Cook Landing Site National Historic Reserve

**A site out of sight
**You can decontextualise heritage without moving it. This obelisk marks the setting of Europe’s encounter with Maori New Zealand. In 1642 Maori killed three men of Dutchman Abel Tasman’s expedition, but a more lasting impact was made in October 1769 after Nicholas Young from HMS Endeavour sighted land at Turanganui-a-Kiwa, modern Poverty Bay. It was an unhappy meeting, especially for the nine Maori Captain James Cook’s men killed. We have Archdeacon Herbert Williams to thank for this overshadowed obelisk.

Another Williams, WL, had been researching Cook’s historic first footing just as the Gisborne Harbour Board, struggling to maintain the district’s lifeline to the world, blasted, dredged and reclaimed away the historic sites. Later research would place Williams’s site within 50 metres of the actual place. Pretty good going. The story of the monument reads like a bad comedy. The Cook Monument Committee collected pennies from the colony’s school children and the government gave £500, but there was still a shortfall as the time approached for cabinet minister James Carroll to unveil the memorial. The committee sweet-talked the balance from the local Patriotic Fund Committee (flush with funds left over from South African War work) and Carroll pulled the cord on 7 October 1906. But there was outrage when people discovered that three of the four sides saluted Poverty Bay troopers and just one Cook.

The Evening Post cracked a painfully obvious joke about a ‘monumental folly’ and another committee passed the hat around for the Cook Memorial Rectification Fund. The reserve became a national historic reserve in 1990, 14 years after gaining partial protection. Now, though, the site is barely within sight or scent of the sea (unless leaking log carriers are aground offshore). A small drop in the ground in front of the obelisk marks the old shoreline and a ‘Banks Garden’ exhibits specimens of the plants collected by Joseph Banks in 1769. Historic Places Trust plaques tell the Cook story. They have battled to maintain a ‘cone of vision’ through to the sea but the log piles, container stacks and cool stores require you to think fairly imaginatively if you want to recapture the essence of the events of 230 years ago.

2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: Frances Porter, A Sense of History, Government Printer, Wellington, 1978.

Image Credit: Pseudopanax

Kia Ora Cook by Lester Hall

Captain James Cook by Marika Jones