THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 1932 IN MEMORY OF CAPTAIN COOK

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21258, 11 August 1932, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 1932 IN MEMORY OF CAPTAIN COOK

In the Christchurch statue of Captain Cook this Dominion receives a welcome addition to its memorials of the great navigator to whose exploits it owes an inestimable debt. Such reminders of the debt have been too few and too tardily instituted. The inscribed obelisk at Gisborne, the monument in Ship Cove, the tablet of dates in Endeavour Inlet —these mark places famous in his story and ours ; and elsewhere, as in some place-names, his memory has honour. But New Zealand has done too little to stir its people of to-day and to-morrow to grateful thought about the fateful yesterdays when he came exploring. In his homeland—it is ours as well—there are many visible tributes to him. London has a bronze statue in the Mall, a bust in the National Portrait Gallery, and a tablet in Mile End Eoad. Liverpool, too, has a statue. A pew carved in his honour adorns the parish church of Stockton-on-Tees. Here and there throughout England are similar reminders; no place associated with his youthful days is without one in some form. Medals struck to commemorate his expeditions, including one issued by the Royal Society, are on exhibition in many a town and village. Australia has a number of memorials—at his landing-place in Botany Bay, at Cooktown to recall the repairing of the Endeavour, and 011 Possession Island in Torres Strait in reminiscence of his claiming there a British right to the whole east coast of the island-continent. The statue at Randwick attracts constant notice. Pacific groups have a share in such honour, as at Hawaii and in the Societies. France, in a garden pleasance at Mereville, has its "Le Tombeau de Cook." His fame is worldwide and immortal. Yet, when the peculiarly close "and vital relationship of him with this country is remembered, there is reason to regret that more has not been made here of the opportunity to do him reverence. What has now been done in Christchurch makes some amends. Other populous centres might well do something of the kind. The name of Captain Cook should have a particularly deep appeal to New Zealanders. Their country, they know, is not alone in the association of its early history with him : almost the whole Pacific is in debt to him, to a greater or less extent, for his work in discovery and development. The fact is, however, that he had longer and closer touch with New Zealand than with any other country visited in the course of his three great voyages. He was not, it is true, the European discoverer of these islands. That honour, putting aside as doubtful the shadowy stories of Spanish and Portuguese exploits, belongs to Tasman. But this Dutch achievement, although earlier by over a century than Cook's, was casual ; Tasman made no landing, saw only a few points of coast-line, and sailed away with the mistaken impression that he had lighted on a part of the fabled Southern Continent and with no wish to have further acquaintance with either it or its feared inhabitants. He recorded this disinclination in somewhat bitter terms. Cook's attitude was vastly different. He engaged in careful charting of the coast, dispelling illusions about its being part of any Terra Australis, set himself to understand the Maori, took formal possession in the name of his King, and envisaged a day when British occupation would set a seal on his work and bring the boon of civilisation. He reckoned without the aversion to colonising that afterwards undid all that he had officially done and necessitated the fresh start made when Marsden, Busby and Hobson came to their tasks; yet on his beginning, although it was a foundation buried out of sight, there was erected all that rose later. Had his work not been so ardently and so thoroughly done, what followed after the interval of indifference could scarcely have happened. Others were to enter into his labours, but these con- ( tributed the cardinal element of the activity, official and unofficial, that made these islands incurably British.

He was a great Empire-builder, an outstanding example of the men who glimpsed the possibilities of winning a more spacious place for British people in a world waiting for their invigorating entry to untamed regions. Not for him merely to cast a horoscope ; he set his hand, with fervent loyalty and wise skill, to the spadework of the task. Lord Bledisloe, in unveiling the Christchurch monument, has well described the qualities of mind and heart that entitle Cook to honouring remembrance, by other nations as well as our own ; every word of that eulogy, deliberately phrased and warm in its admiration, is justified. True beyond denial, also, is His Excellency's insistence that recall of Cook's achievements, especially when linked in memory with those of the men who came in his wake, can do much to create in this land a wholesome sense of nationhood. This intrepid Yorkshireman, schooled in a salutary creed and inspired by a wonderful experience, wrought so well that pride in his doings is inevitable; yet, as his face was so resolutely set to the future, memory of him must needs turn from record to resolve. lln his proclamation of British sovereignty, his studied fostering of amicable relations with the Maori, and his prolonged effort to prepare the way for settlement, is a prompting to realise fully the dream he cherished, a dream of British service to the world in its far spaces. The roots of this inspiration are in history, and in no story have they firmer hold than in the pioneer doings that gave this land its British bent.