by Michael King
With Tasman’s departure, the inhabitants of Zelandia Nova had no further recorded contact with Europeans for another 126 years, sufficient time for the Dutchmen’s visit to recede into the mythology of Ngati Tumatakokiri and to leave no impression at all on the oral traditions of other tribes. And since Ngati Tumatakokiri eventually disappeared without recording their recollections and understanding of what they saw in Taitapu in December 1642, those insights were lost to history for ever.
Nor was Tasman himself much better recalled three and a half centuries later by Pakeha New Zealanders or the descendants of his fellow countrymen, though they at least had narratives based on his journal by which to remember him. They also had, in the land he discovered for Europe, mountains, a glacier and one national park named after him. But only three of the placenames he bestowed survive on the map of modern New Zealand; and the few discreet memorials commemorating his offshore movements there appear to be in the ‘wrong’ places. Even a statue raised to his memory by the Dutch community in New Zealand in 2000 had been recycled from an earlier exhibition in Barcelona.
Like James Cook, the navigator who eventually followed him into that same corner of the south-west Pacific, Tasman was largely unprivileged and worked his way up the ranks from common sailor by virtue of what he learned at sea. Unlike Cook, however, the Dutchman was never perceived as a hero or a role model for other mariners. The best that can be said of and for him, perhaps, is the verdict of John Beaglehole, the great historian of the European exploration of the Pacific and citizen of the country Tasman discovered for the wider world.
Greatness is a relative term, and one would not wish to bestow it upon Tasman unmodified. He was not a great leader; he has left no legend. Of his character indeed we know but little … rough probably, well salted from the southern sprays, eyes set in a skin seamed with intent gazing, with a voice that had borrowed more from the tempest than from converse with the polite … probably he was respected more than loved by his subordinates. But respect he must have, the respect due to at least first-rate professional competence.
[1] The eventual conversion of the Dutch name into English should have been ‘New Sealand’. The spelling incorrectly adopted misled some commentators into supposing an historical connection with Denmark, whose principal island has also assumed the form Zealand in English. In 1990 a Maori activist, Titewhai Harawira, went to the Netherlands to ask the Dutch authorities to reclaim the name New Zealand in order to facilitate the country’s reversion to a Maori name. She was unsuccessful. In any case, there was no unanimity among Maori as to what that name should be.
Chapter 8
The Arrival of Europe
Like a meteorite which appears, flares and disappears, Abel Tasman’s short encounter with New Zealand and its inhabitants in the summer of 1642–43 left no lasting imprint. For the Maori of Golden Bay and the Three Kings Islands, Tasman’s ships and men constituted a brief exotic vision of unrecognisable people and incomprehensible technologies that were, literally, visible one day and gone the next.
More than 126 years later, however, there was an umbilically linked sequel. In Tahiti in July 1769, Lieutenant James Cook of the British Royal Navy completed his observation of the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. He then opened secret Admiralty instructions to sail south until he either discovered Terra Australis Incognita or else ‘fall in with the Eastern side of the Land discover’d by Tasman and now called New Zeland’. Cook carried out these instructions. And his rediscovery of New Zealand was an encounter of a very different order from Tasman’s.
In a six-month-long circumnavigation of the country in the barque Endeavour, a converted North Sea collier, James Cook met with Maori on dozens of occasions, on board ship and in their settlements ashore. He even sailed 20 km up the Waihou River at the head of the Hauraki Gulf and into the interior of the country. Thanks to the presence of the Tahitian ariki Tupaia, who had boarded the Endeavour at Raiatea and learned sufficient English to communicate with the ship’s master and crew, Cook was also able to communicate with the New Zealanders and thus allow a transfer of information in both directions across the same cultural divide that Tasman, with disastrous consequences, had been unable to bridge. As Anne Salmond has noted, ‘not only did the Europeans have extensive opportunities to observe Maori life in different parts of the country, Maori people of various tribes had the first opportunity to examine Europeans at close quarters – to trade with them, to fight with them, to become infected with European diseases and to work out strategies for dealing with [them]’.
The first New Zealanders compelled to devise such strategies were Rongowhakaata people of the East Coast of the North Island. Some of them, when they saw the Endeavour in Poverty Bay on 8 October 1769, believed it to be a floating island; others suspected it was a giant bird. Both phenomena, floating islands and birds, featured in their mythology and such identifications fitted what they saw into the cosmography with which they were familiar. Like the Ngati Tumatakokiri people of Golden Bay, however, Poverty Bay Maori paid a price for confronting the unknown visitors. When a Maori party approached the Endeavour’s pinnace ashore on the bank of the Turanganui River and ceremonially challenged the crew, a sailor judged their intention to be hostile and shot one man dead. The following day another local was killed for snatching a sword from an Englishman and brandishing it menacingly.
Cook, son of a humble farm labourer and a plain Yorkshireman of modest learning but considerable humanity, regretted these casualties, neither of which he had ordered. He was carrying instructions from the Earl of Morton, President of the Royal Society, which had described native populations of the places he might visit as ‘human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European … No European nation has the right to occupy any part of their country … without their voluntary consent.’ After only a fortnight off the New Zealand coast, Cook’s naturalist Joseph Banks noted that a canoe-load of potential aggressors had dropped astern after the Englishmen had fired over their heads: ‘not I believe at all frightened,’ Banks said, ‘but content with having shewd their courage by twice insulting us. We now begin to know these people and are much less afraid …’ Unlike Tasman, Banks and Cook recognised that bravado was an inherent element in Maori competitiveness and capacity for survival. After such exchanges, assured of both their own courage and their own safety, New Zealanders were often willing to accept offers of friendship and to settle down to bartering, a process close to the Maori custom of reciprocity and recognised in most parts of the country that the Englishmen visited.
Cook’s circumnavigation and mapping of New Zealand – ‘precise, comprehensive and consistent’, in the later words of one Cook scholar – represented an expert feat of seamanship and cartography. He determined the proportions and shape of the country with considerable accuracy, mistaking only Banks Peninsula for an island and Stewart Island for a possible peninsula. In this manner, alongside his immediately subsequent mapping of the east coast of Australia, Cook largely disposed of the myth of Terra Australis Incognita and established that Tasman’s single line of cartographic scrawl was in fact an indication of the two principal islands of New Zealand. He recognised the relationship of Maori culture to that of the Tahitians, and deduced rightly that the two peoples must share a source of origin.
With Banks and the ship’s artists, Cook began the process of documenting the language and material culture of Maori in the eighteenth century. The corpus of knowledge which he and his men assembled on all his visits to New Zealand would be a boon to scientists, historians and anthropologists for the next 200 years. Cook’s sober but positive reports on the resources of the country, especially its timber and flax, its seals in the south-west and the quantity of whales in the surrounding seas, led directly to a quickening of British interest in New Zealand and to the establishment of extractive industries there in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the course
of his three voyages and four visits to the country (two in 1773–74), Cook spent a total of 328 days off or on the coast of New Zealand. For Maori, the consequences were far-reaching, although they did not immediately change the cultural pattern or the quality of day-to-day Maori life. The bartering introduced Maori to metals, especially in the form of nails, which were immediately sought after for their efficacy and long life in the form of chisels, gouges and fishhooks. Sexual encounters brought the unpleasant phenomenon of venereal disease to communities where Cook’s crews stayed for longer periods, particularly in Queen Charlotte Sound. The Englishmen left vegetables, especially potatoes and turnips, which would become major items in the Maori diet and economy (just 20 years after Cook’s visit to the Hauraki district, English ships’ crews found an abundance of potato cultivations from Tapu south to Hikutaia). They introduced Maori to European fire-power in the form of cannons and muskets, though Cook did not leave firearms in the country. And, thanks to the presence of Society Islands Polynesians – Tupaia on the first voyage, Hitihiti on the second and Mai (or Omai, as he was called) on the third – Cook’s visits communicated to Maori the fact that a world wider than their own existed over the horizon, and that it was made up of other Polynesians as well as races, cultures and technologies that differed from their own.
Cook’s relations with Maori were, on the whole, as cordial and mutually respectful as he could make them. On the first two voyages, in particular, he had been determined to act as an ‘enlightened’ leader. There were misunderstandings, and there were further shootings; and in 1773 ten crew members of the Adventure, the vessel accompanying Cook’s ship Resolution, were killed and eaten at Grass Cove on Arapawa Island in Queen Charlotte Sound. When Cook learned of the episode and returned to the Sound on his third voyage, he did not respond punitively, believing that the cannibalised men may themselves have acted provocatively. He was told by Maori who took part in the killing that one of the sailors concerned had taken an adze from a would-be barterer, but offered nothing in return. The owner of the adze had then seized some food from the sailor, who retaliated. Thus was generated what became a mortal fight. It was typical of Cook that he took the trouble to find out what actually happened and, when he had done so, to act with restraint. Moreover, for the most part, he acted with moderation and with common sense in the course of all four visits to New Zealand. But he failed to do so in Hawai‘i in 1779 in the circumstances that led to his death in Kealakekua Bay.
Cook was also responsible for transporting Maori, for the first time in probably 400 years, from New Zealand back to Island Polynesia. Te Weherua was a genial young man who attached himself to the navigator in Queen Charlotte Sound during Cook’s final expedition. He insisted that he wanted to travel to Huahine with Omai, the Society Islander whom Tobias Furneaux had taken to London in 1774 and whom Cook was taking home again in 1777. After much pleading Cook agreed to the proposition, and Te Weherua and an even younger relation, Koa, travelled on the Resolution to the Cook Islands, Tonga, and eventually to the Society group. There, according to William Bligh, the two New Zealanders remained with Omai until about 1780, when their protector died. They too then died, apparently from grief. It would be another two decades – into the sealing and whaling era – before any Maori had opportunities to make comparable voyages.
In the twentieth century, some Maori, Polynesians and others would succumb to the ‘fatal impact’ view of history, which held that all European contact with Polynesians in the eighteenth century had been an almost unmitigated disaster for the peoples of the Pacific. According to this perspective, Cook was an icon of imperial history who carried with him the ideas that would eventually subvert those of indigenous cultures and colonise them, the technologies that would make indigenous tools and weapons redundant, and, even more disastrously, the pathogens that would eventually kill hundreds of thousands of people who had no immunity to them. ‘His voyages epitomise the European conquest of nature, fixing the location of coastlines by the use of instruments and mathematical calculation, classifying and collecting plants, animals, insects and people.’
Most Maori who came into contact with Cook during his visits, however, particularly in Mercury Bay, the Bay of Islands and Queen Charlotte Sound, appeared to respect and admire him. While he was not given the ceremonial status of ariki in New Zealand, as he was in Tahiti and Hawai‘i, Maori none the less recognised in him qualities that they regarded as rangatira or aristocratic. One and a half centuries after his voyages to New Zealand, the great Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) would speak of him to another Maori leader as ‘to tatau tipuna, ko Kapene Kuki’ (our ancestor, Captain Cook). Horeta Te Taniwha of Ngati Whanaunga, who was a small boy when the Endeavour was in Mercury Bay in November 1769, reportedly told Lieutenant-Governor Robert Henry Wynyard in 1852:
There was one supreme man in that ship. We knew that he was the lord of the whole by his perfect gentlemanly and noble demeanour. He seldom spoke, but some of the [crew] spoke much. But this man did not utter many words: all that he did was to handle our mats and hold our mere, spears, and wahaika, and touch the hair of our heads. He was a very good man, and came to us – the children – and patted our cheeks, and gently touched our heads.
Cook’s view of Maori, in turn, was that they were ‘of a Brave, Noble, Open and benevolent disposition …’ Like his crew, Anne Salmond notes, Cook was affected by his encounters with Maori, ‘surprised [by their] sexuality, infuriated by their attitudes to property, and shocked by … cannibalism’. But he was never in any doubt that they, like the Europeans they confronted, befriended and even wept over, were fully human – on each side there was ‘savagery and kindness, generosity and greed, intelligent curiosity and stupidity’.
Unlike Tasman, Cook became and remained a hero in both the land of his birth and in at least two of the countries whose coasts he had charted, Australia and New Zealand. In the latter, more of his placenames were retained than those of any other European navigator or surveyor, and to those would be added the attachment of his own name to the country’s highest peak (known to Maori as Aoraki), to the strait separating the North Island from the South, and to hundreds of other minor geographical features, communities, suburbs, streets, schools and hotels. Banknotes and consumer products too would bear his likeness.
All this was in part a recognition of his exceptional seamanship and cartographical skills (his charts remained in use well into the nineteenth century and in some instances into the twentieth), and of the fact that the scope of his voyages – from Europe to New Zealand and back, from Antarctic to Arctic, literally ‘farther than any man has been before me’ – were as worthy of marvel and celebration as the travels of Odysseus or the journeys of Polynesian star navigators. But even more, perhaps, the gestures of naming were an acknowledgement of the honest and humane way that Cook had, on the whole, dealt with indigenous peoples, and of his essential humanity. Posterity would also value the fact that he was a plain man, systematic and thorough, a ‘genius of the matter of fact’. The greatest compliment his biographer John Beaglehole could pay him was that Cook ‘saw and [by his own lights] reported truly’, an understatement that would have been characteristic and worthy of the man himself.
One unexpected theme to emerge from New Zealand history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the close proximity of French colonial initiatives in the South Pacific to those of the British. In 1769, Cook’s first expedition was followed closely by that of a French explorer. Jean de Surville sighted the North Island only two months after Cook’s men and passed within 80 km of the Endeavour in the course of a storm and poor visibility off the country’s north-east coast. De Surville remained two weeks in Doubtless Bay, where he was welcomed by local Maori, who were almost certainly better prepared for the visit by what they knew of Cook’s recent contact with neighbouring people in the Bay of Islands. After his chaplain, a Dominican Catholic named Paul-Antoine Léonard de Villefeix, had conducted the first Christian servi
ce in New Zealand waters on Christmas Day 1769, de Surville left the country and took with him a Te Patupo chief named Ranginui, in retaliation for a Maori theft. Ranginui’s death from scurvy off the coast of South America almost three months later prevented his becoming the first New Zealand Maori to visit a country other than his own and, possibly, becoming the first of his people to convert to Christianity.
The next European navigator to visit New Zealand, Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, was also French and brought two vessels around the Northland coast in April 1772. He put men ashore at Spirit’s Bay and Tom Bowling Bay, and then proceeded to the Bay of Islands, where he and 26 of his crew were killed by Maori in June, apparently as a result of breaching tapu. In retaliation, and in the process of repelling further attacks, the surviving crew members levelled a village and killed between 200 and 300 local Maori. Julien Crozet, who led the punitive expedition, was moved to comment that ‘there is amongst all the animals of creation none more ferocious and dangerous for human beings than the primitive and savage man …’ This outcome, like the burning of the vessel Boyd in Whangaroa Harbour in 1809 in retaliation for the mistreatment of a Maori crew member, emphasised the considerable potential for cross-cultural misunderstanding between Maori and European, and that the violent consequences of such misunderstanding could be catastrophic for both parties (as many as 70 Europeans may have been killed in the Boyd incident).