British hero or ‘genocidal’ relic? The turbulent life of Captain James Cook

In February 1772, the musician and author Charles Burney held a special dinner at 42 Queen Square, his London residence. The guest of honour was Captain James Cook, who, since returning from his three-year expedition to the South Pacific the previous year, had become something of a celebrity.

Burney’s primary objective that evening was to advance his son’s naval career, but, like all of London, he was eager for every detail of Cook’s voyage. Before supper, he took Cook on a tour of his library, to which he had recently added the newly published travel diaries of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a French adventurer who had made his own, less successful, Pacific voyage in 1766.

Burney wanted to know how the two journeys compared, whereupon “Cooke [sic] instantly took a pencil from his pocketbook,” wrote Burney in his memoirs, “and said he would trace the route, which he did in so clear and scientific a manner, that I would not take 50 pounds for the book.” An excited Burney painted the annotated map with skimmed milk to preserve Cook’s marks for posterity. It worked a treat; visitors to the British Library in 2018 could see that very map, with Cook’s marks still clear as day, at a successful exhibition commemorating 250 years since he first set sail on the Endeavour.

Cook became an Imperial icon in the late 18th and 19th centuries. (A 1794 illustration depicts him being lifted to heaven by Britannia.) And for a long time afterwards his story, enshrined in Ladybird’s now-cult 1958 series, Adventures from History, was told and retold to schoolchildren. He was, as this 20th-century flyleaf had it, “one of the greatest sailors, navigators and explorers ever to sail from the shores of England”.

That’s one version. More recently, for all the richness of the British Library show, Cook’s reputation has come into question. By mapping the Pacific, it is said, he guided subsequent generations of European visitors to its shores, helping usher in all the ills of colonialism. These days, public effigies of Cook are often defaced – in Australia, his statues have repeatedly had paint sprayed and thrown over them.

Now, in Britain, campaigners from the Stop Trump Coalition have added the explorer – whose “invasion” of Australia, they say, was “followed by 250 years of genocidal activities” – to a national target list of statues that they want to see torn down. These include one overlooking Whitby harbour, erected in 1912, and one by Admiralty Arch in central London, erected in 1914.

On top of that, there are calls to rename the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby, Captain Cook Square, Crescent, and University Hospital in Middlesbrough, and even the local chain of Wetherspoons, named after Cook’s ship The Resolution.

But is the picture the protesters paint of Cook as a rapacious servant of imperialism a historically accurate one? His biographer Dr Vanessa Collingridge isn’t convinced.

“Cook never set out to be a national hero," she says. "He was made into a hero of the Empire after his death. And frankly, I personally think he would have hated it. We’re talking about the son of a farm labourer, he came up from the working classes, he is not somebody that arrogantly swaggered around the world.

“He was also heavily influenced by his lifelong mentor, John Walker, who was a Quaker shipbuilder who taught him how to sail. And the Quakers are extremely anti-slavery, anti-hierarchy. We wouldn’t have the abolitionist movement were it not for the Quakers.”

Cook, who was born in 1728 in the Yorkshire village of Marton, first went to sea at the age of 18, on coal ships in the North Sea. By night, he studied mathematics. Following a spell in the Navy, during which he learned surveying, he was marked for advancement. When the Royal Society was looking for a commander for the first scientific expedition to the Pacific, Cook was the obvious choice.

Ostensibly at least, the thrust of the voyage was to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun, but Cook was also given a sealed packet of instructions to verify the existence – or not – of the Southern Continent, an imagined land-mass that cartographers felt must exist beneath the equator in order to balance the globe. The Admiralty hoped that this vast, undiscovered continent would be rich in gold and spices.

During this voyage and his next, not only did Cook dispel the myth of the Southern Continent, but he charted virtually the entire Pacific basin, bringing back detailed observations and collections of everything he and his crew encountered. When the Endeavour docked at Dover, in 1771, it had more than a thousand zoological and 30,000 botanical specimens on board, not to mention the range of weapons and costumes, and many of these are included in the exhibition.

On the question of whether Cook’s activities in Australia constitute an invasion, Collingridge is circumspect. “I know certainly people do consider it an invasion. I think that’s something that there needs to be discussion and dialogue about.”

She points out that the matter was already being debated in Cook’s day. “He was given some hints from Lord Morton [one of his backers] that said, ‘you’ve got to respect the fact that indigenous people living there have a claim for that land.’ But his Admiralty instructions were to claim land. There was obviously conflict in the actual system of discovery.”

As a historian, she finds the allegation from the Coalition that Cook “symbolises racial oppression and violence” to be “really, really hard to take.” She quotes a passage from one of his journals, reflecting on the impact of European contact with the peoples of the Pacific:

“That’s a very thought-provoking comment from someone portrayed as an imperialist” she says. “No wonder it was edited out of the published version” which came out in 1777, long after he had left Britain for his third and final voyage.

She is no defender of the Imperialist project: “I’m certainly not going to defend imperialism and or the abuses have been rife in Britain’s Imperial history.” But she is keen to separate Cook himself from Britain's imperial ambitions. “The bottom line is that Cook was a man of science and from the evidence of his writings, there is certainly no argument that he was a racist. What the British establishment did with him after his death, raising him up to be this Imperial icon – that has nothing to do with the man and that has everything to do with a British imperial project.

She concludes: “Given the close – and genuinely respectful – relations he had with so many people of the Pacific, I think it is not only unhelpful but a misreading of history to cast him as as the man who spearheaded a conscious movement to subjugate them.”

By the time Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 – on his third voyage searching (in vain, as it turned out) for the North West Passage – accounts of his voyages had been published the world over, many of them pirated, such was the demand. He had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and awarded its Copley medal, its oldest and most prestigious award. When offered something to read while awaiting her execution, Marie Antoinette requested The Travels of Captain Cook.

None of that mattered a jot to the Hawaiians, though. He was slain there in 1779, on Kealakekua beach, following a fracas that broke out when the islanders stole his cutter (small boat). Lamentably, just before she died, Cook’s wife, Elizabeth, burned all the private letters he had sent to her during his years at sea. His professional public face is all that’s left, meaning we are missing any true sense of Cook’s character.

As part of her research for Cook’s biography, Collingridge crewed a replica of the Endeavour and also sailed to the Antarctic in a modern yacht. It was this, in the end, which gave her the most insight: even with mod-cons it was hard going. “To think that he did that back in the 18th century in a wooden ship and without a map – three times crossing the Antarctic Circle – is quite extraordinary.”

To Collingridge, he was no monster, but a scientist whose open-minded desire to meet new peoples was complicated by his ethical doubts as to the justification of the beginnings of European imperialism. Nonetheless, his “discovery” of Australia paved the way for the deaths of thousands of aboriginal people. So should Captain Cook be kept on his pedestal – or, as a far more monstrous figure of imperial history was recently, flung down into the waves?

Additional reporting by Susannah Goldsbrough