The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific

by Gananath Obeyesekere

Here Gananath Obeyesekere debunks one of the most enduring myths of imperialism, civilization, and the notion that the Western civilizer is a god to savages. Using shipboard journals and logs kept by Captain James Cook and his officers, Obeyesekere reveals the captain as both the self-conscious civilizer and as the person who, his mission gone awry, becomes a "savage" himself.

In this new edition of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook , the author addresses, in a lengthy afterword, Marshall Sahlins's 1994 book, How "Natives" Think , which was a direct response to this work.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology

Hardcover

First published July 1, 1992

About the author

Gananath Obeyesekere was a Sri Lankan anthropologist who was emeritus professor of anthropology at Princeton University and had done much work in his home country of Sri Lanka. His research focused on psychoanalysis and anthropology and the ways in which personal symbolism is related to religious experience, in addition to the European exploration of Polynesia in the 18th century and after, and the implications of these voyages for the development of ethnography. His books include Land Tenure in Village Ceylon, Medusa's Hair, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, Buddhism Transformed (coauthor), The Work of Culture, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, and Making Karma.

Reviews

[James Murphy]

Hawaii was discovered by the legendary British Captain James Cook in 1778. He was on his way north to find the fabled Northwest Passage but had to return to make repairs to his ship. On this return visit he was killed in a skirmish with the Hawaiians. Anthropologists and historians, under the sway of Sir James Frazer's powerful ideas about the dying god myth, have interpreted his death as a ritual slaying of a fertility god. In this exhaustive study Obeyesekere looks at Hawaiian and Polynesian myth in contrast with the assumption that European explorers in general were considered gods to indigenous peoples. He convincingly argues that Cook was celebrated and accepted by the Hawaiian people as a chief but not divinity and exposes the apotheosis of Cook as false. More, Cook's consecration is shown to be the product of European views of Cook's death, his apotheosis being brought about mostly by the European need to explain the loss of a man of Cook's stature by giving it a meaning and significance required by Hawaiians. That need is the origin of myth. In this case, Obeyesekere concludes the need is European rather than Hawaiian while also explaining how Hawaiians of later generations subscribed to the ideas of Cook's being thought divine. Along the way the book gives us a full picture of the history of Pacific exploration in the latter half of the 18th century as well as a detailed narrative of Cook's visits to the islands and a description of the society he found there.

[Katherine Addison]

This is an awesome book. It's about how the death of Captain Cook got reimagined by Europeans, from the journal-writers of his expedition, through the missionaries, to twentieth-century anthropologists, and how those reimaginings strayed further and further from the truth of eighteenth-century Hawaiian culture--and obscured both that and the truth of Cook himself. It is absolutely fascinating. Obeyesekere is tracing how European commentators chose the story they wanted to be true and then mangled and mutilated the evidence until it seemed to be telling that story (he indicts his principal scholarly antagonists for the cunning and misleading use of ellipses--leaving out the bits that you don't want makes everything so much clearer).

Obeyesekere refuses, again and again, explicitly and sometimes with withering sarcasm, the idea that non-Western peoples are naive or childlike or incapable of rational thought or unable to understand metaphors. He shows how the myth of Captain Cook's apotheosis--that the Hawaiians believed him to be their god Lono--is founded not on the behavior or beliefs of the Hawaiians themselves, but on European beliefs--European wish-fulfillment, even--about how white men were regarded by the indigenous peoples of Australia and Polynesia and South America.

Obeyeskere is very present in his work, not merely in that he talks about himself--using his own experiences as examples, explaining how he, a Sri Lankan with no expertise in Polynesian ethnography, came to be writing this particular book--but in that his passion shows. That's unusual (still) for academic books, and I appreciate the hell out of the straightforward assertion that objectivity is a myth.

[Ally M.]

3.5 stars

This was a well written, mostly well argued, and engaging book. However, as I was forced to read this during finals week with a mountain of other work over my head, I did not enjoy it as much as I would have otherwise.

[Catherine]

In European mythology, Captain Cook is often heralded as the embodiment of the Enlightenment Man - rational, humane, intelligent, curious. The relationships into which he entered with Native Hawaiians have been similarly mythologized - Cook, so the story goes, was considered by Hawaiians to be the returning god Lono, treated as a god, and ritually slaughtered at the end of the annual Makahiki festival.

Obeyesekere, to be frank, calls bullshit.

With painstaking attention to detail, Obeyesekere gathers together all the surviving accounts of Cook's voyage to Hawaii - including Cook's own journal where available (much was destroyed), the journals and observations of others on the ships (both written at the time and revised some years later), the official retelling of Cook's voyage (constructed from interviews with a member of Cook's personnel), early histories of the same, and Hawaiian histories of the encounter, written after the arrival of missionaries to the region (around 1820). (No written accounts from Native Hawaiians predate these accounts, and Obeyesekere argues that oral accounts have become so laden with the tropes the missionaries brought with them as to make them a source very much like the 19th century written accounts. I'd imagine that's a debatable point, but I'd need to read more to know for sure.)

Obeyesekere treats every document as an object created in a specific time and place, under specific cultural circumstances - an approach that might seem obvious to historians, but Obeyesekere is an anthropologist, taking issue with Sahlin's interpretation of Cook's identity as a "god"; he's deliberately pointing out that documents have histories in order to prove the limitations of 'simple' anthropology (as opposed to ethnology, which is what he's trying to do.) By cross-referencing between accounts, Obeyesekere demonstrates that Cook was demonstrably angry, vengeful, and more than a little unhinged everywhere he went on his third (and last) voyage into the Pacific (including New Zealand and Tahiti); that the Makahiki festival was very likely *not* taking place when Cook arrived (and even if it was, the festival could be postponed and altered in reaction to important events; no one was bound by its structures beyond all change); and that the Native Hawaiians did not think he was a god, nor treat him as such - rather they ceremonially honored him as a chief, engaging him in rituals that meant he could come onto the island without breaking their tabus.

It's this last portion of Obeyesekere's work that is key. Native Hawaiians were not stupid, he asserts - they could, like all other human groups, size up new encounters and experiences and make sense of them. Cook as god was not the only explanation available to them - Cook as human made a heck of a lot more sense. Obeyesekere spends a great deal of time investigating the Hawaiian language and points out that multiple different people, offices, and gods could be called Lono, and it's the Europeans who couldn't distinguish between humans and gods. He also takes several pages to point out that humor is culturally specific, and we lose all sense of potential comedy, irony, and sarcasm when a European writes down what they believe a newly met Native Hawaiian says (especially given that almost non of Cook's crew knew any Hawaiian at all).

Obeyesekere's book is a cautionary tale - a superb critique of what happens when academics run away with their own fancies. The beginning - where he talks about schools of anthropological thought - is almost impenetrably dense, but everything picks up speed beyond that point.

[Andrew Esposito]

As a provocative, alternative view of the legend of Captain James Cook, Obsevesekere brings forth a welcomed Hawaiian perspective. Written accounts of Cook’s demise all stem from crew members on the ill-fated Third Voyage of Circumnavigation, with some details gleaned and scrubbed as the official view of the Admiralty and a few rogue accounts that were not supposed to be published without Naval consent.

Despite the various viewpoints, the physical actions appear similar – Cook and four of his marines were slaughtered in the shallows of Kealakekua Bay in 1778 after their return to repair a mast splintered during a coastal storm. The semantics and heroics of the attack is a debate that has polarised Historians over two centuries. Obseverekere puts forward a strong argument that the killings arose from provocation by Cook and his men. Certainly the English version agrees that Cook attempted to kidnap the Hawai'i King with a ridiculously small posse - as ransom for the theft of one of the HMS Discovery’s boats (a large cutter).

The myth of Lono is the heart of Obseverekere’s argument, the crux of the apotheosis of Cook. As luck would have it, Cook arrived during the harvest festival of Makahiki. The English version is that he was viewed by the Hawaiians as the personification of the God of agricultural abundance, Lono. Obseverekere’s alternative view is a jolt to anyone who was spoon fed the English version at a young age at school and typifies the wariness one must have for myth and legend that so often escalates to a ‘form of truth’.

Anyone with an interest in Cook and his demise needs to read this book. If for nothing else, it presents two insightful views of the famous mariner; firstly, esteemed throughout the nautical world as a journeyman venerated by the Pacific peoples; a navigator, astronomer, discoverer and chartist of new lands and secondly, a man fatigued by three circumnavigations of the world - a disgruntled, short-tempered Englishman beyond fifty years of age, his final actions stifled by retribution and arrogance.

[Brenda]

The event of Captain Cook’s death on February 14, 1779 shocked Britain and Europe. Cook, champion to the British, is the greatest explorer of the Pacific, according to the British. Cook can be called the “humane persona of the Enlightment” (O p.7). Many Pacific Islanders today know of Captain Cook, for example, if you were to ask a Tongan how horses came to Tonga, he would tell you that Captain “Kooki” brought them from “Britannia”. Captain Cook is commemorated in Britain and throughout the former British colonies. In New Zealand a mountain is named after Cook along with many other things including streets and lanes. Today children around the world are taught about Captain Cook and how the Hawaiians murdered him.

Histories are not set in concrete, as indigenous people the world over realize their identity in the coming century, many histories (not only the Pacific and Hawaii) will be rewritten. Haunani Kay Trask in From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i makes a clear statement for this cause when she states that “(a)s the object to intense anthropological observation, Natives have often wished that white people would study their own ancestors, whom they could at least know culturally, instead of us, whom they generally misunderstand and thus misrepresent.

Obeyesekere presents a very convincing interpretation of the events that lead up the death of Cook and the events that follow. But the larger issues of methodological strategy, the politics of methodology, and ethnographic interpretation needs to be scrutinized further before the verdict is in. This debate has opened up the opportunity to rediscover the eighteenth century.

[Brandy]

So I read Sahlin's book in a graduate course in theory, but this one was not paired with it as it had been in previous years, to my disappointment. So I borrowed it from a friend. Because that's the kind of amazingly boring person I am.

I do think you should read both this and Sahlins back to back to really understand what either is on about. I lean more towards Obeyesekere's interpretation of events/sources, but I can see where there's possibility to come down on either side. A very interesting example of dueling historians!

[Luther Obrock]

I'll reserve judgment until I read Sahlins :)

[Chris]

Very combative, not overly well supported, but at least shows that Sahlins isn't necessarily right either.