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ā ori’s fish, sweet potatoes, and dog-skin cloaks. Occasionally the two traded aggressions, canoe-loads of M ā ori singing heartily of killing Cook and crew, Cook and crew returning the compliments with guns and cannons.
    Cook would eventually make three Pacific voyages, stopping each time in New Zealand and leaving more than trinkets and the occasional skirmish behind. His boats came increasingly loaded with animals from home. “Floating menageries” of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, rabbits, chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, peafowl, dogs, cats, cockroaches, and rats toured the Pacific, as guests of Captain Cook. The barnyard passengers were regularly unloaded as gifts to the islanders. The ships’ stowaway vermin helped themselves ashore. Cook’s mooring lines provided his ships’ rats with the equivalent of gangplanks, spilling them ashore like convoys of cruise-ship tourists.
    The rats of Cook’s ships were an animal apart from the M ā ori’s kiore . They were Rattus norvegicus , brown rats originally misnamed Norway rats, natives of northeast China that had mastered a rewarding vocation raiding the grain bins and garbage heaps of Western civilization, and stealing rides on its sailing ships around the world. “They stood in their holes peering at you like grandfathers in a doorway,” wrote a young adventurer named Herman Melville from aboard one of the whaling ships that would one day inspire Moby-Dick . “Every chink and cranny swarmed with them; they did not live among you, but you among them.”
    Once ashore, ferried either aboard cargo or by the paddling of their own little feet, the brown rats immediately made themselves at home. Not quite as able climbers as the kiore , they made a better living on the ground. They combed the beaches for shellfish and sand fleas and stranded marine life. They prowled the seabird colonies that had come to such shores as New Zealand’s to avoid their type. The brown rats swept inland, pushing the smaller kiore aside, making meat of forest birds so conveniently nesting on the ground. They spread through the mountains and forests.
    By the 1870s the plague of rats had become a common entry in the journals of New Zealand’s colonial naturalists. “This cosmopolitan pest swarms through every part of the country, and nothing escapes its voracity,” wrote the ornithologist Walter Buller. “It is very abundant in all our woods, and the wonder rather is that any of our insessorial birds are able to bear their broods in safety. Species that nest in hollow trees, or in other situations accessible to the ravages of this little thief, are found to be decreasing, while other species whose nests are, as a rule, more favorably placed, continue to exist in undiminished numbers.”
    â€œThese rats are the great enemies of birds, and any bird living or breeding near the ground has but a small chance of existing,” wrote the ironic Andreas Reischek, a noted collector and plunderer of New Zealand’s scarcest avifauna. “They play havoc alike with eggs and young, and even attack the parent birds … It took five months of shooting, poisoning and trapping before they showed signs of decreasing around camp.”
    By the latter half of the nineteenth century, what was left of the New Zealand fauna had been invaded by a third species of rat. Rattus rattus , the black rat, had made its way from its homeland in Southeast Asia with the sailors and whalers of the southern seas. More lithe and athletic than the brown rat, and a better climber of trees than the kiore , the black rat was the most versatile killer of the trio.
    It got worse. Captain Cook and his cohorts, whose ships came infested with rats, brought cats to hunt them. It became routine at ports of call for the ship’s cat to stretch its sea legs, saunter ashore for a stroll through the local woods, and make game of the island birds and lizards. It was