As Cook and his men attempted to take the chief to his ship, they were confronted by a crowd of Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay seeking to rescue their hostage.

James Cook led three separate voyages to chart areas of the globe unknown to the Kingdom of Great Britain.

[4][5] On 2 February 1778, Cook continued on to the coast of North America and Alaska, mapping and searching for a Northwest Passage to the Atlantic Ocean for approximately nine months.

[12] During Cook's initial visit, he attempted to barter with the Hawaiians and ordered his men to remove the wood used to border the natives' sacred "Morai" burial ground, used for high-ranking individuals and depictions of their gods.

[13] John Ledyard also tells of an episode where Captain Charles Clerke accused a native chieftain of stealing the Resolution's jolly boat.

They had been oppressed and were weary of our prostituted alliance...It was also equally evident from the looks of the natives as well as every other appearance that our friendship was now at an end, and that we had nothing to do but to hasten our departure to some different island where our vices were not known, and where our intrinsic virtues might gain us another short space of being wondered at.

[13]While the Resolution was anchored in Kealakekua Bay, one of its two longboats was stolen from the ship by the Hawaiians,[15] testing the foreigners' reaction to see how far they could go with such a significant loss.

To try to obtain the return of the stolen longboat from the Hawaiians, Cook attempted to kidnap the aliʻi nui of the island of Hawaii, Kalaniʻōpuʻu.

[24] By the time they got to the beach, Kalaniʻōpuʻu's two youngest sons, who had been following their father believing they were being invited to visit the ship again with the ruler, began to climb into the boats waiting at the shore.

Some accounts state that Kanaʻina did not intend to hit Cook while other descriptions say the chief deliberately struck the navigator across the head with his leiomano.

The remaining sailors and marines, heavily outnumbered, continued to fire as they retreated to their small boat and rowed back to their ship, killing several of the angered people on the beach, including possibly High Chief Kanaʻina.

Cook's ships did not leave Kealakekua Bay until 22 February; they had remained for another week to continue repair of the mast and collect better-quality drinking water.

[30] A young William Bligh, the future captain of HMS Bounty, later claimed to have been watching with a spyglass from Resolution as Cook's body was dragged up the hill to the town by the Native Hawaiians, where they tore him to pieces.