The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific
According to many standard histories of the Pacific, when Captain James Cook landed on the  island of Hawaii on January 17, 1779, he was received by the natives as an avatar of the god Lono and  feted accordingly. InThe Apotheosis of Captain CookSri Lankan scholar Gananath Obeyesekere  questions this "fact" of history, arguing that it was the Europeans, and not the natives, who  found a need to establish their colonization of new worlds on the notion of deities come home. Cook  himself, Obeyesekere adds sympathetically, was a man caught between social classes, treated as an equal  by Polynesian kings but shunned by members of the English nobility because of his lower-class  background; he was a good man, but a god only in the imaginations of his compatriots. Obeyesekere  devotes much ofThe Apotheosis of Captain Cookto arguing spiritedly with anthropologistMarshall Sahlinsover matters of  Hawaiian history.