In fact, the new names \u2013 Kupe, after the great explorer of Pacific and M\u0101ori tradition, and Cook, honouring the commander of three British Pacific expeditions from 1768 to 1779 \u2013 already mark a break with past naming traditions.<\/p>\n
Since the 1960s, ferries often bore the te reo M\u0101ori prefix “Ara”, meaning “path”. The first was the Aramoana (“passage over the sea”), a “roll-on, roll-off” rail ferry that transformed travel across Cook Strait between New Zealand\u2019s two main islands.<\/p>\n
Of course, naming practices shift over time. And Peters was correct in highlighting the “indelible mark on these islands, and on Cook Strait in particular” left by both Kupe and Cook.<\/p>\n
![\"Minister](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/winston-peters-3XZRXASYG5G5NMA3VUBZC3B52A.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Minister for Rail Winston Peters. (Source: Getty)<\/p>\n
Many features of this waterway are associated with Kupe. For example, its M\u0101ori name, Te Moana Raukawakawa, refers to the kawakawa leaves worn to protect ocean travellers as they neared the islands called Ng\u0101 Whatu (The Eyes), understood to be the calcified eyes of the great wheke (octopus) Kupe had pursued and killed.<\/p>\n
Yet that M\u0101ori name is rarely visible: most maps call it Cook Strait and the vessels that cross it are widely known as “Cook Strait ferries”.<\/p>\n
This primacy of English names is an extension of the process Cook started, including at T\u014dtaranui (which he called Queen Charlotte Sound) and a favoured anchorage there, Meretoto, which he named Ship Cove.<\/p>\n
Discovery and rediscovery<\/p>\n
There is no doubt, however, the new ferry names do recognise some deep historical associations.<\/p>\n
They are also in line with a cultural tradition of linking Cook and Kupe. The pair were prominent in The Discovery of New Zealand, the landmark work by New Zealand historian and Cook scholar J. C. Beaglehole, published in 1940.<\/p>\n
Beaglehole imagined a conversation where “Cook would eagerly have talked” with Kupe, “as men converse between their peers”.<\/p>\n
But this equivalence between Kupe and Cook as men of the sea and great navigators glosses over the very real differences between “discovering” uninhabited islands and the “rediscovery” of already occupied lands in the context of empire building. So there is a fundamental tension in placing the two figures side by side.<\/p>\n
Peters suggested it has become fashionable for Cook \u201cto be condemned, cancelled and cast out\u201d, and dismissed those who identify him as a \u201charbinger of colonisation\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, it is misleading to suggest that critiques of Cook are a recent product of a so-called woke agenda.<\/p>\n
As my book Captain Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire demonstrates, the M\u0101ori communities who experienced injuries and death as a result of Cook\u2019s expeditions have never forgotten those losses and have increasingly shared their perspectives with the wider public in recent times.<\/p>\n
And there also has been a long tradition of commentary from P\u0101keh\u0101 New Zealanders expressing deep unease about the violence used as a tactic during Cook\u2019s voyages.<\/p>\n
In 1859, the pioneering historian A. S. Thomson \u2013 a Scottish military surgeon who hardly fits the profile of a \u201cwokester\u201d \u2013 noted that after the first voyage,<\/p>\n
“Captain Cook left the country without having had one of his crew killed or wounded by the natives; while they had to mourn the loss of ten men killed, and many others wounded, by the English during this visit.”<\/p>\n
The politician and historian William Pember Reeves (1857\u20131932), who was also an influential architect of immigration laws designed to exclude Asians from New Zealand, observed that Cook repeatedly used gunfire and this had terrible consequences:<\/p>\n
“Once Cook fired on the crew of a canoe merely for refusing to stop and answer questions about their habits and customs, and killed four of them \u2013 an act of which he calmly notes that he himself could not, on reflection, approve.”<\/p>\n
Cook and colonisation<\/p>\n
Peters announced the names in a speech at Parliament today, alongside confirmation KiwiRail will operate the two vessels for 30 years from their arrival in 2029. (Source: Supplied)<\/p>\n
Reeves celebrated Cook as a navigator and a mapmaker, but he was troubled by the violence Cook and other agents of empire set in train, initiating a \u201cseries of deeds of blood and reprisal which made the name of New Zealand notorious for generations\u201d.<\/p>\n
And the historical record teaches us that Cook was indeed a harbinger of colonisation. His secret instructions from the Admiralty encouraged him to \u201ctake Possession of Convenient Situations\u201d during his explorations \u201cin the Name of the King of Great Britain\u201d.<\/p>\n
He undertook rituals of possession in Te Whanganui-a-Hei and T\u014dtaranui during the first voyage, and imagined New Zealand as a flourishing future colony of Britain.<\/p>\n
He suggested it would not \u201cbe at all difficult for Strangers to form a settlement in this Country\u201d because colonists could exploit divisions between the kin-groups that structured Indigenous life.<\/p>\n
Colonists arrived in large numbers from 1840 and many have subsequently looked back on Cook as a foundational figure and a hero.<\/p>\n
But such judgements were never unanimous. From the moment of his death in 1779, Cook has been and remains contested. Questions about his actions and the consequences of his visits are not new and reflect the profoundly unsettling nature of empire and colonisation.<\/p>\n
Such questions will be raised again now with the christening of the new ferries, and rightly so. What we name things matters, serving to shape our sense of ourselves, our pasts and our futures.<\/p>\n
Tony Ballantyne is a professor of history at the University of Otago<\/p>\n