With so many seamen flooding Aotearoa’s shores, there was feverish demand for female companionship, so prostitution became another means by which the Māori could acquire guns and ammunition.
EDWARD MARKHAM, 1801–1865, Nineteenth-century English Writer and Traveller
Thirty to forty ships would come in for three weeks to the bay and four hundred to five hundred sailors require as many women, and they have been out [at sea] one year . . . These young ladies go off to the ships, and three weeks on board are spent much to their satisfaction as they get from the sailors a fowling piece . . . blankets, gowns.
It didn’t make for the most salubrious of settings. One visitor to Russell didn’t mince words. To him, the town was ‘Gomorrah, the scourge of the Pacific, which should be struck down by the ravages of disease for its depravity’.
Given the enthusiasm with which marine mammals were pursued and slaughtered in New Zealand waters, it’s not surprising to learn that within fifty years the industry became unviable. Before that happened, though, the chaos unleashed on the Bay of Islands and general lawlessness inflicted on the local residents had an unexpected consequence.
Fed up with the general nastiness that had become the norm in the Bay of Islands, a group of settlers and Māori prevailed upon the British government to enforce some law and order.
EMERITUS PROFESSOR NGAHUIA TE AWEKOTUKU
Colonisation has been blamed for the doom of so many indigenous peoples. I certainly would never defend what happened to us. But I also like to remind people that what took place here were conversations of encounter. People were reaching out to each other and trying to be friends. OK, there was conflict, fear and hostility. That’s human. But in the context of the colonisation of Aotearoa – New Zealand – what makes us different is that we did have a treaty. It wasn’t until after that we saw the horrors of what uncontrolled migration can bring with it. In 1840 at the time of the Treaty there were about three thousand Pākehā – non-Māori – in New Zealand, but by 1890 there were seven hundred thousand. For me, although Māori had agency until 1840, in a very subtle and sinister way that agency was being worn down. And that is when colonisation occurred. It’s important to remember though that in those periods of first encounter we were friends and we were equals, and the Māori set the terms.
Just across the bay in the settlement of Waitangi, the British consul took heed of the local residents’ appeal and drew up a document. It is now known as the Treaty of Waitangi and regarded as New Zealand’s foundational document.
KINGI TAURUA, Ngāpuhi Tribe, Elder
I don’t think we need a Treaty for our relationship. We worked together, we swore in Māori, we swore in Pākehā, in our own languages . . . that’s what we used to do here. We took one another into consideration. The British – the Pākehā – came here and they sweated for this country. We all sweated for this country. That relationship has always been there.
At the time, the Treaty seemed simple enough. There were just three clauses written in both English and Māori. The English version was fairly straightforward; it ceded sovereignty to the British Crown, stating that Queen Victoria had ‘all the rights and powers of sovereignty’ over Māori land. But as is so often the case, the devil was in the detail. The Māori conceded te kāwanatanga katoa (complete ‘government’) over their land. But as there was no real translation for ‘sovereignty’ in Te Reo (the Māori language) the signatories, including Te Hōreta – now grown to adulthood – thought they had signed up for a cooperative partnership involving power sharing.
TINA NGATA, Ngāti Porou Tribe
The records of the time show there was great debate over the Treaty, right up to the signing. Many were against it. But others felt that this was the best way to move ahead as they knew that the tide wasn’t able to be stemmed so it was best to work out an agreement to try and manage it. It is an interesting thing because we didn’t write it, but it’s often seen as a Māori issue. So one of the eternal struggles for us is to bring our Treaty partners to the table and honour it as their issue as well as ours.
They never intended to hand over authority to a foreign governor. And yet that’s exactly what happened when they signed the document on 6 February 1840.
In a testament to how things have changed, amongst the post-European settlement initiatives conceived to address wrongs inflicted upon Māori people is a concerted effort to repatriate the toi moko that were sent out of the country in the nineteenth century. Between 1820 and 1831, many hundreds of preserved heads were taken away from their ancestral home; over five hundred are still thought to remain outside New Zealand. The Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, has been leading the campaign to repatriate Māori ancestral remains. Some – but, unbelievably, not all – international collecting institutions that hold Māori remains have agreed to repatriate them and send them home.
SAM NEILL
I have begun to understand why Cook’s blamed for so much stuff. He was a precursor of so many things that turned out to be just horrible for those who were already here.
To date over four hundred ancestors have been returned to Aotearoa. Thankfully, the tattoos mean that some of the individuals’ remains can be identified and returned to their families. But given the passage of time, most cannot.
For those remains, a resting place is reserved at Te Papa. It remains a sacred place for New Zealand’s First Nation people; an important site for reverence and remembrance.
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As Cook progressed around New Zealand, he had no way of knowing what his work would mean for its Māori occupants.
TINA NGATA
If there’s one thing that I want people to take away from this, it is that this is not a historical event to us. This is something that is still happening to us – every day.
One thing still preoccupied Cook. Was New Zealand, or was it not, part of the Great Southern Continent? He knew there was only one way to find out for certain; sail right around it.
Using Tupaia as an intermediary, Cook had pursued the question with Māori elders who assured him that New Zealand comprised just three islands. Cook was intrigued by their geographic knowledge, but struggled to process Māori conflation of the physical and spiritual worlds. Te Hōreta described one of these encounters. As the Māori elders spoke of Cape Reinga at the northernmost tip of New Zealand’s North Island, Cook suspected they might be describing the Cape Maria van Diemen charted by Abel Tasman.
TE HŌRETA
This lord of these goblins . . . took some charcoal and made marks on the deck of the ship, and pointed to the shore . . . One of our aged men said . . . ‘He is asking for an outline of this land’; and that old man stood up, took the charcoal, and marked the outline of Te Ika-a-Māui.
But the elders also explained the Cape’s significance to the Māori people. Its name means ‘the leaping-off place of spirits’, and it was where Māori spirits plunged into the Pacific and migrated back to their ancestral home of Havaiki.
Cook was just searching for Tasman’s Cape. As far as he was concerned, the Māori gave him spiritual mumbo jumbo; for someone who saw himself as a rational man of science, their explanation was meaningless. He probably nodded politely, smiled and shut them down – there was no bridge wide enough to cross that cultural chasm.
Although Cook was determined to see the northernmost point on Tasman’s map, the weather was anything but cooperative. A series of brutal gales blew him out further into the ocean, and he sailed back and forth across the tip of the North Island without sighting Cape Reinga. At last, he had a lucky break and spotted it, marking it on his chart.
In a moment of serendipity, Cook was completely unaware that while he was tacking to and fro through the storm, the French navigator Jean-François-Marie de Surville passed by in the opposite direction. It was a literal crossing of ships in the night. This was the European story of the Pacific in a nutshell. These were contested waters. The original occupants of these lands were, as yet, unaware of the fate that com
peting European powers had in mind for them.
TINA NGATA
We had relationships that crisscrossed the Pacific basin. It was like a highway for us until it was cut up by explorers who claimed this area. Then there were borders that were set up and exclusive economic zones that ended our relationships with each other. It’s like having your own family forcibly estranged from you and then, years later, hearing that they had been abused as well.
That was yet to come. Cook’s search for the Great Southern Continent – his charting of these Pacific islands – was, for want of a better term, a land grab. He was here for Mother England and planned to claim as much of what he found for her as he could. He certainly wasn’t planning to lose ground to a Frenchman.
Having successfully circumnavigated the North Island of New Zealand, Cook headed south again. He was sceptical about the existence of the fabled Great Southern Continent. But in this he was at odds with Joseph Banks and most of the other learned gentlemen on board, who had arrived in New Zealand unwavering in their belief that here they would find it.
On 10 March 1770, the question was laid to rest. The Endeavour rounded South Cape and found nothing more than an expanse of ocean to the south. New Zealand was not and would never be part of a Great Southern Continent. Banks was bereft, realising this meant ‘the total demolition of our aerial fabric called continent’. The ‘no-continents’ celebrated by killing and roasting a dog – which had become quite the thing after their time in Tahiti. Tasted like lamb, by all reports. Banks might well have been nursing his dented pride, but he surely lined up for a slice of the roast.
Returning to Marlborough Sounds, Cook had travelled over 4000 kilometres, or 2500 miles, in just over six and a half months. Doing his calculations and measurements on board a listing ship’s deck, he produced a chart of New Zealand that is still frequently held up as his most astounding cartographic achievement.
That was all well and good. But Cook wasn’t done yet.
His instructions were to return home directly, either via Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope. But the Endeavour was no longer holding up to the rigours of open ocean travel. Knowing the ship would face a hammering if he followed the Admiralty’s instructions, he had something else in mind. And it would allow him to pop another feather into his navigational cap.
By Cook’s reckoning, the safest route back to England was via the port of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. It was relatively close in proximity, and he knew he’d be able to find the materials in Batavia he required to repair the Endeavour before returning home across the Indian and Atlantic oceans. But there was one other thing that drew him eastwards. Something big.
Since 1606, navigators – most of them Dutch – had been charting the northern, western and southern coastlines of the continent known in the eighteenth century as New Holland. But the entire eastern shoreline was still a blank. When it was filled in on maps of the time, it was a malformed shape based on ill-informed conjecture and supposition. For someone who liked more than anything to fill in blank spaces on charts, it was too big a temptation to ignore.
JOHN ROBSON, Map Librarian, University of Waikato
Cook’s raison d’etre was chart making, and I think that really was his supreme skill. He saw it as his role, when he travelled, that he should make a chart of wherever he went so that it would be something future sailors could use.
Cook proposed an audacious plan to his officers: they would cross the Tasman and explore the eastern coast of the continent we now know as Australia.
On the last day of March 1770, this man – notable for endowing places with the most prosaic of names – called the last piece of land he saw in New Zealand ‘Cape Farewell’. It was a strangely sentimental gesture from a stoic man.
EMERITUS PROFESSOR NGAHUIA TE AWEKOTUKU
James Cook? He’s someone to whom we owe a great deal, and from whom we must demand a great deal. He was remarkably greedy, adventurous, and an extraordinary human. I can’t hear myself completely agreeing with cousins from the other parts of our ocean when they say on hearing that name: venereal disease, despair, colonisation. Upheaval and catastrophe came with the Endeavour. But so, too, came some really good things. Not just economic and cultural change, but also the opportunity to extend, to explore and to understand.
Cook also seems to be telling us something else. As he was farewelling a land he had grown to love, he was anticipating and, perhaps, dreading what lay beyond.
KINGI TAURUA
I think Cook explored the world and we learnt a lot from him. It was all information, and I think we need to understand and learn about those things. Māori need to know. People like James Cook and Abel Tasman – I think that we understand that they have contributed to our culture.
The unknown coastline and its people would not disappoint him. As for the Aboriginal people of Australia, after Cook’s arrival, their lives – like those of the Polynesians – would never be the same again.
SAM NEILL
I do really think of myself as a Pacific person. I was brought up in New Zealand. My family has been there for one hundred and fifty years. My grandchildren, who have Māori heritage, can trace their connections to the Pacific back thousands of years. But finding a way to understand my own relationship to this extraordinary place has been a challenge for me.
PART THREE
SEVEN
WELCOME TO COUNTRY
It behoves all of us to live in context with what’s going on around us . . . to understand that context in a historical sense and to understand where we live and understand the people we live with.
SAM NEILL
Recent evidence from the Madjedbebe rock shelter near Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory shows that Indigenous Australians found their way south via Asia at least sixty thousand years ago. When Aboriginal people say they’ve lived in Australia forever, they’re not kidding. It makes the two hundred years plus change since the British colonised Sydney Cove look pretty pathetic, doesn’t it?
SAM NEILL
What I was taught at school was so Eurocentric. The Pacific was seen as a mysterious place that was gradually discovered by people like Cook – a last frontier. But if you look at it from the Pacific perspective, the people living here were wondering who the people were who were coming here wearing strange clothes, speaking strange languages, and sailing strange ships. That’s been a revelation to me – seeing things from the other side of the beach.
To put this in a global context, it’s generally thought that the earliest Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand years ago. Sometime very soon after this, we find in northern Australia evidence of an Aboriginal presence on the continent in an impressive range of lithic – stone – technologies. Madjedbebe has yielded the world’s earliest known example of a ground-edge axe, made by grinding – rather than chipping – down the stone to a sharp edge. In Palaeolithic terms, it was a technological breakthrough; the equivalent of a smartphone versus the 1980s analogue brick.
BRUCE PASCOE, Boonwurrung Nation, Author
Most world cultures don’t last for two thousand years and here we are with a culture that is at least sixty thousand years old. We should be so proud of what those old wizards created on this country that we all want to be part of it too.
The people living in Australia when James Cook arrived were custodians of the world’s oldest multilingual and multicultural society, largely undisturbed by the cultural and social upheavals caused by the cross-continental migrations that shaped the Western world. But this wasn’t a discrete population of people. Before settlement, a population of an estimated 750,000 Indigenous Australians occupied over two hundred countries, all speaking their own languages.
As the Endeavour ploughed into the unrelenting headwinds in its crossing of the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Australia, Tupaia must have wondered what on earth the Englishman was doing. The Ra’iatean navigator and priest knew not to fight prevailing winds bu
t to work with them as they changed with the season. Cook, the Enlightenment warrior, was fighting to outwit, outplay and outlast nature, while Tupaia, the star navigator, had learnt to work in concert with natural forces.
It’s often said that Cook was sailing into unknown waters when he embarked upon his journey to the eastern coastline of the continent known in 1770 as New Holland. That’s not strictly accurate, though. Armed with a ‘hot off the presses’ copy of Alexander Dalrymple’s 1767 publication, An account of the discoveries made in the South Pacifick Ocean, previous to 1764, Cook had on hand the most up-to-date information about New Holland and its immediate neighbours.
Dalrymple himself is worthy of a short sidebar in Cook’s story. As a fellow of the Royal Society, Dalrymple had harboured ambitions to lead the expedition to the South Pacific himself. But he had been rather sensibly passed over by the Admiralty in favour of a man who actually knew how to sail a ship. Dalrymple nursed a festering grudge that would explode to spectacular effect after Cook returned to England.
But at this point in the journey, Dalrymple’s thorough academic survey of previous European expeditions to the Pacific was proving to be a great help. From his account, Cook knew of Tasman’s exploration as well as Luís Vaz de Torres’s 1606 navigation of the strait that now bears his name at the northernmost tip of the continent. Also covered in Dalrymple’s book was the early charting of the southern and northern coastlines of New Guinea and a number of the Melanesian islands.
The Pacific Page 11