Captain Cook

I thoroughly sympathise with the Black Lives Matter movement, having grown up in the United Kingdom in an era when racism was endemic.

However, one thing concerns me in the current stream of invective against historic personalities and that is a lack of discrimination – everyone is lumped together in the same category.

Captain Cook is one such victim. His first claim to fame is effectively combatting scurvy in naval crews. The regulations for this were known beforehand, but naval officers had little concern for crews and lived a totally different life to the sailors.

Cook on the other hand had come up from the bottom – he knew what it was like having been a seaman; so the regulations to combat scurvy were enforced and after 139 days at sea, no deaths – described as a miracle.

Coming to our own land, Cook and the first immigrants, Ma¯ ori, were people of their time and culture. Early Ma¯ ori practised slavery; naval crews in Cook’s time were generally press-ganged – little better than slaves. Some Ma¯ ori practised cannibalism and British seamen were often treated as cannon fodder.

Cook was promoted to lieutenant and given the task of exploring the Pacific because noone else was good enough.

For the age in which he lived he was very humane and his conduct was restrained. On the bottom of every letter to the Admiralty, his employers, he wrote ‘‘Your most humble and obedient servant’’. To class him the same as many subsequent British officials in our land is unjust.

Dennis Veal

Timaru