Seldom, if ever, can the discovery of a new land have been attended by more inauspicious circumstances. There were Maoris on the far bank and they were clearly hostile. (One finds it difficult to blame them, even if they were hostile for the wrong reason: the colossal arrogance of the western European nations who roamed the world annexing everything in sight, regardless of the thoughts or wishes of the rightful owners of those regions, is quite stupefying.) Cook and some men crossed the river in their yawl – the pinnace remaining behind – to try to establish some sort of contact with the Maoris. Cook and some others disappeared into the trees and no sooner had they done so than a party of Maoris tried to cut off the crew of the yawl. The men in the pinnace fired warning shots over the Maoris’ heads, but still they advanced upon the yawl. The next shot from the pinnace was not a warning shot: a Maori was killed instantly. Cook and his men retired to the Endeavour. End of round one.

  The following morning Cook and a party went ashore again and approached a group of heavily armed and clearly truculent natives. Cook and his men offered them presents but they weren’t interested in presents, they were interested in the swords that the English were carrying. One tried to wrest Green’s sword away, a mêlée broke out and the inevitable happened. The tally this time – one Maori dead, three injured. Cook and his men returned to the Endeavour. End of round two.

  Cook was not a man to give up easily. In the afternoon he had himself rowed around the bay searching for a spot where he might land unopposed. Everywhere, however, the surf was too heavy and he had no option than to make his way back to the Endeavour. On their way they enountered a couple of canoes. Tupia addressed them saying that they – the white men – were friends and wished to speak to them. The Maoris started to paddle away as swiftly as they could. Cook ordered a shot to be fired over their heads in the hope that this would make them stop. They stopped all right. They stopped, turned, and came at Cook’s boat with all the speed they could muster. They knew enough about musket fire now to associate those bangs with death. Clearly they thought they were going to be killed and if that were the case they might as well die fighting. The tally this time – four Maoris dead.

  That was the end of the third round and the end of this hopelessly one-sided contest. Cook, like everyone else aboard the Endeavour, was appalled by the happenings of the previous twenty-four hours and realised that to attempt any more landings on this particular stretch of the coast would only precipitate further senseless slaughter. The Endeavour weighed anchor and sailed away. Rather sadly or bitterly or both Cook named the place Poverty Bay – ‘Because it afforded us no one thing we wanted’. And Poverty Bay it is to this day.

  The Endeavour moved south round the Mahia Peninsula into Hawke’s Bay – Cook named it after the First Lord of the Admiralty – a huge shallow bay about sixty miles across. At the north end of the bay they encountered some Maoris in canoes who were civil and friendly enough but at the southern end they encountered hostile Maoris. One canoe came alongside making a pretence to barter: what they did, in fact, was to try to kidnap young Tiata. Alas for them, like all the other Maoris they came across, they had never heard of the existence of firearms and three of them had to die before the youngster was rescued. Cook promptly called the spot Cape Kidnappers and went on his way.

  The further south they went the less likelihood there appeared of finding any harbour. Cook came to the conclusion that there were going to be no suitable harbours for a long way down that coast (he was perfectly right) and decided to go back north. The spot where he retraced his steps he christened, appropriately enough, Cape Turnagain.

  It is to be noted that all decisions such as those were Cook’s and Cook’s alone. His was the entire burden of responsibility and there is no doubt that while his officers were occasionally irritated by his secrecy their trust in him was absolute. It is true that Cook did from time to time carry out a form of democratic consultation with his men but these were usually called merely so that Cook could inform them of decisions he had actually made. But there was one authenticated occasion – this was on his next ship, the Resolution – when Cook did ask for general agreement on a proposal. When the allotted time had come for them to return to England he proposed that they should remain for another year in the Pacific and Antarctic! They agreed.

  They repassed Hawke’s Bay and Poverty Bay and came to a sheltered inlet which provided them with water. The Maoris here were friendly and eager to trade. Through Tupia, who experienced no difficulty at all with the Maori language, they learned that the natives called it Tolaga Bay: for once, Cook let it go at that. Banks and his scientists were in raptures for here they found in the wildest profusion trees, plants, flowers, birds and animals and insects that were quite unknown in any other part of the world.

  They continued north, then turned directly almost due west, following the coastline and as they rounded the promontory were threatened by hostile Maoris in huge war canoes. Cook had round shot fired over their heads and they made off for shore at great speed. The promontory, inevitably, became Cape Runaway.

  Now they were moving along the shores of a fertile crescent of land which was astonishingly, well cultivated – to such an extent that Cook bestowed on those waters the name of the Bay of Plenty. At the far end of the bay they put into a suitable inlet and here Cook and Green took their astronomical instruments ashore to observe a transit of Mercury. The inlet became, of course, Mercury Bay.

  And so they made their way up to the most northerly point of New Zealand with Cook busily naming everything in sight. A look at a large scale map gives the impression that Cook must have been so taken up with this occupation, which clearly delighted him, that he could have had very little time indeed left for charting and navigation.

  Cook rested his crew briefly in the Bay of Islands, reputedly the most beautiful in New Zealand, then set off again to the north to attempt the rounding of the northern tip of New Zealand which, from the log entries and navigational fixes Tasman had made the previous century, he knew could not now be very far distant. Nor was it, only about a hundred miles, but Cook was faced with such bad weather and such adverse winds – they blew strongly from the north-west, which was precisely the direction in which Cook wanted to sail – that the lumbering collier, a notoriously poor sailer at the best of times, made practically no progress at all. All the crew suffered horribly and it would have been easy for Cook to take shelter in some convenient inlet and wait for some more propitious moment but then Cook had to have something, some very special quality indeed, to make him the greatest explorer in our history. And he had – this diamond-hard determination to achieve a goal he had set himself, an inflexible will that made it impossible for him to abandon a project once embarked upon.

  And on Christmas Day, 1769 (‘All hands drunk’, Banks reports), after two weeks of incessant battling against gale force winds and continuously heavy seas, Cook did indeed achieve his goal. He sighted and identified a group of islands known as the Three Kings, last seen by Tasman a century and a quarter before. Cook knew that he had cleared the north of New Zealand and was now well to the west of its most north-westerly point, Cape Maria van Diemen, so named by Tasman. Cook turned the Endeavour south.

  The west coast of North Island was less well charted by Cook than the rest of the country. There were two excellent reasons for this. Firstly, Cook was in a hurry: the Endeavour was beginning to leak badly, she had experienced such rough weather ever since leaving Tahiti that the caulking was beginning to come away from the seams; and she was now trailing so much marine growth that it was becoming urgent that it should be removed as soon as possible. For both purposes the Endeavour would have to be careened on some suitably sandy beach and that there were none such around on that inhospitable coast Cook was pretty certain. Secondly, they were on a lee shore with the powerful westerlies trying to push the Endeavour towards land. ‘A very dangerous coast’, Cook observed laconically and prudently gave it a very wide berth indeed, with the result that he missed such splendid harbours as Hokianga, Kaipara, Manukau (where the modern city of Auckland now stands) and Kawhia. (Cook was to miss several very important harbours in the following years, including Sydney and Vancouver: this – with the exception of Sydney – was invariably because he was standing far out on a lee shore, or because he sailed past them during the night.)

  On the 11 January they raised an 8,000 feet snow-covered mountain cone which Cook called Mount Egmont. Beyond this the coast-line turned to the south-east but instead of following it Cook sailed directly across the mouth of the bight until he reached the northern shores of what we now call South Island, where he turned in an easterly direction, passing Murderers’ Bay (now Golden Bay) in memory of members of Tasman’s crew who had been slain by the Maoris there while attempting to effect a landing, and Tasman Bay, before arriving at an anchorage that was perfect for his purpose, an inlet almost totally enclosed by hills and provided with a selection of splendid beaches all ideally suited for careening the Endeavour. It was the finest harbour Cook had found in all of the South Seas and he was to return here several times in the years to come. He gave it the name of Queen Charlotte Sound.

  While his men were scraping and caulking the careened vessel, Cook went climbing. Cook had the extraordinary ability, so uncanny as to be almost clairvoyant, of being able to guess at what lay on the other side of a hill. If he thought there was land close ahead, there would be land ahead. If he thought a coast would tend in a certain direction, it did. If he sighted distant land and thought it would turn out to be an island, an island it would be; if he thought it but part of a much larger land mass, then it would almost certainly be that. There are many instances of disputes between Cook and his officers as to what they were likely to see next or how a newly discovered piece of land would resolve itself: there are no instances of Cook having been wrong. It must have been very exasperating indeed for his officers.

  And so Cook went climbing for he was convinced that there must be a strait leading through to the eastern seas. He didn’t have to climb very far before he reached an elevation sufficient to show him that his supposition was correct, and on 7 February, with the Endeavour ready for sea again, Cook took her through the strait to the east. For once, Banks insisted on naming this passage and as it was one and the same person who had suspected the existence of this passage, had discovered it and was the first to sail through it, Cook Strait seemed a very appropriate choice of name.

  Some of the ship’s officers still maintained that what they thought was North Island might still be only a peninsula attached to a very much greater land mass to the south-east – Cook had steadily maintained that this was not possible but there is nothing so infuriating as being confronted by a person who is always right so his officers stuck stubbornly to their opinions. Patiently, instead of striking off to the south as he had intended to do immediately, Cook turned the Endeavour to the north-east and two days later they sighted Cape Turnagain, the starting point for their circumnavigation of the island. This effectively put an end to the argument.

  Cook turned south, down past the Cook Strait again (astonishingly, he’d missed what is now Wellington Harbour) then down the east coast of South Island – or what we now know to be South Island. Cook, on the other hand, didn’t know whether it was an island or whether it was attached to some southern continental land mass, and, as he didn’t want to find out if it were the latter the hard way, he moved very circumspectly down the coast, tacking to and fro in the hours of darkness in waters that they had already established to be safe.

  On 17 February, after spending two days running parallel to a range of snow-capped mountains, they sailed by what Cook took to be a large off-shore island which, no doubt as a return compliment for Cook Strait, he named after Banks. This is one of the only two mistakes of any note that Cook made in his circumnavigation of New Zealand. It is in fact a peninsula but the strip of land (on which Christchurch now stands) joining it to the mainland is so low-lying that, from some distance out to sea it is easy to mistake it for an island.

  They continued south-west for a few uneventful days along a barren and rather inhospitable coast. As they drew near the south end of the island westerly gales sprang up and drove them well out into the Pacific, and when they turned west again in search of the mainland, having in the meantime made a good deal of southing, they regained contact not with South Island but with Stewart Island, which is separated from the southernmost point of South Island by the Foveaux Strait, and when they rounded Southwest Cape, Cook was in no doubt at all that they had reached the southern limits of the island for the wide deep ocean swell they now encountered could only have been built up over thousands of miles of ocean. Cook headed the Endeavour north, past the magnificent fjords that run deep into the south-west corner of South Island.

  Banks and the scientists thought that those fjords would prove very rewarding for botanising and geological research, and heavy pressure was brought to bear on Cook to sail up one of them and anchor. This Cook positively refused to do and for very sound reasons indeed. Those fjords were cliff-sided so that the wind in the fjords could blow in only one of two directions – from the west, up the fjord, or from the east, down the fjord, and as the prevailing winds were continuously from the west this meant that once the Endeavour got inside a fjord she would be unable to get back down again.

  A man of Bank’s unquestioned intelligence must have appreciated the logic of this, but he still put his angry disappointment on record. Almost certainly the anger was fuelled by an element of chagrin or pique: Banks had tended to go along with Alexander Dalrymple’s concept of a southern continent and had firmly believed that the southern part of South Island would be found to be joined to it. But now he saw Cook in the process of demolishing Dalrymple’s dream, while at the same time completely disproving his, Banks’, own idea. It must have been very vexatious indeed.

  For the next two weeks the Endeavour sailed north-west up the coast, and a bleak, inhospitable and forbidding coast it was, backed by a range of snow-topped and glaciated mountains – what we now know as the Southern Alps. On 26 March they were back in Queen Charlotte Sound, having completed the circumnavigation of South Island, having in the process completely demolished many myths and misconceptions about the country. The most commonly held idea had been that the land Tasman had discovered was a peninsula jutting out from the great southern continent. Now Cook had proved conclusively that it consisted of two separate islands and that there was no continental land mass anywhere near it. There were going to be a good number of red faces in the Royal Society when Cook returned home with what would be, for them, this bad news.

  Apart from mistakenly assuming that Banks Peninsula was an island, Cook’s only other error was to regard Stewart Island as a peninsula, and a very understandable error it was, too, because at that point the Endeavour had been blown so far to the east and south that when Cook regained contact with land he had no means of knowing that they had passed by the Foveaux Strait in the interval. Those errors apart, Cook’s chart of New Zealand is most astonishingly accurate.

  FOUR

  AUSTRALIA AND THE GREAT BARRIER REEF

  The Endeavour did not remain long in the vicinity of Queen Charlotte Sound. Both the ship and all aboard were in excellent condition and Cook was in no mind to linger. They had done all that had been asked of them to do and now they were free to return to England. There were three possible routes home, so Cook called his usual democratic council of officers and, as usual, made up his mind in his own way.

  They could go home by Cape Horn, but that was a long and dangerous passage. Cook doubted whether the cordage, now long past its best, could stand up to the storms they could almost certainly expect off the Cape, and food supplies, now running low, were judged insufficient for the length of the voyage and, besides, the southern winter was coming on.

  They could have gone via the Cape of Good Hope, but this involved the appalling prospect of the Endeavour, which, at the best of times, could only sail into the wind with the greatest of difficulty, beating for endless weeks against the prevailing westerlies before reaching the Cape. This would again involve the question of food supplies. And, besides, Tasman had already done that voyage and Cook wasn’t a man much given to following in the footsteps of others.

  The third choice, the one Cook finally made, was the inevitable one. For Cook, it must have been irresistible, for it involved a fresh achievement, a new discovery, an exploration of the only great stretch of land still left unexplored in the temperate world – the east coast of Australia. As far as Cook was aware, no European except Tasman had ever seen or set foot on the eastern side of the continent: this was a challenge after his heart. (In point of fact what Cook did not know – and died not knowing – was that he himself was the first discoverer, for neither Tasman nor he ever learned that Van Diemen’s Land, which Tasman had visited, was the island we now call Tasmania and quite detached from the Australian mainland.) And when they reached the north of Australia they could head for the Dutch East Indies where, Cook knew, they could obtain provisions in quantity.

  The Endeavour left New Zealand on 1 April. Cook’s intention was to head straight for Van Diemen’s Land – Tasman had left an accurate enough fix on its position – but contrary gales blew them far to the north of their intended route and when they did sight land it was Australia and not Tasmania: just as gales had caused Cook to miss the Foveaux Strait between South Island and Stewart Island, so now more gales caused him to miss Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania. As far as Cook was concerned, he thought he’d just sighted land some way further up the same coast as Tasman had seen.

  It is worth noting, perhaps, that by a remarkable coincidence Cook’s attitude to the Bass Strait was as ambivalent as Tasman’s to Cook Strait. Tasman, in his charts, showed North and South Islands joined together but in his journal expressed the private belief that there probably was a strait separating the two: Cook, in his chart, showed Australia and Tasmania as being joined together but in his journal expressed the private belief that there was probably a strait separating the two.