Hawaii: Ocean Crossing Kingdom Review – A feather-light thriller filled with gods, pumpkins and ghosts | British Museum

RGood relations between Britain and the Hawaiian Kingdom in the Pacific did not get off to a great start. On February 14, 1779, world explorer James Cook was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, in a dispute over a boat: it was a tragedy of cultural misunderstanding whose meaning anthropologists are still arguing. Cook had previously visited Hawaii and was apparently identified with the god Lono, but he did not know it. Marshall Sahlins claimed that Cook was killed because by coming twice he violated the Lono myth, while another anthropologist, Gnanath Obesekere, attacked him for imposing colonial assumptions about “indigenous” irrationality on Hawaiians.

It’s a fascinating and controversial debate. But what happened in the wake of Cook’s death is less well-known – and the British Museum’s account of it, in collaboration with Native Hawaiian curators, community leaders and artists, reveals a surprisingly complex, if doomed, cross-cultural encounter.

Cook is not mentioned in the wall texts or depicted in the display, but his ghost is omnipresent in the objects he and his men brought to Britain. And what are the wonders? Before Cook’s voyages, Pacific peoples, bound together by epic canoe crossings that linked Polynesians from Hawaii and Easter Island to Tahiti and New Zealand, created cultural forms that we now call art. The faces of the giant, pink-feathered gods with mother-of-pearl eyes grimace and grimace while a club embedded in tiger shark teeth combines beauty and menace. The bowls carried by naked figures on their backs exemplify how Hawaiian chiefs and kings were celebrated and respected.

Royalty is the heart of this show, and is a common language between Hawaiians and Britons. After Cook’s death, which was greatly regretted by both sides, Hawaii learned to speak English and assert its equality with the “modern” nation. It worked for a while. In 1810, King Kamehameha I sent a magnificent feathered cloak to George III, with a yellow-on-red diamond pattern – here on loan from the Royal Collection, which still owns it. The King apologized for being so distant from supporting Britain in the Napoleonic Wars, but expressed his friendship – and could Britain help if Hawaii was attacked by France? The Hawaiian mantle is here ingeniously juxtaposed with the sparkling, jewel-encrusted costume worn by George IV at his coronation: there were distinct customs on both sides of the world.

“Forget Koke: remember King Liholihu,” the presentation suggests. In 1824, he and his queen, Kamamulu, embarked on a journey that reflected all of these British “discoveries.” They sailed to Britain laden with gifts, and boarded a crane on a whaling ship (the story would have been better if they had gone by outrigger boat). George IV appears to have been moved by the greetings coming from both surroundings because in 1824 he received the Hawaiians with diplomatic honors. They were seen in the theater’s royal box and photographed by artists. Cartoonists were usually less generous, with Cruikshank depicting the corrupt George IV with his arms around a tattooed Polynesian. They also visited the British Museum where they couldn’t miss three of the most stunning exhibits, the faces of feathered gods brought back from Hawaii by Cook’s team and which are known to have been on display at the time.

The Hawaiian treasures recovered from the British Museum’s storerooms are so magnificent, they should have their own permanent exhibition. You can’t stereotype them: the ferocious gaze of a military-looking god with a chunky wooden body seems modernist, which is no coincidence because Pacific sculptures helped inspire modernism. I mistook a feathered deity with an almost cartoonish eye for a work of contemporary art. Compiled by Cook.

These wonders are not relics of a dead culture. There is a perfectly preserved 18th-century dance rattle, or ‘uli’uli, brought back from Cook’s third voyage, a gourd with sprouting and radiating purple, red and white feathers. A video shows Hawaiian dancers using a modern reproduction of the same instrument. For Hawaiians, the artistic masterpieces created by their ancestors are carriers of memory, tools of identity.

This exhibition is a celebration of Hawaii and a defense of museums with world-class collections. The almost miraculous preservation of delicate, fragile works of art made of feathers, teeth, wood and bark for almost 250 years is certainly a credit to the British Museum, as is this way of seeing them as embodiments of living culture.

How does the story end? The King and Queen of Hawaii gave their lives for the sake of cultural diplomacy: they died of measles in London in 1824. George IV honored them by sending their bodies home on a Royal Navy ship. Hawaii had successfully convinced Britain and Europe that it was a nation-state, with a monarchy they could handle – so Britain kept its greedy hands away from that particular place. In the end, it would be the United States that captured Hawaii, colonized it, and eventually made it the 50th state. The objects here are weapons in ongoing cultural resistance. Look for that shark-toothed club, Mr. President.