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kilometres (2,300 miles) from the American mainland. Polynesians had established settlements on the islands by about AD 800, part of that great ocean-going expansion which also settled Easter Island and New Zealand. It seems that from about 1200 to 1700 they were utterly isolated; Cook was the first stranger to visit for 500 years. But he was probably less surprised by them than they were by him. During their isolation the Hawaiians had developed social structures, customs, agriculture and craft skills that, although superficially alien and exotic, nonetheless seemed to make sense to the Europeans. The anthropologist and expert on Polynesian culture Nicholas Thomas explains:

When Cook arrived in Polynesia, he encountered societies that struck Europeans as possessing their own sophistication … In Hawaii in particular, extraordinary kingdoms had emerged that embraced whole islands and that were caught up in complex trading relationships among different islands. They were encountering complex and dynamic societies with aesthetics and cultural forms that impressed Europeans in all sorts of ways … How could such cultural practices exist in places that were so remote from the great centres of Classical civilization?

In many ways, it seemed not unlike eighteenth-century Europe. A large population was ruled by an elite of chiefly families and priests. Under these families came the professionals – craftsmen and builders, singers and dancers, genealogists and healers – who in turn were supported by the main population, who farmed and fished. The maker of the feathered helmet would have been a professional craftsman. Kyle Nakanelua, from Maui, Hawaii, has examined the helmet:

If you figure that only four of those feathers can be taken from one bird at a time, and that looks like about 10,000 feathers, you get how many birds you need. At one given time, this chief has a retinue of people with the occupation of collecting, storing and caring for these feathers, and then manufacturing them into these kinds of products. So you’re talking about an industry of anywhere from 150 to 200 people just collecting and storing and manufacturing, and it could have been that they were collecting these feathers for generations before putting one of these articles together.

Chiefs donned feather helmets and capes to make contact with the gods – when making offerings to ensure a successful harvest, for instance, to avert disasters such as famine or illness, or to propitiate the gods before a battle. The feather costumes were the equivalents of the great helmets and coats of arms of medieval chivalry – highly visible ceremonial clothes worn by chiefs to lead their men into the fight. Above all, these costumes gave access to the gods. Made from the feathers of birds, themselves spiritual messengers and divine manifestations which moved between earth and heaven, they gave the person who wore them supernatural protection and sacred power. Here’s Nicholas Thomas again

Feathers were particularly sacred, and not just because they were pretty or attractive: they were associated with divinity. Legends often had it that gods were born as bloody babies covered with feathers, saturated, in a sense, with divine power and associations from the other world, particularly when they came in sacred colours of yellow and red.

These ideas were not so strange to Cook. Of course, English kings weren’t born covered in feathers, but they were divinely anointed monarchs who carried out priestly functions in elaborate ceremonial robes in a cult where the Holy Spirit was represented by a bird. Cook seems to have ‘read’ this society as, at bottom, like his own. But he could not grasp the Hawaiians’ very particular sense of the sacred, which is hedged around by terrifying prohibitions. The word taboo is Polynesian, its resonances both holy and lethal.

When Cook returned to Hawaii in 1779 it was during a festival devoted to the god Lono in the season of peace. He was given a grand reception by the paramount chief – a vast red feather cape was thrown round