MAKING A NAME
It has been 250 years since Cook first set foot in New Zealand. The anniversary is being seen as a chance to re-evaluate the country’s relationship with a man who defined the way many New Zealanders see themselves today
This October marked 250 years since Captain James Cook first set foot in New Zealand, kickstarting a wave of British colonisation on the archipelago. The anniversary has been seen as an opportunity to re-evaluate the country’s relationship with a man who, with a strike of his pen, defined the way many New Zealanders see themselves today
With a coastal breeze fluttering through dark hair flecked with grey, Nick Tupara stares out across a nondescript dark sand beach, enclosed within a large semi-circular bay, at the distant horizon. My attention is taken by a large granite obelisk standing just a few hundred metres away, at the foot of a looming headland – a tiny piece of Edwardian Westminster seemingly dropped into provincial New Zealand. It symbolises a noteworthy but highly divisive moment in the topsy-turvy history of these islands.
Tupara catches my gaze. ‘That had been a landing site for 500 years before Cook arrived,’ he points out, in reference to the gentle slope running from the obelisk to the water’s edge. ‘That landing site was created by ancestors centuries before him. We want to talk about those people. We want to tell some of their stories, because his story is already there, with the monument.’ It’s almost 250 years to the day since Captain James Cook and the crew of the Endeavour navigated their way into this exact bay, the first time they set eyes on this land. The obelisk marks their initial landing place, at the mouth of the river Tūranganui that flows through the modern city of Gisborne (the first city in the world to see the sun, according to local signage).
Between October and December this year, a nationwide event called Tuia 250 is acknowledging and commemorating the two and a half centuries that have elapsed since Cook first arrived in the country now known as New Zealand (or Aotearoa, ‘the land of the long white cloud’) in the midst of his 1768 to 1771 circumnavigation of the world. Many large-scale events are taking place, including a ‘flotilla of Pacific, Māori and European sailing vessels’ navigating the coastline, one of which is the HM Bark Endeavour, an Australian replica of Cook’s ship. Most than that, it shines a spotlight on a man who embodies a complicated history and sense of identity for the country.
FIRST CONTACT
The Endeavour spent nearly four months in French Polynesia in the middle of 1769, but finally departed Tahiti in mid-August. On 6 October 1769, ‘Young Nick’, the 12-year-old cabin boy, cried out from atop the ship’s rigging: he had spotted land! Two days later, the ship weighed anchor in the large bay, and Cook assembled a party to go ashore, landing at the foot of the headland. The first encounter with local Māori (the Ngāti Oneone tribe) was not good. While Cook himself was not present, his men were so intimidated by the challenge the Māori greeted them with that they fired shots, killing leader Te Maro. The next day, accompanied by Tupaia, a Tahitian navigator and translator who had agreed to accompany the journey, Cook and his party faced off against more Ngāti Oneone warriors performing a haka across the Tūranganui river. This time, with Tupaia’s help, they managed to establish some communication, with Cook being greeted with a hongi (the touching of noses) by an elder. But amid
confusing trade exchanges, Cook’s men responded by again opening fire, shooting chief Te Rakau dead. As the two sides parted ways, Te Rakau’s body was left on the river bank, right where he fell.
A few days later, having failed to obtain any supplies or amicable relationships with local Māori, Cook ordered the ship to depart. The Endeavour went on to travel all the way around both of New Zealand’s major islands, making multiple stops en route, engaging with various local tribes (known as iwi). Maps were drawn, stars charted, flora and fauna studied, and landforms named. Eventually, the ship turned west, and continued their journey onwards towards Australia, ultimately arriving back in England in July 1771. So ended the first of Cook’s three global voyages, each of which brought him back to New Zealand, a country where he would go on to become a hugely divisive figure.
SHIFTING VIEWPOINTS
In Christchurch, on the east coast of the South Island, Rowan Light, lecturer in the department of history at the University of Canterbury, shows me an enormous stained glass window in the Great Hall of the city’s landmark Art Centre. First installed in 1938, it depicts Cook standing proudly among a long, escalating procession of iconic British figures, everyone from
Scott and Shakespeare to Henry VIII and Florence Nightingale. At the back of the line, tucked away in the far corner of the window, stands a solitary Māori man. The symbolism of New Zealand’s ‘progression’ to becoming a solidly British territory (if not yet a completely independent nation) is painfully clear.
‘It sits at the heart of quite an intense period of memorialisation, and a heightened imperial identity for New Zealand,’ explains Light. ‘It tells a story of national progress, with that very heavy British emphasis.’ This inter-war period was a time when New Zealand found itself searching for a unifying identity, something to give the country a sense of direction. They found it in the form of the British voyager who had put the country on the map a century-and-a-half earlier.
‘Cook almost takes on an ancestral-like presence in New Zealand in the mid-20th century,’ continues Light. ‘Everything revolves around him, as the one who sets it all off. New Zealanders go all in for World War I, for example, and we see this story emerging of New Zealand as “the best of the Empire”. The best Britons, better than the Aussies, better than the Canadians, better than everyone else.’ This attitude led to a wave of new memorials, statues – and, yes, stained glass windows – to confirm the importance of Cook, and other British ‘heroes’, in the making of the New Zealand origin narrative.
Such enthusiasm perhaps peaked in 1969 when
New Zealand celebrated the Cook bicentenary, 200 years since his well-known arrival. Enormous crowds filled the streets of Gisborne for a symbolic parade featuring a model of the Endeavour, as well as a float with a huge representation of Cook’s head. Ships from the navies of the UK, Australia, Canada and the US all paid a visit, jets flew dramatically overhead, and a bronze status of Cook was installed atop Kaiti Hill, the headland looking down on the bay where captain and crew had first landed two centuries earlier. Large firework displays left the crowds in no doubt about the celebratory nature of the occasion.
But behind the scenes, times were already changing. ‘What you see in 1969 is interesting,’ muses Light. ‘Māori, politically and socially, are in a very different place in the 1970s. There’s a new generation of Māori voices who are less and less accommodating to that kind of history. That reflects a shift in demographics; Māori are younger, more educated, increasingly politically active. So what you have in 1969 is in some ways a reproduction of tropes of quite an imperial story, but which are quickly looking very sketchy.’
Just as in 1969, Gisborne is again central to the commemorations for Tuia 250. But that central, unchallenged Cook-centric narrative, with dissenting voices kicked out of sight, little changed from a 1930s stained glass window, is quite radically different 50 years later. ‘In 1969, there were massive public parades celebrating Cook as the central figure,’ says Light. ‘It’s unimaginable now. It would ring very strange for New Zealanders. It reflects the tide of those cultural narratives draining away. These cultural foundations that once made sense about Cook, no longer make sense in 2019.’