The New Zealand village of Mangonui has banned a replica of Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavour from docking in its port in response to objections from the Māori community to the "barbarian" explorer.

The replica is part of a fleet circumnavigating the country as part of a series of events commemorating the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival in New Zealand and the early contact between the Māori and Europeans.

The head of Northland’s Ngāti Kahu tribe, Anahera Herbert-Graves, told Radio New Zealand that Cook was “a barbarian”.

“Wherever he went, like most people of the time of imperial expansion, there were murders, there were abductions, there were rapes, and just a lot of bad outcomes for the indigenous people… He didn’t discover anything down here, and we object to Tuia 250 using euphemisms like ‘encounters’ and ‘meetings’ to disguise what were actually invasions.”

The Hon Kelvin Davis, New Zealand's Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti, said the government "completely accept and respect Ngāti Kahu’s position as mana whenua (the right of a Māori tribe to manage a particular area of land)".

"Tuia 250 is about having honest conversations about our history. We’ve always been open about the fact that these are not easy conversations to have - there is real hurt that remains for many of our people. The first encounters in our country between Cook and Māori were not a fairy tale, and this is not a celebration of Cook - it’s a commemoration of those first encounters.