Not everyone arrived home. This may be the way always with these long voyages. People who are already sick when they board at Gravesend hope that at sea, far from the soot and fumes of England, they will recover. Kihirini Te Tuahu was one of those who hoped to reach New Zealand but did not. Like that poor boy Wiremu Repa, it was too late for him. In England he’d wasted away in the damp and the cold, and with every breath he drew he rattled. We had been waiting for him to die for so long, it was not a surprise when it happened, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
We didn’t mourn his death the way Mr Lightband expected. We didn’t really like Kihirini, I suppose. He was very grumpy, even before he was ill, and too proud. It could be said that we Nga Puhi were too proud, but we have many things to be proud about. Mr Lightband was a good man, but he didn’t understand much about us or our way of seeing things. We didn’t mourn Kihirini because we didn’t know him. He was from another region, another iwi. He wasn’t one of us.
Hare Pomare and his wife, Hariata, were back in New Zealand long before we were. Their baby, Albert Victor, is full-grown now, like Wharepapa’s daughter. Not many children have such auspicious beginnings and certainly, his was more auspicious than that of Wharepapa’s girl. Albert Victor’s christening was written of in the Times. As a baby, he was held by his godmother, Queen Victoria herself, and kissed by the Royal Princesses. He was presented with a silver mug, engraved with his name, and that of the Queen.
But there was much unhappiness in store for this boy when they returned to New Zealand. Hare Pomare died when still a very young man, just a few years after the trip to England. I heard that Hariata married again, but someone at the Native Hostel once told me that she did not live long either. The boy was placed in the Anglican Orphan Home, all the expenses of his keep and education paid by Queen Victoria. When Her Majesty’s son, Prince Alfred, visited New Zealand, Hare Pomare’s brother took the boy along to be presented.
When he was about ten years old, I heard, Albert Victor was given a place in St Stephen’s Native School here in Auckland, the school begun by Bishop Selwyn when the city was no more than a fern gully and a fort. That was the last thing I heard of him for some time, until Wharepapa said that the boy had joined the Royal Navy. Perhaps Albert Victor is sailing in some distant ocean now. Perhaps he has been back to London, his birthplace, many times. If so, he must have walked through Limehouse, and seen, or even stayed at, the Strangers’ Home.
Of some of the others in our party, I’ve heard less. Mr Lightband returned to Nelson, I believe, to do whatever it is that Pakeha do. Horomona Te Atua, who travelled back to New Zealand without his elder brother, Wiremu Pou, lives somewhere near Wharepapa’s settlement in Mangakahia. All these years I’ve kept my distance from that chancer Hirini Pakia, and his wife, Tere, and thankfully they’re rarely about the Native Hostel these days.
The last time I saw Ngahuia, she was flouncing away from the wharf in Auckland. Off to sell her pearl cross, Wharepapa said, but I don’t believe she’d do that. She was a silly woman, I suppose, but not that silly. That cross was a gift from the Queen. If it had been handed to Wiremu Pou, he would have worn it on his coat every day and boasted that the Queen had implored him to marry her.
The other woman in our party on the Flying Foam was Haumu. That poor woman ranted and cried on the voyage back in much the same manner she carried on when we sailed to England a year earlier. She was not right in the head. All those months at the big asylum in London had not helped her. If anything, she was more afraid to stay on a ship, more likely to hear strange voices in the wind. Her people took her away when we landed, and I don’t know what became of her, or of the little daughter she’d left behind.
Reihana Te Taukawau is dead now, though he was younger than I, and I’m still here. After he returned, he built a church, as he said he would, though his health was not good. His people worked as gum-diggers to raise the money. It’s at Ohaeawai, near the old battle site. Reihana died before it was completed, and he’s buried there. All this happened within five or six years of our return from England. I never saw him again, and I don’t think this troubled either of us much.
Not to be outdone, Wharepapa built a church as well, in the Mangakahia Valley. Miss Weale sent him and Reihana precious things for their churches – a prayer book, I think, and a font, and possibly a fine altar cloth. I say that Wharepapa lives in Parnell now, but really he comes and goes, staying a great deal of the time up north. He’s here in Auckland for most of the winter because it’s too difficult to get in and out of Mangakahia once the rains set in. I’ve always lived by the sea, and would not like to struggle over hills and fight my way through dense bush just to get home.
Elizabeth, his wife, didn’t like it either. She grew tired of the mud and the loneliness, and the endless fetching of water and digging in the kumara pits. She said she would not live with him deep in the bush any more. He bought the house in Parnell for her, and now she lives all the year in Auckland with her daughters. Sometimes Wharepapa talks of getting a new wife, one who will look after him in Mangakahia. He says that English wives are too much trouble. This sentiment is not something, I suspect, he would ever include in one of his letters to Miss Weale.
Thinking of Miss Weale reminds me of Wiremu Pou, who she promised to find. He didn’t sail home with us, or even with Jenkins. He was too busy travelling England, performing on the stage with his new friends in the Maori Warrior Chiefs, greasepaint smeared over his grinning face. But Miss Weale found him, as we knew she would, and harangued him and the others members of his troupe, as we knew she would, until they all agreed to stop their carrying-on in theatres and permit her to raise the funds for their journey home. I think he sailed back late in 1864.
Wharepapa, who still gets annoyed at the mention of his name, told me that Wiremu Pou found himself an English wife too, and brought her back to New Zealand. He didn’t want to slink back like a whipped dog. He wanted to come home with treasure to show off, and a big story. They got married in London, just before they sailed for New Zealand. Miss Weale was at the wedding, perhaps to make sure that the marriage was properly Anglican, and that Wiremu Pou didn’t run off to join a circus afterwards instead of boarding the ship.
After he returned, Wiremu Pou, like Horomona Te Atua, spent a lot of time in Mangakahia, so Wharepapa knows all their affairs. When Wharepapa met this wife, Georgina, he could tell she was some kind of lowly servant girl, tricked into believing that her new husband was a prince like one of Victoria’s sons, with carriages and servants. Unlike the Maori women in Mangakahia, who’d all been taught to read and write by the missionaries, this Georgina could not read a word of the Bible or even sign her own name.
Of course, Wiremu Pou was telling people that his wife had worked at one of the royal palaces, and that Queen Victoria herself had blessed their union. Wharepapa let him tell his story, and didn’t say anything to contradict it, except for one night when he grew sick of all the boasting, and suggested writing to Miss Weale and Mrs Colenso to ask more about this royal blessing. That shut Wiremu Pou up for a while! At any rate, we all knew the truth. Wiremu Pou couldn’t stand that the Queen had singled out Pomare and his wife, choosing them for special gifts and offering to be godmother to their little boy. The last thing I heard was that Wiremu Pou died around 1872, leaving his English wife to fend for herself in the bush.
The other two who refused to travel home with us, preferring to stick with Jenkins, were Hapimana Ngapiko, who was Jenkins’ first recruit, and his friend Takarei Ngawaka. They both sailed from England in June, on the Surat, the same ship as Jenkins. We didn’t realise it when we saw the last of them in Birmingham, but their illnesses were not just the winter chills most of us had. Like Kihirini Te Tuahu, they were suffering from consumption. Both of them died on the journey home and, like Kihirini, and the boy Wiremu Repa, they were buried at sea. This is a terrible thing, in my opinion – for your body to be dumped into the waves rather than returned to your ancestral home. I woul
dn’t wish this on anyone, not even my enemies, though I suppose when I was young, and away on a taua, it would have given me some satisfaction.
Wharepapa likes to mutter that it was good we didn’t travel home with Jenkins, because obviously the man was bad luck. This is true. I don’t agree with all the things said against him, but Jenkins was bad luck. He was cursed in some way. When he got back to Auckland, he should have hurried home to his family in Nelson, to the wife and many children he always spoke of so warmly. But instead he stayed in Auckland, trying to sell some jewellery entrusted to him, so he said, by friends in Birmingham. I don’t know who these friends were. Not Miss Weale or Mr Sneyd Kynnersley, to be sure.
But Jenkins had these things to sell, and a boy from Birmingham to help him. This lad had travelled on the Surat with Jenkins and Takarei and Hapimana, along with Jenkins’ brother and his family, who had decided to make a new life in New Zealand. The boy, who was called Samuel Wakeman, had been sent by his own family, to make his way in the world. Jenkins was to be his protector on the voyage and in his new country. Well, we could have told Samuel Wakeman and his family that Jenkins was not reliable in this way.
Jenkins was not a bad man. Let me say that again. But when he was supposed to be protecting us, he was thinking all the time of making money. And this was no different when he arrived back in Auckland with this boy. They went from place to place to sell these trinkets, these pearls, and Samuel, who knew no one in the city, was sent out alone to try to effect a sale. Jenkins needed desperately to make some money, I suspect, because he had lost so much when we were in England.
After a day or two there was some kind of disagreement between them. Wharepapa read the story in the Daily Southern Cross, and told me about it. Jenkins accused the boy Samuel of trying to steal from him. They were in dispute over the jewellery, of what had been taken and what had been sold. This boy said he’d taken nothing. He was sad to be so far from home, I think, and the sadness turned his head. He went to a chemist on Fort Street and bought some kind of poison. By the next morning he was dead. Jenkins was called to the court to give evidence, and was not in Auckland much after that.
In fact, he was travelling about the country for some time with the man the Bohemian knows, Walter Buller. Jenkins was working again as an interpreter for the Native Land Court, and Buller – another Wesleyan – was a judge. They were down in Whanganui when Jenkins died. It was just three years after we returned from England. Jenkins was still a poor man.
So it is fair to say, I think, that none of us made money from that trip. Reihana said that Jenkins was lining his own pockets, but now I doubt that this was true. He was always trying to line them, but the money fell through. This is what I mean when I say he was cursed.
One other thing about Jenkins strikes me now. I judged him severely for not coming down to see us, or to pray with us, during the voyage to England. I thought this was evidence of Jenkins thinking himself in some way above us, or not truly caring about the Maori souls in his care. But over the past few days, as I’ve been thinking of all this again, I remember this one thing that Charley Davis told me. Not before we sailed off to England, but years afterwards.
He said that back in 1840 or so when Jenkins and his wife first travelled to New Zealand from England, they brought with them their two oldest children. These children, a boy and a girl, were still very small. On board the ship they fell ill, and first one, then the other, died. Jenkins’ wife was already carrying their third child when they set sail, and she was delivered of this child safely as soon as they arrived in Wellington.
Jenkins was a young man then, a cabinet-maker, with no wealth or connections. I think he and his family would have sailed to New Zealand in steerage, not a fine cabin. Perhaps this is the reason he could not bring himself to seek us out below deck. Seeing our dark, cramped berths, and the swollen belly of Hariata Pomare, and the children of the soldiers playing at our feet, he would have remembered too clearly his own voyage out – his own wife with child, his own children playing. Perhaps even the lingering smell down there, of smoke, grease, and rank bodies, would have reminded him of the children he loved, and the manner of their deaths. It’s little wonder he stayed away.
You know, I couldn’t read the story about Jenkins and Samuel Wakeman in the Daily Southern Cross back then, because I could not read English, or speak it. But when I returned home to Tutukaka, I knew what I wanted to do. Reihana and Wharepapa were building churches, but I wanted to build a school. My taina, Henare Te Moananui, and I gave the land for it at Ngunguru. The Church Missionary Society bought the planks of wood, and tin for the roof. It’s not grand like the fine Wesleyan School I saw in Bath, and there’s no room for beds or kitchens and such things, but it does the job. The school opened in 1870.
Maori children attend, as well as Pakeha children. There are more of them every year, girls and boys. The schoolroom is so full, there is almost no room for me to find a seat in there any more. But for more than ten years I visited the school whenever I was staying up there. Sometimes I would sniff the chalk or strum on the counting beads to make the children laugh. Usually I would sit quietly at the back, and listen to their lessons.
This is how I learned English. Though I don’t have much chance to speak it, I know how. If I were to sail to England again, I would be able to speak to the Queen directly, and understand exactly what she was saying to me in reply. I wouldn’t need Jenkins or Mr Maunsell or Mrs Colenso to tell me the words of other people.
I won’t be going back to England, though. It’s too late. I was old when I went in 1863, and now it’s more than twenty years on. I pull the blankets high around my shoulders, because just thinking about England like this makes me feel cold. If I went back there, maybe I would see Pomare’s son, Albert Victor, walking the streets of London in his naval uniform. Some people, you know, insist he’s lost at sea, but then some people will be always making up stories to explain what they don’t know. Someone in the hostel told me that Albert Victor was last seen in an American city, on the other side of the Pacific, and that he’d changed his name.
This too is ridiculous. This young man was held by the Queen when he was a baby. At her personal request he was given the name of Albert, the name of the husband she loved. His second name, Victor, was hers. The missionaries persuaded me to change my name, but no one will ever persuade Albert Victor Pomare to change his. I would rather believe him lost at sea.
I know of Miss Weale, of course, from her letters to Wharepapa. She left the Winson Green Road Girls’ Home, and the city of Birmingham, not long after we returned to New Zealand. Her health was not good, so she took my advice to move closer to the sea. She lives in Dorset now, in the south of England, where there is less snow and fewer chimneys. Mr Sneyd Kynnersley, she tells Wharepapa, is retired and still living in Birmingham, with his many children and servants. The young Mr Maunsell returned to New Zealand, and has been working with his father, the Archdeacon, on a new Maori Bible. Mrs Colenso left England as well, I heard, and is now doing good work at a mission on Norfolk Island.
Some of those who we knew in England are dead now. Reverend Stack, old Te Taka, died there three years ago. The Duke of Newcastle and the Earl of Shaftesbury are both dead. When I met those fine gentlemen I never thought that I would outlive them for, as I say, I was already old then, and they were not. That’s the thing you don’t know when you’re young, that so much of your life will be spent being old. This is why you must do everything you can when your mind is still alert, your body still strong. Youth is the time to be a warrior, and a student, and a traveller. You have no time to waste for, like Prince Leopold, that serious little boy who shook our hands at Osborne, you may not live to be an old man. The prince died just a year or so ago, still quite young. Sometimes there’s not enough time for everything we want to do, that must be done. I worry about running out of time now, just to sort out this business with my land, and I’m eighty-six years old, or something close to that number.
Eventually I fall asleep, and sleep for a long time, even though there is always too much noise at the hostel. Too much talking. Always too much talking. When I put away my writing and take a walk around the Maori market that afternoon, just to get a little air, no one is selling anything and no one is buying. Everyone is talking.
Wharepapa is there, speaking so fast I can hardly understand him. He heard the sound last night as well, the boom that I thought was a ship hitting a sand bar, or lightning slicing through a tree. I was wrong about these things. The sound we heard was Mount Tarawera, hundreds of miles to the south, erupting.
‘Many people have been killed,’ Wharepapa tells me, in that authoritative way he has, as though he was personally at the scene. Before he can say more, many other voices chime in, for this is a story everyone wants to tell. The spirit waka was a sign, just as the old tohunga said. The volcano exploded some time after midnight. There was one eruption and then another, and another, throwing fire and rocks into the sky. The sky spat back lightning, and shouted with thunder. Hot mud and ash fell like rain.
Entire villages are buried now in this ash and mud, and whatever Wharepapa says, no one knows yet how many people, Maori and Pakeha, lie dead within them. Some people are crying for those who are dead, and some fear that the end of the world is upon us. The Bible warns us of a great earthquake, when the moon is filled with blood, and the stars of heaven tumble to earth. One old man shakes his head, his body crumpled in despair. Tarawera is the place Ngatoro-i-rangi fought the atua Tama-o-hoi, burying the demon deep in the mountain.
‘This is the doing of Tama-o-hoi,’ he moans. ‘For centuries his anger has been building. Now he’s pushed open the mouth of the mountain, and shown us his fury.’
Some are lamenting the end of the Pink and White Terraces. These, I hear, have been plunged deep into the lake, shattered into pieces like broken coral.