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The Discovery of New Zealand

3. Cook

3. Cook

On Cook the best writer is Cook. His own accounts of his voyages have been published by the Hakluyt Society, edited by the present writer: The Journals of Captain James Cook, Vol. I, The Voyage of the Endeavour (Cambridge, 1955); Vol. II, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure (Cambridge, 1960). A third volume is in preparation for his third voyage. Banks's whole journal of the first voyage has never been published, except in a much shortened and garbled version by Sir Joseph D. Hooker (London, 1896), now out of print; a full edition, edited from the original MS in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, is now to appear. The New Zealand portion, however, has been well edited from an MS copy in the Alexander Turnbull Library by Professor W. P. Morrell, under the title Sir Joseph Banks in New Zealand (Wellington, 1958). For the first voyage Sydney Parkinson's Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (London, 1773) adds some interesting details. The material in McNab's Historical Records, Vol. II, pp. 44 ff., bears on all three voyages, and is most valuable. A good discussion of the first landing is that by W. L. Williams, 'On the Visit of Captain Cook to Poverty Bay and Tolaga Bay', Trans. N.Z. Inst., Vol. XXI (1889), pp. 389-97; while J. A. Mackay's Historic Poverty Bay (Gisborne, 1949), Chaps. III-VII, is detailed as well as good. The account of the visit to Mercury Bay given by Te Horeta Taniwha is printed in John White's Ancient History of the Maori, Vol. V (Wellington, 1888), pp. 121-8; a shorter account is given in the same volume, pp. 128-30. The Endeavour is vividly and charmingly described in G. Arnold Wood's The Voyage of the Endeavour (Melbourne, 1926).

Of the eighteenth-century editions of Cook, two out of the three volumes of Hawkesworth's Voyages (London, 1773) are devoted to the first voyage, and can still be read with interest, though they are more Banks than Cook; they have been reprinted and adapted innumerable times. The Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World (2 vols., London, 1777) sticks much more closely to Cook's words than anything else over his name. The interest of A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean . . . for making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere (3 vols., London, 1784) is great, but not, so far as New Zealand is concerned, one of discovery.

page 97

The New Zealand portions of Cook's journals—for the first voyage, from Wharton's imperfect edition of 1893, now long out of print; for the others, from the eighteenth-century texts—have been brought together in A. H. and A. W. Reed's Captain Cook in New Zealand (Wellington, 1951).