The one blemish on Captain Cook’s otherwise noble character was a liability to outbursts of ungovernable temper, and during these he seems to have behaved on more occasions than one in a manner almost befitting one of the old buccaneers. For instance, he would punish paltry thefts by cutting off the ears of the islanders, firing small shot at them as they swam to the shore, chasing them in boats, and ordering his men to strike and stab them with boat-hooks as they struggled out of the way. On one occasion he punished a Kanaka who had pilfered some trifle by “making two cuts upon his arm to the bone, one across and the other close below his shoulder.” Again, at the island of Eimeo, because a goat was stolen, he landed thirty-five armed men, blockaded the island with armed boats, and burnt every house and canoe that he came across, and, as an eye-witness says, “several women and old men still remained by the houses, whose lamentations were very great, but all their tears and entreaties could not move Captain Cook to desist in the smallest degree from those cruel ravages.” Now it was undoubtedly this anger-madness of his, combined with an equally incomprehensible act of duplicity, which cost him his life. When he returned from his attempt to find the North-East passage and landed at Hawai, he was hailed by the natives as Lono, a god who had disappeared ages before, saying that he would return in huge canoes with cocoa-nut trees for masts. Now unhappily there is no doubt that Captain Cook, for some reason or other, took advantage of this belief. Not only did he not undeceive the natives, but he permitted divine honours to be paid to him. From personal knowledge of the Pacific Islanders I am able to say that in their pristine state they look upon deception and lying as the gravest of crimes, and usually punish them with death, and Captain Cook, with his vast experience of them, must have known this also, and therefore he must have been fully aware that the moment anything happened to show the natives that he was _not_ a god, his life would not be worth a moment’s purchase.