Wild Journeys

by Bruce Ansley

  One summer’s day I begin following their trail, searching for traces of this amazing tale. I drop my anchor in the greeny-gold water of Horahia, the western beach on Motuihe where the ham bone is at its thinnest, so that you can go from one side of the island to the other in a minute.

  On the edge of this bay is the old stone quay and the jetty, which in one form or another was there in von Luckner’s time. It was perhaps twice as long then as it is now. From where I sit in my boat, which he’d have been far too smart a seaman to hijack for his getaway, he’d have been able to see Rangitoto still recovering from its last eruption, for its scoria surface was a good deal more bare a century ago than it is now. The young Auckland lay behind him. Now Auckland’s skyline juts upward, the Skytower beyond even the Sea Raider’s imagination. Motuihe, though, is intent on going back to what it once was, untouched by human hand.

  I haul my dinghy up the beach and walk the easy slope onto the island. The day is blue, the sea warm, the island alluring.

  The odd thing is that many people, Europeans at least, who lived on Motuihe for any length of time had to be dragged here, sometimes literally. Maori lived here once, but the evidence indicates there weren’t many of them. They left remarkably few traces, a couple of pa, one large, one smaller. They preferred Motutapu just across the water, or the much bigger Waiheke nearby, where historians have counted dozens of pa.

  Motuihe was covered in forest when Rangitoto erupted in the fourteenth century. It blew red-hot scoria and ash over its near neighbours, Motutapu and Motuihe, destroying the bush on those islands and probably on the western end of Waiheke Island too.

  It’s hard to see where Maori lived and cultivated their soil on Motuihe because in the early days of European settlement it was farmed. The farmers felled the remaining forest and cleared the land. Sheep and cattle efficiently disposed of the rest.

  When economics and common sense put an end to it all, a wider public took over, cleared out the rats and ferrets, got rid of the weeds and began the long job of regenerating the native cover. On some nearby islands such as Motutapu and Rotoroa the shift back to past glories is working remarkably well.

  Only eighteen hectares of coastal forest remain here, but the Motuihe Trust is planting much more, and kiwi now run in the undergrowth.

  A Pakeha farmer bought Motuihe in 1839, paying its Maori owners one cow, twenty blankets, ten axes, ten hoes, ten spades, six gowns, two red blankets, twelve Dutch pipes, six pots and one shawl. It was a bargain, all right: Pakatoa, a small island nearby, just out of sight beyond Waiheke, was for sale recently for $40 million.

  When the government bought Motuihe in 1872 they had a quarantine station in mind. One end was for animals. The other, the northern end, was intended for a possible smallpox epidemic. They built two big barracks buildings, a hospital, a brick fumigation structure with a high chimney and stables. One young girl died there of scarlet fever, and may lie in one of the unmarked graves in the cemetery.

  But smallpox was overtaken in 1918 by a much greater tragedy. The SS Niagara had sailed from Vancouver via Hawaii and Suva to Auckland and picked up a highly contagious influenza on the way. Nothing, not even World War I, killed as many New Zealanders in such a short time as the 1918 influenza epidemic. Influenza was an even greater and certainly more immediate menace than Germans, who by then had signed the Armistice. Some 9000 people died between October and December that year.

  Auckland’s death toll eventually reached 1100 and the city was in no mood for risks: thirty-nine men, twenty-four women and twelve children, all passengers and crew aboard the passenger liner RMS Makura, were landed on Motuihe in December 1918 and quarantined. One was dangerously ill, eight were seriously sick and the rest showed symptoms.

  The ship proceeded to Auckland, to the dismay of Aucklanders. They suspected, probably rightly, that politics had overtaken caution. Two of the passengers were the Prime Minister, William Massey, and the pompous Joseph Ward, who fancied himself as co-prime minister. Aucklanders saw them as a toxic mixture, literally: they did not believe doctors’ assurances that the remaining passengers were disease-free. They preferred conspiracy theory: politicians had prevailed.

  The Makura berthed in the city under cover of darkness, over the protests of some passengers who objected to any suggestion of surreptitious entry, and sent everyone off to homes and hotels. She then left for Sydney, with Auckland’s mayor, James Gunson, wailing in her wake: ‘The whole business is reprehensible in the extreme.’

  Some of those quarantined on Motuihe never left, and are buried on the island. The small cemetery there has seven marked graves. One is the final resting place of poor, brave Ethel Browning, wife of the Makura’s captain, who rushed to the island to help the sick and died nursing them. Another of the graves might contain the remains of a smallpox victim from the previous century. They all lie here, in a sheltered spot on Motuihe, where the wind sings a sad song in the pines. Little flax sculptures sit on the graves.

  Oh, the view from this clifftop eyrie: Motutapu to the left, then Rakino, and the Noises, and the eastern end of Waiheke, and other islands peeking from behind, and the blue sea all the way to Great Barrier.

  Maybe von Luckner and his fellow Germans sat here and dreamed of home and saw the Gulf as their pathway. But what an unimaginative view of this paradise.

  Old fortifications lie nearby, a gun emplacement which once commanded the approaches to Auckland harbour. A great deal more effort went into its concrete than ever went Ethel’s way. But the military are quite used to graves, and their constructions last longer.

  The internment camp on Motuihe for Germans and Austrians classed as enemy aliens was designed, in keeping with the stratified society of the day, for a better class of person: German and Austrian businessmen and government officials, the governor of Samoa and a bevy of bureaucrats. They might have counted themselves lucky.

  Less fortunate ‘aliens’ went to Somes Island, that weather-beaten pile in Wellington Harbour, and shivered their way through the war. On Motuihe they swam, fished, lived in quality accommodation.

  The former governor did his time in a new house of six to eight rooms, flasher than the camp commandant’s house behind it, and much, much better than the barracks for soldiers and guards. Motuihe boasted quite a little village then, buildings spreading down the hillside, a fine view from every one of them.

  A century on, the question, to me, is why anyone would want to leave. New Zealand prisoners of war who had endured the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front and were imprisoned in a cold, dark land would have found this a paradise. It is, of course.

  Passing by on the Waiheke ferry you can see only two buildings remaining on Motuihe. One is an angular structure on the northwest headland which I always believed must have been a barracks building but turns out to be nothing more than an old Ministry of Works shed, which, built of concrete, may simply have been too hard to remove with the rest. The other is the ancient water tower, too expensive to demolish but shaky: some worry that it is a risk to the public. A nearby concrete pad was the base for the navy’s flagpole.

  I walk up to the remains of the old pa on Te Raeokahu Point, and follow the angled trenches and ramparts. They run across the base of a small peninsula whose sides and bottom drop sheer to the sea. They’re now guarded by Department of Conservation warning signs: ‘Steep Drop-offs’, ‘Danger of Falling’ and so on.

  The earthworks are testimony to the pa architects’ skill, for this is a perfect site: beaches for waka on either side, sheltered terraces.

  Did von Luckner pause here to wonder? I doubt it. He was too immersed in notions of European aristocracy to consider traditional peoples. In 1918 he regarded himself as among barbarians born of a ‘convict colony’. Yet the remains of Maori civilisation still lie on this island long after most traces of the Pakeha one have been obliterated.

  In 1929, the quarantine station became a children’s health camp. Hunger and disease, notably tuberculosis, were rampa
ging through the children of the poor and, on the threshold of the Great Depression, there were plenty of those. Health camps set out to give them good food, sunshine, exercise and structure. Even when I was growing up they still had a fearsome reputation among children; you were ‘sent’ to health camp, which sat darkly in our minds as some kind of prison.

  Whatever their regimes, they protected and healed vulnerable children, and still do. Children evacuated from the Napier earthquake in 1931 swelled Motuihe’s numbers.

  In World War II gun emplacements were built on the island to protect Auckland against a possible Japanese invasion. Meanwhile Motuihe became home to a naval training base, HMNZS Tamaki. Jolly jack tars, no doubt celebrating their good fortune, were accommodated in the old quarantine buildings, twenty-two of them then. Another fifteen were built, including food and clothing stores, canteen, gymnasium, chapel, school, hospital, dental clinic, dormitories — enough for 517 people.

  The village had become a town. Photographs from the era show streets, lamp-posts, two-storey buildings, a town square which the Navy called a parade ground. The rest of the island was farmed. When the Navy left in the 1960s the island went back to farming and eventually became part of the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park.

  So a slice, a cross-section of New Zealand history, is contained in an island of 179 hectares: drama, disease, war, adventure, pestilence, plague and disaster. If Motuihe itself has not been through the fire, the fire has certainly been through it.

  What is left of all this? The enterprise, the history, the drama of von Luckner and his famous escape? Nothing, really. A few graves in the cemetery, some remnants of the wartime gun emplacements.

  I tramp around the northern end of the island, past the old Ministry of Works shed and the water tower, stop at the cemetery, admire the view from the gun emplacements, stroll back down to the isthmus. For all of its history, a walk around this part of the island doesn’t take very long.

  Everything has disappeared: the governor’s house, the camp commandant’s, barracks, village buildings, the twenty-two quarantine buildings, guns, the naval training establishment. It’s hard even to see where they’ve been, for the Navy’s parade ground, roads, and building sites flattened the land. Some roads remain.

  Only the derelict navy surgeon’s cottage still stands, an old yellow-ish weatherboard house with a chimney and boarded-up windows. I rest beside it, in the quiet, beside the fallen remains of a giant tree.

  Somewhere on this island artefacts from von Luckner’s time are said to be hidden. Some of them are in the boat-builder’s cave used by von Zatorski and his companions to build the craft for their intended escape before von Luckner arrived. The cave collapsed in a storm, burying the boat and, presumably, all the heavier gear that went with it mast, oars and so on.

  Some are in another cave. The Count’s tale of his time on Motuihe says that after their capture in the Kermadecs the Germans planned another escape from the island, and hid supplies, pistols, even a folding boat, in a cave. The Count said the cave was dug into the side of a dry riverbed and disguised. The plan was to hide in it while giving searchers the impression that they’d escaped over a cliff and been picked up by a boat. They would wait until the hue and cry had died down then hijack a passing sailing ship. The plan, von Luckner claimed, was an excellent one but was interrupted by the Armistice, when the Germans were released and repatriated to Germany in May 1919: ‘If it had been delayed a week, there would have been another escape at Motuihe.’

  Can this be true, so close to the end of the war? None of his fellow Germans ever mentioned the cave. Still, the Motuihe Trust believes that it exists, that it has collapsed and buried the Germans’ gear inside it.

  When von Luckner returned to New Zealand and cheering crowds in 1938, the New Zealand Herald accompanied him back to Motuihe to search for his cave. Von Luckner wanted to recover his supplies, including, he said, a kerosene stove, bottles of rice and beans and other items, all stolen from the camp storehouse.

  A 1927 report in the Herald claimed that a rifle and two flame werfers, shields and a collapsible boat all manufactured on the island, along with a stolen automatic pistol and ammunition, were also hidden in the cave.

  The 1938 article had von Luckner and his party climbing into a bush-clad gully then up a small hill. For some time, the newspaper reported, the Count was at a loss, but then he saw two trees which had been growing at the cave’s entrance lying on the ground, beside a deep, overgrown hole. Eureka! The Count asserted that this was what was left of his cave, and a Mr Hill, the city council caretaker on the island, said he knew of the hole as sheep often fell into it and he’d had to pull them out. He’d never suspected a German cave lay below. Neither had anyone else, and the stage was set for a fascinating treasure hunt. But no one excavated it or found the other, the boat-builders’ cave.

  Many years later David Veart, a former Department of Conservation archaeologist and historian, and a fellow archaeologist spent a lot of time scrambling around the island searching for any trace of either cave, unsuccessfully. Were there two caves? Or was von Luckner simply cashing in on a good story, von Zatorski’s?

  I go looking for the boat-builders’ cave, ‘Bootshohle’ on a map drawn by von Zatorski. It seems to me the more reliable of the two stories. Von Zatorski certainly planned an escape, and the evidence survives in Te Papa. According to the map the cave should be on the south-eastern side of the island, in a gully, but I can find no trace of it by land.

  From the sea there are two places in the area shown by von Zatorski where you might build an illicit boat. They’re both in gullies beside the coast, well out of sight of the settled area, within easy reach of the water. I row ashore and rummage around. Not a sign.

  Well, the plan is now a century old. There’ve been plenty of floods and slips and erosion since — and gullies, after all, are carved by water.

  I take the 1938 Herald report and search for the alleged second cave. I reason that it would be on the eastern side, within carrying distance of the coast and well away from the built-up area. No fallen trees, of course; they’d have rotted away or been chopped up. No overgrown hole either.

  The island has no sign of von Luckner and his fellows. Except for a few artefacts in museums, they’ve left no trace.

  Ripapa was once a tiny island of rock in Lyttelton Harbour, joined to the mainland by a reef exposed at low tide. Its pedigree is similar to Motuihe’s, although the Maori pa here was much stronger, a bastion covering the entire island. It became a quarantine station for immigrants (renamed Humanity Island) and an internment camp for some of Te Whiti’s people after their passive resistance at Parihaka. Conscientious objectors were jailed there in 1913.

  During the Russian scare of 1885 the young New Zealand nation grew paranoid after a fake newspaper report of Russians invading Auckland and taking the mayor hostage. In 1886 Ripapa was turned into a fortress called Fort Jervois, a medieval construction right down to a drawbridge to the mainland. Stone walls were thrown up where the pa palisades once stood, tunnels and emplacements were built, and huge guns pointed towards the harbour entrance. They were never fired in anger, which was just as well, for the authorities feared that firing them all at once would shake the fort to pieces.

  The most warlike figures to emerge from the grey Southern Ocean here were the recaptured von Luckner and Kircheiss, who seemed to fit perfectly into this melodrama. Von Luckner was placed in an old hut, the former battery hut, and for the 109 days he was there moaned about his bitter quarters.

  He didn’t need to exaggerate. Ripapa is beaten up by the easterly wind from one direction and bullied by the southerly from the other. Even on a good day it is cheerless.

  The island was open to the public by sea until the Christchurch earthquakes. I clambered over it as a boy, scrambling over the reef at low tide and scaling the stone walls, breaking in rather than out as von Luckner longed to do, and so easily!

  The island was worth the trouble. Its greatest priz
es, for boys, were the two surviving guns, one of which is very rare, one of only a dozen left in the world. The remnants of two further guns lay around too. Mysterious barred tunnels vanished into the rock below. Altogether it was a perfect playground, although the two Germans didn’t see it that way.

  When he returned to tour New Zealand in 1938 von Luckner wanted to revisit Ripapa. The authorities wouldn’t let him: it was a military installation, no Germans allowed.

  ‘By Joe [his favourite exclamation], what a pleasure it was to see that old weary Ripa island again,’ he wrote in the visitor’s book of the launch Awatea, which had taken him to the island. ‘But there certain fools wouldn’t let me land for fear I didn’t know it well enough!’

  A pleasure? He lied. All the time they were there he and Kircheiss complained of the cage-like barbed-wire net over their heads. Kircheiss inscribed his sentiments on the wall of his room: ‘109 weary days held in this dreary place . . . We are fed up with this monotony and off we go to Motuihi [sic]. Thank God.’

  My memory says I saw this inscription. But the hut is no longer there. The inscribed wood was later kept in the sea cadet base in Redcliffs, Christchurch, not far from where I lived. But when I went to check, that had disappeared too. I kept a grip on myself lest I vanished with them.

  Now that chunk of wall, grey tongue-and-groove wood, lies behind glass in the Torpedo Bay Navy Museum in Devonport, alongside a room key with a wooden tag carved with the name ‘von Luckner’. The Navy says his ‘cell’ had a concrete floor to prevent him tunnelling out. Tunnelling was unlikely, for Ripapa Island is a rock fortress built on rock.

  The Count’s fellow Germans on Somes Island in Wellington Harbour were no better off. The island is the final resting place of dozens of immigrants quarantined here who died of typhoid and other diseases. Kim Lee, a Chinese man was suspected of having leprosy (probably wrongly), thrown onto a nearby rock and left to die in a cave.

  Not a proud history, although the Germans fared better: I visited the single remaining barracks building on the island, which must have held some sixty men. It was lined with wood and had wooden floors and must have been an icebox in a Wellington southerly.