Captain Cook was cooked, but not eaten

"I visited the exhibition Voices of the Pacific at CaixaForum Barcelona, where he is mentioned several times generally in a negative light: one work by a Polynesian artist satirizes him, and another depicts his first ship, the HMS Endeavour, upside down and above all, I read an extraordinary book about his third and fateful final voyage, The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Doubleday, 2024), full of new research. As"

"Sides argues that Cook was indeed cooked, but not eaten, by Hawaiians after they killed him on the beach at Kealakekua Bay. Cook whom Michel Le Bris, in his Dictionnaire amoreaux des explorateurs (Plon, 2010), points out inaugurated a long fascination that, despite Bougainville and La Perouse (or Magellan and Alvaro de Saavedra), made the South Seas a space of the Anglo-American imaginary (Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Donovan's Reef)"

Voices of the Pacific at CaixaForum Barcelona presents negative portrayals of Captain James Cook, including a satirical Polynesian artwork and an upside-down depiction of HMS Endeavour. New research reconstructs Cook's third voyage, tracing stops from the South Seas to Tenerife, Alaska, and the northernmost American coast while documenting icy landscapes. The third voyage carried a mission to discover the Northwest Passage and to return a young Polynesian man to his home. Cook, already famous from previous circumnavigations, commanded HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery. The voyage culminated at Kealakekua Bay where Hawaiians killed Cook; evidence indicates he was cooked but not eaten.

Read at english.elpais.com