(SIGHS)
I'm as far north as I've ever been in my life,
and in mid-1778, so was James Cook on his third voyage.
His crew had endured brutal conditions before,
but nothing as bad as this.
The Pacific's frozen north lured Cook like a siren's song,
drawing him in with promise and then ejecting him in despair.
But it couldn't kill him,
and yet die he will, on this, his final expedition.
It's 24 below today. Might just kill ME.
I may be some time.
(PANTS)
By June 1778, Cook and his two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery,
had travelled along the wild coastline of north-west America.
They were heading for the Arctic,
hoping to find the fabled North-West Passage,
a theoretical short cut between Europe and Asia.
The summer thaw would offer a brief opportunity.
As his ships passed Unanga Island,
some natives gave them a box containing papers written in Russian.
It was a clue.
Other Westerners were already exploring the same region,
but none were sighted in the heavy fog
as Cook and his men crossed into the Bering Sea,
continuing north.
Morale on board was low.
Despite the promise of riches to come,
the crew were, frankly, fed up,
They're now three months in the Arctic.
It's difficult to imagine
just how miserable conditions were for the crew,
but try to visualise this.
Their hot food snap-freezes by the time it hits the table.
The weather means they can barely see where they're going.
But in the silence of the dense fog,
they start to hear the strangest of noises,
and it is the mass mournful bellow...
..of the walrus.
(WALRUS GRUNT)
This is good news for Cook.
For one thing, the fog is full of icefloes,
and Cook wants to avoid them,
and the sound of the walrus means that he knows where the icefloes are.
The second thing is that, as always, they're low on provisions,
and he sends men out to kill the walrus.
And the slaughter that follows turns the ice red.
Cook called it,
rather optimistically, "marine beef".
He writes, "It's rather a strong taste.
"The heart is nearly as well tasted as that of a bullock.
"The fat, when melted, yields a good deal of oil,
"which burns very well in lamps,
"and their hides, which are very thick,
"were very useful about our rigging."
The men were having nothing of this.
They thought it was disgusting and really only good for oil.
Disgusting or not, Cook insisted that the men eat the walrus.
He halved their regular rations.
In return, the crew went on hunger strike.
It was a stand-off.
But within days, his famished men were ready to collapse
and Cook had no other choice but to back down.
He reinstated the salted rations, and...
..I think it's fair to say that for a time,
Cook lost some respect among his men.
Though the British were here in midsummer,
sailing in these latitudes was always potentially perilous.
If they became trapped in the ice, they would almost certainly perish.
Time was against them.
As they sailed north,
the short northern summer was coming rapidly to a close,
and then, one day, they saw something quite astonishing,
what looked like a cliff of ice
that stretched from horizon...
..to horizon.
For 10 days, they sail along the wall, looking for a gap,
until one day, it becomes apparent that the wall is moving towards them.
(ICE CRACKS)
Unusually, Cook uses the word 'fearful'.
The Discovery and the Resolution are in grave danger
of being entrapped by ice and crushed.
He realises it's time to turn around,
and with the northerly wind behind him, he heads south.
Cook retreated to Norton Sound to consider his next move.
For now, his quest,
despite a year's planning and more than two years sailing,
was on hold.
He wasn't defeated, not yet,
but he was increasingly doubtful a passage actually existed.
And for his time, he was absolutely right.
Cook's valiant attempt at finding the North-West Passage
was not so much a failure as...
..he was just here a couple of hundred years too early.
It's only because of Arctic warming in the last decade or so
that the passage has become an actual reality as a shipping lane.
And now the North-West Passage is achieved
many times a year during the summer,
not just by commercial vessels but, of all things, cruise liners.
(BARKS)
Polar melt has brought more change than simply shipping routes.
For millennia,
the seasons dictated the way of life of the native people, the Inupiaq...
..berries and fish, collected in summer,
and seal and walrus, hunted in the winter.
(FIRE CRACKLES)
Raymond, you grew up hunting?
Yes, when I was younger, and...
..we'd go after bearded seal, mainly.
Every now and then, I'd go walrus hunting with my uncles.
Do you kind of miss the old ways?
Yeah, I do, because it's...
..getting harder to hunt nowadays.
Right.
And I think it's probably because of global warming.
Yeah.
We used to have, like, maybe a month of hunting season.
Now it's about one week. One week?
Some people won't even get walrus or seal,
because the ice gone out so far, so fast.
That's because you're hunting at the edge of the ice?
Is that correct? Yes.
And if... if the... if the ice is retreating really fast...
Yeah. ..got a very short season.
Yes. That's kind of... a big loss.
Yes, especially for the natives around here
that depend on it for food.
When Cook was here,
the men would not eat the walrus...
Uh-huh. ..because they just hated the taste.
Uh-huh.
What do you think of the taste of walrus?
When I was growing up, we had to eat it at the young age
because that's all we can eat sometimes, is walrus, but...
..you have to get used to the taste. (LAUGHS)
What do you think of it?
I don't like walrus.
You don't like walrus? Uh-uh.
Because...?
The taste is no good?
Uh-uh. (MEN LAUGH)
But I think before I leave the Arctic,
it's time to settle the question...
Thank you so much.
..is walrus edible or not?
Not bad.
You sure? Mm-hm.
Were Cook's men justified in going on hunger strike?
Oh.
Oh, no. (LAUGHS)
No. Oh, no.
Wow.
(CHILD LAUGHS) Ugh!
I can't taste it, that... (LAUGHS)
It's... it's the texture too, you know. It's that...
(LAUGHS) It's all very well for you to laugh.
Sure you don't want any of this? Uh-uh.
Come on.
Come on!
The walrus stew, kindly cooked with great care by my friends,
was, in all truth, stomach-churning, like rancid fish.
As for Cook's men, well, I'd be on strike as well.
In Norton Sound, Cook decided to abandon his mission for now
to head south, for tropical waters,
and to try again for the North-West Passage the following summer.
The retreat meant stopping at the Aleutian Islands
for supplies on the way.
Cook sailed for two weeks to Unalaska Island.
It should take ME two hours by air.
But that doesn't mean it's an easy trip.
Our plane is slightly delayed. A little bit anxious about it.
It is already one of the most notorious flights in the world.
I'm a little bit like this bear from Alaska.
I'm not entirely sure if he's...
..delirious with excitement
or absolutely (BLEEP) himself.
Unalaska is in the Aleutians,
a string of volcanic islands as remote as you can possibly be,
and also somewhere I've always wanted to go.
RECORDING: In the unlikely event of water landing...
It's entirely possible that we won't make it because...
..the weather there is so violently unpredictable
that this flight often turns back, doesn't make it at all.
Something similar happened to Cook.
As they were approaching Unalaska, they were in thick fog,
and they could hear the sound of breakers,
something you really don't want to hear when you're navigating in fog.
Oh, my God. This is absolutely amazing.
But Cook calmly, by instinct,
navigated those two ships to safety and to anchorage.
The next morning, it was apparent when the fog cleared
that they'd passed through a gap between two lines of jagged rocks,
and it was Cook's calmness in the face of very great danger
that did a tremendous amount to restore
the crew's confidence in their captain.
(ALERT CHIMES)
WOMAN: (ON PA) Gonna be a little bumpy going in.
Electronics off, please. Thank you.
(TYRES SCREECH)
WOMAN: That was nice. Incredible.
Captain is a pro here.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
This is incredible. I can't believe we're here.
Thank you very much.
As it happened, Cook was not the first European explorer
to arrive on these shores.
Unbelievable!
The Russians were here already,
and the results of that were nothing short of horrific.
Dutch Harbor is today Unalaska Island's main town
and America's most productive fishing port.
But at the time of Cook's visit, in 1778,
it was only a small settlement for aggressive Russian fur traders.
Cook knew nothing of their presence
as he moored his ships on the other side of the island,
in a cove aptly named English Bay.
I'm out on the water today with a self-described Cook nut
to find out what happened here, in Unalaska.
This isn't exactly the cruise ship you promised me.
MAN: Well, come on. This is... this is The Ritz.
This is Dutch Harbor's finest.
Gotcha. This is understated elegance.
Morning.
When Cook arrived on Unalaska,
the Russians had been here for some 14 years
and the Unangans had suffered at their hands
massacres, rape, disease and enslavement.
Cook knew nothing of this barbarity.
He was focused on navigating these seas,
some of the most dangerous in the world.
Uh... Do you want to come over this way?
Hang on tight.
Yeah. Hey, Sam, getting a little spray here.
Jesus. Why are we out here in these crazy conditions?
(LAUGHS) Can you explain this to me?
(LAUGHS) This isn't crazy. This is perfectly normal.
This is pretty average. This is absolutely horrendous.
Oh, you haven't seen anything yet. What are we thinking?
(LAUGHS) What was Cook thinking?
Good... good point.
And for him, that was home. He went out of retirement to do that.
He had a pension. Well, it was...
Yeah. He had a pension. He had a wife and kids.
And this boat was bigger than Cook's boat.
This is 130 feet. Yeah.
And his Resolution was, what, 100 feet long?
Yeah. Barely.
And they had 100 people on board.
100 people on board and all that... all the masts and so on
swaying back and forth, and a much rounder hull.
And going around the world
and going up into the Arctic Circle in a boat like that,
that's true grit.
You know. That's true grit.
It really is.
For all Rick's true grit, he's down below throwing up.
But I'm fine.
This bay is the site of a former Aleutian village
where Rick's done archaeological fieldwork.
The rawness of the landscape makes it hard to believe
that this place was once bustling with humanity.
The indigenous Aleutians, the Unangans, had thrived here
for some 9,000 years when Cook met them.
He described them as
"the most peaceable, inoffensive" native inhabitants he'd ever met.
His officers, however, were rather less kind.
And what happens when they land?
Well, Cook anchored up, and there was a path,
and a couple of his officers and whoever, the artist, followed that
and went down and discovered this village.
Unangans had adapted brilliantly to their harsh environment,
living in homes built partly underground.
Cook's onboard artist, Webber,
drew someone appearing from one of these houses, on the left.
Today, you can just see the tussock hills
are the remnants of these mounds,
and it was into this kind of house
that Webber and the officers descended.
And went indoors and immediately had sex
with the first woman they met, right in front of her husband.
What?! I know.
And there was a lot of sex going on
between the sailors and the native women.
And it's probably related to the fact that the Russians,
just 14 years earlier,
had, you know, been in conflict with the natives.
There was large-scale massacres. And people remember that.
And it could be that the women were afraid
or just felt that they... they had to do this for these people.
Oh, my God. Yeah.
So they were probably terrified to see
these white men get off this boat.
Certainly at first. Mmm.
But it also could be they were getting goods for it.
They were getting tobacco and pieces of metal and so on.
And so it could be that this was an exchange
that maybe we shouldn't judge by modern mores.
So... It's very complex, isn't it?
It is.
While this is going on, what's... what is Cook doing?
Cook stayed on his vessel most of the time,
and the only time he got off the boat's when he went hunting,
ptarmigan hunting, with a fowling piece, up in the hills, by himself,
while this... all this madness is going on around him, and...
..very tightly wrapped guy, I think.
So... so... (LAUGHS)
..all this stuff's going on down there and he's up shooting birds.
Yeah. Alone.
So it's... it's a disturbing little bit of history.
It's troubling. It is.
And Cook arrived at kind of a unique period here
and saw the detrimental effect on indigenous people,
and I think it troubled Cook as well.
Mmm.
A few days after anchoring,
a couple of Unangans arrived at Cook's camp with a salmon pie.
It was a welcome gift, sent over by the Russians.
Today, pie is still a tradition,
and I've been invited to supper
at the home of one of the few remaining families
who can trace their ancestry back to Cook's time and beyond.
Hey, Sam.
(LAUGHS) Welcome.
Thank you, Denis.
I don't know how you recognised me under this...
..under this big green thing.
Because it's a small... small community,
and... and... and the newcomers are...
Yeah. (LAUGHS) ..are known.
Denis is a leader in the movement
to restore the pride of his people, the Unangan.
Fantastic. Delicious.
Well, myself and five other... other folks wrote a constitution.
It took us about... probably about a year and a half.
The main thing was to take care of the social issues that plagued us
from probably the onset of first contact.
Through leaders like Denis,
culture and a sense of direction are slowly coming back to First Peoples.
That's a beautiful-looking pie, Linda.
Thank you.
Is this something you do all the time? (LAUGHS)
I do it on special occasions.
It's a familiar story, common to much of the Pacific -
disease, alcohol and the imposition of an alien culture
that would devastate generations.
The only disease that was found in the Unangan people
were... was arthritis.
And the common cold killed people.
Yeah. Cold.
Cold. Flu.
Influenza. Syphilis.
Yeah, all the venereal diseases.
And... And it devastates...
..and 90% of the people are dead within a generation.
How do you recover from that? How do you...
We... we haven't.
If we were wolves, we'd be on the endangered species list.
I don't speak our language. It was basically beaten out of us.
And...
..like I said, you don't recover from it.
You got to pick up and...
..and just pass what you can down to your children.
So...
That's pr... that's really upsetting.
Mmm.
Sorry about that. (CLEARS THROAT)
Let's get back to the pie. (LAUGHS)
(ALL LAUGH)
(CAMERA CLICKS)
In a decade of voyaging, Cook had occasionally met indigenous people
who'd experienced brief contact with the West.
But Unalaska was the first place where he witnessed
what sustained European contact looked like.
For Cook, perhaps, this was disturbing.
Was this what lay ahead
for the societies he had opened up to the rest of the world?
Cook wrote of his plan to head south
and attempt the passage again next year.
I'm heading south as well, whatever the weather.
Call it self-interest if you like, but...
..this is St Nicholas, and he's the patron saint for travellers.
We need all the help we can get.
On October 22, 1778, Cook left the frigid north.
The plan was to recuperate further south over winter
before reattempting a search for the fabled North-West Passage.
12 months earlier, he'd come across a string of islands in the Pacific.
He called them the Sandwich Islands,
named after his patron, Lord Sandwich.
We know them today as Hawaii.
Cook finally sailed towards the supposed comfort and security
of the tropics of Polynesia.
The relief among the crew, not to mention the excitement,
must have been absolutely palpable.
Cook spent no less than a month
sailing around the Big Island of Hawaii, trying to find anchorage.
On board, tensions were mounting.
Just over there was Polynesia again, all that great food, women,
everything that a sailor could possibly desire.
To his men, the captain's refusal to land
must have been immensely frustrating,
but to the Hawaiians, the path of this strange vessel
travelling around the island with its billowing sails
suggested something else.
It paralleled their annual parade
to celebrate and honour the Hawaiian god of fertility.
Perhaps, they mused, on board the strange vessel was Lono himself.
Finally, Cook pulled into this bay.
No-one could have expected the tumultuous, joyous welcome.
1,500 canoes of all sizes surrounded the ships.
There were tens of thousands of Hawaiians in and around the bay.
So many women climbed onto the Discovery, it heeled over.
Many of them had to be thrown off to avert disaster.
The time of Lono, or Makahiki, was met with unbridled licence.
It was ecstatic and orgiastic,
a celebration with wild lovemaking and hula.
(DRUMMING) (PEOPLE CALL OUT)
Cook got the first taste
of the extraordinary adulation that persisted
wherever he went in the next few weeks.
People would prostrate themselves on the ground in front of him.
(CHEERING) (DRUMMING)
(DRUMMING STOPS) (APPLAUSE)
The journals of Cook's officers described how Cook was received.
"A divinity", said one, adding to the notion that he could be
the human manifestation of the god Lono.
Not all historians subscribe to this view,
but what cannot be denied is Cook was feted in ceremonies
and showered with extraordinary gifts,
the most astonishing being a feathered cloak, an ahau'la,
and a helmet, mahiole,
traditionally worn only by chiefs of the highest rank.
So these are feathers from tiny birds.
WOMAN: Yes.
These honeycreepers that dwell high up in the mountains.
You know, they're difficult to access. They're a bit elusive.
How many feathers would you estimate in a... in a cloak like that?
So it's estimated for this particular ahau'la
4 million feathers...
4... million feathers for one cloak? ..in total, yes.
They're quite small.
So that's a lot of man-hours just catching those birds.
Yes.
Those birds were not harmed or killed
in the process of capturing them.
So even more care is needed... Oh, my goodness.
..to safely collect
and then return the birds to their nat...
..to their natural habitat, yes.
How did this come to be in Cook's possession, do we think?
So at the time that Captain Cook arrives on the island of Hawaii,
Kalani'opu'u is the paramount chief,
and he gifts Captain Cook
with many things, and among them his own ahau'la,
his own mahiole, places them upon Cook's body,
which is a tremendously significant gesture.
Extraordinarily significant, and not just generous,
but he's bestowing upon him
mana as well.
That's right.
He's giving of himself.
Mmm.
Because his own mana, from the many wearings,
the many adventures, achievements, all those years of living,
are also in these treasures,
and then he transfers them to Cook.
Spectacular.
So why... why Cook?
Why is he investing Cook with all this mana and prestige and wealth?
He's not looking for an ally in his empire building as such?
That's certainly possible.
His efforts to expand his influence have been ongoing for several years.
And if you're looking to someone
who's come from across a great sea successfully,
that might certainly make a suitable ally.
Cook took every advantage of Hawaiian hospitality.
The chief seemed to accommodate his every request,
providing food for his 200 men,
wood from the temple for his ship's burners.
But even gods have rules.
Cook was taking too much,
right down to the carved tikis from the temple fence,
and staying too long.
It was beginning to dawn on the long-suffering Hawaiians
that Cook may not be Lono's emissary after all.
Finally, it was time to leave.
Orders were orders,
and the North-West Passage beckoned once more.
Cook had been almost continuously at sea since he was 18
and was by now 50 years old.
Was he feeling his age?
After all he'd endured, he must have been, at the very least, bone-weary,
and yet to his crew, he seemed utterly indestructible.
Did he see himself that way?
Was he...
..beyond mortal restraints?
A few days out of Hawaii, the fates intervened.
The top mast of the Resolution snapped in a storm.
Cook had to return to repair, but from the moment they arrived,
it was apparent that everything had changed.
The bay was virtually empty. There was no-one to greet them.
And those they did meet were not happy to see them at all.
It was eerie and quiet.
Somehow, everything had turned upside down.
Cook was not to know, but his life was in jeopardy
the minute he arrived back in Hawaii.
Why did the people who were so welcoming before now spurn him?
What and why did it all go bad
for this most knowledgeable of Pacific explorers?
For things went horribly wrong,
and the only certainty is the date of his death.
On 14 February 1779, Cook staggered to this rock right here,
and X marks that spot.
Cook's death was brutal, short and shocking.
He was knocked down, clubbed and held under the water until he drowned.
So it's sort of extraordinary that Cook was killed
in your mum's front garden.
And I think that was the reason I...
..I approach her in the 1980s for oral history about Cook,
because, "You must know something, 'cause he died in your front yard."
And the story she told me, I have never read that before,
never seen it anywhere before.
I go, "Wow, Ma. This is heavy-duty."
Now, keep in mind, even though
the people greeted him like...
..a... a royal guest when he arrived here...
(SIGHS) ..Cook and his men were somewhat disrespectful,
and in a sense that...
..you know when you have that one guest
that spends a little too long at your house?
(BOTH LAUGH)
There's much conjecture about the events on the day Cook died.
He'd escaped danger so many times in the past.
What made this fateful day any different?
It started by his waking up to discover
one of his largest boats had been stolen by the locals.
What I think happened, when... when he discovered
that his launch boat was gone,
he got very angry.
Now, Cook has several designs.
One of 'em was taking people hostage.
And some people tell me that the Hawaiians here,
they knew that he did that, he took people hostage.
Cook went ashore with his usual idea
of luring the chief, Kalani'opu'u, to the Resolution,
holding him hostage until the stolen boat would be returned.
Kalani'opu'u's house site is right up here.
So they walked from here to there.
And it was, like, early in the morning,
and the chief was getting up - he was kind of hungover from awa.
Kava? Awa. Yeah.
And he didn't know what Cook was talking about.
And you can imagine the... the language difference.
So Cook invited him to come on his boat.
Now, the stories that I've read is when they walked from there,
which is the face of that cliff, down to the landing,
there was 6,000 people that followed them,
all of them chanting,
discouraging the chief from going with Captain Cook.
Because of all the chanting going on, telling him, "Don't go,"
his wife is begging him not to go, he sat on the ground.
When he sat on the ground, it is said that Captain Cook approach him
with his hand outreached to pull the chief to his feet.
It's kapu.
The commoners and foreigners are not allowed to touch this man.
This was a fatal misunderstanding of local custom.
The outraged Hawaiians moved menacingly on Cook.
He drew his musket and fired, killing a man.
His marines started shooting
in a vain attempt to stop the madness now enveloping their captain.
The natives onshore just went nuts. They went ballistic.
Cook runs down to the water, says... getting away from the crowd,
waving his, "Don't do that! Don't do that!"
And at that point, he gets clubbed and then stabbed
and then pushed underwater to die.
As he fell, he signalled with his hand
to one of his boats just off the beach,
but, in an act of cowardice,
they rode away, rather than come to his aid.
The demise of Cook has provoked contradictory interpretation,
much to the fascination of anthropologists like Mark McCoy.
In this painting, he's calling for help here,
as opposed to saying, "Don't shoot!"
Well... yeah. That's right.
He does look like, "Come... come and help me."
And you can see behind him, he's... he's outnumbered.
Yeah. And then his marines start shooting.
The folks in the boat start shooting,
in that chaotic...
Chaotic. ..sort of an event.
And what Herb Kane, the artist, has done is he's...
..he's part of the sort of larger native Hawaiian
kind of sovereignty movement,
painted this from a literally different perspective
than the British version of Cook being heroic.
I mean, when you think about that question,
"Why was Cook killed?"
it really is a better question, "Why did it...
"did he last as long as he did?"
Right?
How did he survive Aotearoa and Tonga and Tahiti
and finally meet his end here in Hawaii?
He had flown in the face of those priests
and the king, who had received him as Lono,
by not doing things that Lono would do.
So they thought they'd been defrauded?
This was not Lono, and...
..clearly, his return confirmed that.
Yes, and the... the way I look at Cook anyway
is that he was coming here and behaving badly,
by a lot of measures, to the native Hawaiians.
I think he looked at it very much as a... a rest stop on his way.
He wasn't setting up an embassy.
He wasn't setting up, you know, long-term relations
between the... King George and the King Kalani'opu'u.
And so I think that short-sightedness
and sort of the... missing the cues got him into a bit of trouble.
Touching royalty was taboo, but that wasn't Cook's only mistake.
His death was also the consequence of unfortunate timing,
when the days of Lono would give way to a deeper, darker power.
It was time for a new god, an angry god.
MAN: When Cook came back, Makahiki season had ended,
and that's when the Hawaiians turned back
to the time period of Ku, or the god of war.
And this heiau that we're standing in front of
was dedicated not only to Lono but also to the god of war, Ku.
And this is now bad luck? Yes.
Ku, or Kuka'ilimoku,
is very vengeful.
You wouldn't want to meet Ku, that's for sure.
Yeah.
This temple complex - Tracy, tell me what we're looking at here.
Hikiau Heiau was probably built around 1400 to 1500 AD,
but it was used for human sacrifices to please the god Ku.
So literally thousands of people have been sacrificed on this?
Easily hundreds, if not o... over a thousand people were definitely...
Right. ..sacrificed on this heiau.
We're not allowed to actually go up and film there,
and I'm actually rather happy about that.
(BOTH LAUGH)
It's slightly freaked me out. Yep. Yep.
Cook comes back. He's killed on the beach over there.
Then they divide him up into little pieces.
Well... somewhat.
What they did is they took him up to the cliffs up here
to another smaller heiau, named Puhina o Lono,
and that heiau was also dedicated to the god Lono.
And in the ancient times when a chief would die,
they would strip all the flesh off of your bones.
And how they treated his body after he passed
was very similar to how they would treat one of their own chiefs.
So they're honouring him as much as anything else?
Correct.
But, clearly, not everyone felt the same way.
On the beach, a group gathered to taunt the crew.
They danced wearing Cook's coat and hat,
waved his sword at them and bared their bums.
It was never going to end well.
Clerke, who was now in command, advised caution.
But a couple of days later, a water party at the beach ran amok.
They burnt a village. They destroyed canoes.
They slaughtered villagers and paraded their heads on poles.
It was a gruesome response.
If you talk to Hawaiians today, there are so many who will say,
"Was my ancestor who killed Cook."
(LAUGHS) At least a dozen of them.
Yeah. Maybe 20 or more, right?
(LAUGHS) So... and probably true, because a lot of people stabbed him.
Now, in the old days,
they would make an earth oven
and let all the flesh fall away,
because it's the bones that are important,
and they keep the bones.
That's what they did with Cook. OK?
Except for the hands and his buttocks.
The Lono priest took those down to the boat and said,
"Oh, you want your share of Cook? Here he is."
And Cook's men said, "Oh, my God!
"This is Cook's body? What did you do? Did you eat him?"
And the Hawaiians said, "Well, no. Is that what you do?
"Do you eat them?"
(BOTH LAUGH)
Do you think he was an empire builder?
Well...
..he certainly helped the Empire by mapping the way to go.
Mmm.
So there is a lot of very bad feeling about Cook in Hawaii,
especially among Hawaiians,
when we think of how many of our ancestors died.
And those diseases were the first
of a whole slew that came with foreigners,
so that by the time we get to 1893, when the American military invaded,
there's only 40,000 Hawaiians left,
and that collapse of population
is really what caused us to lose our sovereignty.
It's easy pickings, right?
However, my personal view of Cook,
he was a tubercular, syphilitic racist,
and when he tried to kidnap our king, Kalani'opu'u,
that was really the last straw.
Yeah.
Yep. A syphilitic racist. That's...
That's how we look at him.
So when we have Valentine's Day, we don't celebrate Valentine's Day.
No. No.
We celebrate the death of Cook. Yeah.
We... and we actually have a... a little card that goes around,
"We celebrate the death of Cook," everybody laughs about it,
but the lack of respect,
that's what I don't like about Cook,
that... that he thought he could kidnap Kalani'opu'u
and take him off and hold him ransom and do whatever he wanted to him,
for a boat?
I've been thinking about Cook's killing here, and it seems to me
is there's a terrible inevitability about it.
Cook's luck that he'd enjoyed for three voyages around the Pacific
had finally run out.
That luck had led to hubris,
and that overconfidence would inevitably have consequences
and then death.
So it's not surprising that it took a few days
for what remained of Cook to be returned,
and he was buried at sea somewhere in this bay.
Cook devoted his life to charting the Pacific,
and that is where he rests,
in this great ocean.
But now my thoughts also turn to Mrs Cook, whose husband never came home.
It is speculated that, for whatever reason,
Elizabeth Cook burnt all of her husband's letters.
She lived till her 90s, and at the end, she left very little.
Though one touching memento is this exquisitely embroidered waistcoat
made, from all things, of tapa cloth that Cook had acquired in Tahiti.
In her way, she was stitching the Pacific into her marriage.
This white tapa cloth was reserved for royalty.
It was being made presumably in anticipation
of a successful third voyage and his elevation to a knighthood.
But it remains unfinished, which in itself is heartbreaking.
And here sits the man himself.
This is a monumental work by Maori artist Michael Parekowhai.
One I find very moving and poignant.
But it's also enigmatic.
Look closely and you may see something of yourself in Cook.
So, what to think of Cook?
JOHN ROBSON: The pedestal that he was placed upon by the Victorians
and the early 20th century,
especially here in New Zealand and in Australia,
were looking for heroes, like a founding father
of these two countries.
You really start to hate him. You know what I mean?
And he... he has to be hated in that way, 'cause, as Indigenous people,
we need to point our finger at somebody or something
for the bad atrocities and the lies that we read in the history books.
And Cook gets blamed for a lot of things...
..for what followed.
You know, we're talking about blaming Cook,
but I blame his boss.
I blame the Crown.
Because it was the Crown that was stimulating all this activity.
TIM FINN: I don't think he was ever really a villain,
because, in his mind, he wanted a great discovery, and...
..never finding the North-West Passage,
I think, ended his life as a disappointed man.
And what have I learnt, travelling in his wake?
So many things, humbling things.
All around the Pacific, we see regeneration,
new voices, a renaissance.
I would say thanks to the revival movement,
we know more today and maybe more than our grandparents.
AWEKOTUKU: With the Endeavour came the opportunity to extend,
to explore and to understand,
and the difference was up to us to maintain as a positive one,
as something glorious and brilliant
and continuing the adventure that he started in Whitby.
There's something completely right about Cook's death in the Pacific,
so more right, for instance, than, say, slumping over a pint in Whitby.
The Pacific made Cook, and it killed him as well.
They are forever bound together.
He stitched its islands, its continental borders
and its indigenous peoples
into the fabric of the global community we know today.
Admire or hate him,
James Cook cannot be banished from its history even now.
As peoples of the Pacific,
we journey together and make our own history.