Nevertheless, Captain Cook is not without controversy. He always had to follow secret orders from the London Admiralty, which served the global expansion plans of the British Empire. Therefore, he repeatedly planted the British flag – whether in Australia or Aotearoa/New Zealand, the largest of Britain's future colonies. James Cook, who was regarded on board as a fair man and mild captain, and who had an equally good, diplomatic instinct for approaching the unknown peoples of Oceania - his voyages also left a trail of blood.
There was hardly an island where the Natives were not flogged, taken hostage, or had their ears cut off – or worse, fired upon with shot, bullets, and sometimes with cannons. On Cook’s first voyage, deaths occurred in Tahiti, the Austral Archipelago, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. On his second expedition, people were killed at Moorea (Society Islands), Tahuata (Marquesas), Tanna (Vanuatu), and more than 20 deaths on both sides occurred in Aotearoa/New Zealand. On his third circumnavigation of the globe, Captain Cook himself became a victim.
As on other Polynesian islands, on February 14, 1779, in Hawaii's Kealakekua Bay, the British captain had attempted to take high-ranking chiefs hostage to recover stolen goods. When he opened fire in the ensuing skirmish, Hawaiian warriors knocked him down and stabbed him to death. Charles Clerke, the captain of Cook’s escort ship, the Discovery, remarked immediately after the tragic collision that ultimately killed 26 Hawaiians and four other British sailors, “There is much to suggest that the natives would have behaved differently if Captain Cook had not unfortunately been the first to fire.” In this respect, James Cook is an ambivalent hero: a legendary British navigator and pioneer of world exploration – and a pioneer of the dawning colonial age.