European voyagers were received across cultures as ghosts, gods, or spirits

Evidence

To less isolated peoples who had established relations with their neighbors and who no longer conceived themselves as the only inhabitants in the world, a newcomer of strange appearance might still be viewed as anything but human. The accounts of early European voyagers to out-of-the-way parts of the globe tell again and again of their being received by the native populations with fear, astonishment, apprehension, ceremonies of propitiation, protective rituals, fainting, and so forth-the exact emotion and behavior of the hosts depending on just what they conceived these strange white objects to be. Sometimes the voyagers were thought of as ghosts or ancestors from the normally unseen world, sometimes as beings from the world of occult powers, sometimes as spirits of the dead or persons raised from the dead, sometimes as malevolent gods (Levy-Bruhl, 1923:355-64; Wood, 1934:77- 84), and in one possibly apocryphal case of one lone white man, as a sacred white monkey: The late Doctor Stutterheim, Government Archeologist in Java, used to tell the following story: Somewhat before the advent of the white man, there was a storm on the Javanese coast in the neighborhood of one of the capitals. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 46

Categorization

• XREF: This grounding of stranger-handling in the cognitive act of classification parallels how urban dwellers categorize strangers — but here the response is ceremonial rather than civil inattention.
• QUESTION: Did any early European voyager deliberately exploit being perceived as a ghost or god to manipulate hosts? Worth chasing.