The European fixation with the Great Southern Continent was spawned by the ancient Greeks. The obscenely gifted polymath Aristotle, who dabbled in everything from physics to poetry and ethics to biology, proposed in his Meteorologica that without a large landmass on the opposite side of the globe to counterbalance the lands in the northern hemisphere, the world would fly off kilter as it spun on its axis. After the geographer and mathematician Ptolemy picked up Aristotle’s theory in the second century AD and his work was rediscovered during the Renaissance, the concept of Terra Australis Incognita, or the ‘Unknown Southern Land’, became a cornerstone of Western thinking. And because human beings are naturally inclined to believe that every lost continent hides unimaginable riches, as Europe stretched its colonial tentacles across the globe, the race was on to find it.
In its earliest imaginary form, the southern continent occupied about a quarter of the planet. Because Europeans had yet to find their way around the tip of Africa, and the Americas were still unknown to them, the proposed continent was depicted as joined to Asia by a land bridge. According to this model, the oceans were actually giant lakes encircled by land. At the time, the sea best known to the Europeans was the Mediterranean, a largely enclosed body of water. To them, it would have been inconceivable that the surface of the planet was covered by far more water than land.
All it took to make this conceivable was Columbus’s landing in the Americas in 1498 and Magellan’s passage into the Pacific in 1520. But the terraqueous world the new voyages of exploration gave Europe didn’t put paid to the concept of the Great Southern Continent. In his 1569 map of the world, Gerard Mercator included a vast continent spreading from the fiftieth line of latitude south of the equator with two peninsulas, each the size of southern Africa, reaching north beyond the Tropic of Capricorn towards Java and New Guinea. When the Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius put his mind to creating the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in 1570, which was the first complete atlas of the world – well, as ‘complete’ as it could be at the time – he depicted the Great Southern Continent as extending around the world and covering a greater area than North and South America combined.
Mercator and Ortelius were the leading lights of the great school of Dutch cartography that emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It’s no accident that this coincided with the expansion of Dutch commercial and colonial ambitions. Without maps to show the way, the ambitious Dutch plans to spread their interests across the globe would have been very short-lived. The information on these maps was valuable beyond measure even where, as was the case of the posited Great Southern Continent, it was somewhat less than accurate. Better a fair guess than nothing at all. Dutch cartography would shape the future of the planet – on paper and on the ground. Even before they launched their expansion into South-East Asia and the Pacific, they positioned themselves firmly in the pro–Great Southern Continent camp. Whether or not it was just wishful thinking, if the missing continent appeared across the waves it would provide them with a raft of new territories to occupy and exploit.
The French had no intention of being left out of the race as they watched the Portuguese and Spanish, and then the Dutch, spread their sails and race across the water towards unimaginable wealth – because what else would a lost continent contain if not lashings of gold, silver and precious gemstones? In 1582, the French politician Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière wrote Les Trois Mondes, an influential history recounting the exploration of the world. In it, he argued that French interests would best be served by their sailors setting out to find and settle the vast southern continent, as yet unknown to European interests. ‘Terre Australe could only benefit France,’ he said. And of course, it ‘is impossible that there would not be marvellous things and delights, riches and other benefits of life there’.
By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had quite a head start on the French. They were already well established in Indonesia – or the Dutch East Indies, as they were then known – where the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, had the sole Dutch rights over the lucrative spice trade. One of the largest shareholders in the VOC was Isaac Le Maire who, after a falling out with the company, founded the Austraalse Compagnie with the express intent of discovering the Great Southern Continent and breaking the VOC’s stranglehold on trade in the region. The company’s founding principle was that it was inconceivable that God would be anything but even-handed in His distribution of natural resources and mineral wealth between the northern and southern hemispheres, and therefore unimaginable wealth awaited those who were fortunate enough to take control of the undiscovered lands in the south. Le Maire and his son, Jacob, set sail with two ships captained by Willem Schouten in 1615. As Cook was to discover on his second voyage, they played an important role in the early European exploration of the Pacific. But a Great Southern Continent they did not find.
After this, many reports found their way to the Dutch about a large, mysterious continent to the south-east of Java. They already knew about the western and northern Australian coastlines, thanks to the many VOC near misses along its dangerous shore. But they didn’t know how far south the landmass extended and whether or not it was connected to the long sought-after southern continent, a place many in the VOC believed must be at least as large as the known world, and where – you guessed it – gold and silver would abound.
In 1642 the VOC appointed the seafarer and merchant Abel Tasman to test that theory. Tasman sailed west from Batavia to Mauritius, then travelled south. Once he got to the fortieth latitude, he hitched a ride on the Roaring Forties – the prevailing winds that tear around the globe at that bearing and only pause their relentless circumnavigation when they meet the southern tip of South America, the island of Tasmania and New Zealand. Tasman carved a path across the Indian Ocean to the south of Australia until he met up with the tiny island that would later bear his name. But at the time, he named it Van Diemen’s Land for Anthony van Diemen, the Governor of the Dutch East Indies. He then turned east and in 1642 became the first European to sight New Zealand, a place he confidently declared was the ‘mainland coast of the unknown southern continent’. He named it ‘Staten Landt’. He used nothing other than fairly wild conjecture to reach the conclusion that it must be connected to the land south of Tierra del Fuego that was first described by Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten when they passed Cape Horn in 1615, and also named by them ‘Staten Landt’. According to Tasman’s reasoning, a massive coastline linked New Zealand to a land just south of the southernmost tip of South America. If it had existed, it certainly would have been a continent that would warrant the name ‘Great’.
This is where Tasman’s story intersects with Cook’s. Tasman returned to Batavia in June 1643, having sailed around the Australian continent – though as we’ll see, he didn’t sight the eastern coastline. By doing so, he proved that the landmass had nothing to do with the much-vaunted Great Southern Continent, which theoretical geographers asserted must be a far larger body of land than the relatively small continent that was then known as New Holland. But there were those who held out hope that as Tasman had proposed, New Zealand was going to deliver the goods. That’s why, after leaving the Society Islands on 9 August 1769, Cook turned the Endeavour south-west towards the fortieth parallel, the same latitude Tasman was travelling along when he bumped into New Zealand. He was carrying with him instructions from the Admiralty marked ‘Secret’ that left him in no doubt that he was expected to continue the search for the elusive land so many believed lay in southern latitudes:
Secret. . . . there is reason to imagine that a continent or land of great extent, may be found to the southward of the tract lately made by Captain Wallis in his Majesty’s ship the Dolphin … you are therefore . . . required and directed to put to sea with the bark you command . . . to pursue to the southward in order to make discovery of the continent abovementioned . . . If you discover the continent abovementioned either in your run to the southward or to the westward as above di
rected, you are to employ yourself diligently in exploring as great an extent of the coast as you can.
Tupaia, who had already demonstrated his encyclopaedic knowledge of Polynesian geography, knew Cook was barking up the wrong tree and told him so. He’d find no great continent in the south – only open water. But Cook was a man of science. He believed in things he could measure, and things that could be learnt in books. The accumulated knowledge and ancient oral traditions that informed Tupaia’s worldview just didn’t cut it for Cook. So he sailed on into some of the most appalling seas on the planet.
SYDNEY PARKINSON (1745–1771), Scottish Botanical and Natural History Illustrator on Cook’s first voyage
The sea ran mountain-high and tossed the ship upon the waves. She rolled so much, that we could get no rest, or scarcely lie in bed, and almost every moveable on board was thrown down, and rolled about from place to place.
For many of the fifty-nine days that followed, the Endeavour was smashed by unrelenting storms driven by the same prevailing winds – the Roaring Forties – that had carried Tasman across the Southern Ocean. Even the usually loquacious Joseph Banks was lost for words. All he could bring himself to write in his journal was: ‘Myself sick all day.’ As anyone who has ever experienced a brutal sea voyage can attest, that’s all that needed to be said.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon of 6 October 1769. The men on board heard a cry from the starboard bow. Land ho!
And not a moment too soon. After a voyage covering more than six thousand kilometres, the communal sigh of relief on board must have been quite something. The men were so desperate for a break from the unrelentingly brutal weather that Cook had offered a generous reward to whoever was first to sight land – so it was that the surgeon’s boy had a headland named for him. Young Nick’s actual head would be feeling a little the worse for wear as the voyage progressed, given his other reward: an imperial gallon – four and a half litres – of 94 per cent proof rum. For a twelve year old.
Once land was sighted, much feverish speculation ensued.
Could this actually be the fabled Great Southern Continent? Cook was sceptical. Not that this would stop him from proving the land’s identity beyond doubt, one way or another. He wasn’t going to leave anything to chance, even if he had a sneaking suspicion that Tupaia was closer to the truth than many of those on board who thought they had, at last, found the lost lands. The strongest supporter of the continental cause was the eternally optimistic Joseph Banks.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS (1743–1820), 1st Baronet, Naturalist and Botanist on Cook’s first voyage
We were now on board of two parties, one who wished that the land in sight might, the other that it might not be a continent: myself have always been most firm for the former.
Whether or not they were part of a southern continent was of little import to the Māori who had arrived on these islands at least five hundred years before the Endeavour sailed into their waters. To them, New Zealand was, and is, Aotearoa. The Land of the Long White Cloud. To state the bleeding obvious, most of the places Cook rushed about assiduously naming from one side of the Pacific to the other already had well-established names given to them by their indigenous inhabitants.
SAM NEILL: Let’s talk about naming for a minute. It’s occurred to me that every act of possession is also an act of dispossession, and that every time someone like Cook names something that already has a name, he’s disempowering the name that was there before.
KIHI HOWE-RIRINUI, Ngāpuhi ki Tauranga Moana Tribe, Tour Guide: You’ll never see Māori names in his country. So why have we got his names in our country?
To the Māori, the newly christened Young Nick’s Head was Te Kuri-a-Paoa.
New Zealand would become Cook’s favourite anchorage in the Pacific. Over the course of his three voyages, he would visit six times. In years to come, he would write in typically restrained prose of his pleasure at returning to the southern islands. But this was his first visit and he didn’t know what to expect.
NICK TUPARA, Ngāti Oneone Tribe, Descendant of Te Maro
I don’t feel that Cook felt any anxiety at all. The British have conquered half the planet already as an empire, and this is perhaps the last bit left. England had been doing this sort of stuff for a very, very long time. I think this land was a brand-new land with new resources, and they found some natives on it. They needed to just go and sort it out. And that was their mission.
The sight of columns of smoke on the shore confirmed to Cook what he already knew – that this land was populated. And what he had learnt of the locals would not have filled him with optimism.
Popular legend held that the remote regions of the Antipodes were populated by fabulous hybrid beings. Dog-faced men. Men without noses. Men without tongues. Others whose heads had sunk so low beneath shoulder level they had been absorbed into their chests. And the skiapodes, who were creatures with a single foot so large they used it as a sunshade to protect themselves from the scorching heat of these desolate lands. Cook, of course, knew enough to disregard such wild tales. He was less concerned about having to fight off a tribe of men with unfeasibly large feet than he was about meeting the locals whom he knew, from Tasman’s experience, were ferocious warriors.
What Cook couldn’t know was that the smoke on shore came from signal fires summoning those warriors to repel the new arrivals. He could only guess at what might happen next. But one thing was certain: this would be nothing like the idyllic tropical islands they had just left behind. When the Endeavour arrived on Tahiti, Wallis and Bougainville had already laid the foundations for his arrival. But in New Zealand, things were totally different. For one thing, the locals had only had one European visitor, and that was over a century before. It was brief, and it didn’t end well. One Māori warrior was felled and four Dutchmen were killed. Tasman’s assessment of the place was summed up rather bluntly in the name he gave the inlet: ‘Murderers Bay’.
The tragic outcome of Tasman’s encounter with the Māori came despite the fact he had been issued with very clear instructions about how to negotiate relationships with indigenous people encountered on his voyage. These instructions were, given the otherwise brutal times in which they were written, surprisingly humane – notwithstanding the liberal use of the world ‘barbarian’:
[E]xtreme caution will everywhere have to be used . . . the southern regions are peopled with fierce savages . . . barbarian men are no wise to be trusted because they commonly think that the foreigners who so unexpectedly appear before them, have come only to seize their land . . . you will treat with amity and kindness such barbarian men as you shall meet and come to parley with, and connive at small affronts, thefts and the like . . . lest punishments inflicted should give them a grudge against us . . . You will prudently prevent all manner of insolence and all arbitrary action on the part of our men against the nations discovered, and take good care that no injury be done to them in their houses, gardens, vessels, or their property, their wives etc.
Most noteworthy is the observation that ‘barbarian men . . . commonly think that the foreigners who so unexpectedly appear before them, have come only to seize their land’. Goodness knows how they might have got that impression.
Cook also carried with him a list of best possible intentions issued by the Royal Society. In a document drafted in impeccable eighteenth-century copperplate, James Douglas, the fourteenth Earl of Morton and President of the Society, put forth ‘hints offered to the consideration of Captain Cook, Mr Banks, Doctor Solander and the other gentlemen who go upon the expedition on board the Endeavour’. It was the consummate Enlightenment-era document:
To exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the natives . . . To check the petulance of the sailors, and restrain the wanton use of firearms . . . [S] hedding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature. They are human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished Europeans . . . Should they in a hostile
manner oppose a landing, and kill some men in the attempt, even this would hardly justify firing among them, till every other gentle method has been tried . . . They [the indigenous inhabitants] are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several regions they inhabit . . . No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent.
There’s no reason to doubt that the Earl was sincere when he penned the most heartfelt passages. With what was about to happen as the Endeavour approached shore, it was a statement that would come back to haunt Cook.
At the Tūranganui River on the eastern coast of New Zealand’s North Island, the Māori watched the approach of the curious vessel.
NICK TUPARA
A visionary three years before Cook’s arrival foretold that Cook would come. He said that a white person would arrive here, and that person would bring one god with him, and that god would be the god of the dead son.
When they first saw the Endeavour, the Māori were astonished. Some thought it was a floating island, its sails the clouds billowing above it. Others imagined it to be Ruakapanga, the mythical bird from Havaiki; the smaller boat they saw lowered into the water beside it a fledgling that bore multi-coloured beings in human form. And some saw the red and white strangers arriving from the spirit world as the fulfilment of a prophecy.
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