Whatever else Cook wrote has not survived. His log breaks off at a moment of considerable importance, the ceremony at the ‘morai’, or heiau, or temple, called Hikiau, on the eastern side of the bay, a substantial raised platform on the beach, surrounded by a fence, containing images of gods, especially of the primal god Ku. Lieutenant King, whose journal provides the fullest evidence of this period, noted that the islanders prostrated themselves as Cook and the priest Koah with his train passed, and that the priest and his acolytes repeated the word ‘Erono’ – ‘the name by which the Capn has for some time been distinguish'd by the Natives’. That is Lono, the name of the god of fertility, whose annual return was customarily celebrated at this time of year. There was a long and elaborate ceremony, during which Cook allowed himself to be led round the images and followed Koah in prostrating himself before and kissing the image of Ku. Two days later Cook was the centre of a second ceremony, also involving the sacrifice of pigs and the drinking of kava.
Meanwhile, observatories and tents had been set up near the heiau, and the caulking of the ships went forward. ‘Remarkable homage’, including prostration, continued to be paid to Cook, and to a lesser extent to Clerke (who didn't like it), while the islanders awaited the return of the king, Kalani'opu'u, and his chief priest, Kao, from neighbouring Maui. When he came, King says they were surprised to find him ‘the same immaciated infirm man’ they had met at Maui (whose name they made out as Terryaboo or Terrioboo). The king came on board, and he and Cook exchanged names. Next day there was a magnificent procession of canoes; the king did honour to Cook and there was a formal exchange of presents.
All this time there was constant trading from canoes with the ships – foodstuff in exchange for anything of iron, especially spikes or bars beaten into daggers. It had all along been impossible to keep women from the ships, but Cook had men flogged who had connections with women in spite of having venereal disease. The ‘gentlemen’ made expeditions into the interior, and there were exhibitions of boxing and wrestling. David Samwell wrote that ‘these people behave to us… with the utmost kindness and Hospitality’.
On 1 February Cook asked King ‘to treat with the Natives’ to let them have the palings round the heiau, Hikiau, for firewood. This strange request was, says King, readily granted. In pulling up the fence, however, the sailors also took the wooden images, which not surprisingly caused resentment. King went in alarm to the chief priest, Kao, who, he wrote, ‘desir'd only that we would return the little Imag’' (of Ku) and two others. A second event on this day was the death of William Watman, an old sailor who had also been on the second voyage, and in whom Cook took a special interest. Once again, the heiau was central, for Watman was buried within its confine. King says the chiefs themselves requested it. It seems more likely that in spite of pulling up its fence for firewood the officers thought the temple the nearest thing to consecrated ground. There was a very strange burial service, an amalgam of Anglican and Hawaiian rites.
Next day Kalani'opu‘u and his chiefs ‘became inquisitive as to the time of our departing & seemd well pleas'd that it was to be soon’. On 4 February the ships took their departure. They sailed north, in the direction of Maui, keeping to the coast, and in continuous contact with the Hawaiians by canoe. On the third day the weather became squally, and worsened, and on the morning of 9 February, it was found that the head of the Resolution's foremast was ‘badly sprung’, i.e., split. The problem lay in the fishes, or splints, made of driftwood, which had been put on the mast to strengthen it in Nootka Bay. It was ‘absolutely necessary to replace them with others’, and to do that the whole foremast had to be got out. No sheltered anchorage was available where they were, and there was no help for it but to head back to Kealakekua Bay, ‘all hands much chagrin'd & damning the Foremast’ (King). They anchored at daylight on the 12th.
They were surprised that in contrast to the previous welcoming crowds, ‘very few of the Natives came to us’. It was understood that this was a temporary taboo. The foremast was got out on the 13th and sent ashore to the area to the east previously used, near the Hikiau shrine. Kalani'opu'u arrived in the morning, came aboard with his chiefs and ‘was very inquisitive’ to know why the ships had returned. When given the reason, he ‘appeared very much dissatisfied with it’ (Burney). From then on there was nothing but trouble. A Hawaiian stole the armourer's tongs in the Discovery, was flogged with forty lashes and tied up to the main shrouds. King, ashore on the eastern beach, was told that a watering party was being hindered and that ‘the Indians had now arm'd themselves with Stones’. This row was quietened, but Cook, who was on hand ashore, told King to be prepared to fire ball instead of shot, and the sentries' muskets were accordingly reloaded. Just after this they heard firing from the Discovery, and saw a canoe being chased by one of her boats. The armourer's tongs had again been stolen, and the master, Edgar, was in pursuit of the offenders. Both King and Cook went in chase of the thief when he landed; ‘we kept running on till dark’ – being misdirected by bystanders. While they were away, there was a fracas over the canoe. Edgar tried to impound it; in the row that followed, Palea, a consistently friendly chief, was struck on the head with an oar by a seaman, the crews of two boats were stoned, and Edgar and the midshipman Vancouver were assaulted with stones, broken oars and staves. The whole episode was a frightening defeat and humiliation.
Back on board, Cook told King ‘that the behaviour of the Indians would at last oblige him to use force, for that they must not he said imagine they have gaind an advantage over us’. At daybreak, the Discovery's Officer of the Watch realized that the ship's cutter, moored to a buoy, had been taken away. Clerke immediately went aboard Resolution to inform Cook, who ordered boats from both ships to blockade the bay on either side to prevent the escape of any canoe. He himself went ashore in his pinnace with an armed party of marines under their lieutenant, Molesworth Phillips. He had made the fatal decision to take Kalani'opu'u hostage. The king's house was in the village of Kaawaloa, at the north-western end of the bay – the opposite end from Hikiau. They found Kalani'opu'u asleep, and Cook sent in Molesworth Phillips to bring him out. He willingly accompanied them as far as the shore, and was ready to go aboard with them, but ‘an immense Mob… of at least 2 or 3 thousand People’ had gathered (said Phillips). The king's wife was in tears and appeared to be pleading with her husband. Two chiefs took hold of him, made him sit down, and said he should not go aboard. ‘The old man now appear'd dejected and frighten'd’ (Phillips). The marines were drawn up on the shore facing the crowd. Cook told Phillips that it would be impossible to get Kalani'opu'u aboard ‘without killing a number of these People’, and seemed to be about to abandon the scheme. But the crowd was now very hostile. It is impossible to work out from the reports of eyewitnesses exactly what happened. It would seem that someone threatened Cook with a stone and a dagger. Cook fired at him with small shot, which had no effect against the mat worn as armour. He then fired his other barrel, loaded with ball, and killed another man. Phillips and his marines were firing into the crowd, and so were the seamen in the boats. But Cook was stabbed from behind with an iron dagger, and he fell face down into the water. He was set upon and killed by a number of assailants with daggers and stones. Four marines were also killed. The pinnace took in Phillips and the rest of the marines. The cutter, lying off, came up and joined in the firing. Incomprehensibly, the launch, under Lieutenant Williamson, pulled further out and made no attempt to assist. The guns of the Resolution fired, but had little effect. The boats pulled back to the ships, leaving the bodies to be dragged off the beach.
The underlying reason why Cook was killed will never be known. But I think one must take with great caution the view that he was killed because he had been taken for the powerful fertility god Lono. Lono's return from the sky was celebrated every year in the makahiki festival, and Cook's ships appeared from over the horizon at the right time, and they departed at the right time, seeming to set out on Lono's expected clockwise circuit of the island. Cook was greeted as and constantly called ‘Lono’, and not only the homage and reverence and honour shown by everyone, king, chiefs, priests, common people, but also the elaborate religious ceremonies of which he was made the centre, seem to demonstrate that he was assumed to be a god. The theory was given immense impetus by the work of the distinguished anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in a number of works from 1978 to 1995. Sahlins not only provided a formidable context in Polynesian myth and ritual for the identification of Cook as Lono, but an explanation of why he was killed. For kingship involves contest; power is gained by violent usurpation. The god of Kalani'opu'u was the warlike Ku. During makahiki Lono is in the ascendant, but the climax of the celebration is the kali'i, the ritual mock battle in which Lono cedes to Ku and the reinvigorated king wins back his sovereignty. But Cook was a dying god with a difference. He left at the right time but he came back, and he tried to take Ku's protégé away over the water. Cook-Lono, now hors-cadre, had to be killed in earnest.
Sahlins' views were attacked by Gananath Obeyesekere in The Apotheosis of Captain Cook in 1992. Obeyesekere believes that the long-lived view that the Hawaiians thought Cook was a god is an illustration of the arrogance of western imperialist culture. The Hawaiians were not such fools. They thought Cook was an extremely powerful chief, they honoured him as they honoured many others with the appelation ‘Lono’. They wanted to recruit him in Kalani'opu'u's war against Maui. They installed him as a chief and in the Hikiau ceremony he was dedicated to Ku. He was killed because he tried to kidnap the king, whose god Ku he had insulted by desecrating his shrine (taking the palings for firewood). But after his death, when his remains had been treated with the honour due to a great chief, he was deified.
One does not need to share Obeyesekere's casus belli, or accept his reconstruction of the Hawaiian reception of Cook, to feel that his abrasive scepticism has done irretrievable damage to Sahlins' hypothesis. It simply does not seem necessary to make the assumption that Cook was believed to be a god to account either for the Hawaiians' homage or for his death. That he was revered as a person of unique power and importance, that he brought a tincture of the divine with him and was given honour ‘that seemd to approach to Adoration’ (King) – all this may be agreed without accepting that the Hawaiians thought he was one of their gods, and it certainly does not need the theory of divine status to explain why he was killed.
It is often held that it was the news that Lieutenant Rickman, carrying out the blockade in the bay, had shot and killed a chief that inflamed the crowd on the shore and triggered the anger that led to the assault on Cook. It may be that this news had arrived, and it may have increased the anger of the crowd assembled and armed to protect their king. But the situation, as Gavin Kennedy holds in his book The Death of Captain Cook (1978), was one of war. And Cook lost the battle, because of his belief that ultimately Pacific islanders would not be able to withstand European firepower. In all his dealings with ‘natives’, he was humane, tolerant, patient, anxious for peaceful relations, deeply interested in their customs and manner of life. But there was a strict and firm boundary to his tolerance and patience. It was peaceful coexistence that he wanted, but it was coexistence. His presence had to be accepted, and – nemo me impune lacessit. It was a constant refrain throughout the three voyages that natives should never be allowed to think that they had defeated him, outwitted him, or got the better of him in any way. His prime sanctions against injury were confiscation and destruction of property (canoes in particular), taking the most powerful person available as hostage, and (if all else failed) firepower.48
It is remarked by every commentator that, for whatever reason, Cook was less patient and tolerant, more given to anger, more severe in his punishments, both in regard to his own men and the people they encountered, during this last voyage. His measures to secure the relationship with indigenous people which he required had never really failed, but there probably had to be a point when they would be resisted. The Hawaiians on this second visit to Kealakekua Bay were the first to meet his challenge and repudiate his conditions for coexistence. They would not allow their king to be taken into custody, and they were not deterred by musketry. They won the skirmish, and Cook paid the price of his high-risk strategy with his own life.
The very marked change in the attitude of the Hawaiians to Cook on this second visit is not really difficult to explain. They had given him everything, and he had gone away. Their foodstuff and livestock were seriously depleted. They did not want him back. Their repudiation of his conditions was a repudiation of his presence, or rather of the western presence. He brought them iron, and they used it to kill him. But they won themselves only a short respite.