How To Kill A God: The Myth Of Captain Cook Shows ... - The Guardian

In a type of neoclassical painting one might call The Apotheosis of X, the dead hero is bundled up to heaven by a host of angels, usually in a windswept tumult of robes, wings and clouds. A crowd of grieving mortals watches from below as their hero becomes divine. It’s a celestial scramble: in Rubens’ sumptuous Apotheosis of James I, heaven is chaos and James looks terrified at having arrived.

In Barralet’s Apotheosis of Washington, the dead president has his arms outstretched in a crucified pose, while Father Time and the angel of immortality bear him up to heaven. In a mid-1860s Apotheosis, a freshly assassinated Lincoln joins Washington in the sky, and clings to him in a tight hug. In Fragonard’s Apotheosis of Franklin, the new god reaches back to Earth with one hand while a stern angel, grasping his other hand, drags him upward.

In 1785, in a Covent Garden theatre, a spectacle premiered depicting Capt James Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific. During the final scene of Omai, or A Trip Around the World, at the words “Cook, ever honour’d, immortal shall live!” an enormous oil painting descended from the ceiling – Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Apotheosis of Captain Cook, commissioned for the occasion. Cook is carried up to heaven by the angels Britannia and Fame, but his gaze is directed back at the vertiginous earth, where ships and canoes are facing off in Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay. His expression is queasy and his eyes seem to plead: “Don’t drop me!”

Cook had been a revered figure among British seamen. “Wherever he goes he plants English gardens,” noted a Sri Lankan anthropologist, not without some disgust. Cook’s ship was an ark, heavy with sheep, cattle and potted plants, ready to domesticate any savage land he spied. Whenever he took possession of a new South Pacific island for the crown, Cook would sow seeds and set loose pairs of animals “almost in a loving fashion”. Among his crew, Cook was allegedly adored as a father, who cared deeply for his sailors’ health, and rarely lost a man. In England, he was renowned as the navigator who determined the boundaries of the habitable world, and was praised for his humane conduct in dark, faraway waters.

But on his third voyage, on the quest to find the Northwest Passage, Cook had begun to drown in some unseen, interior deluge. He sank into a black mood, lost touch with reality and inflicted punishments on his crew at the slightest whim. He paced the deck and flew into rages that the sailors called heivas, after a Tahitian stomping dance. He spread terror across the islands, torching entire villages and carving crosses into natives’ flesh in revenge for petty crimes. Even before he became a god, Cook had staked out the true space of divinity: violence, of the arbitrary kind. After weeks at sea, as supplies of food and water began to run low, his ship, the Resolution, sighted a paradisal shore. Rather than landing, Cook insisted, for no reason at all, that they keep sailing, interminably, around the coast. As the unhinged captain circled the island, the year turned from 1778 to 1779. Eyes watched from the beach.

On 17 January, the Resolution cast anchor at last in a black-sand bay and a crowd of 10,000 gathered to await it. Five hundred canoes, laden with sugar cane, breadfruit and pigs, glided up to the ship. Histories narrate that for the people of Hawaii, the arrival of Cook was no less than an epiphany. “The men hurried to the ship to see the god with their own eyes,” wrote the 19th-century Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau. “There they saw a fair man with bright eyes, a high-bridged nose, light hair and handsome features. Good-looking gods they were!” An elderly, emaciated priest went on board the Resolution and led the deities ashore. Thousands fell to their knees as Cook passed by. The priest led the captain to a thatched temple, wrapped Cook in a red cloth and sacrificed a small pig to him, as the people recited lines from the Hawaii epic Kumulipo, a creation myth.

According to the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, among others, Cook’s arrival marked an extraordinary coincidence. A ritual known as the Makahiki was taking place on Hawaii at the time, in which the god Lono is said to reappear from the distant land of his exile, and to seize power over the Earth from the king, for a period of time. As it circled the island in a clockwise direction, the Resolution had inadvertently traced the path of the effigy of Lono as it was borne in a procession around the coast. The idol is made of a pole and crosspiece with white cloth hanging from it, resembling a sail. And Cook, as if following the script of a myth he could not have known, had landed in the bay said to be the god’s home. His sailors reported that the captain was hailed variously as Lono, Orono, Rono, Eroner – “a Character that is looked upon by them as partaking something of divinity,” the ship’s surgeon related, echoing a biblical phrase describing Christ. Another word used to greet Cook was akua, a Hawaii term that was translated as “God”.

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The Hawaiians fashioned a special idol in Cook’s honour, recorded the sailor Heinrich Zimmermann, but using “white feathers instead of red”. The mariner John Ledyard wrote that the natives “observed that the color of our skins partook of … the white from the moon and stars”, and concluded that the strangers must have some connection with the heavenly bodies. The white men remained on the island for three weeks. They dismantled part of the temple at Hikiau for firewood, and turned the rest into an observatory housing their astronomical equipment, which they would take out, now and then, to stare up at the sky. Each day the priests ceremoniously presented the British with a barbecued hog. The people would gather all the fruits of their land – sweet potatoes, coconuts, bananas and taro – for these gods from a heaven where food had run out.

Can one become trapped, unaware, inside another’s myth? During the Makahiki festival, after the Lono effigy has sailed around the island, a ritual is performed known as kali’i, meaning “to strike the king”, in which Lono and the king fight a theatrical sham battle. According to Sahlins, Cook continued, unwittingly, to perform the Makahiki script. On 3 February, the Resolution departed Hawaii to continue its explorations in the north, yet was struck by a severe storm and forced to turn back. When the British anchored again in Kealakekua Bay, eight days after they had departed, a fog of suspicion and hostility settled over the island as the people attempted to discern the strangers’ reason for returning. The tension soon erupted into violence; two Hawaii chiefs were killed, and Cook decided to take the king, Kalani‘ōpu‘u, hostage. When the captain waded ashore, hundreds of warriors fell upon him with iron daggers and clubs.

Following Cook’s death, the captain was accorded the traditional rituals for a vanquished chief. His corpse was dismembered, his flesh roasted and his bones separated and portioned out, with his lower jaw going to Kalani‘ōpu‘u, his skull to somebody else, and so on. Among Cook’s sailors, who had fled back to the Resolution, “a general silence ensued”, wrote the officer George Gilbert; it was “like a Dream that we could not reconcile ourselves to”. Two priests rowed to the ship with a bundle containing a large chunk of the captain’s thigh.

Along with their charred offering, they brought with them “a most extraordinary question”. They wished to know when Cook would return to the vessel “and resume his former station”. Would it be in – a very Christlike estimate – “three days’ time?” The two men “shed abundance of tears at the loss of the Erono”, Lt James King recorded, and they asked, “what he would do to them when he return’d”. On shore, other islanders “asserted that he would return in two months & begged our mediation with him in their favor”, according to Mid James Trevenan. The German sailor Zimmermann recorded a prophecy: “The god Cook is not dead but sleeps in the woods and will come tomorrow,” as translated by an interpreter. Over the following years, the idea seemed to persist that Cook would resurrect.