Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  Whenever I have been to Pakiri, the day has been fine, the immaculate beach stretching on and on until it disappears into the haze at Mangawhai Heads. Not many people come; you see a few black heads bobbing in the surf, some children skidding on their bottoms down the icing sugar dunes and pipi-pickers, like chessmen on the gleaming board of wet sand, using their fingers for spades.

  The day I had been with the Browns was one of especial splendour; galleons of cumulus mounted the airy tent top of the sky and the chain of islands lay deep blue and immensely solitary against the water’s darker tone. A single gannet flew watchfully along the second line of waves, diving like a dart, then up again to continue his search; and, flinging helter-skelter in the steady beat of his wake, were a handful of terns, the light touching their eager breasts to silver.

  A long, irregular lip of foam trembled on the blue-green ramparts of the advancing waves, then broke over the shining onyx of the beach, and scores of spinifex flowers like golden catherine wheels bowled along at the edge of the tide, poised tip-toe on their fragile spokes, then were caught up in the breeze and carried off across the wide ocean.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Girdle of Islands

  In December 1769 Endeavour sailed into the northern limits of the Hauraki Gulf and Cook added to the list of names he had bestowed on capes, promontories and islands already passed. This wise dedicated man had one flaw — he was very dull about names. In the main he chose to commemorate his patrons and superior officers at the Admiralty — Brett, Rodney, Colville and so on. The Court of Aldermen off the seaward coast of Coromandel was one flight of fancy and the Poor Knights at the top of the Gulf were the other. Were they only half visible when Endeavour came upon them first, clad in ragged cloaks of mist, or was it some trick of light at sunrise or dusk never observed by travellers since? Dr J.C. Beaglehole, the great authority on these Pacific voyages, suggests the islands, “brown, upstanding and rocky”, may have reminded Cook of a dish common at the time, called Poor Knights, made from lumps of bread dipped in egg and then fried. Perhaps the galley had sent up Poor Knights for breakfast that morning and they were sitting heavy.

  If you look at the map, you see the girdle of islands at the head of the Gulf, first Aotea, which Cook named Great Barrier, Little Barrier (his name for Hauturu), then the Hen and Chickens and last of all the Poor Knights.

  “This bay,” wrote Cook, as Endeavour beat up the coast near to, but missing, the entrance of Whangarei Harbour, “might be known by some small islands lying before it called the Hen and Chicks one of which is pretty high and terminates at the top in two peeks.” (sic)

  Fifty-seven years later, a heavy south-west squall forced d’Urville’s ship Astrolabe to stand off the same islands. D’Urville was more or less following in Cook’s wake up the coast; his log is full of references to Cook (not always complimentary) and comments on the weather Cook encountered in comparison with what the French party were meeting and also he is rather sour about Cook’s chart-making.

  “I could not refrain”, wrote d’Urville as they left Cook Strait, “from expressing my surprise at the errors which had crept into this part of the great man’s records.” Then, as they sailed through the entrance to the Gulf, “Here again, Cook’s work was very inaccurate and a new survey was indispensable.”

  The French commander was much more concerned with preserving the Maori place names than the British expedition had been. He rightly records the Hen as Taranga, the Chickens four miles to the north as Moto-Tiri and he calls the Poor Knights collectively Tawhiti Rahi. Tawhiti Rahi is the largest Knight and the others in order of size are Aorangi, Mammoth and Aorangaia. I have never been closer to either group than the shore of the mainland at Pakiri or at a similar remove in a boat, so they remain secretive and featureless islands for me, known only at the singular distance bestowed by water.

  There is not much you can read about them except papers written by botanical or archeological field parties who are almost the only people who ever land on them. Mostly they are written in the wonderfully unfunny style of their kind, reinforced with platoons of footnotes drawn up at the bottom of each page and mysterious asides followed in brackets by (Pers. Comm.). I admire their special kind of imagination that can conjure up from a few shards of obsidian a teeming aboriginal axe factory.

  I know that there is a cave on Tawhiti Rahi so big you can sail a boat inside it and that a lily grows on the Poor Knights (not my red one) which is found nowhere else except on the Three Kings, another desolate group further out. Tawhiti Rahi is 600 feet at its highest point and, on the three other islands, the cliffs rise from 50 to 400 feet in height. A huge amphitheatre, the remains of a volcanic crater, lies between the ridges of Aorangi and then gradually slopes down to the sea in a rocky shelf.

  The Hen and Chickens are equally precipitous. The Chickens, or Moto-Tiri, have high bluffs to the north and others, sheer but less lofty, running round the rest of the coast. A plant with huge leaves of brilliant green called pukenui flourishes on the Hen and Chickens and the Three Kings and, according to William Colenso, the missionary naturalist, “The leaves are large enough to wrap a codfish in and this summer, D.V., I shall be in the neighbourhood and get some.”

  Many traces of considerable and ancient Maori settlement have been found on both groups. They may have been established before the Migration of 1350 but, by 1821, all the villages were deserted. In the late 1840s, a Mr Holman of Whangarei visited Taranga, the Hen, and found complete skeletons, with their weapons and ornaments beside them, lying on the stone-faced scarps of the terraced pa.

  In the 80s and the 90s of the last century, fishermen used the South Cove on Taranga as a base camp and traders occasionally came ashore to cut the flax. Copper has also been mined here. Now both groups of islands are inhabited by nesting colonies of sea birds, the white-faced storm petrels, gannets, terns, all kinds of shearwaters and what one writer describes as the “uncommonly shy and spotless crake.” The venerable tuatara lizard also thrives in the quiet air of these islands.

  An Austrian naturalist called Andreas Reischek has written about visiting the islands in the 1880s. He came to New Zealand in 1877 at the invitation of Sir Julius Von Haast, to arrange the newly built Canterbury Museum. He stayed for twelve years, long after the museum was arranged, exploring the countryside on foot, accompanied by his faithful dog Caesar, while his no less faithful Frau Reischek waited patiently at home in Austria. He pottered placidly about the North, making side trips to the islands off the coast, and he wrote a book called Yesterdays in Maoriland which remained unpublished in an English version until 1930.

  “Landed in a bay on the West Side of the largest island and when the tents were up we cooked a good supper. Tuatara lizards visited us in the camp that evening.” He wrote this when he visited the Hen and Chickens with Cheeseman, the naturalist from the Auckland Museum, and goes on to list the relics he found of Maori occupation, “Cooking middens, mussel shells, the bones of seals and rats, firestone knives and other things.”

  He counted twenty different kinds of birds and a new breed of puffin. He also noticed that puffins shared burrows with the tuatara lizard.

  “Caesar announced the discovery with a bark at one of the holes. The lizard resides in the first chamber, the bird in the second and they mutually protect their young.

  “The lizards live on wetas, grubs, beetles, grasshoppers and flies, and only if these are scarce will they attack other birds.”

  Reischek wanted more than anything to land on Little Barrier, the last retreat of a bird which had become extinct on the mainland, a little honeyeater called in English the stitchbird and in Maori hihi or tiora. He made several attempts to land on the island’s dangerous shores but it was two years before he succeeded, when Sam Brown’s grandfather Tenetahi took him there in his cutter Rangatira.

  In 1889 Reischek went home to Austria and his wife met him at the station as uncomplaining as if he had been gone only a month. He never visited New Zealand
again and when he died in 1902 his collections were acquired by the Imperial Museum. Among them were two thousand two hundred and seventy-eight New Zealand birds, including many examples of the stitchbird and of the totally extinct huia. Some years later a slight hue and cry was raised in New Zealand that such a collection should have gone from the country. The matter was discussed at government level but nothing was ever done and there in Vienna Dr Reischek’s collections are retained to this day.

  I hope I may yet land on Taranga or the Chicks, sail into the great cavern beneath Tawhiti Rahi and climb to the crater on Aorangi but, until I do, these loneliest of islands remain for me much as d’Urville described them in 1827.

  “We ran along the narrow grim chain of the Moto-Tiri islands only half a league away from them. On their deserted shores one heard nothing but the monotonous sounds of the waves breaking on the beach and the terror-stricken cries of a few seabirds.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hauturu

  For all I knew, until I started work on the television programmes, Little Barrier was as lonely and uninhabited as the Poor Knights. I knew it was there and not much more, visible on my immediate horizon on clear days, like a smudged blue thumbprint. I first saw the island at close quarters when we were filming the aerial sequences and Captain Ladd had flown us throughout the entire compass of the Gulf.

  We had waited until autumn, when the crisper air dissolved the haze. Our patience had been rewarded by a day so lucid that the pursuing shadow of the amphibian sped along beneath us and overlaid the fainter shadows of the little clouds resting on the surface of the ocean. We did a double circuit of the lighthouse tower on Tiri Tiri Island and Fred scribbled one of his poems before he dropped off the paper.

  It’s nice up here

  Looks nice down there

  Hello down there

  From us up here.

  If you’re wondering what’s the latest caper

  Read all about it in the morning paper.

  “I’ve always wanted to get one right on the little gallery round the tower” Fred remarked when he closed his window again. “But mostly I end up in the cow paddock or down among the cabbages.”

  We dropped another paper in the garden at Motuora Island, flying low enough to admire a grove of banana palms and a fat white duck waddling on the lawn. The tide was down to the dregs and the three other Motus, -tara, -rekareka and -ketekete, were standing on bare bones of beaches and rocks.

  “Not much use leaving a paper there” and Fred made a running dive over the remains of the Rewa in Moturekareka Bay.

  When the Motus were left behind, we dropped down low to keep our shadow company and scooted along the silken water like a fat and frolicsome dragonfly.

  Little Barrier floated in the distance, blue, insubstantial, with not a wisp of cloud along the summit. It is a roughly circular island of nearly 8,000 acres, ringed with austere cliffs, dark garnet rock streaked with grey. There are no beaches, only scree falls and a narrow verge of heavy boulders. The only flat land is on the south west at Te Maraeroa and the only landing where the boulder banks run out to a narrow spit at Titoki Point.

  Rodger Blanshard the ranger, Anne his wife and their four children live on the flat and they are the sole human inhabitants of the island, a sanctuary of New Zealand flora and fauna since 1894. It is one of the last surviving areas of primaeval forest and the only one unthreatened by browsing animals like deer and possum. We came over the red-roofed homestead. Two of the children ran across the lawn waving and Fred dropped the paper almost at their feet, waggled his wings in greeting and in a second they were left behind. We flew close beside the cliffs and then climbed steeply, turning in towards the wooded ranges of the interior. Little Barrier seems a wretched diminutive when you look down at the majestic prospect of bluff and pinacle and plunging ravine, at the kauri groves astride the ridges with their great grey boles soaring above the lesser trees of the forest.

  The old name Hauturu was bestowed by Toi, the Polynesian explorer, who came down from Hawaiki about 1150; it means the Resting Post of the Winds. Toi is the common ancestor of many of the Hauraki and Coromandel Maoris and, when he first saw Hauturu, believed that no ordinary men could dwell there and that the high peaks hidden so often in the mist were the home of the fairies, the Patu-Pai-Arehe.

  * * *

  The Ngatitai of Hauturu, Toi’s descendants, lived here for centuries. They repelled several determined invasions in the 17th and 18th centuries and it was not until about 1825, when the wars of Hongi destroyed or drove off so many island communities, that they withdrew to the coast. From time to time they came back to cut firewood or snare birds and to ensure their ownership. In 1880 another tribe challenged the Ngatitai ownership of Little Barrier and the first of five hearings began. The claimants were Ngatiwhatua who based their case first on a battle fought about 1650, in which they claimed to have won the island as a prize of war, and, second, on the ground that the Ngatiwai, by quitting their permanent settlement there, had renounced their title. At the final session in 1886 scores of witnesses were called; Tenetahi recited the Ngatitai family tree to the court, another witness, Hone Paama, sang an old waiata as further proof to their rights over the land and Judge Puckey disallowed the Ngatiwhatua’s claim on both counts. Little Barrier, he declared, was the property of the Ngatitai. Tenetahi, his wife Rahui (Sam Brown’s grandparents) and fourteen of their kinsmen shared it between them.

  During the litigation, influential people who saw extinction threaten so much native forest and the birds which lived in it, urged the government to buy Little Barrier as a sanctuary. The Ngatitai owners were offered the sum of £3,000 which was provisionally accepted, but, before all the owners had signed a bill of sale, tempting offers were made for the standing kauri and Tenetahi entered on a contract with a European called Simon Welton Brown for the kauri on Little Barrier. The new tangle seemed likely to last as long as the previous succession of cases. While the government was petitioned to act before the remaining forest was destroyed and with it any hope of a sanctuary, bushmen were already at work up some of the streams and Tenetahi’s scow was making regular trips to Auckland loaded with timber.

  An injunction was passed forbidding any more trees to be felled and inevitably the government prevailed. Tenetahi and the others were given the £3,000 and summarily told to vacate the island, taking their livestock with them. Tenetahi delayed, saying that his scow must be repaired before they could go. Months went by and when it was plain he had no intention of moving, as he felt the whole business to be grossly unfair, the islanders, according to one account “were removed with the help of the permanent force in a specially chartered vessel and withdrew to other lands in their possession on the coast.”

  This was in 1896 and, in January 1897, the first curator, R.H. Shakespear, landed at Titoki Point and took up his duties as the permanent guardian of the island at a salary of £200 a year.

  When the litigation was beginning, the Austrian naturalist Andreas Reischek at last achieved his ambition and made several visits to Little Barrier, taken there each time by Tenetahi in the Rangatira.

  Coming ashore at Titoki Point is more often than not a fairly rough business with the surf pounding in on the boulders. In a sou’-wester you can neither land nor get off and this driving Gulf wind twice stopped Reischek from achieving his purpose. The third time he and Tenetahi set off, a storm near Kawau forced them into Leigh for shelter. Next day when it was over, they set off again and managed to scrape ashore. They slept miserably in a camp infested with fleas and looked in vain for the stitchbird. Reischek returned in July 1882 when bad weather again stopped them from landing. In October they tried again and this time they succeeded.

  “In this primaeval paradise” wrote Reischek, “I felt the windows of my soul were opened.”

  He heard the cry of the stitchbird, then on the 25th of October he saw a male hopping about in a very excited manner and this brief glimpse had to suffice until November 7, when he
discovered a male and a female close to their nest. Naturalists in Reischek’s day had a curious attitude to wild life. They loved it, cherished the sight of it, sought it for days in the most perilous of country and then, when they found it, had no hesitation in killing it.

  “In the act of escaping, I shot them.”

  His last visit to Hauturu was in 1883 when he and his dog Caesar were caught in a terrifying storm on the summit. When they had stumbled back to the shore, they met their old friend Tenetahi and learnt that his cutter had been lost off Great Barrier. He and his wife Rahui, with two other men and a boy, had set off for Hauturu in a whale boat. The storm broke out with fresh force, overturning the boat and an oar was lost. The men righted the boat while Rahui swam off after the oar. After she brought it back, one of the men was swept away and Rahui, still in the water, caught hold of him and supported him in the heavy swells. She was in the sea for fourteen hours. One of the men died of exhaustion but Tenetahi and Rahui had at last reached the island and were resting in their whare there.

  Reischek attended what he described as a ball at the native rununga.

  “All inhabitants of the island were present, mostly Maoris, and as well two Portuguese and two white girls. Dance music was provided by a Maori playing waltzes, polkas, mazurkas and quadrilles on the accordion, and the polyglot chief Tenetahi sang snatches of English, Maori, Portuguese and even German songs. At midnight, very jolly, we sat down to a supper of bread, honey and tea.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Landing at Little Barrier

  One morning, not much after dawn, we set out by launch from Great Barrier. A south-west wind had kept me awake most of the night, not so much by the noise it made in the branches outside the window, but because I knew that if it did not drop we would not land on Little Barrier. Then quite suddenly at six, the trees were still, the sea lost its chop and we could sail. We sliced through the swell in Man o’ War Passage and passed the innumerable islets and rocks which lie like stepping stones off the coast here. By now I knew that Little Barrier was administered, like other island sanctuaries such as Kapiti and the Poor Knights, by the Lands and Survey Department, that there is no lighthouse on it and that landing is forbidden without a permit.