The Poolie Bunker

Years ago I thought it was a risky strategy for Teesside/Middlesbrough to be so keen to link itself to Capt Cook Now i see this.
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/0 ... HBNVqFLRVR

Certainly the inscription on his monument on the N Yorks moors wouldn't get past the PC brigade today.

"In memory of the celebrated circumnavigator Captain James Cook F.R.S. A man of nautical knowledge inferior to none, in zeal prudence and energy, superior to most. Regardless of danger he opened an intercourse with the Friendly Isles and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere. He was born at Marton Oct. 27th 1728 and massacred at Owythee Feb. 14th 1779 to the inexpressible grief of his countrymen. While the art of navigation shall be cultivated among men, whilst the spirit of enterprise, commerce and philanthropy shall animate the sons of Britain, while it shall be deemed the honour of a Christian Nation to spread civilisation and the blessings of the Christian faith among pagan and savage tribes, so long will the name of Captain Cook stand out amongst the most celebrated and most admired benefactors of the human race."

I think you're pushing it to suggest that someone like him shouldn't be celebrated. I've always thought those type of explorers from that sort of era must have been pretty incredible people, literally sailing into the unknown. Bravery doesn't really cover it. At some point I'd imagine your luck runs out and you're going to get beaten to death by a baying mob in Hawaii.

It's also not surprising that future generations of the indigenous people of places like Australia and New Zealand hold the views expressed in that article. They have suffered some fairly awful racial discrimination since and have widely been perceived as second class citizens in what they see rightly as their own country, even to this day. It that a slur on the great explorers? Probably not you're talking the thick end of 250 years ago here, travelling abroad was somewhat different as was the World! I imagine the person who worded that transcript for Cook had never seen any foreigner of any description never mind someone from the other side of the World, in many ways like your average Brexit Party member.

I seem to remember going to James Cook museum in Whitby and it was possibly the most boring experience of my life.

hth.

Currently in James Cook hospital , Boring here also.

And......? Hardly unusual for it’s time and should be taken in that context. Oh dear.

want a ban on any viking related stuff thats about due the rape and pillage of my anglo saxon relatives of the past.

It was the mode of operation at the time but the marketing dept of Boro and N Yorks should maybe have looked into this a bit deeper as they have themed the area on him.
If this takes off its going to be a costly re-branding exercise.

Are you being serious!?

Yes

To be fair, if you're a Maori or an Aborigine there isn't much to celebrate about the arrival of the Europeans. It would help if they weren't still treated so badly and the whole thing really was only about their ancestors but the endless shit they've been given over the years still continues.

Would be fair to remember the likes of Captain Cook as a great navigator but, considering what followed his arrival, building replica ships and organising festivities to welcome them must look pretty insensitive. You have to appreciate the context of now as well as the context of the times.

That’s like blaming the inventor of electricity for the electric chair.
We really are turning into a bunch of twee darlings. Oh dear oh dear oh dear

Did a steam roller drive over your head at an early age? It would explain a lot.

No but i did fall off a wall and landed on my head but it was nothing to do with me being educated as to the virtues of Capt James Cook FRS.

But it did irretrievably damage your common sense function.
You may find life challenging.

I have weathered a few storms but lifes plain sailing now.

With all this good weather i am feeling very becalmed so i am going to drop anchor, get cabin-ed up, get my sextant out and hoist my jolly roger.

Should this thread be scuttled or should it drift on?

Leave it to drift on, it may bump into a previously undiscovered island where the inhabitants are happy not to be discovered.
It’s said the the Vikings discovered America and hushed it up for over 600 years.

everybody in Middlesbrough actually looks like him

He had a lot of sex while on shore leave, so much that he was widely known as Captain Cock. Not mentioned on the monument for some reason.

Probably not attracted to the Boro lasses for some reason.....just cant think why

but going half way round the world to avoid maintainance payments is a bit OTT.

A great seaman.

I think this story may run.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-49903759

It stands to reason that bloke who went to pick flowers didn’t approve of the local slaughtering he didn’t sign up for that and I bet a lot of stuff he wanted to take back got trampled on or blood stained during the scuffle.

By the way I’m not going to Hawaii until they apologise for the angry mob bludgeoning Captain Cook to death plus I want a full statement from the Scandinavians and the mayor of Rome for some of the frightful things their relatives got up to. If Captain Cook museum in Stewart Park is closing I want the Colosseum, and that’s just a start, raising to the ground. Yeah they invented central heating blah blah, but some of them I have heard were a little bit violent.

I'm not entirely sure that picking flowers was the main reason for the voyages, Britain and lots of other european powers did pretty well out of lands they 'discovered'. Obviously Cook was a keen botanist, great mariner and so on but that doesn't mean you can seperate him out from what the crew that were part of his expedition did on arrival.

I can't see the problem with admitting that bad stuff happened in the past or that people who became national heroes during the age of the British Empire might have had a bad side too. Given the culture they grew up and thrived in it would be remarkable if they didn't.

Applying 21st century ‘morals’ ( which are pretty shit on a much greater scale) to 18th century folk is a pointless exercise. Accentuating the negativ3 has become de rigeur in some circles sadly.

My serious contributions to this thread ended after my first post.

I’m off to dig some dirt on Field Marshal Montgomery.

I’m expecting an ‘Adolf wasn’t that bad really’ post.

I think you're just being stubborn Snowy.

There is a big difference between applying 21st century morals to the past and looking at dodgy celebrations in the current context.

Was Cook great in many respects and were misdeeds perpetrated by his crew seen as excusable or even normal at the time? Yes. People from non-Christian cultures were seen as savages, stereotyped as canibals and generally viewed as potentially dangerous primitives. Killing a few of them while going about Britain's business wasn't seen as a serious matter then, or in British history books for the best part of the next couple of centuries.

Maoris obviously see it differently, for them it is the start of an land grab that brought death, disease and discrimination that continues to this day. Why would they celebrate that? If it was all ancient history and everybody in New Zealand was treated equally maybe a low-key, balanced event acknowledging both sides of the story would be fine but, as things stand, celebrating with a replica ship and cheering people dressed up as the crew members who killed Maoris is always going to get a reaction.

No, I think I’m being realistic. All history has it’s consequences and the voyages of Captain Cook are hardly heady stuff. Whoever ‘discovered’ New Zealand was going to be getting denounced in today’s climate.
I lose no sleep over thi# particular this topic.

That's true in so far as if it wasn't him it would Captain Smith or whoever. I don't think they're so much denouncing him as an individual though, it's more like saying should we really still celebrate this given the world we now live in? Whether he was good or bad, nice or nasty, is secondary.

It could well have been some other power discovered the place and some countries we now regard as cute and enlightened within Europe were utter bastards with their new colonial acquisitions and regrettably efficient at eliminating problem locals.
Someone’s always offended, so nothing new there, someone always has an axe to grind, but the world moves on.

It could well have been some other power discovered the place and some countries we now regard as cute and enlightened within Europe were utter bastards with their new colonial acquisitions and regrettably efficient at eliminating problem locals.
Someone’s always offended, so nothing new there, someone always has an axe to grind, but the world moves on.

The Dutch for one example. Though to be fair, if you visit the section on the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, it pulls no punches on what heartless monsters the Dutch colonizers were.

In the end it all comes down to profit and power relationships - the Arabs developed the slave trade in sub-Saharan Africa centuries before the Europeans got involved, and were very happy to sell pagan Africans to the Christians when they arrived on the scene.

The Belgians were the nastiest bastards of all. All chocolate, fruity beer, and chips with mayo now but Leopold II's love of slaughter was second to none.

I remember learning some pretty brutal stuff about the Dutch when I was in Jakarta a few years back, including them slaughtering every man in a village (over 400 from memory) because the locals wouldn’t tell them where someone was hiding and that was in 1947.

I feel like pitching a Colonial atrocities Top Trumps game to Dragons Den I have some great categories in mind, Genocide, Slavery, Famine, Despotic rulers, raping and pillaging. Most major countries get a card at some point!

It’s interesting though when traveling in India back in what feels another lifetime now we met a bloke who owned the hotel where we were staying in Jaipur in his 70’s at a guess who was a retired Colonel from the Royal Poona Horse and he maintained that the ‘Britishers’ as he referred to us were the best thing that ever happened to India and without us even now very little infrastructure would be in place. He also said that many of his generation share that view. Mind it seemed much of that colonial past had rubbed off on him as he informed us on arrival that he did room service just ring the bell and ‘the boy’ will come and bring you anything you want on the menu (including an item which was called ‘special water’ which he told us was beer as he wasn’t licensed!) this ‘boy’ was a bloke in his 40’s with no shoes. The special water was cold though.

I suppose the truth is many of his class and background share that view as they weren’t affected by any of erm let’s say more questionable stuff that went on, or the consequences of it. In dedication to the phrase different times a quote attributed to Winston Churchill after he diverted food to British Troops and countries like Greece during World War Two which led to a famine that killed four million people “I hate Indians they are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits” I’m sure even Teflon Boris wouldn’t get away with that!

Funny how recent memory fades. The Japanese now appear innocuous workaholics who mind their own business. Yet when I bought a Japanese car in the 80’s my dad went ape shit because his mate was a POW of the Japanese. My father in law was captured at Dunkirk ( they didn’t all get away) and found the Germans in ‘relative terms’ treat western prisoners a lot better than Russians or any Slavs who were treat worse than dogs. He was always amazed at how they re-branded themselves.

Historians generally agree that the possibility of Cook not finding King Kong lsland on his travels is so small as to be laughable. A cover-up operation that lasted 200 years before being exposed.

If Cooks ‘cover’ for the voyage wasn’t exploration and botany, what was he after? At the time we had nearly all the resources we required and a voyage to God knows where wasn’t going to change that. MacDonalds franchises would be out of the question and unless there was a market for Kiwi feathers or ferns, there was nothing to actually exploit.

Maybe he was the first gory combat botanist? When you find an uncharted natural harbour you go ashore with an armed party and kill a few of the people who live there. That puts the shits up the local flora and fauna so they don't object while you collect them. Not an unreasonable approach but for some reason it has fallen out of favour with modern naturalists.

could not have been that bad as he owned a german shepherd dog. could have understood his actions if he was a siberian husky owner. some think round me the stupid bastard is a funny name for a dog.

Well the Hawaiians seemed to like him.

"The esteem which the islanders nevertheless held for Cook caused them to retain his body. Following their practice of the time, they prepared his body with funerary rituals usually reserved for the chiefs and highest elders of the society. After been killed Cooks body was disembowelled, baked to facilitate removal of the flesh, and the bones were carefully cleaned for preservation as religious icons in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of the treatment of European saints in the Middle Ages. Some of Cook's remains, thus preserved, were eventually returned to his crew for a formal burial at sea."

Maybe he was actually a good guy who loved exploring and charting the known world and a couple of his crew were twats. Seeing evil in everyone is never a good philosophy.

Hitler actually was a tee total, non smoking vegetarian who liked cream teas, architecture, Wagner and oddly enough films. I kid you not.
Today we’d classify him as a green ..... with mass murdering tendencies.

if he had won the war he,d have moved to harrogate tp annex betty,s tea rooms calling them brunhilde.s.