When Captain Cook was killed on Hawaii’s Kealakekua beach in 1779, his assailants made off with his corpse. A few days later, a native priest returned Cook’s butchered body to his ship the Resolution, and the man who had sailed three times around the world was buried at sea. Or was he? Several decades later, stories filtered back to England hinting that not all of the Captain had been consigned to the deep. At least some of his bones were still at Kealakekua, hidden away in a temple dedicated to the fertility god Lono.
And then there’s this arrow, part of a collection of Cook relics held at the Australian Museum in Sydney. At one end of the shaft is a metal tip and at the other are the remains of what look like faded scarlet feathers. But the shaft is unusual. For most of its length it’s made of wood. But behind the tip is a 10-centimetre stretch of polished bone cut from one of the Captain’s lower leg bones. Or so it’s said. In an attempt to discover the truth about Captain Cook’s arrow, the museum has turned to modern medicine.
IN SEPTEMBER 1823, King Kamehameha II and his wife Kamamalu boarded an English whaling ship and set sail for England. By May, the King and Queen of Hawaii – or the Sandwich Islands as they were called then – were the toast of London society. They visited Westminster and sat in the royal box at the Covent Garden theatre. In June they caught measles. And despite the ministrations of King George IV’s personal physicians, in July they were dead. Before Kamehameha died, however, he gave one of his medical attendants an arrow with a piece of bone in the shaft. The bone, he said, came from a human leg. And the leg belonged to Captain Cook.
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There is some suggestion that the King, recently converted to Christianity, had decided to return some of Cook’s bones to his family. By the early 1800s, it had become clear that when the islanders delivered Cook’s body to his ship, they hadn’t returned all of him. In fact, it might not have been him at all. Four marines were killed alongside Cook and while their bodies meant nothing to the Hawaiians, the Captain’s meant a lot. Cook was revered and under the old island religion his bones would have had supernatural power or mana. In 1820, a missionary tracked down some of them to a temple at Kealakekua where they were “preserved in a small basket of wicker-work, completely covered over with red feathers”.
There’s no record of what Kamehameha brought to London with him, but the arrow certainly found its way to the Cook family. In 1878, it belonged to eminent surgeon William Adams, a distant cousin of Cook’s wife. Adams had it on good authority that the bone belonged to his distinguished ancestor. He had a note written in 1828 by Joseph Green, senior surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and later President of the Royal College of Surgeons. “This arrow,” Green wrote, “was given by the King of the Sandwich Islands, when in England, to one of his Attendants, with the assurance that the bone attached to it was a part of the leg-bone of Captain Cook.”
As well as the word of a reputable medical man, Adams also had the word of Thomas Staley, Bishop of Honolulu. In 1869, while Staley was visiting London, Adams told him about his arrow and asked if the Bishop could find out more about it. Back in Honolulu, Staley discreetly asked the King – Kamehameha V – if there was any truth in the story about the arrow. Was it possible that the bone was Cook’s?
It was “quite probable” said the King – but he’d ask his father, a chief who had been on that disastrous trip to England. The old man didn’t remember such a gift but it was possible that another member of the entourage, a powerful chief called Boki, had given the arrow to the medical attendant. Boki was dead, so there was no way to check. But the King’s father said “that what was stated of the bone’s being Captain Cook’s was most likely to be true”.
In 1886, Adams lent the arrow to the New South Wales government for display at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. When the exhibition ended, he donated the arrow to Australia – which is how it came to lie in a drawer at the Australian Museum. And it probably would have remained just another artefact in the anthropology collection if it hadn’t been for Cliff Thornton, President of the Captain Cook Society. After years researching old documents and letters linked to Cook, Thornton came across a mention of the arrow. He spent several years trying to track it down. In 1999, he finally found it.
Despite the word of a surgeon and a bishop, the museum’s anthropologists were sceptical about the story. The arrow doesn’t look Polynesian. It looks much more like arrows made along the north-west coast of America – Cook’s last stop before he set course for Hawaii. On the face of it, it seemed more likely to be something Cook had collected during his last voyage. On the other hand, what if it was Cook’s bone?
The museum decided to check whether the bone was human. If it wasn’t then that would be the end of the matter. The people on the north-west coast of America sometimes incorporated bone from sea mammals in their arrow shafts. Bone from different animals has quite distinct structure and density depending on the animal’s lifestyle, whether it walks on two legs or four and how much of a load the bone must bear. An X-ray might identify the bone.
It didn’t. The bone was rather dense. That probably ruled out whales and dolphins. Their bones don’t support the animal’s weight, which is buoyed up by water, and they have a light spongy internal structure. Human bone was still in the frame – along with bone from seals and walruses, sea elephants and manatees, all of which have some compact bones. The museum called in Estelle Lazer, a forensic archaeologist practised in identifying the most unprepossessing pieces of bone – tiny fragments, sometimes battered, burnt or worked into ornaments.
“Bone from different animals looks different, feels different and has different structure,” says Lazer. But in worked bone many of the usual clues have been polished away. To Lazer, “Cook’s bone” didn’t really look right, but when she compared it with worked bone known to be human she had to think again. There were similarities, and the differences weren’t enough to rule it out.
What now? A bone density scan, the sort used to screen women for signs of osteoporosis, might exclude human bone. But it would be expensive. By coincidence, Lazer’s mother was due for a scan at St Vincent’s Clinic in Sydney. Loath to pass up a chance of solving the mystery, Lazer’s mum asked if she could take the arrow under the scanner with her. Judy Freund, the clinic’s head of nuclear medicine, was intrigued. She decided to give the arrow a scan of its own and “James Cook” was booked in for an appointment in early May.
The “patient” had his own bed. “Everyone had a curtain around their bed and shoes underneath – except the arrow,” says Lazer. The arrow was laid with its tip on the pillow, and bags of rice tucked around the shaft to simulate flesh around a bone.
“We were hoping that if the readings were outside the range for normal human bone we could exclude it once and for all,” says Lazer. They weren’t. The density of human bone varies with a person’s sex and age. Bone thins as people grow older, and women’s bone tends to thin more quickly than men’s. Exercise and diet also make a big difference. A fit and active person is likely to have stronger, denser bone than an inactive one. “The rating was within the human range but appears to be rather low for a robust, active man of 50,” says Lazer.
However, the “normal range” is based on measurements of those bones most at risk of osteoporosis – the vertebrae of the lower back and the upper part of the femur. If Cook’s bone came from the tibia, the shin bone, then it might be a perfectly good reading. “I do have doubts about it being human, but it can’t be ruled out from the work so far,” says Lazer.
What now? The ultimate test would be a DNA test – although there is no guarantee that any survives in this slender piece of bone. But if there’s a smidgin of genetic material then it should be possible to say whether the bone is human. And if it is, then there are ways to tell if its owner was European. It might even be possible to identify the bone as Cook’s. The great explorer’s line died out with his children but his sister’s carried on and there are living descendants who might be willing to provide material for comparison. “It would be nice to find out the truth and wrap it up one way or the other,” says Thornton.
