Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imagined Apotheoses: Drake, Harriot, and Ralegh in the AmericasWilliam M. HamlinPerhaps the two best known stories of Europeans being taken for gods by non-European peoples are those of Hernan Cortés in Mexico and Captain James Cook in Hawaii. Separated by two hundred sixty years, five thousand miles, and vast differences in cultural and linguistic context, these two incidents nonetheless share many traits in the conventional telling. Cortés and Cook were both strong leaders, for instance, both capable of inspiring devotion among their subordinates. Both men became amateur ethnographers during their lengthy sojourns away from Europe, both sought to promote an image of respectful rather than rapacious foreign incursion, and both are said to have been taken for returning gods by the native peoples among whom they landed: Cortés for the Toltec culture-hero and demigod Quetzalcoatl, Cook for the Hawaiian deity Lono. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.“The Far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson. Courtesy of Chronicle Features, San Francisco.Recent scholarly studies and debates—among them the rather strident dispute between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins over the alleged deification of Cook by eighteenth-century Hawaiians—have opened up these returning-god theories to skeptical critique and detailed justification; but such discussions have had little, if any, impact on popular imagination. 1 [End Page 405] Indeed, the idea that redoubtable European explorers can be (and often are) perceived as supernatural beings by non-European “primitives” has been uncritically perpetuated to this day by filmmakers, fantasists, writers of popular history, and purveyors of cultural literacy. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for instance, informs our children that Caribbean islanders encountered by Columbus “asked if he had come from heaven”—the implication being, of course, that they took him for a god. 2 And in the recent film, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, we hear the indefatigable Admiral (played by Gerard Depardieu) claim that “on every island the natives welcome us with great generosity and trust.... Because of our appearance, we have been mistaken for gods, and are treated accordingly.” 3 Fortunately, we also have a “Far Side” parody of the cultural conceit on which such ideas in part rely, but the cartoon serves as well to demonstrate just how thoroughly the conceit has permeated our collective awareness (see figure 1). 4 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.“It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” From The Return of the Jedi, dir. Richard Marquand, Lucasfilm, Ltd., 1983. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Lucasfilm, Ltd.Let me offer just one other example. Near the end of the popular 1983 film The Return of the Jedi, the forest-dwelling Ewoks begin to chant and salaam upon first glimpsing the golden robot C-3PO, who in turn tells his captured comrades, “I do believe they think I am some sort of god.” When Han Solo sarcastically asks the robot to use his “divine influence” to help extricate them from their predicament, C-3PO replies that such an action would be improper: “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” Here we see, embedded within a film romance, both the classic trope of the apotheosized foreigner and the related motif of the foreigner’s reluctance to [End Page 406] play the god-role (see figure 2). It is worth noting, however, that while C-3PO may be unwilling to exploit the Ewoks’ misperception, Luke Skywalker is not; he uses the “Force” to convince the Ewoks of the robot’s magical prowess and, more to the point, to perpetuate their misapprehension. 5What I wish to suggest in this essay is that certain habitual Western assumptions or conceits regarding cross-cultural encounters—assumptions which have been usefully termed “myth models” inasmuch as they condition human perception and find frequent discursive expression—coexist easily but in fact disjunctively with certain other ideological structures in many early modern travel narratives and colonial accounts. Obeyesekere, in his provocative book on the supposed deification of Captain Cook in Hawaii, has linked such myth models to the conceptual structures of the longue durée as characterized by Fernand Braudel, and it is possible that they may also be...