Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  “When the service was over” wrote Mr Nicholas, Mr Marsden’s travelling companion, more in hope one feels than truth, “the natives to the number of three and four hundred commenced their war dance of yelling and shouting, which they did, I expect, from a furious demonstration of their joy for the solemn spectacle which they had just witnessed.”

  Before they could begin reaping souls, the missionaries Marsden had entrusted with New Zealand had to trade for timber with which to build their houses. It was not long before they ran into currency troubles as the Maoris preferred muskets and powder to axes and lengths of red flannel, nor was it long before the Northern tribes had acquired a fair arsenal of the tupara, their word for a two-barrelled musket, from other traders less hampered than the missionaries by the need for peace.

  In 1820 Hongi Hika, the Ngapuhi general and chief, visited England with Thomas Kendall to help compile a Maori dictionary at Cambridge University. When Hongi was presented to George IV, he greeted him with “Hello, Mr King George” and the British monarch replied “Hello, Mr King Hongi.” The First Gentleman of Europe was then much engaged in the noisy scandal of his divorce from Caroline and Hongi expressed surprise that so great a king as Britain’s should manage one wife so ill when he himself found no difficulty with four. He visited the Tower of London, was given a suit of armour, which he later wore in battle, and a number of other valuable presents which he exchanged for muskets and powder when he stopped in Sydney on the way home.

  During his campaigns, which began in 1821, the island and coastal communities of the Hauraki Gulf were laid waste. The great settlements of the Auckland isthmus, their plantations, carved meeting houses and their people, all went down before Hongi and his muskets. The missionaries, who existed under Hongi’s patronage, could do nothing and neither could the colonial government embodied in one anxious and ill-supported man, James Busby, the British Resident in the Bay of Islands.

  By 1840, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed and the seat of government moved from Russell to Auckland, the ancient pattern of Maori life was irrevocably changed and the lean-to village creeping up the furzy hills beside the Waitemata looked out towards the Gulf whose islands were bereft of people and whose lofty kauri forests had all but vanished.

  Present-day Auckland has also been built looking towards Hauraki and at weekends innumerable water gypsies in day boats, in dinghies, in tiny sailboats and splendid keelers plot a summer course round their happy hunting-ground of holiday pleasure and fine fat fish. My travels round the Gulf have been made over the last two years. We have sailed there by launch and by yacht; on land we have travelled by tractor, by landrover and quite often on foot; we have whizzed about in Captain Ladd’s scarlet and cream amphibians and we have seen the islands, of which I have grown so fond, in fair weather and in foul.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Youngest Island

  Rangitoto is the first island because it is the nearest and the youngest and has no geological kinship with the mainland or Hauraki, for it arrived so many centuries later. There have been no farms here, or whalers, or mines for copper and manganese and gold, as there were in other islands of the Gulf, and most Aucklanders know its symmetrical form by heart as an inescapable fact and a symbol of their harbour, as a Londoner knows Big Ben. It is a very convenient shape to have for a symbol, as it is round and looks the same from every point in the compass. It has barely any soil. The stunted green forest springs from the scoria the eruption left behind and the flattened shores run down to the sea in frozen fingers of lava. The literal translation of “Rangitoto” is Bloody Sky, in memory of the night its peaks pushed up from the ocean bed and drenched the neighbouring islands with an impenetrable layer of ash.

  Until I had my first flight with Captain Ladd, I knew it as most of us do, only from a distance, not peering as we did then deep into the bushy depths of the crater and then buzzing cosily round inside like a wasp in a honey-pot.

  There was a later time when we had started to film the television series. Don Whyte and I, off to Waiheke to cover a wedding, were the only passengers and when we were aloft Fred handed me a small white cardboard box.

  “Hold that, will you?” he asked.

  It was remarkably heavy for its size.

  “It’s some ashes,” he explained. “A man from Maungatekauri asked in his will if he could be scattered over Rangitoto because of the happy times he spent there in his youth.”

  I sat with the man from Maungatekauri on my lap.

  “The wind’s more your way, Shirley,” Fred was saying. “Do you mind opening your window and letting them go that side?”

  Don was loading film in the rear of the plane and his window did not open.

  “My side?” and I looked at the window and back at the box.

  “Perhaps I’d better, then,” said Fred and kindly took the box away. “It’s a bit awkward but we’ll manage.”

  We were directly over the summit now and Fred opened his window, covered the top of the box with his handkerchief and gently let our ghostly fellow passenger go off into the slip-stream.

  “There” and Fred closed the window. “So be it.”

  We all sat in silence for a minute while I reflected on the awfulness of mortality and remembered the piece from Cymbeline about golden lads and girls all must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust.

  As we climbed back on course, a covey of launches were setting out below for the weekend, trailed by their slender plumes of white wake.

  “It was much easier” reflected Fred as the launches were left behind, “when they put them up in plastic bags.”

  * * *

  Around the shore of Rangitoto, half hidden in groves of pohutukawa and karaka trees, are perhaps twenty or thirty cottages, lived in by weekend or retired people, and on the lower slopes are occasional colonies of square white beehives, the source of the dark aromatic Rangitoto honey. The only sandy beaches are on the northern coast, where two old coal hulks were beached during the Depression, the Gladbrook and the Dartford, once fully rigged three-masted sailing ships.

  Rangitoto measures about four miles from the Motutapu causeway on the eastern tip to the salt works on the west. The works have gone now, only their red and white beacon tower remains, attended by a gaunt line of rocky columns that at low tide look like a company of apostles. The strange, ancient-looking moonscape of the island belies its geological youth. Great black flows of basaltic lava extend far out from the shore and on clear days you can see them lurking on the bottom like the shadows of whales. The forest canopy stretches from summit to shore, halted now and then by barren drifts of rock, jagged boulder piled on boulder, that have a deathly quality as if no plant, not even the most tenacious lichen, could find a foothold there.

  Almost in living memory, much of Rangitoto was desert. A photograph of 1869 shows only a brief girdle of forest, as does a sepia sketch drawn by Charles Heaphy in 1840 when he, Dieffenbach the naturalist and other members of the New Zealand Company were encamped there. According to Dieffenbach, “Rangitoto is nothing more than an immense heap of scoria and only at the top have a few bushes taken root.”

  In 1827, Dumont d’Urville in Astrolabe made his second exploration of the eastern shores of New Zealand. They anchored in the Waitemata on the 25th of February in the late afternoon. “Astrolabe, gracefully riding the surface of the waves, with her sails gently filled by a light wind, was in vivid contrast to the absolute stillness of nature. On the left is an island, Rangui-Toto, flat at both ends with a high peak in the centre whose flourishing vegetation forms a curious contrast to the bare land on the opposite coast.” D’Urville’s description is also a curious contrast to what Dieffenbach and Heaphy described thirteen years later. Perhaps Rangitoto seemed a garden compared with the desolation the French expedition were met with on the mainland; no trees, a drab tangle of bracken and low-growing shrubs and the only sign of habitation a ruined village of about a hundred whares. Not many years before, the isthmus teemed with life, pas cr
owned the summits of Maungakiekie (One Tree Hill) and Owairaka (Mount Albert). Now Astrolabe was the only ship in the bay. The canoes, bound on fishing trips, ceremonial visits and war parties, which must have been as numerous as gondolas in Venice, were nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  I made my first expedition to Rangitoto before I read d’Urville’s account of his. It took place during one of Auckland’s Festivals of Music and the Arts, held each year in the month of May. As well as the performing arts, the programmes embrace a catholicity of other events of which the Festival Outings are most popular. Busloads of people are shepherded round Auckland’s factories, Auckland’s historic churches and buildings, Auckland’s wharves and shipyards, Auckland’s drainage scheme and on this particular year a trip to Rangitoto had been arranged. The party gathered under the Italianate clock tower of the Ferry Building at the Queen Street jetty where the harbour ferries tie up and, on the opposite quay, the largest of the overseas liners.

  Old men sit on the benches along the front, dozing in the sun, dropping an idle fishing line over the railing, and the little grey gulls fossick round their feet for a sandwich crust or a gobbet of bait. Our launch, the Olive Rose, was one of Rangitoto’s fleet of sturdy Blue Boats. The outing marched on board, programmes were passed along the line, our couriers from the Botany Department of the University counted heads, the hooter hooted and Olive Rose backed from her anchorage in a flurry of foam and shrieking gulls.

  The day was remarkably mild for late autumn and by the time the launch tied up at the spindle-shanked wharf in Rangitoto Bay some of the party were already a little flushed.

  Some of the ladies, thinking perhaps a Festival Outing to an island was more formal than an ordinary picnic, had gloves and hats and far from sturdy shoes. One, rather stoutish, was most festive of all, in a taffeta dress as brilliantly blue as the Olive Rose, a crocheted stole, blue nylon gloves, a little hat with a veil and a long-handled umbrella. On the reverse of the coin were two amazons who made the rest look very amateurish. Their boots were laced with leather thongs, their shearer’s socks folded neatly over the tops and their broad backs in ancient chamois jackets were bowed beneath bulging rucksacks. One even had a killing bottle ready for any chance lepidoptera encountered on the way up.

  “We divide into groups,” said our leader. “There will be two groups going up to the summit, a third to make a detour to the caves — this is for the more active of you” and everyone looked as active as possible. “Then for those wishing to keep to the lower level another group can confine itself to a ramble round the shore.”

  After some confusion, the groups were sorted and those weaklings for the shore ramble rambled a little shamefacedly off, leaving the rest of the party to attack the summit. Leaders addressed their respective groups, mimeographed sheets were referred to but most of the instructive talk about what we should see was whirled away in the wind. I sat on a rock and looked at the bay, with its cottages and their boats tied up at the bottom of the gardens. They are rock gardens by necessity and although fruit trees have taken root no one here has ever had to mow a lawn. There is a shop, a swimming pool walled with scoria and a broad cinder track that meanders up the hillside.

  We began in Indian file, the low bush, the fern, the tufty mosses and lichen, spreading out on either side. The earlier stages were easy enough but, as we went higher and the path grew steeper, there were those who slithered and others who shed garments and lunch bags, cacheing them behind boulders for retrieval on the way down. The way down seemed a long way off when Up still stretched so far ahead. The electric blue taffeta lady was doing very well, in the van of the party, her stole abandoned but her long umbrella serving as a pilgrim’s stave. The ranks kept close and as the path narrowed so did the view — to the back of the tramper immediately ahead. People had eyes and breath for little else, though occasionally we would halt while an Astelia banksii was pointed out or one of Rangitoto’s forty kinds of fern.

  At last the Sherpa line achieved the summit, 854 feet above the sea. We could sit down on the central cone and look back again to the mainland where the humps of the older volcanoes stood out like Roman tumuli. The crater was mantled in young pohutukawa and akepiro, a cream-flowered shrub with tough, light green leaves. We could see the group trudging doggedly on towards the caves. The sun grew warmer, a small grey lizard flickered over the baking cinders, those who had not abandoned their lunch sat down to eat it and people took photographs of each other on top of Rangitoto.

  The island is a sanctuary of New Zealand flora and fauna and it is planned to isolate it more and more from human occupancy. Owners of cottages may only sell them back to the Crown, no others can be built and gradually all but indigenous plant life will go, even the peach trees and the apples. A campaign is being waged against the seeded pines and the gentle wallabies who have wandered over from Motutapu.

  The flat area on the central cone is large enough for a cricket pitch. It and the two knobs flanking it are called in Maori Nga-Pona-Toru-a-Peretu, the Three Knuckles of Peretu, a chief who owned it long ago. There are records of European sale in the first years of the colony; the price the usual tinker’s turnout of axes and blankets. The earlier sales were invalidated and in 1857 the North Shore Maoris sold it to the Crown for £15, to “Wikitoria and to her heirs for ever”.

  The subjects of Wikitoria’s heirs strolled about pointing to familiar landmarks, mimeographed pages blew down the slopes and when at last the other group came back from the caves the party set off triumphantly for the shore.

  Later, when we had been filming in the Gulf for several weeks, we went ashore at Islington Bay, Rangitoto’s other settlement. It has a shop, a hall, tennis courts and more houses. In the old days it was known as Drunken Bay, as ships outward bound from Auckland put in here to sober up their crew after too merry a leave in port.

  It was a morning that is quite common in the Gulf, when the sun goes on shining but a thin drizzle runs in little squalls across the water. A score or more launches and yachts rocked at anchor and the tide had left bare the flat sandy marsh which almost connects Rangitoto to its neighbour Motutapu. The channel between them is no more than a ditch and you can drive from one to the other over a racketty little bridge set on four heaps of Rangitoto stone.

  The channel must have been wider when Samuel Marsden attempted it in 1820, seven years before Astrolabe anchored off the other side. Marsden had come from Sydney on the Prince Regent in company with two other naval vessels, the Dromedary and the Coromandel. They were convict transports and, when their cargo of enforced immigrants was delivered, they had been directed to continue on to New Zealand and there buy spars for the Royal Navy. When the three ships arrived at the Bay of Islands, they split up and went in separate directions so that they could examine the quality of kauri over a wide area. Mr Marsden, who had come to account for souls, not timber, wished to see how his mission stations were getting on. Accordingly, he and his senior missioner, the Reverend John Butler, set off in a small vessel of their own.

  I have never been able to warm towards the Reverend Sam as New Zealand’s Saint Augustine, with his pinched, pouting little mouth, flat white curls plastered on his forehead and his brutal magisterial record in New South Wales, but he was an intrepid voyager even though he suffered all his life from seasickness. His encounter with the Rangitoto Channel shows that his steering was as unswerving as his Low Church theology.

  On the 4th of November 1820 he wrote, “We sailed to Waitemata between Rangitoto and Motutapu.”

  The Reverend Mr Butler goes into more detail and admits he was afraid.

  “We went to the upper instead of the lower side of the island, as we drew near I went forward to look out and observed the land on one side very low, the entrance narrow, the water discoloured. The air shook with the pounding of the waves and I said to Mr Marsden, ‘Sir, have you mistaken the passage?’ He replied, ‘I have not, sir. There is water enough here for the Coromandel.’”

  Mr Ma
rsden was wrong, but he stuck to his course and at length fifty natives who providentially happened to pass by, dragged their boat bodily through the narrow passage and safely into deep water, whereupon Mr Marsden and a thankful Mr Butler spent the night recovering from the weather anchored in the lee of Brown’s Island.

  CHAPTER THREE

  An Island Called Brown’s

  Brown’s Island sits between the pepper-coloured cliffs of Motutapu and the mainland, browsed over by a handful of sheep. It is an ancient volcano, not a brand new one like Rangitoto, with a wide-lipped crater scooped from its little knoll. Nobody lives there and there was a time when no one would have wanted to. In 1955 it was about to suffer the awful fate at the hand of progress of being turned into a sewage farm when the late Sir Ernest Davis, a wealthy brewer and a great philanthropist, bought it and then presented it to the people of Auckland as a park. The people have not had the opportunity to make very much use of it and unless you have a boat there is no way of getting there. All that remains of the wharf is a tipsy line of rotting piles.

  Its recent past is uneventful. Once it belonged to a rich man from Australia called Featherstone, who built a fine house which later burned down. Then it was leased for forty years to the Alison family who started the North Shore Ferry Company. They ran race-horses here and later put it to the entirely pleasurable role of a picnic island, in the days when picnics on a mammoth scale were the very heart and spirit of summertime pleasure.

  Brown’s, or Motukorea, its Maori name, is, in spite of its smallness, an island nearly every one of the early visitors to the Gulf mentions. It was a half way house for ships making their way down from the Bay of Islands to the Coromandel, a haven they all steered towards if the weather had been rough coming down from the North.

  A few weeks before Mr Marsden insisted on storming the Rangitoto Channel, the Dromedary had anchored in the shelter of Motukorea. The officer commanding the troops who were part of the ship’s company was Major Richard Alexander Cruise and he wrote a book about his ten month stay in New Zealand. In the narrative he mentions Mr Marsden as one of their passengers from Sydney, as well as a son of Hongi’s called Repero and Titore, “aged 45, six feet two in height and perfectly handsome as to features which are darker than Spaniards.” Like many of his contemporaries, Major Cruise regarded the Maoris with the same detachment as he might the native trees and flowers and he found it hard to imagine that a savage should be stirred by the sight of his own country after a long absence. “The wild expressions of joy” he wrote “that were used by the New Zealanders when they beheld their country, were quite amusing.” He admired Titore, though and described how he took a glass of wine with perfect politeness, “but his countenance strongly indicated how much he disliked it.” Of the others who accompanied Titore he declared “The quantity of vermin they carry in their person renders them not very pleasant neighbours.”