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.

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 Gradually the potato superseded amongst them the taro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