Sure, he never had much formal schooling, but his voyages were all about increasing knowledge and scientific exploration. And having him die at the hands of a people who were so obviously mistaken in thinking him a god makes an argument for the superiority over the intellectualism of the Enlightenment versus the so-called primitive religion of the colonies. But whenever a story seems to fit really well into such a framework, we need to ask ourselves, who's telling that story? One of the reasons we know so much about Captain Cook and the reason he shows up in so many history textbooks is because we have tons of records about him, but they're almost all European records. Even the Hawaiian records we have about Cook have been heavily influenced by later contact with Europeans. So if we cast Cook's death as part of a native ritual, we're implying that Hawaiians were just performing a ritual script, which takes away all their agency as human beings. Are we making them recognizable, having them respond as we think Europeans would, by flying off the handle?