Tony
Ballantyne, University
of Otago
With an election looming, it
was perhaps unsurprising that Minister for Rail Winston
Peters used the announcement of the names
of two new state-owned ferries to indulge in a little
campaign signalling.
Targetting the “snivelling
wokesters” who might take issue with one ferry being named
after Captain James Cook, Peters suggested “a mature
country does not run from its history” (a point with which
I fully agree).
In fact, the new names – Kupe,
after the great explorer of Pacific and Māori tradition,
and Cook, honouring the commander of three British Pacific
expeditions from 1768 to 1779 – already mark a break with
past naming traditions.
Since the 1960s, ferries
often bore the te reo Māori prefix “Ara”, meaning
“path”. The first was the Aramoana (“passage over the
sea”), a “roll-on, roll-off” rail ferry that
transformed travel across Cook Strait between New
Zealand’s two main islands.
Of course, naming
practices shift over time. And Peters was correct in
highlighting the “indelible mark on these islands, and on
Cook Strait in particular” left by both Kupe and
Cook.
Many features of this waterway are associated
with Kupe. For example, its Māori name, Te Moana
Raukawakawa, refers to the kawakawa leaves worn to protect
ocean travellers as they neared the islands called Ngā
Whatu (The Eyes), understood to be the calcified eyes of the
great wheke (octopus) Kupe had pursued and
killed.
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Yet that Māori name is rarely visible:
most maps call it Cook Strait and the vessels that cross it
are widely known as “Cook Strait ferries”.
This primacy of English names is an extension of
the process Cook started, including at Tōtaranui (which he
called Queen Charlotte Sound) and a favoured anchorage
there, Meretoto, which he named Ship Cove.
Discovery and
rediscovery
There is no doubt, however, the new
ferry names do recognise some deep historical
associations.
They are also in line with a cultural
tradition of linking Cook and Kupe. The pair were prominent
in The
Discovery of New Zealand, the landmark work by New
Zealand historian and Cook scholar J.
C. Beaglehole, published in 1940.
Beaglehole
imagined a conversation where “Cook would eagerly have
talked” with Kupe, “as men converse between their
peers”.
But this equivalence between Kupe and
Cook as men of the sea and great navigators glosses over the
very real differences between “discovering” uninhabited
islands and the “rediscovery” of already occupied lands
in the context of empire building. So there is a fundamental
tension in placing the two figures side by
side.
Peters suggested it has become fashionable
for Cook “to be condemned, cancelled and cast out”, and
dismissed those who identify him as a “harbinger of
colonisation”.
However, it is misleading to
suggest that critiques of Cook are a recent product of a
so-called woke agenda.
As my book Captain
Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire
demonstrates, the Māori communities who experienced
injuries and death as a result of Cook’s expeditions have
never forgotten those losses and have increasingly shared
their perspectives with the wider public in recent times.
And there also has been a long tradition of
commentary from Pākehā New Zealanders expressing deep
unease about the violence used as a tactic during Cook’s
voyages.
In 1859, the pioneering historian A.
S. Thomson – a Scottish military surgeon who hardly
fits the profile of a “wokester” – noted that after
the first voyage,
Captain Cook
left the country without having had one of his crew killed
or wounded by the natives; while they had to mourn the loss
of ten men killed, and many others wounded, by the English
during this visit.
The politician
and historian William
Pember Reeves (1857–1932), who was also an influential
architect of immigration laws designed to exclude Asians
from New Zealand, observed that Cook repeatedly used gunfire
and this had terrible consequences:
Once Cook fired on the crew of a
canoe merely for refusing to stop and answer questions about
their habits and customs, and killed four of them – an act
of which he calmly notes that he himself could not, on
reflection, approve.
Cook and
colonisation
Reeves celebrated Cook as a navigator
and a mapmaker, but he was troubled by the violence Cook and
other agents of empire set in train, initiating a “series
of deeds of blood and reprisal which made the name of New
Zealand notorious for generations”.
And the
historical record teaches us that Cook was indeed a
harbinger of colonisation. His secret instructions from the
Admiralty encouraged him to “take Possession of Convenient
Situations” during his explorations “in the Name of the
King of Great Britain”.
He undertook rituals of
possession in Te Whanganui-a-Hei and Tōtaranui during the
first voyage, and imagined New Zealand as a flourishing
future colony of Britain.
He suggested it would
not “be at all difficult for Strangers to form a
settlement in this Country” because colonists could
exploit divisions between the kin-groups that structured
Indigenous life.
Colonists arrived in large numbers
from 1840 and many have subsequently looked back on Cook as
a foundational figure and a hero.
But such
judgements were never unanimous: from the moment of his
death in 1779, Cook has been and remains contested.
Questions about his actions and the consequences of his
visits are not new and reflect the profoundly unsettling
nature of empire and colonisation.
Such questions
will be raised again now with the christening of the new
ferries, and rightly so. What we name things matters,
serving to shape our sense of ourselves, our pasts and our
futures.
Tony
Ballantyne, Professor of History, University
of Otago
This article is
republished from The
Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the
original
article.
