‘You paint my face, not this one,’ I tell him, jabbing at the photograph. It’s strange to hear myself speaking English out loud. ‘No feather.’
I smack my left ear so he understands about the feather, and the Bohemian smiles. If a ruru could smile, it would look like him. Even the Bohemian’s little beard is as pointed as a beak. Just his cap, which seems to be made of carpet, is round.
‘Next week I will go away,’ he says. He’s looking hard at my face, and then, without saying anything, he leans forward to take the photograph from my hands. His own hands are thin and veined with blue.
The Bohemian looks at the photograph for a long time. The only noise is the patter of rain against the glass, and a tired hiss from the fireplace. Then he gets up and pokes at the fire with the irons.
‘I go away too,’ I say. ‘Until October.’
If I’m alive then, of course. I think this argument at the Native Land Court may outlive me.
‘I am no more in Auckland this year,’ the Bohemian says. ‘In five days, my wife and I, we go. On Wednesday we sail for England. Mr Buller took some of my paintings to an exhibition in London. You know Mr Buller?’
I nod. This Mr Buller was once a judge at the land court, but not in Auckland or in Helensville. I’ve heard of him, but he’s not one of the judges I know, like Mr Monro and Mr O’Brien, who are sensible chaps, or Mr Macdonald, who is a stupid fellow, and utterly wrong in his judgments.
‘But perhaps …’ The Bohemian doesn’t finish his sentence. He looks at me and taps his chin – one, two, three. He doesn’t have any of the quickness of a bird about him. The last time a painter looked at me, it was very different from this. That painter had a bush of hair, wild eyes, and thick hands that crushed the pencil he was holding. He came to our lodgings and drew me, and then another person, and then another person, wriggling in his seat all the while. Months passed before any of us saw the painting. It was very big, and no one could recognise himself in it. In the picture we were all standing in a room at John Wesley’s house, a place we’d only visited – once or twice, I can’t remember.
This all took place in London. I must tell the Bohemian that I, Paratene Te Manu, have been to London, and have been painted before, and that the painting was very large indeed. I won’t tell him that in this painting I was on the edge of things and looked like a child trying to hide from view, rather than a rangatira, and the oldest person in the room. The only one among them to have fought alongside the great Hongi! The English don’t understand these things. Perhaps Bohemians don’t either.
I hope that the Bohemian is only planning a small painting, so it need not take months and months.
‘Can you come tomorrow?’ he asks me. ‘We meet tomorrow, and again on Monday and Tuesday, maybe?’
I agree to this. There’s little else for me to do in Auckland these days, except spend money and hear people talk about bad omens, and neither of these things is good for me at all.
‘You will talk to me about London, yes?’ The Bohemian is smiling again. He pins my photograph back on the wall. ‘I know you spent much time there, some years ago. With your friend, Mr Wharepapa.’
Wharepapa should write stories for the Auckland Weekly News. He likes to shout his business up and down the town. I’m sure he’s told the Bohemian that without him, without the personal invitation of the great Kamariera Te Hautakiri Wharepapa, I would have never stepped onto that ship and sailed to England.
This annoys me so much that I start muttering bad words and banging my stick on the floor. The painter, who I think does not understand Maori, glances at the window as though he’s eager for the day to be over. The rain has stopped and, finally, so do I.
‘Tomorrow,’ he says, bowing to me, and I let him help me up from my chair. This weather makes my bones creak.
When I leave the Bohemian’s little studio, I walk down Queen Street towards the water, making my way back towards the Native Hostel. The canal of shit is covered over now, but the city still smells, especially when the wind blows the smoke from the big sawmills at Te To. I could cut down Fort Street, but I don’t want to. Old men like me remember when this was Fore Street, when its shacks and stables used to gaze out to sea. Now it’s a foul and bedraggled place, fed by the muddy alleys where harpies lurk, waiting for night to fall and the sailors to stagger along into their arms.
Here on Queen Street, a lot of the old shops have burned down or been replaced. These grand banks with their pillars and railings, these shops with the big letters outside, the trams that have to be pushed and dragged up the hill, even these flat footpaths supposed to keep your shoes dry – they’re all new. If you stood in the middle of Queen Street, looking at all the false fronts, and the gas lamps, and the men hurrying about their business, you might think that this is a real city now. But it’s not. I’ve seen a real city, the biggest city in the world. And whatever that chattering kaka Wharepapa has to say, it was nothing to do with him.
Here are the reasons I went to England. The only reasons.
I went to England because I happened to be down in Auckland in January of 1863. I was there to speak up for old Tirarau in his dispute with Te Aranui, to make sure we in the North were not going to start fighting each other again with guns. I arrived just after the big fire, the one that raged up and down Queen Street and turned the Thistle Hotel to a mound of ash.
I was near the ruins of the Greyhound, I think, watching it smoulder, when Charley Davis walked up. He had been a friend to us Maori for many years, so I listened when he asked me if I would like to join a party of rangatira people the following month. This party would be making a journey to the other side of the world to see England and some of its great factories, palaces, churches, and schools.
Our passage there and back would be paid, as would all our lodgings and expenses. He said we would see the riches and wonders of this place, and learn their language. People would assemble in churches and schools, eager to hear us talk of our customs and old ways.
This sounded very interesting, of course, but perhaps a little vanity played its part as well. When I should have been suspicious, or cautious, I was thinking how important I must be, to have Charley Davis seek me out and make such an offer. I would be among rangatira, not riff-raff, as I am all too often at the hostel.
But this was not the only reason. I went to England because while I was in Auckland for too long, busy with the affairs of Tirarau, my younger brother drowned off the Tutukaka coast, and he had died and been buried before I could get home to learn of it. And then my dear son, the only one of my children to survive to manhood, had the coughing sickness, and died just two days after I returned to Tutukaka. With my brother gone, and my son gone, I couldn’t bear to stay there. This was January of 1863. My wife had been dead for six years. Everyone I loved most in the world had left me.
None of my people wanted me to go, and there was a lot of wailing and begging from my sister and my youngest brother. They tried to stop me from boarding a boat for Auckland. They said I needed to stay at home to receive mourners, as was customary. But I didn’t care anything about custom any more. I wanted to sail as far away as possible, where there was nothing to remind me of all I’d lost.
So then, these are the reasons most people know – that I was invited and lured with many promises, that my brother had died, that my son had died, that I wanted to travel far away. But one thing no one knows, because, unlike Wharepapa, I don’t announce all my business to the world.
I went to England because when I was a young man, still eager for fighting, I heard Hongi tell stories of his own trip there. This was the visit when he met King George, and when he helped the missionary and the professor write their book of Maori words. He returned with chainmail and a helmet presented to him at the King’s armoury, and a vast number of muskets, collected in Port Jackson on his way home. I carried one of these guns on my first taua against Ngati Paoa at Tamaki, just two months after Hongi arrived back.
That was 1821. I??
?d been learning to fight, waiting to fight, my whole life. The night at camp, not long after the first battle, when I heard Hongi speak of going to England, I decided that I too would go one day. I wanted to see the riches that Hongi had seen, the castles of powerful men, the book-houses holding the maps of Napoleon’s battles. I never thought I’d have to wait so long, or that by then I would no longer have any appetite for muskets, or armour, or battles of any kind.
And of all the stories that Hongi told, or other people told of Hongi, there was one I should have believed, more than any of the others. He said that after that voyage to England he realised a Maori could never trust a missionary. All the missionaries did was put themselves in the way of things, speaking for the Maori, trying to stop us from conducting our business in the proper and established way.
That day on the street in Auckland, when Charley Davis told me about the trip to England, I should have remembered Hongi’s words. There was a good Pakeha in charge of our party, Charley Davis told me, and this man, this Jenkins, would see to everything. Jenkins wore a white neckcloth. He was a Wesleyan, and at first I thought he was a minister. He didn’t say he was, but that’s what I assumed.
Jenkins had worked as a native interpreter, Charley Davis said, so he knew our language and our ways. He was a devout man too, building Wesleyan chapels down in the South Island, when he first arrived in New Zealand.
I signed the piece of paper he put in front of me, and agreed to join the group travelling to England. I didn’t read this paper at all, although it was written in Maori, and at my age I should know better about signing pieces of paper without looking at every word. Charley Davis said we could trust Jenkins, a fellow Christian, to take care of us, and I believed him because I wanted to believe him. But Charley Davis was wrong. We couldn’t trust Jenkins, and we couldn’t trust ourselves.
There’s too much to this story – too much to remember, too much to explain. I will write it down, and I will write it down in English. There must be a record. So much depends, as I have discovered, on things that are written down on paper.
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
PSALMS 107:23–24
We sailed in February of 1863, and the voyage took a hundred nights.
I know about boats, of course, because this is the way I’ve always travelled. How else am I to move between the various places I live? New Zealand is not like England, with its straight roads and hump-backed bridges, and its trains that charge from place to place. Whenever I move from one home to another – between Tutukaka, Whangaruru and Ngunguru on the mainland, or to and from my island homes on Aotea and Hauturu – I sail.
But even in the old days when I was travelling with a taua, paddling through the waves day after day, I was never gone for more than a couple of months. Every night we would pull our waka onto the shore, to find food and a dry place to sleep, and sometimes to gather more fighting men. On this big ship, named the Ida Zeigler, we slept every night deep below the deck, in a small, dark room that smelled of salt and sweat. Fourteen of us down there like the lowest prisoners, while Jenkins slept higher up in a cabin by himself, with his own bed, and chairs, so I heard, and fresh meat every day.
Most of us were from the North, because a lot of Maori further south were busy getting ready to fight the government, and because when Jenkins and his friends were recruiting for the trip, a number of us happened to be in Auckland to help the court settle Tirarau’s dispute. But some on this trip were not Northerners, which meant there was a natural divide between us. This is the way it’s always been. The missionaries can’t sweep clean our memories. Our old saying is that the only men in the south are the ones the Nga Puhi warriors chose to leave behind.
Hapimana Ngapiko, who liked a joke, and liked a drink even more, was Ati Awa from Taranaki. I didn’t mind him so much at first, though I soon grew to wish that his laugh wasn’t quite so loud. He had met Jenkins down in Nelson, though I never found out what young Hapimana was doing down there in the South Island, so far away from home. Perhaps he was looking for gold.
Takarei Ngawaka, of Ngati Tuwharetoa down Taupo way, didn’t use his mouth for smoking, or for talking much either. It was hard to believe that his grandfather was the great tohunga Te Heuheu, known as Mananui, who was buried by an avalanche of mud at Te Rapa in 1846. I always heard that Mananui was a giant, but his grandson was short and squat. This Takarei, his Pakeha friends called him Sir Grey, because they said he looked like Sir George Grey. This is what Takarei told us, anyway. I don’t know how they got that idea, because Takarei had no whiskers on his face. Maybe Sir George Grey never visited the Taupo area.
On board the ship Takarei became friends with cheeky young Hapimana. This would have amused old Mananui if he were still alive. He led the famous taua against Te Ati Awa, Hapimana’s people. He also refused to sign the Treaty because he didn’t trust missionaries and didn’t want to be subject to any woman, even if she were the Queen. This trip of his grandson’s to England wouldn’t have pleased him at all!
Takarei managed to get a berth to himself, sleeping alongside his box, which he refused to place on the floor. Hapimana had to share a berth with the other stranger, Te Tuahu, who the missionaries called Kihirini. He was Tuhourangi, from the shores of Lake Tarawera, a descendant of Rangitihi. Old Kihirini would be very unhappy to know of the bad signs this week from his native region. He was not a friendly man, preferring to keep to himself, and we all took against him from the start.
Kihirini was sturdy, and stout in the face, when we set off, so later it was a shock to see what England did to him. No one in his family would have recognised him. But I’m remembering too much, too soon. At this point, we were all in good health, and most of us were in good spirits. We had no notion of what lay ahead.
The rest of our group were from the North, more or less, if you include Huria Ngahuia in that list. She was one of the Hauraki people, and the granddaughter of Te Horeta, Hongi’s old adversary. This is the man the Pakeha called Hooknose. Ngahuia was born long, long after we sacked the pa at Mauinaina and Mokoia, and at Te Totara, and this was a subject, of course, which I never raised in her presence.
On board the ship I thought she was pleasant enough, and handsome as well, though she spoke too often of her grandfather’s meeting with Captain Cook, which none of us cared about. Later, once we were in England, she was more troublesome. She spoke a little English, and this was part of the problem. But one thing I will say for her: she was the only person on board who could handle Hariata Haumu.
I can’t tell you much about this woman Haumu. There was something about her being related to Arama Karaka Pi, I think, so she was well-born, and came from the Hokianga. She heard some talk on our last night down at the hostel, and resolved at once to join us. Her husband, a Pakeha, had died, and she decided to leave their little daughter with her people. Jenkins and his associates knew nothing of her, I think, until she turned up on board and demanded to be taken to England as well. He should have made some enquiries before agreeing but, as we were to learn, Jenkins was not a wise man, and he often acted in haste. She and Ngahuia shared a berth that was something like a store cupboard, behind a door that led to our own dark room. That door would not last long.
There were two other women in our party, and they could not have been more different. The first was another Hariata, the daughter of Pikimaui, who fought long ago alongside Hongi. She was a sweet-natured thing and, like her husband, Hare Pomare, very young, quite fresh in the face. I knew Hare’s father, the Pomare who signed the Treaty, and I knew Pomare the Great, his matua. He was a leader on my first taua, and my hapu sailed away with his when things went bad at Te Totara. Our siege of the pa was achieving nothing, so Hongi decided to trick the Ngati Maru by making a false peace. Pomare was unhappy about this, so we set off for the Bay of Plenty, where we had much other business to settle.
I say
nothing to Hare Pomare, but that father of his, the one who called himself Pomare II, he once tried to sell Hauturu to a grocer on Shortland Street in exchange for a schooner. The island wasn’t his to sell, and Te Kiri, Rahui’s father, had to stop the sale. But there were no bad feelings over this. We owed a debt to Pomare. Some years earlier, he had given me a letter to take back to Hauturu. A lot of Ngati Wai and Ngati Rehua were on the island then to harvest muttonbirds. In this letter everyone was warned to return at once for Aotea, because Te Mauparaoa had overrun the pa there, and plundered all the muskets and powder.
This was in the days before Pomare became a Christian, when our country was still governed by the old rules and customs – though of course we were all happy for the missionaries to teach us how to read and write. Pomare’s allegiances to us were deeper and more entwined than his alliance with Te Mauparaoa, so he wanted to warn us. Te Mauparaoa managed to escape, sailing back to the mainland on a raupo raft. Soon he was back living near his old ally, Pomare. I don’t think he ever knew about that letter.
Hare Pomare had been raised in a world entirely different from the one his father was born into. When we sailed for England, he and Hariata were both very young and not long married. Though we did not know of it during the voyage, she was with child.
The other woman was neither young nor sweet. She was Tere, the wife of Hirini Pakia. Yes, she was high-born, like all the Nga Puhi on this voyage. As I said before, everyone there was a rangatira by birth. Her grandfather was the great Kawiti, who was both a warrior and a peacemaker. But she was not like her grandfather. She was more like her husband, a slithery eel.
As for Hirini Pakia himself, he makes as much as he can from the fact that his father was Hongi’s cousin. This is the closest he can creep to glory, you see. He actually tried to stop me from boarding the ship so I wouldn’t be able to sail to England. He sided with my brother and sister, saying that it was improper I should leave, and seemed determined to prevent me from going. Perhaps he knew that with me present, he wouldn’t be able to tell so many tall stories of his illustrious ancestry, or boast of his family connection to Hongi. Or perhaps he was afraid I would tell Jenkins and the other Pakeha that he was not a reputable person. He stole things, and he drank a great deal, and he would do anything to get money. This was something that Jenkins would discover eventually, when we were all far from home and nothing could be done.