Patrick V. Kirch, one of the most esteemed historian of precolonial Oceania, argues that the Hawaiians believed that Captain Cook was the god Lono because of some of the following reasons:
I believe Marshall Sahlins, another important anthropologist, argues much the same thing.
On the other hand, I've heard it said that Captain Cook was simply titled "Lono" because he arrived during Lono's season (Hawaiians often naming people after major ceremonies of their birth) and that Hawaiians did not think Cook was a god any more than they thought kings or priests named Lono were gods.
Which has more support today?
The question remains unanswered, and probably will stay unanswered. A lot of the conflict took place between Sahlin and Obeyesekere. In order to shed some lights on the counterarguments used by Obeyesekere I will use a summary by Steven Lukes:
[Obeyesekere] thinks it is ‘quite improbable that the Hawaiians could not make a distinction between the physical shape of Lono’s tiny canoe that is floated at the conclusion of Mahakiki and Cook’s great ships, or that for them the corpse of Watman [an old sailor that died, jwltr] was a sacrificial victim, or that marines dismantling the palings of the shrine for firewood was a ritual dismantling of the sort practised by their own priests’. What Sahlins describes as the welcoming of the god in the royal temple, Obeyesekere takes to be the ‘installation ceremony’ of Cook as a chief; and he argues that the Hawaiians eventually killed him because their food supplies were depleted by the effort of supplying the two British ships. He finds it ‘awfully hard to accept the scholarly view that Hawaiians believed that Cook and company touring their island actually came from Kahiki, the mythic land, when they fully knew that they came from “Britannee” ’. And he writes:
When James Cook arrived during the festival in two large ships with a large number of people who neither looked Polynesian nor spoke the native language, the Hawaiians, it is said, thought he was the god Lono. By contrast, I argue . . . that Cook’s arrival would violate Hawaiians’ commonsense expectations, though it could be consonant with European assumptions regarding native perceptions of white ‘civilizers’.
Moreover, Obeyeskere repeatedly insists upon the plurality of native points of view: ‘there can be no natives’ point of view because those native voices are multiple and disparate’. And where the journals of the ship’s crew members appear to report the natives believing in Cook’s divinity, Obeyesekere imputes this to European mythmaking; and where Hawaiians retrospectively record such belief, he attributes this to the influence of the Europeans’ myth upon them, chiefly through Christian missionaries.
Quoted from : Lukes, Steven. "Different cultures, different rationalities?." History of the human sciences 13, no. 1 (2000): 3-18. PDF
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