David Penberthy: Cook was not Hernan Cortes leading the Spaniards into Mexico

If forward-thinking men like James Cook are junked alongside those who fought for slavery, we have gone beyond thinking, writes David Penberthy.

For the past 25 years, the Australian and English national rugby teams have competed against each other for the Cook Cup.

The trophy is named, obviously enough, after Captain James Cook, who in 1770 circumnavigated the east coast of Australia and claimed the continent as British territory.

Cook’s name was always a fitting choice to grace this cup as no-one better personifies the links between the two nations, through his exploration of the Pacific and the creation of an English colony here.

But now, without so much as a single tweet denouncing the use of Cook’s moniker, the English and Australian rugby authorities have decreed that Captain James Cook is no longer an appropriate figure to name the trophy.

Instead, it will now be known as the Ella-Mobbs Cup, named after Indigenous Wallabies great Mark Ella and former England winger Edgar Mobbs, who was killed in action in France during World War I.

Without detracting from either man’s legacy, we should call out this unexplained decision for what it really is. It is an example of how cancel culture hysteria has now got to the point where otherwise sane organisations will cancel themselves, even in the absence of public calls to do so. Maybe they wanted to head a Twitter storm off at the pass, acting pre-emptively to avoid future scandal.

But through their pea-hearted actions in airbrushing this explorer out of existence, the rugby authorities have effectively placed Cook in the same moral space as Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and every other slave trader, Klansman and genocidal imperialist whose statue has been torn down over the past few years.

It shows how in 2022 we now lack the ability to process historical information with perspective or nuance, instead dividing the world and its history into a good-versus-evil which saves anyone the trouble of thinking about the overall story of people’s conduct.

Captain Cook Statue in St Kilda, Melbourne. Picture: Wayne Taylor 10

The truth is that James Cook was a man who was ahead of time. You could rightly describe him as a humanist. He was marked by a respect for the indigenous people he encountered in his groundbreaking journeys around Australia, New Zealand, east to Vanuatu, Tahiti, Hawaii, and other island nations of the Pacific. Some of it might have sounded patronising, indeed it undoubtedly was. In the language of the days, he talked about people as “natives”. On some isolated cases, Cook came into conflict with indigenous people. On one occasion he fired a blunderbuss above the heads of a group of fired-up Aboriginal men he encountered in NSW, not to kill them but to scare them off.

But in his totality, Cook was not Hernan Cortes leading the Spaniards into Mexico to destroy the Aztec empire.

He did not regard himself as an invader whose jobs it was to suppress a pre-existing race of people in the land they owned and occupied.

Rather, he wanted to map the land he discovered, he wanted to befriend not conquer the people he met, and to record the plants and animals he saw with his travelling botanist Joseph Banks.

Cook was also decent enough to reflect on whether his actions in “discovering” a continent that was already inhabited would have the effect of feeling like an invasion.

He said it would be up to future generations of settlers to live peacefully with indigenous Australians, and to show by their conduct that their arrival had not been designed as an invasion. It might sound like a naive hope, and it certainly jarred with the subsequent displacement, disease and, in several cases, deliberate racist violence. But it showed that Cook was moved by a level of thought and compassion that had none of the racism and heartlessness of his era.

In his masterful biography of Cook, author Peter FitzSimons delves on the extent to which Cook ruminated on the impact of his actions in claiming Australian for the British Empire.

British PM Sir Winston Churchill had some positive achievements too.

Fitzsimons recalls: “There’s a quote from Cook where he says that the natives could be forgiven for thinking we were an invasion. It will be for us to persuade them otherwise. It’s a stunning quote.”

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, one of the best examples of how screwed up the world has become came out of England, where statues of Winston Churchill were attacked on the grounds that he was an imperialist and a racist. Whatever foibles Churchill had, I’d have thought you could cut him some slack out of gratitude for fighting and defeating the greatest and best-organised racist who ever lived.

Beyond the question of the goodness or badness of all these people lies a bigger question about how we remember and learn about history.

Do we make the past easier and the present better through the removal of statues of people who, unlike James Cook, were demonstrably bad? Or is the presence of historical monuments venerating the despicable a reminder of past wrongs, however uncomfortable and brutal the past might be? In 2022, it feels like the time has passed for any level-headed questions.

If James Cook is being junked alongside the men who fought for the South and the retention of slavery, we have gone beyond thinking and into mindless barracking. So much so that organisations like these two rugby boards will embrace such politically correct and historically bankrupt stupidity, with the added comic bonus that they’ve been under no actual pressure to do so.