The many deaths of captain cook corrected

The Many Deaths of Captain Cook A Study in Metropolitan Mass Culture, 1780-1810 Ruth Scobie PhD University of York Department of English April 2013 i Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook Abstract This thesis traces metropolitan representations, between 1780 and 1810, of the violent death of Captain James Cook at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to these representations, in order to show how the interlinked texts of a nascent commercial culture initiated the creation of a colonial character, identified by Epeli Hau’ofa as the looming “ghost of Captain Cook.” The introduction sets out the circumstances of Cook’s death and existing metropolitan reputation in 1779. It situates the figure of Cook within contemporary mechanisms of ‘celebrity,’ related to notions of mass metropolitan culture. It argues that previous accounts of Cook’s fame have tended to overemphasise the immediacy and unanimity with which the dead Cook was adopted as an imperialist hero; with the result that the role of the scene within colonialist histories can appear inevitable, even natural.

In response, I show that a contested mythology around Cook’s death was gradually constructed over the three decades after the incident took place, and was the contingent product of a range of texts, places, events, and individuals. The first section examines responses to the news of Cook’s death in January 1780, focusing on the way that the story was mediated by, first, its status as ‘news,’ created by newspapers; and second, the effects on Londoners of the Gordon riots in June of the same year. It suggests that the related demands and concerns of mass culture and commerce inform the representation of Cook’s death in elegy (such as Anna Seward’s Elegy on Captain Cook) and visual art (such as John Webber’s Death of Cook). ii Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook The second section discusses the further absorption of Cook’s death into metropolitan entertainment culture.

The key site for this process was the Leverian Museum, in the centre of London, where artefacts collected by Cook’s crew in Hawaii were displayed in a room dedicated to his memory. The section suggests that these objects were presented as sensational or sentimental relics of distant ‘Owhyhee.’ The techniques by which this took place emerged from similar presentations, in popular entertainment, of antiquities as animated materialisations of a gothic past. These techniques, in often controversial ways, shaped the understanding of Cook’s death, not only in the museum but also in travel writing, theatre, poetry and painting. iii Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook Contents List of figures 1 Acknowledgements 2 Author’s declaration 4 Introduction 6 Section 1 54 1.

Interpreting newspaper reports on the death of Cook 71 2. Anna Seward’s Elegy on Captain Cook 110 4. Pictures of the death of Cook, 1779-1805 127 5. The lives and afterlives of John Webber’s Death of Cook 148 Section 2 161 6.

The museum experience of Hawaii 176 7. Hawaii in A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean 198 8. The Death of Captain Cook in theatre 224 9. Helen Maria Williams’ The Morai 252 Conclusion 265 Illustrations 271 List of References 291 1 Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook Figures 1.

‘Ditty box’ made by sailors on Resolution. Wood, silver, mother-of-pearl, watercolour sketch and human hair, c. State Library of New South Wales. Search results (25-30 November 2010) for the terms “Captain Cook” OR “Capt Cook” OR “James Cook.

General Evening Post (11-13 January 1780). Ramberg, Death of Captain James Cook. Oil on canvas, c. State Library of New South Wales.

John Hall, John Thornthwaite and Samuel Smith after George Carter, The Death of Captain James Cook, by the Indians of Owhyee, one of the Sandwich Islands (London: Sayer & Bennet, 1784). National Library of Australia. Francesco Bartolozzi and William Byrne after John Webber, The Death of Captain Cook (London: Byrne and Webber, 1784). National Library of Australia.

John Chapman after Nathaniel Dance and John Webber, Captain Cook (London: J. National Library of Australia. Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg and John Webber (after), The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (London: John Thane, 1794). National Library of Australia.

Johann Zoffany, The Death of Captain James Cook, 14 February 1779. Oil on canvas, c. National Maritime Museum. 2 Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook Acknowledgements The writing of this thesis was funded for three years by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Travel grants from the F. Leavis Fund and the English Department at the University of York enabled me to carry out extensive research overseas. I am grateful for this assistance, and for the help and expertise of staff at the National Library of Australia, the Australian Museum, and the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington, Vancouver Public Library, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum in London. Robin Peach generously contributed help with Latin translation, and Kahutoi Te Kanawa her time and vast knowledge of Maori and Pacific art.

I would like to thank my supervisor, Harriet Guest, for her unfailing and continuing support and guidance. I would also like to thank Helen Smith, David McAllister, and James Watt for their help as members of my Thesis Advisory Panel. I have been very lucky to be involved with the unique research community at the University of York Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, and I would especially like to thank Mary Fairclough, Kevin Gilmartin, Emma Major, Alison O’Byrne and John Barrell for the ideas and approaches which have shaped this thesis, whether given knowingly or not. Early versions of some chapters were given as papers, and received useful feedback, at conferences including BSECS 2012 at Oxford; Cultures of Collecting at York, Transforming Objects at Northumbria University and Crossings: The Cultures of Global Exchange in the Eighteenth Century at the University of Alberta, as well as the York CECS Postgraduate Forum.

The Postgrad Forum, and the postgraduate community at CECS in general, have been a source of 3 Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook inspiration and sanity for the last four years. I am in debt to the brilliance, help and friendship of current and former CECS students, especially Adam Perchard, Dillon Struwig, Joanna Wharton, Lucy Hodgetts, Ian Calvert, Amy Milka, Darren Wagner, Sophie Coulombeau, Trisha Liu, and Ipsita Chakravarty. Finally, I would like to thank the staff of Café Concerto, for an immeasurable quantity of strong black coffee, my friends and family, for their kindness, and most of all my parents, for their patience and support. 4 Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook Author’s Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work.

It has not been previously published nor submitted for any other degree at the University of York or any other institution. 5 Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook What an immense difference there is between hearing of an extraordinary fact – between even believing it […], and witnessing the same fact in proper person! […] We read Captain Cook’s adventures amongst various savage islanders, and even his death by their hands, without any very startling or exceptional impression. It is an amusing romance, a terrible tragedy, no more. Household Words1 Earlier than I could learn the maps had been coloured in.

When I pleaded, the kings told me nothing was left to explore.2 Margaret Atwood, from “The Reincarnation of Captain Cook” 1 Household Words, edited by Charles Dickens. 2 Margaret Atwood, “The Reincarnation of Captain Cook” in The Animals in that Country (Toronto: Oxford U. 6 Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook Introduction How did white people know about Captain Cook? Only through books, of course: books are notoriously changeable.3 Mourning Captain James Cook: Ditty boxes, medals and mass culture. On the morning of 14 February 1779, the fifty-one-year-old naval captain and “famous civilizer and secret terrorizer”4 James Cook left his battered ships Resolution and Discovery and was rowed onshore with ten marines at Kealakekua Bay on Hawai‘i Island.

They marched to the home of an old man, Kalani‘opu‘u, who was the island’s mo‘i (highest ruler) and their own ally, and persuaded or coerced him to return to the beach with them. Cook’s plan was essentially to take Kalani‘opu‘u and his sons hostage, seizing a large number of fishing canoes at the same time, in order to force unknown Hawaiians to return a boat which had been stolen in the night from the Discovery. Tension between crew and natives had been building for some time, with a series of thefts and violent incidents building up to this confrontation. The local people possibly resented the huge quantities of food which British sailors had bought or been given, and might also have begun to suspect that the British were planning to settle permanently on the island.

Indeed, the shifting 3 Chips Mackinolty in Mackinolty and Paddy Wainburranga, “Too Many Captain Cooks”, in Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions, edited by Tony Swain and Deborah Bird Rose (Adelaide: Australian Association for the Study of Religion, 1988), 355-360, p. 4 The phrase is Marshall Sahlins’, the idea attributed to Gananath Obeyesekere. Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. in Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), p.

7 Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook perceptions and appropriations of Cook and his ships among the different religious and political factions on the island have been contested by Pacific historians ever since.5 As Kalani‘opu‘u changed his mind and refused to get into a rowing boat to go to the ships, a huge crowd – perhaps as many as three thousand people – began to gather, and seemed to some of Cook’s men to be preparing for battle. At this point news probably arrived that a shot from one of the British ships had killed a member of the high-ranking ali‘i class as he was canoeing across the bay. The crowd became angrier, throwing stones and coconuts and flourishing weapons. Despite being heavily outnumbered, Cook fired his gun, loaded with smallshot, at a man he considered especially “insolent.” The tiny pieces of lead failed to penetrate his protective mat, and the action seems only to have provoked the crowd.

They surged forwards, attacking Cook and his men with daggers, clubs and rocks. The boats in the bay opened fire, while the marines attempted to retreat. When a brief, confused struggle was over, four marines and many Hawaiians were dead, as well as Cook, who was trapped at the rocks at the water’s edge, and had been beaten and stabbed several times before probably drowning in the shallow water. The surviving marines, either to save themselves or to prevent a massacre, retreated back to the ships, with the news but without the corpses.

Following local funeral traditions, Cook’s body was cut into pieces: some were burnt, while others, including Cook’s arms, thighs, skull and hands, were returned to 5 See Greg Dening, “Sharks that Walk on the Land” (1982) in Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64-79; Marshall Sahlins, “Captain James Cook; or, the Dying God” in Islands of History (London: Tavistock, 1985), 104-135; Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton U. Howe, “Review: The Making of Cook’s Death,” in The Journal of Pacific History 31, no. 108-118; Robert Borofsky et al, “CA Forum on Theory in Anthropology: Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins”, in Current Anthropology 38, no. 8 Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook the ships wrapped in cloth, and given a naval burial at sea.6 The confrontation was a local tragedy, killing and wounding many Hawaiians, and was followed by days of indiscriminate revenge attacks by the British against onshore settlements.