The Dromedary was looking for the Coromandel when she anchored off Motukorea. Cruise had sent some of his men ashore to cut firewood and later he and some fellow officers followed and shot quail and redbill. In the course of the day they met two chiefs and later a large party of Maoris came over from the mainland. It was a friendly meeting. Language could not have been much of a problem as Irishman and Maori had seen enough of one another to acquire a smattering of the other’s tongue and the visitors were entertained with songs and dances. “Many of the songs” Cruise noted “were quite extempore and one which was frequently repeated commemorated the arrival of the Coromandel and their hopes that other ships would follow so that the white man would trade with them for muskets so that they could defend their wives, their children and their kumaras from invasion and their enemies.”
“These were very handsome New Zealanders, compared to those of the north, fairer, taller, more athletic, their canoes richly carved and ornamented.”
Then parties of women came paddling over to the island “as wives for the Englishmen” but Major Cruise, on behalf of himself and his fellow officers, claimed that only the “other ranks” accepted this further hospitality. He was more interested in collecting kiwi feather cloaks and greenstone meres and dried human heads and he was very much put out when one of the ladies declined to give him a greenstone ornament. “Venal as most New Zealanders are” he wrote that night, “they can seldom be induced to part with an heirloom.”
When the Dromedary was ready to sail further down the Gulf, where the Coromandel had already gone ahead, the Maoris made a final gesture, a present of a dead cat and they expressed surprise that their visitors would not eat it even though they insisted that it was English. Major Cruise guessed it to be the ship’s puss from the Coromandel. If so, it was the only casualty on the voyage so far.
Six years later when d’Urville had finished his brief exploration of the isthmus, he too anchored just where the Dromedary had. In those few years, the handsome settlements which Cruise described on the mainland were all but gone. Only the big pa at Panmure or Mokoia was still intact. Just as Major Cruise had done, d’Urville received two local chieftains on board his vessel. Their names were Te Rangui and Tawhiti. “They were dressed” says d’Urville, “in Scottish costume”, a charming manner of describing his visitors’ flaxen kilts. “Te Rangui was a very fine man in the fullest sense of the word, his attitude was dignified and gave an expression of remarkable calm, confidence and dignity.”
D’Urville was always most anxious that local place names be preserved and Rangui and Tawhiti gave him many names for the chart he was making, as well as the Maori for their prevailing winds. D’Urville does not say how they managed to converse although he had Kendall’s little Maori grammar with him, but he goes on to mention that Rangui and Tawhiti stayed on until dark and slept that night in d’Urville’s cabin and that of the chief officer.
No one was living on Motukorea then. The Maoris, like the Frenchmen, cut firewood there and used it as a camp on their fishing expeditions. The crew of the Astrolabe were offered the same canoes-full of “wives” and d’Urville, showing the same esprit as Major Cruise, records that only the lower ranks accepted. Of all the early visitors, d’Urville regarded the Maori with the most respect and friendship and felt their customs to be in no way inferior to his own, only different. Yet even he souvenired like all the rest and, when Tawhiti’s wife refused him her sharkstooth earring, he could have been echoing Major Cruise. “These natives cling very tenaciously to keepsakes, but of course it may be merely the result of some superstition.”
The Commander can never have wondered how Madame d’Urville might have reacted in a similar situation.
These encounters with the island were only fleeting and it was never the home of such visitors as it was to be Sir John Logan Campbell’s and that of his partner William Brown, who were encamped when the new capital of New Zealand was proclaimed in September 1840.
Campbell was a doctor by profession but he made his fortune, like many other colonial magnates, as a brewer, a fortune which advanced with Auckland’s. When he died in 1912, not far short of a century, he had become known as the father of his city, with flowing white hair and beard to match the role. He had long ago sold Motukorea. His gift to his fellow citizens was the wide acres of Cornwall Park where he is buried at the top of One Tree Hill. He hated the banal European place names which were replacing the Maori. “Mount Hobson” he held to be a poor exchange for “Remuera” and he wondered, in print, if “Rangitoto” might soon be swapped for “Twin Paps Mountain” as “Maungakiekie” had become “One Tree Hill”. His thoughts on “Motukorea” descending to the homeliness of “Brown” remained unexpressed.
When he was sixty-three, he wrote a book called Poenamo about his adventures in Hauraki when he first arrived from Scotland, a high-spirited young man of twenty-two. He looks back from middle age with a joyful nostalgia to the islands and to his Maori and pakeha friends. It seems that the days were almost always fine, the shore lapped by blue and sparkling waters and that the brief winter was only an added spice to living in the wilderness. His story begins in 1840 when New Zealand was about to become a proper colony instead of a neglected appendage to New South Wales. While Governor Hobson, his surveyor Felton Mathew and the rest of the official party hesitated between the Mahurangi, the Thames, the Tamaki and the Waitemata as possible sites for a capital, the “Land Sharks”, as they were artlessly known in those days, tried to keep one leap ahead to guess which would be the site and to have prudently established themselves there first.
Campbell and his friend William Brown were down at Coromandel staying at Herekino, the station of William Webster, an American trader whom the Maoris called Wepiha and who reigned there like an uncrowned king, dealing in timber and flax, pork and potatoes. The “Sydney Sharks”, as Campbell calls some of Mr Webster’s guests, were also after land and he describes a dinner table discussion on the endless topic of where the capital should be. King Wepiha listened to all the theories, finished his last mouthful of pork and potatoes and then claimed the attention of the table. “Wait,” he said and he waved his fork like a sceptre. “Wait until you see the Waitemata.”
Campbell and Brown listened to the advice and, when they found there was no land they could buy on the mainland, they bought an island in the Waitemata. It belonged to the Ngati Tamatera tribe who lived further down the Gulf, at Waiomu near Thames and the two Scots stayed with them for three months until the slow business of transaction was completed to everyone’s satisfaction.
On the 13th of August their Ngati Tamatera friends ferried them across the Gulf to their island and when, six weeks later, the new capital was proclaimed, Campbell and Brown were virtually its first citizens.
They pitched a tent in a bay sheltered by a long sandy reef. Of that day Logan Campbell remembered “Sunset saw the great landed proprietors monarch of all they surveyed (provided they did not look beyond the island itself), busy cooking their dinner.”
They had bought their little kingdom for twelve shirts, four double barrelled guns, four casks of gun powder and twenty-five pounds each.
Not long ago we were flying back from Waiheke. We were near the end of our last trek round the islands, Captain Ladd was in the very best of spirits and so were we all. It had been a day when the sky had excelled itself in blueness and the only clouds had been shining towers of cumulus which had vanished by the afternoon. There was no sunset, just a great intensity of light and we flew directly towards it. In the midst of our path lay Motukorea.
“Look at that line of trees along there on the point” I said to Fred. They were growing on a long spit, laid bare by the low tide, which extended out from the bay where Campbell must have pitched his tent. The trees, undistinguished pine and macrocarpa, pushed this way and that by prevailing winds, stood still as sculptured figures in a frieze, black against the beaten silver of the sea. Lying in the lee of the island, just as Astrolabe had and the
Coromandel and the Dromedary and a thousand other nameless vessels, was the Hawea, a pensioned-off frigate from our small navy.
“We dips our lid to her,” we shout, and then bow in passing to some homeward-going yachties. They wave, we wave; the silver air, the silver sea encompasses us all.
“There are your trees,” cries Fred and we almost clip the tops off them. A mewing multitude of gulls rise on an angry surge of beating wings and fly shrieking up the Gulf.
Then at last we came down, over the ships and masts and funnels and cranes, unwillingly earthbound again. I felt like Icarus might have before the glue in his wings began to melt.
Brown’s Island lies directly before my window here. It cannot look very different from what it did in 1840 when Campbell and Brown drove their pigs ashore and had their first dinner of oysters. As one of its titular owners, I hope quite selfishly that the wharf will not be rebuilt, no shop be opened there and that it stays at its moorings in the Gulf, with only the sheep and the gulls for inhabitants, a snug, green little castle of an island.
CHAPTER FOUR
Two Islands
Motuihe and Motutapu are often coupled for an alliterative as much as any other reason, their cadence broken down by usage to ‘Motahee’ and ‘Motatapp’. They look across to one another, about a mile or so of Gulf between, and they are both farms. Motuihe has been a park of the city of Auckland since 1930 and, apart from the interruption of the Second World War when it was off limits, it swarms with visitors all summer long. For the rest of the year, its 460 acres are left to the sheep and fat cattle and to the only full-time islanders, Darryl Cotter the farm manager, his wife Barbara and their two small sons, Vernon and Nicholas.
A missionary called William Fairburn was Motuihe’s first European owner. He bought it in 1839 for trade goods worth £103 and then, with the keen sense of property values shared by so many of his colleagues, resold it six months later for £200 in cash. Sir John Logan Campbell farmed there for a little time, in 1873 the government bought it for the melancholy purpose of establishing a quarantine station and, as HMS Tamaki, it served as a naval base in both world wars. The navy handed back their piece of land in 1963 and since then an unresolved discussion has raged over the disposal of their barracks which sit shuttered and padlocked on the northern cliffs.
Every weekend from October to Easter, basket-laden picnickers stream down to the Devonport Ferry Wharf to take a trip to an island and leave the mainland behind, even if it is just for the day. The ferry boats with their swelling green hulls and long black smokestacks have been ploughing across the harbour and on excursions to the nearer islands for almost sixty years. Motuihe is only eight miles away, a long harp-shaped island, its crest feathered with Norfolk pines. Groves of pohutukawa spill down to the beaches and in December their branches flush crimson in the full tide of Christmas blossom. The wharf meanders out into the bay for what seems like miles when you have the day’s supplies to carry ashore. The ferry backs and fills into her mooring, the water churning beneath her stout behind; then the passengers, seething with impatience, use baskets and pushchairs as battering rams, charge the gangways and clatter down the jetty.
“The ferry boat leaves this island at 4.30 sharp,” a voice bawls after them from a loudspeaker. “At 4.30 sharp” and, with the day only an hour short of noon, the procession gathers speed so that none of what remains is wasted. Ant-trails of people scurry this way and that, babies in carrycots, fathers with fishing rods, mothers who wonder if the picnic basket will see them through the day and children who run straight for the tide with buckets and boats and inflatable swans and dolphins. There are some who stream over the headland or round the rocks for the further beach and there are the cautious ones, mindful of warning of the 4.30 departure, who stay close to the little sweet shop and stake their claim with umbrellas and rugs and heaps of cushions.
Many of the day-trippers to Motuihe are newly arrived migrants, their skins English pale in the morning, encrimsoned by the afternoon, and the shore rings with the accents of Lancashire and outer London.
“No, yer can’t have loonch yet. And ’oo ate all the boons on the trip over?”
A party of Tongans in scarlet shirts, crepe paper leis and flowers behind the ear, settle beside the bank. A boy strums a guitar and they sing and chatter in their high, sweet voices. An elderly couple stroll along the water’s edge, his trousers rolled at half mast, her shoes dangling from her hand, the little waves crisping round their white old ankles.
A tall Hindu and his wife in a fluttering sari and pink plastic butterflies clipped in her hair pace wordlessly along the sand.
A woman looks out to the bay and nudges her neighbour. “They said about sharks being sighted out by these islands, but there don’t seem to be none.”
“It’s in Australia they have the sharks.”
“Oh no, they’re here too, it was in the papers” and she peers anxiously past the anchored yachts for a sinister fin, but there is only the wake from a water skier.
A blare of Beatles from one transistor.
The cricket from another and the muffled thwack of a broadcast ball.
“He’s out, he’s bowled,” shrieks the radio.
“He’s out!” from a game on the beach as a ball knocks down the driftwood wickets.
Someone’s grandpa gently snores, a knotted handkerchief between the noonday heat and his bald old crown.
February and March form the high picnic season, Bible Classes and Sunday Schools, the Fire Brigade and the Waterside Workers, and then a brace of ferries ties up at the wharf. One day last summer the Policemen’s Picnic, several hundred strong, were encamped down one end of the beach and a Communist Party picnic was up at the other.
The naval base is just above the wharf. They have been gone only two years but it might be fifty. Fat boilers sit in the whitewashed galley, caught fast in rust and cobweb, a flypaper spattered with little cadavers hangs from the light cord and a mouse scutters into a cupboard.
Nothing is left in the barrack rooms but rows of hammock hooks and a sheepish lavatory pan lurching by a door.
In the centre of these ranks of empty hutments is a two-storeyed building whose proportions are much more handsome than the rest. It was put up in Auckland during the Waikato Wars and, when the wars were over, the barracks were floated down the harbour and rebuilt here. Their military character has been diminished by a coat of primrose paint and a scarlet hibiscus growing up between the steps of a fire escape leading to the upper floor. “The Sea Wolf” is said to have been quartered here when he was a prisoner of war on Motuihe during the First World War.
Felix von Luckner was the dashing Robin Hood of the Kaiser’s Imperial Navy. With his beautiful ship Seeadler he accounted for 86,000 tons of allied shipping before he was captured in the Cook Islands. Von Luckner was a born swashbuckler and made the classical start of running away as a cabin boy. At sea he pursued his prey like a buccaneer, grappling at ships’ sides and fighting hand to hand, but he treated his prisoners honourably and, when he himself was taken, he set about convincing his captors that he was as model a prisoner as he was an officer and a gentleman.
By the early summer of 1917 von Luckner and his comrades seemed very much at home. They worked on the farm digging ditches and building water races, but whenever their tasks took them to the further end of the island they added to a cache of supplies they were accumulating at the bottom of a gully. They asked for leave to give a Christmas concert and the camp rang at night with the prisoners rehearsing Tannenbaum and other songs of old Bavaria. So much had von Luckner and his companions endeared themselves to authority that they were even permitted to fill out their own supplies requisitions. Once the authority had been signed it was easy to add a few more items and by December the 13th they were ready to make their escape.
In the confusion raised by a false fire alarm the Germans hopped it. The commander of the naval base at Devonport was visiting the island for the day, so they borrowed his pinnace, too
k his sword as well and slipped round to their gully to pick up the supplies so prudently ordered from the naval quartermaster. They set off across the Gulf, commandeered a timber scow called the Moa, then, with the crew held captive in the hold and flying a German flag they had contrived from New Zealand Navy regulation drill, they headed for the Kermadecs, six hundred sea miles north.
When the news was released it caused a great sensation. Yachtsmen put their craft at the disposal of the Navy and played hide and seek down the Coromandel coast and away in the further islands. Authority were bedevilled with false alarms and at least four innocent scows were challenged in the name of His Majesty’s Navy and had shots fired across their bows. As well as all these amateur admirals, the cable ship Iris was sent in pursuit. And she caught them hove to off a desolate beach in the Kermadecs, the escapers camped in a wooden hut.
Islands of the Gulf Page 6
