He gave the natives seed potatoes and the seeds of cabbages and turnips.  The potatoes were cultivated with care and success.  One tribe had sufficient self-control not to eat any for three years; then they had abundance.  Gradually the potato superseded amongst them the taro and fern-root, and even to some extent the kumara.  The cabbages and turnips were allowed to run wild, and in that state were still found flourishing fifty years afterwards.  The Maoris of Poverty Bay had a story that Cook gave to one of their chiefs a musket with a supply of powder and lead.  The fate of the musket was that the first man to fire it was so frightened by the report and recoil that he flung it away into the sea.  The powder the natives sowed in the ground believing it to be cabbage seed.  Of the lead they made an axe, and when the axe bent at the first blow they put it in the fire to harden it.  When it then ran about like water they tried to guide it out of the fire with sticks.  But it broke in pieces, and they gave up the attempt.  With better results Cook turned fowls and pigs loose to furnish the islanders with flesh-meat.  To this day the wild pigs which the settlers shoot and spear in the forests and mountain valleys, are called after Captain Cook, and furnish many a solitary shepherd and farmer with a much more wholesome meal than they would get from “tame” pork.  The Maoris who boarded Cook’s ships thought at first that pork was whale’s flesh.  They said the salt meat nipped their throats, which need not surprise us when we remember what the salt junk of an eighteenth century man-of-war was like.  They ate ship’s biscuit greedily, though at first sight they took it for an uncanny kind of pumice-stone.  But in those days they turned with loathing from wine and spirits—­as least Crozet says so.

What Captain Cook thought of the Maori is a common-place of New Zealand literature.  Every maker of books gives a version of his notes.  What the Maori thought of Captain Cook is not so widely known.  Yet it is just as interesting, and happily the picture of the great navigator as he appeared to the savages has been preserved for us.  Among the tribe living at Mercury Bay when the Endeavour put in there was a boy—­a little fellow of about eight years old, but possessing the name of Horeta Taniwha (Red-smeared Dragon)—­no less.  The child lived through all the changes and chances of Maori life and warfare to more than ninety years of age.  In his extreme old age he would still tell of how he saw Kapene Kuku—­Captain Cook.  Once he told his story to Governor Wynyard, who had it promptly taken down.  Another version is also printed in one of Mr. John White’s volumes.[1] The two do not differ in any important particular.  The amazing apparition of the huge white-winged ship with its crew of goblins, and what they said, and what they did, and how they looked, had remained clearly photographed upon the retina of Taniwha’s mind’s-eye for three-quarters of a century.  From his youth up he had, of course, proudly repeated the story.  A more delightful child’s narrative it would be hard to find.