Rangatira

  The rest of us were still in England, with no word of when we could return home. Kihirini was confined to his bed, moaning about his cough and his aches. Wiremu Pou was still touring with the troupe of so-called Maori Warrior Chiefs. Hapimana was with Jenkins, watched so he could not get drunk or arrested again. The remaining nine of us sat in our rented rooms in the dark city of Birmingham, waiting to be told of our next engagement. We were cold and we were homesick.

  On the day after Christmas, I was sitting by the fire, straining to read the English words of the New Testament. I understood some of the words, but too many of them looked strange on the page, and too small to make out in the dim light of our room. Wharepapa was at the desk, where the lamp’s yellow light was strongest, writing a letter. He was always writing and receiving letters. We all wrote letters, but no one but Wharepapa received one almost every day of the week.

  The sound of excited voices downstairs was followed by the now-familiar sound of Mrs Johnson climbing the stairs; for such a small woman, she had a heavy tread, though her knock on our door was always timid. Wharepapa called out in English, telling her to come in.

  She was breathless and red in the cheeks, and wanted Wharepapa to come downstairs at once. A lady was waiting there.

  ‘A lady?’ Wharepapa turned to me, speaking in Maori now. ‘Who is this lady? I know no ladies in Birmingham.’

  This was quite true. He only knew ladies in London – or one lady in particular, Miss Elizabeth Reid, and though he had not been in London for some months, I had seen him write her name on many letters.

  Mrs Johnson talked for some time and later, when Wharepapa had recovered his humour, he told me what she said. This lady, she assured him, was quite unknown to him or to Mr Broughton.

  That was me. She always called me Mr Broughton, for she found the name Paratene too hard to say.

  Mrs Johnson’s friend Mrs Strong had yet another friend, and this lady had met another lady somewhere about the town. I was quite confused by this part of the story, for there were too many ladies involved. One of these ladies had told the other of our plight. And now this lady was downstairs, and Wharepapa and I were to come at once.

  Mrs Johnson was particularly agitated because the only one of us sitting downstairs was Reihana, Mr Richard, who spoke no English at all.

  ‘She said,’ Wharepapa told me later, choking back a laugh, ‘that he was just sitting there looking very grave.’

  When Mrs Johnson finished her speech, Wharepapa blotted his letter, and told her that we would both come downstairs at once. The lady’s name was Miss Weale. Miss Dorotea Weale, a highly respectable lady, friend of the local magistrate, and superintendent of the Winson Green Road Home for Girls.

  Of all the meetings we had in Birmingham, this meeting with Miss Weale was to prove the most important. I was about to say ‘of all the meetings we had in England’, but that would be untrue. Meeting the Queen and the Prince of Wales were the most important meetings, the ones we would speak of when we returned home.

  Perhaps Wharepapa’s most important meeting was in London, the day he met Miss Elizabeth Reid. After our visit with Miss Weale was over, and we were alone together in our room, Wharepapa confessed to me that when Mrs Johnson announced the arrival of a lady in her house, he was very, very afraid. He thought, you see, that this lady was Miss Reid.

  Of course he would have been most happy to see Miss Reid again, he told me, but if she’d travelled up to Birmingham and presented herself at Mrs Johnson’s that day, everyone would have discovered the thing that Wharepapa had been keeping to himself for some time. Elizabeth Reid was with child.

  The Bohemian surprises me. He was a fighting man himself once, so he says. Bohemia is part of a great empire, and he was summoned to become a soldier.

  ‘I was no good at fighting,’ he says. This part does not surprise me. ‘They said I should paint the officers’ wives, for that was my talent.’

  I don’t understand why the Bohemian would want to be a soldier when he had no skill or passion for it, but he explains that there was no choice.

  ‘You cannot say no to the Imperial Army. When they called me to fight again, I decided to leave the country. I went to Germany, and looked for a ship sailing far away. I thought of America, but instead I came to New Zealand.’

  The Bohemian washes his hands in the basin. He has an appointment with someone in the bank, and I’m not to return to his studio until later this afternoon. I drape the ngore over my chair, and gingerly make my way down the stairs. I’m going to walk back to the Maori market to find something to eat. The day is quite bright, with no rain, so I don’t mind the walk. Once I’m in the street, I laugh to myself like a drunk man, for the idea of the Bohemian as a soldier is a funny one.

  Henry Williams, the missionary, was a fighting man as well once. I’d forgotten that until today. He was a sailor in the British Navy during the long wars with Napoleon. This was something that impressed us in the North when we first met him. He knew the ways of war, but he’d turned away from them. This is what he persuaded us to do as well, though it took him many years. Very few of us would even consider it before Hongi died. Many were waiting for a great ariki to lead the way, so Mr Williams was very happy when Patuone agreed to baptism in 1840.

  Henry Williams and his brother, William Williams, spoke very good Maori. They were almost as good as Mrs Colenso, who learned when she was a little girl. The missionaries gave us parts of the Bible in Maori, and taught us how to read them. For many years the only things we Maori had to read were books from the Bible and the letters we wrote each other.

  Soon it will be fifty years, I think, since my own baptism. Both the Williams brothers are dead now. I won’t have the privilege of dying the death of a warrior, as Hongi did. I’m too old to fight now, and all our battles are conducted at the Native Land Court. There’s still business going on down in Taranaki, I hear, and that Te Whiti is up to no good. But the missionaries would say, no doubt, that he goes about things in the right way, not with guns but with words.

  He giveth snow like wool: he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.

  He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his cold?

  PSALMS 147:16–17

  Birmingham. I have never been so cold, not in all my life before or all my life afterwards. Maybe this cold addled my brain, because much of those last months in Birmingham is confused in my memory. I remember the snow, which I was seeing for the first time, wondering how something so white could fall from so black a sky. I remember the jabs of the frost, and our endless illnesses. There were many letters, people coming and going. And Miss Weale taking up our cause, which is when things started moving quickly.

  Mihi Wira, we called her. She was an unmarried lady of about the same age as Mrs Colenso, I imagined. She had a strong face and a strong voice, and knew a great deal about New Zealand, for she had travelled there herself. Bishop Selwyn was an old friend, she told us. At our first meeting she could tell us little else, because she could not speak much Maori, and though Wharepapa understood much English, he couldn’t speak all the words. Later we learned that Miss Weale was from London, that her father had left her sufficient fortune so she did not need a husband, and that she was in charge of the Winson Green Road Home for Girls, a place we would come to know very well. She was a lady of great energy, like a tiwakawaka, always busy and curious. She was very devout in her ways, too, so of all of us she preferred the company of Reihana, the Christian soldier.

  The first time she and Jenkins met was in the parlour of our lodgings, and though at first he seemed grateful for her attentions to us, the smile on his face flickered when Miss Weale said she had spent time in New Zealand, and knew many important people in the Anglican Church. As usual Jenkins talked on and on while we sat in silence, and he only appealed to us to speak once.

  ‘This lady says you all look dejected,’ he told us. ‘But this is untrue, is it not? Some of you are ill, and that is the beginning and end of it.
Tell me what you wish to say to her.’

  ‘Tell her that we have no business here any longer,’ Wharepapa said, swiping a handkerchief at his running nose. ‘Tell her we are heavy in the heart, because this is no good, this scheme, and we all long to go home.’

  ‘This is no time for your tricks,’ Jenkins said, his voice severe. His face was strained and pale, and I wondered if he too was ill. This climate was good for no one.

  ‘This is no trick. We are tired of these lectures. We long to go home. Give the lady the answer she requests.’

  Miss Weale could understand none of this, of course, but she looked from one of us to the next, trying to grasp our meaning by reading our faces.

  ‘I have already explained to her that we would all dearly like to return home, but that this is impossible until we have made more money. Perhaps this lady can help us find money, but not if we say we’re reluctant to give lectures to the good English people who wish to meet us.’

  ‘Always the money,’ grumbled Reihana, and only a coughing fit prevented him from continuing.

  Our faces must have been easy to read, for the next time we saw Miss Weale, in the warmth and comfort of her own large parlour, she showed Wharepapa a sheaf of letters and told us she was investigating our situation. She’d written to old Te Taka, Reverend Stack, and to Mrs Colenso, and they had both replied. She also had a letter from George Maunsell, the son of the great Reverend Maunsell, who was in London studying, like his father before him, at the Church Missionary College.

  After those letters arrived, she no longer trusted Jenkins. By the time Mrs Colenso herself arrived in Birmingham, and sat for many hours with Wharepapa while he wrote letter after letter outlining our complaints, Miss Weale no longer smiled at Jenkins, or made an attempt, as far as I could see, at the usual civilities.

  Some of us were spending more and more time at her house. Ngahuia and Haumu sat many afternoons sewing with the girls and their teachers, and I tried to read my English Bible, though I was probably dozing much of the time. The illness made me tired and idle. Miss Weale suggested that we write letters to be translated by Mrs Colenso and sent to the Birmingham Daily Gazette. These letters would describe our meeting the Queen, and the kind reception we were receiving from her subjects, and perhaps the good people of Birmingham would be moved to help fund our return to New Zealand. I happily undertook my letter, because I needed to fill my hours somehow, and because with every passing day I was more anxious to be home.

  Kihirini was very little at Miss Weale’s, because his lungs were inflamed and he could not rise from his bed. Hirini Pakia and Hapimana were not often at the house either, as I recall, for a very different reason. Miss Weale had heard talk of their various exploits in the public houses of Birmingham, and frowned whenever they entered the room. ‘Gross sin,’ she called their conduct, until Hapimana told us his head was getting tired from pretending to hang in shame. Takarei stayed away much of the time too for, like Kihirini, he was often too sick to leave his bed. Tere Pakia said she preferred the small fireplace and big smile of her own landlady to the sermons of Miss Weale. Yet she was to move all her things to Miss Weale’s house, when the time came, without complaint, and they seemed to become great friends.

  When did we move there? Not soon enough. It was 1864 by now, the winter stretching on, and still, those of us able to travel were venturing out with Jenkins to other towns for meetings and lectures, and any other appearance he could arrange. We had signed a contract, he reminded us, and this was the only way money for our weekly payments, and our passage home, could be raised.

  I must say that this was not the only reason we went to this place and that with him, however. It was dull sitting around all day, waiting to return to New Zealand. English rooms were stuffy, for it was too cold to open windows and doors. Parlours I found to be hot as ovens, while passageways were like ice-houses. I would much rather go with Jenkins to tour the vast factory of a ribbon manufacturer in Coventry, or to appear before a crowd of eager boys at Rugby School, or to view the glassworks in Birmingham, which resembled the fires of hell, than sit inside a house where the sounding of the clock was the only noise, and lamps had to be lit all day because no sunlight peeped through the curtains.

  For however fatigued we might have been with England, England was not yet fatigued with us. The night we appeared at the Corn Exchange in Coventry, thousands of people crowded the place. This is not an exaggeration, you understand. Accounts were published in the newspaper, and told to us in Maori by Mrs Colenso. Only some of the people had chairs on which to sit. Most of the people there, including ladies, were forced to stand for almost three hours.

  We always thought of these night-time events as meetings or lectures, but the newspaper called this one an odd word, a ‘Conversazione’. This is the Italian word for korero, if I remember rightly. I don’t know why we couldn’t just use the English word for korero, but apparently this Italian word was something all English people understood.

  This night I remember in particular, because of the enormity of the crowd, and because it was the night I finally saw things Wharepapa’s way. Before this time I would hear the complaints of others and think that Jenkins was not so bad a man. He rarely snapped at me the way he did at some of the others. I was not in one skirmish after another with him, as Reihana was. I never tested him by staggering from a public house into the arms of a policeman, like Hapimana. He asked too much of us, perhaps, and thought too little, but I didn’t think he had a dark heart.

  For example, when we spent half a day touring a big factory where watches and clocks were made, surely this was for our benefit, not his? The making of watches was not new to him, so there was neither enjoyment or money to be had from such visits. Also, during these trips he had to translate questions and explanations back and forth. If we were tired after a day’s activities, he must have been very tired as well. I could not feel rage against him, as some did, and I tried to understand him. In my English Bible I looked for the words the Reverend Henry Williams had often spoken, when he was persuading us to leave our warrior days. ‘He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.’

  That night at the Coventry Corn Exchange, though, something inside me turned against Jenkins. We were not all present that night. Haumu, who could not be trusted at such public events, was spending the evening at Miss Weale’s. Wiremu Pou was, of course, still away with the Maori Warrior Chiefs, disgracing his family by falling about on stage. Kihirini’s illness was much more serious than any of ours, and Miss Weale had arranged for him to stay in a hospital in London. In fact, he had caught the train down to London a few days earlier, escorted by Horomona Te Atua and Hirini Pakia. Those two said they would spend a few nights at the Strangers’ Home before joining us again in Birmingham.

  Originally Horomona was to be the only escort, but Hirini insisted on going, for he had other plans. As well as his unspoken but obvious intention to carouse with low-life people and spend the money he had wheedled out of Mr Lightband and Miss Weale, he intended to visit Mr Ridgway in Leicester Square, and present our complaints about Jenkins to a sympathetic ear.

  The programme in Coventry began as it ever did, with some minister or another leading the group onto the platform. This particular minister escorted Ngahuia on his arm, which she liked very much, for the crowd cheered and shouted as soon as she stepped onto the platform. We stood for a while, acknowledging the applause, then arrayed ourselves on chairs. Some of us wore cloaks over our usual attire, but not all, of course: Reihana and Wharepapa wore nothing over their coats, and in any case, we had just a few of these garments left.

  The Reverend began his remarks by praising the beauty and manners of Ngahuia. Wharepapa whispered a translation in her ears. His knowledge of English was growing all the time, though he didn’t share it with everyone. When the minister was smiling and gesturing at Tere Pakia, possibly saying fine things of her as well, Wharepapa sat back in his chair
and gazed up at the ceiling, as though the words were beyond him.

  After Jenkins started his long talk, Wharepapa drew his chair back so he and I were close. Jenkins always started by speaking of the great deeds of missionaries in New Zealand. Wharepapa had told me this before.

  I started thinking about Henry Williams, the minister who baptised me all those years ago in Whangaruru. In the North we’d known him for some years, and had learned to trust and respect him. When he translated the Treaty of Waitangi, all the ariki and rangatira listened to him and most of them signed. They accepted the idea of allowing the Queen to govern over us all, in return for her protection from all the Pakeha arriving in ships, especially the French.

  The Maori words Williams read out for everyone to hear meant we would be governed by the Queen, and this was acceptable to us. But later there was much talk among the Pakeha of something else in the English words of the treaty. What we rangatira expected to keep for ourselves, the English words had given away to someone else.

  Hongi was dead by then. He would not have signed, I think. Yes, I know he wouldn’t have signed. Mr Williams was a good and important man, a rangatira, and he talked a great deal of our best interests. But that’s the trouble with missionaries, with ministers, with men like Jenkins. They’re convinced they know what’s best, yet most of them will never be rangatira. Why should a lesser man speak for those of us who are?

  Wharepapa nudged me, and leaned to whisper in my ear.

  ‘He says that Hongi was a cruel man,’ Wharepapa said. ‘He’s speaking of the evil of Hongi and his wars. Hongi was thirsty for blood.’