Rangatira

  Into smoke shall they consume away …

  I don’t know what to think. I walk off down the beach, trying to escape the wailing voices. Whether this is God’s vengeance or that of Tama-o-hoi, this eruption is a terrible thing. Demons may walk among us now. What will be unleashed next? I need to get back to Hauturu, to stand on the rocks there and look up at my own mountain, the place where our world touches the sky. I feel very far away from it, as far away as I did all those months in England.

  I sit down with my back against the sea wall and close my eyes, listening to the call of the gulls and the rhythmic lapping of waves. This is the best way for me to go to sleep, and right now I long for the escape of sleep, even if it’s only for a few minutes.

  This is the moment I see it. I’m not a matakite, so this isn’t a vision, and I’m still awake, so it isn’t a dream. But I know that what I see before me is a sign.

  I’m standing on a boat. Hauturu lies in the distance, a deep green, its trees quivering with birds. The wind blows from the east, filling the sails. I want to be ready to clamber onto the rocks as soon as we arrive.

  But the island is receding, not getting closer. I claw at the boat, willing it to turn around, but there’s nothing I can do. We draw further and further away, and I know that however long we sail, however far we sail, we’ll never reach it.

  Cloud draws around it, until I can no longer see the island. Hauturu is lost to me, as though the mountain has exploded like Tarawera, tearing up or burying everything below.

  I have been to England, travelling so much further than our ancestors, those greatest of voyagers. I thought that home waited for me, unchanging, and that I could re-take my place there, tend my fire. But nothing is unchanging. I saw that when I was a younger man, and everything that I grew up believing and understanding was swept away. Even before that, I knew that a home could be invaded, or destroyed, or taken. I was one of the invaders.

  I have stood on a beach, waiting to hurl myself at the palisades and plunge a spear deep into the belly of a man. I’ve trained my gun on a figure hurtling towards me, and clubbed a man so hard I sliced the top of his head away. I’ve eaten the body of a dead man to destroy his tapu, and set fire to a pa so its men and women and children would be forced to flee into the path of our guns. These things I did knowing that they had been done in the places I lived, to the people I knew, and that I could be the man turning the sand to rust with my blood. I could be the man whose pa would be burned, whose head would be carried on a stake and preserved as one of the spoils of war. Only when the weather was stormy could we live without fear on the shore of Hauturu. The rest of the time we lived high on the cliffs, defended by our trenches and the sea, and watched for the approach of waka.

  There was much to fear when I was a young man, though I knew how to fight and thought only of how the day would unfold, not the century. But how can I fight the men of the courts? They’re like warriors on a spirit waka – barely visible, untouchable. They glide in through the mist and we’re helpless, able only to watch and wait. I don’t know how to fight them. I see Hauturu disappear, and I know that the battle is already lost. For the first time in my life, I’m afraid.

  Postscript

  This novel is inspired by the life of my tupuna, Paratene Te Manu, based on the account of his life he gave in 1895 at the request of James Cowan, published in Pictures of Old New Zealand. In this oral history, Paratene lists each of his eight taua in detail, and talks at length about the trip to England in 1863.

  In addition to this account, I’ve drawn extensively from letters by Paratene, Kamariera Te Hautakiri Wharepapa, Reihana Te Taukawau and Dorotea Weale; from the diaries of William Jenkins, Reihana Te Taukawau, Elizabeth Colenso, and William Wales Lightband; and from articles, announcements and letters in the Birmingham Daily Post, the Coventry Times, the Coventry Herald, the Coventry, Warwick and Leamington Times, the Bristol Mercury and Western Counties Advertiser, the Western Daily Press, the Illustrated London News, the Daily Southern Cross, and the Australian and New Zealand Gazette.

  Although I’ve been largely faithful to the chronology, personnel and locations of the English trip, much in this novel is conjecture and invention. Many liberties have been taken with history, particularly in the relationship between Paratene and Lindauer. The Lindauer portrait of Paratene Te Manu in the Partridge Collection was probably taken from a photograph rather than life, and I’ve uncovered no evidence that the two men ever met. In June 1886 Lindauer and his wife had already sailed for England to attend the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, for which Walter Buller had commissioned twenty of his paintings – one of which was presented to the Prince of Wales.

  No engravings were made of the painting by James Smetham, and it’s unlikely that any of the Maori party saw it in London. The painting was completed by January 1864, and William Jenkins met with the artist three times early that month, spending a whole day posing so his own portrait could be altered. Smetham suffered from many long periods of depression, and ended his days in an asylum. The painting was purchased by Thomas Hocken in 1881, and is now held by the Hocken Library in Dunedin.

  The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders, its foundation stone laid by Prince Albert in 1856, was demolished in 1937 and replaced with a block of flats. The Alhambra Theatre burned in 1882, on a night so cold that the water froze in the firemen’s hoses, and was rebuilt. Eventually it too was torn down – in 1936, to make way for the Odeon Leicester Square. Marlborough House, with its early eighteenth-century battle scenes painted on the walls of the Blenheim Saloon, is now home to the Commonwealth Secretariat.

  Much of mid-Victorian Birmingham is gone, thanks to the efforts of World War II bombers and post-war urban planners. Gone forever are the grand house of Thomas Sneyd Kynnersley and the Winson Green Road Home for Girls. But Birmingham Town Hall, which has played host to Charles Dickens, Mendelssohn, and Jenny Lind, among others, still stands. It was closed in the 1990s, but reopened, fully restored, in 2007.

  Kingswood School in Bath, founded by John Wesley in 1748, served as the headquarters for the Admiralty during World War II and is now a large co-ed independent school. Paratene’s visit in 1863 coincided with a difficult period in the school’s history: its strict governor, Reverend West, was unpopular with boys and staff, and the headmaster, Henry Jefferson, resigned in 1865.

  It’s also unlikely that Paratene ever learned to speak English, though local history in Ngunguru records him regularly visiting the school and sitting in on lessons. The drawn-out court battles over Hauturu (Little Barrier) are, unfortunately, based on historical record. In October 1886 the Native Land Court finally ruled in favour of Ngati Wai and named fourteen people, including Paratene Te Manu, as owners of Hauturu. The next ten years were characterised by fraught negotiations with the government over the sale price, mounting court costs, and the issue of a Maori reserve on the island.

  By the end of 1886, the Secretary of the Auckland Institute was urging the government to buy the island as a bird preserve rather than a military base or timber resource. Later, the situation was complicated by a continued campaign by Ngati Whatua for ownership; by the government contravening its own 1891 agreement by trying to negotiate with individual owners; and by Tenetahi’s discovery that timber contractors would give him up to £5000 for the island’s kauri (versus the government’s fixed purchase price of £3000).

  Maori residents were accused of bird harvesting, though it’s been argued that Walter Buller – a dedicated and ambitious ornithologist – and some of the Pakeha island custodians were the true culprits. In Yesterdays in Maoriland, Andreas Reischek, the nineteenth-century Austrian naturalist, recalls searching for the stitchbird on Hauturu in 1883 ‘partly at the request of Sir Walter Buller, for whom I procured specimens of which his collection was deficient’. (Reischek himself left a collection of 2700 – dead – New Zealand native birds, now held by the Natural History Museum in Vienna.)

  Although Buller dra
fted Lord Onslow’s memo to the New Zealand government arguing for native bird sanctuaries on islands like Hauturu, he continued to acquire ‘specimens’ of endangered birds, such as the huia, for his own collection. Privately he believed that New Zealand’s native birds, like its native population, were doomed to extinction.

  Although Paratene agreed to sell his interest in Hauturu in 1892, he still expected all the owners to receive a fair price from the government. He also expected the government to honour Tenetahi’s request for a small Maori reserve on the island. But the presence of Maori inhabitants – especially ones who might be cutting down kauri, or shooting kereru – wasn’t compatible with the island’s new purpose. As the lucrative tree-felling continued, the government decided the time for negotiation and conciliation was over. The Little Barrier Island Purchase Act, to compulsorily acquire the remaining shares, was passed by Parliament in October 1894, despite arguments against it led by Hone Heke Ngapua, the Northern Maori MP.

  Rahui and Tenetahi, my great-great-grandparents, kept up the fight. Rahui returned to the Native Land Court, arguing that the sale price should take into consideration the value of the kauri, livestock and cultivations on the island, and Tenetahi wrote a long letter to the New Zealand Herald invoking Article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi, but to no avail. The price was fixed, the sale was decided, and an eviction notice was served. All ‘natives’ were supposed to leave by 10 December 1895.

  After one unsuccessful eviction attempt by the Crown – sending the steamer Nautilus to carry the Maori residents away, only to find they were all back within days – a more impressive show of force was deemed necessary. At 5 a.m. on 19 March 1896 the government steamer Hinemoa dropped anchor at Hauturu and landed two boats, carrying Lieutenant Hume, a Mr J.P. McAlister, the Crown Prosecutor, his dog, an interpreter, a police sergeant, and ‘21 men of the torpedo corps’ each with ‘20 rounds of ball cartridge’, according to Charles John Alexander, a passenger on the steamer. ‘From the ship’, Alexander wrote, they could see ‘two or three natives about their hut, and it appears that these are the people this small army has been sent out to evict’.

  Five people were removed from the island: two women and three men. The women, Rahui and her daughter, Ngapeka, were dropped off at Little Omaha, where Rahui’s son, Wi Taiawa, was arrested and brought onto the ship. The Hinemoa arrived back in Auckland late that afternoon, where the army was dismissed. The four male prisoners – Tenetahi, Wi Taiawa, Kino Tamihana, and Kiri Tenetahi (my great-grandfather, then about twenty-four years old) – were marched away by the police sergeant, charged with wilful trespass on Crown lands. Lieutenant Hume, Alexander wrote, seemed ‘ashamed of the part he played in the comedy of “the taking of the Little Barrier” ’.

  The New Zealand Herald observed that there was ‘something pathetic in this unfortunate Maori [Tenetahi] being dragged away from his ancestral rocks by force and arms’, and suggested that the Crown appoint him ‘caretaker of the birds and beasts’ on Hauturu. But there was too much mistrust between the parties to make this viable. Rahui and Tenetahi proceeded to drive the government crazy: by making frequent returns to the island; by continuing to graze cattle and grow crops there; and, in October 1896, by (allegedly) demolishing the island’s only remaining inhabitable dwelling.

  The early diaries of Robert Shakespear, the first caretaker of the new sanctuary, are full of complaints about Tenetahi’s constant visits to Hauturu, though he grew to like and respect Rahui, describing her as ‘most interesting’ and ‘a plucky old thing’. As late as August 1897, she was still sailing to the island to harvest kumara, sharing with Shakespear her considerable knowledge of the history of the island.

  Shakespear’s dim view of Tenetahi was not shared by Hugh Boscawen of the Lands and Survey Department, who said, in 1893, that he could ‘not speak too highly of the kindness I received from Tenetahi and his family … [He] was only too glad to explain and show me everything that he thought would interest me.’ This, of course, was before Tenetahi’s eviction, and Boscawen, unlike Shakespear, had not moved into Tenetahi’s house and threatened to shoot him if he caused any damage.

  Tenetahi continued to battle in the courts, petitioning the government in 1910 over the forced sale of Hauturu. He died in June 1923; the occupation listed on his death certificate is ‘Master Mariner’. Rahui died in 1930, in her hundredth year. They are both buried in the urupa of the Te Kiri/Omaha marae, just outside Leigh. In 2011, as part of a $9 million Treaty of Waitangi settlement, the Crown vested the descendants of Rahui and Tenetahi with fee simple title to Hauturu, with the understanding that all but 1.2 hectares of the island were to be gifted back to the Crown, and that Hauturu would retain its status as a nature reserve run by the Department of Conservation.

  Paratene Te Manu was not present on Hauturu for the final eviction, but he was living on the island a great deal towards the end of his life. James Cowan was visiting Hauturu in late 1895 the day Paratene, then aged in his nineties, received his eviction notice. ‘The ancient warrior, bent with age, would not touch his summons so it was laid on the ground at his feet. He picked up a manuka stick and danced feebly around the obnoxious paper, making digs at it as though he were spearing an enemy. The old man said he was not going to court, and was not going to leave the island; it was his, and he was going to die there.’ As we know, the eviction from Hauturu made this impossible. Paratene died in Ngunguru in late 1896. Some say he is buried out on the islands Tawhiti Rahi or Aorangi, the Poor Knights.

  Ngunguru School, which Paratene Te Manu and Henare Te Moananui founded in 1870, moved to larger premises overlooking the water in the 1930s. Today 200 children attend school there. A print of Lindauer’s portrait of Paratene hangs on the wall at the school, and the marae at Ngunguru is named in his honour. The Lindauer portrait, held by the Auckland City Art Gallery, is so rarely displayed that many of Paratene’s iwi have never seen the original.

  Acknowledgements

  I am greatly indebted to a number of libraries and archives, and the librarians who helped me navigate their treasures. In New Zealand, these include the Auckland Museum; the Auckland City Art Gallery; the Auckland City Library; Archives New Zealand; the Auckland Maritime Museum; and the Alexander Turnbull Library. I’m particularly grateful to Ngahiraka Mason, curator at the Auckland City Art Gallery, for taking my father and me to see – in storage – the Lindauer portrait of Paratene Te Manu.

  In the UK I spent many fruitful hours in the British Library; the British Library Newspaper Reading Room in Colindale; the Birmingham City Archives; the Zoological Society of London’s Library; the Museum of London Docklands; and Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives. I’m also grateful for information received from the Coventry History Centre.

  I was able to walk in the footsteps of Paratene at a number of locations in England, including City Chapel and John Wesley’s house in London; and at Birmingham Town Hall, where I was given an informative personal tour by Rebecca Buswell of its Education & Community Department. The tour of Marlborough House (now the home of the Commonwealth Secretariat) by Terence Dormer was exceptional. I’m also very grateful for the generosity of Osborne House curator Michael Hunter, who took me around the palace on the Isle of Wight, and provided a vast amount of useful information on the meeting with Queen Victoria; and to Chaplain Mike Wilkinson and Headmaster Simon Morris for the warm welcome at Kingswood School in Bath.

  There are numerous non-fiction books without which this novel could not have been written. Chief among them are Pictures of Old New Zealand: The Partridge Collection of Maori Paintings by Gottfried Lindauer, with descriptions by James Cowan, and – of course – Brian Mackrell’s informative and insightful book Hariru Wikitoria! An Illustrated History of the Maori Tour of England, 1863.

  In addition, I returned on many occasions to Taua by Angela Ballara; London: A Pilgrimage by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré; Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor; and Victor Skipp’s The Making of Victorian Birmin
gham.

  Much of the information on the forced sale of Hauturu is drawn from Ralph Johnson’s ‘Report on the Crown Acquisition of Hauturu (Little Barrier)’, commissioned by the Waitangi Tribunal. The quotes from the letter by Charles John Alexander, passenger on the Hinemoa, are from Marine News 48, numbers 2–4 (1999–2000). Thanks also to Ian Conrich for bringing to my attention ‘The New Zealand Warrior Chiefs’ by Francis

  T. Buckland in Curiosities of Natural History.

  I was helped a great deal by the expertise and research of numerous historians and curators, including Carl Chinn at the University of Birmingham; Len Bell at the University of Auckland (in particular his essay ‘Actors in a Charade: James Smetham’s 1863 Maori Chiefs in Wesley’s House’); Chanel Clarke at the Auckland Museum; and independent researcher Pam Gillespie, who provided invaluable insights into the testimony of Paratene Te Manu at various sessions of the Native Land Court.

  A number of people gave me money to help me research and write this book. Many thanks to Tulane University, which – over three years – awarded me a Council on Research fellowship, a Lurcy Travel Grant, and a Phase II Research Grant. Without these grants, I would not have been able to make research trips to the UK. Much of the New Zealand-based research was conducted in 2008 while I was a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Trust fellow – an immensely productive and enjoyable fellowship. I’m also extremely grateful to my sister, Lynn-Elisabeth, and her husband, Stephen Hill, for coming to the rescue when everything seemed quite bleak.

  Thanks to whanau and friends – Stephen Morris; Roi McCabe; Conrad Grey; Naphelia Brown; Vicki Taylor at Ngunguru School; Steve Braunias and Emily Simpson; Bill Manhire; Katrina Smit; and Hamish Coney and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy – for their support and encouragement.