COME ON SHORE
AND WE WILL KILL
AND EAT YOU ALL
A New Zealand Story
CHRISTINA THOMPSON
BLOOMSBURY
For Aperahama, Matiu, and Dani Matariki
Time is a flattened landscape, a land of unlinked lakes seen from the air.
—Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: New Zealand, 1642
1 Paihia
2 Abominably Saucy
3 Mangonui
4 Terra Incognita
5 Present Perfect
6 The Venus
7 A Natural Gentleman
8 A Dangerous People
9 Smoked Heads
10 Turton’s Land Deeds
11 Nana Miri
12 Hawaiki
13 Once Were Warriors
14 Gu, Choki, Pa
15 Matariki
16 Thieves and Indian-Killers
17 One Summer
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Maps
Epilogue: New Zealand, 1642
Glossary
Selected Bibliography
A Note on the Author
A Note on Pronunciation and Spelling
Imprint
Prologue: New Zealand, 1642
It is the evening of December 18, 1642, about an hour after sunset, ten, perhaps ten thirty at night, with the sky still holding the last vestige of light on the western horizon. The crews of the two ships Heemskerck and Zeehaen see the light of many fires on shore and four canoes, two of which come toward them through the deepening gloom. It is not their first indication that this island or continent—they know not which—is inhabited, but it is the first time they have been close enough to make out the people.
For five days they have been following the coast, running north with a wide, open sea to their left, rolling in great billows and swells, and a high, mountainous land to their right, masked by low-lying clouds. They have been keeping well out to sea lest the wind, which is predominantly from the southwest, should freshen and drive them onto the shore. They are looking for a landlocked bay or sheltered harbor where they might safely go ashore and see what kind of country this is they have discovered. They want wood and water, fresh food, game, and greens. When they find a long, low sand spit curving round to the east enclosing a large, open bay, they call a meeting of the ships’ council and make a resolution to land.
The two ships set sail in August from the Dutch outpost of Batavia, now the Indonesian city of Jakarta. They were under the command of Abel Janszoon Tasman, a captain in the service of the Dutch East India Company, and were commissioned to explore what lay south of Java between the Indian Ocean and the coast of the New World. Sailing west and south with the winds to Mauritius, Tasman’s ships described a great arc through the Indian and Southern oceans. When they turned east in the high southern latitudes, they passed into a region that was largely unknown. They sailed south of mainland Australia, missing the continent entirely, and made their first landfall on the island now known as Tasmania, which they named Van Diemen’s Land in honor of the governor-general of the Dutch Indies.
Here they landed long enough to see smoke and signs of fires. They heard people singing and playing a gong somewhere in the forest. They found notches cut into a tree at five-foot intervals and, believing these to be steps, concluded that the people must be giants. But the Tasmanian Aborigines remained hidden in the bush, “with watching eyes on our proceedings,” or so the nervous Dutchmen believed. There was, in any case, nothing of interest to the Company and so Tasman set sail again to the east. Eight days later they sighted “a large land, uplifted high”: the first recorded European glimpse of New Zealand.
The evening of December 18 finds them anchored in fifteen fathoms. The wind dies with the setting sun and there follows an hour of glassy calm, broken only by voices and the splash of oars. The Zeehaen’s boats have been sent to reconnoiter the bay and, when they return with the fading light, they are followed at some distance by two canoes. These come within a stone’s throw of the Dutch ships and lie there, riding on the swell. Each of the canoes carries a dozen well-made men of average height with skin of a color between brown and yellow and thick black hair tied up in the fashion of the Japanese. Their chests are bare but around their waists they wear some kind of mat or clothing.
After a while, a man in the prow of the larger canoe stands and calls out in a guttural voice words that no one on board the ships can decipher. The master’s mate calls back in Dutch and then the man in the canoe lifts something to his lips and blows a blast on what sounds to the sailors like a Moorish trumpet. The second officer of the Zeehaen, who has come out to the Indies as a trumpeter, is sent to fetch his horn and ordered to play a tune. This exchange is repeated a number of times and, when it finally grows too dark to see, the canoes turn and paddle back to shore. Uncertain of the natives’ intentions, Tasman sets a double watch and sees that the men have muskets, pikes, and cutlasses to hand.
Early the next morning, a canoe carrying thirteen men approaches. The Dutch sailors lean over the rails, showing white linen and knives and trying to indicate by signs that they want to trade. But the natives keep their distance and eventually they leave. Tasman calls a council of his officers and resolves to bring the ships inshore, since, as he notes in his journal, “these people (as it seems) are seeking friendship.”
But barely has this decision been reached when seven canoes set out from shore, speeding across the water. The Zeehaen’s skipper, who is on board the Heemskerck, grows nervous about having left his crew unsupervised and sends his quartermaster, Cornells Joppen, back in the cockboat with instructions to the junior officers to be on their guard. The canoes, meanwhile, having reached the ships, take up positions on either side.
Joppen delivers his message and gets back in the cockboat, ordering his rowers to return to the commander’s ship. As if on cue, the nearest canoe begins paddling furiously in his direction. Joppen has his back to the canoe and, at first, he does not see it coming. The sailors on board the ships begin to shout, but the natives in the other canoes are also shouting and waving their paddles in the air. The canoe, now flying over the water, rams the cockboat so violently that two of the sailors are tossed into the sea. Joppen reels and grabs for the gunwale but a native jabs him in the neck with a spear and hurls him overboard. The rest of the natives leap from their canoe and fall upon the sailors with clubs, beating them so furiously about the head that three sailors are killed instantly; a fourth lies bleeding in the bottom of the boat.
Joppen and the two sailors manage to swim away and the shallop is sent to rescue them. The natives drown one of the bodies and drag another into their canoe. The Dutch fire heavily with muskets and guns but miss their mark and the natives retreat to shore without suffering any casualties. The Heemskerck’s skipper is sent to recover the cockboat with its grisly cargo of dead and dying men, and Tasman gives the order to set sail, since “no friendship could be made with these people.”
The ships weigh anchor and begin to move but the sailors can see a fleet of twenty-two canoes massing like storm clouds in the distance. The canoes, which are much faster and more mobile than the heavy ships, advance with alarming speed, obviously intending to cut off the intruders before they can escape from the confines of the bay. The Dutch wait until the natives are within range and then fire, this time rattling the canoes with shot and hitting a man in the leading canoe who is standing with a little whi
te flag in his hand. The natives abruptly stop paddling. The Dutch spread what canvas they have and the Heemskerck and Zeehaen sail away, leaving behind the Maori armada and the bodies of two of their men.
Tasman calls a meeting of the ships’ council and then goes below to commit his account of what has happened to paper. “Since the detestable deed,” he writes, “of these inhabitants, committed this morning against four of the Zeehaen’s crew, teaches us a lesson, we consider the inhabitants of this country as enemies.” And to this place he gives the name of Murderers’ Bay.
I
Paihia
If you stick a hatpin in at Boston and drive it through the center of the earth, you come out very near the Bay of Islands. The first Europeans to go south of the equator expected to find a sort of looking-glass world, backward but recognizable, like people who resembled them but walked on their hands. This, of course, is not how it was, though there were birds that scuttled and animals that flew, trees that lost their bark and kept their leaves, pools of bubbling mud and other wonders. But even today there is something about the antipodes that makes one feel estranged, as if time had stopped or begun reversing, as if under a different heavens one were breathing a different air.
The first time I was in New Zealand it was as a tourist. I had been living in the Pacific for about three years, studying at the University of Melbourne, and I was on my way back to Australia after spending Christmas with my family in the States. I was traveling alone with no real plans, only that I wanted to spend a week somewhere, and New Zealand, like Tahiti or Rarotonga, was conveniently on the way. I had been to the islands on previous trips and I was looking for something uncomplicated, someplace I could just relax before starting the new academic year. At the tourist bureau in Auckland they suggested I try the Bay of Islands. “It’s beautiful up there,” said the girl at the counter with a sigh. So I took a bus to Whangarei and got up early the next morning to catch the milk run going north.
There were only a handful of passengers on the bus, all half-asleep. The front two seats were stacked with mailbags and parcels. I took a seat halfway back and watched as we pulled away from a Victorian country railway station on a defunct stretch of line. The sun was climbing into the sky and the day promised to be hot and bright.
We left town by the industrial quarter, a series of low, corrugated aluminum sheds, chain-link fences, boats on blocks, and the hulks of rusting machinery. We passed a three-story Victorian corner hotel painted blue, the Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant, the vast, empty parking lot of Pak ‘n Pay. Then we were on the outskirts of town, row after row of little wooden houses, yellow and white, each with a concrete step and a patch of yard and a Hill’s hoist gleaming in the morning sun. Every couple of blocks there was a corner store already open for business, the day’s headlines blaring in four-inch type from posters propped outside—FINANCE MINISTER SACKED; FRENCH EMBROILED IN DIPLOMATIC SCANDAL. I caught a glimpse of dim interiors behind strips of fluttering plastic, the poor man’s fly-screen door.
For nearly four hours we ground our way up steep, volcanic hillsides between dense patches of native bush, thickets of manuka and giant fern. Then down the other side, the engine whining in protest and the landscape opening out before us like a nineteenth-century painting. The names of suburbs and towns rolled by: Kamo, Hikurangi, Whakapara, Waiotu, Moerewa. I looked them up in my dictionary of place names: Kamo—to bubble up, descriptive of hot springs; Hikurangi—point or summit of the sky; Whakapara—to make a clearing in the forest; Waiotu—spring or pool of Tu, the god of war; Moerewa—floating like a bird in sleep or, perhaps, to sleep on high. In between, the country was empty. Stripped of its native covering, it looked smooth and bald. Sheep the color of dust grazed on hillsides covered with a stubble of grass and the scoria of ancient volcanic explosions. In the vales and clefts the grass was startlingly green; on the hills it was burnt golden brown by the fierce antipodean summer. There were farms every so often and once or twice a view of the sea, glimmering far off.
At Puketona we left the main road and made a steep descent through a twisting, deeply shaded ravine, emerging suddenly into a blinding world of sunlight and water. WELCOME TO PAIHIA, said a sign by the roadside, JEWEL OF THE BAY OF ISLANDS.
Paihia is not a Maori name. It is widely believed to be a pidgin expression: pai means “good” in Maori, while hia is thought to be a transliteration of the English word “here.” According to a popular story, the Reverend Henry Williams, who established a mission there in 1823, was so enchanted by the site that he exclaimed, “Pai here!” meaning “What a good place this is!” or “How good it is to be here!” The experts, though, cast doubt upon this explanation, arguing that it seems too good to be true. At least two other early commentators had spelled the name differently, referring to it as Pahia, which, in Maori, means “to slap.”
Today Paihia is a tight half mile of chip shops, milkbars, seaside motels, and concrete condominiums, a pale, patterned grid of balconies and awnings set against a backdrop of brooding, prehistoric bush. Across the road is the Pacific Ocean. Not the open sea, but the Bay of Islands, a sublimely beautiful stretch of water with dozens of islets and a complex, meandering coastline, named in 1769 by Captain James Cook, who was the first European to see it.
My bus rumbled to a stop at the edge of the wharf. The passengers all got off and stood outside, blinking and stretching and putting on hats and shading their eyes with their hands. I stayed where I was for a moment, staring out at the glittering sea and thinking about the long January arc of the sun as it made its way across the southern hemisphere. In Boston, where I had just come from, it was pitch-dark at four thirty.
After a minute the bus driver stuck his head back in. “You need any help there?”
I got off the bus and walked out onto the pier. To my right an arm of the coastline reached out into the bay, enfolding a little harbor. A number of yachts and launches bobbed at anchor and I caught the faint, melodic clanking of wires hitting the aluminum masts. To my left and beyond was the open bay and the myriad islands like the hills of a drowned continent sticking up out of the sea. There were dozens of boats out on the water, their brightly colored spinnakers bellied out in the breeze. But the air on shore was still and the sun hot in a cloudless sky.
In Australia I often used to stand on the beach and look out to sea and think about what it must have been like to see these places for the first time. It was a curious thought, since the view from where I stood was exactly the opposite of what those first Europeans saw. They, seeing land from sea, recorded it in gently undulating profiles, taking note of any distinctive formations that might prove useful to future navigators. To them it was a stretch of rocky coastline, miles of inscrutable gray-green bush, a series of possible landfalls, inlets and bays where one might get water, reefs and sandbars to avoid. To me, standing there with my back to the cliffs, it was a great reach of emptiness, a stretch of possibility, the gentle curve of the horizon at the edge of the sea. Still, I thought I understood something of the sense of expectation those early explorers must have felt as they approached an unknown coastline for the first time.
The Pacific was an enormous challenge for Europeans. It was so far away, so difficult to get to, and, when they finally reached it, so unexpectedly immense. The early explorers suffered terribly from scurvy, hunger, thirst, not to mention disorientation in the course of voyages that often lasted for years. But it was not just the size of the Pacific that confounded them. It was its emptiness, a reality all the more distressing for the fact that it was not at all what they had imagined they would find.
For centuries the map of the world showed a huge mysterious landmass to the south peopled by men with funny hats or the heads of dogs, wielding spears and praying to idols. It was known as Terra Australis Incognita, the Unknown South Land—or sometimes, more optimistically, Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, the South Land Not Yet Known—and its existence was an article of faith among European geographers for fifteen hundred ye
ars.
The theory, first articulated by the ancient Greeks, was that the landmasses of the northern hemisphere must be counterbalanced by an equal weight of continental matter in the south, or else the world would topple over. But although European explorers crisscrossed the Pacific, beginning with Magellan in 1520, the great South Land remained stubbornly elusive. There were tantalizing hints, rumors of sightings: an island auspiciously named Austrialia del Espiritu Santo by Quirós in 1605, something called Davis Land in the eastern Pacific, sighted by an English buccaneer in 1687 and never seen again, suggestions of continental shadows, of land birds too far out to sea, of unexpected cloud formations in places where they shouldn’t be. There were bits of Australia, a tip of Tasmania, a coast of New Zealand, islands scattered here and there, but few complete outlines well into the eighteenth century. And in the absence of conclusive proof to the contrary, many continued to cherish the idea of a strange and marvelous country somewhere in the South Seas.
But if Europeans in the Pacific were always hoping to stumble upon some great good place, experience often disappointed them. The Solomon Islands, named for the biblical King Solomon (and his gold) by the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Alvaro de Mendaña, turned out to be inhabited by cannibals. Australia, first visited in the early seventeenth century by the Dutch, was, in the view of Jan Cartensz, “the most arid and barren region that could be found anywhere on earth,” while New Zealand was inhabited by a people so treacherous and belligerent that anyone hoping to land there would, at least according to Abel Tasman, have to fight his way to shore.
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