For nearly two hundred years, one of the smallest nations in the Pacific carried a name given to it by a man who was never allowed to set foot on it. The island is Niue. The name he gave it was Savage Island. The story of how it got that name is worth telling properly, because it is the opposite of the insult it was meant to be.

1774, three times turned away

In June 1774, Captain James Cook came to Niue and tried to land. He was driven off. He tried again. Driven off again. A third time, the same. Three attempts, three refusals, and he never got ashore.

The Niueans who met his boats came down to the water with spears, and by several accounts their mouths were stained red, from chewing a red banana bark, so it looked like blood. To Cook it read as ferocity. To Niueans it was very likely a traditional challenge, the way you meet strangers arriving uninvited on your shore. He misread it, the way outsiders so often misread us. What he saw as savagery was a people telling him, plainly, that he did not have permission to land.

The name he left behind

Turned away and unsettled, Cook named the place Savage Island. That name went onto European maps and stayed there, in some form, into the twentieth century. A whole island labelled for the crime of defending itself.

Think about what that name actually records. Not savagery. A small island that would not be walked onto by an armed foreign ship, and made that stick. Cook charted half the Pacific and forced his way ashore in a lot of places. Niue was one that said no, and made it hold.

The name that was always theirs

Niueans never called it Savage Island. Among themselves it was always Niue.

The name means behold the coconut. Niu, coconut. E, behold. The story goes that early voyagers, coming in across open water, saw the coconut palms and knew there was land, and life, ahead. A name about arrival, sighting home, the exact opposite of the fear Cook projected onto the place.

One name was given in a bad temper by a man who could not get what he wanted. The other was carried across the ocean by the people who belonged there. Only one of them survived, and it was not his.

Why this sits on an NK blog

One Family. Many Islands. Niue is one of them, and today more Niueans live in New Zealand than on the island itself. This is a diaspora people, exactly the family NK is built for.

Their story is the one every Pacific people knows in some form. An outsider arrived, misread us, wrote us down wrong, and moved on. And we kept our own name anyway, and carried it, until the map had to catch up. That is not a story about Cook. It never was. It is a story about a people who knew who they were before he came and stayed that way long after he left.

If your people are Niuean, this history is yours, and it is one to hold with honour.

One Family. Many Islands.

See what we make

Detail from Te Papa, the Australian Army KYR: Niue and Encyclopedia.com. Meaning of the name and diaspora figures from Te Papa and public historical records.