As a postscript to my previous comment, I would urge vandals to stop attacking statues of James Cook. A brilliant seaman and commander, Cook cannot be held accountable for how things transpired in the decades that followed. He was dead even before the First Fleet was conceived of. 

Apart from the Endeavour's central stated mission of observing the transit of Venus in the Pacific, Cook had secret orders from the British Government to look for a south land, which he duly did, bumping into New Zealand before his fateful rendezvous with Australia and subsequent charting of the east coast.

Much as it is absurd to impose modern 'standards' on writers from the past (also arrogant and plain foolish) it behoves us to become aware of the social and cultural milieu of the time when assessing historical figures such as Cook. Maybe its a youthful thing, to be so full of self-righteous anger and to be so prone to confirmation bias, but not understanding people in their own time as a prerequisite to assessing their worthiness is so obviously wrong as to be incontestable.