CULTURAL DEATH: THE APOTHEOSIS OF CAPTAIN COOK

The instance of cultural death is not necessarily borne from the transference of power from the indigenous to the foreign through military conquests and expansionist enterprise alone as is evident from the continuation of and engagement with cultural traditions of preceding dynasties and empires in the pre-modern period. One thinks of European engagement with Greek tradition and Mongol adaptation to Islamic tradition as potent examples. This demonstrates that even in the aftermath of violent conquest, cultural footprints prove difficult to remove. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook demonstrates therein the erasure of Polynesian culture not by way of mere aimless violence but by stripping away the agency of the indigenous conscious in articulating the meanings of their culture, condemning Polynesian culture to be wholly subsumed by European consciousness. Cultural death in the case of Captain Cook’s voyages is a Hegelian process whereby indigenous culture is relegated to the status of an object dedicated to the subservience of the European subject, the latter being the only one capable of improvisation and rational thought. The normalization of the European articulation of Polynesian culture is so pervasive that even the condemnation of European violence against the indigenous people as seen done by Todorov is accompanied with the presumption of indigenous inferiority, a consequence of the frequent (and, one can assume from the perspective of the colonizer, convenient) paucity of knowledge about indigenous cultures.

Captain Cook’s tendency towards harsh violence against indigenous people during his third voyage exemplifies the processes by which cultural death manifested. The whipping of a tribal chief at Nomuka as if he was a common seaman is one of the many means of public humiliation that was designed to bring Polynesians in line with British judicial norms, the forcible implementation of said norms uprooting the very structure of Polynesian society and culture.

Violation of admiralty rules with regards to the acceptable number of floggings became more and more commonplace as officers' logs show that indigenous people were flogged up to six dozen times. This routinization of violence was in line with the modus operandi that Cook must have inherited from other European explorers like Cortes and Columbus and was intended to intimidate and traumatize the indigenous population so as to make them docile lest the “barbarians” mistake kindness for weakness. The preponderance of this otherizing gaze is a consequence of the myths about indigenous peoples that Cook’s aforementioned predecessors used as models for and of reality. Said myths thus by this time during the 18^th century become part of European consciousness which sought to overwhelm and subsume indigenous consciousness.

As Obeyeskere mentions, Cook’s relationship with his crew began to deteriorate sharply and was marked by instances where Cook cut the allowances of seamen and withheld provisions to dispel mutinous behavior and theft. Cook is described by Obeyeskere as a “stern father” and his relationship with his crew became a blueprint for engagement with tribal chiefs and thus, by extension, his engagement with Polynesian culture as a whole. Much as he would not tolerate disloyalty from his crew, he would not tolerate obstructions to his civilizing mission from the indigenous masses either. When Cook gathers the tribal chiefs and distributes the domestic animals from Britain to each of them, he is not carrying out cultural exchange but rather reprising his imperial role as the civilizer by “dispensing his largesse” to what he perceives to be a savage land. And so when animals went missing, Cook quarantines the tribal chiefs much like he would reprimand a crew of seamen after reports of theft. Though the Tahitians’ ability to navigate Cook’s anger summarily rebuts any claim that they were not capable of rational improvisation and were bound by the rigidity of their beliefs, the very fact that the survival of the Tahitian chiefs relied on acquiescence to being patronized by Cook highlights the degree of Hegelian objectification that took place that marked the processes by which cultural death occurred. Cook’s ignorance of propriety during Tongan religious ceremonies, his trampling on consecrated land and his tampering with sacred objects were therefore externalizations of the European consciousness that had developed to facilitate and galvanize efforts to control indigenous populations. The superimposition of European hierarchical norms necessitated in turn the transformation of indigenous voices into instruments for the exaltation of European supremacy and the civilizing mission in historical discourse that along with the plunder and desolation of indigenous lands constituted their cultural death.