CAPTAIN COOK
Hero, villain or both?
Even as a replica of his ship the Endeavour comes closer and closer, the man himself fades from view. In the year 2019, some 250 years after he first made contact with Ma¯ ori at the start of a six-month circumnavigation of New Zealand, it has become harder than ever to know what to say or think about Captain James Cook.
He seems to have almost vanished while other people from the past become clearer. Although the Ministry of Culture and Heritage finances and supports anniversary events under the banner of the
$23 million Tuia 250 project, you hear little about Cook himself. He is barely mentioned on the Tuia 250 website that promotes Ma¯ ori, Pacific and European voyaging traditions and where waka have equal billing with the Endeavour.
Unfashionable words like ‘‘discovery’’ and ‘‘celebration’’ are gone from the conversation. ‘‘Encounters’’ and ‘‘commemoration’’ are preferred.
‘‘It has been framed as a much broader opportunity to reflect upon the engagements between cultures and the legacies of those meetings, and what possible futures might be,’’ is how Otago University historian Tony Ballantyne describes Tuia 250.
Few would dare put it quite this boldly, but Cook has become politically incorrect. He is problematic. He has been called a barbarian, a racist, an invader, a white supremacist, a syphilitic destroyer of indigenous cultures.
Those and other claims about Cook and his voyages will be examined and challenged over coming weeks. But before we do that, we need to know who Cook was and why he was here.
There are two things simultaneously, as historian and anthropologist Anne Salmond explains at the start of her magnum opus, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas. On one hand, he was undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest explorers, and the scale of his travel is still breathtaking, from Antarctica to the Arctic Circle, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii and all across the Pacific.
On the other hand, ‘‘Captain Cook has become an icon of imperial history’’ whose voyages ‘‘epitomise the European conquest of nature’’. Cook and his men were here to map and chart and, if possible, to claim land for the Crown.
The first reason for the voyage was scientific, to observe the transit of the planet Venus from Tahiti. The second reason was to locate a mythical great southern continent.
It didn’t exist and Cook, the gifted sailor and surveyor, had been more sceptical than others about its existence. Instead, he found the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand in October 1769 and expertly circumnavigated the country.
By cancelling the imperialist Cook, do we also lose Cook the explorer?
‘‘There are many things about Cook’s first voyage that we don’t want to lose sight of,’’ says writer Tessa Duder.
Duder, best known for the Alex books, has produced First Map with illustrator David Elliot. It’s a beautiful object but a little old-fashioned in the year of Tuia 250. It is a view from the ship, celebrating Cook’s remarkable achievements as a surveyor and sailor.
Duder is struck by how closely Cook’s map of New Zealand resembles those used today: ‘‘All the seafarers I know talk about Cook’s chart with great awe and astonishment. It is so accurate.’’
Inspired by Salmond, Duder sees Cook as relatively progressive on issues of race, desperate to understand Ma¯ ori and other people the Endeavour encountered. The impression is of a man who was stern but fair, a remote father of the nation. She is impressed by a moment in the Bay of Islands when Cook learned that three of his sailors had been caught stealing from
Ma¯ ori gardeners and were flogged.
‘‘He was determined to show his sailors and
Ma¯ ori that he could treat both equally. His justice applied to both. One sailor who said he’d done nothing wrong got an extra lot.’’
In Salmond’s influential account, such even-handedness led to a traumatic moment that gave her book its title. When Cook learned that a group of sailors on the Adventure, a ship that accompanied his second Pacific voyage, had been cannibalised by Ma¯ ori in the Marlborough Sounds, he refused to take revenge, losing status in the eyes of both his European shipmates and Ma¯ ori, who had strong traditions of reciprocity and vengeance.
Duder sees her account as apolitical, which is a tricky position in 2019. Her book emphasises the ‘‘guilt and despair’’ Cook felt over the shooting of two men, Te Maro and Te Rakau, during the Endeavour’s first encounters at Tu¯ ranganui-a-Kiwa, which Cook named Poverty Bay.
From that disastrous start, according to Duder, Cook developed his genuine interest in Ma¯ ori. He saw ‘‘a proud race, demanding respect and highly capable – as mariners, boatbuilders, gardeners, fishermen and warriors’’. This image of Cook as the first enlightened Pa¯ keha¯ will be hard for some Ma¯ ori to swallow but it is an enduring and useful story for others.
‘‘Pa¯ keha¯ New Zealanders have somewhat domesticated Cook,’’ Ballantyne says. ‘‘We have made him a figure we can imagine as a founder or cultural ancestor. He is practical. He has limited emotional range. He is quite stern.’’
Cook is skilled and highly capable. He is classless, like a prototype New Zealander. Part of the appealing story is that Cook was not an aristocrat handed a navy title but the son of a labourer who worked his way up. Salmond’s book contrasts the sensible, no-nonsense Yorkshireman with the Endeavour’s wealthy scientist, Joseph Banks, who comes across as vain, pampered and largely interested in pursuing women across the Pacific.
But to create this good Cook, Ballantyne says, we have to ‘‘underestimate or contain the way Cook was directly implicated in the workings of empire and the way his voyage laid the foundations for the
exploitation of the Pacific and ultimately its colonisation’’.
And while he sees Salmond as ‘‘an incredibly eloquent writer and very important modern interpreter of the voyages’’, Ballantyne would put more emphasis on ‘‘Cook’s implication in empire and the recurrent use of violence as a strategy, from the first voyage through to the third, to shape cross-cultural relationships’’.
Salmond’s view is not just about New Zealanders today, but an imagined future, Ballantyne believes.
‘‘I think she has a very optimistic, positive reading of a future that can be created if we are willing to truly engage across cultural boundaries and learn from each other and experiment across worlds,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s a very future-looking history, an optimistic history.’’
Salmond is on the Tuia 250 national advisory committee and it is fair to say that her ideas about Cook and Ma¯ ori have shaped how the event has come into being. She speaks with admiration about those in the Ma¯ ori world who want to use Tuia 250 to perhaps air the old stories one last time and then move on. She is less eager for it to turn into a grievance festival.
‘‘There are a lot of countries going down extraordinarily negative, self-destructive pathways,’’ she says. ‘‘We’ve got a chance to not do that.’’
It does not have to mean creating a bland, inoffensive Cook. For Salmond, part of the problem we have in 2019 is the sheer difficulty of understanding how people saw the world 250 years ago, whether they were Ma¯ ori or European. Cook stepped into a mythological story in Hawaii on the third voyage that proved to be fatal for him, but Salmond also emphasises the mythological elements around Cook’s appearance in New Zealand.
Some on shore wondered if the Endeavour was a floating island or a giant bird. In New Zealand as well as Tahiti, there were prophecies. A Ma¯ ori priest fell into a trance and related a vision of ‘‘red and white strangers’’ and ‘‘the high chief from the sky’’. The priest drew pictures of their ships, carts, horses and clothing.
Others saw the Europeans as goblins or similar mythological beings. It is significant that they had sailed from Tahiti, which Salmond says was identified with the mythical homeland, Hawaiki.
In short, it is hard to put ourselves into the heads of those who were at Tu¯ ranganuia-Kiwa in 1769. ‘‘There are a lot of things you can’t understand from this distance.’’
But Cook himself? Her view is multi-faceted. Yes, it is significant that he clawed his way up in the navy. It is important that he had a mentor who was a Quaker.
Salmond has read Cook’s journals and letters and those of other explorers in the Pacific and, compared with them, ‘‘Cook does not appear to have been racist in the way that a number of them were. They talk about savages, they talk about cannibals. A lot of the commentary from early European explorers is extremely derogatory.
‘‘Cook just doesn’t do that. He talks about them as other human beings and perhaps that’s because he was not part of the hierarchy back home. I’m not sure. And of course he was treated with a huge amount of respect in Polynesia in particular, as a high chief, really. You get the sense by the third voyage that he preferred to be in Polynesia and on the ocean than at home.’’
She stresses the other side as well. Cook was ‘‘an emissary of a system’’ that did enormous harm in the Pacific. He found and charted islands and opened the floodgates for disease and colonisation. But there were historical forces, greater than any one man.
‘‘I’m trained to understand how these things come to pass,’’ she says. ‘‘What I see is a Europe that was in a phase of expansion. Spain was sending out ships, the Dutch had sent out ships, everybody was competing, and Cook was part of all that. He happened to be the person who turned up first in some places.
‘‘But it’s a system. This whole view of the world, the epidemic diseases, the firearms – to land all that on the shoulders of one man narrows the understanding of what was really going on, which was something much, much bigger.’’
Previous generations made a hero of Cook. Now we despise him or even try to ignore him. None of these options are the right ones, Salmond argues.
‘‘It’s so easy to turn history into some kind of melodrama where you hiss [at] the villain and cheer the hero. That’s what I think we’ve been doing.’’
This is the first of five stories on the histories behind Tuia 250. Next week: Ma¯ ori views on remembering Cook.