Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  Late in his life, Darwin began a series of experiments designed to verify his suspicions empirically. For ten years he collected data on the height, weight, vigor, and fertility of dozens of plant species—morning glories, foxgloves, orchids, petunias, Chinese primroses, French poppies—which he carefully cross-pollinated with a paintbrush and compared with plants that had self-pollinated. In 1876 he tabulated the results. His cousin Galton, the eugenicist, checked his statistics: the crossed plants were superior in every respect to those that were self-fertilized.

  Make of this, children, what you will. There are many reasons to feel bad about what has happened: your father’s people suffered more than their share, my people benefited, if not directly from their distress, then from the distress of others just like them. It’s an ugly story and no mistake, but it’s important to see it clearly and not to be sentimental about things that happened in the past.

  Sometimes it seems that we are all just part of a great tide sweeping us forward from our separate streams into one vast, undifferentiated ocean. It is hard to know how to feel about this. When two cultures come together they do not blend in equal parts: one invariably dominates, the other often disappears. It seems the rule of nature: the dominion by the many of the few. And yet, although so much is lost, something is gained. The world gets smaller—or is it larger?—the boundaries that have been so troublesome begin to disappear.

  Half-caste. It is the language of the last century, of Kipling and Conrad, and deeply out of vogue. But to me it is a word that smacks of daring. Hapa, they say in Hawaii, where almost everyone is part one thing and part something else, meaning simply a person with a foot in two worlds. When you children were young and we used to shuttle back and forth across the Pacific, following the erratic path of my academic career, we often stopped in Hawaii. There was a spot outside the university library that I particularly liked, a cool stone bench beneath the green and humid canopy. I used to sit there with my piles of books and watch the local kids go by, hapa haole, hapa pake, hapa pilipino, with their almond-colored skin and their long dark hair. In their indeterminate exotic beauty they always reminded me of you.

  I hope you boys will not feel cheated out of what you might have had—money, land, a turangawaewae, “a place,” as the Maoris say, “to stand.” But you come from a long line of nonconformists. Your maternal grandmother, as you may recall, was a Communist in the thirties, a fact which absolutely horrified the maiden aunts. And your father’s side goes back like an arrow to Tareha, who was virtually alone among the northern chiefs in refusing to sign the Treaty of Waitangi. This history is alive in you. It is your birthright, your inheritance, a kind of shadow DNA, in which the great house on Grand Avenue is encoded, with its aspidistras and its soup tureens, along with the huia feathers that your great-great-great-grandfather wore and the carved canoes of the tangata whenua, the people of the land.

  I slipped the folder into the filing cabinet between Mass. Taxes and New Zealand Immigration. I knew there were a lot of people who questioned what I’d done in marrying a man who could not have been more different from me if we’d set out to embody the principle of Opposites Attract. And even I sometimes wondered why I hadn’t stayed home and married a radiologist. But there it was, that interesting personal history, which was shorthand in my mind for all that mattered in life—for freedom, for adventure, for risk and the charm of the unexpected, for the gamble of not always knowing what was going on.

  Author’s Note

  This work is a mixture of history and memoir and, as such, it adheres to the truth in some areas and deviates from it in others. I have tried to be completely scrupulous with regard to the historical material both from New Zealand and the United States, and have used real place names and real historical figures in these parts of the text. Any errors or discrepancies here are my mistakes. I have also felt free to use real names and places in the case of my own family, that is, my husband, my children, my parents, my grandparents, and so on. When it comes to my husband’s family, however—and by this I mean not his distant ancestors, whose lives are a matter of historical record, but his living relatives and those recently deceased—I have handled the material differently. It is not their story I am telling; it is mine. It would no doubt be very different if they told it and I feel that it would be improper to tie them too closely to my text. I have, therefore, disguised their names, the names of the places from which they come, and the details of their stories.

  It may be objected that this distinction is overfine and that what applies to one side should apply to the other. But I have spent all these years thinking about and living with the consequences of colonialism, and I believe that this small gesture of respect, the offer of this small protection, is the least I can make to a group of people who have been unfailingly kind and generous to me, and who, when they talked to me and told me stories, never expected to find themselves cast as characters in a book.

  Acknowledgments

  This book was along time in the making and many people have helped me on the way. I’d like to thank the Literature Board of the Australia Council and Arts Victoria for a pair of grants that got me started and Hazel Rowley who read some very early drafts. My old friend Peter Craven gave me an early vote of confidence when he included a version of two chapters in Best Australian Essays. I also want to thank the members of my writing group—Ann Cobb, Terry Butler, Maryel Locke, Gwynne Morgan, Henriette Power, Jeanne Stanton, and Meg Sinnott Rubin—whose generous enthusiasm, good fellowship, and admirable professionalism kept me going through the long middle slog. Many other people read bits and pieces and listened patiently to me; although I cannot name them all, I would like to mention my friends Tessa Fisher and Birgit Larsson.

  There are two people, though, without whom this book would never have become a reality. The first is my agent, Brettne Bloom, to whom I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, not only for taking on the project in the first place, but for the unflagging enthusiasm, warmth, and generosity she brought to it at every stage. And the second is my editor, Gillian Blake. They say that no one edits anymore, but, if my experience is anything to go by, that is utterly untrue. Were it not for Gillian’s firm, insightful guidance and editorial acumen, I would still be sitting at my desk with a work forever in the process of becoming.

  Finally, I want to thank the members of my family. It was my parents’ unqualified generosity over more years than I care to enumerate that enabled me to undertake a project that must have seemed astonishingly self-indulgent at times. I could not possibly have done it without their assistance and my only regret is that, after helping me out for so many years, my father did not live to see it finished. Lastly, but only because I owe him so much, there is my husband, Seven. My constant companion for two decades, he has ridden out these last few years with remarkable (even for him) equanimity. Although I’ve tried to juggle my various obligations as wife, mother, daughter, editor, teacher, and writer without dropping too many balls, both he and I know just how many have gone flying. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for quietly, generously, and uncomplainingly picking them up.

  Epilogue: New Zealand, 1642

  Always to islanders danger

  Is what comes over the sea;

  Over the yellow sands and the clear

  Shallows, the dull filament

  Flickers, the blood of strangers:

  Death discovered the sailor

  O in a flash, in a flat calm,

  A clash of boats in the bay

  And the day marred with murder.

  The dead required no further

  Warning to keep their distance;

  The rest, noting the failure,

  Pushed on with a reconnaissance

  To the north; and sailed away.

  —Allen Curnow, from “Landfall

  in Unknown Seas” (1942.)

  IN THE WARTIME year of 1942, a little book was published to commemorate the tercentenary of Tasman’s discovery of New Zealand. It
contained three separate pieces: a poem composed in honor of the event by the New Zealand poet Allen Curnow; an essay on Tasman’s place in history by the great Pacific historian J. C. Beaglehole; and the text of Tasman’s journal “of a voyage made from the city of Batavia in the East Indies for the discovery of the Unknown South Land, in the year anno 1642.”

  It is a wonderful book: the poem, a severe, moving mediation on the relationship between the present and the past; the essay, expansive, thoughtful, and enormously well-informed; and the journal, intriguing and elusive as documents from the distant past so often are. Taken together they constitute as good an analysis of these events as can be imagined. And yet, you can read them all—and everything else ever written on this subject—and still not feel as though you really, truly understand what happened in New Zealand on December 18, 1642.

  In part, this is because there is no record at all of these events from the Maori point of view. At least, no story that seemed to have its origin in Tasman’s visit ever reached European ears. Five or six generations later, when Cook arrived, he could find no one in the vicinity of Murderers’ Bay who knew anything about it. And by the time another fifty years had passed, the social upheaval associated with colonialism had so completely altered the makeup of the region that Ngati Tumatakokiri, the tribe that is thought to have lived there in Tasman’s day, had effectively ceased to exist.

  To the Maoris of the colonial era the place was known as Taitapu, meaning “sacred coast” or “sacred tide,” a word with overtones of danger and prohibition. Taitapu is also an old word for “boundary,” and some kind of boundary was certainly breached on December 18, 1642. For while, in a sense, nothing happened, no lasting settlements were made, no treaties signed, no flags raised to signal an intention, nevertheless, a crack was opened in the world, an almost invisible crack that no one would notice for over a century, but a crack nonetheless in the isolation in which the Maori people had lived for almost a thousand years.

  Ironically, given what came later, it was the Europeans who fared worst in this first encounter. Tasman’s instructions warned him about the sort of “rough wild” people he might find, arguing that, as experience in other parts of the world—namely America—had shown, “no barbarous people are to be trusted, because they usually think that the people who appear so exceedingly strange and unexpected come only to take over their lands.” This was something many “barbarous people” had learned from painful and repeated experience, but the Maoris had never heard of Europeans and no one “strange” or “unexpected” had appeared on their shores for hundreds of years. Still, they clearly intended to attack; they were so quick to assemble, so ready with their plan. They had numbers on their side and no experience of firearms. From the Maori point of view it must have looked an easy victory.

  And yet, if we think about how outlandish the Dutch vessels must have seemed, with their great wooden sides and the strange pale faces peering down from them, if we think about the sound of cannon fire and the flash of guns, it is almost impossible not to wonder what the Maoris were thinking. It is sometimes said that Maoris and other Polynesians mistook the arriving Europeans for ghosts or gods or some other kind of supernatural being, though it is hard to know even how to frame such an argument, given the Maoris’ routine acceptance of the presence of the supernatural in their lives. But either way, they must have recognized the extraordinariness of the event. And so the question naturally arises: Were the Maoris of Taitapu responding to the astonishing arrival of Dutch ships with equally exceptional behavior? Were they motivated by dramatic tension, by an urgent need to display their strength? Was it the very strangeness of the situation that inspired them? Or were they treating their visitors conventionally, as they would any tribal enemy caught trespassing within their territorial bounds? Were they acting out of an inverse terror or a brazen and belligerent poise? Was ambush and massacre a last resort or a first?

  At this distance we will never know, so slight is the documentary record of what happened on the day when New Zealand swam into European view. But history often gives no answers to the most interesting questions. What it does tell us is that such moments, however murky or absurd, eventually become mythic, archetypal. They are the beginnings of a new story, the first notes of a new tune, the first turns of a rope that binds people together. This is not, of course, how they at first appear. At first, they are just things that happen. But before long they acquire a special status as reference points against which all subsequent contacts must be measured.

  With hindsight we can point to the use that was made of Tasman’s story by later Europeans, to the way this first contact encounter shaped the perception and experience of those who followed in his wake, and to the monumental consequences this had for the Maori people. But we can also look back and see a day like any other, a day of wind or no wind, of rain or no rain, a day, for the Dutch, of surprise and anxiety, for the Maoris a day of triumph, but also surely of doubt.

  The past, they say, is a strange country, but I think it’s more like a place we lived in as children and left while still young, a place warped and twisted by memory but one that, at some level, we still know. History repeats, and yet it doesn’t—not quite. The same scenarios crop up again and again, the same splits, the same structures, but each time the details have all changed and it’s a different story. What matters is both the way it changes and the way it stays the same: the particularity and the pattern, the dancer and the dance. What matters is that we understand the past as something familiar and recognizable and, at the same time, something so foreign that we can barely make sense of it—like the sound of a conch-shell trumpet, Moorish and yet not quite Moorish after all.

  THE SOUTH PACIFIC

  AND THE POLYNESIAN TRIANGLE

  Australia

  New Zealand

  Glossary

  aroha love

  fale (Samoan) house

  haere mai come here

  haka dance or action song

  hangi earth oven

  hapa (Hawaiian) part or fraction (a loan from the English “half); a person of mixed ancestry as in hapa haole (part-Caucasian), hapa pake (part-Chinese), hapa pilipino (part-Filipino)

  hapu adj. pregnant; n. subtribe

  iuri bone; tribe or nation

  kai food

  kai moana seafood

  kete woven flax bag or basket, often called a “kit”

  kina sea urchin

  kūmara sweet potato

  makai (Hawaiian) toward the sea

  mana power, authority, influence, prestige

  Māori adj. normal; usual; ordinary; n. native of New Zealand

  marae meetinghouse

  mate death

  mate uruta death cold; influenza

  mere short flat weapon made of stone

  moko tattoo

  mokomokai preserved head

  mōrehu survivor; remnant

  nui big; great

  ora life

  pā fortified village

  Pākehā person of European descent

  patu n. a weapon; v. to beat

  paua abalone

  pipi a type of shellfish

  pō night

  pūha a kind of edible wild green

  rangatira chief

  rata a kind of tree

  raupŌ bulrush

  rengarenga adj. crushed; n. rock lily

  roa long

  taiaha weapon of hardwood about five feet long

  tangata whenua the people of the land; indigeneous people

  taniwha mythical creature; sea monster

  tapu adj. forbidden, sacred; n. ceremonial injunction (source of the word “taboo”)

  taua war party

  te definite article (“the”)

  tupuna ancestor

  turangawaewae a place from which to speak; a place to stand (i.e., on the marae)

  umu (Hawaiian) earth oven

  utu the principle of reciprocity

  wahaika fiddle-shaped weapon o
f bone or wood

  whare house

  whare kai kitchen (of the marae)

  Selected Bibliography

  One book has influenced me above all and that is Bernard Smith’s pioneering study of art and history, European Vision and the South Pacific, which framed so many of the questions that it seemed important to ask. I am also deeply indebted to a generation of scholars whose lively, authoritative histories set a standard for work in the field that will not soon be surpassed: J. C. Beaglehole (1901-1971), E. H. McCormick (1906-1995), and O. H. K. Spate (1911-2000). Other writers I would like to mention include Nicholas Thomas, whose brilliant, flexible thinking has long been an inspiration to me; James Belich, whose seminal study of the New Zealand Wars should be required reading for anyone interested in New Zealand; and Anne Salmond, whose work on contact between the Maori and European peoples brought the knowledge of two disciplines together in a wonderfully useful and interesting way.