Captain Cook Day

[The Kap'n]

-February 14 2019-

On this day in 1779 Captain Cook was relieved of his living responsibilities by the native Hawaiians.

http://www.coffeetimes.com/cook.htm

Edit: Talk about things going so wrong, so fast. This is it.

 

[kastom_lif]

But yet only a short time later when the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was unified, they thought so highly of the Brits that they voluntarily decided to add a Union Jack to the Hawaiian national flag.

Cook and Kamehameha were both amazing people. Maybr a bit controversial, though still totally worthy of celebrating. Today I'll have a few shells in memory kap'm James Cook.

 

[The Kap'n]

But yet only a short time later when the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was unified, they thought so highly of the Brits that they voluntarily decided to add a Union Jack to the Hawaiian national flag.

Cook and Kamehameha were both amazing people. Maybr a bit controversial, though still totally worthy of celebrating. Today I'll have a few shells in memory kap'm James Cook.

It really seems like things were going well, and took a turn for the worst in a very short period of time. The article says they buried him in the same fashion as they do with high chiefs, and islanders continued to ask about his return long after he was killed, indicating that he may have been seen as a god to the Hawaiians.

 

[fait]

I call Captain Cook's death a misunderstanding. Tragic? Yes? A scandal? Maybe at the time. But I do agree, Captain Cook, for all his feats and mistakes, is worth celebrating!

(Largely unrelated: Did you know the Russians briefly had a fort on Kauai?)

 

[verticity]

This event also inspired the greatest episode ever of "Drunk History"

 

[Intrepidus_dux]

This event also inspired the greatest episode ever of "Drunk History"

Best version ever. What a trip. I love a good history lesson. White peoples get cray. "What're you, white or something?"

 

[Kojo Douglas]

There’s a really good book about Captain Cook called “Blue Latitudes” where the author retraces his voyages. It really is amazing to think he traveled to all those far flung places on a boat. I don’t remember the peculiarities that led up to his death, but I remember feeling like the Hawaiians were justified in their actions.

 

[kasa_balavu]

While it's undeniable he was one of the greatest navigators and explorers, Cook has fallen out of favour among some "woke" Pacific Islanders because a passenger aboard Cook's second voyage to the Pacific wrote about how they raped girls as young as nine on their voyages. Incidentally, that passenger was the german naturalist and ethnologist Johann Georg Adam Forster, who first recorded for science the plant Piper Methysticum.

 

[kastom_lif]

It really seems like things were going well, and took a turn for the worst in a very short period of time. The article says they buried him in the same fashion as they do with high chiefs, and islanders continued to ask about his return long after he was killed, indicating that he may have been seen as a god to the Hawaiians.

There's probably some urban legend to that. Cook arrived during Makahiki, Lono's holy season. Some historians claim his ship's cruciform masts were thought to resemble Lono's regalia. So, perhaps he wasn't mistaken for a god but for a foreign kahuna who was bringing holiday cheer to Hawaiiʻi.

That misunderstanding may have set the stage for tragedy. If the Hawaiians thought Cook and his sailors already understood Hawaiian culture, they might have been even more shocked when they inevitably made cultural gaffes.

And on the flip side, Cook's marines violently misunderstood when some of their ship's boats were taken. The Native Hawaiians may have believed that they were gifts, or free to use to come and go from Cook's ship anchored offshore.

@kasa_balavu: I had no idea about the rapes. That is unforgivable. Yuck. What a terrible thing.