How Navigators Think: The Death of Captain Cook Revisited

Abstract

For the best part of a century anthropologists have been forced to consider ‘how natives think’. By the time Marshall Sahlins used that phrase as the title of his book on the death of Captain James Cook at Hawaii, the problem had become equally familiar to historians. 1 Yet when attention has turned from ‘natives’ to the navigators, it has been not how they think but how they see that has thrown up some of the richest historiography in recent decades. Rough sketches, field studies and finished paintings have been decoded to unveil the visual new world created by the first Europeans to coax their rickety ships into the Pacific Ocean. 2 But there is a more everyday history that in large part still remains to be told, concerned less with how than with what navigators see. To take an example, around 8 o'clock on the morning of 14 February 1779, First Lieutenant James Burney claimed that, ‘With Glasses we could see Captn Cook receive a Blow from a Club and fall off a Rock into the Water’. 3 Burney can be confidently located standing on the deck of the Discovery , the second of the two ships to leave England in the summer of 1776 to undertake the third voyage of Captain James Cook around the world. Two and a half years later both were anchored in Kealakekua Bay on the western coast of the island of Hawaii, making emergency repairs to the mast of the Resolution , damaged during a storm five days before. Despite the abiding interest of the events Burney saw through his telescope, the statement is disappointing as an eyewitness account: everyone who wrote about the event at the time said something similar. But our witnesses are literary Arians: the substance of their reports is only similar, not the same. When the comments recorded in the journal of the Discovery 's captain, Charles Clerke, are examined we encounter something rather curious: It was now just 8 o’clock when we were alarmed by the discharge of a volley of small Arms from Captain Cook's people, and a violent shout of the Indians; with my glass I clearly saw that our people were drove off to their boats, but I could not distinguish Persons in that confused crowd. 4

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