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him and a helmet placed on his head. In other words, he was treated like a great chieftain with godly status. He spent a month peacefully on the island repairing his ships and taking precise measurements of latitude and longitude. Then he left to sail north, but a month later a sudden storm forced him back to Hawaii. This time things went very differently. It was now the season devoted to Ku, the god of war; the local people were much less welcoming and incidents broke out between them and Cook’s crew, including the theft of a boat from one of Cook’s ships. Cook planned to use a tactic he had used before – he decided to invite the chief on board his ship and hold him hostage until the missing items were returned. But as he and the chief walked on the beach at Kealakekua Bay the chief’s men raised the alarm and in the ensuing mêlée Cook was killed.

Why did it happen? Did the Hawaiians think Cook was a god, as some suggest, who was then unmasked as human? We will never know, and the circumstances of Cook’s death have become a textbook study in anthropological misunderstandings.

The islands were permanently changed by his arrival. European and American traders brought deadly disease, and missionaries transformed the islands’ cultures. Hawaii itself was never colonized by Europeans, and instead a local chief was able to use the contacts inaugurated by Cook to create an independent Hawaiian monarchy that survived for over a century, until Hawaii’s annexation by the United States in 1898.

I began this chapter wondering how far it is ever possible to understand a totally different society, and it is a difficulty that greatly exercised eighteenth-century travellers. The surgeon David Samwell, who sailed with Cook on HMS Discovery, mused upon the problems of communication with this other world as he recorded his observations with admirable humility:

There is not much dependence to be placed upon these Constructions that we put upon Signs and Words which we understand but very little of, & at best can only give a probable Guess at their Meaning.

This is a salutary reminder of the limits to certainty. It is now impossible to know exactly what objects like this feather helmet meant to Hawaiians of the 1770s. What is clear, as Nicholas Thomas explains, is that they are now taking on a new significance for the Hawaiians of the twenty-first century:

It’s an expression of that Oceanic art tradition, but it also expresses a particular moment of exchange that marked the beginnings of a very traumatic history that in some ways is still unfolding. Hawaiians are still affirming their sovereignty and trying to create a different space in the world.

And for Hawaiians like Kaholokula, from the island of Oahu, these feathered objects take their place in a very particular political debate:

It’s a symbol of what we lost but a symbol of what could be again for Hawaiians today. So it’s a symbol of our chiefs, it’s a symbol of our lost leadership and our lost nation, of loss for the Hawaiian people, but also encouragement for our future and the rebuilding of our nation as we seek independence from the United States.

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North American Buckskin Map

Map drawn on animal hide, from midwestern USA

AD 1774–1775

In the middle of the eighteenth century a philosophical Chinese visitor came to London and commented on the intense rivalry – hilarious, bitter, bloody – between Britain and its neighbour over the Channel, France:

The English and French seem to place themselves foremost among the champion states of Europe. Though parted by a narrow sea, yet are they entirely of opposite characters; and from their vicinity are taught to fear and admire each other. They are at present engaged in a very destructive war, have already spilled much blood, are excessively irritated; and all upon account of one side’s desiring to wear greater quantities of furs than the other.

The pretext of the war is about some lands a thousand leagues off; a country cold, desolate, and hideous: a country belonging to a people who were in possession