Descendant Of Captain Cook

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32391, 2 September 1970, Page 3

Descendant Of Captain Cook

The great - great - great niece of Captain James Cook, Mrs J. B. Heitz, of Chicago, was in Christchurch yesterday with her husband on a sentimental journey through New Zealand in the wake of her famous ancestor. Mrs Heitz, who lives in a Chicago suburb, considers that she is probably the closest living descendant of Captain Cook. Her great-great aunt, Elizabeth Cook, was Captain Cook's niece. "We have absolutely no family records of Cook at all,” she said. “Not even a portrait There was one, but* vandals broke into my old aunt’s house and slashed all the canvases, including that of Captain Cook,” she said. “The old aunts, who must have known a great deal about Captain Cook, never

talked about him because American missionaries practically made his name a dirty word,” she said. “When the missionaries went to Hawaii

they tried to teach Christianity to the natives by destroying the traditional Gods,” she said. The Hawaiians had regarded Captain Cook as a god because he fitted in with one of their myths which forecast the coming of a great man in a tree. When Cook’s ship appeared on the horizon it looked like a tree—and so they called him Oona, which meant God, she said. Mrs Heitz and her husband, Professor Heitz, said they had been delighted at the displays of Captain Cook's voyages which they had seen at the ’Dominion Museum in Wellington. They were very excited about visiting the Dusky Sound area, they said, where Captain Cook anchored the Resolution on his second voyage.