A few weeks ago, the library of Cambridge’s Trinity College (home of the recently defaced Lord Balfour portrait) exhibited four Australian fishing spears. They are all that remain from a collection of 40-50 stolen by James Cook and the crew of HMB Endeavour in 1770 – during the first landing by Europeans at Botany Bay. Cook’s arrival wasn’t a peaceful affair: two members of the indigenous Gweagal people resisted the British landing, and one was shot as a result. Now, 254 years after their depart
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Captain James Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific in the late 1700s exemplify the law of unintended consequences. In recent decades, Cook has been vilified by some scholars and cultural revisionists for bringing European diseases, guns and colonization. Sides’ book is sure to rile some Indigenous groups in Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific Islands, who contend Cook ushered in the destruction of Pacific Island cultures.