Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  If sex had been the crew’s principal obsession at Tahiti, in New Zealand it was food. After more than a year at sea, some of the Endeavour’s stores were running low. A week after leaving Tolaga, the Endeavour arrived at the bay where the young Te Horeta later told of a goblin killing birds with his thunder stick. The goblin was probably Banks, who wrote in his journal of shooting “shags” at the bay and quickly broiling them. “We find ourselves able to eat any kind of Birds,” he observed. “Hunger is certainly most excellent sauce.”

  When the Endeavour later reached New Zealand’s South Island, the English discovered that the native diet wasn’t restricted to birds, fish, and vegetables. Cook and Banks found Maori cooking on the beach beside a basket containing a sinewy bone that appeared to be human. Cook, “in order to be fully satisfied,” said to one of the Maori that this was surely the bone of a dog. “But he with great fervency,” Cook wrote, “took hold of the flesh of his own arm with his teth and made shew of eating.”

  The place became known as Cannibal Cove, and crewmen penned lurid accounts of what took place there. One reported that Maori killed men for sport and dangled the thumbs of their victims from their own ears. Parkinson, evoking images of witches’ covens, wrote that Maori consumed their own kind during “horrid midnight repasts.” On a return to New Zealand during Cook’s third voyage, a ship’s surgeon even claimed that ravenous Maori spared nothing but their enemies’ penises, which they somehow crafted into musical pipes.

  Banks, amused by the Endeavour’s fanciful sailors, observed, “Eating people is now always the uppermost Idea in their heads.” Human bones, he added, “become a kind of article of trade among our people who constantly ask for and purchase them for whatever trifles they have.” Banks, ever the collector, joined in this grisly traffic, bartering a pair of linen drawers for a preserved head with its scalp and facial hair still attached. “The flesh and skin,” he wrote with clinical admiration, “were soft but they were somehow preservd so as not to stink at all.”

  Cook also regarded cannibalism with startling matter-of-factness. “They eat their enimies Slane in Battell,” he calmly noted. “This seems to come from custom and not from a Savage disposission.” Cook’s supposition was correct. Maori ate only their enemies, to degrade foes and ingest their spirit and power. Still, it is possible they took gustatory delight in so doing. Anthropologists have noted a craving for fat in traditional societies where lipids, and the calories they provide, are scarce. Maori, living on islands devoid of large mammals, may have been subject to this hunger for fat—a yen that would also explain their ravenous consumption of ships’ candles and lamp oil.

  Despite the tales of cannibalism the Endeavour’s crew carried home, some in England doubted their veracity. After all, no one had seen Maori in the act of eating another human. But any lingering doubt was dispelled during Cook’s second voyage. An officer purchased a fresh head (for two nails) and brought it aboard, then asked a visiting Maori if he’d sample some of the flesh. “He very cheerfully gave his assent,” wrote Charles Clerke, who duly broiled a bit and gave it to the man. He “devour’d it most ravenously, and suck’d his fingers ½ a dozen times over in raptures.”

  A few weeks after this episode, ten men from Cook’s companion ship on the second voyage boated into a cove to gather greens. They never returned. A search party discovered, in the words of its lieutenant, the “most horrid & undeniable proofs” that the men had been killed and eaten. The evidence included baskets filled with roasted human flesh, the head of a black servant, and the tattooed hand of a sailor.

  Even then, Cook defended the Maori against charges of barbarism. Later investigating the “Melancholy affair” himself, he concluded that the English had been killed after firing on natives for stealing food. If anything, Cook blamed crewmen for “too hastily” taking action. “I must,” he wrote, “observe in favour of the New Zealanders that I have always found them of a Brave, Noble, Open and benevolent disposition, but that they are a people that will never put up with an insult if they have an opportunity to resent it.”

  More than two centuries later, the insult to Maori was Cook himself. I’d gotten a taste of this at the tribal office in Tolaga. Back in Gisborne, I learned that a visit by the replica Endeavour, four years before, had prompted death threats against the captain and warnings from tribal elders that they couldn’t guarantee the ship’s safety because of the “atrocities” committed by Cook and his men in 1769. “We see it as a menace floating around the Pacific,” one activist said of the replica. Added another: “We wonder at those who would honour the scurvy, the pox, the filth, and the racism that Cook’s arrival brought to this beautiful land.”

  The replica’s visit went off without incident, but city officials were nervous about the possibility of Maori protests over the erection of the new Cook statue in Gisborne. I stopped by the office of Gisborne’s tribal council to talk with the group’s chief executive, Tracey Tangihaere. She wore a black pants suit, black pumps, and small, rectilinear glasses of the sort that stylish professionals wear in America. This was the new, untattooed face of Maori leadership: young, smart, tough, and well armed with the language of empowerment. “We’ve survived colonial oppression by being proactive,” Tracey said, “and by adapting Western skills to our own ends.”

  To illustrate this, she showed me a three-hundred-page “working paper” for a land claim one local tribe had filed with the government. To prove such claims, tribes had to demonstrate a long-term pattern of use and settlement. “Cook’s one of our best sources,” Tracey said. With a surveyor’s eye, Cook had carefully delineated the boundaries of villages, the location of shell mounds, the use of fishing nets. At one point, the Endeavour’s men saw fishing canoes more than twelve miles offshore—evidence the Maori now used to determine the extent of their traditional fishing ground.

  At Tolaga Bay, Banks’s assistant, Herman Spöring, had spotted what appeared to be a Maori kite. Some activists now wanted to use this and other evidence to seek “atmospheric rights,” giving tribes a share of revenue from the radio and television spectrum, and perhaps even plane overflights. “It’s come full circle, eh?” Tracey said. “Cook led to the destruction of our world, and now we’re using him to put it back together again.”

  In 1960s America, Martin Luther King, Jr., cited Christianity and the words of America’s founding fathers to craft a plea for civil rights that spoke to many whites. A generation later, at the far side of the world, Maori were using much the same tactic, seeking their own racial justice by deploying old treaties, English common law, and the journals of a man regarded by many Pakeha as New Zealand’s founding father. When I suggested this analogy to Tracey, she smiled tightly. “We admire King, and we’re Christians, too. But we’re not so keen as he was on turning the other cheek.”

  It wasn’t just insults from Pakeha that Maori resented. All week in the local newspaper, I’d read about a trial involving the “Mongrel Mob,” a Maori gang alleged to be active in the drug trade, drive-by shootings, and other crimes. The current case involved a rugby match that had been intended to reconcile the Mongrel Mob with a rival gang of Tongans (islanders from across the Pacific flocked to New Zealand in search of jobs). The Tongans had won the game. After the match, the two sides went to a popular Mob pub, a few insults were exchanged, and four Mob members stomped a Tongan man in the parking lot before slamming a car door on his head until they killed him. Upon their conviction, the defendants yelled “Sieg heil!” to their supporters on their way to jail.

  I was curious to meet this twenty-first-century remnant of Poverty Bay’s warrior cult. The pub where the killing occurred stood just across the street from Anne McGuire’s house. But she didn’t recommend I visit. “Have you seen the movie Once Were Warriors?” she asked. “It’s like that. Big guys drinking too much and picking fights.” However, she told me where to find the Mob by day, on a back street beneath Kaiti Hill, on which stood the “crook Cook” statue.

  I waited
until eleven A.M. on a Sunday, reckoning that would be a quiet, sober time to visit. As I navigated an alley alongside a dilapidated garage, following Anne’s directions, a fully tattooed face poked out a side door and demanded, “Who the bloody hell are you?”

  “I’m an American. A writer.” I held my arms wide, clutching nothing but a notebook and pen, feeling oddly as though I was replaying Cook’s meeting with a Maori warrior in the river a few hundred yards away.

  The man gestured me inside. The garage was fitted out with tattered easy chairs, a bar, and pictures and carvings of bulldogs, the gang’s symbol. Three men sat drinking beer and rolling cigarettes. They wore sleeveless black leather vests, black leather pants, heavy chains, and storm trooper–style boots. All had “Mongrel Mob,” “MM,” or bulldogs tattooed on their faces.

  “We’re mixed breeds, mongrels, mean dogs,” one man said, explaining the name and symbol. He opened his vest to reveal a Yale University T-shirt, adorned with the school’s bulldog mascot.

  “My grandfather went there,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Yale. It’s a top university in America.” As a child I’d worn bulldog pajamas that my grandfather bought at a reunion. I didn’t mention this. “Very tough to get into Yale,” I added.

  The man nodded approvingly. He pointed at the garage’s only window, adorned with a swastika and a picture of a bulldog in an SS helmet. This seemed an odd emblem for a mixed-race mob to adopt. “It’s nothing to do with Nazis,” he said “It’s about our own supremacy. The swastika, it’s like Satan. It’s just saying, ‘We’re staunch. We’re bad.’”

  At this, his mates growled like bulldogs and wiggled their thumbs and pinkies in the same motion I’d seen teenagers demonstrate on the dock in Raiatea. In this context it seemed to mean “right on,” or “amen.” One of the men handed me a quart bottle of Steinlager beer and asked, “What you doing in Gizzy?”

  “Researching a book about Captain Cook.”

  This brought more growls. “Cook and his mob, they put us in this position,” one of the men said. “He put us down. We don’t take shit like that anymore.”

  “Cook’s a wanker. He can go to hell,” another added.

  One of the men disagreed. He had a scorpion tattoo on his neck, and wraparound sunglasses. “I wouldn’t have hot water if it wasn’t for Cook,” he said. Of all the modern conveniences he might have mentioned, this seemed a curious choice. “Sooner or later someone else would have come here,” he went on. “Could have been a lot worse than Cook.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Like what if the Chinese had conquered us? Then what would we be eating? I don’t like Chinese food.” He paused. “You got to look at all angles.”

  The others shrugged and gazed into their beers. An older man came in. Heavyset, with a shaved head, he introduced himself as Bill Irwin, a gang spokesman. He told me there was a softer, gentler side to the Mongrel Mob that the press never wrote about. “We’re not a criminal gang, we’re just outcasts who come together because we don’t fit into the society,” he said. “Ever since Cook, we did what the colonialists told us to, we opted for their way of life. It didn’t work. We’re unemployed, alienated, eh? So we make our own family.”

  Bill liked to paddle around Poverty Bay in a traditional war waka. “It gives me a feeling of wairua, a spiritual feeling of doing what my ancestors did.” To him, the Mob’s tattooing and toughness sprang from the same impulse. “Why does a Scotsman put on a kilt and blow bagpipes? Why do people still sail around in the Endeavour? That’s their tradition. Ours is a warrior tradition, and there’s nothing wrong with reclaiming it.”

  This seemed reasonable, if you overlooked the dead Tongan in the parking lot. A den full of hard-drinking Mongrels seemed like the wrong place to raise this. Instead, I asked Bill if the Mob objected to the new statue of Cook. He led me outside and pointed up at Kaiti Hill. “You’ve seen the crook Cook?” he asked. I nodded. “I feel sorry for Pakeha,” he said. “We know all about our ancestors. We have many heroes. All they have is Cook and they hardly know the man. They can’t even agree on what he looked like. It’s kind of pitiful, eh?”

  The Endeavour stayed almost six months in New Zealand waters but spent only a third of that time anchored near land. Most of the trip was devoted to charting the coastline of the country, some 2,400 miles in all, often in high seas and stormy weather. Cook accomplished this survey with such astounding accuracy that a French navigator who followed in his wake, Julien Crozet, declared with un-Gallic modesty: “I doubt much whether the charts of our own French coasts are laid down with greater precision.” Several of Cook’s charts—perfected on his two later voyages—remained in use until 1994, when the Royal New Zealand Navy finally updated his surveys with its own soundings and satellite readings.

  Cook not only charted a country the size of the United Kingdom; he also dispelled the notion that it was a peninsula of the fabled southern continent. Several of his officers clung to this myth from the moment Nick Young first sighted land. The master’s mate went so far as to label each new drawing of the coast “A Chart of Part of the So. Continent.” Joseph Banks joined this giddy cadre of “Continent mongers,” as he called them, and refused to abandon his faith until the March day when a fresh wind finally carried the Endeavour around the southernmost point of New Zealand, “to the total demolition of our aerial fabrick calld continent.”

  Cook expressed no such disappointment. While most explorers might dream of the glory attending discovery of a new continent, Cook reveled in the opposite. A born skeptic, he prized fact over fantasy throughout his career, becoming a master of what the historian Daniel Boorstin terms “negative discovery”—the uncovering of what’s not there. Less admirable, perhaps, was Cook’s obvious delight in being proved right. On the day the Endeavour finally circled the bottom of the South Island, he wrote: “I then called the officers upon deck and asked them if they were now satisfied that this land was an Island to which they answer’d in the affirmative.”

  Cook’s summary remarks on New Zealand reveal how much his horizons had broadened during the year and a half he’d spent at sea. He ventured opinions on a wide range of subjects, including linguistics and ethnography. Observing that the scattered tribes of the North and South Islands spoke a very similar dialect, and that this language closely resembled Tahitian, he speculated that South Sea islanders and New Zealanders “have had one Origin or Source.”

  As to where this original homeland lay, Cook couldn’t say, but he ruled out the possibility of Pacific islanders having come from the south, and doubted they’d arrived from the vast empty ocean to the east, either. Cook’s thinking was far ahead of his time. Despite the claims of Thor Heyerdahl, who wrote in the 1950s that Pacific islanders arrived from South America, contemporary scholars are almost unanimous in believing that the first Polynesians migrated in canoe voyages from Southeast Asia.

  Cook also ventured into what today would be called political science. “It doth not appear to me to be attall difficult for Strangers to form a settlement in this Country,” he wrote. “They seem to be too much divided among themselves to unite in opposing, by which means and kind and gentle usuage the Colonists would be able to form strong parties among them.” In other words, divide and conquer—a prescription for what the British eventually did in New Zealand, and what settlers did to Indian tribes in America.

  Cook wrote as a shrewd mercantilist, too, carefully calculating the value of New Zealand’s natural resources. “I judged that there was 356 solid feet of timber in this tree,” he wrote of an astonishingly tall, straight pine that soared eighty-nine feet before its first branch. Of New Zealand’s hemplike flax, he wrote that it would make “the very best of Cordage, Canvas &ca.” His walks on the beach also revealed “great quantities of Iron sand,” which suggested ore deposits. And in the gardens where Maori planted sweet potato, Cook conjured fields of European grain and flocks of sheep and cattle. “In short,” he concluded, “wa
s this country settled by an Industrus people they would very soon be supply’d not only with the necessarys but many of the luxuries of life.”

  Cook, once again, proved remarkably prescient. Within two centuries of his visit, resource-rich New Zealand would enjoy the highest per capita income on earth. But Cook’s remarks were also unsettling. They presaged the fate of New Zealand’s natives and their environment, just as Lewis and Clark’s journals foretold the ravaging of the American West. With hindsight, the line between exploration and exploitation, between investigation and imperialism, seems perilously thin.

  Cook couldn’t really be blamed for this. His orders were to “observe the Nature of the Soil…the Beasts and Fowls…Minerals or valuable stones…the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives.” Also, as Cook noted on a return trip to New Zealand: “We can by no means [tell] what use future ages may make of the discoveries made in the present.”

  But if Cook couldn’t know that the stately pines he extolled would be quickly logged out, or that muskets traded to one Maori tribe would lead to the near extermination of neighboring clans, he lived long enough to lament some of the consequences of his own discoveries. Returning to New Zealand in 1773, and again in 1777, Cook found the Maori prone to thievery, deploying Western hatchets as weapons rather than tools, afflicted with venereal disease, and eager to prostitute their wives and daughters in exchange for spike nails.

  “Such are the concequences of a commerce with Europeans,” Cook wrote, in one of the most despairing passages he ever penned. “We debauch their Morals already too prone to vice and we interduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serves only to disturb that happy tranquility they and their fore Fathers had injoy’d. If any one denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.”