Now, grown up into a world of other, more complicated maps, I eat my breakfast with the Collins World Atlas open on the table. I like toast and marmalade while surveying the Mato Grosso or the Chugoku Mountains, still mentally walking my fingers from Espiritu Santo across the sea to Malekula. I like historical maps, watching my country surface, its broad back rising, glistening, from the depths in that astounding God-like projection as fish and waka, and then as fragments of coastline recorded by Dutch and French and Spanish and English navigators, carefully measuring the indentations of harbour and estuary and filling their waters with dense shoals of numbers.
It feels to me as if there has always been an element of the ‘flyover of hope’ to the mapping of this country. I sit in the National Library, carefully unfolding a map from a huge volume published in 1798. The paper is brittle and crackles in the quiet of the reading room. The book lies open on a little cushion: it contains the observations of a meticulous colonial administrator, David Collins Esq.: An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, … To Which Are Added Some Particulars of New Zealand.
Collins doesn’t miss a thing. He reports on the weather, on arrivals of people and livestock and a furious guerrilla resistance to the settlers, and among the ‘particulars’ he records the abduction of two Maori to Norfolk Island. A British ship, the Daedalus, had been doing a pick-up run down through the Pacific in 1791: some wild cattle from Nootka Sound, 100 hogs from Tahiti, and, along the way, a couple of ‘natives of New Zealand’. The colonial authorities had come up with a plan: plant flax on Norfolk Island, give gainful occupation to the assortment of Irish insurgents, petty thieves and other unfortunate men and women transported to that isolated rock for life, and produce useful items like ropes and rigging for British ships.
The two men chosen to be instructors in this doubtful venture were ‘Hoo-doo-do-do-ty To-wa-ma-how-ey’ (Ngahuruhuru), a man described in the captain’s report as ‘about 24, 5’ 8” tall, of athletic make, his features like those of Europeans and very interesting’, and his friend, ‘Too-gee Titter-a-nu-e Warri-pedo’ (Tukitahua), a ‘young man of the same age as Hoo-doo but about three inches shorter … stout and well-made’. The men had paddled out to view the Daedalus at anchor off the northern coast, ‘drawn by curiosity and the hope of getting some iron’. They were offered a meal below decks, locked in and several days later found themselves ashore in one of the most repressive penal colonies in the world.
They were, reported Captain Hanson, ‘sullen’ on arrival and reluctant to give any information concerning flax, until promised that they would be sent home again, just as soon as they had passed on what they knew. Which turned out to be not very much. The administrators had been unaware that flax was women’s work and the instructors so casually seized were a warrior and a priest.
But they taught what they knew, in the hope of escape. ‘Hoo-doo,’ Hanson records, ‘had two wives and one child about whose safety he seemed very apprehensive and almost every evening at the close of day, he as well as Too-gee lamented their separation in a sort of half-crying, half-singing, expressive of grief which was at times very affecting.’ Both men moreover ‘repeatedly threatened to hang themselves if they were not sent to their own country’ but, says the good captain, ‘they were soon laughed out of’ their despair.
Tukitahua drew a map. He was given chalk and the floor of a hut set apart for the purpose, and later copied the drawing to paper as ‘an object of curiosity’, adding and correcting details over the six months of his enforced restraint.
He depicts his homeland as two large rectangles set alongside each other, with a scattering of smaller offshore islands. EA-HEI-NO-MAUE is drawn larger than its twin, POENAMU, for Tukitahua came from Oruru and knew this region best. He marks on the map the great harbours and rivers and pa sites, noting the numbers of fighting men in each. He draws the ornate frontage of the wharenui that ‘marks the site of his own habitation’ and the deceitful little ship moored offshore where he and his friend were seized. On the other island he draws three lakes and the rivers that drain them and ‘A Tree of which Toogee tells wonderful stories from the authority of the T’fou-duckey people’. He marks in one corner a ‘lake where Stones for Hatchets are got’. But the largest feature by far, running the whole length of EA-HEI-NO-MAUI, is a double dotted line, representing, notes Hanson, not an actual but ‘an imaginary road’ along which the spirits of the dead travel to a tree drawn with twisted branches at a point named ‘TERRY-RINGA’.
A map of longing: half-crying, half-singing …
THEN THERE ARE THOSE MAPS of settlement. In other countries, cities evolve over centuries. Their origins are obscure: a defensive palisade upon a hill, perhaps, or a farm or a temple or a trading place by a shallow crossing on a river. Streets evolve following the dawdling path of cows, or tracing the perimeters of buildings, now long fallen and forgotten. Their original purpose must be guessed at. But in this country, we don’t guess. We have the plan. Cities and towns took shape on paper first. We have the maps and can read their intention.
Some are comic in their unlikelihood. The map for a town in South Westland, for example, with streets and boulevards and space set aside for a university. Now it’s a row of cribs as insubstantial as driftwood tossed on a shingle bar between the wild sea and the luminous acres of a lagoon where kotuku stand motionless on spindly legs, the very image of purity. Or the map for that place on the Canterbury coast where baches knocked together from the remnants of car crates shudder on wonky foundations as the waves rear up, three storeys high, and drop like thunder. And the shingle shelves steeply along the line where some optimistic draughtsman has sketched a curve and labelled it ‘The Esplanade’.
Or there’s that city intended for the Petone foreshore. Britannia. Conjured into existence by Samuel Cobham seated at his desk in Newgate Street, London, in 1839, within the shadow of that gloomy Dickensian prison.
His Britannia is a rectangle within a city wall, each corner manned by a fortified tower. The towers are fanciful things: circular structures surrounded by bartisans arrayed like the petals on a daisy. The inhabitants of Britannia will be safe from attack from without. They will also be safe within. There’s an arsenal and barracks and several police offices and two prisons on the streets of this orderly grid. By each tower, Cobham has made provision for the disposal of the dead with cemeteries. And for the living, around the inside perimeter of the city walls there’s a broad terrace, where on sunny Sunday afternoons the citizens may make their promenade. The streets themselves, prints Mr Cobham in a round and curiously child-like hand, will be 45 feet wide and paved with wood. (Not so unusual: streets in Cork in Ireland were until recently paved with wooden cobbles. A friend of mine recalled, as a child, going with an ancient pram to pick up loads of cobbles when the city council decided to replace them with stone. Everyone was in for their share: the cobbles had soaked in oil and tar for decades and burned a treat in the grate.)
Along these paved streets Cobham makes provision for entertainment: there will be two theatres — Covent Garden and Drury Lane. And for shopping, two fish markets — Billingsgate and Hungerford — as well as markets for produce. (Cobham’s originality did not extend to nomenclature.) A wide river flows through the centre of the city, and little boats unload at its docks: the Government Dock, the Molesworth Dock and the Wellington Dock. There are public baths, a library, post office and Mechanics’ Institute, a hospital, a College of Surgeons and a House of Legislature. One thousand, three hundred and sixty-one acres in all, with 1100 acres set aside for housing. Colonists will also be entitled to farms beyond the walls: 1100 100-acre farms have been carved by the planner’s pen with careless insouciance from bush on steep and slip-prone hills. And overseeing it all, from a site with an uninterrupted view of a wild harbour, is a little rectangle marked ‘President’s Palace’, which immediately lends a somewhat raffish air to the whole enterprise, a whiff of South American Mosquito Coast.
Or there is the equally
beguiling Regency confection dreamed up by Felton Mathew for the Waitemata shore. His version of Auckland is his hometown, Brighton, translated as readily as Cobham translated London to an equally unlikely landscape. Here, crescents and wide streets are superimposed upon the ashy slopes of a volcanic cone, one of fifty in the region, each representing the explosive vent of a single vast mass of molten magma around 90 kilometres below. A plume of molten basalt could, at any moment, rise like toffee in a pot. In a matter of hours — experts mention two days to several weeks between detection and surface eruption — the magma could burst from the surface as lava, fiery fountain or in a vast cloud of steam, gas and rock, an explosive style enticingly named ‘wet explosive’. This cloud could rise a kilometre or more into the air before returning to earth and surging over the landscape, consuming everything in its path. It could happen at any time. It is only 600 years since the last eruption.
But here is the planner’s frail geometry laid down over all that probability: decorous Victoria Quadrant, Nelson Quadrant, Adelaide Crescent, Shortland Street and Queen Street. The names suggest Georgian terraces with four storeys of solid brick, and pedestrians going about their business in top hat and frock coat. The quadrants and crescents display equal indifference to the ramparts of the great pa of Te Horotiu, whose inhabitants Mathew casually consigns to an area on the extreme right-hand margin of his map, ‘reserved for the church and the general use of natives’.
You look at that map and behold the man: thirty-nine, out from London, on the make, a man with a plan of divine simplicity. When dispatched from Sydney as Governor Hobson’s acting surveyor-general, Mathew confessed to his diary that his intention was no more than ‘to buy up as much land as I can possibly find enough money to pay for, and if that do not prove a fortune to me in four or five years, I am much mistaken’. And off he went to Waitangi to witness the legal preliminaries to other men’s plans as simple and unashamed as his own. Off to scope the site of ‘the Town of Auckland in the Island of New Ulster (or Northern Island) New Zealand’, a mercenary invader clutching, as his chosen weapon, not a gun but a protractor and set square.
In the end, Mathew’s experience, like Speer’s, is proof that plans and maps do not always translate so readily to reality. He was dismissed before he could realise his fortune. Hobson appointed in his place another surveyor, Charles Ligar, whose style was more to his taste. And Mathew departed the colony for England, but died on the way in Callao, the Peruvian port Kipling was later to identify as one of the planetary dumps chosen by his Broken Men.
Behind was dock and Dartmoor,
Ahead lay Callao.
Callao is not fit for the Empire’s heroes but for men who have failed disastrously in their ambitions or had a brush with the law. It offers them
… diamond weather,
The high, unaltered blue —
The smell of goats and incense
And mule-bells tinkling through.
But at night, the Broken Men long for home. Home with a capital H. The sentimental Home of expats the world over:
Ah God! One sniff of England —
To greet our flesh and blood —
To hear the traffic slurring
Once more through London mud!
Our towns of wasted honour —
Our streets of lost delight!
How stands the old Lord Warden?
Are Dover’s cliffs still white?
Mathew arrived in Callao a little sooner than Kipling’s imperial refugees, but the air of disappointed ambition sounds familiar.
THE MAP OF CHRISTCHURCH was a less fanciful affair than Mathew’s Auckland or Cobham’s Britannia. It was the work of naval surveyors, military men: a serviceable, rational, rectangular grid, set four square on a swamp on the eastern coast of the southern island.
In myth, the narrow island is a waka, come to grief upon a reef in an immense primeval ocean where its crew of demigods froze and turned to stone as the mountains of the Main Divide. The plains that stretch to the east between mountains and sea were the work of another immortal, come to discover the fate of his grandfather. With a great rake, Tuterakiwhanoa drew the wreckage of the great sea-going craft into a pile at the sea edge. The area so cleared formed a wide plain, watered by mighty rivers, a place fit for human habitation.
Or there is the version that eschews gods for geology. By that reckoning the island is land thrust up by the grinding of tectonic plates, the Australian Plate riding up and over the Pacific Plate at a steady, inexorable 40 millimetres per year and in the process forcing these islands, this little rim of continental crust, up into the light. This version of the country’s history is all movement and change. Nothing is steady. Gondwanaland has slid and cracked. Zealandia has drifted from Australia, the east coast of the North Island is rotating slowly in a clockwise direction, the east coast of the South Island is sliding towards the mountains, Christchurch is sinking, as are the Hauraki Plains, Hamilton, the Bay of Plenty and Marlborough. Wellington is rising. Cook Strait is moving south. Millimetre by millimetre the whole place is shifting beneath our feet. But myth and geology concur in this: both describe a twitchy, unstable place.
The geological plains are made up of shingle, greywacke and schist drawn down from the mountains of the Main Divide by the rivers. They cut a direct path from mountain to sea, dividing the plains into roughly rectangular blocks as they surge eastward in broad beds of multiple interconnecting channels. They are called braided, though that always sounds too tame to me. They are beautiful, as a woman’s plaited hair might be beautiful, or a woven silken tassel. They are heart-stopping in their sinuous flow of blue water milky with snowmelt, surging between banks of white silt.
But this is no domestic beauty. They flow with powerful singularity of purpose, shifting about in their restless beds, forming an estuary here, a lagoon, a sand bar, an island, then abruptly changing course, swinging in a single season from south to north or back again. In spring spate they rumble with cargoes of rock and boulder. From above, from the point of view of the map god, they resemble not so much a braid as a flayed limb, all muscle, nerve and twisting sinew. And these are just the visible waterways of the region. Alongside them, but out of sight under the earth’s surface, flow aquifers as powerful as those on the surface, but secretive, elusive, forcing their way through to the sea, down in the dark.
At the northern edge of the plain one of the great rivers nudges the foot of the pile of wreckage that, in the geological version, is the remnant of two volcanoes. Long extinct, they lean companionably back to back, their summits smoothed to hills that rise abruptly from sea level to around 920 metres at their highest point. Their calderas, flooded long since, form two deeply indented harbours on a peninsula that juts into the sea like a fist.
Sometimes, encountering the peninsula’s recalcitrant bulk, the river flows south. Sometimes it takes another tack, and empties into the sea to the north. Back and forth, leaving, between the two alternatives, a wetland made up of gleaming acres of coastal lagoon and estuary, swamps of rustling reed and flax, springs that bubble up in cones of white silt from the aquifers that are the great river’s dark cousins below ground and creeks that dawdle to the sea past muddy islets. The whole land teems with birds and lizards, fish and eel and skittery insects in their uncountable billions.
And they all know their way about.
They learn its map from birth: where to shelter, where to feed, where to nest, how to get there, how to leave. Those eels in their millions drift in each year as tiny glassy creatures, borne south over thousands of kilometres from their breeding place in tropical waters. They come to land, wriggle over the shingle bar, drop into their lives in some shadowy pool, close to the bank. Head on against the current, eating, not breeding, until the time comes for them to leave. For the male longfins this might be after forty years of living. For the females, however, it’s much longer: eighty, maybe 100 years of growing till they are the size of a man’s leg, one glistening, undulating muscle.
Then something changes. They stop eating, their guts shrivel and their ovaries fill with eggs. And one night they turn and swim with the current. They head downstream, out into the ocean they had last known when they were no more than a glassy leaf. They swim north for thousands of kilometres, following a map of stars, some taste, or scent, to the tropic waters, where they release their eggs in one final explosive contraction. And then they die. They are eaten by gulls while sperm wriggles to egg and the whole cycle begins again. Another shoal of tiny glassy creatures drifts south to the creeks and rivers in the wetlands around the stumps of old volcanoes.
So humans are not the first to find their way about this country. It has been mapped for millennia in the cortex of creatures not that far removed in evolutionary terms from ourselves. At the deepest level, a map is not just about naming places, but of knowing where we are on the planet and feeling we belong.
FOR MILLENNIA, THE BIRDS AND FISH have it to themselves. Then people arrive, following maps created from close observation of ocean currents and winds and the trajectory of moon and stars, noting bird flight and the movement of fish, interpreting the luminescence that is visible beneath the water a certain distance from land and the tang of earth on salt air, knowing how to navigate with absolute precision from one calculated point in this universe of scattered islands across water to this point, with its swamps and eroded volcanoes.
The people paddle down the coast and discover its mountains, plains and rivers and their rich resources. Over hundreds of years, the place acquires a dense patina of names and narrative, an unseen layer covering all those layers of shingle. The winds that breathe over the land, investing everything with life and being, are Te Punui o Te Toka, who blows from the south, Puaitaha, who blows from the south-west. Tiu breathes from the north. Uru Te Maha is the source of all winds that blow from the west, including Te Mauru e Taki Nei, the nor’wester, who dominates these plains with such force that he is known by Ngai Tahu as Te Hau Kai Tangata, the wind that devours people.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 2
