Before his death, Cook had attempted to take a Hawaiian king hostage in response to Hawaiians taking a bunch of stuff from Cook's boats. This was common practice for Cook. He had done the same thing in Tahiti and other Polynesian islands after islanders had taken European goods. Which, by the way, happened everywhere Cook went in the Pacific, so maybe he should have figured out that it was like a thing, that you were allowed to take stuff off boats in exchange for the right to hang out there. Great sailor, terrible anthropologist, although to be fair, anthropology hadn't been invented. Additionally, right before Cook was killed, there were rising tensions between the Hawaiians and the Europeans, even though at first their relationship had been quite cordial, as evidenced by all that gonorrhea. So why the tension?