11/09/2025
This is the account recorded by Captain Tobias Furneaux, commander of The Adventure, one of the two ships on James Cook’s second Pacific voyage. The Adventure was meant to rendezvous with The Resolution in Aotearoa—but that meeting never happened. Instead, a fatal and often overlooked event took place on 17 December 1773 in Queen Charlotte Sound (Totaranui)
James Swilley’s death in this violent encounter places him in Aotearoa 78 years before "George" who arrived on the Duke of Portland in 1851 🔗https://teara.govt.nz/en/artwork/675/george]. Yet James Swilley’s name is absent from most NZ archives. Some accounts state that the head of James Swilley was the only part of his body brought back.His story survives thanks to volunteers at Project Gutenberg, a nonprofit digital library based in Utah, USA.
Swilley’s presence aboard The Adventure reminds us that New Zealand’s early colonial era—before Te Tiriti o Waitangi 1840—was not only violent, but also multiracial. African and Caribbean men were here, not as bystanders but as labourers, sailors, and witnesses. Their pathways here were shaped by global systems of slavery, colonisation, capitalism, and empire—and then largely erased from the record. We are choosing to put names to the nameless, & center them in the retelling, in that way honouring those that came before us to these shores of Aotearoa. In Gutenberg link scroll down to Appendix 1 to read James Swilley’s harrowing ordeal and what happened to "The Adventure 10"
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand, by Augustus Earle.
