“Cook club” to come to N.Z.

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32880, 1 April 1972, Page 5

“Cook club” to come to N.Z.

(N.Z.P.A. Staff Correspondent) LONDON. March 31. A heavy wooden dub which is claimed to be the weapon which killed Captain James Cook was sold in London this week to a private New Zealand collector, Mr C. Winstone, of Auckland.

A buyer for Mr Winstone paid $2290 at a Christie’s auction for the finely incised Tongan club, which resembles a baseball bat Mr Winstone, the buyer, said he intended to open a museum of Pacific and Oceanic art in Auckland soon. A letter describing the killing was sold with the club. It is thought to have been written by Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist who accompanied Cook aboard the Endeavour when he discovered New Zealand in 1769. Banks passed on the dub to Thomas Legh, the great-great uncle of its most recent owner, Mr A. H. Lowther Pinkerton. Banks had been given it originally by Admiral Sir John Hunter. The letter describing the killing of Cook by a Hawaiian native in 1779 says: “Cook was first stabbed, and with a club given a blow on the back of the head.” It adds: “This is the identical club given me by the late Admiral Sir John Hunter.” The ship’s surgeon aboard the Resolution, describing the fatal attack on Cook at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii in 1779, wrote that after the stabbing ‘ Cook “endeavoured to scramble on the rock, when a fellow gave him a blow on the head with a large dub, and he was seen alive no more.” The dnb is thought to have been traded to a Hawaiian by a European sailor who had acquired it in Tonga. It was last exhibited at the Captain Cook bicentenary in Australia House in London two years ago.

Christie’s said that a similar club without any historical association would sell for about $l5O.