Captain James Cook and ‘The Pacific’

I saw my self this morning a little way from the ship one of the Animals before spoke off, it was of a light Mouse colour … with a long tail which it carried like a grey hound, in short I should have taken it for a wild dog, but for its walking or runing in which it jump’d like a Hare or a deer.              
                                                               —James Cook, Journals, 1770

In the first episode of the 1986 Australian mini-series Captain James Cook, a twelve-inch astronomical quadrant, designed by John Bird, is stolen from the Endeavour by Tahitian islanders. As the purpose of this first of James Cook’s three major sea voyages is to observe and record, with the astronomer Charles Green, the 1769 transit of Venus across the sun, part of a multinational scientific effort to map the size of the solar system, Cook (played by Keith Michell) remarks, “If we can’t find that quadrant, we’ve come halfway across the world for nothing. It means failure.”

The quadrant, crucial to his task, is the forerunner of the sextant, and was used in the eighteenth century to measure longitude, latitude, time of day, the altitude of the sun and angles up to ninety degrees.

It was on this initial voyage (1768 to 1771) that Cook came upon the east coast of Australia and recommended it as a future British colony. This year is the 250th anniversary of Cook’s landing in Australia, and I want to revisit this inspiring mini-series and contrast it with the Foxtel documentary series, The Pacific: In the Wake of Captain Cook.

Captain James Cook runs six hours, in four episodes, and was a production jointly financed by Revcom France and the ABC, with a major portion of investment coming from 10BA tax money. Most Australian films during the 1970s had depended on funding from the Australian Film Commission, but in 1981 a 150 per cent tax concession, Division 10BA of the Income Tax Assessment Act, made Australian film production attractive to investors.

The first episode of the series begins on the Big Island of Hawaii, at the end of Cook’s third voyage, as he is attempting to take the Hawaiian king, Kalani’ōpu’u, hostage aboard his ship, in order to persuade the locals to return a small boat that was stolen. This act leads to his death on the beach at Kealakekua Bay.

We flash back to Lincolnshire, ten years earlier, where Cook receives his first sponsored expedition from the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich, to explore the South Seas—Brazil, Tahiti and New Zealand. He says farewell to his wife, Elizabeth (played by Carol Drinkwater), who he will not see again for three years. The esteemed botanist Joseph Banks (John Gregg), also a wealthy investor who has financed the trip, accompanies Cook as a key member of the crew. Cook introduces his sailors to sauerkraut, his innovative solution for avoiding scurvy, the most common form of death at sea. Cook states that he “intends to bring them home again. Bruised, perhaps, but alive.” Sailors are flogged for not eating the sauerkraut, onions, lemons or fresh meat.

After a hazardous journey of eight months, the Endeavour reaches Tahiti, without a single man dying of sickness. The exhausted sailors believe they have stumbled onto paradise when they are welcomed enthusiastically by bare-breasted Tahitian women. The men indulge freely with the islanders but Cook refrains, even when propositioned by the chieftainess, Oberea. Cook shows Oberea a picture of his wife, “who is very jealous and who would be angry”. Oberea accepts this and transfers her affection to Banks, who is also reluctant, but is persuaded by Cook that it would now be an insult to refuse.

As a result of sexual liaisons, some of the men contract venereal disease. As all of the sailors had been medically examined and cleared before leaving England, it is determined that it was brought to the island, either by Samuel Wallis’s HMS Dolphin, two years earlier, or by a French frigate, Boudeuse, in 1776, under Louis Antoine de Bougainville (who attempted to claim Tahiti for France, naming it New Cythera).

The ship’s quadrant is stolen and Cook orders Oberea to be taken hostage until it is returned.

In the second episode, the quadrant is found but, before the Endeavour can depart, two marines desert, escaping with their local girlfriends into the mountains. Oberea is again held hostage until the men are located, as Cook realises if he doesn’t set an example his men will be running off every time they drop anchor in a favourable port. The deserters are returned and the ship makes sail but Cook chooses leniency, reducing the formal charges from desertion, punishable by hanging, to deliberate absence.

Cook opens his “Secret Instructions” from the Crown, informing him that he is to proceed due south to prove the existence of the legendary Great Southern Continent, to survey it and to “report on the nature of the people and, with their consent, take possession of this land, in the name of the King”. After weeks at sea, exploring existing maps, Cook concludes that the Great South Land is a fiction and orders a change of course, to chart lands they actually know exist: New Zealand and Terra Australis Incognita, “somewhere to the west of that”.

They arrive in New Zealand and are initially met with hostilities but, after an exchange of gifts, and the help of Tupaia, a Tahitian navigator and translator, who has joined the crew, communication with the Maoris is established. Cook proceeds to survey and map the coast, circling both islands. He now has to decide how to return home to England, whether east, via Cape Horn, or west, towards New Holland, the name given to the mainland of Australia in 1644 by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman.

Cook continues westward and lands on the east coast of Australia, where the sailors encounter Aborigines. Tupaia attempts, unsuccessfully, to speak with them. Banks shoots an emu and orders it sketched, plucked and prepared for eating, as it reminds him of a giant turkey. He says, “We’ll have it stuffed and served with a French sauce.” But he later says it was “tough as anchor rope and smelt of old sea boats—even the greyhound declined it”. On shore, a wooden marker is nailed to a log, Banks proclaiming the cove’s name, Botany Bay. The British flag is hoisted and Cook addresses the crew and locals, “I take possession of this land in the name of His Majesty King George III.” The Endeavour sets sail again. In the meantime Cook’s four-year-old daughter has died in England.

Approaching the Great Barrier Reef, the Endeavour runs aground on rocks. From Cook’s Journals, June 1770:

Monday 11th: Before 10 oClock we had 20 and 21 fathom and continued in the depth untill a few Minutes before 11 when we had 17 and before the Man at the lead could heave another case the Ship Struck and Stuck fast … [we] found that we had got upon the SE edge of a reef of Coral rocks … upon which we went to work to lighten her as fast as possible which seem’d to be the only means we had left to get her off … [we] throw’d overboard our guns Iron and stone ballast Casks, Hoops staves oyle Jars, decay’d stores …

Cook’s plan is to hold steady until the morning high tide can lift the ship above the reef. The tide comes but the ship doesn’t budge. Fearful that strong winds could break the ship apart, Cook dispatches longboat crews with tow ropes and they heave the ship free by brute force.

Tuesday 12th: At 9 oClock the Ship righted and the leak gaind upon the Pumps considerably. This was an alarming and I may say terrible Circumstance and threatened immediate destruction to us as soon as the Ship was afloat. However I resolved to risk all and heave her off in case it was practical and accordingly turnd as many hands to the Capstan & windlass as could be spared from the Pumps and about 20 past 10 oClock the Ship floated and we hove her off into deep water … this fortunate circumstance gave new life to every one on board. It is much easier to conceive than to discribe the satisfaction felt by every body on this occasion … in justice to the Ships Company I must say that no men ever behaved better than they have done on this occasion, animated by the beheavour of every gentleman on board, every man seem’d to have a just sence of the danger we were in and exerted himself to the very utmost.

Going ashore, Cook examines the breaches in the hull. Badly damaged and struggling to the Dutch port of Batavia in the East Indies, the ship is repaired, but the crew fall ill and seven die of dysentery, including Tupaia. The Endeavour sets sail again, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and arrives at the English port of Deal after three years at sea. The success of the expedition is celebrated throughout England but it is tempered for Cook by the discovery that his young daughter is dead.

In the third episode, disappointed that he hasn’t actually discovered any new lands, Cook is reassured by Banks that what they have found is of great value: a huge collection of flora, precise new charts and increased knowledge of the South Seas. Cook is publically criticised by a Royal Society fellow, Alexander Dalrymple, that he has returned with a ruined ship and has failed to discover the Great Southern Continent, “something that we all know is there”. George III now recommends Cook attempt a new expedition commanding two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure, each with its own astronomer, to try again to locate the mythical southern continent and claim it for England.

Banks risks a good deal of his fortune to finance this second voyage but is unhappy with Cook’s choice of ships. He feels Cook’s favoured colliers are “unsuitable, unfitting, unwise—too small, too slow, too limited in every possible way”. He prefers a ship with space and a “modicum of comfort”. Cook argues that he needs strong ships with a shallow draft to sail close to the shoreline, in order for accurate surveying, and ships that can withstand the force “of any wind known to man”. This requires colliers “built in the north—there are no others”. The collier was a bulk cargo ship designed for naval use, a coal-fired warship. The Endeavour had previously been a merchant collier, a type known as a Whitby Cat, with a deep hold. The flat-bottomed design made it well suited to sailing in shallow waters and ideal for exploring coastland and for repairs without requiring a dry dock.

Cook argues that the reason England has lagged behind the Dutch, the Spanish and the French in ocean exploration is inferior ships. Banks initially agrees to a compromise, if the ships are altered to improve accommodations, but when this proves impractical, he resigns from the expedition and is replaced as the naturalist by Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg. The Resolution and the Adventure set sail from Plymouth Sound, and reach the Antarctic Circle, but become separated in fog. The Adventure, commanded by Tobias Furneaux, arrives at their arranged meeting place, Queen Charlotte Sound, in New Zealand, surveying Van Diemen’s Land on the way, and Cook’s ship, the Resolution, arrives ten days later. Cook discovers that scurvy has struck the Adventure, as Furneaux has failed to enforce Cook’s strict dietary regime.

Both ships continue to explore the South Pacific, but are forced to stop in Tahiti for fresh food and water, due to the scurvy on the Adventure. Cook finds that his old friend, chieftainess Oberea, has been deposed by her nephew, King Tū. The ships set sail but again lose contact with each other. Cook leaves a message in New Zealand for Furneaux, that he plans to continue to explore the southern regions. Furneaux decides to return to England. On the Resolution, Cook falls dangerously ill with either acute infection of the gallbladder, or ascaris (roundworm) infestation of the intestine, and is saved from death by a broth prepared by Johann Forster—made from Forster’s pet dog!

On his return to England, Cook is once again feted for his exploration, the Earl of Sandwich declaring, “There has never been such a journey of discovery before nor can there ever be again.” Cook is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and settles in for comfortable retirement and to publish his journals. He has promised Elizabeth that he has taken his last voyage. But England is now at war with the American colonies and George III begs Cook to take ships to sea to fight the Americans. Cook refuses and the King then suggests another two-ship expedition to find the hypothetical Northwest Passage, between the North Pacific and the North Atlantic, in order to create a shorter sea route for trade between Britain and the Pacific. A purse of £20,000 (many millions in today’s money) is offered. Cook refuses at first, but longing to return to sea life, and to provide more security for Elizabeth, who is pregnant again, he says, “I worry for Elizabeth’s future. I’ve seen too many sailors’ widows end up in the alms house.” Cook doesn’t trust the government to look after his wife in the event of his death and, despite her objections, and his promise never to sail again, he accepts command of the new expedition.

In the final episode, the third and fatal voyage (1776 to 1780), Cook is again commanding the Resolution, with an accompanying ship, Discovery. He chooses twenty-one-year-old William Bligh, recommended by Lord Sandwich, to be sailing master of the Resolution. During the first storm, they discover shoddy workmanship is responsible for serious leakage and are forced to dock in Cape Town to effect repairs. Too late in the season now to sail north, Cook spends the winter in Tahiti. Sheep, cattle and horses are presented to the islanders as gifts, but when the ship’s goat is stolen, Cook retaliates by instructing his men to destroy the villagers’ canoes and torch a village. The goat is returned but some crew members believe the action too severe, as it has created ill-will with the locals.

The ships proceed up the Alaskan coast in search of the Northwest Passage but, unsuccessful, are forced to retreat south, and become the first Europeans to find the Hawaiian Islands. They land on the Big Island at Kealakekua Bay. The Hawaiians, at first, deify Cook as Lono, their god of agriculture, fertility, rainfall, music and peace, but when no bounty comes from this devotion, they ask Cook and his ships to leave. Cook maps the island of Maui and proceeds north in another attempt to find the Passage. However, additional defects in timber and topmast construction require a return to Hawaii for further repair.

Bligh argues that returning to Kealakekua Bay is too dangerous now that the villagers have become disillusioned with Cook as their divinity, but Cook overrides him. The islanders they now encounter on the beach are armed and confrontational. Bligh believes this is because their god has returned with a damaged ship. Lilikalā Kame’ Eleihiwa, Professor of Hawaiian Ancestral Knowledge at the University of Hawaii remarked, “Lono was supposed to be able to control the winds—what kind of god gets a broken mast?” The priests, who had encouraged the people to give pigs and crops as offerings, are now being made to look like fools. Bligh believes the priests need to prove Cook mortal by harming him. A longboat is stolen and Bligh advises Cook that this is an act to provoke him. Cook ignores the warning and goes ashore to take King Kalani’ōpu’u hostage until the boat is returned, but this strategy, so effective in Tahiti, backfires here and the islanders attack, killing Cook.

The author of Captain James Cook, Peter Yeldham, was born in New South Wales in 1927. He went to England in 1956, working as a playwright and writing for British television in the 1960s. He said:

We went back to London. A cheap flat, which was still possible in 1959. On a lucky day we met Spike Milligan. My wife typed Goon Show scripts for him, while I settled down to write television plays in the hope I could sell one. Through Spike I found an agent and wrote more plays.

Moving back to Australia in 1976, he wrote fifteen mini-series, including 1915, All the Rivers Run and The Far Country. He was nominated for an International Emmy for Captain James Cook and, in 1991, received an Order of Australia Medal. His adaptation of Bryce Courtenay’s book Jessica won the show the 2005 Logie for Outstanding Mini-series or Telemovie. The Daily Telegraph called Yeldham “The master of the Australian historical blockbuster”.

I talked with Yeldham briefly about Captain James Cook. When I asked him if he could go back and change anything about the series now, he said “only the title—to The Wind and the Stars”. On the issue of toppling statues and removing historical figures such as Cook from public arenas because they do not meet current moral standards, he replied:

I’m against it, particularly the trend directed at Cook. In a book of mine set in 1842, The Currency Lads, a character was the odious slave trader, Ben Boyd. I wish they’d change the Sydney street named after him. He was a monster. Cook was a sailor. The thought of his statue being destroyed is unbearable.

Boyd was a Scottish shipowner, banker and politician who engaged in “blackbirding”—enslaving South Sea Islanders. When the New South Wales Legislative Council updated the Masters and Servants Act to ban importation of natives of any tribe “inhabiting any island or country in the Pacific”, and Boyd’s business ventures began to sour, he sailed to the Solomon Islands, where he was taken prisoner and executed by the villagers of Guadalcanal in retribution for the murder of twenty-five local people by his crew. Boydtown, Ben Boyd National Park, Boyd’s Tower, Boyd House and Ben Boyd Road in Neutral Bay are named after him.

When asked if he was daunted about creating a television series about Cook, Yeldham said:

To me at first it felt like going back to school, because of the way we’d been taught in Australia about “Captain Cook”. Then I started going to some of the best libraries, and in their pages he began to come alive. Things we’d never been taught. He’d come from a modest home, his first job had been serving behind a counter in a shop, until he tried to work his way into the navy. To me he suddenly became a victim of the British class system, and having seen how this worked at close quarters during the years we lived there, this made him a far more interesting character. I’d thought of him as “Captain” Cook, a naval deity, but he was not even a lieutenant when the first voyage was planned. The affluent Joseph Banks wanted a competent sailor to navigate the ship, allowing Banks and his entourage of scientists to fill the main cabins. When they returned from the first great voyage across the world, it was Banks who was lionised in the streets of London and knighted by the King, while Cook went home to his wife and children in their modest East End cottage. So it was the characters of James Cook and his wife who attracted me.

In 2018, Foxtel presented a documentary series of six forty-five-minute episodes, narrated by Sam Neill, called The Pacific: In the Wake of Captain Cook. Produced by Essential Media and directed by Sally Aitken and Kriv Stenders, it was nominated for the 2019 Logie Award for Most Outstanding Factual or Documentary Program.

In a structure resembling Michael Portillo’s train adventure series, Neill carries with him a copy of Cook’s Journals. Even the background music is jauntily similar.

Neill told Karl Quinn of the Sydney Morning Herald, “I didn’t fully understand how much there are Cook fanatics who see him as close to Superman, and there are people who see him as demonic.” He set out to see Cook’s adventure “from both sides of the beach”, travelling to Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand and Vanuatu.

Jack Latimore, of the Guardian, wrote:

it throws new light on eminent characters—such as the naturalist Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook on his voyage—as well as historical figures who played key roles in many of the voyage’s feats but who have since had their contributions largely downplayed. The show’s focus on the lesser-celebrated contributions of Polynesian polymath Tupaea to the expedition’s accomplishments in navigation and diplomacy—triumphs generally attributed solely to the likes of Cook and Banks—is an example of the kind of welcome shifts in perspective that are becoming increasingly important to contemporary nations such as Australia in reconciling the heavy burdens of their colonial past.

Sam Neill was born in Northern Ireland in 1947 and moved to New Zealand when he was seven. His own family and descendants have Maori and Polynesian ancestry.

In this documentary, he interviews a few local academics and PhDs who supply such dodgy facts that it made me think perhaps getting a doctorate today is like applying for a driver’s licence. A Tahitian PhD tells him that Tahiti was a paradise to Cook’s men when they arrived because “you had water everywhere—they had been drinking sea water for months, stinking biscuits and they had scurvy and they had lice … and when they arrived here and saw those people—they were clean”. Drinking sea water, even for days, would be fatal, because the kidneys are unable to get rid of the salt. Cook’s ship was free of scurvy on that initial voyage and, as far as “clean” goes, his sailors were free of venereal disease when they arrived, and only contracted it from the sexually-open Tahitians who had picked it up from Wallis’s voyage there.

Neill occasionally rescues this blurring of facts with humour, quoting one of Cook’s own rules to his men: Do not ever trade for sex, saying, “Well, that was never going to fly.” He also reminds us of Cook’s “Secret Instructions” from the Crown, to “report on the nature of the people and, with their consent, take possession of this land, in the name of the King”, but then states: “there can be no question of consent here because they weren’t asked”. Peter Yeldham agrees with Neill on this point.

Kame’ Eleihiwa tells Neill:

[Cook] certainly helped the empire by mapping the way to go … my personal view of Cook: he was a tubercular, syphilitic racist … the lack of respect, that’s what I don’t like about Cook … that he thought he could take [our King] off and hold him ransom and do what ever he wanted to him—for a boat?

There is no evidence anywhere that James Cook was tubercular, syphilitic or a racist, in the ugly sense we throw that word around today. And dress it up all you want, Cook was killed by a Hawaiian lynch mob. Neill says, “Cook’s luck over three voyages had led to hubris and that hubris led to death.” Cook was the most skilled seaman in England and luck only played a minor part in his tremendous achievements.

Kame’ Eleihiwa boasts to Neill:

We Hawaiians still celebrate every 14 February as Hau’oli Lā Ho’omake iā Kapena Kuke, or Happy Death of Captain Cook day! Tradition demanded that his body be dismembered, and the bones be put into a sennit casket. The Lono priests took Cook’s hands and his buttocks, wrapped in ceremonial kapa cloth, to his ship. We Hawaiians killed Cook and rid the world of a very bad man. Many Hawaiian families still claim the honour today.

I find it hypocritical that some of the traditional practices of indigenous people, practices many now consider utterly barbaric, are still so reasoned-out and defended, while the equally traditional activities of old European nations, such as exploration and settlement, are diminished and devalued.

When Mark Twain visited Hawaii in 1866, in a foolish remark he called Cook’s death “justifiable homicide”. Peter Yeldham thought this might have merely been one of Twain’s less successful attempts to be funny.

What is impressive and enlightening about Neill’s Pacific documentary is the number of times he is set straight by the people he is interviewing. A descendant of a Maori man killed by Cook’s men on the beach perceptively tells Neill he understands why this would have happened at that time and holds no rancour. He says, “It was part of empire expansion, and life will be lost.”

On Vanuatu, Neill is excited by his fortune in meeting an unusual family—seven males, all named Captain Cook: Captain Cook Senior, three sons named Captain Cook and three grandsons also named Captain Cook: “[They were] so taken with Captain Cook they have studiously named every man and boy after him, and still do.”

In Australia, Neill plays a 1960s board game called Captain Cook: Voyage of Discovery, with Ernie Dingo. Dingo tells him he has trouble understanding how Captain Cook discovered Australia: “It wasn’t lost.” Neill laughs nervously but Dingo tells him, “Sam, I love you and respect you but … he was one of yours.”

Neill talks to Bruce Pascoe who argues that Cook was confused by Aborigines burning off “with an agricultural purpose in mind”. Pascoe says Cook must have been aware of this as he was “taking warrigal spinach off the roofs of Aboriginal houses—he wanted it to cure the scurvy of his sailors. So it must have occurred to him surely that these people are growing food.” Neill asked him why Cook never mentioned this in his journals, to which Pascoe replies, “Because he was there to possess.” Neill concludes, “The botanist Joseph Banks must have been looking the other way.”

Why does Pascoe assume the locals were growing the warrigal spinach? We’ve had fields of nettles, one of the most nutritious and versatile bush foods in Australia, growing wild on our bush properties for fifty years. None of us ever planted or cultivated it. Coconut and banana trees self-propagate all over the South Pacific, and papaya is so prolific that Hawaiians use it for pig food.

My favourite interview is an exchange between Neill and Maori Emeritus Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, curator of ethnology at the Waikato Museum, lecturer in art history at Auckland University, professor of Maori studies at Victoria University of Wellington, and a lesbian activist. She tells Neill that Joseph Banks “seduced” a local into trading a preserved head, to add to his collection, for a “pair of fine white drawers”. Neill tries to rephrase Awekotuku’s words, to show empathy: “So let me get this right. Banks sees fit to buy a head for a used pair of underpants … Banks’s second-hand underpants.”

But Awekotuku isn’t having any of this:

Those underpants were white linen. No Maori textile could equal white linen. And something that no one else in the tribe on the island had ever seen worn … when Cook came, everyone was fascinated by the weaponry, by the way of controlling death. People wanted that. We tend to romanticise how Maoris were and sometimes I get really annoyed by that because so often we are portrayed as being either stolen from, or exploited but … we were friends, and we were equals and the Maori set the terms. Maori were conscious of what they were doing. And even though now we have taken the more righteous view of the preyed upon, we were the predators, too.

In the inaugural issue of Quadrant, in the summer of 1956, Alan Villiers wrote a detailed character piece on Cook: “James Cook, Seaman”—written from the point of view of a fellow seaman and commander. Villiers first went to sea at the age of fifteen as an apprentice. An accident when he was nineteen forced him to find work as a journalist for the Mercury, in Hobart, where he developed his writing skills. Recovering from his injuries, he worked as a whaler with Carl Larsen on the Sir James Clark Ross, the largest whaling ship in the world. He became a ship owner, purchasing full-rigged sailing ships, and circumnavigated the world, teaching sailing. In the Second World War he saw action in Normandy, Sicily and Burma and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. He captained the Mayflower II across the Atlantic in 1957.

Villiers stresses the Cook’s remarkable achievements:

He virtually established the modern science of hydrography … he kept sickness in check at sea over long voyages … in a way that had never been achieved before.” He reminds us that in Cook’s time, “drowning was accepted as the common end of a seaman’s life … the amount of physical hardship which was accepted then as a commonplace necessity in the seafaring life is now almost unbelievable.

Cooks insistence on those “uncomfortable” collier ships gave him an advantage as a surveyor. Villiers says:

One other thing James Cook learned in abundant measure from his nine years in the North Sea Trade [on colliers]. He learned not to be afraid of the land. A mariner trained in deep sea ships might easily acquire a dread of working ships near the land. It was the land which caused the loss of most sailing ships, not the accidents of the sea. Being driven on a lee shore, getting on a sandbank, or rocks, or shoals—these were the ever present dangers of coastwise sailing … he was a seaman first, and a navigator and surveyor afterwards.

I recommend tracking down Villiers’s article during this 250th anniversary.

This first issue of Quadrant was edited by James McAuley, who wrote the commentary to introduce the new magazine and explain why the image of the quadrant was chosen:

It is this quarter of the globe we are particularly interested in … you may think of our magazine as an instrument for measuring the altitude—of ideas—or perhaps of brows … or taking the idea of squareness which is lodged in the word, it is also a sign that we stand squarely by certain principles and values … the principles and values referred to … are not arbitrarily chosen but the very life and impulse of our venture. They are: To be Australian in our orientation, quite naturally, because we are interested in this country, its people, its problems, its cultural life, its liberties, and its safety.

The marking of 250 years since Cook’s exploration of Australia will no doubt be met with the same kind of protest as is now common everywhere in the world. A website, “Topple the Racists”, has identified over one hundred statues and street names in the UK—reminders of colonial times—that protesters want removed, including those of Cook, Columbus, Churchill, Peel, Cromwell, Robert the Bruce, Charles II, James II and Nelson.

The Australian historian Dr Mark McKenna has written:

[Cook] is at once the agent of destruction and the agent of redemption. A man who becomes a story that remains open ended—a story that continually draws us back, although we know the whole tale will always elude us. Cook can be lionised, misrepresented and reviled, but he can never be banished from Australia’s historical consciousness. We stand forever on the beach with him. 

Graeme Lay, of the New Zealand Listener, said:

Let’s not make Cook a scapegoat for the lapses that later accompanied the colonisation of New Zealand. His visits actually laid the foundation for a society based on a blend of Europe and Polynesia. It’s true that mistakes were made, and there were casualties on both sides. As colonisers, the British were far from ideal, but they were infinitely preferable to the Dutch, Spanish and French, who were often brutal in their treatment of the indigenous peoples they colonised. The real culprits in our colonisation story were not Cook and his crews but the hordes of men who came in his wake: the whalers, sealers, traders, land speculators and gun-runners who saw New Zealand mainly as a place ripe for plundering. The activities of these men helped sow the seeds for the disastrous Musket Wars, the land wars and the punitive confiscations that followed.

James Cook was aware of the inequities of the colonialism of his time. He said himself of the Tahitians, “They are a forgiving people. They cried that we are leaving. Perhaps they should have cried that we came.”

In his essay, “Unkept Promises”, now online in the National Library archives, McKenna wrote:

At Kurnell in Sydney, every anniversary of Cook’s landing since 2000 has been commemorated through a Meeting of Two Cultures ceremony, in which visiting dignitaries, politicians, local Indigenous elders and school and community groups come together to listen, remember and share their understandings of Cook’s visit. Aboriginal, Australian and Sutherland Shire flags fly side by side. By moving away from the tired clichés of discovery and nation-making, they have made Cook a more promising emissary. The celebrations in 2020 will continue the theme of the Meeting of Two Cultures. The Kurnell and Cooktown communities’ willingness to rethink the way they commemorate Cook’s landing shows how acknowledging our history need not be a crude choice between shame and pride … as the ways of remembering Cook’s landings have changed over time, he has become much more than the embodiment of modernity, invasion and dispossession; he is also the promise of peace and reconciliation.

Elizabeth Batts Cook lived another fifty-six years after her husband died. She received an annual pension from the Admiralty of £200 (something like $65,000 in today’s money). As one of Cook’s stated reasons for undertaking that final fateful voyage was concern over his wife’s financial welfare in the event of his death, I think he can rest in peace. She died in 1835, at the age of ninety-three, outliving their six children.

Endeavour 250 (www.endeavour250.gov.au) is the national program of activities marking 250 years since the Endeavour’s voyage along the east coast. Peter Yeldham’s website is www.peteryeldham.com