1769: Kidnappers Bay: Captain Cook Names a New Zealand Inlet After a Botched Abduction
On 15 October 1769, during his first voyage along the coast of New Zealand, Lieutenant James Cook watched a group of Maori men attempt to seize a servant from his landing party and haul him away in a canoe. The attempt failed and the servant was recovered, but Cook marked the spot on his chart with a name that stuck: Kidnappers Bay.
According to the Maori version of events recorded at the time, the men believed they were not abducting a stranger at all, but rescuing a Maori boy they thought was being held captive aboard the English ship. The misunderstanding, born of two cultures reading the same scene in entirely different ways, turned a rescue attempt into what the English recorded as a kidnapping.
