Captain Cook’s Maori paddles: an artefact of encounter

Maori paddles presented to Captain Cook's crew on their first voyage of discovery capture the spirit of a first encounter between two cultures. they enter'd into a traffick with our people.. giving in exchange their padddles - William Monkhouse, Ship's Surgeon, HMS Endeavour Living in a multicultural, globalised world, it's hard to imagine the moment when different cultures first met, or a time when people's knowledge of each other's worlds was nonexistent. Yet, on 12 October 1769, seven Maori canoes paddled out from the east coast of New Zealand south of Poverty Bay to investigate a large ship. The vessel was the HMS Endeavour , captained by Captain James Cook, and this was the first time the Maori people had encountered a European. They were at first reluctant to approach the ship but then, according to the diary of ship's surgeon William Monkhouse, "very soon enter'd into a traffick with our people for [Tahitian] cloth.. giving in exchange their paddles (having little else to dispose of) and hardly left themselves sufficient number to paddle a shore." A set of these finely carved and decorated paddles is now housed in the University of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where an innovative research project 'Artefacts of Encounter' has been working with Polynesian communities to understand what the earliest Europeans to visit the Pacific Islands made of the people they met, and what those people made of them.