Captain James Cook

I am indeed grateful to have your audience once again.

I shall get straight to the point. Because I am nothing if not precise. In fact, that is exactly why the admiralty selected me for the most important voyage of the 18th century – because I was meticulous in the extreme – which you can see from the detail of my maps and in the way I ran my ship, making sure my men were without scurvy (and also without rum – despite the navy supplying rations of the stuff to every seaman).

For my efforts I have been given the great honour of being immortalised in statue all throughout the empire. You’ll see that this one is now sporting a faint red ‘x’. I can’t tell you how it irks me - both because I am tidy by nature (I made my crew scrub the decks with vinegar daily to protect from germs) and because I feel I have been unfairly coloured as the villain of colonisation.

So if you could spare me a moment, there are a few things I’d really like to set straight. Firstly, the mission I signed up for was not to do with colonisation or discovery – those orders were kept secret and only opened after the advertised mission (observing the transit of Venus near Tahiti) was complete. I hope it doesn’t spoil your idea of me if I tell you that discovering and adventuring really wasn’t my thing at all. Ordering. Tidying. Classifying. Oh, and mapping. That was my thing. I was a scientist. With a boat.

In fact, did you know that searching for the great southern continent wasn’t even on my original to do list? I was given a secret set of instructions sealed and with orders to open only after we had observed the sun crossing Venus in the southern sky. I’m still not quite sure why it was such a secret. Myself, I prefer everything to be very detailed up front. Which you could see from my journals – great detail – except that by the time these were published they had received a very thorough edit from none other than Joseph Banks, the wealthy naturalist who paid to join my voyages.

Which brings me to my second point – this devious editing by Mr Banks. I had long been stabbed and dismembered by the Hawaiians when Mr Banks took it upon him to nearly re-write my adventures. He was, by then, a strong advocate for   colonisation, using his influence in the government to push for the establishment of a penal colony in Australia. And when you review his edits carefully, as some have done, you’ll see the way his changes were designed to smooth the way for colonisation. In one such example, you can see he very clearly minimised the sophistication of indigenous society that I had carefully observed. The level of sophistication of the natives of Te Wai Pounamu the South Island turned out to be quite an important factor in the end, for it allowed the doctrine of terra nullius to be invoked. You see, Hobson – though he had never been but to a small part of the northern point – had been informed that the natives of the South Island were “wild savages”. With this, he assumed that they would not be able to understand the Treaty of Waitangi. According to European international law, this would entitle Britain, or any other country, to apply terra nullius and claim sovereignty by right of discover, as Britain had done in the case of Australia.

And this is exactly what happened. Hobson’s had was forced by New Zealand Company colonists at Port Nicholson (now Wellington), who were attempting to set up their own government. In May 1940, Hobson hurriedly declared sovereignty over the North Island by virtue of the treaty and over the South Island by virtue of discovery. So imagine what Major Thomas Burnbury must have thought when he sailed in Akaroa harbour soliciting signatures for the Treaty of Waitangi and found the rangatira Hone Tikao (also known as John Love), who had travelled the world, spoke five languages and whose people had been running sophisticated trade with ships and whalers for decades. So Joseph Banks’ editing my journals to make the natives seem less sophisticated and less numerous did have its intended effect – and that is before we even begin to debate the rather flawed ideas of terra nullius.

Well, I hope I have given you some food for thought, as it were. Maybe some reason for my statue to exist here after all, as a reminder that we can have great impact on the world around us and that it is not without consequence. I believe there is a great deal to learn from the past if we look at it carefully.

Your sincerely,

Captain James Cook