Catching the Current

by Jenny Pattrick

  Anahuia tells her story simply and without emotion. She holds her head high as she speaks, and looks over the heads of her audience. Once or twice she turns towards Conrad and pauses, as if searching for the correct expression. Sometimes she uses an English word, occasionally Maori. The meaning is always clear. The listeners seem spellbound. They lean forward to catch every quiet but powerful word.

  ‘My father was Danish,’ says Anahuia. ‘His name was Johan Gerhard Jensen. Jutland was his home — a land, he said, of rain and mist and bogs. He could not name any mountain as his, but used strange names of seas and lakes to describe his place. There were seven boys in the Jensen family. The land of their farm was sour and damp: seven men could not make a living there. So my father left Denmark with his two brothers for a life at sea. These three youngest were only boys when they left, my father just twelve years old and his brothers a little older. Work was available for all three on a sailing ship bound for Australia — a convict ship, but one that also brought free settlers to Botany Bay. They were strong and adventurous fellows in those days, I think, not yet ruined by too much strong liquor.

  ‘At Botany Bay they left their ship to work on a coastal trader. My father never said why they ran away from their ship but I think it was something bad they did — or had done to them. For two years they worked trading up and down that coast — Botany Bay to Hobart and other places in between. My father was happy talking about that time, and would have stayed, I think. But his brothers became restless and wished to try whaling. My father, with no other family but those two brothers, followed their wish. They signed all three with a whaler bound for New Zealand. My father’s oldest brother said he was experienced, which was not quite true, but the owner of the trading ship was desperate for men and he accepted my uncle’s word.

  ‘They were set down at Wharemauku, a shore whaling station on the coast about three days’ walk south from here. Just opposite the island called Kapiti. Their task was to search for the whales at the time of year when they came close to shore, to harpoon them and drag them to land, where the rich fat of the whales was boiled down and barrelled up for oil.’

  Anahuia has used a Maori word for whale — tohora. Conrad sits forward.

  ‘Tohora — is that a kind of whale?’

  Anahuia smiles. ‘I have forgotten the Danish word. In English a whale. Not the big one — paraoa, who dives deep and is caught further south. Paraoa did not come close to our station. Sometimes the other big ugly ones came. More often the black whale — not so big but with good oil and bone.’

  ‘Grindabo∂!’ shouts Conrad, ‘Grindabo∂! Our whales were the smaller sort, too — and black!’ He jumps to his feet and, humping his back, shapes with his hands a narrow dorsal fin. ‘Do your fish also have this fin?’

  She nods, and Conrad leaps around the room in excitement, imitating the curving passage of the pilot whale. ‘It is the same! What if our whales swam the whole ocean to visit this place? What if I have seen the same whale off the shore of my Su∂eroy as you have seen off your Kapiti?’

  Monrad clears his throat. He is trying not to smile. ‘That is not a likely idea, young man. Why would a whale swim from one cold sea to another, and not stop when it finds the warm ocean of the tropics? Eh? Also, one whale would no doubt die before it completed such a heroic journey.’

  Conrad stops to think. He is about to put forward a theory when the bishop’s raised hand halts him.

  ‘Are we to hear this young woman’s story, then? Enough of the mythical journeys of whales.’

  Anahuia has been laughing at Conrad’s antics. Now she sighs, arching her back against the weight of the baby. Even so, she will not sit down. Conrad’s interruption has relaxed her, though, and now as she talks she does so to her audience, and moves a little this way and that as she explains her early home.

  ‘My father came to our place about three years before I was born. The brothers had changed their names to English-sounding ones. My father was known as Johnny Jacks. I never knew the names of the others. I called them uncle when I was little, and then they went away.

  ‘The whaling station already had two boats and the new whalers, my father and his brothers among them, were dropped ashore with two more. They were left there for the season, which was about four months. The boats that chased the whales were not big — three people could manage one boat. My oldest uncle was headsman, which meant he gave the orders; the next uncle was steerer, which meant he threw the harpoon; and my father, in those early days, was commonman, which meant he rowed all the time. By the time I was born he was headsman of his own boat, and then for a short time chief headsman.

  ‘The whales have gone now and the stations with them, but when I was growing up the whales still came.

  ‘My mother is Paora of the Pukeroa hapu. Our tribe is Te Ati Awa. We call our mountain Taranaki, though we no longer live under it. We came south when there was fighting among the tribes. My mother’s family is influential and it was felt fitting that a Pakeha–Maori be added to the hapu. So she was offered to my father as wife to him.’

  Anahuia smiles at the shocked look from the bishop’s wife. ‘This was the custom. And in some places still is. An alliance with a white man is an advantage for trade and other connections.’

  Napoleon digs Conrad in the ribs and slides his eyes towards the bishop, who is examining his pipe with great concentration. Perhaps he is remembering their conversation in the study yesterday.

  ‘Two other families,’ continues Anahuia, ‘gave wives to the older brothers. My Danish uncles both had Ngati Toa wives, related to Te Rauparaha’s hapu. The other tribe from the area — Ngati Raukawa — were angry that they had missed out but Te Rauparaha still had a little mana in those days and they kept their peace.

  ‘The young brother, my father Johnny Jacks, was pleased with his wife, and excited to have a woman of his own at such an early age. My mother told me she was proud of him in the early years. At seventeen he was very tall and strong, his hair the colour of scraped and bleached flax, his head full of stories and songs that she did not understand but still enjoyed. He worked hard at his rowing and spent much time with Paora and her family. At the end of the season, when the trading boat came for the barrels of oil and the whale bone, Johnny Jacks decided to stay on shore and wait for the next season. His brothers were eager to return to Botany Bay, so away they went, leaving Johnny with his share of the profits — his lay — as commonman, one one-hundredth part. The uncles received more.

  ‘After he had been with us for three years, I was born and named Ana for my Danish grandmother and huia for the bird whose white-tipped feather is prized by Te Ati Awa. My mother and father and all our hapu planted many potatoes each spring to sell to the trader when he returned, and my father suggested to the elders that they might build a small trading boat for themselves so they could take their potatoes and flax down to Port Nicholson, where new settlers were arriving every day and there was a strong need for food. Oh, my father was full of great plans and good ones in my first three years.

  ‘The family respected his views. The boat was built, and Johnny Jacks sailed it with some others down the coast. My mother said there was a great welcoming feast when he returned with blankets and nails and liquor and tobacco. He did not bring guns. Te Ati Awa had turned Christian a year or two before, and anyway the way of guns was not popular at that time. I was two years old. Te Rauparaha, our great leader and neighbour — and a cousin by marriage to my grandfather — had just been returned to his people at Otaki. That great chief was humiliated and lacking in mana after his ten months in jail. The rule of guns was no longer a path that most Ngati Toa or our own Te Ati Awa felt to be profitable.

  ‘So my father was well loved. His brothers returned for three more seasons but then disappeared. Johnny Jacks became headsman of his own boat. My first memory is of the whaling station. The smell! The sight! It is like a nightmare in my memory. Our kainga — our village — was a little distance from the whaling station
. There we had our own dwelling, built by my father. Most days my mother would walk over the small hills with food for my father. Sometimes my little brother and I came too and we would all sit with my father to eat it. We would sit at the top of the …’ Anahuia turns to Conrad. ‘What do you call a hill all of sand with stiff grasses and flowers growing on it? Is there a word?’

  Conrad shrugs. ‘A hill of sand? There is no Faroese word for such a sight.’

  ‘A dune,’ says young Karen, who is eager to show off her English. ‘A sand dune.’

  ‘Well, we would sit on that tahuna and look down at the black smoke from the trying pots, the black bodies of whales spilt open to show the pale and shining fat that foreigners would pay so much money for; the red blood, worth nothing, soaking into the sand. Men with knives on long poles slashed at the dead whales and many, many seagulls screamed above them. The skulls of the great fish and the ribs and backbones lay everywhere, jutting out of the sand like the timbers of a village that has been destroyed by flood. The smell and the smoke and the flies made my little brother scream in fright and I was not much better. My mother told me that once my father had wanted to take me down to the shore to show me to the other whalers, but I beat him with my small hands and struggled from his arms to run back over the dunes to our kainga.

  ‘The earlier years were good for Te Ati Awa and Ngati Toa. They shared in the good money for whale oil and bone, and made their Pakeha whalers welcome. But then the whales became fewer and fewer. The year I was six no whales came at all. Not even if my father rowed all day and searched the sea far beyond the protection of the island.

  ‘After that year our station closed and the trader ship took the whale boats away. My father had no work except the potato planting, which, so my mother said, was not in his nature. Fearing that he might leave, she spoke with her Ngati Toa relatives and they gave him whaling work at Waiorua, the one remaining station on Kapiti Island. But it was not the same. No longer was he chief headsman. Even out on the island few whales came. My mother said they had learned good sense; what whale, she said, would willingly come towards the shore, year after year, to be slaughtered? Another old man — a Pakeha–Maori of the Ngati Raukawa — told me later that the way the whales were taken was sheer madness. And that greed had blinded the common sense of Pakeha and Maori whalers both.’

  ‘How was it done, then?’ asks Conrad, who is interested as always to compare techniques and new ways of performing old customs.

  ‘In the time when the sun sets directly out from our shore, not north or south,’ says Anahuia, ‘the female whales came close to the shore to give birth. That was always their custom. Perhaps they needed to give the newborn a warmer sea for their first days. The whaling boats would row out looking for the spouting whales and then wait until they saw a newborn. This they would kill and haul towards the shore. The mother would not swim away with her own family group but would stay close to where her young had been born. She is a constant mother. The whalers would then harpoon the mother also, and drag her to shore, where the heavy ropes attached to the shears at the water’s edge would drag her body to land.

  ‘As the old man, who had himself once been a whaler, said,’ (Anahuia uses a grating, angry voice for the old man) ‘“Killing the mothers and babies year after year was the work of idiots! The heart of the group destroyed. Breeders, future breeders. We were greedy bastards, myself included, and deserved what we got. Or didn’t get. The whales themselves did not deserve such a savage cull.” Those were his words.’

  Conrad shakes his head, striking one fist into the other palm to emphasise his words. ‘Mothers and babies only! Bad. Very bad.’ He looks down at Napoleon. ‘But are we any better? We take all! Fathers, mothers, babies young, old. If we can get the whole group, then good! But the whales still come.’ He hesitates. ‘Sometimes.’

  Again the bishop’s hand is raised for silence. Anahuia continues, but now she sits on the stool that has been placed beside her. She settles her bare feet wide apart to give space to the baby, rests her hands firmly on her knees, the plaid blanket, cream and brown, reaching down almost to the floor.

  ‘For us that was the end of the good times. My mother and her family were disappointed that their Johnny Jacks was now only a commonman who brought little mana and less money to the kainga. There were many days when no whales came, even in the season. My mother said that all the good whalers had gone — to search for gold or to begin farms of their own — and that only the wasters had stayed, to drink and make nothing but trouble all day. She would point to other whalers who had accepted land from their hapu and developed good farms for their wives and families; who were now prosperous men, respected by Pakeha and Maori alike. When my father turned his face away from work on the land, my mother shouted at him to turn then to the sea. What about his grand trading plans, she asked. Why did his trading boat lie idle week after week?

  ‘Drink — strong liquor — was my father’s problem. He had grown to love it. Sometimes he would become soft and gentle with the drink and tell my brother and me stories in his own tongue. He encouraged us to speak back to him in Danish and we did, though my mother was angry and said we should go and work in the garden and not encourage him. Other times he would rage and swear and pick fights with Paora’s brothers and uncles, until she screamed at him and beat his back, and then he would hit her too.

  ‘I think he was too young a man to be left with no kin of his own except us — my brother and me — who were too small. I have thought about him leaving home so early and growing up on a harsh ship with no person to be father or mother to him. He said that in his country it was the custom for boys to go to sea very young. Who, then, could teach them right ways of living? My thought is that he was a good man who took one wrong turning and then another.

  ‘So, the end came on a trading trip inland.’ Anahuia smiles sadly. ‘Near here, not far from Tiakitahuna, which you call Jackeytown. My mother had begged my father to go with her brothers and uncles on a trip to sell potatoes for flax and other things that we needed. He went, grumbling and already drunk, and that was the last I ever saw of him. At the kainga where the party stopped my father was offered more drink by some foolish Rangitane man. During that night my father, it is said, stole into the hut of another man’s family, dragged out his daughter and made … takahi wahine … to her.’

  ‘Rape,’ whispers Conrad to Napoleon, who nods. There is no need for translation; the way Anahuia growls the words makes the meaning clear.

  ‘The girl screamed and the father and mother came running. My father was a big, strong man. The others of the village let the father of the child fight on his own because his own honour demanded this. My uncles should have dragged Johnny Jacks away but did not. I don’t know why. At the end of a long and bloody fight, the father of the girl lay dead and my father on his hands and knees, still drunk, still cursing, a wound in his arm bleeding onto the ground. Out ran the mother of the dishonoured girl, out from her hut where she had been sheltering. At the sight of her dead husband she screamed curses and abuse at my father. She flew at him, clawing at his skin, reaching for his eyes to gouge them out. My father, they say, went to defend himself, and even hit out at the distraught woman, but then, then my uncles held him and let the woman have her way. The woman took a knife from one of their warriors and, while Johnny Jacks’ kin held him, she stabbed many times in her rage and grief until he was dead.’

  Monrad clears his throat and looks to his wife to see if this gory tale should be curtailed. She in turn looks to Karen, whose eyes are glued to Anahuia.

  ‘Go on,’ whispers Karen.

  Anahuia speaks calmly, but there is a tension in her voice. ‘That was the end of the killing. The death of the husband had been avenged by the wife, as was proper in our custom. But the matter of the … other thing … with the young girl — that wrong was not settled. The Rangitane people let my uncles go home but both sides knew a muru party would soon be sent to finish the feud. My mother cried all n
ight when they returned, and tore at her breasts with her fingernails. My brother and I watched in silence. We had never seen our mother so wild. I think now that she was more upset at what she knew would happen than at the death of our father, Johan Gerhard Jensen, known as Johnny Jacks.’ After a pause she adds, ‘But I cried for him. I loved his loud laugh and his beard that was like dry tussock-grass, and the stories of his childhood in Jutland. He was not a good man, I suppose, but I cried for him.’

  ‘The muru party?’ The bishop brings Anahuia back to her story. He has his pen ready poised over the paper. This is the part that interests him. ‘Muru means the same as utu? Revenge?’

  Anahuia considers this. ‘Not the same. But it can have the same result. A feud or a debt is ended after a successful muru party.

  ‘At this time I was nine years old. Ten years ago. We Te Ati Awa had become Christian so we no longer killed and ate our enemies. Rangitane were not yet Christian. You have made some changes in their thought since you came, tihopa Monrad.’

  The bishop smiles. ‘I do what I can. Your chief and I have many talks.’

  ‘But Christian or not,’ continues Anahuia, ‘some customs remained. Still remain. A wrong deed must be paid for, even after many years. My mother knew that the bad thing my father did to the dead man’s daughter must be paid for. She thought it was better to settle sooner rather than later, when the deed may be exaggerated or provoke a lasting feud for generations to come. So when she heard that the muru party had set out she was relieved, I think. All our hapu met together to plan. I remember the day, but did not guess the way it would end. I hope that my mother also did not guess. Some of the uncles and great-uncles were angry with my mother for her stupid Pakeha husband. I remember that my grandmother kept looking at me with sad eyes. Only later did I realise why.