{"id":84,"date":"2025-09-17T15:45:19","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T14:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/?p=84"},"modified":"2025-09-17T21:34:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T20:34:05","slug":"harakeke-and-the-power-to-save-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/2025\/09\/17\/harakeke-and-the-power-to-save-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Harakeke and the Power to Save the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sometime between early 1779 and 1780, the poet Anna Seward put pen to paper to write her Elegy on Captain Cook<\/em><\/a>. The British explorer\u2019s death in Hawai\u2019i was cause for national mourning. Anna\u2019s poem rides the wave of popular British opinion at this time; many, Seward included, saw Captain James Cook as a heroic figure valiantly struggling to civilise the Polynesian peoples of the Pacific before dying at their hands. The 38-year-old writer was part of a learned and literary circle of men and women, and keenly interested in botany. From her home in Lichfield in Staffordshire, Anna staged Cook\u2019s South Sea voyage and death within a landscape of \u2018scorch’d Equator, and th’ Antarctic wave\u2019, amidst \u2018Leaves of new forms\u2019, \u2018flow\u2019rs uncultur\u2019d\u2019, \u2018vegetable silk\u2019, \u2018fruits unnam\u2019d\u2019, and animals such as a \u2018Kangroo\u2019, \u2018poi-birds\u2019, and a \u2018Giant-bat\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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George Romney, Anna Seward<\/em>, 1782. Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Burden, 1953.9. The book on the table next to her is about America. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Jumping from one island to another, Anna\u2019s poem is hazy about location, perhaps indicating that she herself wasn’t entirely sure of the geography of these new places. The people that Cook comes across lack individual description or human dignity; they are \u2018shiv’ring\u2019 or \u2018frowning natives\u2019, \u2018human fiends\u2019 who scowl \u2018with savage thirst of human blood\u2019. They, like many of the commodities their land produces, are enveloped into a fantasy of the exotic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An 18th-century print depicting \u2018the Natives of New Zealand in the War Canoe\u2019. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It was not until 1806 that Moehanga<\/a> of the Ng\u0101puhi tribe in Aotearoa New Zealand would \u2018discover\u2019 England. Anna therefore knew no M\u0101ori men nor women but she mentions a New Zealand plant by name. Importantly, it was one that she appears to have seen herself and it provides one of the poem\u2019s few geographical anchors. She writes in a footnote that \u2018vegetable silk\u2019:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018is a flax of which the [New Zealand] natives make their nets and cordage. The fibres of this vegetable are longer and stronger than our hemp and flax; and some, manufactured in London, is as white and glossy as fine silk\u2019. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Harakeke or New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax<\/em>), arrived in Europe after Cook\u2019s second voyage to the Pacific in 1772\u20131775, only a few years before Anna\u2019s poem was published. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Student Salon cabinet, an envelope of harakeke seeds is modelled after those sent to botanist James Edward Smith from Norfolk Island in the late 1700s. \u2018Flax Plant\u2019 is scrawled across one side, accompanied by a drawing of harakeke with tentacle leaves. Inside, the seeds are flat, papery, and black. By including harakeke in her poem, Anna demonstrates how her material interests were central to her writing. Anna\u2019s elegy on Cook earned her the friendship of David Samwell, the surgeon on Cook\u2019s ship Discovery<\/em>, who later presented her with some of his collection. Knowing her botanical interests, perhaps he gave her harakeke. Cook\u2019s voyage led to the collection of not only seeds and harakeke fibre, but also cloaks<\/a>. In M\u0101ori communities, harakeke was vital for producing items from clothing to nets, and valued for the medicinal properties of its flowers, sap, and roots. When Europeans arrived, they quickly identified harakeke as a plant that would be useful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Phormium, collected 1769 by Sir Joseph Banks, Dr Daniel Solander, New Zealand. CC BY 4.0. Te Papa (SP063874\/A).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Although Anna describes the silken \u2018white and glossy\u2019 fibres manufactured from flax in London, the carefully labelled package of seeds are a reminder that the \u2018smiling Eden of the southern wave\u2019 and its \u2018valuable\u2019 plants were still in the process of being catalogued for European uses. Seeds were only as valuable as knowledge about them. In York, where the Salon and its seeds live today, the Borthwick Archives hold a local letter dated 1863 from Mary Radley to Mary Backhouse. Radley asks her correspondent\u2019s husband to \u2018name the seeds enclosed & say if they require heat or particular soil – They have been sent from Otago New Zealand by a nephew of Revd Babington to his sister – who wants me to help her to rear some of them\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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William Parry, Omai (c.1753-c.1776\/7), Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and Dr Daniel Solander (1736-1782)<\/em>, c. 1775-6, Amgueddfa Cymru \u00a9 Purchased jointly with the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Side by side, Anna\u2019s poem and the Salon\u2019s seeds are a reminder of the reliance of British botanists on Indigenous plant interpreters. Anna\u2019s footnote on harakeke is the most comprehensive mention of Indigenous subjects in her poem, which otherwise renders them somewhat invisible. Likewise, new research has provided evidence that the Polynesian Omai<\/a>, here painted with two British botanists in a portrait unusual for its sensitivity, helped them to classify Pacific plants when he visited London in the 1770s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A watercolour painted in 1769 by Tupaia<\/a>, who joined Cook\u2019s voyage in Tahiti as a navigator, reminds us of the power of such knowledge. It shows an unknown M\u0101ori man presenting the botanist Joseph Banks with a crayfish (lobster). Does the botanist want the crayfish as food, or for scientific classification? The man on the left is the one who knows how to find and catch it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Courtesy British Library, ADD MS 15508, f. 12.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The M\u0101ori that Cook met believed in the power of harakeke and used it in everything from clothes, to sails and transportation. While New Zealand\u2019s flax industry faltered at the turn of the twentieth century, an enterprising Kiwi company<\/a> has started making harakeke into sustainable sports equipment and car bumpers using traditional harvesting methods. Perhaps it\u2019s time to return to this knowledge \u2026 These tiny seeds might have the potential to help save a world floundering from the misuse of resources, no small hangover of its colonial past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Susannah Lyon-Whaley is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (UKRI-guaranteed) fellow at the University of York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometime between early 1779 and 1780, the poet Anna Seward put pen to paper to write her Elegy on Captain Cook. The British explorer\u2019s death in Hawai\u2019i was cause for national mourning. Anna\u2019s poem rides the wave of popular British opinion at this time; many, Seward included, saw Captain James Cook as a heroic figure … Continue reading Harakeke and the Power to Save the World<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":267,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","custom_fields":{"_edit_lock":["1758141234:267"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/267"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}