Captain Cook’s Aboriginal spears belong in Cambridge, not Australia

On the eve of the First World War, Trinity College, Cambridge deposited four spears collected by Captain Cook during his first encounter with native Australians in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge University. There they could be seen and studied by any visitor to Cambridge, rather than being hidden away in a cabinet of curiosities in the Wren Library at Trinity. Now, more than 250 years after Cook’s visit to Australia, they are to be returned to Sydney and to members of the tribe that originally made them.

After they arrived in what became known as Botany Bay, Cook’s men confiscated about 40 of these rods from members of the Gweagal clan. At first, the Gweagal were suspected of using these spears as weapons, and over several days the crew picked them up in their villages and along the coast; some were as much as 15 feet long. Only four have survived, all now in Cambridge, and of these only one or two were obtained on the first day of Cook’s visit.