by Tony Horwitz
For almost two months after leaving the Society Isles, the Endeavour sailed out of sight of land. Life returned to its oceangoing routine: furling sails, swabbing decks, drinking to excess. In late August, celebrating the first anniversary of the Endeavour’s departure from Plymouth, Banks and his retinue broke out Cheshire cheese and porter beer and “livd like English men.” The People also indulged themselves. “Out of mere good nature,” Cook wrote, the boatswain gave his young mate a bottle of rum, “which it is supposed he drank all at once.” The next morning he was found in his cot, “speechless and past recovery.” He died two hours later.
At 40 degrees south, the Endeavour encountered “very tempestuous” weather, but no sign of land. The ship had reached what has since become known as the Roaring Forties, a band of latitude where the wind blows around the southern hemisphere almost unimpeded by continental land. “The sea ran mountain-high and tossed the ship upon the waves,” Sydney Parkinson wrote. “She rolled so much, that we could get no rest, or scarcely lie in bed, and almost every moveable on board was thrown down, and rolled about from place to place.”
Cook swung west and held his course for a month, sighting little except seals and albatross. Then seaweed and barnacle-encrusted driftwood appeared, signs that land was near. Cook offered to name the approaching coast after the first man to sight it, and threw in a gallon of rum as well. Banks, who was convinced the southern continent—“our land of Promise”—lay just ahead, penned a self-conscious passage that gives a rare glimpse of life in the great cabin.
“Now do I wish that our freinds in England could by the assistance of some magical spying glass take a peep at our situation: Dr Solander [a Swedish naturalist] setts at the Cabbin table describing, myself at my Bureau Journalizing, between us hangs a large bunch of sea weed, upon the table lays the wood and barnacles…we were talking about what we should see upon the land which there is now no doubt we shall see very soon.”
Four days later, a boy of about twelve, Nick Young, saw land from the masthead, and Cook duly named a coastal bluff Young Nick’s Head. There is no record of what Nick did with the rum. The Endeavour had arrived at the east coast of today’s North Island of New Zealand (a nation comprising two very large islands, separated by a strait, plus smaller outlying isles). In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had probed a bay at the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. Men in canoes appeared, blowing shell trumpets. The Dutch sailors answered by playing horns. “These people apparently sought our friendship,” Tasman wrote. The next day, when canoes returned, the Dutch waved white linen and other trinkets and sent out a boat. The natives paddled over and clubbed four sailors to death.
Tasman named the inlet Murderers Bay and sailed off without ever setting foot on land. Sketchy Dutch writings and charts (later naming the coastline for Zeeland, in Holland) were all that Cook possessed as he neared a bay three hundred miles from the one Tasman had so briefly visited 127 years before.
The natives watching the ship from shore knew even less of the approaching strangers than the English did of them. (Cook later visited Murderers Bay and found no surviving memory of the Dutch, even there.) In fact, it seems unlikely that any vessel had approached the North Island from open sea for six centuries or more. Most scholars believe that sailing canoes set off from the Society Isles, or the nearby Cook Islands, between A.D 800 and 1200, carrying pioneers as well as plants and animals. They landed on the unpopulated North Island and gradually spread out, making New Zealand the last major landmass on earth to be settled. Then, nothing—until Cook arrived, the first intruder on the North Island since roughly the time of the Crusades.
To me, this was the most extraordinary and enviable facet of Cook’s travels: the moment of first contact between the “discoverer” and the “discovered.” No matter how far a man traveled today, he couldn’t hope to reach a land and society as untouched by the West as the North Island was in 1769. Cook, at least, anticipated first contact; finding new lands and peoples was part of his job description. For those he encountered, the moment of European arrival must have been so strange as to defy modern comprehension. The only experience that might resemble it today would be to find an alien spacecraft touching down in your backyard—except that Hollywood has prepared us even for that. Pacific islanders had no basis for so much as imagining a tall-masted ship, much less one from the other end of the globe carrying white men speaking an unfamiliar tongue.
According to stories told long after Cook’s arrival in New Zealand, some natives thought the ship’s billowing sails were the wings of a giant bird. Others saw three trees sprouting from the vessel’s base and guessed it was a floating island. A much fuller account survives from Mercury Bay, up the coast from Cook’s first landfall, where the Endeavour visited a month later. A boy about the same age as Young Nick, named Te Horeta, stood watching the ship’s approach from shore and lived long enough to share his memory with colonists, several of whom recorded his words. Te Horeta’s vivid and poetic detail, corroborated by the journals of Cook and his men, makes his story one of the most remarkable accounts in the annals of exploration.
“In the days long past,” Te Horeta recalled, he went with his clan to gather oysters and cockles beside a calm bay known by the name Gentle as a Young Girl. One day, an apparition appeared on the water, a vessel much larger than any canoe Te Horeta had ever seen. Watching from the beach, the clan’s elders wondered if the ship had come from the spirit world. Then pale creatures climbed from the vessel and paddled small craft toward shore, with their backs to the land. At this, the clan’s aged men nodded and said, “Yes, it is so: these people are goblins; their eyes are at the back of their heads.” Te Horeta fled into the forest with the other children, leaving the clan’s warriors on the beach.
At first, the goblins did no harm. They gathered oysters and other food. One collected shells, flowers, and tree blossoms, and knocked on stones, putting them in bags. Curious, the children crept out of the woods. “We stroked their garments,” Te Horeta recalled, “and we were pleased by the whiteness of their skin, and the blue eyes of some of them.” The goblins offered food from their ship: hard, dry lumps that looked like pumice stones, and fatty meat so salty that even the warriors winced. Was it whale’s flesh? A man’s?
One goblin pointed his walking stick in the air. “Thunder was heard to crash and a flash of lightning was seen,” Te Horeta said. Then a bird fell to the ground. “But what had killed it?” Later, a warrior offered to trade with the newcomers, then snatched a goblin’s cloth and paddled away without surrendering his own dogskin cloak. A walking stick flashed and the warrior fell with a hole in his back. The clan buried him in the goblin’s garment; because the warrior had caused his own death, there was no utu, no revenge. The site of his killing became known by the name A Warm Bad Day.
Trade gradually resumed, and one day the clan canoed out to visit the “home of the goblins.” The children refused to walk around the ship. “We were afraid lest we should be bewitched,” Te Horeta said. But he and the others let the strangers fondle their hair. “They made much gabbling noise in talking. As we could not understand them we laughed, and they laughed also.”
From inside the ship appeared a tall man who spoke very little. He studied the warriors’ weapons and patted the boys’ heads. Then he marked the ship’s floor with a piece of charcoal while pointing to shore. Te Horeta recalled: “One of our aged men said to our people, ‘He is asking for a picture of this land.’” The elder took the charcoal and drew an outline of Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud. He also sketched Te Reinga, the rocky headland near the top of the North Island from which spirits leapt into the next world. He illustrated this by lying on the deck as if dead. “But the goblins did not appear to understand anything about the world of the spirits,” Te Horeta said. In parting, the tall figure gave the old man two handfuls of a lumpy plant. He also handed Te Horeta a small, sharp piece of metal. Then the goblins sailed away.
Te Horeta
was an ancient and venerable chief when he told all this to pale men who appeared again in his bay, many decades later, in search of gold. “The days are numbered for my taking part in the things of life,” he told the visitors. “But here I am, here I am, like the old stump, throwing out twigs again.” By then, Te Horeta understood much that he had not in “the days long past,” when he was but a boy. The strange plants left by the goblins had been seed potatoes, their salty meat was pork, and the pumice stone was ship’s biscuit. Te Horeta had used the thunderous walking sticks in his own wars against enemy tribes.
He had also made use of the piece of metal he’d been given on the goblins’ ship. Te Horeta wore it round his neck as a hei-tiki, a talisman or private god. He fitted it to the point of his spear, and used it to carve wood boxes and repair canoes. “I kept this nail till one day I was in a canoe and she capsized in the sea,” he said. “I dived to recover it, but could not find it. My god was lost to me.”
Te Horeta also remembered the tall man who had given it to him. He had heard that the man was a great captain named Kuku. This did not surprise him. On that day long ago, Te Horeta and his companions had been struck by the head goblin’s kindness, and by his air of quiet command. In their own language they had a saying for this: “E koro te tino tangata e ngaro i roto i te tokomaha.” A noble man cannot be lost in a crowd.
The two-lane highway across the North Island wound through a green and pleasant land of sheep-covered hills, deep forest, and cozy cafés offering “Devon Tea,” a pot of Earl Grey and scones filled with jam and clotted cream. The car radio droned cricket scores. On the plane a few hours earlier, I’d read that the square mileage of New Zealand was almost exactly that of the United Kingdom. New Zealand’s two islands reached almost the same latitude in the south that the British Isles occupied in the north. The country’s white settlers were overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, lured by Victorian boosters who had touted New Zealand’s cool, wet climate, so similar to home. In Australia’s blazing sun, one nineteenth-century writer declared, “man degenerates into an emasculated idler,” while in New Zealand the Anglo-Saxon naturally thrives.
This was the stock image of New Zealand: the Britain of the southern hemisphere, more English than England, a woolly colonial throwback. During my first few hours in New Zealand, the stereotype seemed to fit. The map on the seat beside me bristled with imperial names: Nelson, Blenheim, Palmerston, Wellington. I lunched on fish and chips (or “fush and chups,” as New Zealanders pronounce it), wrapped in a greasy tabloid with a headline that read: WE’RE DOWN TO LAST 45 MILLION SHEEP! This figure compared to a census of seventy million just two decades ago. Still, that left fifteen sheep for every human in New Zealand.
I saved the story for Roger, a connoisseur of ovine jokes. (What do you call a sheep tied up in a paddock in New Zealand? A leisure center.) Australians are close cousins to “Kiwis” in culture, accent, and political system. But they tend to regard New Zealand—only one sixth as populous as Australia—with mocking condescension, as a decent but dull little brother, much the way many Americans view Canada.
Bored with cricket, I twiddled the car radio dial and picked up a call-in show. The topic of the day was the Treaty of Waitangi, an 1840 compact between white settlers and Maori chiefs that was now regarded as modern New Zealand’s founding document. Its signing date had become the country’s national holiday. To me, the callers might as well have been speaking a foreign tongue. “They went to the marae and had a hui and sorted it out after a lot of argy-bargy,” one said. “I think Willy Te Aho and Tu Wyloie were there. One of them was head of the Nooie Kewa, the Runanga, eh?”
This, I gathered, was a white speaker, or Pakeha, as he called himself, using the Maori term for Europeans. The radio host pronounced Maori names and places just as fluidly—a considerable challenge, judging from the road signs I passed. What was I to do with “Ngatea”? Or the unappetizing billboard announcing an agricultural town: “Stop and Taste Te Puke!” (I did stop, and learned that the town’s name was pronounced “Tay Pookie,” rhyming with “hey bookie.”) It was hard to imagine white Americans designating a treaty-signing with Indians as the country’s Fourth of July and debating the legal niceties of the pact on daytime commercial radio.
The show faded out as I crossed the mountains separating the interior of the North Island from its easternmost shore, where the Endeavour arrived in 1769. A few days after Nick Young sighted land, the Endeavour anchored near the mouth of a river. Cook took several boats ashore. While he explored on foot, four natives burst from the woods and frightened a coxswain guarding the boat. The sailor fired a warning shot over their heads; when the warriors didn’t retreat, he shot and killed one of them.
The English returned the next day to find men performing a startling dance on the opposite bank of the river. “With a regular jump from Left to Right and the Reverse,” wrote Lieutenant John Gore, “They brandish’d Their Weapons, distort’d their Mouths, Lolling out their Tongues and Turn’d up the Whites of their Eyes Accompanied with a strong hoarse song, Calculated in my opinion to Chear Each Other and Intimidate their Enemies.”
This was the first European description of the Maori haka, an aggressive dance popularized in modern times by New Zealand’s national rugby team, which performs the haka before each match. Cook ordered a party of marines to form a protective line behind him. Then he and a few of the gentlemen approached the river, joined by the Tahitian Tupaia, who called across to the warriors in his own language. “It was an agreeable surprise to us,” Cook wrote, “that they perfectly understood him.” Though the Maori had been isolated for hundreds of years, their speech still resembled the language spoken on the islands from which they’d originally sailed.
The English waved gifts and threw a nail that landed in the water. One of the warriors waded, unarmed, to a rock in the middle of the river. “I then laid down my Arms and went to him and gave him some presents,” Cook wrote. The two men touched noses. Several other warriors came to the rock, carrying their weapons. When their comrades on the riverbank resumed their hostile dance, Cook “thought fit to retire.”
Twenty or so armed warriors then came to the English side, and began snatching at muskets. “I got Tobia [Tupaia] to tell them that we was their friends and only come to get water and to trade with them,” Cook wrote, “and that if they offer’d to insult us we could with ease kill them all.” But the warriors persisted until one pried away an English sword. As he ran off, Cook ordered the thief fired at with “small shot,” a pellet spray akin to birdshot. Though hit, the warrior defiantly turned and waved the stolen sword. Cook then ordered the ship’s surgeon, William Monkhouse, to fire his gun, loaded with a musket ball, which mortally wounded the man.
This brief exchange typified Cook’s style of command. He led from the front, laying down his arms as the warrior had done, and going to meet him in the river rather than putting one of his men at risk. Nor did he flinch when the warrior pressed noses in a hongi, the Maori equivalent of a handshake or kiss. But Cook wasn’t reckless. When surrounded by armed men, he retreated. And when natives failed to reciprocate what he regarded as peacemaking, he didn’t hesitate to threaten them, and to make good on his threats. Small shot, intended to wound and frighten, was his first recourse. If that failed, Cook shot to kill. Cook would hew to this carefully calibrated escalation during tense moments throughout his Pacific career, with considerable success, until he lost control of himself and his situation early one morning on a beach in Hawaii.
Also characteristic were Cook’s actions once the fray ended. Unlike many other explorers, he didn’t sail away, or engage in wholesale massacre. Instead, he respectfully draped the dead warrior with beads and nails, and decided to row elsewhere in the bay, to find fresh water, and, “if possible to surprise some of the natives and bring them on board and by good treatment endeavour to gain their friendship.”
This plan also went awry. Firing over the heads of fishermen in a canoe, in hopes of scaring them into s
urrender, Cook instead provoked them. The seven men in the canoe threw rocks, lances, and paddles at an approaching English boat—even hurling fish once they ran out of other missiles. The English opened fire, killing several, an act Cook greatly regretted. “I can by no means justify my conduct in attacking and killing the people in this boat who had given me no just provication and was wholly igernorant of my design,” he wrote. “But when we was once a long side of them we must either have stud to be knockd on the head or else retire and let them gone off in triumph and this last they would of Course have attribited to their own bravery and our timorousness.”
The next day, when Cook returned to the riverbank, a well-armed crowd of about two hundred men again confronted the English. Cook decided to abandon the troublesome inlet, recording with disappointment, “We weigh’d and stood out of the Bay which I have named Poverty Bay because it afforded us no one thing we wanted.”
I reached Poverty Bay in the dark and found a motel by the water. Though Cook’s unflattering name had stuck, a town of thirty thousand, called Gisborne, had grown up beside the bay. I’d timed my arrival for a small event that the town’s tourist officer had told me about on the phone: a Sunday morning walking tour of Cook sites led by two women knowledgeable about local history.
“Good morning, I’m Sheila Robinson,” said a lean fair woman who worked with the local museum and historical society.
“Kia ora, I’m Anne Iranui McGuire,” said her fellow guide, a stout, brown woman who taught Maori studies at Gisborne’s university. Kia ora, meaning “good health,” was a common Maori greeting.
We’d gathered with a dozen other walkers at a park by the bay, beside a statue of Nick Young pointing at the headland bearing his name. Sheila began by telling us about Nick, a mysterious figure who wasn’t listed on the Endeavour’s muster roll at the time of the ship’s departure from England. No one knew for sure why he’d suddenly appeared on the roll in Tahiti, “in lieu of 7”—the number assigned Alexander Buchan, the deceased artist.