A New Zealand village has refused permission for a replica of Captain Cook’s ship to dock there, with the local Māori community branding the explorer a “barbarian.”
The vessel is separately circumnavigating Australia and New Zealand as part of commemorations of the navigator’s arrival Down Under 250 years ago. Cook used his ship, the HMS Bark Endeavour, to claim Australia for the British during his historic 1768-1771 voyage.
But its scheduled stop at Mangonui, in New Zealand’s North Island, in October has been cancelled after complaints from indigenous people.
Known as the Tuia 250 project, the commemoration of Cook’s voyage celebrates and acknowledges “the first onshore encounters between Māori and Pākehā” and is being billed as “an opportunity to hold honest conversations about the past, the present, and how we navigate our shared future together.”
However, Anahera Herbert-Graves, the head of Northland’s Ngati Kahu tribe spoke to the New Zealand Herald about Cooke’s legacy: “He was a barbarian. Wherever he went, like most people of the time of imperial expansion, there were murders, there were abductions, there were rapes, and just a lot of bad outcomes for the indigenous people.
“He didn’t discover anything down here, and we object to Tuia 250 using euphemisms like ‘encounters’ and ‘meetings’ to disguise what were actually invasions.”
Tamsin Evans, deputy chief executive for the ministry of culture and heritage, told the Guardian the government had responded to the calls, and the flotilla the vessel is part of would only stop at communities “where a welcome is clear.”
Endeavour and her Royal Navy crew set off from Plymouth harbour in August 1768 in search of the hypothesised continent of Terra Australis Incognita.
She first reached New Zealand in October 1769 and arrived in what is now known as Botany Bay in New South Wales in April the following year.
From there, Cook and the Endeavour sailed along Australia’s east coast, coming close to oblivion when she ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
The ship arrived back in Dover in July 1771, and Cook, a farmer’s son from Marton in North Yorkshire, earned his place in history as one of the great explorers.
Critics have pointed out that Cook did not sail all the way around Australia and cited the commemoration celebrations as questionable, given the long-running debate over the legacy of British involvement Down Under. It is believed the first indigenous Australians arrived in the country some 50,000 years ago and other European sailors visited the continent before the explorer.