Cook, Tupaia and Maori

Page 1 of 6

• 1. The newcomers arrive
• 2. Early European voyagers
• 3. Tupaia and Cook meet
• 4. Colonisation
• 5. Outcomes
• 6. Find out more
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The newcomers arrive

Captain Cook's voyages around the globe took him to remote parts - to the Pacific Island nations and to Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa is Maori for 'Land of the Long White Cloud', an earlier name for New Zealand given by the Polynesian explorer Kupe, upon discovery of these lands about 1,000 years ago). Cook's arrival offered immediate benefits, both for the weary European travellers and for the Maori in New Zealand. Both parties, eager to capitalise on the opportunities offered by the arrival of the newcomers, traded material items, ideas, values and worldly information with each other.

'The voyages themselves... had a more immediate impact on the Maori than on other indigenous peoples of the Pacific region...'

Cook's erstwhile Polynesian associate, Tupaia, facilitated much of this. But it was not only goods and ideas that were exchanged. Less fortunate outcomes, including death, resulted from the meeting of the two groups, marring relationships between the Maori and Cook's people. In today's language, such circumstances have been put down to 'cross-cultural misunderstandings'. The net effect of these early meetings, however, and the subsequent intercultural relationships that developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in New Zealand, was the growth of distinct identities and the definition of new rules of encounter between the two groups. Not least, they were founding contributions - both positive and negative - to nationhood.

Such ideas were largely for the future. The voyages themselves were remarkable in their own right, and had a more immediate impact on the Maori than on other indigenous peoples of the Pacific region, although in the context of the history of travel in the southern seas of the Pacific, Cook could be considered a latecomer. Fast-forwarding some 230 years, the present writer is a Maori who has embarked on her own ethnographic voyage - in New Zealand and elsewhere around the world - and now offers her own perspective on the range of assumptions that underpinned Captain Cook's journeys to the southern Pacific, on the cross-cultural relationship-building mediated by Cook and Tupaia, and on the impact of each culture upon the other. Put simply, this piece considers the role played by Cook in the formation of modern-day New Zealand.

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Published: 2002-08-01