Anne Salmond: The trial of the cannibal dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas

Reviewed by BUDDY MIKAERE

It is nearly 60 years since Professor J.C. Beaglehole of Victoria University published the results of his comprehensive editing and annotation of James Cook's original journals.

That work was considered by many to be the last word on Cook's journeys of discovery. Indeed, the respected Australian author Alan Moorehead, who produced the classic account of African exploration and adventure in The White Nile and The Blue Nile, opined that after Beaglehole's publication, any further account of Cook's journeys could hardly hope to be more than an appendage, if not a plagiarism of his work.

So, it was with these thoughts in mind that I sat down with The Trial of the Cannibal Dog. It seemed that several days later I was still sitting there, having in turn been stunned, amazed, saddened and on occasion brought to loud laughter and near tears. At 432 pages of close type and a further 70-odd pages of appendices, bibliography, notes and index, this is definitely not an easy weekend read, and rightly so.

In an age when exploration seems to be about men in machines, Cook's journeys have an intensely personal, out-in-the-weather quality that modern explorers will never know.

We can recognise in Cook the qualities of the Kiwi battler which might explain his appeal to me, a New Zealander. He was a man of humble origins who rose to prominence in an 18th-century society which in normal circumstances would have firmly denied him entry. He did it through a combination of study, hard work - sometimes dangerous work - risk-taking and the fortunate patronage of men who recognised in him the qualities of good sense and steadiness they themselves lacked, or cynically thought they could exploit. To the latter, Cook was just a means to fulfil a political end.

Hugh Palliser was the good patron. He was the commander who initiated Cook's career as a naval cartographer and surveyor. He knew of Cook's famous exploit in mapping the dangerous St Lawrence river in Canada just before the British assault on the French fortress of Quebec which brought to an end the Seven Years War. He was responsible for Cook surveying the coast of Newfoundland, an experience which shines through in the amazing map that Cook produced of the New Zealand coastline.

Another patron was the infamous London rake, John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, said to have had a fondness for orgiastic sex and for playing drums alongside the men's chorus at performances of Handel's oratorios.

In his role as First Lord of the Admiralty and later Secretary of State, Montagu had grandiose plans for English global domination of trade and colonisation through the discovery of new lands.

Sandwich and his friend, the playboy botanist Joseph Banks, hatched a plot whereby Banks would effectively command a proposed Royal Society voyage to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun from a Pacific location. Sandwich used his influence to secure the appointment of Cook as ship's master, assuming that Cook's lack of social polish would see him awed by Banks' authority, wealth and intellect.

At a time when there were unemployed naval officers aplenty, the proposed Royal Society circumnavigation voyage was a plum job. That it went to a supposedly uncouth Yorkshireman was nothing short of miraculous. However, that both Sandwich and Banks erred hugely in their pre-judgment of Cook's character is one of the most engaging and fascinating sub-plots to the marvellous story of Cook's first voyage.

Banks' patronising arrogance lasted only as far as Tierra del Fuego where his willfulness and bad judgment led to the death of two of his servants and one of Cook's sailors. From that point he seems to have deferred to Cook, and against all odds the two apparently became fast friends.

As the intricate detail of Cook's three voyages unfolds, the reader is drawn into a world that is familiar yet unfamiliar. All of us know something of our Maori and Pacific heritage and the echoes evoked by the text and the astute comments of Cook and his companions about the people they meet, their customs, the land, the sea, the creatures and plants, crowd from the pages like old friends.

"I have always found them of a Brave, Noble, Open and benevolent disposition, but they are a people that will never put up with an insult if they have an opportunity to resent it," is how Cook described the Maori character in 1775. Anyone who has sat in on a heated marae debate will know the truth of those words.

But here also be acts of unspeakable violence. The brutality of the naval disciplinary code - Seamen W. Bradley is given 24 lashes for having connections with native women knowing himself to have a venereal disorder - is at once shocking (his back would have been flayed open) but also touching in that it opens a small window on the humanity within Cook's tightly ordered soul, and his concern for the wellbeing of the people he encountered.

Gunfire and Cook are like 18th-century condiments perched at the side of the Pacific meal table. On the first voyage at least, the Tahitians and Maori quickly appreciated the power of firearms, and Cook had no hesitation in using his guns.

The brutality of life below decks was in sharp contrast to the licentiousness of the Polynesian women, the balmy climate, and the mostly freely available supply of food, which all served to confirm the legend of the Pacific Garden of Eden/paradise. That legend flashed through the seagoing populations of England and the other maritime nations faster than an internet virus and was of such potency that it was still believed and anticipated by American Marines coming to the Pacific in World War II.

The strength of this book lies in the fact that, unlike her earlier publications about Cook and other early Pakeha visitors to New Zealand, Salmond's interpretations of the Polynesians' responses to Cook and his crews has been done with a light hand. Cannibal Dog has an independent strength that lets it stand on its own merits without the need for an overlay of academic interpretation.

There are some points which are a little grating from a historian's perspective: Horete Te Taniwha's 1769 description of Cook and his crew as "goblins" is credited by Salmond to Beaglehole's annotations of Joseph Banks' journals. However, the original source of this information (taken in dictation from an unknown person at the order of Lt Governor Wynyard) dates from 1852. It means that Te Horete would have been in his early 80s reminiscing about an event that took place when he was under 5 years old. The point is that the goblins passage has been repeated so many times - in 1862 and 1888 - (see, too, Keith Sinclair's History of New Zealand) without qualification or analysis that repetition has led to authentication.

Apart from the fact that goblins are not a traditional Maori concept, I think the shaky origins of the goblins passage mean it should not be accorded the same weight as, say, extracts from Cook's own journals. Salmond, unfortunately, makes no such distinction. This is, however, a criticism that should not detract from a book that is already calling for a revisit.

I said I came to near tears. That came with the description of Cook's death on the rocky beach of Kealakekua Bay, in the Hawaiian Islands. Cook's body was baked in an umu, then dismembered and distributed around the island. Four Hawaiian chiefs divided up Cook's heart and consumed it between them. I had not known that detail before and though it is understandable in Polynesian cultural terms - in the traditional Maori world, for instance, it was not only delicious revenge to kill and eat an enemy, but through eating the heart and sometimes eyes, it was an assumption of that person's mana - nevertheless it was an end for which the words "tragic death" seem hugely inadequate.

It is surprising how Cook's story reaches across the centuries to touch us still. I visited some Ngati Hei friends at Wharekaho near Whitianga on the eastern Coromandel coast. Over lunch on the veranda they casually pointed out the gully Cook is said to have walked up from the beach to visit with their ancestors, where the Endeavour had anchored and where the sailors had filled their water barrels.

On my way home to the Coromandel the other afternoon I paused briefly at the small monument marking the spot where Cook ended his trip up the Waihou River. It was the farthest inland that he ventured in New Zealand. Cook's ambition was "to go as far as I think it possible for man to go". As I stood there looking at the silent, evening river I thought: "Good on you. And so you did."

Penguin, $59.95