NO MAN'S LAND
"The wild justice of revenge."
The Maoris told Cook that, years before the _Endeavour_ first entered
Poverty Bay, a ship had visited the northern side of Cook's Strait and
stayed there some time, and that a half-caste son of the captain was
still living. In one of his later voyages, the navigator was informed
that a European vessel had lately been wrecked near the same part of
the country, and that the crew, who reached the shore, had all been
clubbed after a desperate resistance. It is likely enough that many a
roving mariner who touched at the islands never informed the world of
his doings, and had, indeed, sometimes excellent reasons for secrecy.
Still, for many years after the misadventure of Marion du Fresne, the
more prudent Pacific skippers gave New Zealand a wide berth. When
D'Entrecasteaux, the French explorer, in his voyage in search of the
ill-fated _La Perouse_, lay off the coast in 1793, he would not even
let a naturalist, who was on one of his frigates, land to have a
glimpse of the novel flora of the wild and unknown land. Captain
Vancouver, in 1791, took shelter in Dusky Bay, in the sounds of
the South Island. Cook had named an unsurveyed part of that region
Nobody-Knows-What. Vancouver surveyed it and gave it its present name,
Somebody-Knows-What. But the chief act for which his name is noted in
New Zealand history is his connection with the carrying off of two
young Maoris--a chief and a priest--to teach the convicts of the
Norfolk Island penal settlement how to dress flax. Vancouver had been
asked by the Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island to induce two
Maoris to make the voyage. He therefore sent an officer in a
Government storeship to New Zealand, whose notion of inducement was to
seize the first Maoris he could lay hands on. The two captives, it
may be mentioned, scornfully refused to admit any knowledge of the
"woman's work" of flax-dressing. Soothed by Lieutenant-Governor King,
they were safely restored by him to their people loaded with presents.
When in Norfolk Island, one of them, at King's request, drew a map of
New Zealand, which is of interest as showing how very little of his
country a Maori of average intelligence then knew. Of even more
interest to us is it to remember that the kindly Lieutenant-Governor's
superior officer censured him for wasting time--ten whole days--in
taking two savages back to their homes.
For two generations after Cook the English Government paid no
attention to the new-found land. What with losing America, and
fighting the French, it had its hands full. It colonized Australia
with convicts--and found it a costly and dubious experiment. The
Government was well satisfied to ignore New Zealand. But adventurous
English spirits were not The islands ceased to be inaccessible when
Sydney became an English port, from which ships could with a fair wind
make the Bay of Islands in eight or ten days. In the seas round New
Zealand were found the whale and the fur-seal. The Maoris might be
cannibals, but they were eager to trade. In their forests grew trees
capable of supplying first-class masts and spars. Strange weapons,
ornaments, and cloaks, were offered by the savages, as well as food
and the dressed fibre of the native flax. An axe worth ten shillings
would buy three spars worth ten pounds in Sydney. A tenpenny nail
would purchase a large fish. A musket and a little powder and lead
were worth a ton of scraped flax. Baskets of potatoes would be brought
down and ranged on the sea-beach three deep. The white trader would
then stretch out enough calico to cover them. The strip was their
price. The Maoris loved the higgling of the market, and would enjoy
nothing better than to spend half a day over bartering away a single
pig. Moreover, a peculiar and profitable, if ghastly, trade sprang up
in tattooed heads. A well-preserved specimen fetched as much as twenty
pounds, and a man "with a good head on his shoulders" was consequently
worth that sum to any one who could kill him. Contracts for the sale
of heads of men still living are said to have been entered into
between chiefs and traders, and the heads to have been duly delivered
"as per agreement." Hitherto hung up as trophies of victory in the
_pas_, these relics of battle were quickly turned to account, at first
for iron, then for muskets, powder, and lead. When the natural supply
of heads of slain enemies ran short, slaves, who had hitherto never
been allowed the aristocratic privilege and dignity of being tattooed,
had their faces prepared for the market. Sometimes, it is recorded, a
slave, after months of painful preparation, had the audacity to run
away with his own head before the day of sale and decapitation. Astute
vendors occasionally tried the more merciful plan of tattooing "plain"
heads after death in ordinary course of battle. But this was a species
of fraud, as the lines soon became indistinct. Such heads have often
been indignantly pointed at by enthusiastic connoisseurs. Head-sellers
at times would come forward in the most unlikely places. Commodore
Wilkes, when exploring in the American _Vincennes_, bought two heads
from the steward of a missionary brig. It was missionary effort,
however, which at length killed the traffic, and the art of tattooing
along with it. Moved thereby, Governor Darling issued at Sydney, in
1831, proclamations imposing a fine of forty pounds upon any one
convicted of head-trading, coupled with the exposure of the offender's
name. Moreover, he took active steps to enforce the prohibition. When
Charles Darwin visited the mission station near the Bay of Islands
in 1835, the missionaries confessed to him that they had grown so
accustomed to associate tattooing with rank and dignity--had so
absorbed the Maori social code relating thereto--that an unmarked face
seemed to them vulgar and mean. Nevertheless, their influence led the
way in discountenancing the art, and it has so entirely died out that
there is probably not a completely tattooed Maori head on living
shoulders to-day.
Cook had found the Maoris still in the Stone Age. They were far too
intelligent to stay there a day after the use of metals had been
demonstrated to them. Wits much less acute than a Maori's would
appreciate the difference between hacking at hardwood trees with a
jade tomahawk, and cutting them down with a European axe. So New
Zealand's shores became, very early in this century, the favourite
haunt of whalers, sealers, and nondescript trading schooners.
Deserters and ship-wrecked seamen were adopted by the tribes. An
occasional runaway convict from Australia added spice to the mixture.
The lot of these unacknowledged and unofficial pioneers of our race
was chequered. Some castaways were promptly knocked on the head and
eaten. Some suffered in slavery. In 1815 two pale, wretched-looking
men, naked, save for flax mats tied round their waists threw
themselves on the protection of the captain of the _Active_, then
lying in the Bay of Islands. It appeared that both had been convicts
who had got away from Sydney as stowaways in a ship bound for New
Zealand, the captain of which, on arrival, had handed them over to the
missionaries to be returned to New South Wales. The men, however, ran
away into the country, believing that the natives would reverence them
as superior beings and maintain them in comfortable idleness. They
were at once made slaves of. Had they been strong, handy agricultural
labourers, their lot would have been easy enough. Unfortunately for
them, one had been a London tailor, the other a shoemaker, and the
luckless pair of feeble Cockneys could be of little use to their
taskmasters. These led them such a life that they tried running away
once more, and lived for a time in a cave, subsisting chiefly on
fern-root. A period of this diet, joined to their ever-present fear
of being found out and killed, drove them back to Maori slavery. From
this they finally escaped to the _Active_--more like walking spectres
than men, says an eye-witness--and resigned, if needs must, to endure
once more the tender mercies of convict life in Botany Bay.
More valuable whites were admitted into the tribes, and married to
one, sometimes two or three, wives. The relatives of these last
occasionally resorted to an effectual method of securing their
fidelity by tattooing them. One of them, John Rutherford, survived and
describes the process. But as he claims to have had his face and part
of his body thoroughly tattooed in four hours, his story is but one
proof amongst a multitude that veracity was not a needful part of the
equipment of the New Zealand adventurer of the Alsatian epoch. Once
enlisted, the _Pakehas_ were expected to distinguish themselves in the
incessant tribal wars. Most of them took their share of fighting with
gusto. As trade between whites and Maoris grew, each tribe made a
point of having a white agent-general, called their _Pakeha_ Maori
(Foreigner Maorified), to conduct their trade and business with his
fellows. He was the tribe's vassal, whom they petted and plundered as
the mood led them, but whom they protected against outsiders. These
gentry were for the most part admirably qualified to spread the vices
of civilization and discredit its precepts. But, illiterate ruffians
as most of them were, they had their uses in aiding peaceful
intercourse between the races. Some, too, were not illiterate. A
Shakespeare and a Lemprière were once found in the possession of a
chief in the wildest part of the interior. They had belonged to his
_Pakeha_ long since dead. Elsewhere a tattered prayer-book was shown
as the only relic of another. One of the kind, Maning by name, who
lived with a tribe on the beautiful inlet of Hokianga, will always be
known as _the_ Pakeha Maori. He was an Irish adventurer, possessed not
only of uncommon courage and acuteness, but of real literary talent
and a genial and charming humour. He lived to see savagery replaced by
colonization, and to become a judicial officer in the service of the
Queen's Government. Some of his reminiscences, embodied in a volume
entitled _Old New Zealand_, still form the best book which the Colony
has been able to produce. Nowhere have the comedy and childishness of
savage life been so delightfully portrayed. Nowhere else do we get
such an insight into that strange medley of contradictions and
caprices, the Maori's mind.
We have already seen that a lieutenant in Her Majesty's service
thought it no crime in 1793 to kidnap two chiefs in order to save a
little trouble. We have seen how Cook shot natives for refusing to
answer questions, and how De Surville could seize and sail away with a
friendly chief because some one else had stolen his boat. When in
1794 that high and distinguished body, the East India Company, sent
a well-armed "snow" to the Hauraki gulf for kauri spars she did not
leave until her captain had killed his quota of natives,--two men and
a woman,--shot, because, forsooth, some axes had been stolen. If such
were the doings of officials, it came as a matter of course that the
hard-handed merchant-skippers who in brigs and schooners hung round
the coasts of the Islands thought little of carrying off men or women.
They would turn their victims adrift in Australia or on some South Sea
islet, as their humour moved them. With even more cruel callousness,
they would sometimes put Maoris carried off from one tribe on shore
amongst another and maybe hostile tribe. Slavery was the best fate
such unfortunates could expect. On one occasion the missionaries in
the Bay of Islands rescued from bondage twelve who had in this fashion
been thrown amongst their sworn enemies. Their only offence was that
they had happened to be trading on board a brig in their own port when
a fair wind sprang up. The rascal in command carried them off rather
than waste any of the wind by sending them on shore.
An even more heartless piece of brutality was the conduct of a certain
captain from Sydney, who took away with him the niece of a Bay of
Islands chief, and after living with her for months abandoned her on
shore in the Bay of Plenty, where she was first enslaved and finally
killed and eaten by the local chief. The result was a bitter tribal
war in which she was amply avenged.
Another skipper, after picking up a number of freshly-cured tattooed
heads, the fruit of a recent tribal battle, put into the bay of the
very tribe which had been beaten in the fighting. When a number of
natives came on board to trade, he thought it a capital joke--after
business was over--to roll out on the deck a sackful of the heads of
their slain kinsfolk. Recognising the features, the insulted Maoris
sprang overboard with tears and cries of rage.
[Illustration: MAORI WAHINÉ
Photo by GENERAL ROBLEY.]
A third worthy, whilst trading in the Bay of Islands, missed some
articles on board his schooner. He at once had the chief Koro Koro,
who happened to be on board, seized and bound hand and foot in the
cabin. Koro Koro, who was noted both for strength and hot temper,P
Land. They were varied by tragedies on a larger scale. In 1809 the
_Boyd_, a ship of 500 tons--John Thompson, master--had discharged a
shipload of English convicts in Sydney. The captain decided to take in
a cargo of timber in New Zealand, and accordingly sailed to Whangaroa,
a romantic inlet to the north of the Bay of Islands. Amongst the crew
were several Maoris. One of these, known as George, was a young chief,
though serving before the mast. During the voyage he was twice flogged
for refusing to work on the plea of illness. The captain added insult
to the stripes by the words, "You are no chief!" The sting of this lay
in the sacredness attached by Maori custom to a chief's person, which
was _tapu_--_i.e._ a thing not to be touched. George--according to his
own account[1]--merely replied that when they reached New Zealand the
captain would see that he was a chief. But he vowed vengeance, and on
reaching Whangaroa showed his stripes to his kinsfolk, as Boadicea
hers to the Britons of old. The tribesmen, with the craft of which the
apparently frank and cheerful Maori has so ample a share, quietly laid
their plans. The captain was welcomed. To divide their foes, the Maori
beguiled him and a party of sailors into the forest, where they killed
them all. Then, dressing themselves in the clothes of the dead, the
slayers made off to the _Boyd_. Easily coming alongside in their
disguises, they leaped on the decks and massacred crew and passengers
without pity. George himself clubbed half a dozen, who threw
themselves at his feet begging for mercy. Yet even in his fury he
spared a ship's boy who had been kind to him, and who ran to him
for protection, and a woman and two girl-children. All four were
afterwards rescued by Mr. Berry, of Sydney, and took refuge with a
friendly neighbouring chief, Te Pehi. Meanwhile, the _Boyd_ had been
stripped and burned. In the orgie that followed George's father
snapped a flint-lock musket over a barrel of gunpowder, and, with the
followers round him, was blown to pieces. Nigh seventy lives were lost
in the _Boyd_ massacre. Of course the slain were eaten.
[Footnote 1: As given by him to J.L. Nicholas five years afterwards.
See Nicholas' _Voyage to New Zealand_, vol. i., page 145. There are
those who believe the story of the flogging to be an invention of
George. Their authority is Mr. White, a Wesleyan missionary who lived
at Whangaroa from 1823 to 1827, and to whom the natives are said to
have admitted this. But that must have been, at least, fourteen years
after the massacre, and George was by that time at odds with many of
his own people. He died in 1825. His last hours were disturbed by
remorse arising from an incident in the _Boyd_ affair. He had not, he
thought, properly avenged the death of his father--blown up by the
powder-barrel. Such was the Maori conscience.]
Then ensued a tragedy of errors. The captains of certain whalers lying
in the Bay of Islands, hearing that the survivors of the _Boyd_ were
at Te Pehi's village, concluded that that kindly chief was a partner
in the massacre. Organizing a night attack, the whalers destroyed
the village and its guiltless owners. The unlucky Te Pehi, fleeing
wounded, fell into the hands of some of George's people, who,
regarding him as a sympathiser with the whites, made an end of him.
Finally, to avenge him, some of the survivors of his tribe afterwards
killed and ate three seamen who had had nothing to do with any stage
of the miserable drama.
Less well known than the fate of the _Boyd_ is the cutting-off of the
brig _Hawes_ in the Bay of Plenty in 1829. It is worth relating, if
only because it shows that the Maoris were not always the provoked
party in these affairs, and that, moreover, vengeance, even in No
Man's Land, did not always fall only on the guiltless. In exchange for
fire-arms and gunpowder the captain had filled his brig with flax and
pigs. He had sailed out to Whale Island in the Bay, and by a boiling
spring on the islet's beach was engaged with some of his men in
killing and scalding the pigs and converting them into salt pork.
Suddenly the amazed trader saw the canoes of his friendly customers
of the week before, headed by their chief "Lizard," sweep round and
attack the _Hawes_. The seamen, still on board, ran up the rigging,
where they were shot. The captain, with those on the islet, rowed away
for their lives. The brig was gutted and burnt. The Maoris, perplexed
by finding a number of bags of the unknown substance flour, emptied
the contents into the sea, keeping the bags.[1]
[Footnote 1: Judge Wilson's _Story of Te Waharoa_.]
Certain white traders in the Bay of Islands resolved to bring "Lizard"
to justice, in other words to shoot him. They commissioned a schooner,
the _New Zealander_, to go down to the scene of the outrage. A
friendly Bay of Islands chief offered to do the rest. He went with the
schooner. On its arrival the unsuspecting "Lizard" came off to trade.
At the end of a friendly visit he was stepping into his canoe when his
unofficially appointed executioner stepped quietly forward, levelled
his double-barrelled gun, and shot "Lizard" dead.
As a matter of course the affair did not end there: "Lizard's" tribe
were bound in honour to retaliate. But upon whom? The _Pakehas_ who
had caused their chiefs death were far out of reach in the north.
Still they were not the only _Pakehas_ in the land. In quite a
different direction, in the harbour which Captain Cook had dubbed
Hicks's Bay, lived two inoffensive Whites who had not even heard of
"Lizard's" death. What of that? They were Whites, and therefore of the
same tribe as the _Pakehas_ concerned! So the village in which they
lived was stormed, one White killed at once, the other captured.
As the latter stood awaiting execution and consumption, by an
extraordinary stroke of fortune a whaling ship ran into the bay.
The adroit captive offered, if his life were spared, to decoy his
countrymen on shore, so that they could be massacred. The bargain was
cheerfully struck; and when an armed boat's crew came rowing to land,
the _Pakeha_, escorted to the seaside by a murderous and expectant
throng, stood on a rock and addressed the seamen in English. What
he told them to do, however, was to get ready and shoot his captors
directly he dived from the rock into the water. Accordingly his plunge
was followed by a volley. The survivors of the outwitted Maoris turned
and fled, and the clever _Pakeha_ was picked up and carried safely on
board.
At that time there was living among "Lizard's" people a certain Maori
from the Bay of Islands. This man, a greedy and mischievous fellow,
had instigated "Lizard" to cut off the _Hawes_. This became known, and
Waka Néné, a Bay of Islands chief, destined to become famous in New
Zealand history, punished his rascally fellow-tribesman in a very
gallant way. On a visit to the Bay of Plenty he bearded the man
sitting unsuspecting among his partners in the piracy, and, after
fiercely upbraiding him, shot him dead. Nor did any present venture to
touch Waka Néné.
The South Island had its share of outrages. On December 12, 1817, the
brig _Sophia_ anchored in Otago Harbour. Kelly, her captain, was a man
of strength and courage, who had gained some note by sailing round
Tasmania in an open boat. He now had use for these qualities. The day
after arrival he rowed with six men to a small native village outside
the harbour heads, at a spot still called Murdering Beach. Landing
there, he began to bargain with the Maoris for a supply of potatoes. A
Lascar sailor, who was living with the savages, acted as interpreter.
The natives thronged round the seamen. Suddenly there was a yell, and
they rushed upon the whites, of whom two were killed at once. Kelly,
cutting his way through with a bill-hook he had in his hand, reached
the boat and pushed out from the beach. Looking back, he saw one of
his men (his brother-in-law, Tucker) struggling with the mob. The
unhappy man had but time to cry, "Captain Kelly, for God's sake don't
leave me!" when he was knocked down in the surf, and hacked to death.
Another seaman was reeling in the boat desperately wounded. Kelly
himself was speared through one hand.
The survivors regained their ship. She was swarming with natives, who
soon learned what had happened and became wildly excited. Kelly drew
his men aft and formed them into a solid body. When the Maoris, headed
by their chief Karaka--Kelly spells it Corockar--rushed at them, the
seamen beat them off, using their large sealing-knives with such
effect that they killed sixteen, and cleared the decks. The remaining
natives jumped overboard. A number were swept away by the ebb-tide and
drowned. Next day the crew, now only fourteen in number, repulsed an
attempt made in canoes to take the vessel by boarding, and killed
Karaka. Emboldened by this, they afterwards made an expedition to the
shore and cut up or stove in all their enemies' canoes lying on the
beach. This was on Christmas Eve. On Boxing Day they landed and burnt
the principal native village, which Kelly calls the "beautiful city of
Otago of about six hundred fine houses"--not the only bit of patent
exaggeration in his story. Then they sailed away.[1]
[Footnote 1: _Transactions New Zealand Institute_, vol. xxviii.]
What prompted the attack at Murdering Beach is uncertain--like so much
that used to happen in No Man's Land. It is said that Tucker had been
to Otago some years previously and had stolen a baked head from the
Maoris. It is hinted that an encounter had taken place on the coast
not long before in which natives had been shot and a boat's crew cut
off. As of most occurrences of the time, we can only suspect that
lesser crimes which remained hidden led to the greater, which are more
or less truthfully recorded.
[Illustration]