Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  Mr Chandler tried to plant an orchard and had to transplant it when the trees were all blown from their holes in a storm.

  A modest stores list request two (2) lead pencils. A later keeper, cut of the same determined cloth as Mr Chandler, conducted a dispute for three months over a new lamp for the second assistant keeper and the Head Office charged that the old one had not been turned in. “Chief Keeper Wilson” (who meant to have the last word) “has the honour to report that indeed it was turned in and must at this very moment, sir, be sitting in the Marine Department store in Wellington.”

  “It is” he wound up with a parting shot, “our twelfth week without mail.”

  A laconic entry in 1893 reports the birth of a girl, Eve Maria Alice Sanders and in 1896 that of her brother William.

  A memorandum of 1894 cautions keepers about drinking and points out that a keeper has recently been discharged for drunkenness and using obscene and abusive language to an inspector.

  It closed with an order to use the attached earthquake forms whenever they reported an earthquake.

  Principal Keeper Lyall’s early entries are written in vigorous style, with a thick spluttering nib, but as his spirits droop his hand becomes as thin and querulous as his reports. The steep hill to the tower affects his knees, he says, then his wife falls ill and the doctor ascribes it “to the strong sea air”.

  Principal Keeper Cox took over from him and on 1st December, 1900, writes, “Sir, I wish to call attention to the fact that we have been here three months and have had no mail since we came. There is no flagpole should we want to signal a passing vessel. This is the worst station I was ever at, there is no convenience and should any of us meet with an accident how would it fare with us?”

  Like Lyall, Mr Cox soon lost heart and by February of the next year his knees were as bad as Mr Lyall’s had been. “I myself would much prefer coming home to my own bed than staying up at the tower.”

  Three years later, when he was about to be transferred, Mr Cox made a farewell gesture. “I have the honour to report that the principal keeper’s fowlhouse which blew over and went in several pieces during the gale in February last can I think be put together again. I should like to get it rebuilt before I leave the station.”

  The mail service continued to be bad and Cuvier was one of the few stations to use carrier pigeons, but the weather was often so rough that the pigeons refused to leave the island. In December 1914 there is a note from an assistant keeper called Dustin. “Owing to the unpleasantness that has arisen during my stay here I feel it is my duty to ask for a shift to some other station. I don’t care where as long as I am not kept here.”

  Assistant Keeper Robert Twelftree Spark wrote on the same delicate business. “Owing to the service no longer agreeing with me I regret having to hand in my resignation. I have also a desire to go to the War” (anything presumably was better than his present situation) “and would like to be relieved of my duties on the next trip of the Hinemoa.”

  The bay at Cuvier, or the nearest approach to one, is a half-moon beach of black boulders sleek as seals in the tide. There is a concrete jetty, a gaunt crane and a narrow gauge track up the steep hill. Three children were perched on the rock by the steps. Pia and I got into the dinghy and sat where we could amid the sacks and boxes and crates of poultry. Landing at Cuvier is even more balletic than it is at Little Barrier. The dinghy pulled into a concrete staircase slimed with sodden weed and we jumped on the crest of the wave as the boat swung in with it.

  The three homesteads were identical in white paint and pattern to those at Moko, only looking out to the ocean instead of to land. It was hot on the island and not at all quiet, with the waves pounding on the rocks, the noisy beat of the cicadas and the gulls crying, thousands upon thousands of them. Cuvier is a bird sanctuary and flocks of bellbirds live in the scrubby bush further inland.

  The wives of the three lightkeepers are all English girls. Mrs Lloyd, whose name I had seen on the duck’s crate, has toddling twin boys, David and Daniel, and an infant boy called Murray. Pia went off to their house with her brown bag to check their weight and their progress since her last visit. I was to lunch with the principal keeper, Mr Harris, and his wife Patricia and while they were getting through the busy hour of unloading the stores I went for a walk on my own, first to see the brave survivors of the orchard Mr Chandler planted nearly seventy years ago, then up the steep path to the tower, which burned so white in the sun I could scarcely look at it. I thought about Mr Cox and his poor knees as I rested and looked back down the dizzy slope to the wild shore and the cliffs. A copse of pohutukawa had had the life blasted out of it in the wind and streamed gauntly up the hill like a cat’s fur blown the wrong way. When I came down I looked longingly at the beach but the tide was down and that meant stingrays.

  The Harrises have a cheerful house, with the red Gulf lilies blooming in the garden. Like all island young, their children were forthrightly friendly. Ruth, who was eight, showed me a batch of kittens, their eyes scarcely open, mewling in a box and Mark, who was eleven and New Zealand’s youngest lone sea-scout, his shells. The men came in to see if lunch were imminent — Rex had decided that his time on the trip had been good enough to deserve a rest — and, when Mrs Harris said they had a little grace, Mr Harris suggested to Captain Brown he might enjoy a stroll to the tower and they went off with the purposeful air men adopt when they mean to have a glass of something.

  Mrs Harris, Greta Turner, who completed the trio of women, and I went up to the Lloyds to see the babies and if Pia had finished her check-up. They all seemed on easy terms with their isolation. Plenty of back country farms are as remote as a lighthouse, they said. They agreed that nothing infuriated them more than curious people asking them whatever did they do all day and that the hardest and most time-consuming chore their life involved was supervising the children’s correspondence lessons.

  Three women on an island might engender friction and I asked about this.

  “Well, we don’t pop in all the time,” said Patricia Harris. “We can ring up if we want to and have one another in for coffee, or we do each other’s hair, home perms and things like that. But all the houses have gates on the gardens and if you want, you can close it. But we’re busy and, when there is time to rest, we enjoy it.”

  Tentatively I suggested the obvious things from the mainland they might miss, like concerts.

  Sue Lloyd pointed to a record player and a large stack of recordings.

  “And town smells so dreadful when you go back there” said Greta, the youngest.

  Pia came into the room with Mrs Lloyd’s youngest son, a fat and chuckly baby of eight months and gave him to his mother.

  “Your twins have wakened up” she informed her.

  “Oh Lord” said Sue, and presently came back with a twin on each arm. “Miss anything? When would I have time?”

  The families all came down and waved goodbye as we scrambled from the slithery steps to the dinghy and out to Colville where the boys had all been fishing. We were about an hour out of Cuvier when Rex Brown’s forecast about the weather was fulfilled. The sky erupted in huge brown porridgy clouds, the wind ran in shivering catspaws over the water and the birds were wheeling in towards the shore.

  “You won’t be getting any hapuka today, Pia” said Rex and Colville’s nose butted down into the trough.

  We were following the same route up the seaward coast of Barrier that d’Urville had taken almost a hundred and thirty-eight years ago to the day and the weather was blowing up for us exactly as it had for him. He gave Cuvier its name, after a French naturalist he admired; the Maori name was Repanga. On 20th February, 1827, he wrote that the morning began in bright sunshine and the sea was calm. “We saw no trace of inhabitants or of their dwellings, not even any smoke to mark the presence of a being belonging to the human race.” Few explorers felt the awe in isolation that d’Urville did and I thought how strange it must have been to sail in Astrolabe or Endeavour, moving in unch
arted waters and looking on land that none of your fellows had seen before. The hogsback and peak of Mount Hobson retreated into cloud and the squall was pushing from behind just as it had for the Astrolabe.

  At last we rounded the northern tip of the Barrier and came to the graven rocks d’Urville christened the Needles. The weather was coming down lower and lower, as it did when we sailed round to the site of the wreck of the Wairarapa and just as it had the night she struck. The mist hurried across the dreadful face of Miner’s Head and wild goats scrambled through the flax bushes.

  It was good to be inside the cabin with the lamps lit. Outside, the world had shrunk to a whirling tunnel of ragged waves, there was no sign of land, no other island, only a greyness of drenching rain upon the drenched ocean.

  “Look” Rex said. “Moko’s started up.”

  We all looked and waited, then dimly through the murk we could see the light flash.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Along the Coast of Coromandel

  The Coromandel Peninsula forms the eastern wall of Hauraki and, all the time we have been trekking about the Gulf, the Moehau Ranges and Cape Colville have never been out of sight. After the Moa Hunters had vanished, the subsequent tribes were the product of several migrations and some, like the Hauraki island peoples, were descendants of Toi. In 1820, when Major Cruise came on the Dromedary, the Maori population was considerable. Their destruction began a year later when the Ngatimaru pa of Te Totara fell to Hongi and his musket-armed warriors and, by 1833, the missionary Henry Williams could write that “once these hills and valleys were peopled, but of late years they have been hunted as the deer until few remain.”

  On 23rd August, 1820, the Dromedary dropped anchor at Waiau and Cruise described the foretop gallant kauri mast she had used out from England as a “stick of excellent quality”. The Coromandel, who left her name both here and on the peninsula, was already in the bay and had successfully bargained for a cargo of spars 74 to 84 feet long as masts for the Royal Navy. “The hills overhanging the harbour are romantic and richly wooded and there is no scarcity of cowdie” wrote Cruise. “We were welcomed by an old chief and hundreds of natives who sang a special song welcoming us to Shourackee. The most perfect harmony exists between the natives and the crew.”

  The results of this perfect harmony were observed nearly twenty years later by Sarah Felton Mathew. “Some of the half-castes are like very lovely gypsies” she declared and was quick to notice their ages were coeval with the Coromandel’s visit. Waspish and a snob, Mrs Mathew was, none the less, a brave and spirited woman and writing a diary distracted her from the miseries of travel on the tacky little cutter Ranger, as it bore the squabbling government suite about the Gulf looking for a capital.

  They had come now to the kingdom of the American trader, William Webster, King Wepiha of Waiau, whose establishment at Herekino was on Whanganui Island, at the mouth of the Coromandel Harbour. Sarah found Mr Webster rough and common, nor did she enjoy his hospitality, approve of his native wives or the company he encouraged.

  “We sat down to dinner table d’hote and it is difficult to imagine a more extraordinary assemblage, there were adventurers of all kinds including the half-piratical master of a vessel strongly suspected of being in the slave trade. We of course commanded every attention as being attached to the government.”

  A surgeon called Jameson, who wrote a book about his travels in New Zealand at much this time, enjoyed Mr Webster and his household very much. “It is of a cheering aspect and on the wild shores of Shouraki we enjoyed the true spirit of colonial hospitality and the substantial comforts of a European home. This person . . . has risen from being a ship’s carpenter to the ownership of one of the principal establishments in New Zealand. Beside the gangs of ‘boys’ dragging out timber, he keeps fifteen to twenty Europeans, sawyers, boat builders, pork and fish curers, coopers and blacksmiths, and their disorderly conduct is the greatest difficulty Mr Webster has to contend with, some of them being the most persevering drunkards it has ever been my fate to encounter.”

  John Logan Campbell was also Webster’s guest and wrote about the famous table d’hote, whose charge of six dollars a week anticipated decimal currency by much more than a century. “Her Majesty taking possession of Poenamo has caused an influx of landsharks so to prevent himself being eaten out of house and home . . . all comers who had the privilege of a bunk in the barracks and a seat at the table d’hote paid six dollars a week.

  “Wepiha reigned supreme along the whole coast — I found him a right-hearted, easy-going kind of fellow with plenty of brains. He was a pakeha with the pakehas, a Maori with the Maoris, was this great John Bull of a Yankee.”

  King Wepiha’s reign was almost over when Campbell met him. All the landsharks had been dispersed by the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and the accompanying invalidation of all previous land sales not transacted through the Crown. The British government had discovered that most of New Zealand had already been “sold” by the native owners. Wentworth, the Australian statesman, was the most distinguished claimant as his syndicate’s share was nearly all of the South Island, bought for a halfpenny an acre. Webster’s more modest holdings embraced land on Great Barrier, Waiheke and in the Thames. He refused the token compensation offered and went back to America where his own government took up his case with the Secretary of State for the Colonies. The legal dispute was occasionally revived in Congress; the last time was in 1928 when Webster’s heirs finally abandoned the family claims.

  While he was King of the Waiau, timber was the richest coin, but the Coromandel Peninsula, which was one of the triumvirate of kauri lands in the north, had more than tall trees, it had gold as well.

  In 1850 the population of Auckland was 30,000 and in a year it lost a thousand men to the Californian gold fields and fifteen hundred to the Australian. Local merchants, scenting ruin, offered a reward to anyone who made a strike nearer home. In 1852 Charles Ring, back from prospecting in California, found gold in Coromandel the day he started looking for it. The deposits were in a creek not far from a timber mill where he and his brother had once worked. The flutter did not amount to much and soon was overshadowed by the southern goldfields of Otago. When the great rushes to the Shotover and the Dunstan began, Auckland entered a dismal decade of depression and soup kitchens. She was the poor relation of the New Zealand provinces. The Coromandel field was worked throughout the Waikato Wars and the first quartz crusher installed in 1864, but it was three more years before Maori opposition to any more land being taken for gold was overcome. Then the real excitement began in 1867, when the Thames was opened. The rest of the 19th century saw a gaudy procession of rush succeeding rush, just as they had burst like fireworks round the Pacific from San Francisco to Ballarat. The climax was reached with the Martha Mine at Waihi, whose total yield of silver and gold was twenty and a half million pounds.

  Between the rushes were recurring interludes of depression. Thames was clouded with just such a storm, when an unnamed reporter was sending reports back to the Thames Evening Star in 1875 describing the tumult attendant on opening up a new field at Ohinemuri and laying out the settlement of Mackaytown.

  “Thur. Mar. 4.

  Whole township alive at 6 a.m. Time hangs heavily till 10.

  General adjustment of watches.

  50 foot counter — canvas up — clerk in front of each compartment with books of miners’ rights with no. of tickets. Strong fence — distance which clerk could conveniently reach outstretched hand, receive ticket and hand rights. Hour approached, excitement intensified, impatience visible every face. Horsemen mounted ready for use towards site prospectors claim as soon as “authority” to hand. Everything on 4 legs appeared able carry anxious miner over portion of road had to travel, engaged or stolen prev. night. Scene like Derby Day small scale.

  Heat stung, scarcely a puff of air, and Europeans and Maoris assembled a motley group, arrayed in curious dress or undress. A real Vanity Fair. Seconds counted. At length bust
le is observed amongst those pressing for places and Mr Mackay addressed assembled diggers. Short but ardent cheers. Hopes as agent for the General government to hand over to Capt. Fraser the proclam. of the goldfield for C.F. has been appointed Warden. (Voice: it could not be in better hands. Cheers.)

  Cheers scarcely completed when stampede. The strong barricade was sufficient to stand the test of this first attack. Intense excitement, utmost eagerness. Require the talent of Hogarth to depict the countenances or scene.

  Each so intent little notice crushing and scrambling over shoulders at imminent risk limb many, and esp. those nearest the barricades. 800 rights issued in indescribable confusion.

  Astonishing collection horses, some hidden in fern and teatree and many a man who went to sleep thinking beast securely tethered found minus when awake. Some slept alongside animals. More than one horse after race fell down and refused 2 eat or 2 rise from the rush 2B first on certain ground. The helter skelter at the creek was perhaps the most amusing and was watched with great interest by nos. who stationed themselves on the rise of the hill 4 that purpose. In some places men would be swimming, miner’s right, axe in hand, 2 gain the opp. bank in advance of others, others would run and swim alternately. Many the duckings stumbling over a boulder. By far the greatest no. trusted to their own legs, in some cases relays miners lessened labour and increased speed.

  A number armed in antic. resistance to their progress, one foolishly a 6 shooter in his hand as if to challenge all comers. Whether weapon or frantic appearance of the man said to have been 1st on his ground. As each received rights struggled through the crowds and rushed off madly, utmost desire outstrip all the others in rush to guard prospector’s claim. Horsemen started off with a rush but many came to grief, amidst all the crowd of horses were men on foot scampering as if their lives depended on their speed.

  The race continued about an hour.”