The trope in question is the one where a white guy, typically an explorer of some sort, meets up with a primitive tribe, gets mistaken for a god, and gets worshipped. I must have seen this dozens of times in movies and books.
I’m only aware of two possible real-world situations that might be relevant. The first is Captain Cook’s final expedition to Hawaii. The native Hawaiians did mistake him and his sailors fot deities. However, there was no worship or anything of the sort involved, and it lasted only a short time before the Hawaiians turned against Cook.
The other case is the “Cargo Cults” of New Guinea and Micronesia, in which the natives supposedly believed that various modern gadgets have divine origin. I haven’t been able to find any reliable source verifying their existence. I’m skeptical for a number of reasons. First, I was a World War II buff in my younger days. I read a great deal about the war in the Pacific, and the Cargo Cults were never mentioned. Second, it seems that the idea showed up in pop culture first, before it actually happened during WW II. I’ve seen it in several works of fiction from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Third, since it fits so well with the racist attitudes from that period, one wonders if it could have been fabricated (or at least exaggerated) as a justification for those attitudes.
Cargo Cults are real. They were around before WWII but not in a big way, it was after that they really sprung up. Its a combination of at least the traditional big-man system (like potlatch), missionary influence that hard work would bring reward divine rewards, and contact with more technologically advanced people. When the troops landed they brought all this stuff with them. A lot of the people saw the Cargo as their reward for hard work and the end of their troubles. Groups of people even built airstrips and dummy radios to get the planes carrying cargo to come to them. Try Marvin Harris’ “Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches” for a bit about cargo cults and lots of other stuff. Its a good book. He was a very well renowned anthropologist (he’s dead now). You won’t see cargo cults so much in war books, but you will in anthropology books. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2267426 This link is pretty good too.
Native Americans had very good trade routes. 10,000 year old remains in Alaska showed a well developed marine trade route that far back. Horses were traded far and wide from the first areas of contact and herds were well established across the U.S when white explorers arrived in the late 1700’s and 1800’s, to give you an idea how wide spread the routes were. Stories spread too, about white people with powerful technology (not just guns). I don’t think you see so much “Whites as Gods” worship (though the whites certainly saw it that way) but natives trying to gain the white’s spiritual power that allowed them to make the tools and technology they had.
We did cargo cults in my senior seminar in religious studies, which was on millennialism. That’s more than 30 years ago, though. Let me poke around and see if I can find some good sources. (Marvin Harris, though beloved by skeptics, isn’t taken all that seriously within anthropology/sociology – as a popularizer, he tends to ignore nuance.)
My first reading of this had me thinking you were saying that trade in horses went back 10,000 years. But I assume “first areas of contact” refers to contact with Spanish conquistadors (who brought the first horses, in the 16th century).
What whites thought they were being worshiped as gods?
David Attenborough’s book Life On Air has an excellent account of Cargo Cults, and the stories aren’t exaggerated, although they do have a rather more complex social and political spin on them than dumb natives worshipping aeroplanes. Essentially they are/were anti-colonialist, a millennarian movement which predicted the coming of a prophet named John Frum who would free them from the shackles of honky and provide them with all his material goods gratis.
It’s interesting and impressive in a way that by around ten years after Columbus returned from his first voyage there were already many established outposts as well as a bureaucracy in the New World.
Captain Cook may have been regarded as Lono on his final voyage. Final because the Hawaiians killed him. Apparently there was a pretty high bar for gods in Hawaii.
When the peoples of the central highlands of Papua New Guinea were first contacted in the 1930s, they at first believed that the whites on the expeditions were spirits:
What gag? Rastafarians believe that Haile Selassie was the incarnation of god. Try telling a true believer that the object of his devotion is not divine and see how far it gets you.
You’re saying you sat down in front of a search engine (such as Google), typed in ‘cargo cult’, and were subsequently unable to find any source that documented cargo cults to your satisfaction?
Not just on his fourth voyage. In his letter describing his first voyage, Columbus believed he was seen by the Indians as celestial being. (Of course, we don’t know what the Indians actually thought.)
