New ferry names: Winston calls it woke, but debating Cook’s legacy is nothing new

New Zealand is christening two new state-owned ferries: one named Kupe, after a legendary Māori explorer, and one named after Captain James Cook. Minister Winston Peters defended the Cook naming, dismissing critics as "wokesters" who shy away from history. But as historian Tony Ballantyne notes in the Conversation, this debate is far older than recent culture wars. Since eighteen fifty-nine, scholars have documented Cook's use of violence—firing on Indigenous canoes, for instance. His secret Admiralty instructions explicitly told him to "take Possession of Convenient Situations" for Britain, and he performed possession rituals across New Zealand, setting the stage for colonization. The naming does reflect a cultural shift. Since the nineteen-sixties, New Zealand ferries typically bore the te reo Māori prefix "Ara," meaning "path." Pairing Kupe and Cook honors two great navigators—but obscures a crucial difference: one discovered uninhabited islands, the other arrived in already-occupied lands as a colonial agent. What a nation names its ships shapes how it understands itself, and this christening will likely resurrect questions about Cook's legacy that have never truly been settled.

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