hi I'm John Green this is crash course
world history and today we're gonna talk
about the life and astonishing death of
Captain James Hook whose death via
crocodile check what James Cook is no
crocodiles yeah stupid history always
disappointing me well Captain Cook is
pretty interesting too and his death is
a nice entree into one of the great
historian feuds of recent times god I
love historian feuds
[Music]
so Captain Cook was born in 1728 he was
a sailor and eventually a British naval
officer who saw action in the Seven
Years War which you will no doubt
remember from last week but he's best
known for three voyages of exploration
and scientific discovery that took place
in the Pacific Ocean the first was
between 1768 and 1771 the second between
1772 and 1775 and the third between 1776
and 1781 the last one cook's journey
ended in 1779 because he died and as you
can see from the map pretty much owned
the Pacific he mapped the coast of
Australia paving the way for British
colonization and also paving the way for
the near destruction of Aboriginal
peoples and their culture as with the
Columbian Exchange Cook's voyages to
Australia remade the biological
landscape he introduced sheep which
paved the way for Australia's huge wool
industry right there was a penal colony
established in Australia but the real
story of Australia is its success as a
colony within 80 years Australia went
from a thousand dangle Australians to
1.2 million equally important kook
explored and mapped out New Zealand
again paving the way for colonization
and paving the way for crash course
world history to make an announcement
we did it we finally talked about
Australia New Zealand we're a real world
history class haha now all you
Australians have to shut up about how
we've never mentioned you right so in
his voyages cook also determined that
there was no such thing as the mythical
continent of Terra Australis said to
exist here and he helped to dispel the
idea of a Northwest Passage which
Europeans had been obsessed with for
centuries
he was the first European to describe
Hawaii and also the first to keep his
ships cruise free of scurvy cook and his
successors were part of the middle wave
of European colonization the one that
took place after Europeans settled in
the Americas but before they set their
sights on Africa one more thing to
mention about the context of these
voyages or rather their impact decides
huge territorial gains an increased
wealth exploration of the Pacific
contributed to Europe's romantic
fascination with science in the 18th and
19th centuries Europeans became obsessed
with mapping and charting and
classifying the world which maybe isn't
like candle light dinner romantic but if
you think about visiting
never-before-seen lands and bringing
back odd life forms well I mean think
about how we feel about space and then
of course as they colonized people
Europeans portrayed themselves as a
civilizing force bringing both science
and religion oh it's time for the open
letter and the open letter to the white
man's burden but first let's see what's
in the secret compartment today oh it's
a mustache so I could look like Kipling
dear white man's burden I'm gonna go
ahead and take this off Stan I think
tumblr has had enough to get their gifs
so white man's burden you're a poem and
more than a century after Kipling wrote
you scholars still disagree over whether
he was kidding and this speaks to how
weird and insane imperialism really was
Europeans seemed to genuinely believe
that it was their unfortunate duty to
extract massive wealth from the rest of
the world seriously were you kidding
when you called natives half devil and
half child because in retrospect that
seems to describe you know you best
wishes John Green right so now having
discussed the life of Captain Cook we
shall turn to the most controversial
thing he ever did die let's go to the
thought-bubble
so Cook landed in Hawaii at Kealakekua
Bay in early 1779 and explored the
islands while he was ashore he was
greeted by an important person either a
chief or a God and then in early
February he left but the ship had
trouble and was forced to return to the
bay for repairs during the second visit
he had difficulty with lions who'd
previously been pretty hospitable and
there was a fracas in which Captain Cook
was killed by at least one Hawaiian we
know this from journals kept by various
crewmen but the historical controversy
arises from the details and
interpretation of his death why in short
was Cook killed the traditional view is
that Cook was killed for some religious
reason although what isn't always clear
one of the most fleshed out versions of
this story comes from the anthropologist
Marshall Sol ins in his book islands of
history so in the Hawaiian religious
system who the god of war and human
sacrifice rules for eight or nine months
out of the year the other months are
reserved for the fertility God lono the
season long festival for lono is called
Makahiki and during this the hawaiian
king who is associated with ku is
ritually defeated during the Makahiki an
image of lo no tours the island gets
worshiped and collects taxes and at the
end of the Makiki period Bono is
ritually defeated and returned to his
native tahiti the thinking goes that
because Cooke arrived in the middle of
the
Keke the Hawaiians perceived him as low
knows who cook took part in the rituals
and sacrifices that were made as part of
the Makahiki and in solids view cook was
killed as a ritual murder to mark the
end of Makahiki for kuda return the
festival to end and the normal political
order to be restored lono had to be
defeated and presumably killed for
solids cook's death fits perfectly with
the ritual structure of Hawaiian culture
thanks thought bubble so the big problem
with this interpretation which
admittedly sounds pretty cool is that we
don't have much evidence that Hawaiians
would have actually seen cooked this way
we find it really interesting opposing
view from Gannon at the obse Kari and I
will remind you that mispronunciation is
my things are egged on if anyway he
criticized solids interpretation of
cooks death for looking a lot more like
European myth than like a Hawaiian
ritual stuff obviously Kari argues that
cook himself would not easily be
confused with Lona in fact if you were
taken for a god it would probably be qu
the war god what with all the cannons
and muskets also there's the fact that
the name Cooke sounds more like ku than
low no so arguing that Native Hawaiians
would see a European and think him a god
has all kinds of troubling implications
one of them being that Native Hawaiians
aren't terribly smart when in fact we
know that they are very smart because
unlike the rest of us they live in
Hawaii and last but definitely not least
well know is associated with fertility
and the Hawaiians would have associated
the Europeans with the exact opposite of
fertility because they introduced
gonorrhea to Hawaii and there's a
further problem with the cook equals
lono equation which is that nothing in
Hawaiian religion has any of their gods
being ritually killed part of their
mythology can be seen as sanctioning a
ritual killing of the king but not of a
god and also it's a long way from ritual
killing to actual killing the truth is
probably a lot less spectacular which is
that Cook was probably killed during a
melee in which a bunch of Hawaiians were
also killed before his death cook had
attempted to take a Hawaiian King
hostage in response to Hawaiians taking
a bunch of stuff from Cook's boats this
was common practice for cook he had done
the same thing in Tahiti and other
Polynesian islands after Islanders had
taken European goods which by the way
happened everywhere cook went in the
Pacific so maybe he should have figured
out that it was like a thing that you
were allowed to take stuff off boats in
exchange for the right to hang out there
great sailor terrible anthropologist
although to be fair anthropology hadn't
been invented additionally right
or cook was killed they were rising
tensions between the Hawaiians and the
Europeans even though at first their
relationship had been quite cordial as
evidenced by all that gonorrhea
so why the tension probably because the
Europeans dismantled the Hawaiian ritual
space some sources call it a temple and
used it for firewood hook attempted to
pay for it but his lowball offer of two
hatchets I'm not making that up was
refused I'm sorry we destroyed your
temple but I'll give you two hatchets
one for each hand I mean what would you
even do with the third hatchet so
unfortunately the earliest Hawaiian
account offering this explanation for
why Cook was killed comes well after the
accounts but at least it's a Hawaiian
explanation of course it's also possible
that the Hawaiians were just upset that
Cook had attempted to kidnap their king
most accounts from the time portray a
chaotic scene in which Cook himself
fired at least two shots probably
killing at least one Islander and one
thing that seems pretty clear even as
described by European chroniclers is
that cook's death does not look
premeditated and it sure doesn't look
like a ritual but even so the idea that
the Hawaiians saw cook as a God has
ended up in a good many accounts of his
demise why well one explanation is that
it fits in with other stories of
explorers you've all probably heard that
Patino's thought Columbus was a god and
that the Aztecs supposedly thought
Cortes was a god and this just makes
Captain Cook one in a long line of
Europeans who were thought to be gods by
people who Europeans felt were savages
and making cuca God also sets up a stark
contrast between the enlightened West in
primitive Polynesia because Captain Cook
often appears in history books as a
model man of the Enlightenment sure he
never had much formal schooling but his
voyages were all about increasing
knowledge and scientific exploration and
having him die at the hands of a people
who were so obviously mistaken in
thinking him a God makes an argument for
the superiority over the intellectualism
of the Enlightenment versus the so
called primitive religion of the
colonies but whenever a story seems to
fit really well into such a framework we
need to ask ourselves who's telling that
story one of the reasons we know so much
about Captain Cook and the reason he
shows up in so many history textbooks is
because we have tons of records about
him but they're almost all European
records even the Hawaiian records we
have about Cooke have been heavily
influenced by later contact with
Europeans so if we cast Cook's death as
part of a native ritual we're implying
that Hawaiians were just performing a
ritual script which takes away all their
agency as human beings are we making
them recognizable having them respond as
we think
Europeans would buy flying off the
handle I don't have an answer but the
debate between these two historical
anthropologist brings up something that
we need to keep in mind very often in
history we make statements about people
who haven't written their own story
whether it's Hawaiians or Native
Americans or working-class people and we
try to imagine that we're seeing the
world as they have seen it but the best
we can really do is offer an
approximation so is it really possible
to present a Hawaiian version of Captain
Cook's death or is the exercise
inherently condescending and
paternalistic and most importantly is
our inability to escape our biases a
good excuse for not even trying as usual
those aren't rhetorical questions thanks
for watching I'll see you next week
crash course is produced and directed by
Stan Muller our script supervisor is
Danica Johnson the show is written by my
high school history teacher Raoul Meyer
and myself and our graphics team is
thought bubble
last week's phrase of the week was
fancier hats if you want to guess at
this week's phrase of the week or
suggest a future one you can do so in
comments where you can also ask
questions about today's video that will
be answered by our team of historians
thanks for watching crash course and as
we say in my hometown don't forget to be
awesome
[Music]