Monuments, memories, men of action
If you want to hero worship of Captain Cook, you should have been here 50 years ago.
Fifty years is a long time in New Zealand. Compare and contrast the way we talked about Captain James Cook in 1969 and how we talk about him now.
In 1969, the country marked 200 years since Cook’s ‘‘discovery’’ of New Zealand. And the old idea of ‘‘discovery’’ was still in use then, along with a sense that Cook’s achievement was being celebrated rather than, to use the more neutral word preferred in 2019, ‘‘commemorated’’.
Picture this. A parade was the centrepiece of Cook Week in Gisborne, and the highlight was a giant float of Cook’s head. While the great navigator and explorer has been largely sidelined within the contested politics of Tuia 250, the Government’s marking of the first on-land encounters between Ma¯ ori and Pa¯ keha¯ , 50 years ago the man himself was still the hero.
That giant head ‘‘embodied the Anglocentric celebration of Cook’’, Otago University historian Tony Ballantyne says. ‘‘I think that would make most New Zealanders uncomfortable today.’’
Ballantyne, whose books include Entanglements of Empire, is working on Remembering James Cook: New Zealand and the Afterlife of
Empire, which will be out towards the end of 2020. He has tracked how Cook’s prominence has waxed and waned over time as different ideas about national identity have played out.
‘‘It is very important that we recognise that in the last 50 years, New Zealand society has moved a very long way,’’ Ballantyne says. ‘‘Maybe it has not moved as far as some people would like, or as quickly, and that’s frustrating.’’
He says that ‘‘Cook was the iconic central figure’’ in 1969. ‘‘Ma¯ ori were marginal. It was a celebration of empire, New Zealand’s connection to Britain and to this great 18th-century figure. There is now a much broader recognition that empire and colonisation had terrible consequences for Ma¯ ori.’’
‘‘The whole thing was glossed as being all about Captain Cook,’’ says historian and anthropologist Anne Salmond, whose ideas about complex cultural interchange between Ma¯ ori and Europeans have been
influential on the thinking behind Tuia 250.
What else would the bystander have seen in 1969? Prime Minister Keith Holyoake launched proceedings in Wellington when he opened an exhibition in the former Dominion Museum, which ran for 10 months. There were previews of a new National Film Unit promotional film, tilted Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant, James Cook.
In Gisborne, there were ‘‘Maori and other concerts’’, as CA Fleming wrote in a summary for the Royal Society of London in 1970. Warships from five navies made a pilgrimage to Gisborne: the UK, New Zealand, Australia, the US and Canada. ‘‘The ships dressed with bunting by day, illuminated at night, and their crews at liberty in the streets, left the citizens and visitors in no doubt at all that this was pre-eminently a naval occasion,’’ Fleming wrote.
A plaque marking Cook’s first landing was unveiled on Kaiti Beach. Nine Royal New Zealand Air Force jets did a fly-past. Mayor Harry Barker ‘‘spoke of Gisborne’s pride that Maori and European now live together and play together, not as two separate races, but as one race of proud New Zealanders’’. Then the parade happened: marching girls, navy bands and 75 floats depicting scenes from history and ‘‘community activities in modern Gisborne’’, including that giant head.
Acrowd of 8000 gathered at Rugby Park. Children sang God Defend New Zealand.
More planes flew past and troops were inspected. But there was a dissenting note. Hanara Reedy got to speak for Ma¯ ori and ‘‘recalled that East Coast tradition attributed the discovery of New Zealand to Polynesian voyagers 43 generations ago’’. The Waihirere Maori Club ‘‘presented traditional action songs, haka, and poi dances of high standard’’. Then fireworks lit up the evening.
A new statue of Cook was unveiled that week, along with one of ‘‘Young Nick’’, or Nicholas Young, the boy who first saw New Zealand from the Endeavour. The Canadian high commissioner presented a Native American totem pole, which Holyoake passed on to the city of Gisborne. An exhibition of Polynesian art opened, showing artefacts collected on Cook’s voyages and ‘‘authentic pieces’’ from the same period.
A military mood dominated. Science was secondary. Indigenous people were a long way down the list, and there was little sense that their stories had persisted into the present rather than being trapped in history.
The film about Cook put forward the same message about the full assimilation of Ma¯ ori into European New Zealand that the Gisborne mayor had delivered.
Yes, Ma¯ ori were once ‘‘a
‘‘It is very important that we recognise that in the last 50 years, New Zealand society has a moved a very long way.’’
Tony Ballantyne Otago University historian
warlike people’’, the film’s voiceover said, but ‘‘this brave and noble race have put away their weapons, and accepted, like the European, the inevitability of civilisation. Only their features distinguish them from the other New Zealanders’’. An actor spoke for Cook, who said that, if this country was ‘‘settled by an industrious people, they would very soon be supplied not only with the necessities but many of the luxuries of life’’.
Cook’s ‘‘vision for the country has come true’’, the voice-over intoned, as the governmentproduced film looked upon sunny New Zealand at the end of the 1960s and saw a peaceful and prosperous land of plenty.
But then the country began to change. The celebrations in 1969 were the beginning of the end of something for both Pa¯ keha¯ and Ma¯ ori, the high-water mark of Cook’s role as a founding hero and national myth. As Ballantyne says, ‘‘it marks the final stage in a really Anglocentric moment in how we understand the history of New Zealand’’.
In the 1970s, we had the Ma¯ ori cultural renaissance and the rise of Ma¯ ori activists. Academic Ranginui Walker challenged the ‘‘one people’’ myth that still had such currency among Pa¯ keha¯ .
Historian Keith Sinclair argued in a paper published in
1971 that New Zealand had better race relations than South Africa, South Australia and South Dakota, and ‘‘there is relatively little social prejudice’’ against Ma¯ ori.
That story of racial harmony and equality was much less tenable by the end of the 1970s, Ballantyne argues.
Different places in the country had fostered the Cook myth in different ways. Colonists in Dunedin and Christchurch did not initially see Cook as hugely important and looked instead to their own stories of founding fathers and original ships. But in Gisborne, particularly, the Cook connection was stressed by civic leaders. A monument went on the foreshore in 1906, the first in the country dedicated to Cook. Gisborne worked hard to make Cook central to celebrations in
1940 even though he had nothing to do with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
The first centenary of Cook in 1869 had come and gone with only ‘‘a small amount of discussion’’, Ballantyne says. The North Island town of
Tu¯ taenui used the occasion to rename itself Marton, after Cook’s birthplace in Yorkshire. A lifesize statue was finally put up there in 2004.
A handful of editorial writers and newspaper correspondents in 1869 lamented that the event was not being marked in public. One newspaper measured the progress of the young country over the previous 100 years and looked forward to more: ‘‘Doubtless, as we look back with wonder at the changes which these islands have undergone since our celebrated countryman planted the Union Jack on a hill in Queen Charlotte’s Sound, our successors of 50 years hence will see a far greater comparative change wrought by the willing hands and active brains of those who are fast supplanting the Maori race.’’
As they recounted Cook’s adventures, journalists described Ma¯ ori with a mix of admiration and fear, but almost always in the past tense. ‘‘The Maori was, par excellence, a fighting animal,’’ declared the Wellington Independent. Others suggested that Cook had saved ‘‘a nation of cannibals’’ from themselves.
But as in Australia, the sense that Cook was a founder of the nation really started to take off in the 20th century.
In Christchurch in the 1920s, a committee formed to put a statue of Cook in Victoria Square. It hardly mattered that the Endeavour had sailed right past and that Cook had mistaken Banks Peninsula for an island. When the statue was finally unveiled in 1932, a feature in The
Press explained his greatness to Canterbury readers.
Under the subhead ‘‘Attitude to Natives’’, the paper said, ‘‘Cook was a man of strong character, full of brains and of untiring energy and inflexible determination. Add to this that he was wrapped up in his profession, and, in spite of his humble birth, had all the instincts of a gentleman, and it is not difficult to see why he succeeded. Without the latter characteristic he could not have successfully commanded and gained the respect and affection of men who were his social superiors, and he could not have gained the confidence of the native races in the way he did. Without the friendship of the natives he could not have charted and studied the lands he discovered and replenished his ships at them.’’
His prowess and personality were emphasised; the deaths of Ma¯ ori and other ‘‘natives’’ were unfortunate. The account was also typical of the way that major historical forces were embodied in one man, rather than Cook being seen as he is now, the agent of an imperial system.
As the bicentenary approached, pioneering New Zealand publisher AW Reed reprinted an edited version of Cook’s journals, covering the three New Zealand voyages. The introduction talked of Cook’s studiousness, his determination, his fanatical attention to the health of his men. He was trustworthy and sober, and ‘‘gambling and drunkenness were foreign to his nature’’. He was a ‘‘stern disciplinarian’’.
Reed went on: Cook was strict but fair when dealing with ‘‘native peoples’’ and ‘‘primitive races’’. The deaths of Ma¯ ori were ignored, although Reed noted that Cook lost the patience and judgment he showed during his earlier ‘‘dealings with native races’’ during his third Pacific voyage, which ended with his violent death in Hawaii in 1779.
‘‘What manner of man James Cook was can be seen most clearly from his deeds,’’ Reed concluded. ‘‘Seldom has a man combined such gift of caution and adventurousness, of quiet, meticulous research and epoch-making discovery, of humanity and discipline, of stern sense of duty and ability to command the respect and affection of his subordinates and the admiration of scientists.’’
That portrait leaves out less flattering details. The eminent historian JC Beaglehole wrote about Cook’s relationship with subordinates that ‘‘disobedience incurred his rage, and his rage was formidable’’. Cook’s crew called his foot-stomping rages ‘‘heivas’’, after a Tahitian dance. When people on Tonga learned of Cook’s death, some wept but others remembered his cruelty, Beaglehole wrote.
Hero worship is unfashionable, and few would dare produce such a glowing account of anyone now as Reed did of Cook then. Does this mean that people in the past were wrong and those in the present are always right? It shows that history is contingent and always open for interpretation, shaped by the mood and the politics of the day and the incorporation of perspectives other than ones that have dominated for so long. It means that the past evolves.