by Tony Horwitz
Long after this mythical beginning came the great expeditions that brought Polynesian settlers to New Zealand. Maori today still identified themselves with reference to the sagas of these founding ancestors. “A true Maori can trace his or her family back fifty generations—and recite every one of them,” Anne said. This elaborate, orally transmitted genealogy was known as whakapapa (pronounced “fuckapoppa”).
Anne pulled over at a small settlement centered on a marae, a ceremonial space leading up to a meeting house (a variation on the Tahitian marae). The A-frame building was beautifully carved with sinuous designs similar to those Cook and his men had seen tattooed onto Maori faces and carved onto the prows of their canoes. Like the English, I admired the carvings’ Escheresque artistry, but had no idea what to make of them.
“Think of the marae as a library, and each carving as a book, and each notch in the carving as a page in that book,” Anne said. At the top of the A-frame was the figure of a man astride a giant fish; this was Paikea, a founding ancestor who came ashore on a whale. Wooden panels running down either side of the roof bore images of his descendants, some with monstrous faces and eyes made of abalone shell. One figure, shown with a forked tongue, was an ancestor remembered as a liar. In an era before literacy, these carvings, as well as songs and poems, served as the repository of Maori memory.
“On another side of my family I’m descended from Hauiti,” Anne said. “That whakapapa is easier to recite because Hauiti’s only seventeen generations back from me.” Like almost all Maori, she also had Pakeha blood, which she’d traced to an English great-great-grandfather named Glover, Anne’s maiden name. “I like to think that’s another connection between Maori and Pakeha culture,” she said. “A lot of English are obsessed with their genealogy, and so are we.” She laughed. “Then again, I’d like to see an Englishman recite his family tree back ten centuries.”
We drove on, past rolling fields and hills topped by pa sites: flattened summits ringed by moatlike ditches. Cook described these fortifications as dotting the entire coastline of New Zealand, like medieval castles strung along the Rhine. On closer inspection, he found picket fencing, platforms from which defenders hurled spears, and vast stores of fern root and dried fish in case of siege. “The best Engineer in Europe could not have choose’d a better [site] for a small number of men to defend themselves against a greater,” Cook wrote of one pa. The Maori later adapted these forts for warfare against the British, turning the trenches into rifle pits and adding underground bomb shelters.
Tolaga Bay, which Cook visited in search of fresh water soon after leaving Poverty Bay, lay beneath a sacred mountain called Titirangi, or Sky Piercer. “When I’m at a meeting where formal introductions are required,” Anne said, “I start by saying ‘Titirangi is my mountain.’ Then I name my river, my marae, my iwi or tribe, my hapu—that’s my clan—and so on. It drives Pakeha crazy to sit through an hour of introductions before any business gets done.”
The site of Cook’s landing could only be reached by a rugged three-mile foot trail. Anne, an unenthusiastic hiker, left me at the trailhead and arranged to meet me in Tolaga Bay at the end of the day. I climbed a stile and walked through paddocks of sheep, feeling for a moment as though I were rambling in the Cotswolds. Then the trail plunged into a grove of massive ferns—or what I guessed were ferns—blocking out the sun. The ground became marshy and lush, blanketed with unfamiliar shrubs, spiky grass, purple thistles, and yellow flowers that looked a little like buttercups. Cook and his men had also struggled to describe flora they’d never seen, or even imagined. “Cloth’d with several sorts of trees,” Cook remarked of the same countryside I hiked through.
After a mile or so, the trail opened onto a ridge overlooking Cook’s Cove. The hills all around were now clothed in what looked like clumps of dirty snow. Sheep again. So many that I doubted the census figure I’d read in the paper. Down to last 45 million? There seemed to be thousands of sheep here alone, a creeping mass, like troops viewed from afar. “Nothin’ but mutton, mate,” an Aussie had told me when I’d asked about North Island scenery.
I gamboled along the rest of the trail and down to the cove. The Endeavour spent five days here, one of its longest stays on the North Island. Except for the very brief, unsatisfying stop at Poverty Bay, Cook and his men hadn’t spent time ashore since leaving the Society Isles months before. Land—any land—must have seemed a relief after so much sea, and the crew’s journals and artwork from Tolaga possess a leisurely air that is rare in the records of the Endeavour’s voyage.
“The country about the bay is agreeable beyond description,” Sydney Parkinson wrote, “and, with proper cultivation, might be rendered a kind of second Paradise.” In particular, the English were mesmerized by a rock outcropping beside the cove, pierced by an almost perfect circle that framed a view of sea and hills beyond. “It was certainly the most magnificent surprize I have ever met with,” Banks wrote, adding that he’d “seen such places made by art”—namely, on the landscaped grounds of English country estates. Parkinson sketched the arch, which he judged “very romantic,” and several amateur artists on the Endeavour drew it as well.
One anonymous watercolor from the Endeavour shows a Maori handing a crewman an enormous lobster in exchange for a piece of fabric. Scholars have recently concluded that this painting was done by Tupaia. According to Banks, the Tahitian “learned to draw” on board the ship and developed a “genius for Caricature.” English journals also described the Tahitian priest displaying his tattooed hips to fascinated Maori and discoursing with them on religion.
On a slope by the cove, I found a historical marker. Set into it was a reproduction of a naïve sketch I’d often studied in books. It showed sailors in baggy knee-length britches, rolling water casks ashore while Maori looked on. The drawing intrigued me because it was the only one I’d seen from the voyage depicting common sailors. Also, while some books named the artist as Herman Spöring, a Swedish assistant to Banks, other sources—including this plaque—attributed it to Cook.
If this was Cook’s work, it was a rare example of his drawing (not counting, of course, the hundreds of charts he made). I found a comfortable flat rock, which afforded a view of the cove exactly like that in the sketch, and tried to imagine Cook sitting here. During his stay at Tolaga he turned forty-one, the same age I was now. Perhaps he’d indulged himself just a little, with a few hours of quiet observation. The sketch’s detail and firm, careful lines certainly suggested the surveyor’s hand. So did the purposeful activity it depicted: one sailor pushing a barrel with his foot, a cooper raising his hammer, the Maori on shore tugging canoes and hoisting fish.
“I got as much Sellery and Scurvy grass as loaded the boat,” Cook wrote on his birthday. “This day we completed our water to 70 Tons but have not got enough wood yet.” Cook made no mention in his journal of the “romantic” rock arch that everyone else marveled at, nor did he include it in this sketch. But he did muster a few expressive words for the surrounding landscape. “I went upon some of the Hills in order to view the Country,” he wrote, describing it as “luxuriously clothed with Woods, and Verdure and little Plantations of the Natives.”
This was about as lyrical as Cook ever waxed about scenery. In the next sentence, he was back to business, noting the trees he cut down for firewood (one yielding a yellowish gum he thought “might prove useful in dying”), and the quality of the soil, which he judged “light and sandy and very proper for producing all kinds of Roots.”
Banks also proved true to form, carefully studying native women and comparing all that he saw to his beloved Tahiti. While he admired the tidy gardens he visited near Tolaga and the sanitary layout of a village, which included a “necessary house,” or outhouse, he judged the women much plainer than in Tahiti and felt that they “made themselves more so by painting their faces with red ocre and oil”—goo that transferred itself to the English each time they pressed noses.
Under rough-hewn, knee-length cloaks tha
t “resemble not a little a thachd house,” Banks wrote, women wore girdles of perfumed grass, to which they “fastned a small bunch of leaves of some fragrant plant which servd as the innermost veil of their modesty” (another journal keeper described this as a “stopper of dried grass”). One day, Banks “accidentaly” came upon several naked women diving for shellfish, but he was disappointed when they “shewd most evident signs of Confusion, veiling as well as they could their naked beauties with sea weed the only covering the situation afforded.” This modesty extended to sexual behavior. Some women were “as great coquetts as any Europaeans could be,” Banks wrote, but there was little of the frantic traffic in sex that had occurred at Tahiti.
Banks turned his attention instead to the natural wonders of “a countrey so totaly new.” He marveled at a songbird that awakened him with “the most melodious musick I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells.” Even the mollusks and barnacles thrilled him. “Here were also some fine whelks, one particularly with a long tooth, and infinite variety of Lepades, Sertularias, Onisci &c &c &c much greater variety than I have any where seen,” he enthused.
By the end of the Endeavour’s tour of New Zealand, Banks and Solander had collected specimens of four hundred plant species unknown in the West, and &c &c &c of birds, fish, insects, shells, and stones. Fifteen years before the Endeavour’s departure, the great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had estimated that the number of plant species in the world numbered no more than ten thousand, and he described only six thousand in his encyclopedic Species Plantarum. Banks and Solander recorded some fourteen hundred new species on the Endeavour’s voyage alone, helping to eventually explode the Linnaean orthodoxy. The world, as the Endeavour’s men were fast discovering, was a wondrously diverse place.
Hiking to the town of Tolaga, I met Anne in front of a tribal office on Cook Street. Though three-quarters of the town’s four hundred residents were Maori, early English settlers had named all the streets after Cook’s crew and ships. Anne wanted to consult with members of her iwi about the language Sheila Robinson had proposed for the new Cook monument in Gisborne. Inside, Anne greeted two women named Heeni and Ngahuia by pressing her nose against each of theirs. I followed her lead, expecting the nasal equivalent of a peck on the cheek. Instead, the women pressed hard, squashing my nose for several seconds with disarming intimacy, their dark eyes, coffee-colored skin, and high cheekbones swimming before me.
“Basically a hongi means, ‘I want to share your breath,’” Anne said. “When the Pakeha first came, we thought their kissing was unhygienic. Now we wonder if pressing noses is worse.”
Heeni, a tall, striking woman in a long skirt, unwrapped a newspaper filled with fish and chips. “Have a greasie,” she said, slathering the mountain of fried potato with ketchup and salt. Anne took out the proposed text for the Cook monument and read aloud: “‘James Cook was a fine seaman, a great captain and an honest man. After his three global voyages, the map of the world was substantially complete—’”
“This is shit!” Heeni cut in.
“‘When misunderstood Maori challenges led to warriors being shot,’” Anne read on, “‘the ship sailed without provisions—’”
“Bloody good thing, too. Otherwise he might have stayed!”
“‘—and Poverty Bay was named.’”
“It wasn’t poor to us! We just didn’t want to give him our water and food.”
“‘From here, the Endeavour circumnavigated New Zealand—’”
“Enough!” Heeni cried, grabbing the paper out of Anne’s hand. “This is too bloody long. Cook was a five-minute man, a fly-by-nighter, a storm trooper. He only stayed here long enough to shoot some Maori.”
“So what should the inscription say?” Anne asked. “I’m supposed to give some input.”
Heeni scribbled on the back of the paper and read: “‘Here’s where the first murderer stood. Sanctified by the queen. He died of syphilis.’”
“Sanctified by the king,” the other woman, Ngahuia, corrected her. “And by the Royal Society. I know, because I won a plate on the bicentennial of his landing for a project I did in school. I was ten. I didn’t learn anything about my own culture, but I knew more about Cook than almost any kid in the country.” She shook her head. “It’s ridiculous, eh? I still have the plate. I eat off it.”
“What do you eat?” Heeni asked. “Arms or legs?”
Ngahuia groaned. Of all the Western notions about Maoridom, stories about long-ago cannibalism were the most despised. “If you want to get beat up,” Heeni told me, “go to a Gisborne pub and call someone a cannibal.” Among themselves, though, Maori still referred to the practice, in an insulting way, usually by calling someone a pokokhua, or boiled head. “If you’re arguing,” Anne explained, “you might say, ‘Carry on in that vein, mate, and you’re going to end up in the pot, you pokokhua.’” Maori believed the head was the repository of mana, one’s spirit or authority. Threatening to devour it was the worst thing you could say.
“Of course,” Ngahuia said, “Cook ended cannibalism and everything else bad. That’s what we were taught. Cook was our savior. He gave us clothing and medicine. Then the missionaries came and gave us Christianity.”
“And the rapists brought us Pakeha names,” Heeni added.
Anne nodded. “When I was young and looking for apartments, I used to phone landlords in my poshest accent and say, ‘This is Anne Glover. I’m ringing about your advertisement in the paper.’ It wasn’t until I turned up that they’d turn me down.”
“I hated that I had this long unpronounceable name,” Ngahuia added. “I wanted to be Mary or something. I named my daughter Sarah. Then when she grew up she took a Maori name. Now I’m proud of mine.”
There was also talk of renaming some of the Endeavour-inspired streets in Tolaga. “Cook wasn’t a five-minute man in Tolaga, he was a five-day man,” Heeni said. “But the funny thing is, we hardly remember him. Maori have stories and songs about everything—this war, that feast, he lived up the road, she had a baby, there was a big fire. But Cook? Nothing. Like I said, a fly-by-nighter.”
Ngahuia again corrected her. She said that Tupaia was remembered in local speeches and songs. A rock shelter in which he slept while on land was known as Tupaia’s Cave, and a nearby watering place became Tupaia’s Well. When Cook returned to New Zealand on his second voyage, he found that many Maori remembered the Endeavour as “Tupaia’s ship.”
“What about the beautiful rock arch?” I asked, referring to the holed stone at Cook’s Cove that had so enraptured the English.
Ngahuia blushed. The Maori name for it was Te Kotore o te Whenua.
“‘Anus of the Land,’” Heeni translated. “No wonder the English loved it. Sodomy was their favorite sport.”
When we finished the fish and greasies, Anne made one last attempt at querying the women about the wording for the Cook monument. “I’m on a historical and museum committee, I have to tell them something,” she said. Heeni shrugged. “Tell them we won’t be dragged into this, we don’t want to be their rubber stamp. Let them write what they want. Some young blood will spray-paint over it anyway.”
Anne and I climbed back in her waka for the drive through the dark to Gisborne. “You see what I’m up against, eh?” she said. “Maori are militants, just like in Cook’s day. So if you talk about a conciliatory approach, you get pulled to pieces. At meetings sometimes I’m called a potato—brown on the outside, white on the inside. That hurts.” The only thing worse was to be called a plastic Maori—someone who takes on the veneer of native tradition for the entertainment of tourists.
I asked Anne why she persisted. “You can’t change the history,” she said. “It happened. I’d rather have a say in how Cook’s remembered, and remind Pakeha that we were here long before Cook—and that we’re still here—rather than just let them have their way, and then complain about it.” There was another issue. Anne doubted there was a Maori in all of New Zealand who didn’t have Pakeha blood. �
��Our history is tied up in two peoples,” she said. “It’s silly to hate half of yourself.”
Anne invited me home for dinner at the modest bungalow she shared with her husband, David, and her brother, Danny. We found the two men preparing a “boil-up” of kumara, or sweet potato, a zucchini-like vegetable called kamokamo, pork ribs, and watercress that Danny had collected the day before by the water at Tolaga Bay. I sampled the watercress and asked if it was related to the celery or “scurvy grass” Cook wrote of gathering at Tolaga and other spots, as protection against disease.
Danny shook his head and laughed. Maori knew scurvy grass by a different name: tutaekoua, or bird feces, because it made birds defecate. “I don’t know if it worked against scurvy,” he said, “but I bet it gave the English a helluva bellyache.”
The indigestion went both ways. Cook and his men seemed omnivorous to the Maori, who therefore assumed that everything the English gave them was edible. According to one story, Maori prepared a big “nosh-up” after Cook left, tossing potatoes, shoes, and candles into a stew—everything but nails. Another tale told of Tolaga natives burying gunpowder they’d been given by the English, and which they thought were the seeds of a turniplike plant. Later, on New Zealand’s South Island, several English journal keepers observed natives drinking oil from the ship’s lamps—even consuming the wick.
Cook’s ships carried something else the Maori weren’t sure what to make of: pigs. Some of the pigs went feral and their descendants still roamed the woods, a long-nosed, stiff-haired breed rather like wild boars. New Zealanders call them Captain Cookers.
Danny announced that the boil-up was ready. We ate the entire pot, washed down with quart bottles of beer. At midnight, as I got up to go, David went to the freezer and brought out an enormous lobster, as big as the one in the watercolor made by an Endeavour artist at Tolaga. “Just in case you feel like a snack later on,” David explained. Waddling back to my motel, clutching the lobster, I felt bloated but content, like the Endeavour’s Charles Clerke, who wrote of “The Happy taughtness of my Jacket” after gorging himself in New Zealand.