Great Barrier Island was soon apparent. From my seat beside the pilot I saw it lying across the horizon, its peaks tented, shadows against the sky. It is a bulky island, fifty-six miles from Auckland. After its final rock the next landfall is Chile.
The amphibian was a Grumman Widgeon, a bright pot-bellied little aircraft belonging to See Bee Airlines. It had a cartoon bee painted on its yolk-coloured flank. I had never before travelled in a plane that ascended from and landed on water. It had seemed a long time before we shook off the last drops of Auckland Harbour and rose clumsily into the sky, and the half-hour chuntering journey across the Gulf was noisy, but enjoyable. There were three other passengers, plus a dog, a rabbit in a cage and boxes of goods. We lost height as we neared the big island, dropping down into an encompassed bay, snorting across the serrated water until we pulled up, just short of the beach. Then we jolted in and waggled up the shingle in front of the petrol pump and general store at Mulberry Grove.
On the shore were a group of people and a clutch of cars. Everyone helped. A set of wooden steps – the sort used in shops to reach the high shelves – came out and were put against the aircraft. Cargo began to be passed hand over hand, dogs and barefoot children ran in and out of the surf. The pilot’s hand was shaken several times, as if he had just accomplished a single-handed flight around the world, or the moon for that matter. He then sat on the roof of the plane to do his paperwork. I had climbed out of the hatch after the other passengers, their chattels, their animals and a barrel of beer, and stood on the shingle. The air was warm but there was a sniff of autumn. The island rose green and luxuriant. I could hear birds whistling in the thick trees and the sea nudged the beach with easy familiarity. I thought, at that first moment, I was going to enjoy this little spot, and that is how it turned out to be.
Bill Maclaren, a Scot from Hamilton who had been on the island ten years, and away from Scotland for twenty (although you would not know it by his accent), was awaiting me. I was to stay at his house, called Pigeons, sitting in the crowd of trees above Shoal Bay, an inlet of Tryphena Bay. It had a white iron anchor at the gate (salvaged from the 1920s wreck of the Cecilia Sudden, an American collier). Paths wriggled into the woods, to the headland and down to the profound bay. Trees lodging fat, wooing pigeons; roofs on several levels, bright windows, a balcony from which you see a slice of ocean; a dog, a cat, a son, and a fire in the iron stove. ‘We built this ourselves,’ said Bill, a pleasant, fair-haired man. He patted the wooden wall. ‘Maggie and I. We lived in a tent until we had a couple of rooms finished. Then we moved into them and carried on building from there. When we got here it was just trees and earth.’
Maggie Maclaren was a dark, bright, spare lady. ‘She kept her figure shovelling cement,’ said Bill sagely. They had a ten-year-old son called Roen whom we found on our journey from the amphibian landing, toiling in bare feet up the hill on his way home from school. ‘He’s never known what it’s like to wear shoes,’ laughed Bill. ‘We went home to Scotland a couple of years ago and it snowed and there he was trudging about in the snow wearing no shoes and wondering why his feet were turning blue.’
They knew each one of the five hundred inhabitants of the fifty miles of bumpy island. They admitted that, as in all such places, there are disagreements and geographical rivalries. Because of the competition between the southern islanders and those in the north around Port Fitzroy, the council chamber had to be built exactly in the middle of the island at Claris. Then, when the vote for chairman took place, the members voted six each for two candidates. The clerk looked up a reference book and learned that the matter could be quite legally decided by a toss of the coin and this was immediately done.
‘We had thoughts of seceding from New Zealand at one time,’ announced Bill half-seriously. ‘New Zealand never did a lot for us – most of New Zealand hardly realizes we’re out here. So we discussed breaking away and starting our own country, our own place, and we amused ourselves by selecting the cabinet posts we each would occupy. Unfortunately we fell out over who was going to be Prime Minister.’
There are families on the island who settled there following the wake of the savage battles between the Maori tribes, one of which was fought on a beach on Great Barrier. Hundreds of bones were found there, in the sand of the battleground, and have been stored by an islander called Les Todd, in a cave just up the valley from Mulberry Grove. He has locked a grille over the entrance and he is reluctant to open it (in any case, over several days we could not find him because, even on islands, privately inclined people can keep away from everybody else). Bill showed me the way to the cave, however, and I gazed through the grille at the shinbones, skulls and ribs of the long-gone warriors.
Bill took me to the north of Great Barrier, where the next-door neighbours are literally in South America, and there showed me the grave of a lady with a double tombstone. Her name was Agnes Dalzill LeRoy, known to everyone as Girlie; her family had been on the Barrier, as they affectionately call the island, for a century. The first tombstone is rough and the second is a proper one, but I was glad the islanders had allowed the first to remain as a token of their affection. She is buried on the hill above her family’s house and overlooking an eye of the sea. ‘Each day,’ said Bill, ‘she would go down to Port Fitzroy, to the Last Resort, the store, with milk from her cow. One day she did not arrive and so one of the men came up to find her. She was dead. She had died while milking and he found her with her head still lying against the cow’s flank.’
At evening the wind nudged through the kauri trees high above the bay. Bill started the generator at Pigeons and Maggie cleared the evening meal. Jessie, the dog, after a busy day smelling everything on the foreshore, was tired; wood burned comfortably in the stove. On the following morning the cat was going – by air – to the vet in Auckland. It was clearly time for talk.
‘The day I landed here,’ said the amiable Bill, ‘I came ashore from the supply barge, after a crossing in a storm of fourteen hours, during which I lay in a bunk in which a man had just died. It was not auspicious. For my first step on the Barrier I decided to wear my kilt and I stepped bravely ashore, full of Scots pride. There was a Maori girl standing on the jetty and, believe it or not, she asked me what I wore underneath. I haven’t worn it since.’
Maggie and Bill arrived on the island by accident. He was a design engineer, an emigrant to New Zealand, but had bought a boat and decided to attempt to sail around the world in five years to Scotland, which they had left on the day of their marriage. Their first stop was Great Barrier Island and, as Bill put it, they were waylaid. They did not go any further. They tried farming first, then, pitching two tents (one for themselves and another for their daughter Angie so that she could study for her school exams), they set about digging and building the house of which today they are rightly proud.
Bill and some of his fellow islanders had notions for developing tourism, for the Barrier has a wonderful dreamlike quality of green hills, meadows and bays with giant and deserted beaches. Pigeons and a few other guesthouses provide the only accommodation at present but perhaps one day . . . They have even discussed the possibility of clubbing together and buying their own aircraft.
They are aware of the chequered attempts at communications and commerce in the past. Shipping companies and airlines have tried to make the island services pay but, one by one, they have given up; there have been hopeful starts at lumbering, gold-mining and whaling. Today, abandoned in the thick hills are rotting wooden dams which once controlled rapids carrying thousands of tons of lumber down to the seashore where it was sawn and taken away. The lumber of the kauri was ideal for ship-building – when ships were built of wood.
In the Barrier’s overgrown interior I stood among the foundations of a crushing mill once used to powder rock in the gold-mining days. That dream of successful mining was not realized either and standing there now, looking over a parapet onto nothing but massively conglomerated trees, it is difficult to imagine there was onc
e located here a township of wooden dwellings used by the gold-miners.
Only six miles off the coast is the unwavering route of the migrating humped-back whales. Whaling companies have brought men and ships and harpoons to the island, the latest in the 1970s, but all have gone away eventually, disappointed. After the last failure, when the final whalers had taken themselves off, empty-handed, thirty whales stranded themselves on the beach at Okupu and had to be towed out to sea again because the smell of them was so shocking.
Roads on the Great Barrier struggle single-handedly over escarpments, threading through valleys and trundling along windy shores. So full of holes are they at times that there appears to have been a bombardment; often they sigh and slide in chunks down a chasm under the onslaught of heavy rain.
‘This island,’ alleged Bill Maclaren, ‘is the place where old cars go to die.’ A drive of a few miles through the wooden hamlets shows this to be true. There are cars, seemingly held together only by the ultimate stubbornness of rust. There are vehicles which have been in regular use since the 1920s, including a Ford Model H truck from 1921 kept in prime, beautiful condition, despite making a daily farm-run, by its owner Don Woodcock, a Maori forestry man. Road rules and regulations are ephemeral. ‘The only two vehicles on the island which are actually insured collided one day,’ remembered Bill with a grin. ‘And I was driving one of them.’
By one of those outlandish chances that make a writer’s life worth living, there was also on Great Barrier Island, until recently, the giant black Chrysler Imperial owned by the gangster A1 Capone. It was bought in America, shipped to Auckland by a dealer, and eventually found its way over to the island where it was regularly used as a taxi and was to be seen standing, ready for custom, outside the Last Resort Store at Port Fitzroy. Now, sadly, it has been restored to an American home. The gangster’s ghost seems to have followed me to some unlikely places. On Saint-Pierre, the French island off Newfoundland, I slept in the ‘A1 Capone Suite’ of the wooden Hôtel Robert.
Stories seem to grow in such places as this. The island has the distinction of running the first pigeon post in the world. It was used as an experiment by a newspaper for receiving its reporter’s impressions of the visit by the survivors of a heart-rending shipwreck, that of the Wairarapa. So successful was the post that a regular message service was instituted, with the birds flying the fifty-six miles from the island to their loft in Auckland, each carrying five messages on rice paper, properly stamped at the cost of one shilling each.
The tragedy of the Wairarapa happened on a calm, foggy night in 1894 when the 2,000-ton passenger ship out from Auckland ran full tilt into the cliffs, 600 feet high, at Miner’s Head, northwest of the island. It was a dreadful drama. Some racehorses tethered on deck ran amuck among the passengers trying to escape to the boats. The ship broke her back and the entire bridge structure toppled over like a falling house onto the boats already in the sea.
Some passengers and crew managed to reach the formidable cliffs and clung wretchedly to their ledges while others attempted to reach land by climbing hand over hand along spars and ropes. One woman was saved only because her long hair became caught in floating wreckage. Even today Miner’s Head cliffs (still faintly marked by an arrow showing where the Wairarapa struck) are all but inaccessible. Rescuers, among them Maoris in canoes, had to journey through the blind night and around the dangerous indentations of the coast. Others hurried on horseback across the hills. It was several days before anyone in Auckland knew what had happened to the ship.
One hundred and thirty-four people perished and are buried in the sandy shore on the opposite side of the island at Tapuwai Point. An inquiry held in Auckland (and, incidentally, adjourned for a day to celebrate the Prince of Wales’ birthday) found that the vessel was thirty miles off course. The bearded Captain McKintosh, a stubborn man who had been warned by his junior officers about the ship’s speed in the fog, could not be asked for his explanation for he had been killed when the bridge collapsed.
Tryphena, the blameless settlement in the middle of the bay where the amphibian had landed, has also had its moment of notoriety – the murder of a man called ‘Old Tusky’ Taylor in 1887, and referred to, even today, as ‘The Murder’.
It was a grotesque sequence. A swaggering man, John Caffrey, captained a 53-foot cutter called Sovereign of the Seas. Caffrey fancied himself as a piratical figure, a role enhanced by the fact that almost every inch of him was covered with tattoos and that he had one, baleful, eye.
His fancy had fallen on Old Tusky’s daughter – Elizabeth Taylor – but her father forbade her to see Caffrey and encouraged her to marry a bushman called Seymour. She did and a year later gave birth to a child.
In the harbour bars of Auckland, and on the Barrier itself, Caffrey had boasted that he would kidnap Elizabeth and take her off to South America. He wasn’t merely boasting. One night, the Sovereign of the Seas, flying the skull and crossbones, put into Tryphena, and Caffrey, with his mate Henry Penn and Penn’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend, Grace Cleary, went to the Taylor house. Caffrey, his good eye gleaming, had a loaded revolver in each hand. There was a fight at the house and Old Tusky ended up dead in a pool of blood. The three intruders fled.
Two Barrier men rowed the channel of eighteen miles to the Coromandel Peninsula to raise the alarm, but no sign of Caffrey or his cohorts was found for four months. Then the wreck of his boat was washed up on the shore of New South Wales and Caffrey was arrested shortly afterwards in possession of a gun and the pirate flag. Penn and his girl were caught within a few days.
The two men, wearing leg irons, were extradited to Auckland with the girl, and all three went on trial for murder. Caffrey and Penn went to the hangman but Grace Cleary, prettily hatted, patently enjoying every moment of her murky fame, was acquitted. Old Tusky lies buried in the small bay, Taylor’s Bay, near the house where I was staying with the Maclarens. His daughter Elizabeth lived until 1952.
We took Tinker the cat to the airstrip the following morning and sent him in a basket by plane for Auckland. It appeared to be no more an unusual transaction than sending a letter. The airstrip is on the marshy plain that runs low towards the coast. Mount Hobson sniffs the sky in the background. The Maoris called the island ‘The Place of the White Cloud’. The Barrier warriors came to abrupt extinction when their Coromandel neighbours had their canoes towed stealthily across the strait by a sly English captain who had also provided them with muskets. They were thus fresh and well-armed when they fell on their enemies in the traditional dawn massacre. But the real winners were the white men who had helped the Coromandel tribes and then took the land for themselves.
Our journey to the airstrip at Claris on the waist of the island and then, having deposited the cat with the pilot of the plane, onwards to the north, was a succession of views both sudden and lovely. At each lofty turn another line of splendid hills descended to a green and sun-crossed land, which in turn gave out to stupendous beaches where massive seas, white-toothed, came unchecked to the shore. There were chasms and forests and escarpments and then demure enclosed fields with red-roofed houses tucked into corners beneath a parasol of trees. ‘Those people who live over there,’ said Bill pointing out a distant farm, ‘their house burned down so they moved into their barn until it could be rebuilt. But they found the barn was so comfortable they’ve stayed there.’
William Abercrombie, Jeremiah Nagle and William Webster were the original purchasers of the island from the Maoris in 1838. Needless to say, Captain Cook had already been there first. He loosed some goats ashore and went on his exploratory way. Abercrombie and Nagle stayed and left their names written on the map of the Barrier. Webster went back to the mainland and became a sort of honorary Maori, a blood brother, living with the Coromandel tribes. Port Fitzroy was named after Captain Robert FitzRoy who, at twenty-six, commanded the Beagle on Darwin’s voyage. He insisted on the capital R in his surname to designate royal, if unofficial, descent. Today’s maps, however, only af
ford him a lower-case letter. At Nagle Cove was built the largest sailing ship ever constructed in New Zealand, the Stirlingshire, a three-masted barque which sailed to California during the gold rush and also voyaged to England. She ended her days as a hulk on a not dissimilar shore at Kinsale in Ireland.
Wide areas of Great Barrier Island remain inaccessible, and more are only reached by horse or on foot. The road slips through unseen gaps and along empty and exquisite coasts, like a running boy who knows the short cuts. The sea comes fiercely ashore and then, with wonderful suddenness, enters some flat, shallow estuary or creek, while gulls and shag reside alone. There are people living in the most unlikely and remote places, their lives undisturbed by the rest of the world, some who have not bothered to visit the mainland for years – Maggie Maclaren only goes twice yearly to Auckland for shopping. Children in these remote homesteads are educated by postal packets of lessons received every two weeks. I met a travelling teacher, Mrs Jan Jackson, whose life it is to visit these ‘out-scholars’ on behalf of the education department, both here and on the mainland. ‘It’s by car as long as there’s any road,’ she said, smiling. ‘Then it’s a matter of using your feet sometimes an hour and a half at a time until you reach a house with a child sitting with a pile of books at a kitchen table. They really seem to look forward to someone coming to see them every six months or so.’
Bill Maclaren and I travelled miles on tight roads, through empty hills and vacant plains. Then, rounding a bend, by a creek of still water, we came across a couple contentedly painting a boat in the autumn sunshine. No one else lives within miles. Bill greeted them and then, as we drove on, pointed out their tree-hidden house, a hair of smoke wisping from its chimney. What a fine place to live.
My World of Islands Page 21