Captain Cook’s troubled legacy

Two hundred years after Captain James Cook first visited Aotearoa, a statue was unveiled, in 1969, on a hill above Gisborne. Not everyone was pleased. Initial concerns focussed on the inaccuracy of the uniform and the fact the face did not resemble the well-known portrait by Nathaniel Dance. Subsequently, the statue became only more contentious, in light of more critical assessments of the navigator, so that when the 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyage rolled around, the local council removed the statue entirely. Archives New ZealandThis statue unveiled on Titirangi (Kaiti Hill) in Gisborne in 1969 was always controversial, and ultimately became known as "Crook Cook". The Gisborne District Council removed it in 2019. Photo: R. Coad, 1971, Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o Te Kawanatanga, R24803981 How we are to remember the British naval officer remains a work in progress, and indeed an important new entry in the debate has now been penned by Prof Tony Ballantyne, the Distinguished Chair-Poutoko Taiea in History at the University of Otago. The many faces of Cook, the numerous ways he has been represented and regarded, the “ghosts of empire” and colonisation, are the subject of the professor’s new book, Captain Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire, which was launched at Tūhura Otago Museum on Wednesday. Ballantyne says Cook “carries a lot of weight in those stories about who we are, how we’ve changed over time and who we might become”. “For this book, I see my role as really introducing readers to that story of how people have made and remade Cook, as they have reimagined him. “It’s a book about other people’s interpretations rather than mine. But I think readers will pick up on some of the elements of what I think. “I see him as a man of empire, that his career is made even before he comes to the Pacific, by the fact Britain has an empire — he’s serving in the Royal Navy, which is the source of British imperial power. His career prospers after the Seven Years’ War, and he has a series of opportunities in the Pacific, because Britain is really interested in this region as a new frontier of imperial activity, and there are significant consequences within the empire because of his voyages. “But as a person?” The late historian J.C. Beaglehole, who edited Cook’s journals and wrote a biography, says he is hard to know, Ballantyne notes. “You read the journals — he’s not talking about his feelings very much. There’s no private correspondence, he’s not really talking about his family. “But if there’s not much inward reflection, his journals are suffused with a curiosity about the places he journeys to, the people he meets, the way they do things. He’s curious about the world.” Tony Ballantyne CollectionIn 1969, an array of Cook-related stamps was issued to mark the bicentenary of Cook’s arrival in New Zealand. The stamps emphasised the prominence of science in Cook’s voyage, locating New Zealand’s origins in the Enlightenment. Photo: Tony Ballantyne Collection Cook is clearly a divisive character. As the years have passed, the views of him as a force for good or ill have come and gone. As the book says, “he has always been a contested figure, especially in places where the legacies of imperial violence and dispossession weigh most heavily”. The stories, and the conflicting rationales for his actions, are what Ballantyne calls in the book the “weight of old ghosts”, which continue to trouble New Zealand’s cultural life. “Sometimes it seems these ghosts have been placated and are fading from view; but then they re-emerge as troubling figures demanding attention, spurring debate, bringing the worlds of empire and colonialism back to contemporary public life,” he writes. “Captain James Cook is one of the most enduring and troubling of these ghosts. “Throughout the last two and a-half centuries, Cook has been the subject of countless and varied narratives, his image endlessly reproduced. In texts, oral narratives, monuments, memorials and artworks, in parades and protests, and in the collective imagination, he has taken on many forms: imperial hero, an embodiment of the Enlightenment, a man of human sensibility, a founding figure for the nation, a bringer of disease and death.” As it is with most people, famous or otherwise, rarely is anyone ever totally good or bad. History gives us some distance to better weigh someone’s true legacies. The question is, with Cook, is it lazy and blinkered to say he was mostly a good man? On the other hand,is it too glib and woke to simply call him bad? Cook was highly ambitious and restless, Ballantyne says. “We see that very clearly on the second voyage, when he repeatedly sailed south towards Antarctica. His crew have had it. The German naturalist Johann Forster says Cook is ‘breaking us’, he’s being ‘brutish’ in his desire to keep on going.” It is also evidenced in Cook’s diary comment from January 1774, when Resolution was stuck in Southern Ocean sea ice at 71° 10’ South: “Ambition leads me not only farther than any man has before me, but as far as I think it is possible for man to go.” “It’s the quote that Star Trek rips off,” Ballantyne says. “One of the other things about him is, in the 19th century, in particular, people often emphasised him or imagined him as an embodiment of a benevolent kind of empire. But if you read what his crew say — they’re attached to him, but they recognise he had a temper. “He could make judgements very quickly. He could mete out quite harsh punishments both on his crew and on indigenous people, particularly if they had been what he understood as removing property — some quite harsh things, ordering people’s ears to be cut off, for example. “And, actually, his crew and officers sometimes intervene, saying that’s too much. But then other times they get frustrated with him, because they think he’s too sympathetic to indigenous people — he doesn’t seek retribution when they think he should. “There’s a hardness to him. And that particular bundle — hardness, ambition, curiosity — is a combination that’s incredibly useful from the Royal Navy’s point of view. Because if he was soft, disinterested, shy and retiring, they would have headed off home much sooner.” The public’s views of Cook differed significantly, depending where and when you lived and which of his faces you saw, Ballantyne says. “If you’re from Yorkshire, Cook is celebrated not necessarily as an imperial hero, but as a great Yorkshireman or a proud son of Whitby. Whereas maybe if you are from the southeast of England, he becomes more of an imperial figure. “If you come from Christchurch, say, in the 1920s, he becomes another one of these figures you could use to emphasise this connection back to Britain. But if you are a member of the iwi from Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, from Gisborne, that met him in these really violent collisions, you’re going to have a very different feeling about him.” One of the harshest critics of Cook was Hawaiian scholar-activist Haunani-Kay Trask, a Williams Evan Fellow at the University of Otago in June 1989. In a public lecture, she said Cook should be referred to as a “syphilitic tubercular racist” rather than an explorer. She was so indignant at his oppression of Māori she wanted to scrape his portrait off the wall of the Captain Cook pub, likening it to “having a picture of Hitler in the middle of a Jewish area in Europe”. Meanwhile, her partner David Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawai’i, said those who felt threatened by iwi claims and wanted New Zealanders to be one people “should have stayed in England or Scotland”. Their views upset many in the South and led to appearances on the Holmes show. Rather than a hero, Cook should be remembered as a “plague on Pacific peoples”, Trask told the nation. Ballantyne says while some cast Cook as a hero, almost God-like, even in his own time others doubted him or didn’t consider him the right sort of hero. That range of opinion was apparent around the Tuia 250 commemorations, in 2019, marking the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first visit to Aotearoa. “One of the main things people would say is, ‘if you’re concerned about the violence that Cook used, if you’re concerned about his strategic use of hostage-taking or kidnapping, if you’re concerned about his implication in the colonisation that came after, you’re really judging him by today’s standards’. “But I think one of the interesting things that the research really shows is, actually, his contemporaries had questions. Some undoubtedly saw him as a hero. Some saw him as an embodiment of what they understood as the kind of most benevolent form of empire. But others were troubled by his use of violence. “Others were troubled by what they saw as his arrogance in Hawaii, and they believed that was partly responsible for his death.” Ballantyne’s book explores how Cook’s influence on New Zealand society has waxed and waned down the years. While he was often an overshadowing presence through the years until the centenary of the signing of Te Tiriti, there were some who viewed him with disdain. “Cook could be mobilised as an authority, a source of legitimacy, or invoked as a hero,” Ballantyne writes. “But it would be wrong to think Cook was consistently at the forefront of colonial life. In fact, he was frequently disregarded by colonists preoccupied with more immediate economic and political questions, and by hapū and iwi who fought to retain their rangatiratanga, whenua and other critical resources as they strove to make space for themselves in a fundamentally uneven colonial order. “Various historically minded colonists, however, thought about Cook more frequently. Some worried about the disregard for Cook shown by their peers; others were concerned about what the violence that had punctuated Cook’s visits signified about him or the colony’s foundations.” However, by 1940, “Cook’s image was in constant circulation, and his memory was celebrated and anchored in sites associated with him by durable memorials”, the book notes. Auckland War Memorial MuseumThe Cook bicentenary featured in a number of the issues of the School Journal in 1969. This cover image of Cook is by illustrator Trevor Plaisted. Photo: Auckland War Memorial Museum The 1969 commemorations of 200 years since Cook’s arrival on the banks of the Tūranganui River came as there was growing discussion of Te Tiriti. Gisborne Mayor Harry Barker told the Gisborne Herald that October 9 would be “the biggest day in Gisborne’s history”. Included in festivities was a late shopping night until 9pm, a washing machine derby, musical performances, a Cook bicentennial beach towel “with a rough image of the sighting of Young Nick’s Head” and a tea towel with “a stylised image of Māori, an unconvincing rendering of the Endeavour and a range of East Coast scenes”, Ballantyne records in the book. The float parade was “over three miles long and took an hour to pass”. There were historic floats: “The Original People” by “The Māori Community”, followed by a “Meeting House and Canoe” built by the “Maori People of Tokomaru Bay, Ruatoria and Chaffey’s Transport”. These were followed by sports clubs, bands and marching teams. “One of the floats took a different tack and mobilised hackneyed colonial stereotypes,” Ballantyne writes. “It featured a number of men dressed as Māori gathered around a large fire-licked pot and preparing a human — in the form of a young boy — for consumption. The Gisborne Herald featured a photo of this on its front page. … The float demonstrated a powerful disregard for local Māori who had experienced the shock of the Europeans’ sudden arrival and the wounding, killing and abduction of their kin.” “In 1969, Māori aren’t really central to that at all,” Ballantyne says of the commemorations. “And the history of violence that is so central to those first meetings and collisions in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa is completely set to the side. “There is some Māori participation and a couple of important speeches given. [Ngāti Porou leader] Arnold Reedy, in his big speech, does something really smart and basically gives a speech about the arrival of his ancestors so many generations ago. “He doesn’t really talk about Cook, but I think it’s quite a subtle way of reframing the whole story and actually reminding people that tangata whenua were here for a lot longer and because of that this history of European interest and then colonisation is something that comes after.” Ballantyne’s original idea was to write a short, accessible book. The discovery of so much relevant material, and of extra avenues to explore, soon changed that plan. At Wednesday’s launch, he said the book had its genesis in a discussion with the late historian Tim Beaglehole about memory and empire. “I am sad that I never spoke to Tim about that idea again, but he is a very strong presence in this book — he wrote an outstanding biography of his father, the legendary Cook editor and incredibly influential New Zealand scholar, J.C. Beaglehole. “While Cook is at the centre of this book, it is really a book about history, about memory, about the ways in which Māori, Pākehā and Pasifika folks have made sense of the past of these islands and their peoples. So, it is a big book, but these are important questions, both for historical understanding and our sense of community today,” Ballantyne said at the launch. Te PapaIn the wake of French and British voyages in the Pacific, images of its islands and peoples were woven into European culture in myriad ways. This French wallpaper, which dates to the early 19th century, featured images of Indigenous peoples from across the Pacific region. "Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique" (The Native Peoples of the Pacific Ocean), woodcut by Jean-Gabriel Charvet, 1804-5, expresses a sense of world mastery, where a vast ocean and its great cultural variation could be assessed in a single glance in a European salon or drawing room. Image: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 2015-0048-1 So, what if Cook hadn’t been killed in Hawaii, on a beach at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii on February 14, 1779? Would it have made a difference to the way he is remembered? “If he had come back from the third voyage, I’m not sure what would have happened,” Ballantyne says. “I mean, he was pretty worn out. He’d been at sea continuously pretty much since 1768. But again, he’s such a restless character — it’s hard to imagine him putting his feet up and relaxing. “The circumstances of his death and this struggle with an indigenous group mean that he can be remembered in a certain way. If he had gone back to the East End of London and died in his bed at 82, he would have been celebrated, but probably we wouldn’t have those paintings that kind of cast him in mythic terms.” What would Ballantyne like to have witnessed if he could go back in time? “It would be amazing to be there on the first voyage at Uawa, or Tolaga Bay, when Tupaia from Raiatea is on board. There was extensive trade between the tangata whenua and the newcomers. After Cook and his men land, the tohunga, the ritual experts, really strike it off with Tupaia. They welcome him warmly, they recognise his knowledge, and are immersed in conversations about ideas, rituals and connections in common. “So, the people in Uawa see that as a powerful moment and retain strong memories of Tupaia. Seeing that moment of genealogies and worlds being reconnected would be a truly incredible thing.” [Missing Credit]Captain Cook book cover • Captain Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire, by Tony Ballantyne, is published by Bridget Williams Books.