of the natives.  They took the Endeavour for a gigantic white-winged sea-bird, and her pinnace for a young bird.  They thought the sailors gods, and the discharge of their muskets divine thunderbolts.  Yet, when Cook and a boat’s crew landed, a defiant war-chief at once threatened the boat, and persisted until he was shot dead.  Almost all Cook’s attempts to trade and converse with the Maoris ended in the same way—­a scuffle and a musket-shot.  Yet the savages were never cowed, and came again.  They were shot for the smallest thefts.  Once Cook fired on the crew of a canoe merely for refusing to stop and answer questions about their habits and customs, and killed four of them—­an act of which he calmly notes that he himself could not, on reflection, approve.  On the other hand he insisted on discipline, and flogged his sailors for robbing native plantations.  For that age he was singularly humane, and so prudent that he did not lose a man on his first and most troubled visit to New Zealand.  During this voyage he killed ten Maoris.  Later intercourse was much more peaceful, though Captain Furneaux, of Cook’s consort, the Adventure, less lucky, or less cautious, lost an entire boat’s crew, killed and eaten.

Cook himself was always able to get wood and water for his ships, and to carry on his surveys with such accuracy and deliberation that they remained the standard authority on the outlines of the islands for some seventy years.  He took possession of the country in the name of George the Third.  Some of its coast-names still recall incidents of his patient voyaging.  “Young Nick’s Head” is the point which the boy Nicholas Young sighted on the 6th of October, 1769—­the first bit of New Zealand seen by English eyes.  At Cape Runaway the Maoris, after threatening an attack, ran away from a discharge of firearms.  At Cape Kidnappers they tried to carry off Cook’s Tahitian boy in one of their canoes.  A volley, which killed a Maori, made them let go their captive, who dived into the sea and swam back to the Endeavour half crazed with excitement at his narrow escape from a New Zealand oven.  The odd name of the very fertile district of Poverty Bay reminds us that Cook failed to get there the supplies he obtained at the Bay of Plenty.  At Goose Cove he turned five geese ashore; at Mercury Bay he did astronomical work.  On the other hand, Capes North, South, East, and West, and Capes Brett, Saunders, Stephens, and Jackson, Rock’s Point, and Black Head are neither quaint nor romantic names.  Cascade Point and the Bay of Islands justify themselves, and Banks’ Peninsula may be accepted for Sir Joseph’s sake.  But it could be wished that the great sailor had spared a certain charming haven from the name of Hicks’s Bay, and had not rechristened the majestic cone of Taranaki as a compliment to the Earl of Egmont.