Celebrations to mark 250th anniversary of Captain Cook's landing

Tuesday, 14 June 2016

Captain James Cook's favourite New Zealand anchorage was Ship Cove in the Marlborough Sounds.

Celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook sailing into Ship Cove, in the Marlborough Sounds, will leave a lasting legacy, organisers say.

Totaranui 250 Trust will receive $100,000 a year over the next three years from the Marlborough District Council towards celebrating the nationally significant event.

The trust was set up to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook's landing and Marlborough's dual Maori and European history.

Trust chairman Dr John Hellstrom said Marlborough had a unique place in New Zealand history as both Maori and Europeans settled in Marlborough before occupying the rest of the country.

James Smith, 3, takes little interest in the start of the Cook Bicentennial celebrations at Ship Cove on January 19, 1970.

* Iwi welcome Captain Cook celebrations**

The first significant long-term contact between Maori and Europeans took place in the Queen Charlotte Sound, or Totaranui, in the 1770s.

'We don't want to do what was done in 1913 and 1969 and have a European celebration. That story is not a true story,' Hellstrom said.

'At his core, Cook was a humanist. While there were skirmishes and fighting, Cook worked hard to recognise that Maori had their rights. He was a very humble man. He came from poverty to become the greatest navigator.'

An Endeavour replica, a fleet of tall ships and ocean-voyaging waka would sail to Ship Cove in December 2019.

The trust wanted to establish a Cook trail that would take people to the landing site at Ship Cove, a Cook garden on the Picton foreshore with plants Cook used including scurvy-grass, celery and New Zealand spinach, and interpretative boards in Picton.

'We have a landing site New Zealand can be proud of,' Hellstrom said.

'The tourism potential is substantial. There is a huge appetite among North Americans and Europeans interested in the Cook Story.'

Events to be commemorated included the first encounters at Meretoto in 1770 and Cook's ascent of Kaitepeha on Arapawa Island where he first observed a fact long known to Polynesian navigators, the non-existence of a great southern continent.

The departure from Admiralty Bay for Australia in March 1770, and the encounter at Wharehunga in 1773, would also be marked.

There was a prospect of integrating all the sites into a World Heritage Park, Hellstrom said.

A national programme would recognise Cook's voyages to New Zealand between 1769 and 1777.

The $300,000 budgeted in the council's annual plan would establish an administrative and fundraising structure to support a seven-year programme of celebratory events.

The funding was subject to the trust providing a business plan to the council.

Endeavour first sailed into Ship Cove on January 15, 1770, according to the Marlborough Museum.

Cook spent more than 100 days at Ship Cove, in the Queen Charlotte Sound, on five separate occasions.

The bay, sheltered by Motuara Island became Cook's favourite anchorage in New Zealand.

He considered it to be an ideal place to allow his sailors to rest, to gather vegetables, fish, shellfish and fresh water and to repair his ships.

Several days after he landed at Ship Cove, Cook had his men set up a flagpole on a high point of Motuara Island across the channel from Ship Cove.

Cook along with his officers and a rangatira, or chief, climbed to this point, and recorded that he hoisted the Union flag, named the inlet Queen Charlottes Sound and took formal possession of it and the adjacent lands in the name, and for the use, of his Majesty George III.