Cook Discovers Hawaii and Death at Kealakekua Bay
James Cook sighted the Hawaiian islands in January 1778 on his third voyage, and returned to be killed there thirteen months later. He was looking for the North-West Passage from the Pacific side, and struck the archipelago on the way north. He named them the Sandwich Islands and was struck that their inhabitants spoke a language close to Tahitian, 2,500 miles away, which is the observation that opened the question of Polynesian navigation. He probed the Alaskan coast and the Bering Strait through the summer, was stopped by ice, and came back to winter. The Resolution and Discovery anchored in Kealakekua Bay in January 1779 during the Makahiki, the months-long festival of the god Lono, and were received with ceremonies of unusual scale — perhaps a thousand canoes came out. Whether the Hawaiians took Cook for Lono, or for a chief of high mana, or for nothing of the kind, has been the subject of one of anthropology's longest arguments, between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. He left in February and had to put back within a week with a sprung foremast, at the wrong point in the ritual calendar. Relations deteriorated. A cutter was taken, and Cook went ashore on 14 February with marines to seize the chief Kalaniʻōpuʻu as a hostage against its return — a tactic that had worked elsewhere. A crowd gathered, someone was shot, and Cook was clubbed and stabbed at the water's edge. Parts of his body were returned to the ship, honoured in the manner of a chief.
- Year: 1778 CE
- Category: Exploration
