Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  “No,” I told him. “It’s a dream about responsibility. It’s about having a lot of responsibility and fucking things up.”

  He laughed. “We indigenous people never have those sorts of dreams.”

  This time I told my family about our change in circumstances right away, calling my mother from California as soon as I had my pregnancy test results. I knew we were going to need help—with money, for starters—but there is also something about having a baby that yanks you back into the family fold whether you want it to or not. It’s not just your baby—the way we had thought of it as our marriage—it’s their baby too. And so, what had begun as a romance of two individuals was transformed by this event into an entanglement of tribes, a web of indebtedness and responsibility that extended not only into the future but back into the past. I had been accustomed to thinking about Maoris and the Pacific from the point of view of an interested outsider. But all that changed with the prospect of a baby. Suddenly I began to think of their history as his history and his history as my history and the whole business was suddenly cast in a new light.

  I had not even had the baby yet when this came home to me with some force. I had taken a short-term job as a research assistant at an institute in Cambridge. There were no foundries in the area, and Seven was pretty much done with that anyway—” Too dirty,” he said. Instead, he cashed in his experience as a bicycle messenger for work with a company making high-end bikes, and began casting jewelry on the side, using the silver spoons that my father periodically dropped into the garbage disposal by accident.

  I spent my free time doing one of two things: sending off applications for jobs and fellowships and going to the library. I had discovered, in one of the university libraries, a small but surprisingly good Oceanic collection that no one ever seemed to use except me. Most of the books had not been taken out for decades, some had never left the shelves. With a handful of important exceptions—Beaglehole’s five-volume Journals of Captain Cook, McNab’s two-volume Historical Records of New Zealand—none had been bar-coded. And I came to think, as I stood at the circulation desk filling out little slips of paper—author, title, publisher, date—that I was bar-coding the entire collection single-handedly, one volume at a time.

  But some of the things I wanted were obscure enough to be available only on microfilm and there came a day—it had been alternately snowing and raining, the sidewalks were treacherous, and the forecast was for more freezing rain—when I found myself in a long, efficient-looking room marked Government Archives and Microforms. It was a late afternoon in the middle of the week and the place was almost empty, just a few serious researchers, none of whom looked up when I came in. The room was inviting in an impersonal sort of way: all that beige furniture, the shadowless light, the metal filing cabinets with their cryptic labels: W1260, Y4750. There were cabinets on three sides of the room, each cabinet with many drawers, each drawer with many fiche, each fiche with many pages, each page with many words. It reminded me of that nursery rhyme: Kits, cats, sacks, wives, how many were going to St. Ives?

  I had found in the catalog something described as Turton’s Land Deeds of the North Island, and I asked the attendant to fetch it for me from the stacks. When it arrived, all thirty sheets of it in a little paper pouch, he told me that the index was missing.

  “Oh well,” I said cheerfully. “I guess I’ll just start at the beginning.”

  I began by reading something called “An Epitome of Official Documents Relative to Native Affairs and Land Purchases in the North Island of New Zealand” compiled by H. Hanson Turton in 1883. There was a letter from James Busby, Esq., Resident at New Zealand, to the Hon. the Colonial Secretary of New South Wales, dated Bay of Islands, June 16, 1837.

  Sir,—

  I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your despatch of the 16th ultimo, which was delivered to me on the 27th of the same month by Captain Hobson, of His Majesty’s ship “Rattlesnake.”

  War, it seemed, had broken out again between the tribes of the Bay of Islands, the Ngapuhi and Pomare’s people, the Ngati Manu of the southern bay. This time it had something to do with a woman who was murdered and eaten on being landed from a ship, and Busby wrote that he believed the man responsible to be the woman’s former husband. He described the parties involved in the conflict as “actuated by the most irritated and vindictive feelings” and said he did not hope for a quick end to the hostilities. As a consequence of the war, he added, little or no land was under cultivation and “it may naturally be expected that the Natives will become reckless in proportion to their want of the means of subsistence.”

  Busby’s purpose in writing was to ask that some paramount authority be established over the people of New Zealand. He warned that if some means were not found to stop their constant warring, the natives would annihilate themselves. The country, he wrote, was being depopulated. “District after district has become void of its inhabitants, and the population is even now but a remnant of what it was in the memory of some European inhabitants.” So fast were the people disappearing that it was a matter of debate as to the cause of their decline. Some said that firearms had made their wars more bloody, some that tobacco and grog had made them weak. Some cited the spread of venereal and other diseases, the prostitution of women, and the murder of any half-caste children that they bore. “The Natives,” wrote Busby,

  are perfectly sensible of this decrease; and when they contrast their own condition with that of the English families, amongst whom the marriages have been prolific in a very extraordinary degree of a most healthy progeny, they conclude that the God of the English is removing the aboriginal inhabitants to make room for them; and it appears to me that this impression has produced amongst them a very general recklessness and indifference to life.

  I turned off the microfiche reader and pushed back my chair. The room seemed suddenly close and airless, the light an unforgiving green. Across the room a binder snapped, someone was getting ready to leave.

  There is a hush in serious libraries made up of sounds—a cough, a rustle, the sigh of a pneumatic chair in a thick, enveloping, general silence. It’s like the fog in which researchers move, feeling their way through the blur of data, ships in port, tonnage, cargoes, cases of venereal disease. Only rarely does anything leap out at you; mostly it’s a matter of accumulation, of evidence accruing like interest until it reaches a critical mass. But every once in a while a piece of the past comes flying through time at precisely the right angle. When this happens, it feels as though you’ve been contacted by the dead.

  I clicked the reader back on and fed in fiche after fiche, reading a paragraph here, a sentence there, making an occasional copy. I had difficulty working the machine and the copies all came out as negatives: rows of thin, scratchy white letters on a page that was otherwise entirely black.

  Busby’s letter formed an explanatory preface to the material that followed: thirty sheets of microfiche, all deeds to Maori land. The history of Maori land loss is a scandal, albeit a familiar one, a history of rapacious speculators, government seizures, confusion, dishonesty, and naivete. In the north, where European settlement first started, land was sold by Maori chiefs on behalf of their tribes starting in 1814. The missionaries—of whom it is often said that “they came to do good and did very well indeed”—were among the earliest buyers, acquiring tens of thousands of acres in the Hokianga, Bay of Islands, and far north. Later there were traders, settlers, even Busby himself, who bought fifty thousand acres between 1834 and 1840, a portion of which he intended to subdivide into urban blocks against the day when a government would be established.

  At first the sales were piecemeal, but toward the end of the 1830s the acreage began to fly out of Maori hands, nearly ten million acres between 1837 and 1839 alone. Fifty acres here for a double-barreled fowling piece; a hundred there for a musket, a mirror, four blankets, some powder, and a razor with a strop. Six hundred acres for eleven pounds cash, eleven blankets, ten shirts, six pairs of tr
ousers, a gown, two pieces of print, a velvet waistcoat, three Manila hats, one pair of shoes, eight pairs of earrings, five combs, a musket, a double-barreled gun, five fowling pieces, two bags of shot, three casks of powder, scissors, knives, razors, one hoe, and a hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, divided among eleven chiefly signatories to the deed. That makes one pound and one blanket each, plus a share of the other trade goods. Who got the velvet waistcoat is not recorded.

  How would it feel, I wondered, to be descended from these Maoris? To see those deeds with one’s own great-great-great-grandfather’s signature? Oh, one can understand the allure at first of a pair of yellow breeches, a coat with braid, an ax, an auger. And, in the beginning, who could have known what the Pakeha had in mind? There weren’t enough Pakehas in New Zealand in 1815, even 1820, to work the land they purchased, never mind occupy it in any meaningful way. But by 1837 this sort of explanation begins to make less sense. It is not so reasonable anymore to argue that Maoris did not understand what was happening, that they had no concept of private property, that the meaning of a deed was not clear. Nor can the mere novelty of manufactured goods, seductive as they may have been, account for this headlong rush to alienate their birthright.

  What, then, can have motivated them? Greed? Willfulness? A conviction, all evidence to the contrary, that the Pakehas’ presence was only a temporary thing? Or might it have been, as Busby contended, that everything the Maoris did in those dark days betrayed a recklessness and indifference to life? The words seemed to echo like the tolling of a bell: District after district has become void of its inhabitants, and the population is even now but a remnant of what it was in the memory of some European inhabitants.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand Maoris in New Zealand. Fifty years later, when the first census was taken, there were only fifty thousand left. In the Bay of Islands, a heavily populated region, the collapse was particularly dramatic. It was certainly clear to Darwin in 1835 that the flora and fauna of New Zealand were under siege by foreign invaders. “It is said,” he wrote, “that the common Norway rat, in the short space of two years, annihilated in this northern end of the island the New Zealand species. In many places I noticed several sorts of weeds, which like the rats, I was forced to own as countrymen.” And it was no great leap from the fate of the rat to the fate of the Maori people. In fact, by mid-century the idea had become proverbial: “As the white man’s rat has driven away the native rat, so the European fly drives away our own, and the clover kills our fern, so will the Maoris disappear before the white man himself.” Kei muri I te awe kapara he tangata ke, mana te ao, he ma: “Behind the tattooed face a stranger stands, he who owns the earth, and he is white.”

  By the time I finished reading, everyone was gone, including the attendant. I packed up my papers and left the fiche on the circulation desk. Outside, the promised sleet had started falling, glimmering like snow in the headlights but driving down like rain. It was five o’clock and dark already; the traffic in Harvard Square had slowed to a crawl. I turned up my collar, put down my head, and dashed through the darkness to my car. There was a parking ticket frozen to the windshield, but by my reckoning it was money well spent: fifteen dollars for six black pages and a sightline to the past.

  When our first son was born a few months later, I thought he should have a good name, a strong name, a name that would work in both our worlds. I wanted to give him a Maori name, but I knew it would have to be something pronounceable, something my American family wouldn’t massacre or turn into a joke. For months I had been asking Seven about Maori names for boys, but he seemed unable to come up with a single suggestion.

  “Well, there was a kid on my rugby team called Haircut.”

  “Oh, come on. What about your uncles, your cousins? There must have been somebody you admired.”

  But there wasn’t, or he wouldn’t say, and so I pondered, but insecurely, not confident enough to choose a name in a language I didn’t know. Several hours after the birth, we still had no idea.

  “How about Manu?” I suggested.

  “No.”

  “How about Kipa?”

  “No.”

  “How about Tame?”

  “I never liked Tame. He was a liar and a thief … How about Maui?”

  “Get off.”

  At this point my brother walked through the door.

  “It’s Lincoln’s birthday,” he said. “How about Abraham?” And so we named him Aperahama, the Maori form of Abraham, a Hebrew name from the days of the evangelists, from the missionary period of New Zealand.

  It turned out that there were several Aperahamas in the family already. Our son had an uncle Aperahama in Auckland and a cousin Aperahama in Perth. There was an Aperahama in his great-grandfather’s generation, whom Seven remembered as an old man. He had been famous in Mangonui for a table saw that he built out of a diesel motor, a belt, and a blade. It was a dangerous piece of equipment and everyone was always waiting for the day when it would take off one of his hands. He drove a Model A Ford with no brakes and played the violin. When he died, both hands intact, a son he’d had out of wedlock turned up at the funeral.

  “How’d they know it was his son?” I asked Seven.

  “Looked just like him,” he said.

  So there were lots of Aperahamas these days, but there was a time when it had not yet occurred to any Maori father to give his son this name. Among the very first Maori Aperahamas was one born into my husband’s family in the first decades of the nineteenth century. He was the son of Tareha, the infamous Ngati Rehia chief whose strange fortune it was to be at the height of his powers when history brought white men to New Zealand.

  Tareha was a giant of a man and terrifying to see. He stood over six and a half feet tall and was so broad in the shoulders that there was not an armchair in the cabins of the English ships that would accommodate him. He had a mass of black curly hair and a great bushy black beard. On his face he wore the moko of a chief, an intricate tracery of blue-black lines carved into the surface of his skin. All the Pakehas in the Bay of Islands were afraid of him and were careful to keep out of his way. He was accounted “the greatest savage in New Zealand” by the Reverend John Butler, who recorded in his diary for 1821 that only the other week Tareha had killed and eaten three slaves at Waimate for stealing his sweet potatoes.

  Tareha’s hapu, Ngati Rehia, was part of the great Ngapuhi tribal confederation, whose members occupied the inland Bay of Islands in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some decades before the arrival of Captain Cook, they had conquered the northern coastal area, occupying Rangihoua pa and the villages of Te Puna, Te Tii, and Mangonui. The pa, a Ngati Rehia stronghold, was an impregnable fortress in Tareha’s day, a mass of terraces, earthworks, and palisades where several hundred people might shelter, safe from enemy tribes.

  I had seen it when I was in New Zealand—a great barren, wedge-shaped ridge at the end of a long dirt road through some farmer’s property. To get to it, you had to leave your car at the farmer’s gate, climb over a stile, and walk about a mile uphill and down, descending finally into the little valley through which the Oihi stream trickles down to Marsden Cross. From a distance it is clear that the earth has been worked, closer up the signs are more ambiguous. The ground is rough and tussocked with grass, and the terraces are invisible on the golden hillside. You come upon them suddenly, climbing over a little rise and realizing that you are standing on the flat. Here and there the suggestion of a footpath snakes along the hill. In some places you can see the outline of a kumara pit or a defensive trench. Nothing seems to grow there except grass; there is not a tree or bush anywhere on the hill. A line of scrub at the foot of the pa marks the streambed. On the hillside opposite are rows of faint scarring that might have been plantations once upon a time. On three sides a pyramid, the pa falls away on the fourth in a sheer vertical drop to the sea. From the top it commands a view of the entire Bay of Islands. It has the
unmistakable air of a tapu, or forbidden, place, and it is easy to imagine that the whistle of the wind across its summit is filled with spectral voices.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Rangihoua was commanded by Tareha’s nephew Ruatara, a thoughtful and well-traveled man who had sailed on Pakeha whalers and seen much of the Pakeha world. In 1808 he met the Revered Samuel Marsden, the evangelical chaplain of New South Wales, who considered the Maoris ideally suited to Christian conversion. “Their minds,” wrote Marsden, “appeared like a rich soil that had never been cultivated, and only wanted the proper means of improvement to render them fit to rank with civilized nations.” Six years later Marsden held the first Christian service in New Zealand on Christmas Day at the foot of Rangihoua pa. Lifting up his voice, he sang the hundredth psalm—” Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands”—and preached the glad tidings of the Gospel of Christ before a pulpit made the previous day from a section of a Maori canoe. The assembled Maoris stood up and sat down at a signal from their chief, but complained they could not understand a word of what was said. Ruatara told them not to worry, for he would explain it to them by and by. Within a matter of months, however, he was dead of galloping consumption.

  I thought of the name Aperahama as shorthand for everything that happened in those years. Like most Maoris of his generation, Tareha never converted to Christianity. His support for the missionaries, whom he saw as go-betweens and suppliers of European goods, was purely pragmatic. But as every year brought further transformations—more ships, more buildings, more strangers to the bay—the Pakehas in the Bay of Islands grew stronger and less dependent upon the Maoris, while the Maoris’ capacity to manipulate and exploit them diminished. Tareha was among those caught with a foot in each world and his actions have a sort of shimmer or two-sidedness about them.

  When, in 1840, Busby circulated a petition among the northern chiefs ceding their sovereignty to the British Crown, Tareha refused to sign and argued vehemently against cooperating with the British. He was in the minority and the Treaty of Waitangi was signed without him, inaugurating British colonial rule. At the same time, deed after deed for the sale of land in the 1830s and ‘40s bears Tareha’s name. I have a black copy of one for 250 acres in the Mangonui District for which he received a great coat, an ax, an iron wedge, ten pounds of tobacco, some shot, a chisel, an auger, two frocks, a razor, and a steel purse.