“Cook was not a great hero, but a flawed, uncomfortable and difficult cultural ancestor, who provokes and challenges, reminding us of the weight of history and the painful legacies of an imperial past.”
Ballantyne says in his book,
“The historian Paul Moon has recently suggested that, with time, the moral claims of the past in the present fade.[22] But the stories about Captain Cook gathered and assessed in this book suggest this is far from the case in a postcolonial society where the alternatives of empire haunt the present.” (p. 355)
Ballantyne is promoting social discord. But at the reference given at Note 22 (The Art of Colonisation, p. 233), Moon continues:
“There are several reasons for this phenomenon of the morality of events being diluted over time, but a particularly significant one is the fact that the entirety of the past is unrecoverable. All we are left with – when we look at history – are fragments of it which have survived to the present, and to this extent, history has its own inbuilt selectivity. Without complete knowledge of everything which has occurred previously, moral certainty can sometimes be undermined. … And if items from particular historical periods or episodes were few in number or not especially eye-catching, visual renditions of that history could sometimes fill the gaps.
“Art easily held the upper hand when it came to these efforts to memorialise a specific interpretation of the past in the popular imagination. … The landscape artist Kennett Watkins’ slightly caricatural depiction of the death of Gustavus von Tempsky … served as a form of propaganda art – valorising one side to the same extent that it demonised the other.”
And that is just what Ballantyne has done in Captain Cook: He has assumed the Maori complaints to be well-founded and applicable, and portrayed the European symbolized by depictions of Cook as wicked and threatening. He tells us he has done it with selected “stories about Captain Cook gathered and assessed in this book,” which he has illustrated with depictions of Cook:
“Throughout the last two and a half centuries, Cook has been the subject of countless and varied narratives, his image endlessly reproduced. In texts, oral narratives, monuments, memorials and artworks, in parades and protests, and in the collective imagination, he has taken on many forms: imperial hero, an embodiment of the Enlightenment, a man of humane sensibility, a founding figure for the nation, a bringer of disease and death.” (p. 1)
Ballantyne proposes three phases for how Cook has been held in ‘public memory’ or the ‘collective imagination’. First, imperial memory is about British authority and benevolence up until 1914. The second, in the twentieth century, is memory of a national history shaped by historians and state-sponsored celebrations. The third contemporary memory is of valorising Maori complaints and demonising Cook. It is the manufacture of this contemporary memory which concerns us today.
Haunani-Kay Trask
Ballantyne claims that Cook has always been a contested figure and as an introduction to his book gave as an example the visit to New Zealand of “the Hawaiian scholar-activist Haunani-Kay Trask” in June 1989:
“She suggested that he should not be simply seen as an ‘explorer’, but rather as a ‘syphilitic tubercular racist’. … he was also a symbol of oppression in New Zealand. … The prominence of his image was ‘like having a picture of Hitler in the middle of a Jewish area in Europe’.” (p. 2)
I am not aware that Cook had syphilis or tuberculosis and, if Trask means that his crew gave syphilis to the Hawaiian’s, I have read that the Islanders contracted the disease from the Portuguese prior to Tasman, and instead gave it to the people of the Endeavour.
While Ballantyne made no mention of Jewish sensitivities arising from those spurious comments, he was concerned about a true word said in jest at the 9 October float parade as part of the bicentenary celebrations at Gisborne in 1969:
“One of the floats took a different tack, and mobilised hackneyed colonial stereotypes. It featured a number of men dressed as Maori gathered around a large fire-licked pot, and preparing a human – in the form of a young boy – for consumption. … The float demonstrated a powerful disregard for local Maori who had experienced the shock of Europeans, sudden arrival and the wounding, killing and abduction of their kin.” (p. 189)
Trask’s 1989 comments were within living memory of people who had experience of the six million Jews killed in the holocaust. However, the float parade was two centuries after Cook arrived at Gisborne when a dozen local Maoris were killed and Ballantyne ambiguously conflated them with contemporary local Maoris who have no experience of European arrival. Trask and Ballantyne’s comments are misleading, inflammatory and make a mockery of the holocaust.
Ballantyne further wrote, “She posed the question: ‘Why is this man, who is responsible for genocides against populations in the Pacific, continued to be treated as a national hero?’” (p. 4) That is similarly misleading and inflammatory: Genocide is “the deliberate killing of a very large number of people from a particular ethnic group or nation” (Concise Oxford). The only genocide which has occurred in New Zealand is the Maori genocide of the Morioris from 1835 to 1860 by slavery and cannibalism.
Ballantyne showed that he supported Trask when he wrote (p. 4), “The Otago Daily Times published an editorial headed ‘Cook, the Scapegoat’, asserting that Trask’s characterisations of Cook threatened to turn him ‘into some kind of fictional monster’… This was an argument reassuring to Pakeha, but it demonstrated a clear disregard for the abiding consequences of colonisation.”
But specifically, what accepted consequences of colonization is Ballantyne referring to? The unacknowledged consequences I am aware of include Western food, clothing and housing; and European medical science, resulting in the more than doubling of Maori life expectancy and a large increase of population. But Ballantyne has a clear disregard for those things. Why?
Gisborne
My home town of Gisborne was the site of Cook’s first landing in New Zealand, and a place of celebration for the Cook bicentenary in 1969 and Tuia 250 in 2019.
Ballantyne says,
“In that small city, where the history that is being remembered is studded with violence and death, there are deep and abiding tensions around Cook. … In Te Tairawhiti [Gisborne], Cook’s arrival is now routinely connected with violence and death. The celebratory tone that dominated commemorative events in 1969 has gone, and greater weight is now attached to the perspectives articulated by local hapu and iwi.” (p. 354)
When I was a child, living in Gisborne in the 1960s, I recall my grandmother talking about the Poverty Bay Massacre by Te Kooti and the Hauhaus. In 1868, Te Kooti landed near Young Nick’s Head with 300 Hauhaus who then raided European and Maori villages. On 10 November, Te Kooti attacked the township of Matawhero on the outskirts of Gisborne and killed 54 people, including 22 local Maoris.
Ballantyne doesn’t mention the Poverty Bay Massacre and refers to Te Kooti “as unambiguously unimportant” (p. 345).
Instead, Ballantyne says,
“Joanna Kidman has observed that Nick Tupara’s Te Maro sculpture is both a source of pride for local whanau and a powerful physical statement that requires the significance attached to Cook and the Endeavour to be recalibrated.” (p. 349)
Who was Te Maro? And how does his status affect that of Cook and the Endeavour?
Letter to the Editor
Ballantyne says that, in October 2018, the Gisborne District Council decided to remove a statue of Cook from Kaiti Hill. (p. 311):
“The Gisborne Herald published two opposing opinion pieces during this time (here). The first was by Barrie Davis, a Gisborne-based opponent of what he called ‘Maorification’, who complained about the planned removal: he spuriously suggested that discussions of the use of violence by the Endeavour’s crew did not recognise that Maori were the protagonists who ‘threatened, robbed and attacked’ the incoming Europeans, that ‘Maori have been conditioned to complain’ through the Treaty settlement process, and that ‘Maori are flourishing because of the good that Europeans brought to New Zealand’. The other piece was written by Clive Bibby, a farmer from Uawa [Tolaga Bay]…”
I can address the second and third points briefly, before considering the first point in more detail.
Second point: “‘Maori have been conditioned to complain’ through the Treaty settlement process”
I have described the process of conditioning here. In short, if you put a pigeon in a box with a light, a key and a food hopper, if the bird pecks the key when the light is on and a morsel of food drops into the hopper, it will learn to peck the key when the light comes on again. All animals, including humans, participate these reinforcement schedules. Maoris are no exception: If they complain to the Waitangi Tribunal and the Tribunal awards them ‘Treaty settlements’, they will come back for more, and they have. That is, they have been conditioned to complain through the Treaty settlement process.
Third point: “Maori are flourishing because of the good that Europeans brought to New Zealand”
However, I further wrote: “Maori life expectancy has more than doubled and the Maori population has increased tenfold since the time of the Treaty”. That meets the meaning of ‘flourish’ in the Oxford Concise: “grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way”.
Regarding the first passage, ‘threatened, robbed and attacked’, I wrote in an unpublished footnote to the Letter:
“To appreciate what happened regarding the killing of the Maoris by Cook and his crew I referred to Captain Cook in New Zealand: The Journals of Captain James Cook, Edited by A.H. and A.W. Reed, pp. 33-40. A.H. Reed paraphrases Cook’s account in The Story of New Zealand, pp. 60-62. Michael King in The Penguin History of New Zealand, p. 103 also mentions the circumstances of the Maori casualties.”
Ballantyne did not cite the passage by King which reads:
“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 intentions to be hostile and shot one man dead [Te Maro]. The following day another local was killed for snatching a sword from an Englishman and brandishing it menacingly [Te Rakau].”
Ballantyne frequently cites Two Worlds by Anne Salmond who wrote of Te Maro (p. 125): “Four boys had been left in charge of the yawl … four men with ‘very long lances’ … came out of the woods… The boys ran to the yawl and rowed frantically towards the river mouth, trying to escape… When their leader lifted his lance and prepared to hurl it at the boat the coxswain shot him through the heart. …this man was Te Maro…”
But Ballantyne did not cite this account which identifies Te Maro’s culpability. He is selecting his sources.
Both Cook and Banks expressed regret for the killings, and Ballantyne wrote: “Michael King encapsulated this view of Cook in his discussion of the violence visited upon the people of Turanganui in his popular and influential Penguin History of New Zealand: ‘Cook, son of a humble farm labourer and plain Yorkshireman of modest learning but considerable humanity, regretted these casualties’.” (p. 359)
Ballantyne refers to Te Maro and Te Rakau many times throughout his book and showed that he is aware of the circumstances of their shooting from W.L. Williams, ‘On the Visit of Captain Cook to Poverty Bay and Tolaga Bay’, TPNZI, 21 (1888), p. 389-393: “Williams reconstructed the exact locations where the first collision occurred. … ‘The four men belonged to the Ngationeone hapu of the tribe called Teitanga-a-Hauiti, and the name of the one who was shot was Te Maro’.” “Williams then used the voyage records to offer a recounting of the second landing at Turanganui… ‘According to Maori tradition … The man who seized Mr. Greens hanger [sword], and lost his life as a consequence was Te Rakau’.” (p. 104)
Given that Ballantyne seeks to identify ‘public memory’ and he is aware that King’s History is ‘popular and influential’, it is curious that he did not cite King’s description of the incident from the paragraph I quoted above, which is adjacent to the paragraph Ballantyne did quote (King, p. 103-4). Indeed, Ballantyne mentions King only three times in his book. Rather than use an up-to-date source such as King or Salmond, Ballantyne relied on an 1888 essay. Moreover, he did not recognize Maori culpability.
Cook, his officers and crew acted rationally and fairly. They were aware of Tasman’s visit in 1642 and the unprovoked killing of four sailors at Moordenaers Baij, after which Tasman left without going ashore. The scene was depicted in Isaack Gilsemans’ A view of the Murderers’ Bay, 1642, an engraving of explorers’ art “which circulated in the bloodstream of popular imagination in Europe” until Cook came to New Zealand (Paul Moon, The Art of Colonisation, Chapter 2 “‘Barbarians’ at Murderers’ Bay”; see also Salmond, Two Worlds, p. 82). I expect the people of the Endeavourbelieved it was necessary to assert themselves if they were to avoid a similar fate.
From the Cook Bicentenary to Tuia 250
Ballantyne often compares the Cook bicentenary in 1969 and the 2019 Tuia 250 celebrations in Gisborne; however, he has an opposing view to mine (p. 365):
“Emalani Case, a Hawaiian scholar then based at Victoria University of Wellington, dismissed Tuia 250: ‘It seemed completely absurd to me that a government would spend so much money to celebrate a man who murdered islanders, murdered Maori here in Aotearoa and spread diseases, and who brought a lot of death, destruction and devastation to the islands …’ Case stated: ‘Cook to me is a coward and a murderer and invader and conqueror.’”
Cook discovered and charted New Zealand which established a path for the British to sign an agreement with the Maoris to colonize and build our nation, which is well worth celebrating. As a consequence, the British stopped the Maoris practicing kai tangata, taurekareka and roromi. Inasmuch as Cook was responsible for colonization, Cook was responsible for stopping these reprehensible practices and advancing the Maori race. If that is so, then Cook was the opposite of what Case claimed.
Astonishingly, Ballantyne promotes Case’s veiled threat of violent decolonization (p. 366):
“For Case, Cook’s career and his voyages were not as significant as his death and dismemberment; his killing modelled, she suggested, ‘hopeful and continued resistance to colonialism’.”
Ballantyne contrasts the ‘public memory’ of 1969 with that in 2019 (p. 363):
“Maori and Pacific voices were much more prominent in the Tuia 250 programme than in any that had gone before. This meant that where Cook had been celebrated as both an imperial and national hero in 1969, for example, in 2019 there were running arguments about Cook’s motivations, the place of violence in his exploration, and the extent to which he was implicated in the subsequent colonisation of New Zealand and the marginalisation of tangata whenua. The images that were so central in 1969 – Cook as an imperial hero, the great navigator, the practical man of action – were disrupted by critical counter-memories and new visions that offered fresh incarnations of Cook. … This book has suggested that these memory contests have always swirled around the figure of Cook, but they have deepened as colonisation and the nation have been increasingly interrogated by historians, writers and activists.”
I remember the feeling of contempt among my family and friends when there was an act of vandalism on Kaiti Hill in the 1960s. Back then, we felt a need to conserve and protect our community assets. I also wondered why the houses in the Kaiti suburb were State houses built in the 1950s and exclusively inhabited by Maoris. I have only recently learnt that was because of the Second Migration after World War II, when the bulk of the Maoris decided to move into the towns. Having colonized our town and have the State build housing for them, I expect them to respect that and offer a word of gratitude, but none has been forthcoming. Presumably it would impinge on Treaty narratives.
Ballantyne notes the replacement of cultural symbols in recent times, presumably with the intention of instilling a different ‘public memory’:
A statue of Cook had been unveiled on Kaiti Hill in 1969. “The Gisborne District Council removed the statue in 2019, as part of the revision of Cook’s public presence in the region” (Figure 26)
“In late September 2019, a major monument to Te Maro was unveiled at the new Ruatanuika memorial and lookout on Titirangi [Kaiti Hill].” (p. 312)
“Just days after the statue of the merchant and slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol in June 2020, the Cook statue on Awapuni Road in Turanganui Gisborne was once again the target of graffiti.” (p. 355)
Having been overwhelmed by a more advanced culture, the hauteur Maori attitude towards the beneficent Europeans is to hold a grudge forever.
Tuisiata Avia
Ballantyne tells us:
“Tusiata Avia, a leading Pacific New Zealand poet, wrote a fiercely critical poem about Cook in response to what she understood as the ‘celebration’ of Cook during Tuia 250 in 2019. It was published in 2020 as part of her collection The Savage Coloniser Book, which has been described as offering ‘poetic catharsis’ for the wounds of colonisation and racism.” (p. 356)
Te Herenga Waka University Press published Avia’s poem in 2020, 2021 and twice in 2023 about the arrival of Captain Cook and his killing at Kealakekua Bay, which reads in part: “Hey James, it’s us. These days we’re driving round in SUVs looking for ya or white men like you … and I’ve got my father’s pig-hunting knife in my fist and we’re coming to get you … then we’re gonna FUCK. YOU. UP. FOR. GOOD. BITCH.”
That is a statement by a Polynesian woman of an intention to kill European men, published by a New Zealand university under the guise of poetry. And it won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in 2021. Even so, it is a symptom of degeneracy in New Zealand and the West generally. It is being done intentionally by people who apparently do not realize they depend on the culture and people they seek to destroy.
Ballantyne continues:
“In 2023, The Savage Coloniser Book was adapted for the stage at the Auckland Arts Festival, and a lengthy Stuff article profiled Avia and her work and included the text of her poem ‘250th Anniversary of James Cook’s Arrival in New Zealand’. In response to that article, ACT leader David Seymour stoked controversy by suggesting that the government was supporting racism targeted at white people, and that Avia’s poem about Cook was inciting ‘racially motivated violence’. The journalist Philip Matthews noted that typically New Zealanders show little interest in poetry, but that the Avia controversy was catalysed by right-wing social media influencers and broadcasters, as well as by David Seymour and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters. The psychologist Waikaremoana Waitoki (Ngati Hako, Ngati Mahanga) suggests that many of those who were outraged by the poem wanted to give Cook a ‘free pass’. She noted that the emotive power of the poem expresses a key truth: ‘The impact of Cook’s legacy is not a feel-good story for Maori and Pacific people. It is a story of genocide and intergenerational trauma.’ In this reading of the past, Cook is no longer the ‘humane’ explorer but has become a potent symbol of the most poisonous and enduring legacies of empire.” (p. 356)
That is humbug if not lies: Genocide is what the Maoris did to the Morioris; the Avia controversy was brought about by the language of Tuisata Avia; Cook earned right of entry to the New Zealand Temple of Fame; the British Empire brought industry and literacy to primitive people. The facts are the opposite of what is claimed.
Waitoki is contributing to the lack of social cohesion in New Zealand and Ballantyne is facilitating that. In truth, the Maoris are indignant at being overwhelmed by a superior culture. That indignation is an inappropriate response to “the deliberate lifting of a people of lower culture to full equality in political, social, and moral communion with one of the most advanced races in the world.” (Ngata, 1928)
Conclusion
In the last chapter of his book, Ballantyne concludes that New Zealand must be perpetually divided (p. 369):
“In keeping with the motto ‘dual heritage, shared future’ and the programme’s vision about nation-building, and biculturalism’s emphasis on the distinctions between Maori and Pakeha, Tuia 250 steered away from any suggestion of hybridity or ‘one nation’.
…
“The contention around Cook makes it clear that New Zealand’s ‘shared future’ cannot lie in a unified national history. … So, as we move into the future, it is almost certain there will be many more Cooks, in various guises and with shifting dimensions. … But Cook will not be like a watermark that completely fades from view, or a ghost who is locked away and forgotten; he will continue to be a figure who returns, generating new views of the past, who will inform novel readings of the present, and who may inspire new aspirations for the future.”
Ballantyne’s intention is that your institutions continue to vilify elements of your history and culture until there is nothing left worth having.
And your intention is to just sit there and take it.
Barrie Davis is a retired telecommunications engineer, holds a PhD in the psychology of Christian beliefs, and can often be found gnashing his teeth reading The Post outside Floyd’s cafe at Island Bay.
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