So myths are very important. Because they are the body of myths of a people, a self-portrait of that people. They tell you a great deal about the attitudes, the world view, the social structure, the culture of that people. One of the interesting things to me is how similiar the myths are around the world among all primal peoples, which shows that people are really very much alike. They've become different among modern people.
Moderns make myths too.
But the tendency today is not to concern ourselves with a mythology of the past, but to develop myths of the future. I think we're fortunate in one respect, and that is that Cook was a trained observer and he had trained observers with him. And among his men were several who were sympathetic to what they saw, empathetic to what they saw. These windows would have been shut to us completely had the first contacts been made by illiterate pirates or traders who were here just to scam the people and take what they could, and not make any record of it. The unfortunate thing of course is that regardless of who came, they would have brought what Cook brought and that is tuberculosis, venereal disease and other diseases that devastated the population.