While Westerners have tended to see Cook as an Enlightenment hero, Hawaiians and other Polynesians are not crazy about the man, whom they view as a usurper and the leading edge of a wave of cataclysmic change. Indeed, those who live in the Cook Islands have recently been talking about renaming their archipelago in protest.
Over the years there have been some interesting squabbles about Cook, especially about whether it is fair to say that the Hawaiians—who first feted and then killed him—initially viewed him as an incarnation of their god Lono. This debate played out in a very public spat between two anthropologists in a pair of books: first The Apotheosis of Captain Cook by Gananath Obeysekere (1992), and then the rebuttal by Marshall Sahlins in How Natives Think (1995). A less contentious and beautifully written account of the debates surrounding Cook’s death can be found in Glyn Williams’s The Death of Captain Cook (2008).