But, there were not just “European visions” and colonial imaginaries but “Oceanic visions” and indigenous imaginaries brought to such early encounters. And we can surely discern similar dialectical processes in the relations of cosmological preconception and the unfolding events of successive encounters from the perspective of Pacific peoples. So Marshall Sahlins (1981, 1982, 1985, 1989, 1995) has argued, in a series of influential, magisterial works, that we have to consider voyage narratives not as fabulations or imperialist imaginaries, but offering “truths” about the actual events of encounters, and affording insights not just about how foreigners saw and related to Oceanic peoples, but about how Oceanic peoples saw and related to strangers. Contemporaneous voyage narratives can moreover be juxtaposed with indigenous oral traditions (as transmuted into texts by later indigenous authors, missionaries or anthropologists). So, on the basis of Hawaiian oral traditions and nineteenth-century Hawaiian texts as much as the European archive, Sahlins consistently and ever more trenchantly insisted that Cook was seen by Hawaiians as a manifestation of the god Lono. This interpretation has, of course, been hotly disputed by Obeyesekere and others (Obeyesekere 1992; Bergendorff et al. 1988; and see Borofsky 1997 for a review of the debate).

But, as Tcherkézoff (2004b, ch. 9) has demonstrated, that protracted debate has been predicated on mistranslations and misconceptions. The division between humans and gods, fundamental to Judeo-Christian religion is, he argues, inappropriate to the holistic ontology of ancestral Polynesian cosmology. Obeyesekere (1992) had taken Sahlins too literally, as if Hawaiians had equated Cook the man with the god Lono, whereas what Sahlins had rather attempted to show was how Cook had been incorporated as but one manifestation of the divine principle of Lono, a partial and visible manifestation, alongside many other evanescent material embodiments which Hawaiians already deployed in the annual rituals of the Makahiki (Tcherkézoff 2004b, 124–8, 134–9).

The consequences of so incorporating strangers into indigenous cosmologies had real world effects. At its most obvious, the Hawaiian perception that Cook was an embodiment of Lono, and his return at an inauspicious moment in their annual ritual cycle, led ultimately to his death. But, Sahlins has argued for a more generalised model of how foreign powers were mediated and incorporated, and became crucial to indigenous transformations of the socio-political configurations of the “people of the place.” So, he earlier suggested (Sahlins 1985) that congress between European men and Hawaiian women, at the table rather than in bed, was crucial to the disruption of kapu, and especially those kapu that forbade certain foods to women and enshrined the commensal segregation of men and women. Successive waves of Christian conversion across the Pacific have been seen by Sahlins and many others as the appropriation and indigenisation of sacred powers which first came from “beyond the horizon” (see Jolly 2005a; cf. Robbins 2004).

But can we transpose Sahlins’ arguments about Hawai`i and Fiji to other parts of the Pacific? Were foreigners always seen as embodiments of divine or dangerous forces, if not deified like Lono, then perceived as more modest “ancestral spirits,” “ghosts” or “goblins,” which is how the Maori first perceived the Dutch, according to Salmond (1991, 87–8). We hope to suggest the risks of undue extrapolation from experiences in Hawai`i or New Zealand to other Oceanic sites, such as Samoa (Tcherkézoff, this volume), Papua New Guinea (Bonnemère and Lemonnier, and Mosko, this volume) and Vanuatu. So, Jolly (this volume) queries Salmond’s confident claim that the people of the archipelago Cook called the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) so certainly identified Cook and his men as “the ghosts of their forebears and approached them with caution, for such spirits could be malevolent” (Salmond 2003, 265). She suggests that the linguistic and ethnographic evidence is far more uncertain than Salmond allows, and that the word tomarr she translates as “ancestor” or “ghost” might equally be the word for peace.