The Pacific: In The Wake of Captain Cook With Sam Neill, a six-part series revisiting James Cook’s historic exploratory voyage to the South Seas in the late 18th century, doesn’t play out exactly as the Cook expedition used to be taught in school.
This extended documentary, premiering at 10 p.m. ET Thursday on Ovation, is less a travelogue than a sobering reminder of how Western exploration and colonialism often devastated native cultures that had thrived for hundreds of years.
Neill acknowledges that Cook’s long journey became one of the most important exploratory voyages in history, or at least in Western history. Landing at Tahiti and then roaming through the lower Pacific Ocean, Cook “discovered” multiple islands.
He mapped them as he went. He and his team greatly advanced Western knowledge of botany, and he also scored a big victory in the location game. By mapping the arc of Venus across the sun, a galactic confluence that only happens maybe once a century, he made a massive contribution to the science of determining one’s precise position on the surface of the Earth.
To put it another way, he enhanced the GPS of his time, with a scientific understanding so advanced that it would be another 200 years before science had a telescope sophisticated enough to confirm that Cook’s calculations were remarkably accurate.
Neill’s own mission here goes beyond praising the adventurous spirit, bravery, and tenacity of Cook and the men of his ship, the Dolphin.
In retracing the path of Cook’s voyage, Neill spends more of his time talking with the descendants of the natives Cook encountered. As so often happens when enough time has passed to give us a perspective on colonial exploration, the picture looks less heroic through the eyes of those the European explorers saw mostly as potential colonists.
What the Europeans almost always brought to these encounters was superior weaponry, which is how one boatload of Brits was able to theoretically subdue an entire island full of people.
In truth, Neill notes, Cook’s gesture of planting the British flag on Tahiti didn’t mean much. When he left, no other Brits rushed in, leaving Tahiti up for colonial grabs until the French sailed in a century later.
Today Tahiti is still nominally connected to France, an affiliation hilariously illustrated by a race in which young Tahitian men try to run faster than all the other young Tahitian men with a large, heavy bunch of fruit (bananas, whatever) on their shoulders.
The traditional race is held annually to help mark Bastille Day, making it one of the oddest cross-cultural celebrations in modern global history.
Often, however, Neill notes through interviews with Pacific natives, the impact of Europeans was more sinister. Explorers and missionaries, regarding native culture as primitive and blasphemous, often attempted to wipe it, forcibly replacing it with the culture and religions of the West.
On a cruder and more visceral level, sailors who had spent months at sea often saw native women as theirs for the taking. In exchange for, uh, favors, the sailors would give nails to the women.
It turns out nails were highly prized in a place that had no metal industry of its own because they had so many potential uses.
In the broadest sense, Captain Cook had the same attitude as almost all European explorers: that any natives they encountered in these exotic faraway places must be simple, naïve and primitive. They needed the wisdom of the Europeans, even if their own wisdom had sustained a culture for centuries.
Now they needed to either abandon their culture or fold it into European culture.
The Pacific island area affected by Cook’s voyage, The Pacific notes, extended over a broad triangle from Hawaii to New Zealand. So there’s no diminishing the impact of his voyage.
For better and for worse.