Captain Cook

Your article Return of the death ship gives Maori a long neglected voice on the coming of Europeans to New Zealand. However, I wonder if it is fair.

Arama Rata says ‘‘invasion of Maori whenua’’ to describe Cook’s arrival in New Zealand; invasion was never Cook’s intention. He was an explorer, no less than those Maori who arrived centuries beforehand.

Tina Ngata recalls us to the ills which beset tangata whenua in our time. They are a legacy of European settlement and as she says a blight on our claim of racial harmony. They are subsequent but entirely separate from Cook’s ‘‘discovery’’ of New Zealand.

Arahere Herbert-Graves says Cook’s ‘‘encounters’’ and ‘‘meetings’’ are euphemisms for invasion, but they were exactly that, encounters and meetings.

Some time after Cook missionaries brought Christianity and many Maori took it to heart; warfare between tribes declined. Sadly the Europeans who followed were only Christian in name, certainly not by their actions. The next century saw arrogance, exploitation and the New Zealand wars.

Having said all that, it is wrong to vilify Cook in these matters. He was a man ahead of his time. A man of humble origins, he joined the Royal Navy. He was a brilliant seaman so he was promoted, in a service where officers were ‘‘gentlemen’’ or had bought their commissions. Cook was of the lowest rank but was given the task of exploring the Pacific because no other officer was good enough.

But his success never went to his head. On the bottom of every letter he sent to his employers, the British admiralty, he wrote ‘‘Your humble and obedient servant’’.

Let us acknowledge and grapple with the thorny issues in our history, but we don’t have to do it by destroying the reputation of one of the most able and humane figures in our history. Dennis Veal

Timaru