BREAM HEAD, WHANGAREI HEADS
The sealers and whalers of the first four decades of the nineteenth century knew our outlying islands well. Of the interior of our mainland they knew nothing whatever; but they searched every bay and cove of the butt-end of the South Island, of Rakiura, and of the smaller islets for the whale and fur seal. The schooners and brigs that carried these rough-handed adventurers commonly hailed either from Sydney, Boston, or Nantucket, places that were not in those days schools of marine politeness or forbearance. The captains and crews that they sent out to southern seas looked on the New Zealand coast as a No Man’s Land, peopled by ferocious cannibals, who were to be traded with, or killed, as circumstances might direct. The Maori met them very much in the same spirit. Many are the stories told of the dealings, peaceable or warlike, of the white ruffians with the brown savages. In 1823, for instance, the schooner Snapper brought away from Rakiura to Sydney a certain James Caddell, a white seaman with a tattooed face. This man had, so he declared, been landed on Stewart Island seventeen years earlier, as one of a party of seal-hunters. They were at once set upon by the natives, and all killed save Caddell, who saved his life by clutching the sacred mantle of a chief and thus obtaining the benefit of the law of Tapu. He was allowed to join the tribe, to become one of the fighting men, and to marry a chief’s daughter. At any rate, that was his story. It may have been true, for he is said to have turned his back on Sydney and deliberately returned to live among the Maori.
A more dramatic tale is that of the fate of a boat’s crew from the General Gates, American sealing ship. In 1821 her captain landed a party of six men somewhere near Puysegur Point to collect seal-skins. So abundant were the fur seals on our south-west coast in those days that in six weeks the men had taken and salted 3563 skins. Suddenly a party of Maori burst into their hut about midnight, seized the unlucky Americans, and, after looting the place, marched them off as prisoners. According to the survivors, they were compelled to trudge between three and four hundred miles, and were finally taken to a big sandy bay on the west coast of the South Island. Here they were tied to trees and left without food till they were ravenously hungry. Then one of them, John Rawton, was killed with a club. His head was buried in the ground; his body dressed, cooked, and eaten. On each of the next three days another of the wretched seamen was seized and devoured in the same way, their companions looking on like Ulysses in the cave of the Cyclops. As a crowning horror the starving seamen were offered some of the baked human flesh and ate it. After four days of this torment there came a storm with thunder and lightning, which drove the natives away to take shelter. Left thus unguarded, Price and West, the two remaining prisoners, contrived to slip their bonds of flax. A canoe was lying on the beach, and rough as the surf was, they managed to launch her. Scarcely were they afloat before the natives returned and rushed into the sea after them, yelling loudly. The Americans had just sufficient start and no more. Paddling for dear life, they left the land behind, and had the extraordinary fortune, after floating about for three days, to be picked up, half dead, by the trading schooner Margery. The story of their capture and escape is to be found in Polack’s New Zealand, published in 1838. Recently, Mr. Robert M’Nab has unearthed contemporary references to the General Gates, and, in his book Muri-huku, has given an extended account of the adventures of her skipper and crew. The captain, Abimelech Riggs by name, seems to have been a very choice salt-water blackguard. He began his career at the Antipodes by enlisting convicts in Sydney, and carrying them off as seamen. For this he was arrested in New Zealand waters, and had to stand his trial in Sydney. In Mr. M’Nab’s opinion, he lost two if not three parties of his men on the New Zealand coast, where he seems to have left them to take their chance, sailing off and remaining away with the finest indifference. Finally, he appears to have taken revenge by running down certain canoes manned by Maori which he chanced to meet in Foveaux Straits. After that coup, Captain Abimelech Riggs vanishes from our stage, a worthy precursor of Captain Stewart of the brig Elisabeth, the blackest scoundrel of our Alsatian period.
LAWYER’S HEAD
Maori history does not contribute very much to the romance of the south-west. A broken tribe, the Ngatimamoe, were in the eighteenth century driven back to lurk among the mountains and lakes there. Once they had owned the whole South Island. Their pitiless supplanters, the Ngaitahu, would not let them rest even in their unenviable mountain refuges. They were chased farther and farther westward, and finally exterminated. A few still existed when the first navigators cast anchor in the fiords. For many years explorers hoped to find some tiny clan hidden away in the tangled recesses of Fiordland; but it would seem that they are gone, like the moa.
The whites came in time to witness the beginning of a fresh process of raiding and dispossession—the attacks on the Ngaitahu by other tribes from the north. The raids of Rauparaha among the Ngaitahu of the eastern coast of the South Island have often been described; for, thanks to Mr. Travers, Canon Stack, and other chroniclers, many of their details have been preserved. Much less is known of the doings of Rauparaha’s lieutenants on the western coast, though one of their expeditions passed through the mountains and the heart of Otago. Probably enough, his Ngatitoa turned their steps towards Westland in the hope of annexing the tract wherein is found the famous greenstone—a nephrite prized by the Maori at once for its hardness and beauty. In their stone age—that is to say, until the earlier decades of the nineteenth century—it furnished them with their most effective tools and deadliest weapons. The best of it is so hard that steel will not scratch its surface, while its clear colour, varying from light to the darkest green, is far richer than the hue of oriental jade. Many years—as much as two generations—might be consumed in cutting and polishing a greenstone meré fit for a great chief.[5] When perfected, such a weapon became a sacred heirloom, the loss of which would be wailed over as a blow to its owner’s tribe.
[5] See Mr. Justice Chapman’s paper on the working of greenstone in the Transactions of the N.Z. Institute.
A MAORI CHIEFTAINESS