What Cook Saw

Forest and Bird, Issue 297, 1 August 2000, Page 26

What Cook Saw

MIKE LEE

discovers wildlife mystery and magic in the

records of early European explorers.

Flannery mused that if Abel Tasman and his crew had managed to get ashore at Tasman Bay in 1642, they may well have had the chance to see moa birds. Recent research by Richard Holdaway throws some doubt upon that notion but it is still a fascinating thought. History tells us Tasman and his men did not make it ashore, and 127 years would pass before the next outside observers reached these islands. These were the expeditions of Lieutenant James Cook, and the French under Surville in 1769-70 — but by then the moa, certainly the larger species, were well gone. But just what wildlife did Cook and Surville and their men see? Cook of course was a superb navigator and cartographer, and despite the language barrier was a shrewd observer of the peoples and societies he encountered. Though subsequent scholars may have been more concerned with early anthropology and ethnography, Cook and other members of his expedition also made valuable observations about the wildlife and landscapes of New Zealand and the Pacific islands. Some are very interesting in the context of modern conservation. Natural historians are now aware that following the arrival of Polynesian settlers in New Zealand some 32 bird species — mainly larger ground birds — eventually became extinct. A second wave of extinctions occured in the mid-19th century, with the impacts of European settlement peaking in the mid-19th century but continuing right up to this day. E his book The Future Eaters, Tim

The logbooks of early explorers provide a snapshot of the state of bird life in New Zealand in late 1769 when Cook’s and then Surville’s ships first appeared on the horizon. Interestingly enough the earliest entry about an observation of a New Zealand bird by one of Cook’s men is quite sensational and remains a puzzle to this day. It records Mr SpGring’s ‘close encounter’. ff the south point of Tolaga Bay O lies a small but high island ‘so near to the main as not to be distinguished from it’ The Maori name is Te Pourewa but Cook named this rather unprepossessing place Spoéring’s Island after one of Banks’s artists who had a strange experience there. In an intriguing episode on Sunday 29th October 1769 we are told (in Joseph Banks’s journal edited by J.C. Beaglehole), that a Mr Herman Sp6ring, a German, had a close encounter with a gigantic bird. ‘While Mr Sp6ring was drawing on the Island he saw a most strange bird fly over his head; he described it about as large as a kite & brown like one, his tail however was of so enormous a [size] that he at first took it for a flock of small birds flying after him. He who is a grave thinking man & is not at all given to telling wonderful stories says he judg’d it to be at least -- yards in leng[t]h. Unfortunately, as Dr Beaglehole complains, Banks leaves a blank for the number of yards. Beaglehole comments: ‘While Sporing’s vision, "grave thinking man" as he was, corresponds to no New Zealand

bird otherwise known to natural history’. It should be remembered that this was not the story of one of the common sailors, after a night on a drinking spree, but one of Banks’s team of naturalists (a trained observer and apparently a grave thinking one at that) who was apparently

on the island drawing wildlife. It is not known whether Spoéring attempted to draw the bird but the idea of an enormous brown bird is intriguing. And one has to agree with Dr Beaglehole’s comment that it would be of no small interest how many yards long the tail was. The point is made

Sailors from the Endeavour filling water barrels from a stream near the south head of Tolaga Bay — a drawing by Lieutenant James Cook. Just to the right, but out of the picture, is the island where Hermann Spring saw his gigantic bird.

by Beaglehole that, curiously amongst the numerous paintings of New Zealand and Australian plants made by Banks’s men on that first expedition, there is only one sketch of a land bird, and that was a Banksian cockatoo made at the Endeavour River in Queensland. Beaglehole suggested that there was good evidence that a complete folio of bird drawings and paintings made on Cook’s first voyage was misplaced. As both of Banks’s artists, Parkinson and SpGring, tragically died within two days of each other on the journey home, this is quite feasible. Dr Beaglehole (whose biological footnotes are quite meticulous) is quite right to point out that there is not a kite-like bird with an enormous tail known in New Zealad natural history. The European kite of course is a member of the falcon family with long wings and forked tail. The nearest thing to an enormous kite would be the Haast’s eagle Harpogornis moorei which is assumed to have been extinct by this time. But the eagle’s tail was not ‘enormous. Sporing’s bird remains a mystery. Probably, because the report is so bizarre and inexplicable, the episode has been largely ignored by natural historians.

he French ‘discovered’ saddlebacks, and the pohutukawa in the Far North. By an extraordinary coincidence the French ship St Jean Baptiste commanded by Jean-Francois-Marie Surville also arrived off the Northland coast late in December 1769, departing in January of 1770. Though Endeavour and St Jean Baptiste were not far from each other at times, very little attention has been given to the Surville expedition, probably because of our staunchly Anglocentric culture. The volume of written material which has survived from this expedition is a lot less than that of Cook’s and the rather terse log entries are more typical of what one would expect from sailors — though still fascinating reading nonetheless. Like Cook, Surville and his men quickly worked out that apart from a few lizards the only quadrupeds present in New Zealand were dogs and rats. Like Cook, the French were also moved to comment on the abundance of birds. They described some of the more common species. One ‘like a black bird with two little red wattles like a hen’ (the saddleback), and another ‘black bird’ ‘with the same shape and size except instead of a wattle there is a little tuft of white feathers’ (the tui). They also noted in January 1770 ‘large...

hard-wooded... trees right on the coast covered in bunches of red flowers’ — which could only be the pohutukawa. Surville departed donating to the local Maori a breeding pair of pigs, the ship’s last rooster and hen (with advice in sign language to allow them to breed) and seeds of peas and rice.

Captain Cook — patron of bush walkers

eaving the sensational Sporing incident aside, perhaps the most important nature observation of Cook’s expedition is a more mundane one from Cook himself, who made a walk inland from Tolaga Bay soon after arriving in New Zealand. Tramping through the bush and observing nature has become a popular recreational pursuit for modern day New Zealanders — especially Forest and Birders. It is interesting

to know that the first European to do this was Cook himself. Through the eyes of one of history’s greatest explorers we gain a brief but fascinating glimpse of the way the country was in the last days of Maori New Zealand. He wrote about it thus: ".. the tops and ridges of the hills are for the most part barren, at least little grows on them but fern, But the Vallies and sides of many of the Hills were luxuriously clothed with Woods and Verdure and little Plantations of the natives lying dispers’d up and down the Country... the country abounds with a great number of Plants and the Woods with as great a Variety of very beautiful Birds many of them unknown to us. Cook’s description of the numbers and

visual beauty of the native birds is reinforced by another by the botanist Joseph Banks a few weeks later, on their singing. ‘17th January, 1770, I was awakened by the singing of the birds ashore, from whence we are distant not a quarter of a mile. Their numbers were certainly very great. They seemed to strain their throats with emulation, and made perhaps, the most melodious wild musick I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells, but with the most tunable silver sound imaginable, to which, may be, the distance was no small addition, The reference to ‘small bells’ and to the ‘tunable silver sound’ has always been assumed to refer to bellbirds — but clearly the full range of New Zealand avian songsters would have been present in this mass

choir including tui, kaka, the now-vanished South Island kokako and the native thrush, piopio. Little did they know it but as they sailed away Cook and his men had broken for all time the isolation of these islands which would eventually mean doom for much of the bird life that had so impressed them. MIKE LEE has a long involvement with conservation in the Hauraki Gulf, and with regional government.