‘These biscuits will kill us,’ said Hapimana, trying to make a joke as usual, but it was half-hearted and no one laughed.
‘This expedition of ours will come to no good end,’ Reihana said. ‘Something disastrous will happen. Death will part us. Perhaps the ship will be wrecked.’
He took a bite of his biscuit and sat chewing it, his face foggy with sadness. I did the same, then spat my mouthful onto the table. Perhaps Hapimana was right. We couldn’t survive weeks of those biscuits.
It’s true that times are changing, but as all the talk this week about the spirit waka attests, we still take signs, and dreams like Reihana’s, very seriously. We know that they carry warnings. So we were sombre that morning, though the sea was calmer now and the day was quite fair.
That afternoon most of us went for a walk about the deck, and I stood watching the great sails billow, the westerly winds pushing us through the ocean. Jenkins was up on the deck with Mr Brent or perhaps Mr Lloyd – men we saw little of at this time, but would come to know more in London. Jenkins made the mistake, while Reihana was still in earshot, of requesting another practice. He should have waited until Reihana had returned below, as he was about to do. But no, the words were said, and then Reihana had to respond with words of his own, telling Jenkins about his dream, and the omen of the twitching hand.
‘Stop saying such things at once,’ Jenkins said, his voice curt. This was not the way he spoke to any of us in Auckland, I must say, when Charley Davis was present. ‘I can assure you that you’re in very capable hands. Captain Reynolds will see to it that the ship is not wrecked. The only evil to befall you will be this kind of talk, this primitive superstition. Once we’re in England, you’ll find that no one has sympathy with this sort of heathen belief. Civilised people don’t believe in prophesies.’
When he heard this, Reihana was furious. Perhaps I’m making him seem like a man who talked a lot, and this was not the case. He was quiet most of the time, brooding over his son’s death and – after this day – about the message of his dream. But he would object to the singing and so forth, and now there was something else in the air between him and Jenkins. Reihana did not like to be called a heathen, or to hear the ways and beliefs of his ancestors, of his father, Tu Karawa, dismissed by such a man as Jenkins. Tu Karawa was a great rangatira, and was not to be insulted in this way. In the old days, such an insult would provide what we called a take, and this would need to be resolved in some way. Words had consequences.
But these things could not be resolved on the ship. Jenkins could say whatever he wished and then walk away.
‘You shall see,’ Reihana said, half to himself. Jenkins couldn’t hear him, certainly. ‘We shall come to grief.’
The ship was not wrecked on that voyage, of course, because here I am now, more than twenty years later. But Reihana’s vision was right. Many things were to part us, including death. Already our little party was starting to simmer and seethe, one complaining about the other.
That night, the murmur of sound from behind the door separating the quarters of Ngahuia and Haumu from our own grew into something else, something almost inhuman. At first, in fact, it sounded like the lowing of a cow, but soon it was clear to me that the noise was a terrible moan, interrupted now and then by a fervent, rapid muttering. This was Haumu, taking leave of her senses.
The muttering didn’t stop, day or night, but darkness made her condition worse. Ngahuia tried her best, cradling Haumu, or singing softly to her, trying to calm her when she banged and kicked at the door, screaming to be free. The poor woman seemed to think she was in a prison cell. If there was still daylight outside, Hapimana would lead her up the ladder, to show her that we were all staying below by choice, not because we were shackled or under arrest, even if this was the way it sometimes felt.
But this accomplished very little, and talking to her became increasingly fruitless. Sometimes she would sit quietly, holding Ngahuia’s hand, rocking back and forth on the bench. These were exceptional times, however. As well as muttering and sobbing, there were hysterical shrieks, as though she’d seen a terrible vision. One night, I looked through my book for something to say over her, a prayer for someone of troubled mind. E Ihowa, ko koe te Matua o nga mahi tohu, te Atua hoki o nga whakamarietanga katoa …
Her screams drowned my voice, and she wriggled free of Ngahuia’s grip. The door was the object of her greatest rages, and that night she progressed from pounding and kicking it to battering it with one of the benches. The benches were nailed down when we first boarded, and we’d taken the fastenings up so we could make more room between our berths. We didn’t foresee Haumu suddenly gaining the strength of three men, and using a bench as a battering ram. This happened on more than one occasion, and we had to learn to be vigilant.
On one strange day, she managed to get hold of an axe from the soldiers’ quarters, notching ragged scars into the door and slicing off its handle before she could be disarmed. That was the end of that door. The crew refused to hang it again, or mend the handle. It was taken away entirely, which meant there were no barriers between us and the moaning, crying and incoherent mumbling that rose and fell with the waves each night. We prayed over Haumu daily, but nothing would take away her terror.
‘This is the beginning,’ I heard Reihana say to Wharepapa one night, as they prepared to sleep. ‘This was the message of my dream. Nothing good can come of this voyage into the darkness.’
Not once, by the way, did Jenkins come down to inspect the damage, or to counsel Haumu, though the soldiers’ wives whispered to us that her mania was the talk of the ship. Hirini Pakia reported that some of the men were placing bets about her jumping overboard or murdering Ngahuia with the axe, but I think he invented this story to get attention. For all her madness, Haumu was more trustworthy than either Pakia or his wife. She was pathetic in her misery and confusion, not conniving.
Haumu was Anglican, as I am, but there was something about this fear that none of our Christian prayers could touch. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, years ago, when someone violated tapu and was punished in some way – wasting away, or terrorised by sights and sounds only he could experience. I’ve seen a man lying shivering by a fire pit, unable to walk or speak when only the day before he could stride up any hill.
The missionaries told us that the soul was immortal and this was something that we too believed. But in the English religion, all these souls were corralled into heaven or hell, like the cabins and steerage on a ship, without any means of escape. We knew that a spirit could transform into a malignant force which must be respected and appeased. I couldn’t help but think that Haumu had offended the spirit of one of her ancestors, perhaps, and that there was nothing any of us could do to change her situation.
During the day, the younger ones tried to distract her from her miseries. We all wrapped up in our coats and blankets to peer through the fog at the ice mountains of the Drake Passage and then, after the weather cleared, the green prow of Cape Horn. This was the tip of the continent of South America. Now there was a new ocean to navigate, the Atlantic, where storms blew us towards Africa and then back towards the coast of Brazil, where the days simmered with heat. As we crossed the invisible line into the northern part of the world, it felt as though the whole ship was cooking in an oven.
For many days the wind deserted us, and we bobbed in the ocean, sails limp. The women in our party had wondered if Haumu’s fear of the storms was causing her misery, but these long days of stillness did nothing to help her. None of us could sleep in the damp heat, so we knew all too well that her moanings and mutterings continued every night.
At times I thought we would never arrive in England, or perhaps that England didn’t exist. I began to wonder if the place Hongi had spoken of was a dream he’d had, a warning to us that I’d misinterpreted. Week after week passed, and although we’d travelled so much further than our ancestors, those greatest of voyagers, we were still waiting to arrive.
‘Perha
ps you will wear this pompom cloak?’ the Bohemian says. Like the English, he wants to see us Maori in a cloak, not a coat. He drapes a ngore around me, and it’s soft against my skin. I don’t mind wearing this, as he requests. I can’t see any peacock feathers lying around the studio, waiting to fly into my hair.
The Bohemian is named Mr Lindauer, and he wants to know what I should be called. Do I prefer Paratene or Te Manu? This question takes me some time to answer, because I never really think about this. Te Manu is the name I was given at birth, and Paratene is the one suggested by the minister, Mr Williams, all those years ago. I think it was 1838, or perhaps 1839, when I finally agreed to be baptised.
As I’ve said, Paratene is our word for Broughton. Bishop Broughton had just visited from Australia, and he was a man of great importance, so I was happy to take his name. Tane, of course, had more than one name, though you couldn’t speak of such things with our missionaries. They were always vexed by any mention of Maori gods. We used to joke that the only people they liked less than Maori gods were Catholic priests.
I try to explain about my Christian name, and the Bohemian grins. He was born with another name as well. Now, he says, he calls himself Gottfried.
‘When I was a child my name was Bohumír,’ he says. He tells me about walking to Vienna when he was a young man. Vienna is an enormous city, like London, and it took him six days to walk there from his father’s house. ‘I go to study to paint, at the Academy. In Vienna everyone speaks German. My teachers. The students. The people who will pay me to paint their pictures. So I change my name to a German one, Gottfried.’
These two names of his mean the same thing, I discover. The greatness of God, the peace of God. I wouldn’t mind having a name that meant the greatness of God. Instead I’m named for a bishop who’s been dead for a long time. Soon no one will have heard of him, and it will be so much for the name of Paratene Te Manu.
‘Please, will you look here?’ the Bohemian asks me, and I oblige him by fixing my gaze on a picture on the wall, fastened just behind his head. From this distance, the picture is blurry. However long I stare at it, I can’t make it out. This doesn’t matter. The important thing is sitting here, looking straight ahead. In this painting I will not crouch on the edge of things, or avert my eyes. People will look at it, and see my moko, and know who I am.
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
HEBREWS 13:2
We arrived in England but we were not yet in London. We were told to wait on the ship sitting in the port of Gravesend, in the care of Mr Brent, while Jenkins went ahead to find us lodgings. Jenkins had already bought us more provisions, and we were very happy to eat fresh meat again, and to pour fresh milk into our tea.
While Jenkins was away, we spent much of our time on deck, watching the lowering of barrels and livestock onto the dock, and longing to be away from our cramped berths. It was here, with the seagulls swooping above us, that we were introduced to our first English visitor, though he was a person who had spent many years in New Zealand. This was the Reverend James Stack, or Te Taka, as we called him, beaming a great smile and shouting greetings to us in Maori as he clambered up the plank. Te Taka was my age, and knew Northland and the Nga Puhi well, for as a young man he had lived in the Hokianga, and in Whangaroa when the area was under attack by Hongi.
He asked us many questions about this trip to England, and our purpose in coming here, and frowned when Reihana talked of all the practising of waiata and haka.
‘We are told we must learn the heathen songs for the English,’ Reihana complained. ‘We are to walk the streets dressed in heathen cloaks.’
‘My friends,’ said Te Taka, his face solemn, ‘I beg you not to do this. As Christians you will be welcomed to this country, and embraced by its people. As heathens you will be gazed upon and laughed at. This is no way for rangatira to go about. I will speak to Brent about this.’
Reihana was very pleased with himself after this conversation, and urged us all, at that very moment, to cast our cloaks into the sea and let the people of England drag them out of the water to use as fishing nets. I knew then that Reihana had done very little fishing in his life, if he thought a dogskin cloak could serve much purpose in the water. None of us did as he said, of course, for we didn’t want to anger Jenkins so soon after arriving, and the cloaks we had brought were valuable. My kahu kuri was woven for my father. To wear it was to announce my importance, like the Queen placing a crown on her head and taking up her sceptre.
I don’t know if Reverend Stack talked to Mr Brent that day, or if anything came of such a conversation, for the subject of our cloaks was not mentioned again for some time. There were too many other things to concern us, like the trip by steamer into London itself. How to describe such an arrival? We had crossed oceans and seen almost no other ships, but on the river that wends through London every possible vessel might be seen, clustered so thick in the water that you might cross from one shore to the other without once getting your feet wet. Entire fleets were berthed in the great docks and basins, a thick wood of bare masts. We couldn’t see the city for the boats sailing in and out, and I imagined the whole of London as one vast dock, with all life lived on the river.
At the docks, the ships dangled men. They hung from ropes, or perched on planks of wood, scrubbing or hammering. Among the forest of masts they were small brown birds, or grubs, perhaps, swarming over the bark. Later, when we walked out at night, I saw men sleeping out on the river, bundled up in small boats or exposed on the lumpy mounds weighing down the hayboats. Some had tied themselves on, for fear of slithering down in their sleep and plopping into the dark water.
We were taken to a place called Limehouse, near the great West India Docks, where the coal barges showered the wharves with their black dust and the air was thick with smoke. On some days, we would discover, the smell was even more pungent, when the foul odours from the tanneries across the river swept in on the wind. This was the area we would stay in London, Jenkins told us, until other arrangements could be made. When we drove to our lodgings, we quickly lost sight of the river, for immense warehouses blocked it from view. These buildings were so tall, and constructed so close together, that the narrow streets below were untouched by the sun.
The warehouses were like great churches with men, not saints, framed in the arches and crevices. In the open mouths that gaped on every storey, men reached into the air for the bales swinging from hook and chain, or they sat, legs hanging, looking down out onto the cobbles below, or at the grey wash of river before them.
The house where we would sleep was not far from the river, on a street unusually wide, as I would soon find out, for this part of the city. The building was large, with many arched windows and smoking chimneys, and that day we all thought it imposing and highly respectable. It made the Native Hostel in Auckland look pathetically ramshackle, like a shelter built for boats rather than men.
This building was the work of the Church Missionary Society, we were told, and a Maharajah of India, and was a favoured project of the late Prince Albert. Because it was a new building, its bricks were not yet entirely black with soot, like so many of the other houses we saw. The name of this place, Jenkins told us, was the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders.
But when we stepped inside its wide hall, and saw the other inhabitants sitting about on benches, playing cards or talking with each other in strange tongues, Hapimana gave it a new name. This place was Te Whare Mangumangu, the House of Negroes. There we were to meet many Lascar sailors, waiting for another job on a ship, and also Arabians and Persians and Africans, and men from the many islands of the Caribbean. Very few of us could speak to each other, for they did not know any Maori and some did not know any English, but it was a friendly sort of place, and only Takarei worried that things would be taken from his box. A sign hanging in the hall said ‘Glory to God’ in ten different languages which, according to Mr Lightband
, included Russian, Chinese, Hindee and Portuguese.
We were to stay in some grander places in England, but when we arrived in London this was the finest house any of us had ever seen. It was possible to have baths in this place, and to wash our clothes. Hot-water pipes warmed all the dormitories. The lavatories were indoors, and at first we were all unsure about this. Mr Lightband conferred with Colonel Hughes, who was in charge of the place, and assured us that the Queen herself had an indoor lavatory. She wished that all her subjects could enjoy such clean and convenient bathing facilities.
‘Not clean,’ said Kihirini gruffly. We were all surprised that he knew any English words, and also surprised to hear him speak. He’d said so little to any of us on the voyage over. All he ever did was tell Hapimana, who shared his bed, to stop talking.
The alternative, Mr Lightband explained, was to use one of the outside lavatories in a nearby yard, but these were shared by the hundreds of people who lived in the tall houses surrounding each yard. The yards and alleyways of Limehouse were not safe places, he said, and they were certainly not clean. There were many dangerous people, and dangerous diseases, lying in wait for us Maori.
In Limehouse I saw some people – men, women, children – simply crouching in the street, like dogs. Perhaps they too had been warned against seeking out the lavatories in the yards.
Mr Lightband was relieved we were staying at the Strangers’ Home, for he was the keeper of the company purse, and he said the cost for each of us, for board and lodgings for a week, was just eight shillings. This seemed a great deal of money to me at the time, but I knew that London would be much more expensive than Auckland, and we were yet to spend our days worrying where these shillings were to be found.