His memorials have been the focus of Australia Day protests in recent years but Captain James Cook's life and death show he was no xenophobe, writes DAVID ELLERY.
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"Cook was a captain of the powder days
"When captains, you might have said, if you had been
"Fixed by their glittering stare, half down the side
"Or gaping at them up companionways,
"Were more like warlocks than humble men...
"Daemons in periwigs doling magic out,
"Who read fair alphabets in the stars
"Where humbler men found a mess of sparks".
- Five Visions of Captain Cook, Kenneth Slessor
The following post (edited) appeared on The Indigenous World of Entertainment's Facebook page some years ago: "On February 14, 1779, Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy was killed by natives in Kealakekua Bay, on the Big Island of Hawaii. Cook was a true savage who sailed across the world bringing murder, rape, disease, and colonialism to native peoples all over the Pacific".
After being posted on Reddit, the entry (full text here) provoked a lengthy and nuanced debate about Cook's legacy, his intentions and the actions of earlier explorers such as Cortez and Pizarro.
While not unique, it is a stark example of the many revisionist and ill-informed critiques of the man universally regarded as the most excellent seamen of his time and the most accomplished navigator and explorer the world has ever known that have festered for more than six decades.
Cook filled in almost all of the remaining blanks on the 18th-century maps, charting Newfoundland, Greenland, the east coast of Australia, and dozens of Pacific archipelagos, including Hawaii, with such accuracy and precision that many of the maps he made were still in use well into the 19th century.
Arguments by Stan Grant and others over the use of the word "discovery", as in Cook's crediting Lieutenant Hicks as "the first who discover'd this land (Australia, Journal, April 19)" are non-sequiturs.
Cook was well aware the lands he visited were populated, often by technologically accomplished and sophisticated peoples such as the Maori, the Tahitians, and the Hawaiians.
His frequent acknowledgement of, and references to, earlier voyages by Magellan, Dampier, Tasman, et al. makes it clear he meant "discovery" by Europeans (aka 'the West').
It is impossible not to conclude most, if not all, of those who espouse hostile and vitriolic views about Cook, have never dipped into the million words in his journals or read any of the many excellent biographies available. I recommend Beaglehole's account of the navigator's life and times.
When Cook was slaughtered, aged 50, in 1779, Antarctica was the only major landmass that remained to be discovered. Even it was no longer a complete mystery. While Cook and his men could not reach the frozen continent due to sea ice, they crossed the Antarctic Circle and ventured to within 120 kilometres of its shores. The first confirmed sighting of the continent was not made until 1820, almost 50 years after Cook turned back.
It is remarkable, or at the very least very curious, that almost 246 years after his untimely death, Cook has become such a divisive figure his statues are routinely vandalised in the lead-up to Australia Day (or, as some call it, "invasion day").
Why is Cook, a man credited with almost god-like powers of acuity and skill by the poet Kenneth Slessor, the locus of such hatred and rage and a key figure in the culture wars at this time of the year? January 26 is, after all, the day Captain Arthur Phillip raised the British flag on Australian soil in 1788.
Cook had come and gone 18 years before. Following a perilous journey to chart the continent's east coast - which almost ended in catastrophe near what is now Cooktown - he left, never to return to the Australian mainland.
After two more voyages during which he visited both the Arctic and the Antarctic, he was killed, roasted, and dismembered by the natives of Hawaii who, quite ironically, had venerated him as a god, albeit one who eventually outwore his welcome.
Cook's end was gruesome in the extreme as Mr Samwell, the surgeon aboard his ship, the Resolution, tersely reported: "We found in it (a large cloak of black and white feathers containing the remains) the following bones with some flesh upon them which had the marks of fire. The thighs and legs joined together but not the feet, both arms with the hands separated from them, the skull with all the bones that form the face wanting with the scalp separated from it ..."
There is more CSI data, but let's not go there.
What is frequently ignored in modern accounts of Cook's death is that he and a handful of sailors and marines were confronting an angry mob who outnumbered them by hundreds to one while trying to recover a stolen boat.
Second Lieutenant Phillips, who led the eight marines of the landing party, recounted that "It was at this period (when Cook was trying to entice Terre'boo, a local chief who was not connected to the theft of the boat on board the Resolution) [that] we first began to suspect that they were not very well disposed towards us."
As the next 30 minutes were to prove, this was a masterpiece of understatement.
"The [eight] marines being huddled together in the midst of an immense Mob compos'd at least of two or three thousand people, I proposed to Capt Cook that they might be arrang'd in order along the rocks by the water side ... we now clearly saw they were collecting their spears".
This left Cook dangerously exposed and almost alone.
According to Phillips, Cook realised the gravity of the situation and resolved to return to the safety of the ship without his high-ranking hostage.
"[He] made the following observation to me, 'We can never think of compelling him to go onboard without killing a number of these people'."
These are not the words of a murderous xenophobe. Even though the missing pinnace was vital to the Resolution's equipment, Cook was ready to row away rather than shed blood. No doubt, as previous experience had shown, he felt better results could be obtained on the morrow once the Hawaiians had calmed down.
Tragically, the situation was beyond repair. When he turned his back on the horde to order the withdrawal, Cook was struck down "by a fellow armed with a long iron spike and a stone."
He was then dragged into the water, held underwater and beaten to death with large rocks while the surviving marines - including Phillips - and the sailors fled in their boats. Hardly the Royal Navy's finest hour.
"All my people I observ'd were totally vanquish'd and endeavouring to save their lives by getting to the boats. I, therefore, scrambled as well I could into the water and made for the pinnace, which I, fortunately, got hold of," Phillips confessed. In his defence, he had been wounded in the affray.
While there is no doubt the Hawaiians' blood was up because Cook's ships had returned unexpectedly (the Resolution had sprung a mast in a storm) following a longer stay during which they had depleted the resources of the island, it is likely there was a darker motive behind the killing.
When he first arrived in Hawaii, Cook was greeted as the incarnation of the god or great ancestor Lono-I-ka-Makahiki, who had left the islands for the distant land of Kahiki numberless years before. He endured a long and uncomfortable deification ceremony, which was witnessed by an estimated 9000 or 10,000 people with characteristic good grace and, on his return for repairs, aroused the ire of the chief priest Koa, who clearly preferred an absent god to a ubiquitous and hungry one who threatened his prestige.
It was Koa who struck Cook down, knocking him almost senseless to the point where he could no longer defend himself.
Politics was just as brutal - if not more so - in the "arcadian idylls" of Rousseau's "noble savages" of the North Pacific as it was anywhere else at the time. The difference was that Europeans did not eat the hearts of their fallen foes. (The Hawaiians, contrary to popular belief, were not cannibals in the same sense as the Maori. Cook's "long bones" were removed for preservation. His heart was eaten by four chiefs as part of an honour ritual.)
Cook's desire not to shed blood was in accord with much of what he wrote in his journals about the Indigenous peoples he encountered.
On June 6, 1769, shortly after the Endeavour arrived in Tahiti for the first time, Cook wrote of his fear her crew had brought "venerial distemper" (sic) to the island.
He was much relieved to discover from the natives, among whom "it is now as common as in any part of the world", the real culprits were members of the expedition led by the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville which had landed in April 1767.
Cook's concerns about the impact of European visitations on native populations gnawed at his conscience for much of his career.
Writing of the New Zealand Maori during his second voyage on June 3, 1773, he was moved to observe: "To our shame as civilized Christians, we debauch their morals already too prone to vice, and we introduce among them wants and perhaps disease which they never before knew and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquillity which they and their forefathers enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion, let him tell me what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans."
A profoundly thoughtful, inquiring, and introspective man, he was well aware of how those on shore viewed the unannounced advent of European ships.
"We enter their ports and attempt to land in a peaceable manner. If this succeeds all is well, if not we land nevertheless and maintain our footing by the superiority of our firearms. In what other light can they look upon us but as invaders to their country?"
These are not the words of an intemperate "savage" bent on leaving "murder, rape, disease, and colonialism" in his wake.
The best examples of Cook's willingness to see things from the point of view of those inside the breakers are his perceptive comments on the Aboriginal people he encountered after careening the Endeavour, which had been holed when it ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef on June 11, 1770.
Challenging Dampier's description of Indigenous Australians as "the miserabalest (sic) people in the world", Cook looked more deeply into the reality of their lived experience than any of his predecessors and many of those who came after him: "They [the natives of New Holland] may appear to be some of the most wretched people on Earth; but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans, being wholly unacquainted not only with the Superfluous but with the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe; they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a tranquillity which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition [except for the women and children]. The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life ... they live in a warm and fine climate and enjoy every wholesome air, so that they have very little need of clothing ... they think themselves provided with all the necessarys (sic) of life, and that they have no Superfluities". (Some account of NSW, August 1770, Cook's journal).
Almost 200 years later Geoffrey Blainey, writing in the Triumph of the Nomads (1975), confirmed this assessment: "If an aboriginal [sic] in the 17th century had been captured as a curiosity and taken in a Dutch ship to Europe, and if he had travelled all the way from Scotland to the Caucasus and had seen how the average European struggled to make a living, he might have said to himself that he had now seen the third world and all its poverty and hardship" (Preface, VI).
It is significant Captain W. J. L. Wharton, the editor of the edition of the journal of Cook's first expedition chosen by the Libraries Board of South Australia for its facsimile edition in 1968, felt it necessary to add his own counterpoint (writing in 1893):
"The native Australians may be happy in their condition, but they are without doubt among the lowest of mankind. Confirmed cannibals, they lose no opportunity of gratifying their love of human flesh. Mothers will kill and eat their own children, and the women are often mercilessly illtreated by their lords and masters ..."
Those who came after Cook knew the best way to confirm possession was through genocide justified by slander and calumny. Once you dehumanise your enemy they can be slaughtered without moral consequence.
While the debate over Cook's place in history, which has been under way since long before Alan Moorehead published his The Fatal Impact almost 60 years ago, is entirely legitimate, the attacks on the memorials to his legacy are not.
Cook, a dutiful and highly competent servant of the Crown, was ultimately an instrument of late Georgian imperialism. But he was not himself an imperialist. His mission was a pre-emptive attempt by the British to thwart French endeavours to lay claim to new territories in the Pacific and the South Seas.
Britain had only recently shattered France's imperial aspirations in what is now Canada and in India in the Seven Years' War. The First Lord of the Admiralty at the time Cook sailed aboard the Endeavour was Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, the man who had smashed the French fleet at Quiberon Bay on November 20, 1759, in a battle that was even more remarkable than Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in 1805.
Cook, by the accounts of all who knew him - including many of his Indigenous interlocutors, was no racist, xenophobe or bigot. The Secret Journal and other crew diaries show junior officers frequently criticised him behind his back for his genial affection for, and what they saw as indulgence of, native people.
What can be said for sure is the newly commissioned Lieutenant who set sail in 1769 was a man who, given the technology of the day, had been allocated an almost impossible "endeavour". He carried it through to a tragic end with a remarkable degree of competence, a rare insight into the people he encountered and a degree of humanity scarce in the Royal Navy at the time.
Cook was at the cutting edge of the European Enlightenment, a period of inward and outward exploration that reshaped our world.
Alistair MacLean, in apparent reference to Moorehead's critical account, wrote in his biography of Cook that: "Merely because a man can write a book, it doesn't mean that he can't be silly, and such writers [who criticise Cook] are very silly indeed.
"If it hadn't been Cook, it would have been someone else. Could anyone possibly be so naive as to imagine that if Cook had never lived, the Pacific would still be a trackless and undiscovered waste ... when it was ripe for the man, the hour and the place to come together, blind destiny reached out and tapped Cook on the shoulder."
The last word goes to Kenneth Slessor:
"So Cook made choice, so Cook sailed westabout,
"So men write poems in Australia."
