On the encounter at Turanganui River

Nicholas Thomas, on the second violent encounter between Captain Cook's Endeavour crew and iwi at the Turanganui River entrance in what is now modern-day Gisborne:

One of the things that I would like to know about what happened around this river entrance on 9 October 1769 is at what point it became inevitable that people would be injured and killed. The previous evening's incident [in which the English killed a man threatening their pinnace] suggests that Maori were disposed to resist and repel the intruders, so Cook's commitment to landing and making contact perhaps made some clash unavoidable. Yet there is no indication in Maori behaviour on the morning of the 9th, before the shooting started, that they had planned any massacre or even intended physical harm. They were defiant, and once they saw what the visitors had, they were eager to obtain it from them in whatever way they could. Perhaps there was no retreat, no way of defusing this, once [the ship's astronomer] Green's hanger [a small-sword] was taken. The Europeans fired because they would not submit to being stripped of their property, and because of what they feared, with or without justification. They started shooting to prove that this sort of encounter was susceptible to their control, but they convinced neither the Maori nor themselves.

- Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook, London, 2018 (revised edn.), p.90-1.