by Bruce Ansley
The men he left behind grew desperate. They built a smaller boat and sailed to the mainland. Eventually Stewart did return, working on another ship, but too late to do his marooned men any good. Still, he was said to be a good cartographer, drawing accurate charts of the island coast.
We steamed out of Port Pegasus heading for South Cape. This was the objective, and I was keyed up. The end was in sight.
In this strange seascape the Cape would surely be wild, scary, pointing bleakly towards the great wastes of the cold ocean that ran almost uninterrupted all the way to Antarctica. We ran through clouds of sooty shearwaters, muttonbirds, dark on top with slashes of light beneath their thin wings. They’d rise from the sea, wheel a few centimetres above the waves, and land behind us as we passed.
The coast changed too, as we neared the bottom of New Zealand. The dark tupari and turpentine scrub seemed to shrivel, become patchy, so it looked like a homeless person too long in the cold. The rock was smoothed by centuries of southern seas sometimes caressing, more often beating.
‘That,’ said Wobbles, ‘is South Cape.’
What was this awful waypoint? It took me by surprise. This was one of the five great capes of the south, keeping company with Capes Horn, Agulhas, Leeuwin and Tasmania’s South East Cape. It had been feared for centuries, lying in early sailors’ memories like a caged beast.
It was a simple knob of grey rock. A lump at the end of a low, short promontory, sticking out from a covering of scrub like a fingernail. All around it lay rocks so nearly identical that the Cape itself seemed to have been chosen arbitrarily: why this rock, and not the one beside it?
I wondered at the skill of Cook, the great navigator: how had he calculated that this particular point on a uniform coastline was New Zealand’s southernmost? And what if he’d missed his guess and the Endeavour had struck? Even had he and his crew been able to clamber up that smooth surface, they would have faced a lonely, hungry old age.
I felt more in tune, for once, with the difficult Banks, who goggled at sun glancing off the polished faces of inland escarpments. They are now called Gog and Magog, the Old Testament crowding out their Maori names, Kakapuri, for the reddish parrot-like streak on Gog’s flank, Tupouri for the gloomier Magog. The light winked off them as we passed.
Next time I went around South Cape, it was by accident.
I was intent on reaching the Titi Islands, the forbidden islands of the cold southern seas.
I could not land on them. Some of them were ‘beneficial’, owned by families, whanau of Ngai Tahu, Ngati Mamoe and Waitaha, for centuries. Others were islands that had been returned to Rakiura Maori by the Crown under its Treaty settlement with Ngai Tahu. Either way, you could disembark on those islands only if you were born into the families who had manu, or muttonbirding territories. Those families were bound by webs of rules and customs formed over the ages.
The rules for outsiders were much simpler: they couldn’t land and that was that.
We were outsiders. So we hitched a lift on the Awesome, a big, fast fishing boat which was taking food and supplies down to the Titi Islands. A few muttonbirders were going down as passengers, but most chose to fly down by helicopter: faster if more expensive.
We left Bluff at midnight. The skipper was Jack Topi, of the spreading Topi whanau with its chiefly status (see Chapter 3, in which Topi shoots the erstwhile raider Te Puoho) and a vastly experienced seaman. That was good to know, because the southern waters were terrifying enough by day. By night they were peopled by phantoms.
The Awesome was packed with building materials — wood, plastic, iron, pipes — paint, diesel, food and everything else a family might need if it was going to spend a few months on an island which in its natural state had nothing to contribute to the survival of the human race. Only the titi could live there, for part of the year, by digging burrows in which they laid an egg and hatched a chick whose own survival was seriously limited if a muttonbirder came to visit.
The birders were up at five, gutting, salting, grabbing the grey chicks in their curling burrows, taking them back every couple of buckets-full or so because cold birds are hard to pluck, dressing them in hot wax, breaking open the cold casing, sprinkling the naked birds with salt, putting them in buckets, turning them regularly until they were properly pickled and pink, not brown, because if they were brown they were kippered.
A hard twelve-hour day and early to bed.
Yet every birder I spoke to longed for the titi season to begin, prayed for a good season, loved a feed of muttonbirds, and loved as much the dark difficult life in huts and cribs under the canopies of wind-sculpted scrub. They looked forward to those autumnal days and nights with the fervour of Lions supporters on an international tour, or surfers dreaming of Bali, or foodies in France.
The heavily laden Awesome headed out of Bluff Harbour, squeezing past the reefs at its entrance and past the last sign of civilisation, as we knew it at least, we were to see until our return: the Dog Island lighthouse. Its friendly beam shone over sea that anyone north of, say, the Bombay Hills would regard as horrendous but was seen by our crew as just another day in the office: windy with a short sharp swell and spray feathering off the wavetops.
On 15 March 2012, the Easy Rider was also steaming south with its cargo of birders and their gear. A wave rolled the boat right over. Eight died; one survived by clinging to a plastic petrol can. These seas had claimed 125 boats since 1831 — at least, for some were not recorded and simply disappeared without trace.
The Easy Rider was off Saddle Point, on the north-eastern tip of the island. We were going down the other side, but it made no difference in the dark when logic departs and horrors fill the mind.
Below, some slept in bunks, others in the spacious saloon. In terms of motion it didn’t make much difference. The vessel would rise on a wave, hover for a moment, and crash down into the trough behind it. Horizontal passengers were alternately forced into their mattresses or cushions then, at the top of the wave, lost in space for a split second while the bed descended beneath them, coming to the bottom with a thunk.
People started to be sick. I have never been seasick, but almost broke my duck that night. The sea wasn’t bad. The smell of vomit, however, was.
I went out on deck and wedged myself between a crate and some roofing iron. Somewhere in the dark lay Codfish Island or, more romantically, Whenua Hou (New Land), the bird sanctuary where the lonely kakapo huddles. I could see nothing in the black night.
The wind was cold, but not freezing. The wake spread into the dark. It was eerie. The boat heaved and, every so often, so did a passenger, squeezing past me in the dark and hanging over the side.
In the bare light of a dawn which some aboard hoped they’d never see, fancying death instead, the boats made a rendezvous in a bleak bay. Then the Awesome headed south on its own and began dropping off passengers and supplies at their islands.
The strange, creamy-coloured rock of the southern islands started appearing in the dawn. Jet black then cream, then dull green where the scrub found enough soil to anchor itself against the gales.
I’d looked at the cargo stacked on deck and wondered how it was to be unloaded, for many of the islands were buttressed against the sea: few had beaches or any other of the usual ways of getting ashore.
It must have been a struggle in the past. But this was the twenty-first century. The Awesome would pull into a bay, a passenger would be ferried ashore in the ship’s dinghy, perform an Olympian leap at the top of a swell, miss the kelp and clamber up the rock with the speed of a Barbary ape before the next wave could suck him back. Then a helicopter would appear overhead. The crew would have the load ready. The chopper would hook onto it and vroom! Off it went to the island.
For most of the year the birders’ baches lay empty. Southern gales hammered on their doors. Vicious rainsqualls pummelled their roofs. I caught a glimpse of one occasionally: they looked like huts, but they were, in fact, fortresses.
Beaten-up
bastions, though. The birders’ first jobs were to fix them up for another year, hence the timber, roofing, paint, tar, cement, rainwater tanks, generator bits and everything else that went ashore in quantities, along with the galvanised buckets which were replacing the works of art known as poha, traditional kelp bags that once carried the preserved muttonbirds back to the mainland.
The Awesome slipped into Murderers Cove, Taukihepa, or Big South Cape Island. The refuge lay off a channel between the island and Stewart Island, sheltered from the wild west winds, the wires of the gutbuckets that carried the muttonbird chicks’ innards down to the sea lacing the cliffs. In here the water was calm while swells beat the rocks all around.
This was the biggest settlement we’d seen, like a summer bay filled with traditional Kiwi baches, which, apart from the season, it was. Huts of all shapes and sizes clung to the ridges above the water. But the place had a dark past. This was an ancient refuge for Maori, and for early European sailors, and sometimes Taukihepa just wasn’t big enough for all of them.
The infamous ship Sydney Cove once put into this cove. It was crewed by sealers who’d plundered and murdered their way down the coast. Stories of the Sydney Cove are often conflicting: sealers were not best known for literacy nor respect for Maori, and besides, many of them did not live long enough to tell the tale.
The former convict ship is blamed for the Sealers’ War, a battle between sealers and Maori. It seems to have started on the Otago Peninsula over a theft by a local chief of items including a knife and a shirt. The chief was killed.
The crew killed another chief at Port Molyneux, a tiny place near present-day Kaka Point, which was made redundant as a harbour when a flood changed the course of the Clutha River and left it high and dry. Maori are said to have retaliated at dangerous Waipapa Point, where they killed a sealing gang.
By the time the Sydney Cove reached Taukihepa, Maori were bent on revenge. Under the southern chief Honekai they ambushed a boatload of sealers as they went ashore, killing five of them. Yet one, James Caddell, lived to tell a remarkable tale. Caddell was only sixteen but he too was about to be slaughtered when Tokitoki, the chief’s daughter or perhaps his niece, threw her cloak over him, a traditional gesture of protection.
Caddell married her, received a moko as singular as a coat of arms, and became famous as the first Pakeha rangatira.
Taukihepa on a good day might look like a holiday settlement, but it is not. The massacre seems to tint the air. The work is hard and its history is too. I’m always glad to leave, and as we did Captain Topi gave us a choice. We could go straight back to Bluff down Stewart Island’s west coast. It was faster, but the west wind was stirring up the sea. Or we could go round South Cape and along the more sheltered east coast, a longer trip but more gentle.
The seasick among us made an instant choice. So we went around South Cape with the etched mollymawks arcing over us like a guard of honour. The Cape hadn’t changed at all since my first time round. It didn’t even look different from an anticlockwise direction. It jutted into the sea like a medieval fort, Gog and Magog flashing farewell.
I called in at the Aparima Tavern on my way home. I loved the estuary, the mountains beyond. In 2013 the Tavern burned down. It was 135 years old and flamed like a torch in the night. One of the regulars told the newspapers, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do now.’ Hundreds of kilometres away, I knew how he felt.
A photograph from South Cape, a crowd of muttonbirds banking, diving, scratching the surface of the huge southern swells, every one of the hundreds of birds full of life and action and angles, still hangs on my wall. And once as I sat in an office in Christchurch looking over the Pacific Ocean I got a call from Wobbles. ‘Look out your window,’ he said.
A dot appeared, far out. The Argus, thrashing along the coast. ‘I’m on my way to the America’s Cup,’ he said. He was off to make his fortune taking people out to the races. I don’t know how that went, but I guarantee his passengers got something entirely different.
10
Dashing madly
The situation was desperate. I had to get from Waiheke Island to Wanaka. But in the way men do, or I do anyway, I’d left bookings to the last minute. Correction, the very last. My planning tends to be ad hoc, meaning procrastination then panic. On the other hand, bad planning and adventure often go together: one can lead to the other. It is not a widely approved theory but an interesting one, and this time it came into play.
The rough plan was to fly into Queenstown and hire a car. It turned out that everyone else had the same notion. The nation as a body was packing itself into a plane that week and heading south.
Two choices remained. Giving up was one of them but wasn’t really an option. The urgent event in Wanaka was a week’s tramping. That might not seem critical to some, but it was for me. I tramp with friends twice a year in the South Island. That trip takes a lot of organising. It cannot be shifted. You either go or you don’t, and I was not going to give up half my year’s tramping just like that. I’m a South Islander transported to the north, pining for mountains and big skies.
The other choice was to hop in the car and drive. That would take thirty hours including ferries and waiting time. Sixteen hundred kilometres including two ocean cruises, aka car-ferry crossings.
I had to be there on the Saturday. That was when the first complication cut in. By now it was Thursday. The trip would have to be all but non-stop. Oh, what a balls-up. But I almost liked it. The drive might even be fun if so many hours of travelling, some of it over bad roads, counts as adventure.
Late that spring afternoon I drive my car to the Waiheke ferry. It’s a cheery sort of day, with a clean breeze and little waves hopping over the Gulf. I should have been warned.
My Subaru Outback was a youngster when I bought it. If one year of human life equals seven years of a dog’s, what is the ratio for cars, man’s second-best friend? Yet it always ran well and gave no trouble until, as is the way with cars, I planned this journey.
The garage serviced the car and noticed it had a slight tremble when they turned the steering wheel. I’d felt that too, but treated it as you do with frailties among old friends and politely ignored it. The garage did not think that was the best policy with cars. They thought it might be something to do with the clutch. There were two ways it might go: expensive, and more expensive. It might be best if I took the car to a specialist in the city, just a short ferry ride away. But that might take several days.
My mechanic friend took me aside. ‘Just go,’ he said. The car would hold out.
Of course it would: Subarus were bullet-proof. That’s what people said. I’d had a string of them. They could go anywhere, even places you never intended them to go. Once I found myself in the middle of an icy mountain stream, much deeper than it looked, with the only way out blocked by a lump of rock that had somehow missed its vocation as a war memorial. The car clambered over it with scarcely a groan.
Not one of them ever died on the job, nor had I been forced to put one down. Of course this one would hold out.
So the car ferry arrives in Putiki Bay, Waiheke Island, its ramp shrieking on the concrete. A queue of cars is loaded aboard with a convoy of trucks, part of the supply chain carrying everything needed by an island with a permanent population of 10,000, a few thousand more in holiday homes, and tourists swamping the place any good day. I drive on too, with various parts of my body crossed for luck.
The ferry chugs out of Putiki Bay, passes Motuihe Island then Motukorea, Browns Island, still bald after being being swept by a fire lit by a woman stranded on the island in mysterious circumstances the previous year. The vessel slips into the Tamaki River and passes Bucklands Beach, a mountainscape of its own. We sail beneath tinted plate-glass escarpments and bluffs of ice-white plaster and berth in Half Moon Bay.
The ramp shrieks. The cars land. We file into Pigeon Mountain Road, through the wilds of Panmure, thread and jerk along the Mount Wellington Highway and turn onto the
motorway, heading south.
Ah, you think, the motorway, the freedom of the road, the highway abandoning traffic jams and snarls and whisking you off to soft roads and easy pastures.
Here is the motorway phenomenon: traffic expands to fill the space available. All lanes are crowded except at peak times, when they’re packed to a standstill. What do these people do? Where do they come from? What’s their business? Do they have lives? What did they do before motorways? What’s the point?
There’s no gain in building new roads, for this is a zero-sum game, and all of this means that I am crawling south at thirty kilometres per hour with almost 1600 kilometres still to go and a Cook Strait ferry to catch.
Around the Bombay Hills the traffic begins to thin, and I pass over the top heading south into a land of which legend says Aucklanders know nothing.
The New Zealand Transport Agency has heard of it, though. Alongside a picture of a smooth, graceful motorway disappearing into infinity and carrying five — yes, five — cars, the Agency says:
The Waikato Expressway project will improve safety and reliability and reduce travel times and congestion on SH One by delivering a four-lane highway from the Bombay Hills to south of Cambridge. The expressway is being built in seven sections.
Any one of which you’re bound to encounter, just around the next bend. What a joy this new expressway will be, when it’s finished. On my experience to date, I doubt I’ll live to see it. I cannot remember ever driving between the Bombay Hills and Cambridge without traversing thickets of signs urging me to slow to a crawl, detour this way or that, or mind my windscreen from shrapnel spat by passing cars, although I’ve never known how you’d avoid it. It has always been an obstacle course from one end to the other and the only difference I can see now is that the graveyards, groves of wooden crosses beside the road once so numerous that it seemed a toss-up whether you passed or passed away, have been either removed or paved over. Usually I can count on at least one absolutely stupid, potentially lethal piece of driving per trip, and this is where it happens. A queue of cars forms at a dogleg crossing on the Cambridge bypass road. Someone gets impatient, passes the entire queue, speeds out onto the crossing and finds himself in the way of a truck.
