Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  Another land purchase, however, was not so fortunate. On 20 October 1858 he bought three sections in Main Street in the Onepoto Gully, a steep track that led up to the barracks on the very top of the Napier Hill. The purchase suggests a kind of conservatism, a lack of risk. Or was it just that this was the territory he knew? The land was a Crown grant and had been subdivided on the very first plan for Napier drawn up in 1855. Owners of other sections included officers and an army surgeon. Yet others were essentially speculative, and owned by absent land speculators, people like Takamoana Karaitiana, rangatira of Ngāti Kahungunu, and ‘Lord’ Henry Russell, a sheepocrat. Wellington speculators also owned sections. At the time the land must have looked like a good investment, near as it was to the barracks. (Hospital Hill was then called Barrack Hill.)

  Sergeant Northe paid the relatively high price of ten guineas for each of the sections at 9, 10 and 11 Main Street, which his sons Hugh Frederick and Josiah occupied the following year. (A year later he sold off section 11, described in the advertisement as ‘that very desirable piece of land … surrounded by a substantial wooden fence and under crop. A well has been sunk which provides a constant supply of water.’) In 1860 he spent a further £30 on a section at 13 Main Street, and built a tiny wooden cottage on the site. This is where he lived for the rest of his life with Nancy and his daughters. The receipts, which still exist — and which were as important as a teaching diploma or a university degree is now — were signed by John Alexander Smith, a trader, who was selling the land for various people including William Colenso, the ex-missionary who dabbled in buying and selling land. On pay of ten shillings a week, Sergeant John Northe had somehow managed to salt away £60 for the land.

  Colenso, writing to a friend in 1870, referred disparagingly to these purchases, saying he was only ‘too glad’ to sell the sections at a relatively high price ‘as that part of our “city”(!) is the very fag end, and must be (I fear) for years to come’.17 He was right. Onepoto Gully was a chilly valley. It was far from the sea, from what might be called the ‘dress circle’ of Napier. It looked instead into an interior landscape of swampland but it was, at least, oriented towards the port and inner harbour. Yet it was very much the back end of Napier.

  In 1870 Colenso had noted there were only three residents ‘in all that end of the Island!’18 After the barracks ceased to exist in the 1880s (by which stage they had become immigration barracks), Main Street lost its purpose. It went into a steep decline, ending up housing a woollen mill and the poorer workers in Napier.

  But my point is John Northe was not an inert atom shifted around by historical forces, deposited in Napier like a piece of driftwood. (He along with others of the town’s bourgeoisie also bought shares in Napier’s first Building Society.) As with his role in Manchester Unity, or setting up his sons in apprenticeships, or the buying of land, he was advocating for himself to better his place in the world. We are reminded of the entrepreneurial miners of Cornwall, who auctioned off work and provided a model of contract work and personal advocacy.

  After he died in 1875, two of the surplus sections were sold, and Nancy continued to live in the cottage at 13 Main Street. The £30 purchase had risen in value to £400 by 1882, so it was not an entirely bad investment.

  LET’S SET SERGEANT JOHN NORTHE more tightly in the complex colonial world of Pākehā and Māori. What did it mean that he worked for the British Army? Did this mean he took part in confiscations and fought against Kingite Māori? On 20 April 1869 Sergeant John Northe had written to his daughter Eleanor and son-in-law Samuel Evinson, who lived near Matawhero, ‘Dear Son & daughter … No doubt you have heard of all the goings on here with the Hou-hous and the great Slaughter they have made again, and it would appear no one can stop them.’

  The note of urgency and alarm is very real. The letter seems to be saying that ‘no one’ can stop the ‘Hou-hous’ reaching Napier, where another ‘great Slaughter’ might happen.19 Fear was visceral for these migrants living in a landscape which could not help but be deeply ‘other’. And surprise attacks in the dead of night or at dawn were especially frightening.

  An attack by Te Kooti Arikirangi on Mōhaka between 9 and 12 April 1869 had left sixty-two dead, both Māori and Pākehā. Mōhaka was only 88 kilometres away — within striking distance of Napier. At the time Te Kooti had appeared to be heading in a completely different direction, up to Waikato or Tauranga, where indeed food was being prepared for his arrival. Instead he quietly turned back inland, and in the early hours of Saturday, 10 April he and his Tūhoe followers began the slaughter by killing thirty-one Māori men, women and children. This was revenge against Māori supporters of the Crown, called Queenites (supporters of Queen Victoria) or kūpapa (friendlies or, more derogatively, collaborators). Te Kooti and his followers also killed a young Pākehā family by the name of Lanvin and a farmer named Cooper.

  The Edwardian historian and gatherer of oral history James Cowan was later to write, ‘Mrs. Lavin was lying on the ground, shot dead. Her husband lay by her side with his left arm under her as if he had been protecting her when he was killed; his revolver was in his outstretched right hand. The Lavin children, according to the veteran Armed Constabulary scout Ben Biddle, who was one of the first to find the bodies, had been killed by being thrown up in the air and caught on the points of the Hauhaus’ bayonets, just as the Sepoys cruelly impaled white children in the Indian Mutiny. “The little ones’ bodies were all over bayonet-wounds,” said Biddle.’20

  The last detail is questionable. Facts become propaganda in a heightened atmosphere of war, and killing children can be guaranteed to motivate anger and a desire for revenge. Cowan deploys a classic image from the Indian Mutiny which draws on an arsenal of what might be best termed ‘white fright’. Historian Judith Binney points out the attacks were essentially utu or reciprocity, and that Lanvin’s children ‘were not mutilated’, though she offers no evidence for this.21

  Te Kooti’s real focus was the two local pā which were allied to the Crown (kūpapa). These were Te Huiki and Hiruharama, both of which held much-needed ammunition and guns. Te Kooti negotiated for a ‘peaceful’ entry into Te Huki after a day of siege, but a Ngāti Pahauwera warrior fired on him when he entered, and ‘the surrender turned into slaughter’.22 Twenty-six people, mainly women and children, were killed by Te Kooti and his party.

  On Monday, 12 April word of the slaughter reached Napier after one of the kūpapa Māori rode a horse to the town’s limits, then walked and ran as far as Petane before collapsing in exhaustion and fright. The news of the guerrilla attack led to panic. ‘During the Monday night — commencing at midnight — the bulk of the women and children resident in [outlying districts] flocked to town,’ the Hawke’s Bay Herald reported on 16 April. ‘The writer left Napier about midnight and on his way to Greenmeadows, could not have encountered fewer than twenty carts bound for Napier, laden with timid women and tender children, many of them infants who had been taken from their warm beds into the dank, unwholesome atmosphere of the night.’ The Herald writer defined the rush to the fort as ‘a stampede’. (Possibly this is the night Polly Northe remembered, when she was piggybacked up the hill by one of her ‘uncles’ in a panicked attempt to get inside the fort before the attack began.)

  Sergeant John Northe, now aged seventy, took a sardonic view of the army command and its ability to retaliate: ‘Col. Whitmoor can’t do anything and now they have got another old Wash Woman, Col Lambert an old Drom Boys,’ he wrote with disdain in the letter.23 He felt nothing could be done, partly because of the inept command on the colonial side: ‘… they had the milita [sic] and Volunteers out, a part of them is home again but will have to go out on Sunday, William and Robt have been out and will have to go again on Sunday, we have sent you a news paper so you will be able to see how things is going on —’

  John is referring to his sons William Henry and Robert (my great-grandfather) going ‘out’ on active service. They were both members of the Napier Rifle Volunteers,
one of two ‘volunteer’ companies in Napier, created on 28 May 1858 as part of a self-defence corps. A Pākehā volunteer had to present himself at the place of parade and do 168 hours’ (minimum) service per annum. He was to keep his arms clean and effective. The NCOs, unusually, were elected by the men, and the dress for the Rifle Volunteers was dandyish: a scarlet serge (Garibaldi) jacket with coloured braid facings; trousers of blue serge, with a red band down the outside seams; a blue cloth forage cap with a French peak, and a coloured band with the initials or number of the corps placed at the front. There is evidence, however, that the Napier Volunteers presented a piebald appearance when called up: these were hard times financially, and many men would not have been able to afford a full uniform.

  It is probably no surprise that two of Sergeant John Northe’s four sons would answer the call. William Henry Northe, aged twenty-eight, was a sharp shooter and one of Hawke’s Bay’s crack shots. He had already seen action. In October 1866, 180 Volunteers, accompanied by 200 kūpapa Māori, had encircled and attacked a pā site at Ōmarunui, 13 kilometres from Napier. This was after it appeared Pai Mārire from outside Hawke’s Bay were attempting to set up a cell near Napier. (This too had been preceded by wild rumours of an attack on Napier by stealth. The Napier Volunteers were called up out of their beds and walked in a forced march by night out to Ōmarunui.) Pākehā and kūpapa Māori fought alongside one another but in completely separate companies.

  Twenty-three Pai Mārire followers were killed in the ensuing battle, which appears to have been more of a rout than an actual fight. (Two kūpapa and one Pākehā also died.) It is disputed to this day what the real intentions of these Pai Mārire intruders into Ngāti Kahungunu territory were. The Waitangi Tribunal’s assessment of the battle of Ōmarunui, published in 2004, asserts that the Pai Mārire prophets, rather than coming to attack and sack Napier, were in fact coming to lay down their arms before Minister of Native Affairs Donald McLean — but they insisted on his physical presence, which he did not understand. Misunderstandings and distrust built on each other, exacerbated by the difficulties of a diffuse philosophical language on the part of the Pai Mārire.24 Kūpapa or coastal Māori chiefs were implicated in the attack for their own tribal reasons; and an over-anxious settler militia was headed by a leader (Whitmore) who was angered by the theft of his sheep, for which he blamed Pai Mārire.

  There is even a line of argument that it was all part of McLean’s evil plan to steal Māori land, and that Pākehā militia were just donning military uniform as ‘settlers [who] could always hope to use the law, particularly the Native Lands Act, to secure their landed interests, [but] they were equally ready to don their uniforms as local militia, take to the field against Pai Mārire, and seize their land under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863. In one way or another, the settlers would solve their problem of frontier security and advance their land interests.’25

  All of this is infinitely possible in a theoretical sense, but it absents from the picture the psychological reality of the situation for Pākehā. The sacrificial killing of the Reverend Völkner, his beheading and the drinking of his blood by Pai Mārire in Ōpōtiki in 1865 had whipped up anxieties to an unprecedented level. It was a hysterical environment, and the actions of Pai Mārire in coming to Hawke’s Bay and then diffusely answering queries about their intent were alarmingly naive in this context.26

  When anxiety is high, a situation too easily gets out of control. And while the Waitangi Tribunal’s ‘Mohaka ki Ahuriri Report’ goes out of its way to absolve the Pai Mārire of any aggressive intent, the group’s belief that they could appear in Hawke’s Bay without carrying the dark and bloodstained history of their apocalyptic religion is not credible. But then, of course, how does credibility relate to an apocalyptic religion in which people feel they can walk into bullets and be somehow magically untouched? Is it possible to communicate in this situation?

  History is context. To take away the psychological context is to present a one-sided interpretation. But then I’m a descendent of one of the men who fought at Ōmarunui and perhaps I’d be expected to intuit how this incursion would be seen from my ancestors’ point of view — a perspective entirely lacking in the Waitangi Tribunal historical assessment. (The battle led to lamentable consequences: the Pai Mārire captured were sent away without trial to the Chatham Islands, and there was widespread confiscation of land of those iwi implicated in, or blamed for, the conflict. Ironically some of these exiles became recruits for Te Kooti when he later set out to avenge his imprisonment, leading to the attacks on Mōhaka.)

  William Henry and Robert Northe also took part in the Mōhaka incident. I was surprised to read that my great-grandfather Robert was in the Volunteers, let alone that he risked seeing action in Mōhaka in 1869. At this date he would have been the randy, directionless age of nineteen, possibly just out of his apprenticeship with Robert Holt, builder, although his obituary says that he started out training to be a printer. One senses the carefulness and patience of this craft would have been anathema to the faintly swashbuckling Robert. He did not continue with the Volunteers after 1869 — perhaps he decided it was just not his style. But in terms of whether Robert Northe ever saw action, the force of landscape in New Zealand intervened. By the time troops ‘rushed’ to the spot, it was too late. The very mobility of Te Kooti meant he had slipped the noose and vanished.27

  An aspect of this muddle and misadventure was a fall in the esteem in which the British Army’s officers were held. They were now seen as blundering, inept and foolish. When a sergeant writes about a superior officer as ‘an old Wash Woman’ it is an indication of a loss of faith. This view, interestingly, was echoed in the Hawke’s Bay Herald, which reported a state of dithering about how best to counteract the threat to the north. The troops were kept close to Napier while they awaited supplementary Volunteer troops from Hastings. Then the command made the mistake of marching the men up to Mōhaka, via steep hills and deep valleys, instead of fast-forwarding troops in one of the two ships in port.

  On Tuesday, 13 April 1869 Colonel Lambert — the ‘old Drom Boy’ of whom John Northe spoke with so much disdain — started out for Mōhaka with the Napier Volunteers but had got no further than Tongoio, about 25 kilometres from Napier, when he received a dispatch saying Te Kooti had vanished. The Volunteer troops were sent back to Petane, while Colonel Lambert pressed on ‘for what might be called the front’. From Petane the troops were force-marched back to other side of Napier, which they found deserted because of the panic. ‘Next day they were dismissed to their homes, from which they should never have been taken.’28

  Meanwhile, up at Mōhaka, Lambert and other military leaders talked about how they should pursue Te Kooti though it was ‘utterly fruitless’. (Cowan described Lambert as ‘extraordinarily lacking in military enterprise’.)29 They had got there too late and it had taken too long to deploy all their forces. Local Māori, wanting utu for the slaughter of their women and children, were desperate to pursue and capture Te Kooti. But Lambert prevaricated and lost the initiative. Te Kooti withdrew in triumph with one hundred pack horses loaded with plunder.

  It all risked being a farce. As the Hawke’s Bay Herald commented the following day, 20 April, the day John Northe wrote his letter: ‘Our force is scattered here, there, and everywhere but where they ought to be … [and it all ends] in nothing, absolutely nothing.’ The Herald noted gloomily, ‘An Exodus of the population will probably set in. The Abrupt withdrawal of men of all classes from their daily occupations, the consequent deprivation of all comfort, cessation of business, and alarm to their families, is more than most people can stand; and already many look out for what they cannot obtain here — a place of rest.’ It did not bode well for a small and isolated outpost like Napier.

  William Henry Northe was awarded a Military Medal for his service at both Mōhaka and Ōmarunui. What action did he see at Mōhaka? It’s hard to believe he would get a medal for marching up a road, then turning around and marching back
again. I believe he was one of the twelve Rifle Volunteers who went up to Mōhaka in a lifeboat. He was, after all, one of the best shots in Napier. The boat was loaded with sixty rounds of ammunition. ‘On arriving off the mouth of the river, the crew watched the attack on Hiruharama pa and saw the explosion of the gunpowder at Te Huke pa which was on fire,’ Cowan wrote.

  The boat prepared to land so the Volunteers could rescue any fugitives. But unknown to them the blockhouse was filled with Te Kooti’s followers, who began to fire on the boat as it came to land. From a cliff top further gunshots pursued the boat, so it had to pull out of range. Gunshots were fired back over the stern but ‘the party decided to return to Napier’.30 It was not an especially glorious episode.

  As if both accepting and dismissing this, the retired sergeant moved on in his letter to talk of more mundane matters: how his family was settling down and trying to scrape together a living in colonial Napier. ‘We received a letter a short time since from a Mr Bagnall Dolly’s admirer, he begs permission to become one of the family that he had spoken to you on the Subject and you had no objection … Now of course we know nothing about him, but from what John [John James Northey] say of him it would appear he is a respectable young man, a good trade and from a respectable family’ … So we don’t See there can be any objections — only that they must not be in a hurry.’ That is, Dolly must not be pregnant, which would necessitate a speedy wedding.

  As it was, Mr Bagnall faded away. I tried to find out more about him in Harding’s Almanac but he is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was one of those people who joined the ‘exodus’ away from the tiny and economically fragile polis.