A History of the World in 100 Objects (74 page)

In 1778 the explorer Captain James Cook was in the Pacific, on board HMS
Resolution
, looking for the North-West Passage, hoping to find a sea route north of Canada that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He didn’t find the North-West Passage, but he did redraw the map of the Pacific. He was charting coastlines and islands, collecting specimens of plants and animals. At the end of 1778 he and his crew landed in Hawaii, returning again in early 1779. It is impossible to imagine what the islanders made of these European sailors, the first outsiders to visit Hawaii for more than 500 years. Whoever or whatever the Hawaiians thought Cook was, their king presented him with magnificent gifts, among them chieftains’ helmets – rare and precious objects made of yellow and red feathers. Cook recognized these as an acknowledgement by one ruler of another, a clear sign of honour. But a few weeks later, Cook was dead, killed by the same people who gave him the helmets. Something had gone drastically wrong.

This is one of the feathered helmets given to Cook and his crew, and it stands now as a vivid emblem of the kind of fatal misunderstandings that have run through European contacts with people across the globe. I began this history of the world by saying that objects connect us in our common humanity more often than they separate us, but looking at some of the objects I’m not quite so sure. Can we ever really grasp how a very different society imagines the world and orders itself? And can we find words for concepts that we have never known?

In the eighteenth century European explorers, Cook above all, set about accurately mapping and charting the oceans – especially the huge and unknown Pacific. Before the great Egyptian collections arrived at the British Museum (see
Chapter 1
), it was the objects from Cook’s voyages in the South Sea that everybody wanted to see – glimpses of a new and other world. The Hawaiian feathered helmet, so delicate that the red, yellow and black feathers which cover it could come off at the slightest movement, was one of the prize exhibits. Like an ancient Greek helmet, it fits close to the head but has a thick, high crest running over the top from front to back – like a Mohican haircut. The top of the crest has alternating rows of yellow and red, the sides and body of the helmet are scarlet, and the front edge has a thin black and yellow edging. The colouring is vivid and radiant, and the wearer would instantly have stood out from the crowd. The red feathers are from the i’iwi bird, a species of honeycreeper, the yellow ones from a honeyeater, which has mostly black plumage but also a few yellow feathers. These tiny birds were first caught, then plucked and finally released, or killed. The feathers were then painstakingly attached to fibre netting moulded to a wickerwork frame. Feathers were the most valuable raw material at the Hawaiians’ disposal; their equivalent of turquoise in Mexico, jade in China or gold in Europe.

This is a helmet in every way worthy of a king, and it probably belonged to the overall chief of Hawaii Island, by far the largest of the Hawaiian archipelago, which lies around 3,600 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 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.

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 for time immemorial.

This Chinese visitor is in fact fictional, a latter-day Gulliver invented by the satirical writer Oliver Goldsmith in his book
The Citizen of the World
, published in 1762 and designed to show the British how ridiculous their behaviour must seem to the rest of the world. The war was the Seven Years War between Britain and France, a drawn-out battle for trade and territory fought in Europe and Asia, Africa and America. The ‘hideous land’ turns out to be Canada. Goldsmith makes it very clear that Britain and France are despoiling the legitimate inhabitants of the countries they first explore and then exploit.

From Canada the war moved south, and this buckskin map, drawn on the skin of a deer, shows part of the area the British moved into as they captured the line of French forts from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi, as far south as St Louis. It was made around 1774 by a Native American – one of the people who had, in Goldsmith’s words, been in possession from ‘time immemorial’ – and provides insight into the thirteen years between 1763, when the British threw out the French from the American north, and the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1776.