Rewriting our history

It seems likely gifts that botanist Joseph Banks took back to England were initially given to Tupaea.

This may be close to heresy in Australia, where Captain James Cook is almost as Australian as the Sydney Harbour Bridge and where, National Museum of Australia director Craddock Morton argues, the 18th-century English navigator has been adopted like no other.

But in the same building that is proudly mounting a rare exhibition of Pacific treasures collected by Cook on his last, fatal expedition into the South Seas, and in a country that had at last count almost 80 memorials to the great man - including his parents' cottage, transplanted stone by stone from Yorkshire to Melbourne - Dr Paul Tapsell is suggesting that the Captain was very likely guided on his first exploration by a Polynesian navigator.

Further: his "discovery" of New Zealand, his very survival in the first dangerous meetings with Maori, and the most prized gifts taken back to Britain and now housed at Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford may have been due instead to the islander known as Tupaea, esteemed by iwi who saw him - not Cook or botanist Sir Joseph Banks - as the chief of HMS Endeavour.

The opening of the Pacific to Europeans, Tapsell argues, is very much an achievement of two cultures and should be seen as such.

Tapsell, Director Maori at Auckland Museum, expounded his theory at a symposium at Canberra's National Museum in conjunction with Cook's Pacific Encounters, an exhibition of Maori and other Pacific taonga gathered during Cook's third voyage and held, almost unknown, for more than 200 years at Germany's George-August University of Gottingen.

Were it not for the initiative of Hawaiian historians who convinced the university to allow the collection to be displayed to the ancestors of the original donors for the first time in two centuries, and for the similar initiative of the National Museum in further persuading the Germans to allow it to dog-leg through Australia, it would have remained seen only on Sundays by people who knew it was there.

Remarkably, the world's largest collection of artefacts gathered during Cook's three Pacific voyages survived long storage in primitive conditions, through revolutions and two world wars, housed in what a history written by Gottingen University anthropologists Brigitta Hauser-Schaublin and Gundolf Kruger describe as an "unspectacular and rather neglected university building".

It settled there as an accident of history, and a product of an eminent scholar of the Enlightenment, Johann Freidrich Blumenbach, an associate of Banks, who probably supplied the earliest Pacific artefacts. Blumenbach was also a beneficiary of the tiny elite of European royalty: England's King George II, a member of the German House of Hanover, founded the University of Gottingen. His son, George III, then also the Elector of Hanover, was happy to pass on the fruits of Cook's final voyage to Blumenbach.

The resulting collection represents the beginning of great and at times catastrophic change for the Pacific: sweeping epidemics, suffering and colonisation. It is also, Hauser-Schaubin and Kruger say, a time capsule of immense value, documenting Pacific cultures untouched by European influence.

As the Europeans arrived, islanders immediately replaced stone blades with iron in their wood-working tools. European fibres and textiles, beads, glass, metal and colourings were adopted for decoration. No trace of these is found in the Gottingen collection.

When HMS Discovery and Resolution returned home after Cook's death in Hawaii in 1779, they brought with them unique artefacts, many of which have long faded from their cultures. In the exhibition's catalogue, Morton writes: "Many of the objects on display ... have an inherent power that to the descendants of their original owners has not diminished over the years.

"The elaborate mourning dress, or heva, from Tahiti, the Hawaiian feathered image of the god of war, Kuka'ilimoku, and the chiefly headband of the Marquesas Islands, are all formidable objects in this sense. Similarly, the elaborately printed barkcloths from Tonga, Hawaii and Tahiti, and the intricate baskets of New Zealand and Tonga, are impressive artefacts with considerable cultural weight and meaning."

Also included in the exhibition are superb Maori fishhooks, greenstone adze blade and chisel, wood and whalebone clubs, taiaha (spear), and a pristine flax mai muka (cloak).

Such items often did not come easily to Cook's expeditions. British Museum curator Jennifer Newell notes that when Banks was in New Zealand during Cook's first voyage he was often frustrated by the frequent unwillingness of Maori to give up their ancestral taonga for the beads and other trinkets he had to offer.

This, Tapsell says, forms part of his thesis on the significance of Tupaea. And the Gottingen exhibition, he says, helps to re-open the debate about the role of both Europeans and Polynesians in the opening of the Pacific.

Tapsell's aim has been to see the arrival of Europeans from a Maori perspective: "My way into this is to look at the things that were collected on the first voyage. In particular there has recently been uncovered the Banks collection of material that was presented by him soon after he returned in 1771 to his old Oxford college, Christ Church. It is very important because it helps to contextualise this collection."

The origin of the Banks collection had long been lost by the time it passed to Pitt Rivers Museum. But in 2004, when Tapsell was working there, curator Jeremy Coote finally succeeded in tracing the paper trail back to Banks.

"It was like finding the motherlode, to provenance that collection and knowing it came from Cook's first voyage," he says. "At the time they were collected they were artificial curiosities [then meaning man-made objects of rare interest] and didn't have the same value as scientific material such as botanical or zoological specimens, which were seen as part of a science of understanding, part of the Enlightenment."

Even now, when the true cultural and historical importance is clear, Tapsell argues that still greater significance may lie in the earliest artefacts. Within the Banks collection are items indicative of a status or prestige that he says even today are symbolic of recognition of equality between giver and receiver. These include a dog-skin coat and the only heitiki collected on the first voyage.

Tapsell wondered whether Maori saw Banks as an equal, or whether something else had been happening. He was also puzzled by the genealogical nature of the artefacts: "These were things that were presented for marriages, you could say, between two chiefs. It was about creating a relationship.

"You wouldn't give something that's most personal to you to a stranger, unless that stranger promised you a relationship that would provide an opportunity for you and your descendants."

Tapsell believes that Banks was a capricious, 25-year-old adventurer who was unlikely to have been the kind of man to inspire such gifts. But his cabin-mate may have been: Tupaea, an islander from Rangiatea in the western islands of Tahiti, belonged to Taputapuatea, Polynesia's most sacred marae from which Maori canoes had left for New Zealand 16 generations earlier. Taputapuatea was the equivalent of a modern maritime college, where chiefs sent their young men to learn navigation spanning the Pacific.

Tupaea had been taken aboard by Banks as a trophy to display among the tigers and lions collected by his friends among the English gentry. But Tapsell believes his true value was shown from the Endeavour's first meeting with Maori when, after a chief was killed, Cook was in peril of being killed by overwhelming numbers. Banks' journal reports that Tupaea called out, and the danger passed: "This first encounter may well have been Cook's last, but Tupaea spoke out."

Tapsell says Cook had many close calls in New Zealand, and each time it appeared Tupaea came to the rescue. Even today, he says, Maori remember Tupaea more as the captain of the Endeavour, his name is still used, and places are named after him, much as Cook and Banks have been remembered by Europeans.

He also believes Tupaea, as an accomplished navigator, probably played a much greater role in Cook's first voyage than has been acknowledged, a role that Cook and Banks may have struggled with. Cook had no charts of the vast, empty Pacific, and Tupaea took him from island to island and, eventually, towards New Zealand.

Similarly, Tapsell thinks Banks probably took possession of the gifts likely to have been presented to Tupaea after the Polynesian died in the dysentery outbreak that decimated the Endeavour in Jakarta, Batavia (present-day Indonesia).

He believes Tupaea was the recipient of the gifts, or the intermediary, because journals from the voyage showed Banks had been unable to obtain such items and he was unlikely to have been unable to steal them.

"It's like we have two streams of history appearing," Tapsell says. "What I'm looking at now is how we can actually bring them together. Rather than Maori remembering this [version] and Europeans the other, they belong together on the same pages. We need to discuss them as a partnership that enabled that voyage to occur ... My challenge is this: let's have a look at this. It's something we can't just pretend didn't happen. It did happen. It's about identity. We can show we can add value to the South Pacific in our own way, and also show pride in being part of the South Pacific. This is our time to grow as a nation."