2. The Buttocks of Captain Cook

Above Photo: Robert Conrad and Stella Stevens in Hawaiian Eye. Lopaka’s girlfriend refers to him as “Captain Cook”. ©1960 Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.

Symbols, Myth and TV in Hawai'i

2. The Buttocks of Captain Cook
The legend of Captain James Cook for instance, a hotly contested narrative, is used by all three of the series to define, justify or identify its heroes in Hawai`i space. The Cook analogy is an important factor in understanding the paramilitary cycle in Hawai`i, for the detective/hero, like the 20th century anthropologist and archeologist, inevitably takes up the explorer/navigator role within the series, looking for clues, discovering exotic locales, erotic entanglements, solving crime, negotiating relationships, leading natives, translating for tourists, essentially becoming the new high priests of the tropics, albeit with a gun in hand, and access to high technology, military infrastructure, and unlimited funding.

(Photo: The Death of Captain Cook, Engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi and William Byrne, 1784. Based on the oil painting by John Webber)

Such a trope inevitably collides with other subtropic mainstays, such as the mystic power of the tiki, the benevolence of the primitive native, the authority of the foreign professor, the acquiescence of tribal elders and the inevitable seduction of the explorer by irrepressible women. The myth of Cook is central to understanding the narrative logic of the paramilitary cycle, and a key example of the necessity for writing a history that acknowledges series influences not usually taken into consideration for a television study of this sort.

Cook of course will forever be associated with Hawai`i not so much on the basis of his “discovery” of the archipelago in 1778, but more viscerally because of his death and dismemberment at the hands of irate Hawaiians less than one year later at Kealakekua Bay. The heartfelt, often rancorous debates in academic circles and popular histories over the meaning of Cook’s death suggests that popular and historic narrative continue to function as lightening rods for struggles over cultural and geopolitical power and legitimacy. Often such debates in Oceania, and there are several of them—Sahlins and Obeyeskere, Mead and Freedman, Trask and Linnekin—are framed as intensely partisan campaigns that attempt to leverage the force of academic reputation, command of secondary resources, and fraternity standing as lynchpins for theoretical rationales.

Academic writing and theories of such sort are not culturally or historically inconsequential. Rather, they have tremendous social and cultural impact, and often unintended repercussions, as Haunani Trask has argued in regards to the Navy’s use of anthropological treatises to substantiate their war-game bombing of the island of Kaho’olawe. Thus the importance of historical accuracy in the interpretation of symbolic (i.e., iconographical) communications is paramount, especially since the history of the past is often used to justify and historicize the present. The narrativization of Captain Cook under the rubric of his assumed godhood, for instance, or perception of his godhood by Hawaiians, is problematic if in fact the historical moment is other than the generic interpretation. In fact, undervalued evidence suggests that alternative interpretations of this complex moment are warranted.

For example, despite the erudition of Marshall Sahlins’ dense analysis of the mytho-poetics and structural apotheosis of Cook from the Hawaiian perspective, the long overlooked buttocks of the Captain tell another tale (no pun intended). Though historiographers and anthropologists have tended to overlook or explain away the nocturnal presentation of six to eight pounds of leaf-wrapped “hind parts”, the horrified crew and officers of the Resolution and Discovery fully comprehended the nonverbal, symbolic insult, as is evidenced by their equally symbolic reply. Days later, after the presentation of the Captain’s buttocks, and other acts of derision, like the slapping of buttocks and parading in British regalia, the Englishmen would murder several defenseless villagers of Kealakekua, after the masses and warriors of Ka`awaloa had departed. They then decapitated their victims and impaled the heads on spears, waving them with taunts to the people in the hills.

Excerpt from Symbols, Myth & TV in Hawaii, first published in the critical journal Spectator, "Oceania in the Age of Global Media", University of Southern California