The University of Chicago Magazine April 1995
In January 1778, sailing from Tahiti on a search for the Northwest Passage, Captain James Cook's two ships made the first European contact with the Hawaiian islands. To the Hawaiians, though, Cook was no ordinary sea captain: A series of coincidences between his arrival and their own religious traditions led to the belief that Cook was a form of Lono, a deity celebrated in the New Year's festival during which he arrived. In a return visit, on the shores of Hawai'i Island, the same belief contributed to Cook's death, and the Cook-Lono connection has been a staple of Hawaiian history ever since.
But did the Hawaiians really see Cook as a god, as Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and others have maintained? Or is that explanation merely the ethnocentric invention of Westerners, ascribing to Hawaiians a notion that the native people were, in fact, far too rational to believe?
Gananath Obeyesekere presented this alternative in his award-winning 1992 book, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Obeyesekere, a Princeton anthropologist, argued that Lono was simply a name that Hawaiians gave Cook, a mortal with the status of a chief. Obeyesekere also challenged another "myth": The famous British navigator was not an enlightened explorer but, during his final voyage, a man of violence akin to Cortés and the conquistadors.
If Captain Cook embodied the dark side of Western imperialism, wrote Obeyesekere, his accomplices-at least in their symbolic destruction of Hawaiian culture-are his modern-day interpreters, a group headed by Oceania scholar Sahlins, chair of anthropology at Chicago.
Indeed, Obeyesekere aimed much of his criticism at Sahlins' 1980s research on Cook. That work, he said, depended on "uncritical readings" of historical texts-including some of "blatant unreliability"-and inaccurate and misleading use of quotations. The result, claimed the Sri Lankan scholar: Rather than illuminating the Hawaiians' experience, Sahlins, a Westerner, has perpetuated Western myths.
Sahlins has not taken the accusations lying down. Published this month by the U of C Press, How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example reveals what he calls Obeyesekere's own inaccuracies and appeals to political fashions. But the book, he says, is more than a rebuttal of scholarly details. Rather, larger issues spurred Sahlins to write what he calls "a defense of the possibility of anthropology."
That general case builds from the example of Cook and Lono, starting with the correlation between Cook's visits-briefly in January 1778, and again beginning in November 1778-and the four-month Hawaiian season known as the Makahiki. Marking the return of Lono, a god associated with the winter rains, fertility, and the New Year, the Makahiki includes a month-long celebration in which a wooden icon of the deity is carried clockwise around each island's coast.
In the fall of 1778, Cook's ships passed by Maui, then started a clockwise circumnavigation of Hawai'i, the archipelago's largest island. Seen from shore, the ships' masts and white sails resembled the Makahiki sign placed on the beach to signify the time of Lono's circuit. And, as Sahlins notes, "The first man on board from Hawai'i, in Maui, came on board the Resolution and said, `Where's our Lono?'-before he'd even seen the Europeans or Cook."
Though Hawaiians distinguished between forms of the gods and the gods themselves, Obeyesekere, says Sahlins, does not: "He invents the notion that I say, or that I claim Hawaiians say, that Cook is the god, as opposed to a manifestation of the god." In fact, he adds, embodiments of Lono included "pigs, thunder, rain, and innumerable kinds of fish."
They also included several kings. The Makahiki ritual, explains Sahlins, reenacts historical battles between these Lono-kings and kings embodying a rival god-and, at another level, mythic battles between gods and men. The Lono-kings often ended up as sacrifices.
On Cook's second visit, says Sahlins, he became an unwitting actor in the Makahiki story. At each landing, he was welcomed, fed, anointed with coconut oil, and given gifts of small pigs-all, notes Sahlins, "part of the standard ritual for greeting" Lono's icon when it came ashore. These rituals were documented almost exclusively by Europeans, in shipboard journals-which include transcriptions of Hawaiian phrases-and in oral histories of Hawaiians compiled later by missionaries.
As a source of how Hawaiians actually saw Cook, however, Obeyesekere describes this record as "an embarassment to ethnography." Sahlins believes that's going too far. "You can't say that every time a Hawaiian opens his mouth and says something that it's the European who wrote it who said it," he says. "In that sense it's just as imperialist as anything else."
As the Makahiki season ended in February 1779, Cook's ships left Hawai'i, but returned a week later after suffering storm damage. Post-Makahiki, writes Sahlins, the Hawaiian chiefs now perceived Cook's presence as "sinister"-a violation of the Lono story in which man conquers the god. Frictions escalated until Cook, attempting to retrieve a stolen longboat, tried to take the king hostage. Instead, says Sahlins, "he evoked the anger of some two or three thousand people" and was stabbed, beaten, and killed.
One might wonder how the Hawaiians could confuse a strange white man with one of their gods. This, writes Obeyesekere, goes against "practical rationality"-a universal quality, he says, that Westerners think is theirs exclusively and beyond the grasp of "savages."
Sahlins counters that interpreting cultures through such universals erases what is unique to each group. He concedes, "Com-mon sense says Cook didn't speak Hawaiian, he didn't look Hawaiian, he was a foreigner, and so on." But the Polynesian religion, on the other hand, believes that "gods come from foreign places, the speech of the gods is indecipherable, and the gods take all kinds of forms."
"We can understand other societies in their own terms," Sahlins asserts. The alternative "is defeating for anthropology, and it's not true-not any more true than that you can't know another language."-A.C.
Question: Captain Cook's brother Charles was among the landing party. We did
the islanders let him go?
Answer: (highlight it with your mouse:) [ TOO MANY COOKS SPOIL THE BROTH ]
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