by Tony Horwitz
On my last day in Gisborne, I went to the shore of Poverty Bay and joined Sheila Robinson, my first-day tour guide, as she watched workmen lay concrete for the new Cook statue. The bronze navigator lay on the ground, facedown, bound and gagged by yellow straps, with a noose around his neck tagged “10 Hints for Safe Lifting.” His cutlass poked behind him, like a tail. “It’s a bit sacrilegious,” Sheila said, “but they couldn’t put him on his back because that might break his sword.”
For the workmen, the statue’s pose made for light relief while they shoveled concrete.
“He flogged his share. Now he’s having a wee rest.”
“Cook’s looking a bit overdone lying there in the sun.”
“He’s keeping his ear to the ground. Or his eyes. Maybe he’s trying to look all the way through the globe to see what his wife’s up to back in England.”
For Sheila, this day was the culmination of years of lobbying, fund-raising, and mediation. She’d brought a “chilly-bin,” or cooler, filled with sandwiches and sodas so she could spend the day watching the monument go up. I settled beside her in the shade of a pohutukawa tree and asked what had drawn her to Cook.
“He was a self-made man, he got where he was through sheer competence at his job,” she said. “He’s the sort of person New Zealanders admire. We don’t have a lot of time for people born to greatness. Most of the Pakeha who first came here were lower middle class, working people who labored hard and had had a miserable time in Britain. They can identify with Cook.”
Sheila was the daughter of a Presbyterian parson and had grown up on the South Island, where Scottish influence remained very strong and Maori were relatively scarce. In her thirties, Sheila had gone with her husband to teach at schools in Borneo and Samoa. “I came home much more aware of other cultures,” she said, and began learning about Maori ways while teaching in Gisborne. Among other things, she’d come to envy the Maori sense of belonging. “They’re part of a land where I feel I belong, but never quite do. Maori have their turangawaewae, a ‘standing place’ by their marae. I have none.”
When she later became a curator at the local museum, Sheila also realized how blinkered Pakeha could be about the past. In their attitude to history, some New Zealanders resembled die-hard white Southerners in America, who enshrined Confederate leaders and symbols without acknowledging the offense this might cause to others.
Sheila had tried to change this by gathering more Maori content for the museum’s archives, and urging local leaders to put the new Cook statue in this park, close to where the captain encountered Maori, rather than in the middle of town. At the same time she’d reached out to Maori. This wasn’t always easy. Political differences were one obstacle; personality was another. Scots had a reputation for being dour, austere, buttoned-up. Maori, as I’d seen, tended to be demonstrative and outspoken. Also, to Presbyterian Pakeha, pride was a deadly sin. Sheila admired the fierce pride of many Maori. “That’s part of what makes them so strong,” she said. “But it can clash with some Pakeha, who think it’s a virtue to be self-effacing.”
Sheila had learned to enjoy the cultural difference, even the endless nose-pressing, speeches of welcome, and exchanging of gifts that began Maori meetings. “It’s made me realize how little ritual Europeans have anymore,” she said. “By the end I always leave feeling warmer-hearted than when I arrived.” She’d also become more relaxed about physical contact. “I think Pakeha kiss and hug more than they did a generation ago; they’ve picked that up from Maori.”
She paused as workmen yanked the statue’s plinth into place. “My family has its own piece of granite in Samoa,” she said quietly. While Sheila and her husband were teaching on the island, their seven-year-old son contracted meningitis and died. “We had three other children and no wider family with us, and just felt we had to carry on, or pretend to. We never really talked to the kids about it.” Thirty-five years later, she wondered if that had been the best approach.
“I now find the old Pakeha attitude to death very cold,” she said. “We had closed coffins, sang a few hymns, talked a lot about God but hardly at all about the dead.” Maori, by contrast, held open-coffin funerals with lamentation and long speeches and songs about the deceased, followed by a party. This was a way of staying with the dead as long as possible, helping them back to their mountain, and celebrating their life. Some of this had rubbed off on Pakeha, too. “Stoicism’s a virtue,” Sheila said. “Where would Cook have been without it? But I’ve come to realize the price you pay for that.”
We sat quietly until the workmen were ready to raise the statue. “Okay, time to stand Jimmy up,” the foreman shouted. A truck with a crane lifted the statue onto its perch: a short column set atop a half-globe that was etched with the path of Cook’s voyages. The statue had been carefully crafted to satisfy all constituencies. Legs spread wide, hands on hips, Cook looked properly commanding, as if at the prow of a ship plowing across the map. But the sculptor had chopped the globe in half so Cook wasn’t standing imperially on top of the whole world. The statue had also been sprayed with a special anti-graffiti wax.
The foreman grabbed a glue gun and squirted around the statue’s feet, megapoxying Cook for eternity. Sheila stood back and gazed at the statue approvingly. “He’s human-sized, not too far off the ground. I think Cook would be comfortable with that.”
The new statue, though, created a slight problem: what to do with the crook Cook atop Kaiti Hill. Some Maori had publicly suggested blowing the statue up, or melting it down, and putting up a memorial to Polynesian navigators instead. Others felt the crook Cook was such a fixture of the local landscape—appearing on postcards and tourist brochures for the city—that he should stay where he was. One local wag thought the statue should be replaced with a monument to surfing.
Sheila had an impish solution of her own. In 1919, Gisborne had acquired a cannon believed to have come from the Endeavour. This had turned out to be a counterfeit, too. The gun now resided in the town’s museum, beside a plaque labeling it “Not Captain Cook’s Cannon.” Sheila felt the statue should be moved to the museum and put beside the cannon. “It could have its own plaque,” she said. “‘Not Captain Cook.’”
Chapter 5
Botany Bay:
In the Pure State of Nature
Australian history is almost always picturesque…. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.
—MARK TWAIN, MORE TRAMPS ABROAD (1897)
In late February 1770, after eighteen months and roughly twenty thousand miles of sailing, Joseph Banks confided in his journal that the Endeavour’s crew had split into two camps. The first, comprising the botanist and a very few others, still dreamed of finding a southern continent. “The rest,” he observed, “begin to sigh for roast beef.”
A month later, after completing his circumnavigation of New Zealand, Cook also cast his gaze toward England. “Now resolved to quit this country,” he wrote, “and to bend my thoughts towards returning home by such a rout as might conduce most to the advantage of the service I am upon.” Cook’s first choice was to return via Cape Horn, at the highest possible latitude, “to prove the existence or non existence of a Southern Continent.” But the Endeavour’s worn state, and the approaching winter, made this impractical. He also dismissed the most direct path home: sailing straight toward Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. “No discovery of any moment could be hoped for in that rout.”
So Cook chose a third, more circuitous route. He would steer west until he fell in with another vaguely known land, this one also discovered by the Dutch, and follow its coast to its “northern extremity” before heading home via the Indies. Cook’s calm declaration of this verdict, occupying one line in his journal, makes his choice seem straightforward, almost tame. In reality, Cook had bent his thoughts toward an uncharted course that would eventually carry the Endeavour closer to disaster than at any point during its long voyage.
The going turned rough as soon as the Endeavour reached
open sea west of New Zealand. First, the ship met “flying showers of rain and a large hollow sea.” Then sultry doldrums. Then a hard gale with heavy squalls. “We had a broken sea that caused the ship to pitch and roll very much,” wrote Sydney Parkinson. “At the same time we shipped a sea fore and after, which deluged the decks, and had like to have washed several of us overboard.” Having endured the replica Endeavour’s stomach-churning roll in even mild winds, I felt armchair seasickness just reading this passage.
It no doubt came as a relief when Lieutenant Zachary Hicks “saw the land making high” at daybreak on April 19. Point Hicks, as Cook named it, lay east of the present-day city of Melbourne. Though this was the edge of the vast continent that would later become known as Australia, it was not the bountiful terra australis, surrounding the South Pole, that Cook had been dispatched to find. Rather, it was New Holland, so called because Dutch ships had briefly touched its northern, western, and southern flanks in the seventeenth century.
The Endeavour was the first European ship known to have reached the continent’s two-thousand-mile eastern coast. As in New Zealand, Cook and his men were also the first visitors to describe the land and its people in detail, and to have a lasting impact. The Dutch had coasted the continent in search of fortune and fresh trade routes, but finding nothing of commercial value, they’d quickly lost interest and initiative. Apart from marking their arrival by nailing pewter plates to trees, and tormenting generations of Australian schoolchildren with hard-to-spell place names—Van Diemen’s Land, the Houtman Abrolhos, Capes Keerweer and Leeuwin—the Dutch left no real imprint on the continent.
Nor were their sketchy reports of New Holland encouraging. “We could not find one fruitful tree nor anything that could be of use to mankind,” the explorer Jan Carstensz wrote of his 1623 stop in northern Australia, which he termed “the driest, poorest area to be found in the world.” The inhabitants were worse. “Naked beach-roving wretches,” Abel Tasman called them. Most scathing of all was William Dampier, an English privateer who visited Australia’s northwest coast in 1688 and again in 1699. “The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the World,” he claimed in a best-seller about his adventures. “Their Eye-lids are always half closed, to keep the Flies out of their Eyes.”
Dampier’s popular travelogue remained so influential—no European had touched any part of the continent in the seventy years since his visit—that it was part of the Endeavour’s library, along with books on natural history and volumes by Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dryden. Joseph Banks, peering through his spyglass at his first sight of distant New Hollanders, judged them “enormously black,” but wryly added: “So far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampiers account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men.” At first glance, the landscape also looked as arid and unpromising to Banks as it had to Dampier and the Dutch. The botanist likened it to the back of a lean cow, “where her scraggy hip bones have stuck out farther than they ought.”
Deterred from landing by violent surf and contrary winds, the Endeavour coasted up Australia’s east coast for ten days before reaching a calm, wide harbor. Here, the English found timber, teeming fish, and so many unfamiliar plant species that the naturalists quickly stopped collecting so they could preserve and sketch their specimens before they spoiled. “The great quantity of New Plants &c Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander collected,” Cook wrote of the inlet, “occasioned my giving it the name of Botany Bay.”
The Endeavour stayed at the bay for nine days. Continuing north, Cook made passing mention of a nearby “Harbour wherein there apperd to be safe anchorage.” He named it Port Jackson, after the second secretary of the Admiralty, but didn’t bother to explore the harbor and sailed blithely on.
Nine years later, Britain’s Parliament began canvassing sites for a convict settlement to replace the rebellious American colonies, which had long provided a dumping ground for prisoners sentenced to “transportation.” Parliament sought a “distant part of the Globe, from whence [convicts’] Escape might be difficult,” and where they would be able to “maintain themselves…with little or no aid from the Mother Country.” Joseph Banks recommended Botany Bay, which he said enjoyed a gentle Mediterranean climate and could support “a very large Number of People.” A former midshipman on the Endeavour, James Magra (a man Cook called “good for nothing”), fancifully touted Botany Bay’s advantages as a strategic and commercial outpost. And Cook himself, by then dead, had written glowingly of Botany Bay’s “deep black Soil which we thought was capable of produceing any kind of grain.”
So, in 1787, Britain dispatched a fleet of eleven ships, transporting 736 convicts to the remote bay that the Endeavour had briefly visited seventeen years before. Arriving after an eight-month passage, the pioneers discovered that Cook and his men, for once, were unreliable reporters. The Endeavour had landed at Botany Bay in mild autumn, after what seems to have been an extremely wet season. The “First Fleet,” landing in high summer, found a broiling, parched land that “did not afford a spot large enough for a cabbage garden,” its captain wrote. Botany Bay also proved too shallow and exposed for a colonial port.
So the convict ships quickly decamped to the nearby inlet that Cook hadn’t bothered to explore, Port Jackson, which the fleet’s surgeon declared “the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe.” A settlement arose, and some 160,000 convicts eventually followed, creating the world’s largest jail and, ultimately, the only nation to span an entire continent. In time, Port Jackson would become known as Sydney Harbour, the most celebrated body of water in the southern hemisphere.
As for Cook’s Botany Bay, it would languish into an historical footnote, and a septic field for the nearby metropolis. Even a late-twentieth-century mayor of the Botany Bay district found it hard to praise his domain. “The anus of Sydney,” he called it.
The only way to understand Cook’s mistake, if you could call it that, was to view both Botany Bay and Sydney Harbour from sea. I had my first chance to do this on Australia Day, which commemorates the First Fleet’s arrival at Port Jackson on January 26, 1788. The ships’ landing launched white settlement on the continent, and therefore marked the birth of modern Australia. But few present-day Australians regard the holiday with patriotic fervor. It’s hard, first of all, to celebrate the founding of a penitentiary—except, perhaps, to appreciate the long-term irony; thanks to the First Fleet, today’s Sydneysiders occupy a semitropical paradise instead of wet, chill England.
Also, Aborigines condemn the anniversary as Invasion Day, the start of their dispossession. So while city officials stage speeches and fireworks, and Aborigines hold a protest concert, most Sydney residents head to the pub or beach to enjoy the traditional end of summer vacation.
For Roger, my travel companion in Tahiti, Australia Day heralds an annual yacht race from Sydney Harbour to Botany Bay. I asked to come along so I could see the coast from Cook’s perspective. “We’ll finish dead last,” Roger assured me, motoring his thirty-foot boat, Aquadisiac, toward a yacht club where his fellow sailors waited. “I only get the dregs as crew. Guttersnipes and barflies, mostly. Not to mention you.” He ducked below to check the weather report on the radio. “Winds north to northeast, strengthening to thirty knots, with a three-meter swell and two-meter chop,” he reported. “Sounds disgusting.”
We stopped to give a ride to a crewman from another boat, a stout man Roger introduced as Pugsy. Australians are ruthless with nick-names—and toward their national symbols. Roger and Pugsy jeered at a replica of the First Fleet as it sailed beneath the Harbour Bridge. As we passed several gray warships moored at the naval station in Woolloomooloo, Pugsy put a hand over his heart. “The Australian Navy, all three of it. Makes you proud.”
The Navy gave me an excuse to ask Pugsy the same question I’d posed to Roger months before. What came to his mind when I said “Captain Cook”?
“Cook? Did him i
n school,” Pugsy replied. “Don’t remember much. Ugly man. Face like a dropped pie.”
At the yacht club, Pugsy departed and three women climbed aboard. They introduced themselves as Karen, Susie, and Susie, though the younger of the Susies said everyone called her Spider. I assumed this referred to her long, slim legs, poking from the short shorts she wore. Then I noticed a hideous scar on her shin. “Bitten by a white-tailed spider,” she gaily explained. “You should have seen me a month ago. The bite caused necrosis, and I had an ulcer so deep you could put your thumb in it.” With that, Spider skipped ashore to pick up a “slab of VB”—a case of Victoria Bitter beer—and a dozen bacon-and-egg rolls. “The grease settles your stomach,” she said, handing me a sandwich. “You’ll need it out there.”
As we motored to the starting line, I studied the competition, mostly large yachts with sails touting corporate sponsors: Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, Bloomberg. But even the largest boats bore raffish, self-deprecating names, befitting the Australian temper: Ragamuffin, Rapscallion, Occasional Coarse Language. Roger said the yachts belonged to three racing divisions, depending on the vessels’ size: maxi, medium, and “the rabble—shitbox boats like ours.”
A gun sounded, and we quickly pulled ahead; Roger had timed the start perfectly. “We’ve got them caned!” he shouted. For all his jocular put-downs, of himself and his crew, Roger was a skilled and cutthroat competitor. It was part of the Australian sports mask—of the Australian personality, really—to never seem to care too much or try too hard.
It also became obvious that I hadn’t tagged along on a sight-seeing cruise. I quickly found myself grinding a winch and barking my shins as I tried to interpret Roger’s shouted commands. “Fire the halyard! Ease the main sheet—fast! Hike out, damn it. Hike out!” Then, as we left the harbor and hoisted the spinnaker for the long run south to Botany Bay, Roger issued an order I could understand: “Go below and put the beer on ice!”