76 THE NEWYORKER, DECEMBER 13, 2021
“
D
ear Sir,” the letter from Lord
Sandwich to the English natu-
ralist Joseph Banks began, “poor Cap-
tain Cooke is no more.” That was about
all the Earl or anyone else could say with
certainty, since word of the explorer’s de-
mise had only just reached England’s
shores, nearly a year after he died on the
black-sand beach of Kealakekua Bay, on
the island of Hawaii, on Valentine’s Day,
- Yet the passage of time did not clar-
ify the matter: although thousands wit-
nessed Cook’s death, exactly how he died
is a matter of dispute to this day.
According to Cook’s journal, and to
diari es kept by crew members aboard
the Resolution, Cook first reached Ha-
waii in 1778, while searching for the
Northwest Passage. When he returned,
a year later, circling the islands for a few
weeks before making landfall, the Ha-
waiians were celebrating Makahiki, a
months-long harvest festival that hon-
ors Lono, a god who brings rain, peace,
and prosperity. Like Cook, Lono trav-
elled by sailing vessel and, before land-
ing, circled Kealakekua—a coincidence
that, the sailors later concluded, led the
Hawaiians t o call the Captain by the
god’s name, take him into Lono’s tem-
ple, carve a ceremonial idol of him, and
serve the crew feasts every day for nearly
three weeks.
By the end of their stay, however,
Cook and his men had worn out their
divine welcome, spre ad ing ve nereal dis-
eases among the Indigenous popula-
tion, quarrelling about ships and sup-
plies, and destroying part of a burial
ground. When they tried to leave, a storm
forced the Resolution back into Kea-
lakekua B ay, and t he H awaiians a ttacked.
Later, some said that a chief named
Nuaa stabbed Cook with a knife in the
chest, or maybe in the back; others said
that a chief called Kana‘ina struck him
in the head with a shark-toothed club;
and still others claimed that attendants
of King Kalani‘ōpu‘u k illed him with
stones that they picked up along the
beach. The story among Christian mis-
sionaries, meanwhile, was that Jehovah
dealt t he f atal b low, punishing C ook for
allowing the Hawaiians to worship him.
But whether anyone actually wor-
shipped the explorer is unclear. Was
Cook killed because the Hawaiians fi-
nally concluded that he was not really
Lono, or because they’d known that all
along and decided that the reappearing
foreign chief was a mortal nuisance who
would never go back to his own king-
dom? For every artist who engraved an
image of Cook in the empyrean or play-
wright w ho staged a pantomime of him
ascending from Polynesia into Heaven,
there i s s omeon e e lse w ho i nsists t hat
the English merely imagined that the
Hawaiians deified Cook, a fiction that
functioned as propaganda for a self-
mythologizing empire that portrayed
its agents as gods and its distant sub-
jects as simpletons.
Who can make a god is as fascinat-
ing a question as who can kill one, and
Anna Della Subin tries to answer both
in her new book, “Accidental Gods: On
Men Unwittingly Turned Divine” (Mac-
millan). Setting Cook alongside the likes
of Haile Selassie, Hernán Cortés, Prince
Philip, General Douglas MacArthur,
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and
even President Donald Trump, she con-
siders why some men are made into gods,
by whom, and—the most interesting of
the mysteries about Cook and all of his
putatively divine kin—to what ends.
“
A
ccidental Gods” is not so much
a chronology as an atlas of dei-
fication, but Subin nonetheless begins
by tracing a history of the idea of apo-
theosis. In ancient Greece, only gods
BOOKS
HOW DIVINE
Reconsidering the stories of men supposedly mistaken for gods.
BY CASEY CEP
Anna Della Subin’s new book, “Accidental Gods,” offers an atlas of apotheoses.
ILLUSTRATION BY JASON HOLLEY
