In this guest blog post, Professor Dame Anne Salmond provides a comment on a recent blog post by Lorena Gibson, Catherine Trundle, and Tarapuhi Vaeau on James Cook and White Supremacy.
James Cook and White Supremacy, by Lorena Gibson, Catherine Trundle and Tarapuhi Vaeau
A Comment
Anne Salmond
Scholarly debate is a vital testing ground of ideas and arguments, and it should be robust and incisive. In seeking to understand past lives and events, a wide array of surviving evidence should be examined and tested, whether documentary, oral or material – in artefacts, landscapes and sites, for example.
Its also vital to consider the vantage-points of as many contemporary participants as possible, and the interests served by different kinds of accounts, both past and present.
In my Stuff article, ‘Was James Cook a White Supremacist?’, on such grounds I questioned whether James Cook could be fairly described as someone who implicitly or explicitly espoused a doctrine of white supremacy.
In response, the authors of this blog have argued that anyone who participated in James Cook’s voyages was by definition “part of the Doctrine of Discovery, which itself is underpinned by white Christian supremacy and the belief that anyone not white or Christian was and is not fully human.”
This argument assumes that at the time of the Endeavour voyage, ideas of white supremacy and the Doctrine of Discovery were uncontested. This is not the case, however.
In mid-eighteenth century Britain, the old mediaeval idea of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ was commonplace – a cosmological model that ranked all forms of life from God at the top of the Chain through the descending ranks of archangels, angels, cherubim and seraphim down to a divine monarch, the aristocracy and commoners in ‘civilised’ countries, descending to barbarians and savages, sentient and non-sentient animals, insects, plants and rocks.
Every life form in the lower ranks of the Great Chain was expected to offer up tribute and obedience to those in the higher ranks, justifying a world based on unequal, extractive relationships – between different classes; men, women and children; different races; and human beings and ‘Nature.’ The contemporary inheritors of this doctrine include ‘trickle down’ economics, sexism, racism and ideas of ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘resource management,’ for example.
Its fair to say that the ‘Great Chain of Being’ underpinned ideas of white supremacy, and the doctrine that a European explorer who ‘discovered’ another land for the first time could claim it for his monarch.
In the mid-eighteenth century, however, this kind of hierarchical thinking was under attack in Britain and elsewhere. Shortly before the Endeavour sailed from England, the American revolution began, and this was followed by the French revolution, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Mary Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and strong anti-slavery sentiment, for instance. On many fronts, the idea of a ranked cosmos was assailed.
As a member of the ‘lower classes’ who had to struggle for advancement in the Royal Navy, where patronage often determined promotion, James Cook had no reason to exalt a hierarchical model of the world. Its also interesting that his master and life-long mentor, Captain John Walker, a Quaker, believed in peace and plain living, and spiritual equality for all.
At the time of the Endeavour voyage, members of the Royal Society of London were closely engaged in these debates. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, was a Fellow and Council member. He became involved in the international collaboration to observe the Transit of Venus that led to the Endeavour voyage, publishing an account of his participation in the American observations of the Transit in June 1769 in the Society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions.
The President of the Royal Society of London from 1764-1769, the Earl of Morton, a Scottish astronomer, also had radical leanings. In 1746 he was imprisoned for a time in the Bastille for his Jacobite sympathies. As an astronomer, the Earl was deeply interested in the international collaboration to observe the Transit of Venus, and helped to plan and organise the Endeavour voyage to carry out the observations of the Transit of Venus in Tahiti.
Before Cook sailed from England, the Earl of Morton gave him a set of instructions for the Royal Society party on board the Endeavour. In his ‘Hints,’ the Earl exhorted Cook:
‘To exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives of the several Lands where the Ship may touch. To check the petulance of the sailors and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms. To have it still in view that sheding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature:—
They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent.
Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the Aggressors. They may naturally and justly attempt to repell intruders, whom they may apprehend are come to disturb them in the quiet possession of their country, whether that apprehension be well or ill founded. Therefore shou’d they in a hostile manner oppose a landing, even this would hardly justify firing among them, until every other gentle method had been tried.’
While the Earl of Morton’s ‘Hints’ flatly contradicted the doctrine of discovery, Cook had a second set of instructions from the Lords of the Admiralty that upheld it. His ‘Secret Orders,’ which instructed him to proceed to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus, included a sealed packet which was not to be opened until that task had been carried out. These sealed orders instructed Cook to head south from Tahiti to search for a great continent that was thought to exist in the southern latitudes:
‘If you discover the continent above mentioned, you are to employ yourself diligently in exploring as great an extent of the coast as you can…. You are likewise to observe the genius, temper, disposition and number of the natives, if there be any, and endeavour, by all proper means, to cultivate a friendship and alliance with them, making them presents of such trifles as they may value, inviting them to traffic, and showing them every kind of civility and regard, taking care, however, not to suffer yourself to be surprised by them, but to be always upon your guard against any accident.
You are also, with the consent of the natives, to take possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain; or, if you find the country uninhabited, take possession for His Majesty by setting up proper marks and inscriptions as first discoverers and possessors.’
As I argued in my work The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, debates about the humanity and rights of indigenous peoples were played out on board the Endeavour during their voyage around the world. Given his two different sets of orders, how did James Cook deal with the contradictions between them?
The evidence suggests that during the Endeavour expedition, Cook tried to follow the Earl of Morton’s instructions ‘to check the petulance of the sailors and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms,’ but did not always succeed.
From the many logs and journals that survive from the expedition, although Cook ordered his men to avoid violence if at all possible, it is a matter of record that when he and his companions came ashore in Aotearoa at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa or Poverty Bay, nine local Māori were shot in three separate episodes.
While the first two clashes responded to apparent threats, after the third violent confrontation when four unarmed fishermen were shot out at sea, Joseph Banks, the wealthy young landowner and amateur botanist who led the Royal Society party of scientists and artists, exclaimed in his journal, ‘This is the most disagreeable day my life has yet seen. Black be the mark for it, and heaven send that such may never return to embitter future reflection.’
In his own journal, Cook admitted to an error of judgement: ‘I am aware that most humane men who have not experienced things of this nature will cencure my conduct in fireing upon the people in this boat nor do I my self think that the reason I had for seizing upon her will att all justify me. and had I thought that they would have made the least resistance I would not have come near them but as they did I was not to stand still and suffer either my self or those that were with me to be knocked on the head.’
Later acts of violence took place in Te Matau a Maui or Hawkes’ Bay and the Bay of Islands, when the Endeavour crew were under attack. At Whitianga when Lieutenant Gore shot a man dead for taking a piece of cloth, Cook bitterly rebuked him for disobeying his orders. According to Horeta te Taniwha many years later, a young boy who was visiting Whitianga at the time, the local people discussed this episode and decided that since the offender was a well-known thief, his death was justified.
While Cook may have tried to avoid violent clashes with local people during this voyage, his orders from the Admiralty upheld the doctrine of discovery, instructing him ‘with the consent of the natives, to take possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain.’ Cook went through the ceremony of raising a British flag on two occasions - in Whitianga or Mercury Bay, wherethe local people had welcomed him and his crew, and in Totaranui or Queen Charlotte’s Sound, where he was accompanied by a local rangatira.
Did Cook’s compliance with the doctrine of discovery, as the authors of the blog argue, mean that he upheld the doctrine of “white Christian supremacy and the belief that anyone not white or Christian was and is not fully human?” As I argued in the Stuff article, many statements in his journals suggest that this was not the case. Among early European explorers in the Pacific, Cook was unusual in his avoidance of racist rhetoric, and in his doubts about the virtues of the imperial mission:
“To our shame [as] civilized Christians, we debauch their Morals and interduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serves only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their fore Fathers had injoy’d. If any one denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.’
If James Cook was closer in his attitudes to the Earl of Morton than to the Lords of the Admiralty, this is worth noting, I think. As other commentators have remarked, the Earl of Morton’s insistence on the legal rights of indigenous peoples and his denial of the doctrine of terra nullius predated the Mabo judgement by 224 years. It also anticipated Lord Normanby’s 1839 instructions to Captain Hobson prior to the Treaty of Waitangi, which acknowledged New Zealand as a ‘sovereign and independent state.’
In scholarly debates over the history of imperial expansion in the Pacific, its right to point out the powerful impact of doctrines such as white supremacy and the right of discovery on indigenous peoples across the Pacific, their legacies in contemporary injustices and inequalities, and the fact that they still have their contemporary advocates.
At the same time, it’s important not to over-simplify the past by ignoring the passionate debates that have raged over these ideas. If everyone in Europe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had held fast to such doctrines, slavery would not have been abolished, and the Treaty of Waitangi would not have been negotiated. In more recent times in New Zealand, the Waitangi Tribunal would not have been established.
‘Black and white’ versions of the past dehumanise others, leading to disaffection and anger. A blanket condemnation of all white people as ‘white supremacists’ runs the risk of simply reversing the condemnation of all non-white people as ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages,’ rather than opening up alternative visions of how different groups might relate to each other and the planet.
In dealing with the mistakes of the past, its possible to enter into a spiral of anger, insult and mutual recrimination. This has happened in places like Northern Ireland and Bosnia, tearing families, communities and the wider society apart. In that kind of scenario, everyone loses, and nobody wins.
In contemporary Aotearoa, it would be good to see anthropologists among other scholars helping to open up different kinds of dialogues, based on more complex, relational understandings from the Pacific as well as from Europe.
That may be a fond hope, but worth exploring. Nā reira, mauria ōku painga, waiho ōku wherū – take what is good in this, and leave the rest behind.
