by Tony Horwitz
“Probably Banks’s bum boy,” whispered the walker beside me, an elderly, winking man.
As to the land Nick sighted from afar, Sheila said it was undoubtedly one of the mountains rising behind Gisborne rather than the low headland named after him. “Of course,” she added, nodding at her fellow guide, “it’s got a perfectly good Maori name.”
“Te Kuri a Pawa,” Anne said. “The Dog of Pawa.” Pawa was an early Polynesian navigator who landed at the headland and then sailed off in search of wood to fix his canoe. “Our history says his dog died below the headland, waiting for Pawa to come back. If you look at the bluff closely, you can see it’s shaped like a long skinny dog, on its haunches, looking out to sea for its master.”
We walked along the river Cook had visited. A plaque on the wall of a food processing plant told of the first white settler in the area. “We stop here for European reasons,” Sheila said, “so I’ll tell you a bit and then Anne can add something if she wants.” Our next stop was a park that occupied the site of a vanished Maori village. Originally named for Cook’s ship, the park was now called Endeavour Heipipi Park, incorporating a Maori word for shellfish. At the center of the park rose a sculpture of a canoe prow. The inscription read: “Our Maori Seafaring Ancestors were sailing confidently around the Pacific Ocean centuries before European sailors dared to go further than the eye could see, fearing they would fall off the edge of the world.”
This wasn’t strictly true; Vikings sailed off the known map of the Atlantic at about the same time Polynesians ventured to New Zealand. “It’s just a reminder that Cook wasn’t the first one here,” Anne said, “and that Maori were seafarers like the English. It’s a connection between our two cultures.”
This gentle, yin-yang presentation—thin, blond Sheila telling the European history; round, dark Anne relating the Maori version—continued as we crossed the river to the site of Cook’s landing. Gisborne had become a busy industrial port, and this side of the river was crowded with old slaughterhouses, freezing works, and a vast “Debarking Facility” that produced a mountain of sawdust. Log trucks rumbled past, adding to the din from wood chippers and generators.
“The scenery’s changed a wee bit since 1769,” Sheila said, leading us behind one of the warehouses to a simple obelisk of rose-colored granite, erected in 1906 to commemorate Cook’s landing. A recently added plaque, in Maori and English, explained that the first Polynesian voyagers had also landed here, centuries before Cook, in sailing canoes, or waka.
“It was their descendants who made the first contact with Captain Cook,” the plaque said. “Close to this place, Maori and Pakeha began to learn about each other, exchanged gifts, and mourned the deaths which had occurred.” “Pakeha” was believed to have derived from Pakepakeha, meaning “pale-skinned fairies,” or imaginary beings. “Maori” was itself a postcontact word, roughly translating as “normal” or “usual” people, and adopted to distinguish native islanders from Europeans. Before Cook’s arrival, the Maori hadn’t had any concept of race, only of their tribal identities.
“This is a microcosm of New Zealand history right here,” Anne said. “First the arrival of the waka. Then Cook. Then the commerce and change. It all happened within view of this spot.”
“If it’d been whalers or traders who arrived first, ahead of Cook, we wouldn’t have the observations and records that we do, of what life was like before European contact,” Sheila added. “That’s why this place is important to me. Cook first landed here, and as a result we are who we are today, both Maori and Pakeha. This is the real ground. I can’t get that feeling at a museum.”
Unfortunately, it was hard to get that feeling at the landing site, either. Landfill had extended the banks of the river and bay so that the monument lay far from any water. Warehouses, and a seawall of industrial rubble, obstructed all but a narrow glimpse of Poverty Bay. The only way Cook could land here today would be by forklift or helicopter.
Still, preservationists had done their best to create a botanical reminder of the site’s appearance in 1769. Sheila and Anne led us to a nearby plot labeled “Banks Garden.” Imported plants had been pulled out and replaced with indigenous, thick-leafed shrubs and small gnarly trees like those Banks and his assistants found during their brief time on the riverbank. Plaques also explained the plants’ native uses. The leaves of the pepper tree helped reduce swelling; a shrub called ngaio was a natural insect repellent; the bright orange fruit of the karaka plant had poisonous flesh but kernels inside that the Maori baked and ate at feasts.
“It’s funny,” said the elderly walker who had whispered to me about Nick Young. “When I was a boy, farmers regarded all these native plants as weeds.”
“And the native people were worse,” his wife chimed in. “In school, the Maori were presented as criminals and savages. No one told us Cook killed people when he landed.”
At tour’s end, as the walkers headed back to town, I lingered to chat with Anne and Sheila. Until recently, they’d been giving tours separately: Anne to Maori walkers, Sheila to Pakeha ones. Gisborne’s population was evenly divided between the two groups. The two women also consulted about the wording for monuments and plaques, including the one beside the obelisk, identifying this as the site where Maori and Pakeha first “learned about each other” and “mourned the deaths which had occurred.” I confessed that this struck me as a passive and sanitized way to describe a very violent encounter.
“It’s squishy, that’s true,” Sheila said. “But before, the story was only told one way, and from one side, with ‘God Save the Queen’ and the Union Jack and all that.”
“A lot of Maori don’t want any part of the Cook history, they think it’s just Pakeha propaganda,” Anne added. “The only part of the story they like is the haka, the whole macho combat thing. We’re trying to find a middle ground, a way to tell the story from a different perspective.”
Anne had to go off to guide another tour. She and Sheila kissed and embraced. Watching them, and mulling their words, I was reminded of how meager the women’s perspective was in the books I’d read about Cook, many of which were written by old-school scholars of a nautical bent. Native women rarely appeared in these histories except as objects of sailors’ desires. Cook’s wife, Elizabeth, remained a shadowy figure. To a degree, this simply reflected eighteenth-century reality; it would be anachronistic to inflate women’s roles in events and societies that were so male-dominated. But watching Anne and Sheila, I wondered if the very maleness of Cook’s story explained more than I’d realized about the way events unfolded, and how they were remembered.
We take it for granted that Cook’s ships carried only men. But for natives, this was a source of confusion and curiosity. The English journals mention several instances in which islanders groped sailors’ chests and groins, or asked them to undress, seeking proof that they were indeed men. At one stop in New Zealand, an Englishman bartered for sex. He was presented with a boy; when he complained, he was presented with another. The English related this incident with amusement, as a cruel joke. But the Maori may have supposed that homosexuality was the English norm. How else to account for the absence among them of women and children?
In 1769, New Zealand was a patchwork of warring tribes. The sudden appearance of a waka full of men, most of them young, quite reasonably aroused fears of bloodshed and plunder, even before the English opened fire. In Tahiti, “Queen” Purea held a prominent role; she and other women mediated first contact between sailors and islanders. In New Zealand, the English met only well-armed warriors, taunting and threatening them with the haka. Testosterone, on both sides, doubtless contributed to the violence that followed.
Now, on the same exact ground, a Pakeha and a Maori woman were trying to reach out in a way their forebears had failed to do 230 years before—a gesture many people today were still reluctant to undertake. It might be “squishy,” as Sheila admitted, but it seemed better than the alternative.
When Anne left, Sheila offere
d to show me a Cook site that wasn’t included on the morning tour. She led me up the steep hill behind the landing site. Its summit had once been a lookout from which Maori watched the Endeavour’s arrival. “We could plainly see a regular paling, pretty high, inclosing the top of the hill,” Banks wrote. Unsure what to make of this palisade, Banks—perhaps homesick for his own estate—guessed it was a deer park or “a feild of oxen and sheep.” In fact, New Zealand in 1769 had no land mammals, apart from dogs. The fenced enclosure was a fortified position, or pa, where Maori took refuge during attacks by enemy tribes.
No sign of the pa remained today. Instead, near the top of the hill, we reached “Cook’s Plaza,” an ugly wall and terrace made from brick the color of slightly off salmon. Facing the plaza, with its back to the sea, stood an unprepossessing bronze of a man in a Napoleon-style hat. His features were much softer and younger than those in portraits of Cook. Also odd was the triangle he clutched in one hand.
Sheila said the bronze had been cast from a nineteenth-century Italian statue purchased long ago by the owner of the Captain Cook brewery in Auckland. Believing it to be an image of Cook, the brewery had donated money for this replica, erected on the bicentenary of the Endeavour’s landing. “We call him the crook Cook,” Sheila said. “Crook” was antipodean slang for “ill” or “counterfeit.” She pointed at his hat. “Cook wore a tricorn, prow forward,” she said, “nothing like this one.” The statue’s double-breasted uniform also didn’t fit; lieutenants in Cook’s day wore an open frock coat with lapels. As for the triangle in the statue’s hand, Sheila said it didn’t match any known nautical or astronomical instrument. “He looks as if he’s about to rack up balls for a pool game.”
“So who is it?” I asked her.
Sheila shrugged. “Some people think he’s John Paul Jones. Or an Italian commander. Nobody knows.”
The statue had also been subject to frequent vandalism. Someone with a truck and winch had once dragged it off its pedestal. Other vandals had knocked off the sword, covered the statue in graffiti, and spray-painted a pink bikini onto its breeches. “Cook’s not very popular with Maori,” Sheila said. “Even if he’s crook.”
Sheila and other Cook enthusiasts had waged a long campaign to erect a new, more accurate statue of the navigator. It was due to go up in a few weeks near the statue of Young Nick. “Why don’t you stick around?” Sheila said.
After leaving Poverty Bay, Cook sailed briefly south, but, finding the coast barren, he turned north and continued counterclockwise around the island. Heavily manned canoes approached the ship, with warriors inside performing what Cook called their “strange contorsions” while shouting words that he later learned meant “Come here, come a shore with us and we will kill you with our patoo patoo’s.”
Banks described patupatu as bludgeons made of stone or hard wood, held onto the wrist by a strap, and “most admirably calculated for the cracking of sculls.” Other weapons included fifteen-foot spears, “darts” with jagged points or stingray stingers attached, and “battle axes” made of heavy, bladed wood and notched to lift out pieces of fractured skull. “The mind of man, ever ingenious in inventing instruments of destruction, has not been Idle here,” Banks concluded. Maori were also veritable Davids at throwing and slinging stones. “When they have pelted us with them on board the ship,” Banks wrote, “I have seen our people attempt to throw them back and not be able to reach the Canoes, tho they had so manifest an advantage in the hight of their situation.”
Full facial tattoos added to the warriors’ ferocity. The artist, Parkinson, described the tattoos as “fine spiral directions like a volute,” and his drawings show swirls and scrolls encircling eyes and mouths. He depicted the men’s hair as tied in knots atop their heads in the manner of Sumo wrestlers. The Maori adorned the prows of their canoes in a similarly “wild and extravagant” fashion, the artist wrote, carving distorted human faces with lolling tongues and wide eyes made of mother-of-pearl that mimicked their own expressions as they performed their war dance. “Nothing is omittd which can render a human shape frightful and deformed,” Banks wrote of the haka, which included the rhythmic beating of thighs, feet, and paddles, and a grunting chant that ended “with a loud and deep fetchd sigh.”
As fearsome as this behavior seemed—and anyone who has seen the haka, even its rugby version, knows how intimidating it can be—the English quickly realized that it was ritualized bravado rather than genuine belligerence. The warriors taunted and threatened the English, but only rarely did they follow the haka with a sustained attack. Before long, the crewmen responded in kind. When a warrior waved his naked backside at the English, which William Monkhouse termed “the usual sign of contempt” among fishmongers in London, the surgeon decided to “retort the compliment” by baring his ass as well. This so enraged a warrior that he hurled a lance. The English replied with small shot, frightening the Maori—but only for a moment. “They felt the sting of our laughing at them,” Monkhouse wrote, and resumed shouting and waving spears and paddles. Thus ended a fairly typical encounter, which reads today rather like a skirmish between soccer hooligans in Europe.
Maori behavior became so predictable that the English started describing warriors’ elaborate performances in abridged form: they “began again their braging,” or “became very saucy,” or “sang the song of Defiance as usual which we took very little notice of.” Even Cook’s tone became droll. “Accompaned in here by several Canoes,” he wrote of one bay, “and before they went away they were so generous as to tell us that they would come and attack us in the morning.” Instead, the Maori returned and, “after Parading about the Ship near three hours,” consented to trade and talk (or “chitchat,” as Cook described a later such encounter).
In fact, for all their initial bellicosity, the Maori proved reliable trade partners and hosts. Once “they found that our Arms were so much Superior to theirs and that we took no advantage of that superiority,” Cook wrote, they became “our very good friends and we never had an Instance of their attempting to surprize or cut off any of our people when they went ashore.”
To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher’s judgment of Mikhail Gorbachev, Cook found in the Maori a people he could do business with. Tahitians, for all their charms, had perplexed the hardheaded commander. They struck him as not only thieving but also mercurial. The Maori, by contrast, seemed refreshingly consistent and forthright, possessing a Samurai dignity that Cook admired. “They are a brave open warlike people and voide of treachery,” he wrote. His description of the warriors’ bearing—“strong raw boned well made Active”—could just as well be a description of himself.
A few days after the walking tour, I stopped in to see Anne McGuire at her university office behind a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Gisborne. Her department taught Maori arts and language, both of which had nearly gone extinct in the latter half of the twentieth century. Government policies had encouraged the urbanization and assimilation of Maori, while cultural influences such as television and radio further eroded native identity. “When I was a child, the attitude, even among Maori, was that everything from our own culture was bad, and everything Pakeha was good,” Anne said. “We’d play cowboys and Indians, and everyone wanted to be cowboys because they won and Indians were savages who scalped people.”
Attitudes started to change in the early 1970s, when Anne went to university. “It grew out of the American Indian Movement,” she said. “We thought, ‘There’s people who have a huge country, they lost so much more than us, and they’re taking a stand.’”
The civil rights movement had also inspired Maori, who constitute roughly 15 percent of the New Zealand population, about the same as blacks in America. Maori and some Pakeha supporters began staging marches and sit-ins, and famously disrupted a tour by South Africa’s rugby team by pouring onto sports fields and battling with police. Eventually, the government revived and amended the Treaty of Waitangi so that Maori could petition for financial compensation and the return of their la
nd.
This political movement was accompanied by a Maori cultural renaissance. Canoe racing, dance, and traditional crafts now thrived; even facial tattooing, outlawed in 1906 as a sign of rebellion, was making a comeback among young people. Maori were also reconnecting to the land. Anne had grown up on a dairy farm in a seaside community called Tolaga Bay, then moved to Gisborne, attended university in Wellington, and lived in various cities before returning to the east coast. Now, she and her husband spent all their free time at Tolaga, where they kept a garden and “bach,” New Zealand slang for a simple holiday cottage. She was headed up there after class and offered to take me along.
“Sorry about the mess in my waka,” she said as we climbed into her cluttered sedan. Waka was the word Maori still used for all transport, from canoes to cars. A Maori-language commission had been set up to adapt native language to the modern world. Rorohiko, for instance, a new word for “computer,” was a conjunction of roro, “brain,” and hiko, “lightning.”
As we drove north, on a two-lane highway between the sea and mountains, Anne also gave me a primer on Maori belief. The world began when the Sky Father, Ranginui, coupled with the Earth Mother, Papa-tu-a-nuku. They spawned children, but their embrace was so tight that the world remained dark. Finally, one of their boys managed to plant his feet against his father and his back against his mother and pry his parents apart. Thus came light. Cook, who had as much trouble divining Maori beliefs as he had Tahitian ones, offered an abridged version of this Freudian story. “There is one suprem god,” he wrote, who “made the world and all that therein is—by Copolation.”