Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  Of course, none of this stopped Europeans from coming—far from it—but it did occasionally give them pause as they peered into the early-morning mist, trying to decide if that smudge on the horizon were the coast of some undiscovered country or a bank of low-lying cloud, or wondering, as they drew near some unknown coastline, what manner of men they might find.

  I took a long last look out across the bay and made my way back up the pier to where the bus was idling. All the other passengers had vanished, merging into the crowd of tourists and shoppers on the opposite side of the road. For a moment I thought about following them. It was an appealing sort of place, touristy but recognizable in the way that resort towns often are, an easy sort of place to imagine staying. But the ticket I was holding was not for Paihia. It was for an inland agricultural center called Kerikeri, where, in an effort to economize, I had booked a bed at the local youth hostel.

  The driver was already in his seat and he gave me a nod as I climbed back on the bus. It was just the two of us, and as soon as I was settled, he yanked the door shut and we pulled out into the stream of traffic snaking through the town.

  We passed a series of gift shops and tearooms, a couple of real estate agencies, a one-hour photo lab, some restaurants, a hairdresser, and a bank. There were signs for at least a dozen motels that I might have stayed at: the Dolphin, the Outrigger, the Nautilus, the Admiral’s View. There was one with a nice ring to it called Cook’s Lookout and another with the oddly ironic name the Abel Tasman Lodge. But it was not a big place and before long we had reached the end of Paihia proper. Then trundling over the Waitangi Bridge, we left the motels and spinnakers behind us and climbed back into the green and shadowed bush.

  Kerikeri, known to the missionaries as “Kiddy-kiddy,” lies upriver from the Bay of Islands just beyond the navigable head of the Kerikeri River. There is a famous mission house there and the oldest stone building in New Zealand and, not too far from either of these, the ruins of a Maori pa, or fortified village, known in pre-European times as Te Waha-o-te-riri, or the Mouth of War.

  At thirty-five degrees south latitude, well watered, and protected from the prevailing winds, the inland Bay of Islands is a gardener’s paradise. Charles Darwin, visiting the region in December 1835 on the homeward leg of his voyage in the Beagle, described crops of barley and wheat standing in full ear and fields of potatoes and clover. “There were large gardens,” he wrote, “with every fruit and vegetable which England produces; and many belonging to a warmer clime … asparagus, kidney beans, cucumbers, rhubarb, apples, pears, figs, peaches, apricots, grapes, olives, gooseberries, currants, hops, gorse for fences, and English oaks; also many kinds of flowers.” Kerikeri, which means, literally, “dig, dig,” still produces all this and more, including many fruits unknown to Europeans in Darwin’s day, like passion fruit, feijoas, and tamarillos.

  Like most ordinary towns, Kerikeri is made up of concentric circles. It has a small retail center with a handful of shops, a newsagent, a couple of banks, a Laundromat, a supermarket, a post office, and a pub. Outside this is a ring of marine and agricultural businesses: tractor sales and tire centers and places to get a boat engine overhauled. Then there’s a suburban belt of ranches and bungalows on quarter-acre blocks, beyond which lie the commercial orchards and farms.

  Kerikeri is a prosperous town with an air of solid, middle-class well-being. A sizable chunk of the population is made up of local farmers and businessmen, some of whose families have lived in the area for generations. In recent years it has attracted a large number of new arrivals: rose growers and hobby farmers and well-heeled retirees, drawn to the region by the gentle climate and the pleasant way of life. Somewhat less expectedly, Kerikeri is also home to a thriving alternative fringe. Tucked in between the farm stands on the road to Whangarei are pottery barns and woodworking studios. You can easily find someone who does shiatsu massage or aromatherapy, and at least one store in town sells Indian cottons, crystals, and healing CDs.

  On certain days of the week there are great congregations of Maoris in Kerikeri. They sit in parked cars and chat through the window. They buy fish-and-chips at the takeaway and eat it off butcher paper in the park. They splurge on lotto tickets, tailor-mades, pies with sauce, cream buns, and cases of beer. You can see them in the Laundromat, folding and gossiping while the kids play video games, or queueing up at the supermarket, their trolleys piled high with staples: flour in twenty-kilo bags, sugar, tea, milk, potatoes, pumpkins, butter, eggs, and jam.

  Most of the Maoris in Kerikeri live out beyond the smaller landholdings, beyond the orchards and the farms, past where the tarmac ends and the gravel takes over, on small residual blocks of tribal land. Some of these communities are inland, but most of them are on the sea, cupped in a sheltered bend of the coastline or perched at the back of a cove. Many of these settlements are ancient by New Zealand standards, dating from long before the arrival of any Europeans, and many of the people who live there today are directly descended from those who occupied them hundreds of years ago. Although they are not exactly hidden, these places are not easy to locate. A lot of Maori history can be found in the local tourist brochures and guidebooks, and there are maps showing how to get to the ruins of Kororipo pa or the recreation of Rewa’s village. But there are few, if any, signposts to the places where most of the local Maoris actually live.

  I spent just under a week in Kerikeri, much of it on my own. I hiked the trails to Rainbow Falls and walked down the hill to Waipapa Landing to see the Kemp House and the Stone Store. I visited the arts-and-crafts cooperative and a nursery specializing in lavenders and culinary herbs. I hung out in the tearooms and in the newsagent, where I found a surprisingly good supply of books.

  I was always on the lookout for books when I traveled, and never went anywhere without some of my own. One, in particular, I took with me whenever I crossed the Pacific: a battered 1949 anthology called The Spell of the Pacific that my brother had given me when I first left the States. It had a worn, rather lurid dust jacket showing the mauve mountains of a high island with its green coastal plain and, in the foreground, a cluster of lateen-rigged canoes sailing on a coral sea, all framed with a bit of beach grass and a fringe of black palm. It was filled with accounts of poets and explorers, missionaries, sailors, scientists—travelers of all kinds—arranged geographically and prefaced with an epigraph from Moby-Dick: “There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath …”

  Plainly sensational in its presentation—the flap copy was addressed to “those whose hearts can thrill to romance and adventure,” while the back promised “Natives,” “Shipwreck,” and “Treasure”—it was nevertheless a serious, even a scholarly work, containing an astonishing array of European writings about the Pacific, from an eyewitness account of the death of Magellan in 1521 to a wartime dispatch from the Philippines in 1944. Anyone who was anyone was represented—Conrad, Melville, London, Maugham, Tasman, Darwin, Cook, and the unhappy Captain Bligh—over a thousand thin, brittle pages between fraying cloth-covered boards. My copy, which my brother had found at an estate sale in Santa Barbara, had been at some previous time inscribed on the flyleaf: For your travels. I packed it in my hand luggage and carried it with me, reading as I went.

  It was organized by region: Melanesia, Polynesia, Australia, and so on. The New Zealand section began with Tasman’s arrival and the first recorded instance of contact between the Maoris and Europeans at a place thereafter known as Murderers’ Bay. This was followed by a couple of Maori myths; an extract from Charles Darwin’s Beagle journal; a grim uncharacteristic story by Katherine Mansfield about madness on the colonial frontier; some poems, including one with a dirgelike refrain that began, “Morning in Murderers’ Bay, / Blood drifted away”; and an excerpt from a curious book called Old New Zealand, written in 1863 by a “harum scarum Irishman” named Frederick Maning. This last was titled “A Maori Ruffian,” and it told the story of a fight
between the author and “a bullet-headed, scowling, bowlegged, broad-shouldered, Herculean savage” who had “killed several men in fair fight, and had also—as was well known—committed two most diabolical murders, one of which was on his own wife.”

  None of this correlated well with the magazine in the seat-back pocket of my Air New Zealand flight or any of the other popular representations of New Zealand as a land of panoramic beauty dotted with sheep. Nor did it seem to have much to do with places I had visited like Kerikeri or Paihia, and I began to wonder about the history of the country and the undercurrents that might run through its society.

  I was booked on the late bus back to Auckland and, looking for a way to spend my last few hours, I wandered over to the pub. It was a Saturday evening at the height of summer and the place was full of smoke and people sitting at sticky tables crowded with pitchers of Lion and DB. At one end of the room, a jukebox was playing a loud mixture of reggae and rock. At the other stood a pair of pool tables surrounded by players waiting for their turn. There were a number of counter-height tables scattered around the room. The women perched on barstools and drank rum and Coke; the men stood and drank their beer straight from the jug, as if even the largest glasses were too small for their hands. Slumped in the corners of the room were a handful of people who’d clearly been there all day, but most had been trickling in since late afternoon, and by the time the fight broke out, there was standing room only.

  How they all knew something had happened I have no idea, but the minute the punch was thrown, every head in the place swiveled in the fighters’ direction. A space had opened up in the middle of the room and in the center of it were two young men, one of whom was standing stock-still with a hurt expression and blood running down his face.

  The hitter was a Maori, a half-caste, with a compact body and fair, freckly skin. He could hardly have been more than eighteen, probably he was younger. The bleeder was a Pakeha, a New Zealander of European descent. He was blond and wiry and older than the Maori boy, with a face already weathered by the southern sun. He was wearing blue jeans and a red plaid shirt, which was handy, I remember thinking, since he was using the sleeve of it to mop up his face.

  For an instant there was silence. And then it was over, just like that. The Pakeha vanished into the bathroom, the Maori sat down with a thump, and everyone else turned back to his beer.

  “What happened?” I asked the fellow standing nearest, a tall, solid Maori with cropped hair, sunglasses, and a bright pink shirt. “What’s going on?”

  “Guess someone said something someone didn’t like,” he said. “Gotta light?”

  He was very big, I realized, studying him more closely. Not just tall but heavily muscled and dark, or maybe that was the shirt. His face was broad and perfectly impassive. I could see nothing behind the glasses, the lenses of which looked black.

  I handed him my lighter.

  “Ta,” he said. “You here on holiday?”

  I explained that I was living in Australia, though, as he could tell from my accent, I was obviously a Yank. “How about you? Are you from around here?”

  He said he was a foundryman and that he made boat parts in Whangarei. He pronounced it the Maori way—FAHNG-ah-day—so that even though I’d just spent a night there on my way to Kerikeri from Auckland, I didn’t recognize the name. He’d come home for the Christmas holidays. His family lived out in Mangonui, about fifteen miles away.

  I told him I’d been in Kerikeri for a week, staying at the youth hostel, and that I was headed back to Auckland that same night.

  “Hmmm,” he said, looking past me in a manner I found oddly reassuring.

  “My name’s Christina,” I volunteered.

  “Tauwhitu,” he said, pronouncing it TOE-fee-too. “But everyone calls me Seven.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Tau whitu. In Maori it means ‘seven years.’ “

  But this, like everything else, was curiously misleading. He was not called Seven because his name meant “seven years.” He was called Seven because he was the seventh of ten children and because some wag among his cousins had nicknamed him “Number Seven” when he was a kid.

  The way he told it, it was only an accident that he was even in the pub that night. He said he’d been out on the water all day diving for crayfish with his cousins—by which I understood him to mean the piratical-looking crew of Maoris at the next table. They were all wearing sunglasses and close-fitting jeans and some had leather jackets. “We only came into town for cigarettes,” he was saying. “We didn’t plan on stopping at the pub.”

  The problem, it seemed, was that none of them had any money. But then someone had the bright idea of taking the crayfish, which they were supposed to bring home, and hawking them in the pub. At the last minute, the crays were saved when Seven found a twenty-dollar note on the men’s room floor. He laughed as he mimed handing it over to the bartender with the very tip of his forefinger and thumb.

  Just then the noise in the pub, which had once again risen to a steady roar, died abruptly for a second time. A group of policemen, five or six, in hats and uniforms with handcuffs and billy clubs dangling from their belts, were standing in the door. They shouldered their way through the crowd to where the Maori who’d been in the fight was sitting. “Outside,” said one of them roughly. “Outside with yer mates.”

  The boy and his two companions, one with dreadlocks and a crocheted cap and a thin, grizzled fellow in his forties, got to their feet and left, followed by the police.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” And, leaving my drink on the table, I slipped out after them.

  By this time night had fallen. The police had their suspects lined up against the wall and were barking questions at them: What were their names? Where did they come from? What were they doing here? They told the Maoris to empty out their car, a battered old Falcon stuffed with clothing, blankets, fishing gear, and trash. As the one with the dreadlocks went to open the door, a Doberman leaped out and he grabbed it by the collar. I took in the scene from the doorway—the police beacons flashing in the night, the whining dog, the staccato nonsense of the radio, and the dark mutterings of the men, whose disheveled belongings were now strewn around the parking lot—and wondered if this were normal for a Saturday night.

  At last the police decided to take the oldest, most inoffensive member of the trio to the station, leaving the other two to stuff their things back into the car.

  “You can pick him up later,” they told them. “Then you’re on your way.”

  I went back inside, if anything even less clear about what had actually happened. Why were there so many policemen? Why did they take the wrong guy? Why did they even bother to turn up when the fight was over? What had happened to the Pakeha? And why was there no buzz about it in the pub?

  I headed back to where I’d left my beer and put my questions to Seven.

  “Ah,” he said, “they’re just troublemakers. They’re not from around here.”

  2

  Abominably Saucy

  I have often thought of that night as a contact encounter. “Contact” is what we call it when two previously unacquainted groups meet for the very first time. It is what happened when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492 and encountered a tribal people henceforth known as “Indians” from his misconception about where in the world he was. Or when the Leahy brothers, trekking into the interior of Papua New Guinea in search of gold, came upon a group of highlanders who in 1933 still knew nothing about the outside world. It describes a moment of sudden wonder, a tectonic shift, that undermines old certainties and opens up whole new views.

  Of course, there have been thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of such moments. Contact, after all, has taken place in all corners of the world between all kinds of people, most of whom have left no written record of the events. Documented instances are comparatively rare and this, perhaps, is why so much glamour attaches to these moments—that and the fact that
they no longer happen. First contact, unless it is with someone in outer space, is a scenario that will not be repeated on the terrestrial globe, and this naturally adds to its attraction.

  But contact, as a generalized concept, is still a very useful idea. In the context of the last five hundred years, the age of European expansion, contact has often been understood as an asymmetrical event, an act, in which someone contacts someone else. But historians and anthropologists tend to speak rather of a “contact period” or “contact zone,” meaning a time and space in which two groups of people come together, part, come together, part, and come together again in a strange, unsettled period of uncertainty, like a dance that none of the performers has had a chance to fully learn.

  Because contact, whatever else it is, is a matter of confusion. One side may have technological superiority; the other maybe have numbers on its side. But when they first come together, there is, for a limited time, a kind of parity, the parity of incomprehension. Each side constructs hypotheses, tries to assess the other’s strength, to parse the other’s utterances, to deduce the other’s purpose and intent. Neither fully understands what’s happening and neither can say with confidence what’s going on.

  The absolute truth of this, and its applicability even to contemporary situations, was impressed upon me that evening after I left the Kerikeri pub. My bus to Auckland had been scheduled for ten o’clock, but somehow ten had come and gone and, before I knew it, the pub was closing and there I was with all my gear and no place to go. “You can come with us,” said Seven. And so I did.

  Our destination, it turned out, was a house that belonged to somebody’s uncle. The owner was away at the time and in his absence the place had become a sort of flophouse for those of his relations who could not be bothered, or were too drunk, to drive back out to Mangonui. You could walk to it from the pub, which is what we’d done, stumbling through the schoolyard and across a lumpy paddock to a surprisingly suburban-looking street at the bottom of a hill.