Kealakekua Bay

A method that has worked eight times is not a method. It is a habit, and habit is what a navigator falls back on when the chart runs out. The trouble with the ninth island is that it answers a question the previous eight were never asked.

THE NAVIGATOR

James Cook is forty years old on the morning of the fourteenth of February, 1779. He is post-captain of the white, Fellow of the Royal Society, the son of a Yorkshire day-labourer who learned his trade in colliers out of Whitby and his latitudes in the St Lawrence under Wolfe. He has, in nine years across three voyages, run the Endeavour through the Great Barrier Reef and out again, fixed the southern limit of any habitable continent at sixty degrees, charted New Zealand entire, and proved, by sheer plodding circumnavigation, that the great southern land of the geographers does not exist. The Pacific is, on his charts, no longer a rumour. He has come back to it a third time to look for the passage from its northern side, has been turned back by the ice at seventy degrees, and has put into Kealakekua Bay on the lee shore of Hawaii to refit before trying again in the summer. He has been ashore here three weeks. The island has received him, by the coincidence of his arrival at the season of Lono and the shape of his masts against the bay, with a courtesy he has not seen elsewhere in the ocean. On the night of the thirteenth a chief took the Discovery's cutter from her moorings. He proposes, at first light on the fourteenth, to do as he has done eight times before in eight other islands: walk ashore with a small marine guard, invite the ruling chief aboard the Resolution as a guest until the boat is returned, and so settle the thing without firing a shot in anger. He has written, in his journal of the second voyage, that he has never been a moment in want of a friend among such peoples when he has dealt with them firmly and openly. The method has the authority of repetition behind it.

THE BEACH AT KA'AWALOA

It is a quarter past seven on the lava beach below the village of Ka'awaloa, on the north shore of the bay. The trade is light from the north-east, the water in the bay is glass, the sun is not yet over the cliff. He is in undress uniform, a fowling-piece in his hands, one barrel loaded with small shot, the other with ball. At his right elbow is Sergeant Phillips of the marines with a brace of pistols. Behind him, in a thin line on the black rock, nine marines. Twenty yards offshore, the pinnace and the launch under Williamson and Roberts lie to with their oars tossed. Three hours earlier he sent the boats to blockade the mouth of the bay against any canoe that might be carrying the cutter out to sea. The king, Kalani'opu'u, eighty years old, has come out of his house and walked down to the beach quietly enough. His son of sixteen walks beside him. They have agreed, in the broken vocabulary of three weeks' contact, to go aboard the ship. Cook has the king's hand in his.

THE SECOND ON THE LAVA

From the door of the house Kanekapolei, the king's chief wife, is calling to her husband not to go on the ship. Her voice carries along the rock, and the old man's elbow grows heavy in Cook's hand. The crowd that has gathered along the lava is larger than it was a minute ago; it is larger again a minute later. Out in the bay, from the direction of the head of the bay, a gun goes off, then a second. Williamson is firing on a canoe; the sound carries flat across the water and is heard by every Hawaiian on the beach before it is heard by the marines. A man comes running along the shore from the south. He is, by the later record of the astronomer Bayly aboard the Resolution, a priest of the Lono cult, and he is shouting at the top of his voice in a language Cook does not have, the news that a high chief of Kalani'opu'u's house has been shot dead by the haole in a canoe at the head of the bay. The stones come up off the beach into the hands of the men along the lava. The king sits down. The captain has a second, perhaps two, in which the eight previous islands and the ninth diverge from each other on the black rock under his boots. Eight times the chief has stood up and walked. The wife has not, on those eight beaches, been at the door of the house. The news from the next bay has not, on those eight beaches, arrived in the same minute as the request. He registers all of this; he does not, because he is forty years old and has been at sea since he was eighteen and has never yet been wrong about a man in front of him, change the method. He tightens his hand on the king's elbow. The king does not rise. Behind the king, the chief warrior of his household, Kalaimanokahoʻowaha, steps forward with an iron dagger, an iron of European trade taken off some earlier ship and beaten to a Hawaiian point. Cook lets the king's hand go and fires the small-shot barrel of the fowling-piece into the warrior's chest. The mat armour, woven of olona cordage, stops the shot. He fires the ball. He turns, for the first time on any beach in the Pacific, with his back to the people he has come to treat with, and walks towards the surf.

THE SURF

The surf is twenty yards down the lava. He has the marines around him. They fire one volley over the heads of the crowd in the hope, the old hope, that the noise will break it. The crowd does not break. He reaches the water. The water is to his knees. He turns, his back still to the beach, and waves the pinnace in. The pinnace is fifteen yards out. He has the hat in his hand and the hat is up. A man behind him, by the testimony of a midshipman in the pinnace who is watching him through a glass, comes into the water and strikes him on the back of the head with a club. He goes down on his face in the water at his own feet. Three other men come into the surf with daggers. One holds him under, another stabs him; the marine line on the lava breaks. Four marines who cannot swim are killed in the shallows within five minutes. Sergeant Phillips, wounded, gets to the pinnace. Lieutenant Williamson, in the launch, does not bring his boat in. He will be court-martialled for it twenty years later in another sea. The body is dragged out of the water and up the slope.

THE BAY ON THE TWENTIETH

For eight days the Resolution lies at anchor in the bay with her colours half-mast. Charles Clerke, dying slowly of the consumption he picked up in a King's Bench debtors' prison before the voyage began, has the command. Lieutenant King, who is the best of the young officers and who has spent three weeks ashore at the observatory and has friends among the priests at Hikiau, goes back and forth with messages. On the twentieth of February a parcel comes down to the boats from the chiefs of Ka'awaloa, wrapped in tapa cloth and feathered, and is handed up the side of the Resolution. It contains what could be recovered: the scalp, the hands (preserved in salt, the islanders having gathered that the English would wish to recognise their own), the long bones, the lower jaw, the cap of the skull. The remaining bones have been distributed, by the funerary practice for a man of the highest mana, among the ranking chiefs of the king's house. It is, in Hawaiian terms, the rite for a king. On the twenty-first the remains are committed to the bay with a full naval service, the ship's company at quarters, the colours dipped, ten minute-guns. The bay takes him quietly. The trade is still light from the north-east.

CLERKE'S COMMAND

Clerke is dead of his lungs by August off the coast of Kamchatka and is buried ashore at Petropavlovsk. John Gore brings the two ships home by the Cape. They moor at Deptford on the fourth of October 1780, sixteen months after the morning on the lava. The journals go to the Admiralty and from the Admiralty to the engraver. The Sandwich Islands, named for the First Lord who had backed the voyage, stay on British charts under that name for two more generations and then quietly become the Hawaiian Islands again, which is what their own people had always called them. The third voyage, taken as a whole, fixes the north-western coast of America on the European map and proves, by the failure to find it, that the navigable north-west passage of the geographers is a fiction of the same order as the southern continent. The man who proved both is at the bottom of Kealakekua Bay.

THE OBELISK

The thing the eight islands had taught him was that a confident man walking quietly with a small guard could move a king. The thing the ninth island taught, in the second on the lava when the priest came running and the wife called from the door and the king sat down, was that the method had never been the reason; the reason had been the consent of the other party, freely given for eight different reasons on eight different beaches, and the ninth party, for one morning, withheld it. The miscalculation is small and is entirely a miscalculation of the ground under the boots. In 1874, ninety-five years after, a party of his countrymen put up a white obelisk on the lava at Ka'awaloa, on a square of ground the Hawaiian kingdom ceded for the purpose, and the obelisk is still there: a plain shaft of stone above the bay, the tide on the rock below it, the trade light from the north-east in the early morning, the water in the bay glass.