Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  A few days before I went off on the Colville, a man I had met at a party remarked that islands brought out the truth in people (he had recently spent a short holiday on one) and that their isolation forces you to an uncomfortable self-scrutiny. He was a nice man and I did not know him well enough to say he spoke nonsense. If you need loneliness to take a hard look at yourself, why not a London bedsitter on a wet Sunday afternoon? I was not able to make much of a study in isolation on the Colville’s round, as she rarely stopped longer than it took to unload the stores and swap the mailbags. What I had instead were three days of almost uninterrupted sitting on a boat doing nothing. If you want to take a short sea voyage, it is very economical travelling; your meals are 7s 6d. each and your bunk 7s 6d. a night. The meals are better value than the bunk but fortunately I slept ashore and never had to use mine.

  The cargo going aboard was a wonderful jumble of cases of fruit and sacks of flour, a box of yeast cakes, a dozen bottles of wine, a crate of speckled ducks and another of hens addressed to Mrs Susan Lloyd at Cuvier Island. There was no gangway; you scrambled down from the wharf and under the deck rail. I said good morning to the captain, a stocky, suntanned man called Rex Brown; the rest of the crew were a quiet middle-aged engineer, three young lads, all blond, two of them Australians on a working holiday, and a cheerful Dutch cook called Eric. The other passengers were technicians, variously bound for all three lighthouses, and Anne Blanshard, who had been in town for a few days.

  We sailed at 9.30. Colville made brisk work of North Head and the Salt Beacon off Rangitoto and we were well under way to Tiri Tiri Matangi when suddenly we stopped, slewed round and started back to Auckland. Someone had forgotten to put the mailbags aboard. The morning had warmed up and I was happy to sit and gossip with Anne and watch whatever went past go past. Rex Brown, who probably felt a little differently, stood at the wheel looking testy, making all speed back for the mails. For a mile or so we ran neck and neck with a tanker laden to the gunwales, two old gaffers in a patched up runabout waved a fresh-caught snapper at us and at last we steamed into Kings Wharf. Not only had the mails been left behind, but a lighthouse technician as well. He came aboard a little huffed at being forgotten and we made another start.

  Tiri was the first stop. I knew the big bare island by heart from the air but I had never set foot on it. My foot was to stay unset this trip, too, as the Colville wanted to make up the lost time. Tiri is the oldest light in the Gulf; petitions began for its establishment in 1853. The handsome tower was not completed until 1864 and the light shone for the first time in January 1865. We left three electricians there to finish installing a new beacon which Sir Ernest Davis had presented just before he died. Fifty times more powerful than the old light, its beam extends for thirty miles and is the brightest in the southern hemisphere.

  The wharf is on the other side of the island at some distance from the tower and the houses, and the three families drive over the paddocks in a tractor to pick up the supplies. The winch groaned and rattled as sacks and crates went ashore. Anne leaned over the rail talking to the young wife of the principal keeper. I noticed from the conversation how families in the Gulf pick up word of one another from The Postman, the correspondence school’s magazine, to which all its scattered pupils contribute.

  Don had not been able to come on the trip, so he had loaded a fool-proof camera with sufficient film for thirty-six shots and all I had to do was to push the button. On the wharf, however, a couple of guests of the lighthouse families were aiming their cameras at us. Whichever angle I took, we seemed to stare doggedly down one another’s lens so I left Tiri with no pictorial record of having been there at all.

  At lunch, the captain sat at the head of the table with his family of crew and passengers ranged on either side of plates of ham and tongue and corned beef, vinegary beetroot, pickles, tomatoes and mountains of bread. We had not much conversation and, when the table was cleared, the two Australian boys got out a chessboard and started a game which was kept up throughout the trip between their not very arduous duties.

  The seabird population changes away from the mainland. The grey gulls and the black-backs give place to petrels, the black ones and the round, white-faced Cook’s petrels. There are Buller’s shearwaters with the beautiful W-shaped marking on back and wings, sooty shearwaters or muttonbirds and gannets with downy yellow heads who sit with one another in companionable knots on the wavetops, resting from their solitary hunts. They are big, heavy birds, not much smaller than a goose, who, before they are aloft, make long splashing strides across the water. On Christmas Day 1769, Banks wrote in his journal that they had gannet pie for dinner. “It was the humour of the ship to keep Christmas in the old-fashioned way and our goose pye was ate with great approbation and all hands were as drunk as our forefathers on like occasion.”

  We saw a shark leap high into the air, almost level with the rail. Then it tailed us with jutting dorsal fin showing and the water clear enough to see its mean eye and stretching grin. Poor unloved sharks. Each year they are hoisted from the Gulf with Reports and Warnings to add a fillip to the mid-summer poverty of news.

  “Don’t know why they make all the fuss” said Rex as he leaned over the rail watching it. “There’s always been this many sharks about.”

  One of the crew took a shot at it with a rifle but he missed.

  Little Barrier was the next halt and there it was looking no nearer and no further, as it always does. Out to the east, the sky was unsullied azure, then towards the mainland, as if a line had been drawn, was a vast meadow of fretted mackerel cloud, reflected on the sea like ice cracking on a winter pond. I lay on my stomach and watched the wake spill over the oily swell. Near the surface, where it was cut by the bow, the water was thick and gelid in tones of olive and moss green, then deeper down a dead and secret black. The shape of sea things has such harmony — the plume of foam hissing beside the ship, the taut shape of a gannet’s body as he dives, the thrust of a shark’s dorsal fin, the little furrow a penguin ploughs in his dogged paddling and the perfect ring cast when he dives; even the old dinghy lying athwart the deck had the lovely curve bestowed by the sea. It was half filled to the gunwales with last night’s rain and one blue sneaker floated about in the bottom.

  “Look at the tumbleweed” said Anne and pointed to a sodden ball of spinifex which might have come bowling all the way from Pakiri.

  It seemed odd not to be getting off at Little Barrier. Anne watched her stores heaved over the side and at the last minute remembered a case of plums in the hold. There was Mac barking on the boulders and the children waving — and Rodger rowing out. I went in on the stores boat and we had time for a few moments’ shouted conversation. Then I looked back at the procession on the shore, Rodger piling the boxes on to a jitney, the children with little bundles wending their way over the flat and I felt low at going on by myself to new islands and strange faces.

  I climbed the steps to the wheelhouse and talked to Rex Brown.

  “Don’t like the look of it” and he squinted at the perfect sky. “We’ll go straight on to Moko and not risk waiting till morning.”

  “Risk?” I repeated and he showed me an almost imperceptible swell starting from the ocean bed.

  “One more fine day, I reckon, and then the weather’ll break.”

  Moko Hinau is as solitary a group of islands as you could wish to find. They lie about three hours’ sail from Little Barrier at the northern approach to the Gulf. Not far from here, in 1940, the Niagara struck a German mine and went down with her cargo of gold. Most of it was retrieved in a lengthy series of dives the year after. Like most New Zealand lighthouses, Moko’s site was chosen after a wreck had proven its suitability. A brig, the Caroline, struck a rock near by in 1869. The light did not arrive from England until 1876 and meanwhile argument had raged as to whether the Hen and Chickens or Bream Head was a better place than Moko. In the end Moko won the day and in 1883 the tower was begun. The early logs of Moko Hinau and Cuvier are held
at the Auckland Museum Library and before I came away I had spent some time reading them.

  Moko’s first entry, dated 1st June, 1883, is written in a cramped and precise hand. It gives a list of stores landed by the schooner Hawk, not very lavish, which includes “a bottle of ink, one light house table, two garden rakes, one box of pens, two quires of foolscap paper and six sheets of blotting paper.” They must have had a horse as an anvil appears further down the list and shoeing tools and a curry comb. There are also instructions “to light the lamp on Monday night 8th June instanter.”

  The musty pages endlessly repeated a single entry. “Carried out usual duties. Trimmed wick, polished lamp. Cleaned up.”

  A principal keeper with two assistants tended the light. The senior of them took the watch from sunset till ten o’clock, the second assistant watched from ten until three and the principal took over then and watched until dawn.

  After the lamp was lit it smoked badly for the first few days. There are complaints about the want of a steady draught and that the lamp chimney is too short.

  Not until the 8th of July did the lamp burn well.

  Monday, 16th July. “First Assistant Keeper Sandegan has his old complaint.” He was better by the 20th and well enough to stand his watch by the 21st. On the 27th, the schooner Hawk was sighted but they had no signal from her and, when she came in on the 30th, Keeper Sandegan, attacked again by “his old complaint” went off on the Hawk to have it attended to in Auckland. The log is rich in minor ailments as well as in the recital of duties. The second assistant had a cold and then neuralgia and Mr Sandegan returned on 5th August.

  On 29th September, the principal keeper pasted into his log, with no comment, a stern memorandum from the Marine Department complaining that the station-keepers were burning excessive oil in their dwellings and went on to inform them that the pay of temporary lighthouse keepers was fixed at 7/- a day for the first month and 6/- a day for every month thereafter.

  The only reader in the big library, I sat drowsing over the pages, lulled by the conscientious squeak of the principal keeper’s pen as he polished the lamp, trimmed the wick and performed usual duties, when my eye caught a fresh sentence. “Second assistant keeper still insane.”

  I turned back a page and there on 17th November it was, the usual line about the wick and the lamp and then “Second Assistant Keeper Callan gone completely out of his mind; I cannot trust him to keep his watch.”

  On the 18th. “Mr Callan no better.”

  November 19. “Trimmed wick, polished lamp. Carried out usual duties. Keeper Callan still insane. Made fire to signal for help.”

  November 21. “Callan is no better.”

  November 22. “Signalled to ship passing Want Assistance. Report Insanity.”

  November 23. “The Hawk arrived. Callan better in sanity but not otherwise recovered, he went back to Auckland.”

  There is no more reference to Callan and the next day the principal keeper reported “Mouries (sic) came here to catch mutton birds, about 30 of them.”

  Moko Hinau is a corruption of Pokohinu, the Maori word for muttonbird or sooty shearwater. It was one of the great muttonbird colonies in the Gulf and every year parties of Maoris came to snare the young birds in the burrows. From a distance, Moko Hinau looks like one island; as you come nearer it splits into two and then, when you are hard on them, you see them in the correct muster of three. It was the time of day when for a brief span the sun casts a hot, brilliant light before it starts to set. The islands glowered in the brassy water, their golden rock fretted into jagged clefts and caverns and into columns like the worn figures of saints in medieval churches. The waves crashed through the fissures with the dull boom of distant artillery. The lighthouse and the three homesteads are built on Burgess, the largest of the three islands, the wharf is in a little bitten-out boulder bay and when we came alongside the tide was out. Below high water mark the exposed rock was pink and dabbed with vivid green lettuce weed, dull brown sea mosses and fern. On the bottom, through water clear as glass, I could see colonies of starfish and slow-spinning, spine-encrusted sea eggs, stingrays flickering in the kelp and little darting fish, bright cobalt blue, called mau mau.

  More of our passengers went ashore here and briefly I managed to go too. The lighthouse is on a bluff 400 feet above the sea; away to the left of the path across a boggy paddock a great jet of spray shot up every thirty seconds or so. I walked over to it, stumbling on the reeds and clumps of marsh grass. Little dry footfalls scurried at my approach. Lizards, I thought. The sea cannonaded with a heavy roar; there would be a loud report and then the water spray leapt up through a blow hole. Nearby was a stagnant pool with a few shearwaters dabbling about the edge and the ground about it for many yards was white with lime. As I started up the zigzag path I met the three keepers coming down to the boat and we wished one another good evening. Their houses look across the Gulf to the Poor Knights, the Hen and Chickens and then to the mainland. They were white-painted, with lawns of well shaven buffalo grass and glossy taupata hedges. Every tree, every blade of grass, even the wire on the clothesline stood out with startling clarity in the last brilliance of the day. The men must have killed a pig that afternoon; shrouded in cheesecloth it hung draining on a gibbet, illumined by the sunset, too.

  I had been talking only a few moments to Mrs Mallowes, whose husband was principal keeper, when I heard a telephone ring. It seemed a curious sound out here on a small island in a vast ocean. Mrs Mallowes went to answer it and when she came back she said they were ringing up from the wharf; the Colville was ready to leave. Her daughter Linda walked down the path with me, her goat trotting along behind. She showed me where the muttonbirds nest, told me it would have been native rats I heard in the grass, not lizards, that she had a big sister called Maradene away nursing at Thames, that her little brother Kim was four and her goat’s name was Ginger.

  The light faded as we sailed, the rocks, the island, the white tower lost their sharp clarity. Sitting by myself on the deck, I watched the colour stripped from the rock and the water darken, until Eric the cook called me down to dinner. He dealt out plates piled with roast meat and peas, cabbage, baked potatoes and boiled kumara and big orange heaps of pumpkin, all soused in gravy. We had peaches for pudding and Little Barrier cream to pour over the top of them. As soon as they were finished, the boys ambled out on deck, scraped their plates over the side and a shrieking chorus of gulls dived down for the scraps.

  Eric extended his charity as cook to the ducks and hens bound for Cuvier and pushed thick crusts through the slats of their crates as he talked to them in Dutch.

  It was late when we tied up at Port FitzRoy. In defence of the proprieties, Rex bustled me ashore and towards the light shining from Pia’s house.

  “I thought you’d be here before this,” she said.

  Pia’s parish takes in the lighthouse islands as well as Great Barrier and she was coming to Cuvier to give the babies there a monthly check. Rex warned us he meant to start at six, but after he had gone we gossiped so late that when finally we went to sleep it seemed no more than ten minutes before the Colville’s hooter blew and we tumbled into our clothes and down the road to the wharf.

  “What’s the rush?” scolded Pia when her breath came back. “You went to Moko yesterday, didn’t you? That’s only one island left. Maybe we’ll catch some hapuka on the way back.”

  Eric was busy in the galley and presently sent out plates as loaded as at dinner. He hovered over his charges and worried whether they all had enough. The boys took up their chess and bickered over a knight, on deck the ducks quacked peevishly and a starchy looking Ostralorp had her head thrust between the slats of her crate.

  “Nearly there, chookie girls” encouraged Eric as he posted them their breakfast.

  When we lost the shelter of Great Barrier and were out in the open sea, the swell was much more apparent and Colville rolled prodigiously.

  “Told you so,” said Rex with satisfaction. “Late after
noon and she’ll be here.” The crew ambled about their tasks; one of the boys slapped paint on a bulwark and someone else was chipping rust.

  The birds were dense here, petrels, gannets, shearwaters and terns by the thousand. The water was tremulous with their fluttering wings and darting beaks.

  Cuvier lay way off, forbidding as the rock of Gibraltar. It is a single island and the beacon for ships coming from the south and the east. When work began on it in 1888, all the material had to be hauled up the cliffs by ropes as there was no safe landing and on 22nd September 1889 the lights flashed for the first time.

  The lightkeepers here were more articulate than their colleagues at Moko Hinau. They were usually inspired by anger, at slowness of the mails, or the stupidity of their landbound superiors in the Marine Department and they were not backward about speaking out.

  In 1890 Principal Keeper Chandler writes well of probationer Entwistle “who is sober, steady and industrious”, and then adds a first postscript that “the fence posts sent by the Department are the WORST I have ever seen” and a second P.S. “I would remind you that posting letters by passing steamer are the only means of communication we have.”

  “Hinemoa late again” is a recurring entry. She was the government steamer which intermittently came round the islands.

  1st April, 1891. “I have the honour to inform you,” Mr Chandler tells the Secretary of the Marine, “that I have had charge of a station for ten years and apply therefore for the annual increase of £10 which I certainly think I am entitled to and hope to receive a favourable reply.”