Captain Cook and the consequences of colonisation

(A slightly shorter version of this column was published in Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz, October 16.)

Gisborne is one of my favourite places. It has a distinctive character formed partly by its isolation – it’s a long drive to get there, through wild country that leaves you in no doubt that you’re off the beaten track – but also because 45 per cent of its population are tangata whenua, considerably more than any other New Zealand city. 

An old friend, a Pakeha who has lived up that way for a long time, once said to me that when you get north of Wairoa, you’re in “their” country – meaning it’s a part of New Zealand where the Maori presence and influence is all-pervasive.

That’s part of Gisborne’s appeal. No city beats it for sheer New Zealandness.

My wife and I were last there last year.  We strolled on Wainui Beach in the bright winter sunshine, had lunch with the aforementioned friend at the Tatapouri Sports Fishing Club (a Gisborne institution), enjoyed a tasting at the excellent GisVin winery, and marvelled at what must surely be one of the most impressive supermarkets in the country (hint: It’s a big yellow one).

Oh, and we drove to the top of the Kaiti Hill, which brings me to the point of this column.

The view over Poverty Bay from the top of Kaiti Hill, or Titirangi as the tangata whenua call it, is magnificent. But Kaiti Hill was, until recently, the site of a controversial statue – now relocated to Tairawhiti Museum – of Captain James Cook.

I read the plaque on that statue last year, and although I don’t recall exactly what it said, I remember recoiling at what would now be regarded as a very Eurocentric view of our history. It may not have credited Cook with discovering New Zealand, in so many words, but that was the implication.

Since then, of course, the 250^th anniversary of Cook’s first landing at Poverty Bay has served as the catalyst for a reassessment of our history and Cook’s place in it. And it’s probably fair to say that we’ve emerged from the ensuing debate with a more nuanced and balanced understanding of our past than was the case in 1969, when the statue was erected.

As a thoughtful Stuff editorial observed, Cook’s landing was an event that had to happen. In an age of imperial expansion, New Zealand was bound to be (re)discovered.

The editorial wisely went on to say that the benefits and the harms that resulted can't be separated from each other, and that we should resist demonising or sanctifying either party in that historic encounter.

In other words, colonisation produced good and bad consequences, and both Pakeha and Maori should be honest in acknowledging all of them.

Cook has been described as a white supremacist. Well, of course he was. He was a man of his time - a product of his society and culture. To judge him according to 21^st century sensibilities is pointless.

In any case, who could have blamed him for thinking European society was superior to the one he encountered in Poverty Bay? Compared with many indigenous societies, Maori culture was relatively advanced. But to a man brought up amid the trappings of Western civilisation – great cities, science, literature, music, cathedrals, universities – it would have seemed primitive.

That didn’t stop Cook from recognising the admirable aspects of Maori culture. In a strictly literal sense he may have been a supremacist, but he was also, by most accounts, a humane man who treated Maori respectfully.

And while much is made of the fact that nine Maori died in that first encounter, we shouldn’t forget that pre-European Maori knew all about conquest. They lived by it.

Neither should we delude ourselves about the culture Cook encountered. Heretaunga Pat Baker’s 1975 novel Behind the Tattooed Face, which was based on the author’s knowledge of his own tribe’s oral history, depicted a society in which savage tribal warfare was the norm, along with slavery and cannibalism.  

In the very first chapter, a slave is buried alive with a massive corner post for a palisade – a post that took 20 men to lift – implanted on top of him.

And that’s just the start. Naked, bound bodies are thrown alive onto red-hot hangi stones. The blade of a taiaha is thrust into a captured warrior’s chest and his still-beating heart is plucked out and ritually cooked on a fire.

Women and children are bound and thrown to the ground before being impaled alive on spears thrust through their bodies at the navel. A chief is beheaded and his tongue is skewered with a sharp stick.

Much of this is done amid triumphant hakas, chanting and sadistic joking.

It’s fashionable to talk of the lasting damage done to Maori by colonisation; Justice Minister Andrew Little did so in a breast-beating speech at the United Nations last January. But Baker’s book was a reminder that life could be merciless and precarious for pre-European Maori.

Colonisation brought benefits that included education, medicine, a written language and, above all, the rule of law and democratic government. But we must acknowledge that it also had serious negative impacts on Maori in the form of introduced disease, alienation of land, cultural decline and the gradual but irrevocable loss of control over a land where Maori once exercised exclusive domain.

Some of that is now being addressed, but it’s not hard to sympathise with claims that it’s often too little, too late.

On the positive side, each culture has absorbed some of the best qualities of the other, resulting in a society that has evolved into something unique and internationally admired.

Maori and Pakeha are inextricably intertwined. There is a bit of Pakeha in virtually all Maori, even if the activists prefer to disregard that inconvenient part of their heritage, and a bit of Maori in most white New Zealanders, even those with no Maori lineage.

You can’t grow up here and not absorb at least some Maori culture. It’s one of those things that sets us apart, and it should be celebrated.