the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down to smoke and think,
and wish the ship would make the land--for we had not eaten much for ten
hours and were viciously hungry.

Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's
assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide.
Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and
welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all
manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and
ill-treatment. Perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished
and lamented god Lono, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of
the limitless power it gave him; but during the famous disturbance at
this spot, and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen
thousand maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his earthly
origin with a groan. It was his death-warrant. Instantly a shout went
up: "He groans!--he is not a god!" So they closed in upon him and
dispatched him.

His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of
it which were sent on board the ships). The heart was hung up in a
native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook
it for the heart of a dog. One of these children grew to be a very old
man, and died in Honolulu a few years ago. Some of Cook's bones were
recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships.

Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook.
They treated him well. In return, he abused them. He and his men
inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different times, and killed
at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation.

Near the shore we found "Cook's Monument"--only a cocoanut stump, four
feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt. It had lava boulders
piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was
entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom, with rough, discolored sheets
of copper, such as ships' bottoms are coppered with. Each sheet had a
rude inscription scratched upon it--with a nail, apparently--and in every
case the execution was wretched. Most of these merely recorded the
visits of British naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore this
legend:

"Near this spot fell
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK,
The Distinguished Circumnavigator,
Who Discovered these Islands
A