Rangatira
That was the root of the problem. There was no reciprocity in this, no equality. His manner, I think, always suggested that Jenkins believed he was superior to us because he was born an Englishman and a Christian, and because he spoke English, and understood money, and knew about such things as catching trains. But he didn’t realise that we rangatira wouldn’t bow to an Englishman just because of the place he was born. Up north, we’ve had Englishmen around for almost as long as I can remember, and for every government person and missionary there were ten scoundrels, deserters, and drunks.
We Maori can become Christians; we can learn to speak English. Look at me, old as I am, speaking it now every day when I visit the Bohemian. If we had stayed longer in England, we would be jumping onto omnibuses by ourselves, without needing anyone to buy tickets for us or show us the way. These days, we can ride the new tram to Onehunga the same as any Pakeha, though why anyone would want to, I don’t know. I’m not going to clamber out and start pushing that tram up the hill whenever the horses get bogged down in the mud.
These things that the English invent and bring to our country are good things, but they don’t make us want to become English. Jenkins had worked for years down in Nelson as an interpreter, but perhaps Wharepapa was right, and the Maori are different down there. For Jenkins didn’t understand this, the most fundamental thing about us. Who we are is determined by our birth, our inheritance, our connections, our whakapapa. Through marriage or adoption, Pakeha can be woven into our net. But the sweep of our net is broad, and it stretches back to the beginning of time. It can never be cast aside.
Jenkins was our guide and chief interpreter, and when we stopped trusting his words, our relationship rotted. I think perhaps that Jenkins, like some missionaries, didn’t respect us, and thought too much of his own ends. This is what Hongi warned us against. The missionary sought the role of the translator, the negotiator. How were we to know if the truth was told when someone was always standing in our way?
When Hongi talked of all this it was a long time ago, a different time. But when I was in England, I thought of his words a great deal. Jenkins was the one speaking for us, and most of the time there was no one except Wharepapa to know what he said. But Wharepapa only knew so much English, and he wasn’t always there when Jenkins was talking and smiling, telling us what so-and-so had said, and whispering with Mr Lightband about the money collected. Wharepapa was off writing letters, signing his autograph on banknotes, and getting himself into trouble with English maids.
In Birmingham I felt anger towards Jenkins, but now I wonder if this was wrong of me. Everything that made us unhappy there seemed to be the fault of Jenkins, as though he were a god conjuring up the fog and the smoke and the snow! I was discontent because I was sick much of the time, and wishing myself home on Hauturu, where the air would be fresh and I would see sunshine every day. The money I brought with me to England was almost gone, and we were told there was too little in the coffers to dispense the weekly money promised to us in London. When those around me said that Jenkins had tricked us, I nodded my head. It was easier to say we had been tricked, than to say we should not have agreed so rashly to come at all.
So when Miss Weale asked us, I wrote that second letter to the Birmingham newspaper. I wanted to tell the gentlemen of the committee that we Maori, not Jenkins, should have all been permitted to speak to the people of Birmingham. The mouth was stopped, I said, lest it should speak forth. That’s how I talked in those days, I suppose. The only thing I had to read in Maori was my prayer book and the New Testament. I don’t use the language of the missionaries so much any more.
Now I could say: Miss Weale was to blame, or Wharepapa was to blame, or Reihana was to blame. They were the ones who filled my heart with righteous indignation. But in truth I was happy to follow their lead, and to write one of these letters. I did not hesitate to denounce Jenkins’ character in the city where he had once lived and worked, and had many acquaintances. If people laughed at Hapimana when he ranted at the Town Hall, or if they mocked all of us as a group of savages and cannibals, these were insults we could leave behind us when we sailed for home. We had no ties with the place, and would soon be on the other side of the world. But this was Jenkins’ home, the place he’d left to seek his fortune elsewhere, and the place he’d returned years later, still seeking fortune and status. If anyone was cruel on the trip to England, we were.
We wrote those final letters to the newspaper because above all things we wanted to have our say. Mr Maunsell spent many hours working with each of us, making sure the English and Maori words matched, taking great pains to show us words in his grammar book to ensure there could be no mistaking our meaning. We trusted this book, because it was the one Hongi and Waikato helped write in Cambridge, when they visited England with Mr Kendall back in 1820.
However, some improper things were said in these letters, things for which we can’t blame Mr Maunsell. Hirini Pakia, for example, wrote that men who wear white ties in order to appear as ministers are deceivers. When Maunsell read this out to us, I felt ashamed. I too had thought Jenkins was a minister when I first met him back in Auckland, and perhaps in Birmingham I had agreed with others when they said that Jenkins meant to fool us, and that he had pretended to be a clergyman. But to see this accusation in writing in the newspaper was another matter. No one in England thought Jenkins was a minister, and to say this made us Maori seem foolish, and Jenkins devious and false. We should not have written those unchristian letters. There was something undignified and unworthy about the whole business. A rangatira must know when to speak, and when to remain silent.
I must have felt some guilt about my conduct at the time, for without letting Miss Weale or any of the others know, I wrote another letter – this one to Jenkins himself. I paid a boy to deliver it to the house where Jenkins was lodging. For all that had occurred between us, Jenkins had brought us to this country. Without him, we would not have travelled to England and met the Queen. We would still be at home, knowing only the places and people we’d always known. It seemed improper to leave England without bidding him farewell.
Enough. Enough of Birmingham and its shame and sadness. We had worn out our welcome, and made a spectacle of ourselves, each new battle in our petty fight with Jenkins printed for all to see in the newspaper. We had seen the greatness of England, but now we were sick, and cold, and had very little money left. There was nothing to do now but return home.
Today we must finish early, because the Bohemian’s wife needs him. Their boxes must be packed and taken to the wharf. He has to clean all his brushes, for he’s taking all the contents of this room with him as well. When he comes back from England, he and his wife will find a small place in the countryside, he tells me. He won’t paint in Auckland any more.
I unwrap the ngore for the last time and walk around to look at the painting, which is still wet and sitting on the easel. There I am. I’m looking straight ahead, my eyes a little red and rheumy. My hair looks soft and white as the snow that fell in Birmingham, and it’s much tidier in the painting than it was the last time I saw it in a looking glass. There is no peacock feather sprouting from my ear. Although I always wore my coat under the ngore, the Bohemian has not painted my collar. Under the ngore, in the painting, my skin is bare.
My moko looks very bright and very green, my whiskers peeping through its grooves. It’s not quite right, the way the Bohemian has painted it, and much of my face is in shade.
The first time my moko was ever painted was when it was drawn on my face by the tohunga before he began to chisel. The rays on my forehead each have four lines, to show I’m a descendant of the first line. My signature can be read between my nose and my lips. From my chin they can see that I had been placed in charge of a tribal area.
You see, when Pakeha look at us Maori, they see brown faces – some browner than others, some ridged with moko and some smooth. Tenetahi and his sons don’t wear a moko. When he stands up in court, many of the Pakeha don’
t know he’s a rangatira, for there’s nothing on his face to tell them. Anyway, these days there are too many new Pakeha here, who have no inkling of what a moko means. They think it’s a decoration, and another sign of our savagery. Maori are Maori to them.
When I was young, there were seven or eight different ranks into which a person was born – including tutua, ordinary people. These ranks didn’t include slaves, of course, because they had no mana and were not tapu. They had to earn status. I inherited my father’s rank of noaia, though much depends, in all this, on the rank of the mother as well. This is a complex matter, with rules and precedents.
We are not so different from the English in all this, you see. We learned quite quickly that a Duke was more important than a Viscount, and that a Countess was more important than Lady So-and-So, if she were simply the wife of a baronet. We understood that Prince Albert could not be king, but that his eldest son one day will take the throne, for that inheritance, that mana, is on the mother’s side. The English know that there are vast differences in rank between one man and another, and that when status and inheritance is at question, a strict hierarchy is observed within a family. This is our way, as well. Why would they presume all Maori are on one level?
‘You like it?’ the Bohemian asks, wiping his hands with a dirty cloth. The tohunga who carved my moko would be horrified, especially if he knew the Bohemian had been cooking toast over the fire a few hours earlier.
I nod at him and smile.
‘I come to the wharf,’ I tell him. ‘I will bid farewell to you and your wife, and wish you well on your great journey.’
He looks very pleased at all this. There is no point in telling him what is wrong with the painting. The Bohemian is from another place, and never learned the language of moko. To him it is just a detail, like the pom-poms on the ngore, that make the painting beautiful. He can’t read Maori faces any more than he can read Maori books. I’m not even certain that he can read English books.
I mean no disrespect to the Bohemian, you understand. He is an artist, not an historian. He has painted his version of my face, just as Mr Smetham did in London. I suppose that what I’m writing down this week is my version of the trip to England, and if Wharepapa were to read it, he would disagree with half of what I say. Ha! Wharepapa will never read it. My English gets better all the time, but his gets worse.
I must go back to the hostel now, and write more. Soon I’ll be sailing back to Tutukaka, and there’s no gas lamp in my house there. Despite its noise and other irritations, the Native Hostel is good for something after all.
And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and contempt.
And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.
DANIEL 12:2–3
Our last days in England were spent in London. It was cold and wet, and there was the sense among us that we were waiting to be gone, rather than enjoying the sights of this great place. On some days the streets were drowned in a swamp of fog, the lit lamps in shop windows flickering like distant stars on a cloudy night. The city smelled of smoke, and sometimes looked like smoke as well. ‘A bush fire’, Wharepapa called it, when we emerged from the train station, and found ourselves able to hear and smell the city rather than see it. At other times the fog was tinged with yellow, damp and tacky against our chilled faces and hands. We were warned not to roam too far, in case we fell into the invisible river. In this weather London was hidden from us and nothing seemed familiar.
Indeed, these days were nothing like our previous life there, when ladies and gentlemen were eager to entertain us at their grand parties. Since then we had visited dozens of towns, and given all of our cloaks and Maori weapons away. There were no more photographs to be taken, or haka to be performed. The months of lectures and tours were over.
We stayed once more at the Strangers’ Home – Te Whare Mangumangu, the Negro House, as Hapimana had named it when we arrived last May. Hapimana was not with us now. He and Takarei were still in Birmingham, and we would not see them again.
It was in some ways a relief to be back in Limehouse, where men from many countries walked the streets, and we were no longer the darkest or strangest faces, as we were in Bristol, Bath, and Birmingham. Whenever the fog lifted, I spent most of my time wandering the docks, looking at the things I knew I’d always want to remember. There would never be such great wharfs and warehouses in Auckland, not in my lifetime, and such a forest of masts would never grow this thick in our harbours. We will never have the great wealth of England. Our towns will never seethe with so many millions of souls.
Even though it was very cold now in London, the mudlarks were still climbing down the stairs along the river, or down into Limehouse hole, and picking their way along the shore at low tide. I pitied the old women, up to their knees in the freezing water, or crawling like crabs in the mud. It will never cease to be foreign to me, this sight, and the thought that they were not seeking food, but foraging for rubbish.
The more brazen children could hoist each other onto barges to pilfer coal, but the old women with their battered kettles and torn shawls made far more modest harvests. I never saw so much as a piece of coal in their hands. Once I asked Mr Maunsell what they found in the mud, and he supposed it was nails, and chips of coal or wood. They would all be better off in New Zealand, I told him. He said that unfortunately the colony needed strong, skilled workers, and had no need for the destitute, criminal and infirm.
‘Let them go to Australia,’ said Hirini Pakia, and I’m ashamed to say that we all laughed at this.
We saw Mr Maunsell in Limehouse on many days, and one morning not long after we arrived, he and Reverend Stack called to fetch Wharepapa. They were going to the church of St Anne’s, they said, and off the three of them walked. When Wharepapa returned, he was married. The ministers from New Zealand served as witnesses, and Elizabeth Reid brought along a friend to sign her name as well. Wharepapa said this friend was quite disappointed that no other Maori attended the wedding. She had heard that ‘Mr Solomon’, Horomona Te Atua, was very handsome as well, and had taken a great fancy to the idea of marrying a chief of her own.
Elizabeth Reid’s parents and sisters did not attend the wedding either, though Mr Maunsell said that they knew of it, and did not think it such a terrible thing. Wharepapa was a rangatira, even if he knew only a little English, and was much older than their daughter, and looked quite strange and frightening with his moko. The worst thing was that he would take Elizabeth away to the other side of the world, and she would not be with her family again. For that reason, Elizabeth returned home to her parents’ house in Marylebone for her last few days in England. We didn’t see her until Miss Weale and Reverend Stack brought her to the ship at Gravesend, her belly huge with the child due to be born during the voyage home.
At the time I felt sorry for that girl. She was a pretty thing, young and sturdy, and always gazing at Wharepapa with wide eyes. He had told her all sorts of nonsense about how she would be treated like a queen in New Zealand, neglecting to mention that the Mangakahia Valley was nothing like Pall Mall, and that she would be trading her mop for a hoe.
I wondered what his father would have to say about a wife with no dowry, and no important relations, someone who worked as a maidservant in her native land. We’re very particular about such things. Just as the Queen would not let Princess Beatrice marry a footman or a chimney sweep, we would expect the son of a rangatira to make a suitable match, of strategic value to his people. We don’t just marry this one or that one, in the manner of lions and bears, however Wharepapa chose to carry on while he was in England.
While Wharepapa was out visiting his new relatives, Mr Maunsell escorted Horomona Te Atua and me somewhere we’d never been before: the studio of Mr Smetham, the painter. I remember that it was too far to walk all the way, so we took a cab for some part of the distan
ce, and this cost Mr Maunsell a shilling. The studio was a large room high in a house, and the wife of the artist kept fluttering in and out, as though she was afraid we might attack her husband. Before we had a chance to see anything, Smetham and Mr Maunsell had words about the proposed title for the work.
‘It is called Maori Chiefs Converting to Christianity,’ Smetham said, and the way he ran his hands through his hair made it stick up in a wild kind of way. His hands were busy all the while we were there, often scribbling at tiny pictures in his notebook. ‘Though there has been some suggestion it be named Maori Converts to Methodism in John Wesley’s House.’
‘But they are no such thing!’ Mr Maunsell exclaimed. He grew red in the face very easily, I now knew. He told Horomona and me what had been said, and we shook our heads. ‘I cannot speak for all the party, but these gentlemen of the North are all Anglicans, I can assure you.’
‘We mustn’t tell Reihana,’ Horomona said quietly to me. ‘He will catch the train back to Birmingham to box Jenkins’ ears, for now it will be said that he’s a Wesleyan.’
By the time the two Pakeha had decided the painting should be called The New Zealand Chiefs in John Wesley’s House, we were impatient to see the work itself. Mr Smetham had it stacked behind several others, and his stumpy hands shook so, Mr Maunsell had to help him haul it out and lean it against the wall. It was much bigger than I had thought likely, but then, there were seventeen people painted on it, and I suppose such a large number requires much canvas.
When the painting was revealed, Horomona and I stood for some time in silence, looking on it. I think he was as mystified as I.
Mr Smetham had sketched us in our lodgings, but here we were presented sitting or standing about in a room I remembered in John Wesley’s house. I recognised it from the portrait of the founder of the Wesleyan faith. This was shown hanging on the wall in the centre of the painting. Beneath his portrait stood a piano, and this too I remembered from the house we visited. Standing in front of this, looking very true to life, was Jenkins. He was in the centre of things, and I remember thinking: Jenkins would like that. In this picture he was an important man. But the Maori standing across from him I didn’t know at all, and Mr Smetham had to consult his notes to tell us it was meant to be Wiremu Pou.