Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
Three weeks of pampering wasn’t the real reason I went to Hawaii last December (although that was okay). I really went so I could swim in the bay where Captain James Cook was murdered 216 years ago.
And what a gorgeous spot for a murder. Kealakekua Bay is on the west side of the Big Island and is buttressed by a sheer pali (high cliff). A fresh water spring runs into this deep, dish-shaped leeward bay, encouraging sailing master William Bligh to choose this anchorage for His Majesty’s ships the Discovery and the Resolution.
Kekua was the village where Cook and his men came ashore to barter for fresh food. The villagers feted the British seamen with food and drink, and many of the native women threw themselves at the weary sailors. It was paradise indeed for men who’d just come south from charting the frigid coastlines of the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea (including the Nome area) as far north as Icy Cape at latitude 71 degrees. Cook was provisioning in Hawaii, intending to return to Alaska in the spring.
Some insist Captain Cook wrongly foisted himself off as a god, blithely insensitive to cultural differences, and woefully ignorant of the Hawaiian language. Some say he and his crews simply wore out their welcome with the generous native Hawaiians. Cook’s biographer J.C. Beaglehole suggests a stomach ulcer may have contributed to Cook losing his temper over the theft of a small boat that fateful morning. However the circumstances accumulated against Cook, Hawaiians killed him and four of his men with clubs and knives on the rough bayshore lava on February 14, 1779. A brass plaque set on a cement block commemorates the spot.
The history of Alaska veered in a new direction that day. How different it would have been if this humane and curious British explorer had come back to Alaskan waters, charted the coast and islands more thoroughly, and had met more of the Inuit peoples.
As my family set up a beach camp several feet from the Cook plaque, I thought about Cook trying to get to the rowboats that sat just off the rocks that day in February. His last words were, “Take to the boats!” His dead body was dragged off, burned, and the flesh stripped away (customary for Hawaiian chiefs). The British officers then insisted Cook’s bones be returned for sea burial and were given back a few parts of his skeleton. Somewhere, in the stunning blue silence of the bay where I watched yellow tang and parrot fish, those bones rested. But did they rest in peace with this third voyage unfinished? It would be up to another man, George Vancouver, to write the next chapter in the European exploration of Alaska.
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