Upon Cook's death the fighting stopped. Cook's men wanted to take Cook's body back to England for a proper Christian burial; the Hawaiian's wanted to keep Cook's body, as they believed it to be Lono's and thus full of powerful mana. They wished to consume Cook's body to obtain his mana. Eventually, much to the dismay of Cook's crew, the Hawaiian's relented only one of Cook's legs to them for burial. The Hawaiians kept the rest.
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| Modern-day Captain Cook Monument in Kealakekua Bay |
Of course, Cook's men returned to England and told everybody of the new islands of paradise they had found in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Even though Cook was relatively late in the game of discovery (he discovered Hawaii so late that the United States already existed at that point,) he had made a truly valuable discovery indeed.
Of course, many Hawaiians, even today, wish that he had never discovered their arhchipelago. Hawaiian society was far from being idyllic, but at least it was their own.
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| Kealakekua Bay, looking north towards the monument |
**Most of this story I told from memory, as I learned it in my Native American Religions and Traditions class in college. I also gained some additional facts from this site: http://www.hawaiihistory.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ig.page&PageID=266
**First photo from antarcticconnection.com
Second photo from tuckerstikis.blogspot.com
Third photo from aloha-hawaii.com
Fourth photo is my own
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