The islands of history
Captain Cook is remembered in different ways depending on where and who you are. Philip Matthews reports.
By the end of this month, the replica of the Endeavour and the flotilla of Ma¯ ori, European and Tahitian vessels that accompany it will have docked in Auckland, before setting sail for Whanga¯ rei and other ports further north.
The voyage, up the east coast and back down the west, reaching the South Island later in November, is the centrepiece of Tuia 250, the Government’s commemoration of Captain James Cook’s first encounters with Ma¯ ori in 1769.
When it is finished here, the replica will return to its home at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney before setting off on a voyage that is both much longer and more controversial than its jaunt around New Zealand. It will be at the heart of Australia’s own Cook programme, Encounters 2020.
The Australian Government committed A$50 million ($53m) to Encounters 2020, with A$6.7m ($7.2m) of that sum allocated to the replica Endeavour’s circumnavigation of Australia, recreating a voyage Cook himself never made.
‘‘Here, for most of his posthumous life, Cook was a monument rather than a man,’’ Australian historian Nicholas Thomas wrote in his book
Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook.
Thomas was 10 when the Cook bicentenary came along in
1970; he remembered the pomp and seriousness as Cook’s ‘‘discovery’’ was marked: ‘‘That’s what we mostly called it, even though we knew that the Dutch and later [William] Dampier had visited the west and north of Australia well before Cook. Their efforts did not count because they had not been to Sydney.’’
Cook’s encounters with Australia were briefer and less fulfilling than in New Zealand. The indigenous people seemed indifferent to the presence of the Europeans and communication was close to impossible.
While Cook nominated sites in New Zealand for future settlement – Thames and the Bay of Islands were singled out – he had no such thoughts about Australia.
And yet the figure of Cook has been at least as important to Australians as he was to New Zealanders, and has also been more contested.
In short, Australian politicians are more likely to cite Cook as a hero but statues of Cook are more likely to be vandalised. ‘‘No pride in genocide’’ was spraypainted across the base of a statue of Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park in
2017, in a typical act of protest. ‘‘Cook and his treatment by public memory can be seen as the latest front in an ongoing culture war,’’ Australian historian Benjamin Jones wrote at The Conversation earlier this year. Jones notes that Prime Minister Scott Morrison is a Cook fan who has criticised the ‘‘indulgent self-loathing’’ of those who refuse to mark Australia Day on January 26. Some now prefer to see the date, which harks back to the First Fleet’s arrival in 1788, as ‘‘invasion day’’.
Morrison is not one of them. ‘‘It’s very trendy to talk down James Cook and all that sort of stuff,’’ he said on radio in January, but ‘‘we need to rediscover him because he gets a bad show from those who like to talk down our history’’.
An earlier prime minister, Tony Abbott, described Australia as "unsettled or scarcely settled’’ before Cook arrived. Earlier still, John Howard rejected the ‘‘black armband view’’ of those who saw Australia’s history as one dominated by ‘‘imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination’’.
But a hopeful Jones sees these and other politicians as not speaking for the majority of Australians, who no longer identify as British. Jones looks back to anthropologist WEH Stanner, who coined the phrase ‘‘the great Australian silence’’ in 1968 to describe white Australia’s ignorance of Aboriginal history and culture.
In the half century since, ‘‘Australians have become more aware of the ancient cultures that possessed this land at least as far back as the Pleistocene. Retreating into the lazy ‘cult of forgetfulness’ with a government-promoted, triumphant Cook narrative, narrows a history that has been slowly broadening for decades.’’
Taking a similar approach to Tuia 250, Australia’s Encounters 2020 promises to ‘‘reflect on, discuss and re-evaluate the lasting impact this pivotal event has had on us all and, in particular, the repercussions on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities’’, as the official material has it. But again, like Tuia 250, the wider conversations about history it promises to facilitate are still dependent on the anniversary of Cook’s voyage. There will be protests and some tough discussions.
Violent death came for James Cook at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii on February 14, 1779. He was stabbed and probably clubbed after attempting to take King Kalani’opu’u hostage in retaliation for a stolen boat.
Hostage-taking had been a reliable tactic to punish thieves since Cook’s first Pacific voyage, but it went dramatically wrong this time.
The coincidence of the date has not been lost on some in Hawaii who prefer to celebrate the death of Cook rather than Valentines Day.
‘‘There is, oddly enough, a sense of pride for some people,’’ says Emalani Case, a lecturer in Pacific Studies at Victoria University in Wellington.
‘‘Even being here, as a Hawaiian, I have encountered many people who say, ‘Thank you to you and your ku¯ puna [ancestors] for doing what you did’. That’s not an uncommon thing.
‘‘I’m not one to go around celebrating the death of anyone, but there are people in Aotearoa and other parts of the Pacific who recognise what he brought to our islands, what he represents, and then thank me as a way of thanking my ancestors.’’
Hawaiian historian Lilikala¯ K Kame’eleihiwa has said that many Hawaiian families still claim the honour of being the ones whose ancestors killed Cook, and when her ‘‘Ma¯ ori cousins’’ taunt Hawaiians for being too nice to foreigners, Kame’eleihiwa and others reply, ‘‘Don’t forget that you Ma¯ ori had your chance and you missed it. We Hawaiians killed Cook and rid the world of a very bad man.’’
There is a way in which
Ma¯ ori and Hawaiians, who share genealogy and history and are linked by language and migration routes, are also united in their experiences of colonialism, Case says. They were colonised by different powers and suffered in different ways – Hawaiian populations were decimated by introduced diseases – but both know how it feels to be minorities in their own land, with language and culture outlawed or threatened.
‘‘I know what it feels like,’’ she says. ‘‘I’ve been a vocal opponent of Tuia 250 because I recognise how wrong and insidious it is in its logic and in the way it’s presented. That comes from my experience of colonialism in Hawaii.’’
Similarly, many in New Zealand could look at the current struggle over Mauna Kea, the sacred Hawaiian mountain where activists protest against plans to build a telescope, and recognise parallels with home. The Mauna Kea movement has been seen as instrumental in a new Hawaiian renaissance; it has even attracted celebrities, such as Dwayne ‘‘The Rock’’ Johnson, Jason Momoa and Jack Johnson, and has had backing from further afield. Does that sound familiar?
Case agrees. ‘‘There have been many Ma¯ ori who have gone to Mauna Kea and expressed their support, and many Hawaiians who have come here and gone to Ihuma¯ tao.’’
She went to Gisborne when the Endeavour replica reappeared and thought then about how strange it was to see this, and how problematic it looked for the waka to be there with it. When she tells people back in Hawaii, they struggle to make sense of it, ‘‘that this is even a thing, that this is even happening’’.
But the replica has been to Hawaii before. That was in 1999 when it visited Kealakekua Bay, and the influential historian and anthropologist Anne Salmond was present. There were threats of violence, although they did not pan out.
‘‘Young people were reacting by saying they will burn the ship and this kind of thing, because a lot of people were killed after Cook’s death,’’ Salmond says. ‘‘A lot. The sailors run amok after Cook was killed.’’
As many as 30 Hawaiians were killed in the aftermath of Cook’s death, and homes were burned, Thomas wrote in
Discoveries.
In Hawaii in 1999, Salmond remembers a church service, a hula of healing, being performed and the sharing of food on the replica with ‘‘direct descendants of the people who had been involved in his death’’. There was pain but there were also attempts at reconciliation. ‘‘Again, it depends who you talk to,’’ says Salmond, who refuses to see history as a straightforward story of heroes and villains.
Other places in the Pacific have wrestled with the Cook legacy in other ways in these post-colonial times. As historian Glyn Williams put it, on some islands, including the Marquesas, Easter Island, the Cook Islands and Tonga, ‘‘there was no veneration and sometimes very little respect’’. The Cook Islands greeted 2019 with the news that it will
probably change its name to reflect its "true Polynesian nature’’.
But there is one island few talk about when they remember Cook in the Pacific, and that is his distant homeland.
Otago University historian Tony Ballantyne has been going to Britain over the past couple of years as part of his ongoing Cook
project, Remembering James Cook: New Zealand and the
Afterlife of Empire. What he has seen is an understanding of Cook that is less complicated, less contested – more like it used to be in New Zealand and Australia.
Cook continues to be a heroic figure in Britain, ‘‘an embodiment of 18th-century empire and a great man’’. In Yorkshire, he is celebrated as a great Yorkshireman. A second Endeavour replica is docked in the Yorkshire port town of Whitby, but unlike the Australian replica, it is merely a museum. It doesn’t sail.
If you head to the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum in Middlesbrough, you will see museums as they used to be, far removed from what New Zealanders have come to expect in a post-colonial age. This is oldschool exhibiting: a copy of an Easter Island moai, or statue, alongside Australian fauna and Ma¯ ori carving and Native American material. These are souvenirs and symbols of Cook’s journeys.
‘‘Indigenous objects are jumbled together and framed as exotica, which again underlines the way in which, although our society isn’t perfect and our institutions are imperfect, we have been trying to make progress in terms of grappling with these events, their meaning and the way we access the past through objects and the museum collection,’’ Ballantyne says.
Tuia 250 has been part of the grappling. It has been uncomfortable, sometimes clumsy, sometimes even insensitive and crass, but it has been informative too, and revealing. People have learned things, including the lesson that it is not just time that changes how history is seen, it’s also place.
This is the fourth of five stories on the histories behind Tuia 250. Next week: how Tuia 250 is retelling stories of Polynesian voyaging and navigation.