Explore
Captain Cook's
Landing in
Gisborne

​

Captain James Cook remains one of the most contested figures in Gisborne’s history.

​

In October 1769, the HMS Endeavour anchored off the coast of what Cook named Poverty Bay, marking the first recorded meeting between Maori and Europeans in New Zealand. What followed would shape not only Gisborne’s identity, but the story of the country itself.

More than 250 years later, the legacy of Cook still sits uneasily across the city.

​

Monuments have been erected, vandalised, defended, debated, and removed. Replica ships once celebrated with civic pride have quietly disappeared. Historical markers that once symbolised national achievement now provoke difficult conversations about memory, colonisation, identity, and how societies reinterpret their past.

​

Yet regardless of politics, Captain Cook’s arrival remains inseparable from the story of Gisborne.

​

This page brings together a series of articles exploring the strange, fascinating, and often contradictory relationship between Gisborne and Captain Cook.

​

From Cook’s own journal entries describing the first days at Poverty Bay, to the rise and fall of the Kaiti Hill statue, to the replica Endeavour ships that once stood on Gladstone Road, these stories reveal how one historical figure continues to cast a long shadow across the city.

Because in Gisborne, Captain Cook is not just history.

He is still part of the conversation.

​