Imagined Apotheoses: Drake, Harriot, and Ralegh in the Americas

Abstract

Perhaps the two best known stories of Europeans being taken for gods by non-European peoples are those of Heran Cortes in Mexico and Captain James Cook in Hawaii. Separated by two hundred sixty years, five thousand miles, and vast differences in cultural and linguistic context, these two incidents nonetheless share many traits in the conventional telling. Cortes and Cook were both strong leaders, for instance, both capable of inspiring devotion among their subordinates. Both men became amateur etfinographers during their lengthy sojourns away from Europe, both sought to promote an image of respectful rather than rapacious foreign incursion, and both are said to have been taken for returning gods by the native peoples among whom they landed: Cortes for the Toltec culture-hero and demigod Quetzalcoatl, Cook for the Hawaiian deity Lono. Recent scholarly studies and debates-among them the rather strident dispute between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins over the alleged deification of Cook by eighteenth-century Hawaiians-have opened up these returning-god theories to skeptical critique and detailed justification; but such discussions have had little, if any, impact on popular imagination.'