Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Sadly, the damage was already done. Many of those who paddled out to the ships had swollen penises and other signs of disease, evidently spread from the islands Cook had visited eleven months earlier. Still, Cook barred any contact. “Young Women came along side,” lamented Samwell, “making many lascivious Motions & Gestures, but as we lay under the forementioned restrictions in respect to our intercourse with them we could not as yet conveniently admit them.”

  As if this were not torment enough, Cook also cut back on sailors’ alcohol. He wanted to conserve what remained of the ships’ spirits for his next Arctic probe. So he ordered a decoction brewed from island sugarcane, and declared it, characteristically, “a very palatable and wholsome beer.” This provoked a reprise of Cook’s dispute with his men over walrus meat in the Arctic.

  “Not one of my Mutinous crew would even so much as taste [the beer],” Cook fumed in his journal. When he ended all brandy rations as punishment, his “turbulent crew” went so far as to write him a letter, complaining not only about the grog rations but also about their scant food allowance. Cook was oddly unaware that his men were still subsisting on the short rations he’d imposed in the north. He agreed to restore full fare, but held the line on alcohol. A midshipman wrote that the captain regarded the crew’s letter “as a very mutinous Proceeding.” The captain also told the crew that if they didn’t like sugarcane beer, “they might content themselves with Water,” and “that in the future they might not expect the least indulgence from him.”

  Cook, it seems clear, was losing command of his judgment, his temper, and his crew. His next journal entry, a rambling passage covering an entire week of sailing, provides further evidence of his disintegration. In heavy seas, part of the Resolution’s rigging gave out. This prompted the captain to blast the quality of his “cordage and canvas” and other “evils,” and to blame the Navy Board—headed by his longtime patron, Sir Hugh Palliser—for providing him with inferior goods.

  In writing this, Beaglehole observes, Cook surely “knew what he was talking about.” But the captain’s public and accusatory language—which Palliser later made sure was deleted from the voyage’s published version—was so far from the deferential tone Cook usually adopted toward his superiors that it signals, once again, how much his mood had soured.

  On the last day of November 1778, the ships reached the largest of the Sandwich Islands, called by the natives O’why’he. “To the great mortification of almost all in both ships,” James King wrote, Cook again refused to land. Instead, he slowly circled the island for an agonizing six weeks, trading with natives in canoes and sailing through the heaviest seas he’d ever encountered in the Tropics. This discomfited not only the men—“We were jaded & very heartily tired,” King wrote—but also the island women who had come aboard despite Cook’s prohibition. “The motion of the ships by no means agreed with our poor friends,” wrote the surgeon’s mate, William Ellis. “In the midst of their amorous intercourse,” the women “overflowed their unfortunate swains, with a stream not the most pleasing.”

  Rounding the island’s southern tip, the ships coasted a lee shore unlike any the English had seen before. Ellis described it as covered in “large tracts of a dark and almost black matter, which we at first supposed was the soil which the natives had dug up and manured; but we afterward found it was the product of a volcano.” Cook, short of water, finally decided to land. On January 16, 1779, he sent his master, William Bligh, to probe a wide bay. Bligh reported that it offered safe anchorage and fresh water. As the Resolution and Discovery sailed into the harbor, a fleet of a thousand canoes swarmed around the ships, filled with people singing and rejoicing.

  “I have no where in this Sea seen such a number of people assembled in one place,” Cook wrote. “Besides those in the Canoes all the Shore of the Bay was covered with people and hundreds were swimming around the Ships like shoals of fish.” One crewman estimated the crowd at 15,000. So many climbed aboard the Discovery that the ship heeled.

  The natives also treated Cook with even greater awe than those who had greeted him a year before. A kahuna, or priest, presented him with a pig, wrapped him in red cloth, and murmured an incantation. Then he escorted the captain and several of his men ashore. “As soon as we landed,” Cook wrote, the priest “took me by the hand and conducted me to a large Morai,” or open-air temple. “Four or five more of the Natives followed.”

  With these words, James Cook’s pen falls silent, and remains so for the last month of his life. Why this faithful diarist suddenly stopped writing upon his dramatic arrival in Hawaii—or, if he didn’t stop, what happened to his journal’s last pages—is one of the many mysteries wreathing the captain’s stay at Kealakekua Bay.

  The man at the boat-charter company sounded puzzled by my request. “You don’t want to fish,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Or scuba-dive.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Snorkel? Watch whales?”

  “That’d be nice, but really we just want to do the one thing and come back.”

  I sensed a shrug at the other end of the phone line. When we met Pat Cunningham at a boat ramp the next day, I understood why. His skiff, Striker, carried two 140-horsepower outboards, a sonar “fish finder,” and an arsenal of lethal-looking truncheons and gaffes. Pat normally took out deep-sea anglers from Japan or California. Hiring Striker for a few hours of touring the coast was like taking an armored personnel carrier to the corner store for a quart of milk.

  Still, his boat seemed the best option for the reconnaissance we had planned. Kealakekua Bay, twenty miles south of our hotel, was now a state marine sanctuary. We wanted to approach it for the first time by sea, as the English had done, and briefly scout Cook’s death site without deflating the aura of our anniversary commemoration a few days later.

  In the event, Pat Cunningham proved an excellent guide. Like many whites in Hawaii, he was a refugee from the mainland who had reinvented himself on the islands. Nothing about this deeply tanned, wind-creased fisherman in board shorts and reflector sunglasses bespoke his actual background: farm boy from Zelienople, Pennsylvania. He also seemed completely at home describing the weird coastline we skimmed past, alternately lunar and lush, and utterly unlike anything in the continental United States.

  “That’s the cinder cone of an extinct volcano,” Pat said, pointing at a rust-colored hillock. “And see that path winding down the mountain like an overgrown ski trail? That’s an ancient holua slide.” Centuries ago, Hawaiians created steep ramps made of smoothed lava stones, then covered them in slippery fronds and raced down the mile-long chutes on wooden sleds, sometimes launching into the sea.

  If they tried the sport now, they’d land in a golf course. As we continued down the coast, we saw another links and gated golf community under construction, with sprinklers watering grass strips pasted onto the lava. Pat said that runoff from the piles of imported topsoil had already washed into waters that had once been classed “double-A pristine,” among the clearest and cleanest in the world. There was also a risk that the pesticide-laden silt might wash into the ostensibly protected waters of Kealakekua Bay.

  “I don’t understand,” Cliff politely interjected, adopting the tone of his day job as a bureaucrat in England, where history and open space are zealously protected. “Why haven’t state planners put a stop to this?”

  “Planners?” Pat guffawed. “This is America, bud. We don’t plan.” Under Hawaii’s zoning laws, golf courses were regarded as “agricultural.” The developers had also hired many locals to work on the project, defusing and dividing the opposition, which included not only environmentalists but also native Hawaiians who were upset that the golf course was disturbing ancient, unmarked graves.

  Cliff was still silently fuming when we rounded a point and entered Kealakekua Bay. I’d purposefully avoided looking at photographs of the bay or reading tour books so that I could see the place, as much as possible, through the eyes of Cook and h
is men. Kealakekua’s essential outline hadn’t changed much since the eighteenth century. The mile-wide, half-moon bay was bordered by a soaring cliff and anchored at either end by a flat peninsula. But none of the English drawings or writings about the bay had prepared me for the 180-degree majesty of the scene.

  In the distant background loomed the sloping volcanic bulk of Mauna Loa (“Long Mountain”). The cliff rising from the bay was a sheer thousand-foot wall of lava, half a mile across, plunging so sharply to the water that the shoreline was impassable. The cliff’s face was multihued, separated into bands of black and bluish-gray and rust and chocolate, and pitted with lava tubes, miles-long cavities formed as the crust of the molten rock cooled. Miraculously, this lava precipice sprouted life: plugs of feathery beige grass that looked at a distance like shredded wheat spilled from the ledge above.

  At the cliff’s base, a strand line of bleached coral speckled the black lava boulders. And the water lapping against the shore was a color I’d never seen before, mingling patches of violet, ink, and royal blue, yet startlingly clear. Pat said visibility in the bay’s water often reached more than a hundred feet. Spinner dolphins frolicked off the boat’s bow, poking their bills above the surface before arcing out of the water, one right after another. It was easy to see why Hawaiians had named this place Kealakekua, meaning “Pathway of the Gods,” and used the caves in its honeycombed cliffs as sepulchers for their highest chiefs.

  I was jolted from my reverie by Cliff. He grabbed my arm and pointed at the bay’s northern peninsula, on which stood a monument to Cook. “What’s happening over there?” he shouted. I’d momentarily forgotten all about Cook’s death site. From English paintings, I’d gotten the impression that it occupied center stage at Kealakekua, and that the obelisk marking the site would dominate the bay. In reality, the scale and grandeur of Kealakekua were so overwhelming that a casual visitor could miss the monument altogether, if not for its color: a sliver of white, silhouetted against the black-lava shoreline and brilliant green foliage covering the north end of the bay.

  As we motored closer, I saw what Cliff was shouting about. A copper-colored youth, shirtless and shoeless, crouched at the obelisk’s base, wielding what looked like a piece of charcoal and a can of spray paint. We could just make out the words GO HOME on the obelisk’s pedestal.

  “The bastard’s besmirching the monument!” Cliff yelled. Rushing to the bow, he looked as though he might grab one of Pat’s fishing truncheons and hurl himself ashore.

  “Just hold on a minute,” I said, grasping Cliff’s arm. The journalist in me wanted to interview the graffiti artist before Cliff attempted some weird reversal of the violence that occurred on this site in 1779.

  As we pulled up to the jetty by the monument, the message became clear. On one face of the obelisk, large block letters spelled WHITEY GO HOME. On another side was scrawled:

  C R O O K

  A

  P

  T

  Rotten fruit had been thrown against the monument, its pulp splattered like birdshit against the white surface. The monument’s inscription had also been crudely hacked away so that the word “discover” was now almost illegible, and the two O’s in “COOK” formed eyes of a cartoonish face sketched around the captain’s name.

  As I stepped ashore, the youth looked up at me and frowned. He appeared to be about twenty, Gauguin-handsome, with long brown hair, brown eyes, and a white shell necklace strung across his sinewy brown chest. “Idiots,” he said. “They must have come in the night.” Then he returned to his painstaking labor, chipping at the WHITEY GO HOME with a piece of lava and spray-painting over it. “We don’t want tourists to get the wrong impression about Hawaii,” he said.

  Cliff paced on the jetty: face tight, eyes slitted, his rage directed as much at me as at the young man. “It’s all right,” I called out. “Someone else did it. He’s cleaning it up.”

  Cliff’s face went slack and he came up to us, looking suddenly penitent. “I want to thank you,” he said, reaching out his hand to the young man, whose name was Gary. Then he sloped off with Roger to walk along the beach.

  Gary worked as a lifeguard on a catamaran that brought snorkelers to the bay. The vessel’s captain had spotted the graffiti and dispatched Gary to clean it up. I asked him why Cook made someone angry enough to deface the monument.

  Gary didn’t answer. I sensed I’d been too abrupt. This was America, but I was also still in Polynesia, where people tended to be wary of blunt questions from white strangers. Gary chipped and sprayed for a minute, then lit a Kool and sat on the pedestal.

  “A lot led up to that killing,” he said. “We treated Cook like royalty, like a god, and he stabbed us in the back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He vandalized our holy places and buried his own men there. That enraged people. So anger built up and Cook paid the price.” Gary stubbed out his cigarette. “After Cook came the trashing of our culture. No more hula. No more Hawaiian language. My mother could hardly speak a word of it. What I know of the language I learned in school.”

  It was at school, too, that he’d learned most of what he knew about Cook: how the captain had played God and let his men infect all the women with syphilis. “This was probably the healthiest place on earth before his ships arrived,” Gary said. “Cook said ten thousand or more people lived around this bay. And how many now? Maybe a few hundred, most of them haole.” “Haole” was the Hawaiian word for Caucasian: it translated as “without breath,” possibly a reference to Europeans’ inability to speak the native tongue.

  Gary’s version of Cook’s visit startled me. Not because it was negative; I’d come to expect that in the Pacific. Rather, I was struck by how closely he echoed the view of Cook that had been promulgated by New England churchmen more than 150 years ago. The first American missionaries who arrived in Hawaii in 1820 were only a generation removed from the Revolution, and the War of 1812 had ended just a few years earlier. The missionaries were Anglophobes, and they were determined that America rather than Britain establish dominion over the islands. So, along with fire-and-brimstone Christianity, they created a Satanic caricature of Cook, based in part on the writings of John Ledyard, the American marine on Cook’s third voyage. A patriotic New Englander who had trained at Dartmouth to become a missionary, Ledyard returned to America after Cook’s death and published an unflattering account of the captain’s behavior in Hawaii.

  The basics of the missionaries’ denunciation ran as follows. Cook was a genocidal libertine who (according to one tale) slept with a princess and let his men make prostitutes of Hawaiian women, infecting them with the “loathesome disease.” He spat on Hawaiian belief by desecrating their temples. Worst of all, he blasphemed the Almighty by allowing himself to be worshipped by idolators as a false god.

  “Sin and death were the first commodities imported to the Sandwich Islands,” wrote the Reverend Sheldon Dibble, who compiled much of the anti-Cook dogma in an 1838 island history. Cook, Dibble concluded, “was punished by God with death.” Dibble’s history became an enduring island textbook. Later writers cribbed from him and expanded on the list of Cook’s sins, even blaming the captain for introducing the mosquito to Hawaii. Judging from my chat with Gary, this view hadn’t changed much.

  Still, Gary didn’t approve of vandalizing Cook’s monument. “I’m part haole, part Hawaiian, like most people here,” he said. “I can’t disown half of me. I just wish my Hawaiian half hadn’t gotten fucked over so badly.”

  He hoisted a plastic garbage bag to clean up around the monument, leaving me to study the obelisk’s scarred inscription: IN MEMORY OF THE GREAT CIRCUMNAVIGATOR CXXXXXN JXXEX XXXK R.N. WHO DXXXXXXRED THESE ISLANDS ON THE 10TH OF JANUARY A.D. 1778 AND FELL NEAR THIS SPOT ON THE 14TH OF FEBRUARY A.D. 1779. The obelisk had been erected by Britons living in Hawaii in the 1870s, and was later ringed with eighteenth-century cannon, their muzzles raised and joined by a chain. Admirers aboard visiting ships had also added commemor
ative plaques and signposts along the jetty. Many of these had been toppled or pried out.

  I found Cliff and Roger sitting on a rock a short way down the shore. Cliff gazed out to sea. Roger eyed a nearby beach where a woman was tying up a kayak. “Tall, leggy, stud in her navel, probably a tattoo under that string bikini,” he said. “A naughty girl, just my type.” Then two portly men appeared and helped her pull the kayak ashore. “Oafs!” Roger shouted. He stood up, irritated, and slipped on the sea-slick lava, barking his shin. “Cook wasn’t killed at all,” he groused. “He tripped on one of these rocks and hit his head. The Hawaiians were blameless, but they had to take the fall because Cook was clumsy.”

  I asked Cliff how he felt about finally seeing Cook’s death site. Before he could answer, Roger blurted, “Cliff was weeping while you talked to that bloke.”

  “Was not.”

  “Were too. You had a tear in your eye. You took your glasses off to wipe it away.”

  “That was sweat.” Cliff paused. “Okay, I was upset. First I was choked up with indignation at that lad. Then I felt guilty for having those bad thoughts about him. Then I saw all those plaques left by people who came here before me. I had a hard swallow and needed solitude.”

  There wasn’t much chance of that now. Bright, jellybean-colored kayaks crowded the bay, and snorkelers flippered all around us—nothing like the graceful outriggers and swimmers who had swarmed the English ships “like shoals of fish.” We returned to the jetty and climbed back on Pat’s boat. As we motored out of the bay, humpback whales arced out of the sea, spouted, and then “fluked,” their tails fluttering for a moment as they dove deep in the water. A flat patch of sea—a “footprint,” Pat called it—remained visible for several moments after the whales went down. Roger and I scrambled to the bow for a better view and called back to Cliff to join us.