January 13, 2014
Historical rewrite shameful says Moon
Auckland University of Technology Professor Paul Moon has slammed claims of secret European efforts to colonise New Zealand prior to James Cook’s arrival in the country in 1769.
It’s the latest effort by Dargaville man Noel Hilliam, who has a long record of promoting alternative narratives of New Zealand settlement that challenge the idea of Maori as tangata whenua and first settlers.
For his latest stunt served up with the Christmas turkey and picked up by media worldwide, Mr Hilliam arranged for the analysis of fragments of a shipwreck found on North Kaipara Head in 1982.
The wreck has since been covered again by sand, but the fragments were collected at the time and lodged in the Dargaville museum.
A paper in the current issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science by Mr Hilliam and lead author Jonathan Palmer, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales says carbon dating and analysis of tree ring samples puts the date of the ship’s construction at about 1705 – between Dutch explorer Abel Tasman’s 1642 sighting of New Zealand and British Captain James Cook’s landing in 1769.
It says the wood is tropical hardwood, and the ship was probably of Dutch construction.
The paper suggests the ill-fated voyage was part of a secret scheme by European powers to claim territories in the South Pacific.
Professor Moon says the paper is flawed on both scientific and historical grounds.
He says testing a few pieces of wood without any systematic attempt to get samples from all parts of the vessel is almost valueless, because the samples could easily have been reclaimed from other, older vessels and used for repairs.
He says the historical arguments are “shameful”.
“Essentially, they are saying that the absence of any documentary evidence at all is somehow ‘proof’ that there was a secret campaign by some European countries to explore and colonise territories in the South Pacific.”
“Three centuries after the event, with all the archives open, we would expect to see solid evidence of such schemes. The more sensible conclusion to reach from the lack of any paper-trail is that there was no such secret scheme – it’s as simple as that. Instead, what we have been told is this ridiculous cloak-and-dagger story,” Professor Moon says.
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