Islands of the Gulf

by Shirley Maddock

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A Parcel of Islands

  The New Zealand Company had always conjured up for me the Adelaide and the Bengal Merchant lying in Wellington Harbour in 1840, laden with Early Settlers, and the magisterial portrait of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the Company’s founder, which shows him in a thronelike chair with hounds posed gracefully about his long, slender feet. I did not know that his was the second company of that name and that another with similar intentions had been incorporated in 1825 with, as sponsor, the very Earl of Chatham who was Wakefield’s own patron. The first New Zealand Company is variously mentioned by contemporary writers, and summed up by R.A.A. Sherrin, a later historian, who wrote “The clearest thing about the company is its complete lack of success.” D’Urville, in a brief reference to what he calls the New Zealand Flax Society, merely reflects on the differences in the French and English character; the former stay-at-home and the latter “who are of an adventurous nature fearlessly transport their household goods to the ends of the earth.”

  The first New Zealand Company’s only attempt to form a colony was in 1826 and the “fearless Englishmen” were nearly all Scots; sawyers, carpenters, flax dressers and blacksmiths, under the captaincy of another Scot called James Herd. The land they chose for settlement was four islands in the Hauraki Gulf which lie east of Waiheke — Ponui, Paki, Pakatoa and Pakihi. The settlers were aboard a brig called the Rosanna and one of them, Thomas Shepherd, kept a journal, a few pages of which are in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. He describes their first landing on the mainland coast of the Gulf.

  “700 or 800 natives came from inland, some very savage in their actions and appearance. They had potatoes which were not very good, a large quantity of pigs, the best pork that was ever eaten, plenty of fine fresh ducks, wood pigeons and some green stone which is rather soft. No part of New Zealand have we seen or heard equal to this as a commercial settlement.”

  A deed of sale is also at the Mitchell, signed by Herd and showing the curious marks of the Maori landowners who cannot have had much idea of the significance of scratches on a piece of paper.

  DEED OF SALE PAKAHI, TARATOIA,1 PONUI & PAKI

  “Know all men by these present that in consideration of 1 double barreled gun, 8 muskets and 1 barrel of powder now paid and delivered by me Captain James Herd, the agent of the company denominated by the New Zealand Company instituted in London in the kingdom of Great Britain do fully and freely give grant bargain and sell unto George Lyall, Stewart Marjoribanks, George Palmer and Robert Torrens all of the city of London, all four pieces denominated the islands of Pakahi, Taratoia, Ponui and Paki, situated in the district of Tamaki named by Captain Cook the Thames and by the natives Te Cuppa in the island of Eaheinomaive2 on the west3 side of Wyheckee. Creeks, bays, harbours and for the three miles distant from their shores together with the trees thereon and their heirs for ever. Thus done and given out of my hand on board the Rosanna at anchor off Wyheckee this 23rd day of September in the year of Christ, 1826.”

  When this Christian bargain was concluded, the fearful little band of settlers went ashore at Pakihi, the smallest but one of their four islands. Their stay was very fleeting. One account says that a war canoe of Hongi’s happened to be passing and, to them, white men meant muskets and white men had been known to swap muskets for Maori crafts such as preserved tattooed heads. Having some recently severed heads about them in the canoe, they came close in shore shouting out and brandishing their samples. The settlers, misinterpreting the gesture, scuttled back on board the Rosanna and steadfastly refused to budge. Jerningham Wakefield, who, as Edward Gibbon’s nephew, is understandably critical of the first Company, has it that the Maoris merely performed a war dance, “There is every reason to believe, as a mark of welcome.” But whatever their intentions, they were marked enough for the Rosanna’s company to turn tail and never avail themselves further of these islands in the Gulf. They paused long enough to buy more land on the Hokianga, a part of the country Captain Herd knew fairly well. A few settled there but most of the party went back to New South Wales and the first New Zealand Company ceased to exist.

  * * *

  Rotoroa, though it is part of the group, was not included in Captain Herd’s parcel. It has a much more serious purpose than any other in Hauraki, as the Salvation Army who bought it in 1907 administer a hospital there for chronic alcoholics. “Six months on the Island” is a frequent cure prescribed in the magistrates’ court and patients may also come voluntarily. The present facilities can look after fifty men and capacity will be doubled by 1970 when a building programme is completed. Rotoroa’s near neighbour, Pakatoa once also belonged to the Army for the care of what were called “female inebriates”. Later on, their quarters were converted into a homely sort of boarding house and more recently it has become the most luxurious holiday resort in the Gulf.

  In just one day we visited both islands and our fellow passenger on the amphibian was Major McCallum, the Salvation Army Officer who was then in charge of Rotoroa. He is a kind, abundantly practical man with a very complete understanding of his charges, as he was once an alcoholic himself. He told me this while we were waiting to go aboard. The island contains 235 acres of good arable land and they run sheep and dairy cows, herds of pigs and 300 to 400 laying fowls. If the men are well enough, they work about the farm and in the gardens, but many of the patients when they first come are too weakened by a diet whose major components may have been cheap wine and methylated spirits to attempt even the lightest task.

  It was one of the gustiest, stormiest days of a gusty, stormy summer. Great ragged patches of threatening cloud whirled through the upper air and the wind lashed at the swollen grey sea. The landing on Rotoroa is a tight little cove with an old Northern Steamship Company vessel, the Rimu, beached here as a breakwater. The hospital buildings, built on a little rim, have a tropical look about them with their verandahs.

  “We look on the Rimu as a symbol of the place,” Major McCallum had said. “Or as a symbol of the men who come here as wrecks looking for help. Sometimes we fail each other, but when we succeed it is a whole man who goes back to the mainland instead of a derelict.”

  The storm was being driven back by the time we landed at Pakatoa and a drenched cobalt sky emerged from behind the rain. It is a blandly shaped little island of sixty acres and nowhere higher than 185 feet, with pretty beaches and some fine pohutukawa which lately have been augmented by plantings of more than three thousand native trees. Since April 1964, when bought by Sir Robert Kerridge, it has been turned into a small town with 33 chalets, 10 cabana units and a large complex containing the offices, a licensed restaurant and shop. The chalets are built under the lee of the slight hill and their view directed towards the Gulf and the other neighbouring islands. Pakatoa had no electric power except for a small generator, no sewage or water supply, but now there is a reticulated system from two reservoirs, power is brought from Waiheke by an armoured submarine cable, 3,300 yards long, there is a sewerage treatment plant and all of these services are underground. Everything had to be brought down by barge in a wet winter and a worse spring and hauled away to the sites by bulldozers and an army of workmen encamped on the foreshore.

  By the summer of 1964 the island was open for business and, by 1965, when Pakatoa’s transformation was completed, 500 people could boat, swim, fish (or perform illegal operations on the oyster-encrusted rocks with clasp knives, as we surprised one well-known Auckland citizen doing) and enjoy the delights, however cushioned with mid-20th century comfort, of being a temporary islander.

  * * *

  Ponui, with its sheltered beaches and some four-and-a-half thousand acres of ascending green hills, was by far the best of the land Captain Herd acquired in his preposterous bargain. By then, the Ngatipaoa, whose pa sites can still be found on almost every headland, had been destroyed by Hongi Hika in his inexorable progress through Tamaki and Hauraki.

  In 1853 two Maoris, Karamu and Kupenga, sold Ponui to the Cro
wn for £100. The deed, with one breathless sentence of one hundred and forty-three words, declares that Ponui “passes to Victoria the Queen of England and the Kings and Queens after her for ever and ever . . . Witness our names signed Karamu and Kupenga.”

  Almost a year later, Governor Wynyard disposed of Queen Victoria’s rights when Ponui was sold as a Crown Grant to two brothers called Frederick and Charles Chamberlin. The young men were well-educated and well-born with sufficient capital to buy land and pay for labour.

  “Charley and I always had a wish for a “run” rather than a small farm,” Frederick wrote in his diary when he had been down to look at Ponui. “A white man” (he does not say his name) “who had been living here for the ten years previous, having purchased one bay from the natives which he had been cultivating and with killing a wild pig now and then managed to exist, took me over the island . . . I felt I should like the place if the government would buy it from the natives.”

  While he waited to see if title could be obtained to Ponui, Frederick made a trip to the Waikato in company with a government interpreter called Johnson. “We went up the river having our own four natives and eleven others beside who were to be the vendors of a fine tract of land on the banks of the Waikato. They paddled us up in good style and we had morning and evening prayers and psalm singing all the way.” When the party arrived at the native village, they found a large faction who hotly opposed the sale of a single acre. “There had been a feast going on for about the last week and one of the most prodigal wasteful sights to be imagined. I must mention now . . . a very violent speech delivered by one of the opposition who was running backwards and forwards and stamping and jumping about like a maniac. ‘What,’ he said, ‘is the use of selling our ground which our forefathers fought for, what is the use of money to us, we cannot eat that, we spend it and we have nothing. Let us keep the land that is our sustenance,’ and taking up a handful he stuffed it down his throat. ‘And I say do not let the white man come on the sacred river, that granary of the Maoris, the favourite Waikato.’ That,” said Frederick, “was the translation Johnson gave me of it and we had some capital specimens of cannibal oratory.” In 1853 very few Englishmen could believe a savage might love his land and mourn the loss of it.

  In July, Frederick Chamberlin, accompanied by a Mr Locke and his son Samuel whom he had engaged to work on the island, took up his holding on Ponui. His diary during those months tells of clearing and ploughing and wild pigs shot, of hedges planted and scrub burned and how he walked over to Motunau Bay (where the solitary white man must have lived) and “gathered a bouquet there of scarlet geranium, roses white and red, marigolds, sweet peas and iris” and how he passed his 27th birthday, which was a wet day, reading a life of Columbus.

  In November, when, to his great joy, his brother Charles joined him, he writes about “Charley doing a heavy wash” while he tried his hand at a loaf of soda bread and sweet seed cakes baked in the frying pan, “all turned out well.” Not like old Mr Locke whose seed cake “when broken appeared to have cobwebs inside.” He goes on to tell how Charley aroused the household one morning with the Post Horn Gallop, about sails and occasional visits to the mainland and the small victories when the first lambs and calves were born, and the wheat sprung. “Christmas Day, 1854. Went for a short cruise in the dinghy, lost our turkey it having broken out of the house. A fine day, had raspberry pudding, the first since we left Home.”

  The Chamberlins lived in a raupo whare, while they waited for their house to arrive from England. It was prefabricated, two storeys and built in sections of Baltic Pine and, when it arrived, they erected it at Poroaki where it stands to this day. Frederick did not raise a family here. He went off some ten years later to England and married there. Charles, his younger brother, took a wife called Anne; they had two daughters and four sons and the three branches of the family who farm Ponui now are all their direct descendants.

  * * *

  I can never recall a solemn flight by amphibian but the morning we flew to Ponui seemed uncommonly blithe. Perhaps it was because an announcement had just been made that Captain Ladd had been awarded the Brackley Memorial Trophy for outstanding services to aviation and for the countless flights of rescue he has made in the Gulf and that he and Mabel must presently fly to London to receive the trophy. Perhaps it was that nearly all the pictures had been taken, or perhaps it was the weather which, for once in the glum February of 1965, was fine and hot and all that February should be. To celebrate whatever it was, Fred improvised a new chant for takeoff:

  “With a hiss and a roar, we’re off full bore!” and we thundered over the summit of Rangitoto, drew a wand-like ring round Brown’s and the Gulf lay before us, a great gleaming shield with the islands set down on it like jewels.

  One member of our party found us very odd. He was a young Swiss businessman who had allowed himself this one day for sightseeing. He was startled when we first took off, still more so when we landed at Orapiu on Waiheke and Fred raised his hand like a conductor’s baton and said “Now you all know the words” — and we chanted “We’re away in a shower of spray!” The poor young man from Zurich, who did not know the words, looked more alarmed than ever.

  But not nearly so alarmed as when we touched down at Oranga Bay at Ponui. Since the tide was down, we had to land a good distance from the shore. Mr Ernest Chamberlin was rowing out in the dinghy.

  “Come on” said Fred and chivvied his passenger down to the rear door. “Hop out.”

  “Out?” said the Swiss, seeing nothing but water.

  “Don’t sit on the fabric, sit on the metal” commanded Fred.

  “The metal?” repeated the poor Swiss. Fred meant him to climb out and sit on the plane, which is a treat he keeps for fine days and is good for taking photographs.

  Herr Grau looked at his polished shoes, his knife-creased trousers, the immaculate skirts of his overcoat.

  “Go on” encouraged Fred, “Hop out.”

  Just then Mr Chamberlin came alongside with the dinghy and, anxious to please, Herr Grau floundered thankfully into the stern.

  “I meant here” Fred told him kindly but a little late and leapt lightly on to the amphibian’s back.

  “Oh” said Herr Grau, and clicked away with his costly camera, so that he had proof of this eccentric pilot to take back to Zurich.

  “Inside now” said the eccentric pilot and his passenger crept thankfully through the little door and quickly fastened his belt. Then he and Fred with a hiss and a roar were off full bore.

  A long poplar-lined drive goes from the beach to the old house which came out in sections from England. Miss Bea Chamberlin lives here. In the garden were tall oleanders and camellia trees and a datura had scattered its creamy trumpets on the grass. There were clumps of blue plumbago and little wild bees swarming in the claret coloured pincushions. I asked Miss Bea the name of a blush pink rose, a frilled old-fashioned centifolia very golden at the heart, like a Redouté drawing. It was a slip brought out from England, she told me, and they call it the Poroaki Rose because its other name has been forgotten. The wide verandah kept the rooms shaded and cool (in one was an engraving of Narborough Hall, the Chamberlin home near Norwich) and a narrow wooden stair like a ship’s companionway led to the attic rooms baked with the lovely warmth of sun through old timber. There were stacks of the Auckland Weekly News going back before the First World War, an invalid chair, shelves of Edwardian novels and travel books, a box of duelling pistols in a velvet-lined case (the hammers stuck fast with rust), a regimental sword, a wooden chest of flags and bunting and a huge and splendid perambulator, the body curlicued with wicker arabesques. At the foot of the stair was a storeroom with apples and pears laid out in rows for keeping till the winter.

  The Ernest Chamberlins live higher up the hill in a much newer house. They have four children, two sons, John and Richard, a daughter, Claire, at home and another, Mary, who serves abroad with the External Affairs Department of the New Zealand Government. We sat on
a wistaria-hung porch and looked at the diaries. Denis Creagh, a Chamberlin on his mother’s side, whose lifelong interest has been the island’s history, completed some of the stories for us.

  Ernest Chamberlin offered the choice of going to Motunau, where we were to spend the night, by launch or Landrover. We chose the launch and slid lazily round the coast, past Galatea Bay where the first cargo of stock was landed, Merinos, Herefords and a pair of donkeys who bred with such profusion that almost all the donkey population of New Zealand has sprung from Ponui; then Rabbit Bay, named for a pair released here but who died without heir.

  We tied up at the wharf at Te Kawau and walked ashore with clouds of terns fluttering about our heads. George Chamberlin, whose house is close to the beach, was away, so we called on his sister who lives on the headland in a verandahed old house surrounded by a beautiful rambling garden. The coral amaryllis were growing beside the drive. Miss Olive came down the steps to meet us, showed us an immense camphor laurel at the bottom of the lawn and told me how she likes to plant flowers on the gravel drive as well as in the flower beds, golden snapdragons, and zinnias, and freesias in the spring.

  So high were the great trees surrounding the lawns and the beds of gnarled old rosebushes, that the sea which lay at the bottom of the garden was invisible and the day too still even to hear it. As we continued along the coast, Denis Creagh pointed out the terraced pa sites and the cliff where gold quartz was discovered in 1869. The family used to take it over to Coromandel in their cutter to be crushed, until the seam ran out.