In this episode, we look at the life of Captain James Cook, the first European navigator to circumnavigate the South Pacific Ocean, and the first man to make it to New Zealand. In doing so, he became the first person to discover the entire South Pacific coast of North America and South America, and one of the most successful navigators of all time.
00:00:00.000So they sail quite far south, but they don't find anything, which eventually leads Cook to change course and decide to go westward towards New Zealand, which, again, they already knew about, they already knew of its existence because it had been discovered by Abel Tasman in the early 1600s.
00:00:26.960But Cook, when he arrived there, was the first European navigator to basically circumnavigate the entire, well, both islands, and, again, putting his cartography skills on full display, drew the most pristine, detailed map of the islands and its boundaries.
00:00:48.920And I think, isn't it, for generations it wasn't better?
00:00:53.100Or for, like, well, a hundred years or more?
00:00:56.500Yeah, 150 years, something like that, yeah.
00:00:59.960But, obviously, I'd be remiss not to mention something of the encounter with the Maoris whilst he's there.
00:01:07.260So I think it's important to mention that the Tahitians, the Maoris, the Easter Islanders, they're all a part of the same sort of ethnic group.
00:01:17.900They're all, they all speak a similar language.
00:01:21.420When they came from Tahiti, they actually took one of the natives on board with them called Tupia, because Banks had become quite friendly with him and he thought it would be useful to have a translator for any of the islands they went on.
00:01:35.600And when they got to New Zealand, it turned out that Tupia and the Maori could perfectly speak to one another.
00:01:41.520They both spoke the Polynesian language because, obviously, that's where they come from.
00:01:46.660The New Zealanders, the Maoris had arrived in New Zealand in about 1300, something like that, from the Polynesian islands.
00:01:54.640But the Maori were, in many ways, like the Tahitians in the rampant thievery, or sometimes even worse.
00:02:05.280They'd be trading and the Europeans would pass them something and then they'd just bolt and not hand over the thing that they'd obviously said they were going to trade in.
00:02:17.220People say, sorry, just quickly say, oh, that's just their culture, was it?
00:02:33.980I think they did, I think they largely did understand about the idea of ownership.
00:02:39.240You would get the general idea, right?
00:02:41.120You would get the idea of what the Europeans expected out of you, eventually.
00:02:45.820But this was, in the time that Cook sailed around these two islands, there was a constant pattern of, some would be very, very friendly and some would attack with spears.
00:02:56.160So there was one occasion where they fired the muskets purposefully over their heads in order to sort of make them surrender.
00:11:44.620They live in a tranquility which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition.
00:12:12.320The earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all the necessaries of life.
00:12:17.980They covet no magnificent houses, household stuff and others.
00:12:21.820They live in a warm and fine climate and enjoy a very wholesome air, so that they have very little need of clothing.
00:12:28.740And this they seem to be fully sensible of, for many of whom we give cloth to.
00:12:34.420They left it carelessly upon the sea beach and in the woods as a thing they have had no manner of use for.
00:12:41.000In short, they seem to set no value upon anything we gave them.
00:12:46.060Nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one article we could offer them.
00:12:51.120This, in my opinion, argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessaries of life and that they have no superfluities.
00:12:59.440So I just found that a remarkable one.
00:13:02.800There's a hint of Rousseau's noble savage in it, I think, as well, though, which I found an interesting point of view from Cook's perspective.
00:13:11.020There's some great accounts from Alfred Wallace, who went into the Amazon basin and found, basically, Aboriginal type people.
00:13:21.080Basically, people living in, quite literally, the Stone Age.
00:13:45.840I find it remarkable, though, that there's something within that that there is no genuine desire to progress, which I see is just such a fundamental part of human nature.
00:13:54.400Not in, like, the progressive, you know, political sense, but just to advance things, to push, to discover, to...
00:14:48.260Eventually, they get the ship repaired just to go far enough to Indonesia, and they arrive in Batavia, or modern-day Jakarta, which at that point was obviously a colony of the Dutch.
00:15:00.180And obviously, now that they've finally arrived at another European port, Cook can pass on his notes to be sent away to the Admiralty for his research.
00:15:12.180But one of the things that he proudly notes in it is we've not lost a single man to scurvy.
00:15:30.260You know, people get picky and fussy, just like they do today.
00:15:33.240But Cook was like, well, fine, the officers will eat it, and you'll see that we're eating it, and you'll eat it too, but I'm not having anyone dying of scurvy on this ship.
00:15:44.620But the problem is that Batavia is a horrendous, rancid, malaria-ridden place.
00:15:52.900And in the time there, whilst they have no choice, they have no choice because the ship needs to be repaired after the incident on the Great Barrier Reef.
00:16:02.660But that means just sitting it out in this disease-ridden cesspit for weeks and weeks, which ends up losing Cook about 30 of his crew.
00:16:12.260So, just gone, including many of the artist, Sidney Parkinson, who it might be possible to get some of his work up on the actual display on the epoch.
00:16:25.640But we still have some of his stuff, his drawings of the Maori and of some of the plants that he saw on the voyage and some of that.
00:16:31.820But, yeah, just taken in the prime of his life by just having to wait in this malaria-ridden dung heap.
00:16:37.760Yeah, it's interesting. Quite often we get told that when the Europeans visited these new places, we brought diseases with them as though it was deliberate, as though it was a type of biological warfare.
00:17:26.220Eventually they got the ship working again, but they were working with basically a skeleton crew because most of the crew was either dead or incapacitated.
00:17:34.820from the illness, but eventually they managed to get themselves towards Cape Town in South Africa.
00:18:36.420Which obviously was a buzz back in Britain, you know, that what had been achieved.
00:18:44.220But what's important to note is that sort of in the high social circles, Cook got very little recognition for it because Banks had been around, done the circuit, met the king and all that.
00:18:57.640And had really just sold the whole idea to them that it was his expedition.