King Kamehameha

A Night Out With

Cart. Cook And

From a Canberra correspondent A goodly number of the most

socially acceptable people in

Australia turned up at Boo roomba Station, some 25 miles out of Canberra, on the night of February 23 to do homage in their way to the Pacific’s greatest

explorer, Captain Cook,

The occasion was a fancy dress ball, called “A Night with Captain Cook”, which the Canberra Sunday Post described as “the party of the year”.

The 300-odd ball-goers were re quired to dress in contemporary costumes of the people in any of the ports visited by Cook on his three Pacific voyages.

This directive produced a rich array of jolly Jack tars, red coats, pirates, courtiers and naval officers, plus a scattering of Brazilians, Mongolians, Red Indians and Aborigines, a Chinese Mandarin or two and a dozen or so Pacific Islanders—with their ladies in ap propriate costume.

A former cabinet minister, Mr.

David Fairbairn, appeared as Captain Cook; and two of the current ministers took the roles of King George 111 and the First Lord of the Admiralty.

Authentic Hawaii tableau

Tableaus featuring Brazil, Hawaii, Indonesia, South Africa, Canada, Hawaii and Macao were presented with the co-operation of the ap propriate embassies in Canberra.

The American Embassy went to particular trouble to make its Hawaiian tableau as authentic as possible. The Bishop Museum in Honolulu was persuaded to lend $lO,OOO worth of authentic replicas of the costumes of the period, plus various artifacts, and these were flown in by courtesy of Pan Ameri can World Airways.

The costumes included the magnificent feather cape of King Kamehameha I, a royal feather helmet, and the tapa toga of Hawaiian female royalty.

The feathered cape is made of bright golden feathers and is estima ted to contain half a million in dividual feathers taken from 80,000 birds.

The cape was at one time given as a gift to King George IV of Britain, and displayed at Windsor Castle, but subsequently was restored to Hawaii where it is now regarded as one of the 50th State’s national treasures.

The matching helmet is also made of feathers, red as well as gold in this case, and is fixed on a wicker frame.

The carved image, shown in the picture, is the god Lono. The Hawaiians accepted Captain Cook as a reincarnated Lono and at one point presented Cook to this very image.

It too was later taken to England but was returned to Hawaii with other gifts to the Bishop Museum in 1920.

In the tableau. Dr. Ben Finney, an Hawaiian-speaking American re search fellow in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, wore the cloak of King Kamehameha.

At right, Dr. Ben Finney wearing the feathered cape of King Kamehameha, and other ancient Hawaiian pieces loaned for the occasion by the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. On the left, is Mary Ann Heimgartner, wearing the topa toga of royal Hawaiian royalty of the period. -Pan-Am photo.