by Bruce Ansley
Those rocks are slippery, hard on knees. The track lurches out of the riverbed and becomes . . . well, bless me, more of a road.
That is what it was intended to be, in fact. Some early officials in Canterbury and on the West Coast saw it as another likely route for a road between the two provinces, possibly even the best. It would run up the Hokitika and cross the Main Divide at the Mathias, a precarious pass through the tops to the north of the Whitcombe Pass. (‘The whole difficulty in the Mathias Pass route is the pass itself,’ the chief surveyor of the time reported in a rather odd statement of preference for the Mathias over Arthur’s Pass.) They were so certain of their ground that men with picks and shovels were already cutting and benching a track through the valleys.
Oh, what a road-building jamboree this was! Those Victorians were always up for a slash and gash. Washouts? Trifling, said the official report. Big boulders? Roll them out of the way, ‘a little cutting here and there’. Bush? Poof! The whole thing should cost no more than £2000. What an admirable thing was the pioneering spirit!
So now I’m strolling along the surprisingly good remains of all this enterprise, which have the atmosphere of the quiet before the storm. In a couple of hours I reach a cableway across the river. It is supported by pylons on concrete blocks at either end. A kind of carriage runs along the cable. It dangles above the middle of the river. It has a winch whose handle you turn to bring it over to your side. It would be grandiose to call it a cable car. Up close it is more like a tea tray.
The idea is to pile your gear into it, then climb in yourself, cast off and zoom over the river, rejoicing at the ingenuity, the spirit of the thing, the huge adventure of crossing this mighty river in a flash! The Rapid Creek hut is only fifteen minutes from the end of the cable.
I try it, empty, a couple of times. It works wonderfully. Of course it does. Things always work when nothing depends on it.
I put my pack into this contraption, climb in myself, cast off.
Oh the excitement, the speed! In a trice I’m over on the other side of the river.
The cable car/tea tray slows, stops. We’re almost there. But we’re not.
It starts going backwards. It zooms across the river, again. It goes much faster than I can think. Why, here I am, almost back where I started. Oh no I’m not. The damn thing is off across the river once more. Back and forth I go in ever smaller stretches.
It stops, swaying. One thing I hate more than heights is dangling high above a river. And swaying. Oh all right, that’s two things, but I’m hating it twice as much, at least.
The river is rushing and roaring below, and snarling and sometimes sending up a spout to scout the intruder. I wonder how long it will be before someone comes along and finds me. I wonder whether I want to be found because then I’d have to explain myself as an idiot. I wonder why oh why did I ever leave home?
On reflection I think, a couple of days later when my brain cells have clasped hands and started to work again, that I should have grabbed the steel fork lying in the bottom of the tray, used it first as a brake to stop the tray rolling back, then as a lever to get it all of the way over. If there are two of you, none of this is necessary. One cranks the winch, the other hops in, crosses the river, and the two then swap jobs.
Now, alone in the middle of the river, I have three choices. I can stay where I am until someone comes along. But weeks later, when sensible people started using the track again, trampers would find my mouldering body stiff as a tombstone. I can go on, or go back. Going on means coming back, sooner or later. Bugger that.
I valiantly retreat, first pulling the tray along the cable by hand, then using that bloody awful fork. The going gets steeper as you near the end, of course, but desperation works wonderfully. A final heave and a curse and I’m back. Out I go in a flash, out comes the pack, out goes any notion of reaching the Rapid Creek hut, much less the Frew, that night. This trip has no mercy on sensitive souls. Look at what happened to Whitcombe.
I plod back, outwardly defeated, inwardly rejoicing and taking too little notice of the rocks I’m climbing over, for I slip on one and land squarely on my bottom. Swarms of sandflies hone in.
Lauper and Whitcombe must have done this a dozen times a day. Once is enough. I’m sitting there lamenting, wondering if I’ll ever walk again, when I hear voices. Two possum trappers, a man and a woman, are working their way along the riverbed. They stop for a chat. I pretend I’m enjoying the view.
They’re walking in to the Rapid Creek hut. It will be their base for a couple of weeks while they catch possums. They stopped counting when they reached 600 in the square kilometre around the hut last time they went in, and there’s a good market for skins. He is spare and sparse, everyone’s idea of a possum-trapping mountain man. She is every mountain man’s idea of what he might come home to, none of it being spare and sparse.
He says the cableway is a bit hard to crank at this end. I agree. He says it rains a bit up here. We look at the clouds, not far above our heads. I agree.
He says that sometimes, at night, lying in a bunk in the Rapid Creek hut, he hears the growl of huge boulders being swept down the river and feels the hut shake.
You need to know what you’re doing to tackle the Whitcombe, he says. I agree with that too. From somewhere in the mist smoking off the dark forest I hear a sigh. It has a Swiss accent.
14
Keeping count
Motuihe lies in the Hauraki Gulf not far from Auckland, looking from above rather like a ham bone. A long thin island spreading into lumps at each end, it is 179 hectares of subtropical paradise. It was once covered in bush and will be again, one day, when the trees being planted by an army of volunteers grow into a mature ecosystem. In the meantime it is one of the most popular islands in the Gulf.
Sandy beaches grace its flanks. When the southerly wind blows the eastern side is sheltered, and in a northerly the western side remains calm, so that on any fine weekend one side of the island or the other is crammed with boats.
You can float in clear, pale-green water tinted with gold and think, How wonderful, what a place to live, just above the beach there, or on that cliff, or among the trees on that gentle sunny slope.
Yet this island’s history is all about people seeking to get off the island rather than onto it, and one of the strangest episodes in New Zealand’s modern history occurred here.
Count Felix von Luckner, German raider and scourge of the South Seas in World War I, was imprisoned on Motuihe after his capture in 1917. The island became the setting for his escape, among the most daring ever seen.
A few years later, von Luckner was transformed into a romantic hero, an international star. He’d won the attention of a man called Lowell Thomas, who would now be termed a creative. Thomas was an American journalist and adventurer in the early twentieth century, a period Hunter S. Thompson. He started with print, starred on radio, and became a hit on television. One of his two best-known creations was Lawrence of Arabia, a little-known soldier until war correspondent Thomas recreated him as a war hero and made him an international celebrity.
The other was Count Felix von Luckner, the Sea Devil. Thomas may not have coined the name, but he made it world-famous. He was smitten with von Luckner from the moment he first saw him at Stuttgart airport in the 1920s. The Count had stepped off an arriving aeroplane. Thomas, who never used one adjective when half a dozen would do, described him as tall, massively built, saluting in all directions in the perfunctory manner of the Prince of Wales. He was with a small blonde woman, his countess, ‘like a fairy who had arrived on a sunbeam’.
Thomas found himself flying through Germany on von Luckner’s tail and watching the couple being greeted and idolised by cheering crowds at every aerodrome. And when they eventually met, Thomas joined the adoring throng. Von Luckner, he said, was one of the most powerful-looking men he’d ever seen, a rollicking buccaneer of the good old ‘Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum type’.
Well, possibly. Photographs
taken of the Count in New Zealand usually show him as languid, elegant and always good-humoured even when captured.
By von Luckner’s own account he rose from the ranks, joined the Salvation Army in Australia, hunted kangaroos, boxed, wrestled, became a Mexican soldier, blistered through the Pacific in his windjammer sinking millions of dollars of shipping without killing a soul (history records one death) and roaming the oceans under sail.
Now, his was a truly great story but any modern journalist would suspect that the Count was a romancer or, in today’s terms, a champion bullshitter.
Not Thomas, which might explain why he still occupies a place in history after his fellow hacks have turned to dust: people love a good story, and a good story-teller, and the devil take the sceptic.
Von Luckner was as much pirate as ‘raider’. His ship was the Seeadler, ‘Sea Eagle’, even then a remarkable vessel: she was a square-rigged ship, the last ever to be commissioned as a warship. She set sail in December 1916, sneaked through the British blockade in Norwegian disguise, and set about dispatching as many merchant vessels as von Luckner could find. Eleven were sent to the bottom with the loss of just one life, a seaman killed when a steam pipe was ruptured by a shell.
The German raider captured so many sailors, almost 300, that von Luckner was running out of food to feed them. He cornered a French barque, slowed it down by removing some of its spars, loaded the prisoners aboard, appointed a captured British captain her commander, and wished the vessel bon voyage.
The Seeadler then rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific, escaping a British ambush when a storm pushed her well south of the waiting ships. Von Luckner had added another three ships to his tally when he came to Maupihaa, also known as Maupelia or Mopelia, a tiny, lonely atoll in the Society Islands. On 31 July 1917 he anchored outside the coral reef and went ashore, apparently for a picnic. But the wind and sea rose and, as many ships before her had been, the Seeadler was swept onto the reef and wrecked. Von Luckner later insisted it wasn’t poor seamanship that cost him his ship, substituting the unlikely story that he’d been the victim of a tidal wave. The captain, crew and some forty-six prisoners were marooned.
The resourceful Count took an eight-metre ship’s longboat and six of his men, intending to hijack another ship and return for his fellows. The heavily loaded boat sailed more than 3000 kilometres, its crew constantly bailing. They first reached Atiu in the Cook Islands, where they tricked the New Zealand Resident into giving them enough supplies to reach Aitutaki. The New Zealand Resident there was suspicious but powerless to detain them, and von Luckner sailed on to Fiji.
There they were captured by what von Luckner later insisted was a heavily armed vessel but was in fact a cattle steamer. Either way, the game was up. He was taken prisoner along with his crew.
Meanwhile, back at Maupelia the remaining crew, led by Lieutenant Alfred Kling, had done rather well. They had captured the French schooner Lutece, loaded with goods for sale around the islands: it was a floating supermarket whose cargo included Canterbury cake, plum pudding and loads of New Zealand butter. Off they went on a gourmet tour, leaving the unfortunate French crew on Maupelia. But the Lutece proved to be carrying some extra stock: scorpions, cockroaches and a nice range of vermin.
Pumping constantly, they reached Easter Island where Chilean authorities allowed them to put in for repairs. But the ship hit a rock and sank and the crew discovered her secret: she was so rotten she couldn’t be fixed. They were interned for the rest of the war.
The remaining Maupelia castaways were rescued at about the same time von Luckner arrived in Auckland.
The New Zealand public was outraged by the German at first. Von Luckner was suspected of having sunk the passenger steamer Wairuna, along with her passengers and crew. It was untrue, and it would have been ironic if the German had been undone by a falsehood not of his own making. But he was tucked away in the Devonport naval base for safekeeping and later moved to Motuihe, together with government officials from Samoa, which, until 1914, had been a German protectorate. They included the pompous German governor of Samoa, Dr Erich Schultz.
The Germans by then must have become accustomed to paradise: South Pacific atolls, Fiji, and now an idyllic island in the Hauraki Gulf. Von Luckner described it as ‘a beautiful strip of land’. They were trusted, especially by the good-natured camp commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Harcourt Turner. Turner had been beguiled by von Luckner, although according to the German’s account the New Zealander had reservations: ‘He apparently expected us to go breaking out of his camp breathing fire from my nostrils’.
If this was true rather than self-serving, then Turner clearly put his suspicions aside. Photographs and records of the Germans’ lives on Motuihe show a gentle utopia: bushwalks, warm sea, a tolerant and kindly regime which even allowed shopping trips on Queen Street. The best of the South Seas for them. After all, who’d want to return to the carnage that was World War I?
In fact, some of the German population of Motuihe did. They included Walter von Zatorski, a German merchant navy cadet, who was intent on escape even before von Luckner’s arrival. He and three other internees began building a boat in a cave on Motuihe, finishing its hull in mid-1916. He even devised a sextant to navigate with, painstakingly constructed from bits and pieces he found around the island — a brass hinge here, a mirror there, the frame fabricated from the brass of an old Primus stove, an adjusting screw from a safety razor — all of it so finely made it still lies in Te Papa in Wellington. Then a rainstorm struck. The cave collapsed, the boat was wrecked and that was that.
The Germans helped the canteen manager build a second boat but in true Kiwi fashion it was no sooner finished than it was sold.
Von Zatorski turned to a new plan. Lieutenant-Colonel Turner had acquired a launch. The Logan-built Pearl was his pride and joy. The prisoners and internees helped him with it. All the while they were collecting material for an escape: sails, munitions, food, navigation gear.
Von Luckner arrived. He found that the stage had been set, literally, for a Christmas show. Props were made. They became a useful cover for their escape equipment. Von Luckner claimed he built a radio set out of items he said were for the show, which he called the Grosses Shauspielhaus (after a theatre in Berlin). He said bombs were made in tin cans, pistols stolen from the camp arsenal, a fake machine-gun fabricated, a sail disguised as a stage curtain, a German naval ensign painted on a bed sheet.
Some of this was certainly true. The flag later flew on the scow they hijacked, the Moa. It is still on display at the Auckland Museum. The Count claimed to have stolen Turner’s best dress uniform and even his sword and scabbard. If this were so, one imagines Turner must have noticed.
Von Luckner appointed himself star of von Zatorski’s show. A photograph in the Auckland Museum shows him happily at the launch’s helm. His account of the escape included setting a fire in a barracks, which he helped fight, as a diversion. That was untrue, but trying to untangle truth from fiction in his tales is a waste of time. Who wants to let facts get in the way of a story so good that a century later it is still being told?
On the night of the escape, Turner sailed the Pearl back from Devonport, leaving two of the Germans to moor his boat near the jetty while he walked up the hill. As soon as he was out of sight, von Luckner, von Zatorski and nine others cut telephone wires, boarded the launch and off they went, eleven of them. It was 6.15 on a December night. Broad daylight.
At a brisk seven knots they rounded Cape Colville on the tip of the Coromandel Peninsula at dawn, anchored off either Great Mercury Island or Red Mercury (accounts differ) and hid out until they saw two vessels approaching. They captured one of them, the scow Moa, threatening the crew with home-made grenades. The captain protested: the vessel was designed for New Zealand’s shallow waterways, not the high seas. ‘We are sailing for our lives, by Joe,’ von Luckner responded, and raised all the canvas the vessel could carry.
They pointed her towards the Ke
rmadecs with the Pearl in tow. The fine old launch was lost on the first night. It was a second disaster for Turner: although von Luckner’s story had him vacillating between stupid and blind, he was merely kindly. But the theft of his launch was another matter. He was sacked, court-martialled and dismissed from the defence force altogether.
The Germans were intent on raiding the Government stores hut on the Kermadecs for enough supplies to reach South America and thence Germany, or possibly to rendezvous with the German raider Wolf, which at the time was busy sinking two ships near the Kermadecs and laying mines off the North Island coast which claimed two more, one of them the trans-Tasman liner Wimmera. It sank with the loss of twenty-six lives.
The Moa reached the Kermadecs all right, and successfully burgled the government store on Curtis Island. Von Luckner proclaimed the islands German territory and became the only German sailor to capture British territory in that war, however short-lived. Then they saw smoke from a steamer and made off as fast as the old scow could go, which was not very fast at all.
The ship was the government cable steamer Iris, for the authorities had guessed the Germans’ intentions. It caught up with them, fired a shot across their bow and the Germans surrendered.
Back to New Zealand they went, this time amid a great deal of favourable publicity. New Zealanders loved von Luckner’s daring escape, and he came with a character reference from the Iris’s captain: ‘He was a good sport’.
They were locked up Mount Eden prison. Von Luckner claimed the inmates gave them a hero’s welcome on the promise that if the Germans were victorious he’d be made Governor and pardon the lot of them. He and his second-in-command Karl Kircheiss, a smaller and rather portly man, were then carted off to the tiny Victorian fortress of Ripapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour. Most of the others went to Somes Island in Wellington Harbour.
