Remembering Cook
Martin Terry explores the numerous sites dedicated to Captain Cook James Cook’s last words were probably ‘Take to the boats’, but it is impossible to have the last word on Cook (1728–1779) himself. For the Hawaiians, he was a ‘shark who walked on the land’, an expression that historian Professor Greg Dening used as the title for his influential essay (Meanjin, 1982) which helped launch a fresh appraisal of the hitherto unshakeable hero. Since then, a replica of his ship—the Endeavour—has been built, a portrait acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, and a reality TV series produced. Space shuttles have been named after two of his ships—Endeavour and Discovery—and a seemingly never-ending flow of books has been published. Of these, Nicholas Thomas’ Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook is one of the most subtle. Professor Thomas has also teamed up with New Zealand photographer Mark Adams for a compelling study of places in the Pacific visited by Cook; a few still unspoiled, many tawdry. This journey was published as Cook’s Sites, which in turn has inspired an exhibition of the same name, staged by the Museum of Sydney.
When news of Cook’s death reached Europe in January 1780, it precipitated a rush of books and printed images, but constructed monuments were rare. Sir Hugh Palliser built a castellated cenotaph at The Vache in Buckinghamshire. Across the Channel, the fabulously rich trader and tax collector for Louis XV, Joseph de Laborde, erected a monument to Cook at his estate, Méréville. These, however, like the slightly earlier monument placed by Earl Temple in the Elysian Fields beside the River Styx at Stowe, were personal tributes, intended for private contemplation, although the grounds were usually open to visitors. The initiative for more public memorials came later and was something of a colonial initiative, perhaps reinforcing the political and cultural links with far-off England. Today, Cook’s sites are strewn with cairns, plaques and statues. Kurnell Peninsula, south of Sydney, where Forty Thousand Horsemen was filmed amongst its great sand dunes, is the home of the Dharawal people. Their ancestors were witness to the arrival of the Endeavour in April 1770. One of the earliest and oddest memorials to Cook is the plaque affixed to the cliff at Sutherland Point in March 18 by the Philosophical Society of Australasia, and dedicated to Cook and Banks: ‘The Columbus and Maecenas of Their Times.’ A lithograph of it, after Dr John Lhotsky, was published in 1839, and it appears in a wash drawing by S.T. Gill. This helped to turn Kurnell, an area largely left to grazing and lime-kilns, into what we might call a site of ‘historical significance’, and Sydneysiders began making recreational visits. At Botany Bay, the famous Sir Joseph Banks Hotel was established with its neighbouring Pleasure Gardens. In the 1850s, George French Angas sketched its menagerie, which included an elephant.
While French explorer La Pérouse had an impressive memorial at Botany Bay, commissioned by Hyacinthe de Bougainville in 18 5, it wasn’t until 1870 that an obelisk was erected in memory of Cook, paid for by Thomas Holt who owned the Sutherland Estate of about 12 000 acres. It became something of a photo opportunity. Obelisks were Egyptian and were placed within tomb or temple complexes where they were associated with sun worship. The earliest in the colony was the milestone at Macquarie Place (1818) designed by Francis Greenway, but its first use as a commemoration of the dead was the one raised to Allan Cunningham in the Botanic Gardens (1844). The Bathurst Street sewer vent, imaginatively disguised as Cleopatra’s Needle, is from 1857. Cook’s Kurnell memorials lay on private land. Following a number of subdivisions that threatened to intrude upon the site, the New South Wales Government put aside the large sum of £20 000 to establish a public park, and in 1899 resumed about 60 acres, to which some Crown land was added. On 6 May 1899, Captain Cook’s Landing Place was dedicated. The area then became the focus of the ceremonies and re-enactments that continue today. The one held as part of the Federation celebrations on Monday 7 January 1901 was typical. The scene ‘opens with an assemblage of Aboriginals upon the shores, who are cooking at freshly lighted fires. As the cooking proceeds, the Natives will indulge in some of their dances or corroborees. Suddenly a lubra will espy a ship (Cook’s) in the Bay’. A ferry service, taking picnickers from La Perouse to the ‘birth place of Australian history’ also ran. The idea of Cook, rather than convicts, as the ‘true’ and preferred founder of Sydney, was reinforced in 1879 in the unveiling of the Cook statue in Hyde Park. The sculptor was Thomas Woolner, who had travelled to Australia during the gold rush; he returned to England in 1854, but retained links with the colonies and the premier, Henry Parkes, who was determined that the great mariner be commemorated on the centenary of his death. A Citizens’ Committee had been formed in 1869, and the foundation stone laid later that year by Prince Alfred. It is a rhetorical, almost jaunty work. Its position was interesting too, with Cook serving as an example of English enterprise to the boys at Sydney Grammar School, the scientific achievements of his voyages in turn being an inspiration to the staff and visitors of the Australian Museum.
Sixty thousand people attended the unveiling. Governor Sir Hercules Robinson delivered the oration, describing how ‘the moment which Mr Woolner has so happily seized upon’ was just when Cook ‘made out the loom of the land and is exulting at the discovery. (Cheers.)’ Cook, continued Robinson, ‘found this land a desolate waste, inhabited only by a few naked and hostile savages, and what is the prospect which meets the eye today? A country covered with flocks and herds … the happy home of over two million of our own race’. A few years later, in 1887, a handsome columnar monument was erected at Cooktown beside the Endeavour River, adorned with sculpted kangaroos. Melbourne is the unlikely home of our most famous Cook site, known to every Australian as Cook’s Cottage. It is much reconstructed. As a 1979 guidebook cautiously notes: ‘What we have today is a building which Cook probably saw, but which he may never have lived in.’ No one seems to mind. It still conveys a ghost-like memory of Cook’s boyhood in Great Ayton, Yorkshire. In 1933, its owner, Mrs Dixon, wanted to sell. On being persuaded that her condition that it ‘not leave England’ be altered to ‘not leave the Empire’, she sold it to philanthropist Russell Grimwade for £800. Not unsurprisingly this upset the locals, unmollified by Grimwade’s gift to them of an obelisk of Victorian stone from Point Hicks. After fights about where it should be located, Cook’s Cottage opened in October 1934 in Fitzroy Gardens, surrounded by avenues of English elms that had been planted to represent the Union Jack. Council refused to pay for a caretaker, and the contents were gradually looted until it was closed for the duration of World War II. If there was to be a problem with Cook sites and commemoration, it would probably be at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaii, where ‘in a scene of miserable confusion’ Cook had been killed. This does not seem to be the case. After only a few years of European settlement, Theodore Fisquet, an artist on board the French exploring vessel La Bonite, depicted in 1836 or 1837 the Monument élevé au capitaine Cook,à Hawaii, îles Sandwich, although in truth it does not appear to be much more than an inscription nailed to a post. By about 1855 a small cairn raised above some volcanic blocks had been positioned. This was replaced in November 1874 by the whitewashed obelisk that remains today, ‘erected … by some of his fellow countrymen’. It seems surprising but Hawaiian society at the time was quite English in outlook. A boldly expressed Union Jack still forms part of the state flag, perhaps because the support of Queen Victoria was seen as a bulwark against the rising influence of the mainland United States.
While numerous and well-intentioned, few of Cook’s memorials are of great aesthetic merit, Margel Hinder’s Cook Memorial Fountain (1966) at Newcastle, New South Wales (with the assistance of Frank Hinder) being one of the few exceptions. One Cook site encompasses an entire township. Sailing up the Queensland coast, Cook wrote that at 5 pm on 3 May he was ‘abreast of the South point of a large open bay wherein I intended to anchor’. (During the night at this anchorage Cook’s clerk, Mr Orton, had his ear lobes cut off.) This is now Round Hill Head at Bustard Bay near Gladstone, location of the imaginatively named town of Seventeen Seventy. By associating itself with Cook’s brief stay it acquired some instant historical lustre. It is now a tourist destination, its real estate much sought after by sea-changers. Finally, the National Library itself is a Cook site. He is, in many respects, a foundation upon which it has been built. A photograph taken by Greenham Studios of the Parliamentary Library in Melbourne (the National Library’s forerunner), features the portrait of Cook prominently in the foreground—a copy by an unknown artist of the original by Nathaniel Dance—which now hangs in the Main Reading Room of the Library. The whole panorama of Cook’s life is represented in the Library’s multifaceted collection, placed within an 18th-century context by a vast number of books, pamphlets, pictures, maps and artefacts that is continually being augmented by new acquisitions. The Resolution table, a generous loan by the David Roche Foundation, is currently a handsome presence in the foyer. Martin terry is Exhibitions Curator at the National Library of Australia. The exhibition, Cook’s Sites, will be on display at the Library from 16 March – 18 June Martin Terry’s address at the opening of the exhibition at the National Library of Australia, 15 March 2006
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