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Cook(e)'s toe in Typee.

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A tall tale in Chapter 32 of Typee about the fate of Captain James Cook's toe may be indebted to a suitably weird contemporary anecdote involving celebrated British actors Edmund Kean (1789-1833) and his predecessor in Shakespearian histrionics, George Frederick Cooke (1756-1812). In three paragraphs that were deleted for the American "Revised Edition," Melville's narrator "Tommo" first notes the near impossibility of verifying popular reports that Hawaiian natives feasted on the body of Cook after his violent death in 1779. (1) Next, Tommo doubts the authenticity of Cook's grave-marker at Kealakekua and presents English navigator George Vancouver as the gullible victim of a hoax, suggesting that Hawaiians who reportedly brought back Cook's heart to Vancouver's ship were only pretending to be cannibals. Finally, a concluding paragraph on the fate of Cook's remains is taken up with the story of an "old chief" on Maui "who, actuated by a morbid desire for notoriety, gave himself out among the foreign residents of the place as the living tomb of Captain Cook's big toe!--affirming, that at the cannibal entertainment which ensued after the lamented Briton's death, that particular portion of his body had fallen to his share" (NN Typee 234).

The far-fetched accounts of Cook's heart and toe take the form of frontier hoaxes like Mark Twain's "A Genuine Mexican Plug." (2) Despite their brevity and a shift in tone from skeptical to straight-faced, both tales chronicle practical jokes by experienced locals on naive outsiders. (3) Melville depicts the return of Cook's heart to Vancouver as "a piece of imposture" by knowing natives bent on duping a "credulous" European greenhorn (234). Similarly, the fame-seeking elder who supposedly are Cook's toe displays himself only to "foreign residents," the implication being that native Hawaiians would never be fooled by such a preposterous claim. Indeed, offended locals prosecute the self-proclaimed cannibal for "defamation of character" (234). Since nobody can prove that the defendendant has never tasted human flesh, however, the doubters lose their case. Triumphantly vindicated in court as a bona fide cannibal, the enterprising Hawaiian goes on to make a commercial spectacle of himself: "ever afterwards he was in the habit of giving very profitable audiences to all curious travellers who were desirous of beholding the man who had eaten the great navigator's great toe" (234).

The showmanship of Melville's cannibal-king mimics the masterful humbuggery of P. T. Barnum, who exhibited cannibals to paying customers at his American Museum and whom Melville parodies again in "The Authentic Anecdotes of 'Old Zack'" (1847) and Mardi (1849). (4) The chief's battle with litigious natives mirrors public disputes over the authenticity of Barnum's frequently outlandish exhibits, although the mock libel suit could more privately satirize the legalese of Herman's lawyer brothers Gansevoort and Allan....

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