by Tony Horwitz
The lieutenant suggested to Cook that the marines form a defensive line by the water, and the captain agreed. The crowd let the marines pass, but they also started collecting spears and rocks. “An Artful Rascal of a Priest,” Phillips said, began “singing & making a ceremonious offering of a Coco Nut to the Capt.” The lieutenant suspected this was meant to distract the English from “the Manoeuvres of the surrounding multitude.”
At this point, Cook abandoned his plan of taking the king hostage, telling Phillips, “We can never think of compelling him to go onboard without killing a number of these People.” The stage seemed set for a tense but peaceful withdrawal. Cook “was just going to give orders to embark,” Phillips said, when a man in the crowd “made a flourish” with an iron dagger and threatened to throw a stone at the captain. Cook fired the barrel of his gun loaded with buckshot.
This caused no injury: the man wore the thick woven mat used by Hawaiian warriors as protection in battle. But the gunfire, a novelty to Hawaiians, incited the crowd. Islanders began stoning the English and trying to stab them. Cook shot again, killing a man. Then he ordered the marines to fire and called out, “Take to the Boats.”
The marines unleashed a volley into the crowd, but before the English could reload, the Hawaiians surged forward, dipping their battle mats in water, in the apparent belief that this would protect them from the flaming muskets. Sailors in the boats, a short way offshore, started firing into the crowd as well. “The business was now a most miserable scene of confusion,” reported Phillips, who was stabbed and beaten with a stone. “All my People I observ’d were totally vanquish’d and endeavouring to save their lives by getting to the Boats.”
Phillips had lost sight of Cook, but the men aboard the pinnace and launch saw the captain standing with his arm outstretched, apparently beckoning the boats to come closer to shore. The pinnace’s men rowed in. But the launch’s commander, Lieutenant John Williamson, either misunderstood Cook’s gesture or ignored it, and ordered his men to row farther out.
Cook struggled to the shoreline: a ledge of lava, covered in shallow water. He was about ten yards from the safety of the pinnace, if only he could swim.
Strange as it seems today, swimming was a skill that most eighteenth-century mariners lacked. Some had a superstitious dread of the sea. Others may have been discouraged by their superiors from learning to swim, lest this enable them to desert. Cook would have had few if any opportunities to swim during his childhood on Yorkshire farms. He spent his first two decades at sea plying the frigid waters of the German Ocean and the North Atlantic. Nowhere in the many accounts of his voyages is there a single mention of the captain swimming. Samwell and two of Cook’s officers stated plainly that he could not swim.
“Captain Cook was now the only Man on the Rock,” Samwell wrote. The captain stepped into the shallow water, one hand shielding the back of his head from stones, the other clutching his musket. The Hawaiians appeared hesitant to pursue him. “An Indian came running behind him, stopping once or twice as he advanced, as if he was afraid,” Samwell wrote, “then taking [Cook] unaware he sprung to him, knocked him on the back of his head with a large Club taken out of a fence.”
Cook staggered, fell to one knee, tried to rise. Another man rushed up and stabbed the captain between his shoulder blades with an iron dagger. Cook toppled into knee-deep water and the crowd fell on him in a frenzied group assault. “They now kept him under water, one man sat on his Shoulders & beat his head with a stone while others beat him with Clubs & Stones,” Samwell wrote. Then they hauled Cook’s body onto the rocks and continued the stabbing and beating. “As soon as one had stuck him another would take the Instrument out of his Body and give him another Stab.”
It was just after eight o’clock in the morning, an hour or so since Cook’s departure from the Resolution, and only minutes since the skirmish had erupted. Cook and four marines lay dead: the others, all of whom were badly wounded, had struggled to the pinnace, one pulled aboard by his hair. Seventeen Hawaiians had also been killed, including four chiefs; many more were injured. It was, by far, the bloodiest encounter of Cook’s long Pacific career. And it occurred so suddenly and unexpectedly as to seem unreal to Cook’s men, many of whom had witnessed the fight from the boats, or through spyglasses from the ships anchored in the bay.
“A general silence ensued throughout the ship, for the Space of near half an hour,” wrote George Gilbert, a sailor on the Resolution. “It appearing to us some what like a dream that we cou’d not reconcile our selves to for some time.” This collective shock gave way to grief, “visible in every Countenance,” Gilbert added. “All our hopes centered in him; our loss became irrepairable.” Samwell wrote that the men returning in the boats “cryed out with Tears in their Eyes that they had lost their Father!”
It isn’t clear whether they meant “Father” in the religious or familial sense. Perhaps both. Just a few weeks before, the ship’s crew had seemed “mutinous” to Cook. Clearly, sailors often bristled under his stern command; James Trevenen, an admiring midshipman, frankly labeled him “the despot.” Yet the captain’s towering presence in sailors’ lives was a source of security as well as terror. Cook might be a wrathful god at times, but he also seemed all-powerful in his skill at leading his “People” through a watery wilderness of gales, reefs, ice fields, and encounters with hostile natives. He must have seemed to his men a talisman, indestructible, a commander whose decade-long triumph over peril brought glory not only to himself but also to those he carried home safely.
Trevenen put it best. “I (as well as most others) had been so used to look up to him as our good genius, our safe conductor, & as a kind of superior being,” he wrote of Cook’s death, “that I could not suffer myself, I did not dare, to think he could fall by the hands of the Indians over whose minds & bodies also, he had been accustomed to rule with uncontrouled sway.”
The death scene was all the more shocking for its many ironies. Cook, who had often excoriated his men for violent intemperance toward natives, succumbed to precisely that, marching ashore with a menacing but inadequate force and opening fire at the most charged moment possible. A Quaker-influenced child of the Enlightenment, Cook died with a gun in his hand, having just killed a man. The dagger that felled him was forged from one of the iron spikes that Cook himself had ordered for his ships before leaving England, “to exchange for refreshments” and “to be distributed to [natives] in presents towards obtaining their friendship.” The final irony was that Cook died, not in warlike New Zealand or Niue, but on an island where he’d been greeted as a god, and where he’d felt so secure that until the final day he had ordered his men to go ashore unarmed.
So what went wrong? The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins offers a ritualistic analysis. The ships’ initial sail from Kealakekua Bay roughly accorded with the end of the Makahiki season, marking Lono’s departure and the symbolic return of royal sovereignty. When Cook returned to the bay, he was now out of sync with the ritual cycle, and confounded Hawaiians’ prior understanding of him. Also, the Makahiki traditionally closed with a mock battle in which the king reappropriated the land from Lono. Curiously, the day before Cook’s death, an island warrior asked the captain if he was a kanaka koa, or fighting man. Cook displayed his badly scarred hand as evidence that he was.
It is also possible that islanders had come to doubt the divinity of Cook and his men: first with the death of the sailor Watman, then when the damaged Resolution limped back into the bay. Gods weren’t supposed to suffer these sorts of setbacks. Nor did gods feel physical pain. In the early nineteenth century, Hawaiian historians collected stories about Cook’s death. One recorded the surprise felt by a warrior named Kalanimano, allegedly the first to strike Cook. “Lono cried out because of the hurt. Then Kalanimano thought, ‘This is a man, and not a god, and there is no wrong. So he killed Lono.’”
English journals suggest a much more prosaic explanation for the sudden change in islanders’ demeanor: put simply,
the sailors had worn out their welcome. It was no small matter to keep several hundred men supplied with food, water, and sex. James King, the most perceptive man aboard, wrote that sailors’ ravenous appetites, their frantic barter for provisions, and the absence of women on the ships all suggested to Hawaiians that the English were in exile from their own starved land.
“Our quick return seemed to create a kind of Jealousy amongst them with respect to our intentions,” added George Gilbert, “as fearing we should attempt to settle there, and deprive them of part if not whole of their Country.” Some of this jealousy may have been sexual. King observed a chief beat his wife after she briefly took the arm of an English officer. Later Hawaiian stories also told of islanders becoming agitated by their women’s affection for sailors.
Finally, in the view of several crewmen, there was simmering anger over the English having carried off and burned the fencing around the temple, as well as taking idols. According to the American marine John Ledyard, such “sacrilegious depredations,” and other English actions that “oppressed” islanders, made Hawaiians heartily sick of their visitors and unhappy to see them return. “Our former friendship was at an end,” Ledyard wrote, “and we had nothing to do but to hasten our departure to some different island where our vices were not known, and where our extrinsic virtues might gain us another short space of being wondered at.”
This is an unusual and incisive remark—if trustworthy. Beaglehole, a very discerning judge of sources, regards Ledyard as an unreliable and extremely prejudiced observer. But the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere draws on Ledyard and other diarists to posit a darkly provocative thesis. Not only was Cook never Lono; he was Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, “the civilizer who loses his identity and goes native and becomes the very savage he despises.” In Obeyesekere’s view, Cook’s actions in Hawaii betrayed a heart of darkness that was always present—most conspicuously on the third voyage, when Cook flogged natives, cut off their ears, and burned islanders’ homes and canoes. Obeyesekere also alleges a cover-up by Cook’s contemporaries and biographers to conceal damning evidence of the captain’s true character.
One doesn’t have to accept Obeyesekere’s argument—and I don’t; it seems far too selective, ignoring the many instances of Cook’s humanity—to recognize the discomfiting questions it raises. Cook was a diligent diarist, and his clerks made copies of his journals while on board. By his third voyage, Cook was famous, and both he and his men knew that the captain’s words were destined for wide publication. It therefore seems very strange that he left no record of his last month in Hawaii, or that, if he did, his journal entries vanished.
Beaglehole cites evidence that portions of Cook’s writing from the third voyage mysteriously disappeared after reaching England. It seems possible, as Obeyesekere suspects, that these missing pages exposed thoughts and actions so disturbing that someone made sure they were “lost,” just as Cook’s tirade about his ship’s condition was later deleted from the official account of the voyage.
Cook’s crewmen also may have exercised self-censorship. It would have been especially impolitic to disparage the captain following his death. Instead, many sought a scapegoat in Lieutenant John Williamson, commander of the launch during the fray at Kealakekua Bay. A number of crewmen claimed that Cook could have been saved if the men in Williamson’s launch had rowed in closer to shore and kept up a steady fire.
Several crewmen later challenged Williamson to duels. One sailor even claimed that after a lodge of Freemasons was formed on the homeward journey, Williamson bribed his fellow masons with brandy “to promise, as brothers, that they would say nothing of his cowardice when they came to England; so, by this trick, he saved his bacon.” Curiously, Williamson went on to become a naval captain—only to be court-martialed after a Napoleonic battle for “disaffection, cowardice, disobedience to signals and not having done his duty in rendering all assistance possible.”
Charles Clerke, who took command of the Resolution after Cook’s death, conducted an on-the-spot inquiry, mainly by debriefing Molesworth Phillips, the marine lieutenant who had been by Cook’s side. Clerke didn’t assign any blame to Williamson. He also seemed at pains to exonerate Hawaiians. “The unhappy catastrophe which befell us I do think appears by no means the effect of premeditated intention,” he wrote, “but of an unfortunate string of circumstances tending to the same unlucky point, one action irritating another till they terminated in the fatal manner.”
Sadly, the “unhappy catastrophe” was far from over. The Resolution’s damaged foremast, and its astronomical gear, remained on shore. Also, the Hawaiians had carried off the mangled corpses of Cook and the four marines. Clerke couldn’t sail from Kealakekua Bay without attempting to recover them. As for the stolen cutter that had led to the fracas, it was never recovered, having been torn apart for its treasured iron.
February 14, 2001. 0600. Breakfast room of the King Kamehameha Hotel. Empty except for Roger, Cliff, and me, plus a few elderly insomniacs spooning bran flakes. I pulled a crumpled checklist from my pocket.
“Bible?”
“Aye,” Cliff replied.
“Beaglehole?”
“Got it,” Roger murmured.
“Booze?”
“What’s left of it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
I sounded more in command than I felt. We’d gone to sleep only a few hours before, following a rum-soaked rant by Roger. At the last minute, he’d balked at our plan: a dawn hike to Cook’s monument, where we’d commemorate the captain’s death at the precise hour it occurred on the same day in 1779. Just before our planned anniversary, we’d learned that the hike followed a long trail so steep and arduous that running up it was part of a local ironman competition.
“I won’t make it, I’ll be an embarrassment,” Roger said as we’d climbed into bed. “I’m already an embarrassment but I’ll be more of one. I’m not an ironman, for chrissakes. I’m a few years from needing an iron lung.”
“The ironmen run it,” I reminded him. “We’re just going to walk down. And we have all day to get back up.”
“You two walk,” Roger replied. “I’ll ride down in the motorboat again. But I won’t pick you up—just like Williamson in the launch. I’ll shout ‘Sorry, lads, can’t make it in!’ and motor off. We’re interested in verisimilitude, aren’t we? My last name’s Williamson. It’s important that I show tremendous cowardice. My namesake has to be dishonored in all his dishonor. I’ll fuck it up completely, I promise.”
Roger had finally talked himself to sleep, rum glass still in his hand, and was jolted awake by the hotel’s robotic wake-up call. Now, an hour later, he sat in the car, red-eyed and mute. Cliff glanced at his watch and said chirpily, “At just about this moment two hundred and twenty-two years ago, Clerke was telling Cook that a Hawaiian had pinched the Discovery’s pinnace.”
“Pinched whose penis?” Roger grumpily replied. “Anyway, it was a cutter.” We drove in silence, passing an oddly named funeral home: Dodo Mortuary. “You can take me there after I collapse on the hike,” Roger said.
The sun was just starting to edge above Mauna Loa as we parked in high grass beside the trailhead to Kealakekua Bay. Cliff shouldered a large duffel bag, the contents of which he hadn’t disclosed. Roger toted the rum bottle. I hoisted a small knapsack. At first, the going was easy and pleasant, the path wide and carpeted with sodden grass. High reeds rose on either side, with pastures and lychee orchards just beyond. A cockerel crowed. Cliff paused to study purple flowers still wet with dew. We could have been out for a ramble in the English countryside.
Then, after about half a mile, the path became steep and strewn with boulders, and the air turned sultry. We had to pick our way slowly, goatlike. The view opened up, a bare and forbidding expanse of black, wavy lava. “A petrified sea,” Mark Twain called it. After five days in this strange terrain, I’d begun to see that not all lava looked alike. Some of it formed ropey piles, like giant cow pies. Other bits were jagged, v
ery rough on the feet. Much better were the smooth patches, black and almost billowy. I’d read that these variations had to do with the different temperatures at which lava cooled.
“On the whole a pleasant Spot,” Samwell wrote of the surrounds of Kealakekau Bay, “tho’ it must be owned that there is no part of it or near it where a Man can walk with any pleasure on account of the ragged Lava hurting the feet.”
It took us an hour to reach the plain beside the bay, where the village of Ka‘awaloa had once stood. Here, the trail led through a grove of gnarly kiawe trees, an imported mesquite; it had almost supplanted the palm trees that grew here at the time of Cook’s visit. Lichen covered the lava, and coconut husks littered the path, giving off a dank, ripe odor. The woods ran right up to the shore and the small patch of ground enclosing the Cook monument.
Roger and I collapsed beside the obelisk while Cliff went into a frenzy of maintenance, doing more in half an hour than the site’s caretakers had probably done in a year. He picked up trash: flip-flops, Coke cans, food wrappers. He pulled up long grass and patched the seawall with stones. Then he went to work resurrecting a toppled sign, pushing it upright and hefting lava boulders to wedge around its base. Red-faced and sweaty, he stood back to admire his work. “We put them up, they knock them down, we put them up again,” he said.
Cliff hoisted his duffel bag and slipped behind the monument. He emerged in a clean white shirt and a Captain Cook Society tie, navy blue with Cook’s face below the knot. “I brought this shirt and tie ten thousand miles for this occasion,” he said, pressing out wrinkles with his palms. Cliff reached in his duffel again and brought out the Gideon Bible. “Shall we, gentlemen?”
Roger and I stood up and faced the obelisk. As Cliff held the Bible open, reading glasses perched on his nose, he looked rather like a country curate. He began with Exodus 32, in which God reprimands Moses for allowing his people to worship a golden calf. Then Cliff turned to Exodus 34. “You shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images,” Cliff read, “for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous god.”
