First Contact

It looked like such a short trail on the map but when I read the plaque/warning at the top of the trailhead it described a 2000 foot descent over a two mile arduous hike. The reward at the bottom end was the Captain Cook Monument but perhaps more alluring than that was the excellent snorkelling promised by friends.

A gruelling 90 minutes later, skidding on pebbles of aa and sliding on pahoehoe I was down to the black rocky beach. Legs quivering, toes burning, I gulped water and watched as schools of bright yellow tang danced on their snouts along the shore.

When my senses returned I walked over to see the great man’s monument, a tall white obelisk in keeping with the Victorian’s Egyptian fad. The monument is surrounded by a fence of vertical cannons and horizontal anchor chain, fitting for the greatest circumnavigator of the ascent British Empire. As I stood outside the fence reading the engraved obituary, a tall, effete, properly thin woman came up beside me,

“That’s not true you know, he didn’t fall, he was killed.”

“Yes”, I said, “I understand the Hawaiians speared him as he was getting back into his tender.”

She continued, “When he first arrived they thought he was a god, they even gave him a feathered robe to take with him. After several days he went back out to sea and then had to return because of a sudden storm. When he arrived back the natives realized that he wasn’t a god because he couldn’t control the storm and they killed him. Also, the British seamen had given the natives syphilis and other diseases like measles that spread through the islands and killed and sterilized thousands.”

She told me that she was from Baawston, somewhere in Massachusetts and that she liked to read history and visit monuments to further her anti colonialism.

I was somewhat taken aback. Here was a woman who had flown over 5000 miles, stayed in luxurious hotels, ate food and drank wine imported from the world, benefitted from an ivy league education and depended on the expertise of thousands to keep her healthy and yet despised the colonialism that made it all possible.

Do these people think that somehow life was idyllic before contact? It may have been for the chiefs, the nabobs, the sheiks and the emperors, hot and cold running slaves, but life was pretty severe for the multitude of peasants. When women dream of the good old days do they see themselves as Cleopatras graced with tiaras and princesses swathed in crinolines or do they see themselves slogging in a wet potato field, sitting in long rows in spinning mills, servicing the needs of men or cooking and cleaning for a randy earl? There were a lot fewer haves than haven’ts.

I was reminded of this two videos. First a recent video from Tucker Carlson:

And next this one from Monty Python: