"But it is difficult to remain silent in the face of events that affect our lives fundamentally."

"Anne Salmond's ... 'Newsroom' column berat[es] people for having views on the Treaty of Waitangi when they cannot even read the Māori version of the treaty. ... that even when customs, laws or treaties impinge on your daily life, you cannot hold any views on these matters if you are unable to read the relevant documents in their original form.
    "It is safe to say that this view would come as a bit of a surprise to Biblical scholars who are not well versed in all of Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Clearly no Hindu or Buddhist can have any views on their own religion if they cannot read Sanskrit. And no one can say anything about Islam if they are not familiar with Arabic.
    "[Equally] immigrants to countries like France or Germany can express no views on tax or social welfare policies if they cannot read, write or speak the language.
    "This is obviously ridiculous and highly parochial. I have a feeling that even Anne Salmond understands the frivolity of her argument.
    "[She] is engaging in is what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls 'bullshit.'
    "This is where intellectuals and policy makers, who have no good answers to valid questions from regular people, essentially resort to using jargon to sidestep the matter....

    "But it is difficult to remain silent in the face of events that affect our lives fundamentally."

~ Prof. Ananish Chaudhari from his post 'Inability to understand te reo Māori does not prevent people from asking questions about race relations in New Zealand'

"...in exchange for such protection, Māori agreed to being governed by an authority - maybe not necessarily 'sovereign' - but at least one promoting a common law and order? Isn't that identical to John Locke's idea...?"

"On the Treaty, isn't the argument, even of Te Pāti Māori and its supporters, that it was framed to protect and guarantee the private property rights of Māori? That, in exchange for such protection, Māori agreed to being governed by an authority - maybe not necessarily 'sovereign' - but at least one promoting a common law and order? Isn't that identical to John Locke's idea that 'humans, though free, equal, and independent, are obliged under the law of nature to respect each other’s rights to life, liberty, and property.' That we should 'agree to form a government in order to institute an impartial power capable of arbitrating disputes and redressing injuries.' Locke held that the obligation to obey civil government under the social contract was conditional upon the protection of our natural rights, including the right to private property. Whether it was John Locke and the US Constitution, or the Treaty of Waitangi, aren't we all talking similar ideas with similar aims in mind?"

~ Robert MacCulloch. from his post 'Why does Professor Anne Salmond Defend the Treaty by Attacking Liberty? Don't we all, Māori and non-Māori, want to be free & our property rights protected?'

Q: Who first discovered New Zealand?

"[In her book Two Worlds, Anne Salmond] claims that the Dutch were not the first to have discovered New Zealand. In one sense this is true. Polynesians had arrived long before Tasman and had what would be more correctly described as 'found' it. But whether 'found' or 'discovered,' there was a difference.
    "First, Europeans discovered the Maori; but the Maori did not find Europe, until the English showed it to them. Second, even if one speaks of a Polynesian discovery of New Zealand and supposes that the earliest navigators found their way back to where they had come from in order to bring in women and supplies, this knowledge was lost... long before Tasman's arrival.
    "The reason why one cannot say that they had discovered it is that they had no universal schema by which to describe and locate their discovery. The islands they had stumbled upon were, therefore, literally, found, but not discovered.
    "One might imagine that it is a mere quibble whether one calls the Polynesian landfalls a 'find' or a 'discovery.' But it is far from a mere quibble when one wants to understand the differences in the attitudes of the finders and of the discoverers. To the former this was a once-off experience, which did not alter their world-picture or their understanding of themselves; to the latter it was further proof that the earth was round, that its islands or continents were not yet all known but soon would be, and it was an exercise in seamanship, astronomy and geography because they were able to return to Europe and tell others about it. 'To discover' implies that one is able to put one's find on the map.
    "It is true that the Polynesian landings were an addition to knowledge; but a very small and very locally limited addition. The Tasman sightings filled in lacunae in a vast general picture of the world, which had nothing much to do with the strictly local cultural conditions in the Netherlands which had prompted Tasman to sail. Tasman enlarged the world and did not just add one more chant or ritual dance to the self-legitimising features of his own culture. He transcended it.
    "All the same, there is a telling contrast which Salmond not so much as mentions. Polynesian sailors were incredibly intrepid because they were prepared to sail into the unknown. European sailors were never intrepid. They hugged the coastlines and sailed out into the Atlantic only when they thought they 'knew' what they were up to. When Columbus' discovery, for example, did not live up to his bookish expectations, he refused to believe his eyes. Polynesian sailors, unhampered by books, were a great deal more enterprising and receptive of novelty. Salmond wipes out the differences and impoverishes the past."

~ Peter Munz, from his review 'The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress'
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This one-sided debate we're having about James Cook ... [update 2]

James Cook (1728-1779), painted by Nathaniel Dance-Holland [public domain]

You would think from reading media reports of James Cook in recent days that he did little more in his long life but come to New Zealand to commit "hara or atrocities" -- two words used this morning on Radio New Zealand to discuss this man's contribution to history.

RNZ's report this morning recounts how an "expression of regret" on the part of the Crown is to be given, as part of the 250-year commemorations of Cook's arrival to these shores, to "leaders of Gisborne iwi." This is accompanied on the RNZ website (our "public broadcaster") by "related stories" with a headline "He Was a Barbarian," and another recounting how graffiti on a James Cook statue in Gisborne is "an act of activism that prompts debate about New Zealand's history" inciting a "hard but necessary korero."

If this is a "debate" over Cook's legacy in this year of commemoration of his first voyage here, then if this sort of media coverage is any guide, it is a very one-sided one.

Acknowledge as you must that the killing of any innocent is a tragedy. Indeed, that is just how Cook saw these nine deaths, as we will see. But all such incidents happen within a context that, if our "korero" is to be an honest one, must be part of every account.

That First Encounter

Cook was down here in the Pacific not to rape and pillage but to carry out astronomical measurements and, while down here, to explore the botany and geography and to map the coastline of this country -- a place of whom the rest of the world knew little about the inhabitants other than that four of Abel Tasman's crew had been killed by them in 1642. This being the main reason for Tasman spending little more time here, scarpering as soon as the slaughter started.

And as fearful as Cook's crew must have been of their imminent first encounter, imagine how it must have appeared to those on land:

To picture how those undreamed-of strangers must have appeared to the Maori, we must imagine what our reactions would be if we suffered a Martian invasion. According to one Maori chief, Te Horeta Taniwha, who as a small boy was present when Cook came to Mercury Bay, the Maori at first thought the white men were goblins and their ship a god. Eighty years later, the old man recalled their astonishment when one of the goblins pointed a walking-stick at a shag and, amidst thunder and lightning, the bird fell down dead. "There was one supreme man in that ship. We knew that was the lord of the whole by his perfect gentlemanly and noble demeanour.' [1]

A startling and wholly unexpected encounter for the locals! So how did this noble and gentlemanly figure oversee the death of (what is said to be) nine men at Poverty Bay? Recall that this was Cook's first encounter with a people of whom little was known other than a slaughter. He had come prepared, inviting on the voyage a friendly Tahitian called Tupia to help with interpretation. Cook's Endeavour arrived in Poverty Bay after first sighting East Cape two days earlier, anchoring "in a deep bay where it was hoped to find wood, water and fresh provisions."

The natives were numerous -- "a strong raw-boned, well-made active people..." as Cook described them -- and their speech was near enough to Tahitian for Tupia to be able to talk with them. Far from being friendly, however, they were insolent and aggressive, and showed little wish to trade. This was their first contact with white men, and they had yet to learn the chastening power of firearms. There were minor skirmishes ashore in which two Maori were killed and several wounded. 

    When a fishing canoe came near the ship's boats Cook ordered those in it to be brought aboard, forcibly if need be, so that Tupia could explain to them the visitor's desire for peace and friendship. Not surprisingly the natives resisted. A volley was fired and four were killed. Cook's conscience about the affair was uneasy, and his excuse that otherwise he and his companions would have been "knocked on the head" must have sounded thin even to himself.

    [Ships Botanist Joseph] Banks was shocked. He wrote that it was the most disagreeable day his life had yet seen, and added: "Black be the mark for it." In their brief time ashore he and [his assistant] Solander collected a meagre forty plants, and they were glad to get away from the place. So was Cook. 

    He named it Poverty Bay, "because it afforded us no one thing we wanted," and the unhappy name has stuck. On its shores now stands the town of Gisborne. [2]

So now you have some wider context on which to judge this debate, and the beginning of some context to deduce whether this 250-year commemoration should be more celebration or commiseration.

An impression by naturalist Alexander Sporing of Endeavour's  1769
encounter with the defiant occupants of a Maori war canoe,

Could It Have Been Better?

As both Cook and Banks agreed at the time, it could have been a whole lot better. Indeed, they had hoped fervently it would be so -- and in many later landings on this voyage it was, especially as Cook discovered (as many rugby-playing nations have since discovered too) that, despite their obvious love of fighting, "the main purpose of the Maori [haka] was to demonstrate their courage by insulting the white man rather than actually to attack them."[3]

And it could have been a whole lot worse -- as it had been for those local inhabitants who had encountered Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, or the Belgians in the Congo - or for those Maori who almost at the same time, encountered the likes of French sea captain Jean-Francois Marie De Surville -- or for the crew of Tobias Furneaux, or Marion du Fresne and his crew.

First contacts between two entirely unknown cultures invite trouble. There is no reason to believe Cook wished to kill anyone, and every reason to believe he intended only peace and fervently regretted what happened.

Cook's Legacy

 If this is a debate, then let us make a case for this man and his legacy. He is much, much more than the cartoon figure appearing on NZ websites in recent days. To paraphrase George Reisman, "Those who do not understand the place of Cook have been intellectually barbarized by corrupt education."

Cook left New Zealand on this first voyage having observed a people mired in war, slavery and human sacrifice, yet still "deeply impressed with what he had seen of New Zeland and its people." [4]  With this voyage, and his mapping and reports -- and those of Banks and other scientists accompanying him on this voyage -- he left behind a people now connected, through the small amount of trade conducted and the great amounts to come, to the international division of labour. And with it Western Civilisation.

Whatever the accomplishments of Maori in their eight centuries here, what Cook and other explorers brought with them was this link to this wider accomplishment grafted out over many millennia. Over those millennia, savagery was steadily (if irregularly) diminished around the globe. As it has here in New Zealand.

This is not trivial. Without it, human progress on the scale we all now take for granted would not be possible.

To further paraphrase George Reisman,

Those who deny [this] demonstrate that they have not made the knowledge and values that constitute Western Civilization their own. They are self-confessed and self-made aliens living in the midst of Western Civilization yet preferring to all of the knowledge and values that constitute it, the meagre, primitive state of knowledge and values constituting the culture of “indigenous peoples,” who are at a level comparable to that of people who lived many thousands of years ago, with no knowledge of reading or writing, and hardly any knowledge of science, mathematics, philosophy, music, or art. 

    Whoever, in the words of Ludwig von Mises, prefers life to death, health to disease, and wealth to poverty, is logically obliged to prefer Western Civilization and its offshoots of individual freedom and capitalism to all other civilizations and cultures that have ever existed.

'The Death of Cook,' 1785, by Francesco Bartolozzi, William Byrne, John Webber [public domain]

Correcting the Debate

Cook himself was killed at Kealakakua Bay, Hawaii, murdered by another misunderstanding, "sacrificed by the priests of Hawaii. They had made a living god of him and had then realised their error, and the only way to prove him mortal in the sight of the people was to kill him. Many great men have died for the same reason." [5] The man known as to Britons as "the ablest and most renowned navigator this or any other country has produced" was dead. It was said that on hearing the news "all Britain mourned,"

and not only Britain but her friends and her enemies and the whole western world. No-one could be sure how the people of his favourite island, Tahiti, would have reacted, for in their eyes he was a demi-god and presumably immportal ...

Cook was essentially a man of peace. He never commanded a ship of the line, and he never fought in a major naval engagement; yet apart from Nelson he remains today the most famous of all Britain's captains ... 

He was a natural leader of men, a peerless seaman and navigator, a superb cartographer, an acute and accurate observer, and the foremost explorer os his own age. He died knowing that his acheivements in three historic voyages made between 1768 and 1779 could never be surpassed or even again be equalled, for he had left comparatively little for others to do.

"It is almost impossible," say the authors of The Voyages of Captain Cook, "to overstate Cook's contribution to geographical knowledge":

On the negatiive side, he silenced forever those theorists ... who insistead that there must be a great southern continent to counterbalance the land mass of the northern hemisphere, and he disproveed the theory that there existed a practical north-west passage around the top of America...

On the positive side, he discovered and charted much of the Pacific that we know today, from the west coast of Canada and the Hawaiian islands to New Caledonia; he established, by sailing around it, that New Zealand was no part of a mythical continent but two large, narrowly separated islands; he disproved the Dutch belief that "New Holland" was entirely barren by traversing the whole length of its fertile eastern coast, thus paving the way for British settlement there eighteen years later; and he confirmed that a strait separated New Guinea from what is now Australia.

He did much more however. He pioneered and perfected the use of the chronometer to determine longitude, and so took a lot of the guesswork out of navigation. He showed by practical example how scurvy, the greatest single scourge of seafarers, could be controlle and conquered. He wrote simply and informatively about the places he visited and with humanity and insight about the people he met and how they lived. His accounts of his voyages, illustrated by the various artists who accompanied him, became best-selling books which not only broadened the knowledge and mental horizons of the many who read them but lent such apparent weight to the theories of Rousseau and other philosophers of teh back-tonature school that it took several decades of earnest missionary propaganda to tarnish the poppular image of the 'noble savage.' And as father of modern marine surveying he esatablished a tradition and fouded a line that extended through Vancouver, Bligh, Broughton, Flinders, Owen, Fitzroy and others far into the nineteenth century. 

It is remarkable enough that any one man could have achieved so much, but in Cook's case it is even more remarkable ... for he came into the world with no advantage at all save his own intelligence and will.[6]

He was a great man, an Enlightenment-era hero,  and a world-historical figure. That an apology is now possible for what he himself abundantly regretted in that first encounter is a measure of how the world and New Zealand's place in it has changed since then, not least because of him and the values he both represented and helped bring here.

And since we can all now share a similar sense of humour, here's Billy T. James' own reconstructions of those historic "first contacts" ...

[1] Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (1991), p. 32-3
[2] Rex & Thea Rienits, The Voyages of Captain Cook (1968), p.43
[3] Ibid, p. 45

[4] Ibid, p. 50-51
[5] Ibid, p. 152
[6] Ibid, p. 12-14

UPDATE 1:  The Point of Order blog pays tribute to the great man, who

[in] ten years, in three voyages of discovery of high risk and prodigious burden, ... achieved what surely ranks as one of the greatest expansions of the known world (superbly chronicled in J.C. Beaglehole’s edition of Cook’s journals)...

The other marker which emerges from the journals is Cook’s humanity. For a man of initially-limited horizons and trammelled with great responsibility, Cook often showed keen understanding, a remarkably non-judgemental attitude and a willingness to see things from the other person’s point of view. It made him a shrewd and scientific observer, and gave him a claim to fineness of character.

The piece is beautifully written, and deserves to be read in full.  It concludes by suggesting Cook himself is also due an apology --

Cook’s life work took more than ten years. So there is still plenty of time...

UPDATE 2:  Don Brash abhors the "factually incorrrect meddling" of British High Commissioner Laura Clark.

"She acknowledged Cook's regret over the deaths but inflated the death toll to nine without acknowledging that he recorded in his diary four or five deaths at Gisborne," he said.
    "Unwittingly, the British High Commissioner sided with activists and helped them score a major propaganda point."

Backing the iwi's number, Anne Salmond responds that Brash's comments are "extremely unhelpful."
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