Wild Journeys

by Bruce Ansley

  Main died in March 2017, a little after his brother Don. His widow, Anne, told me he’d always liked George: ‘If you’d asked him about George, you wouldn’t have been able to get away. He would have gone on and on. You get the nasty, vicious ones now, but George? He was just a ratbag.’

  His story lies astride another one, of what makes a New Zealand hero, of the characteristics we most admire in ourselves: enterprise, self-sufficiency.

  In the great New Zealand literary tradition he loved small towns, small places. Where he lives now is near one of the smallest, Herbertville, a tiny place on the border of Hawkes Bay and Wairarapa. It was once a much busier place, when steamers put into nearby Cape Turnagain and the big coastal sheep stations were in their prime, loading wool onto schooners beaching on the sand and refloating with the tide. Pub, shops, police station. The grand old pub down the road at Wimbledon was built in 1869.

  Now Herbertville is a place people have left, for it’s more a holiday-home settlement, with a camping ground that was bought by its campers.

  In his own fashion George reversed the trend and boosted the permanent population by one. The Evening Post reported that when he was finally freed from Paparua Prison in Christchurch on 20 June 1969, ‘Wilder disappeared after his release . . . as silently and efficiently as he glided into the bush after his escapes.’

  He’s still lying low. He’s not looking for publicity, although publicity is looking for him. Journalists, writers and TV producers have tried to entice him out. I wrote him a letter care of the local golf club, where, in a photograph of a golf team, published some forty years after his final release from jail, he is instantly recognisable. It was returned unopened.

  George’s wild journey continues. He has made his greatest escape of all.

  2

  Voyaging north

  Capes are the loneliest places in the world. They are a country’s extremities, jutting into the ocean at its corners, places where the winds clash and the cold gathers, feared by sailors, shunned. They both end and begin the land in wells of fear and despair.

  The land-bound stand on them with feelings of vertigo, as if the world has changed and they may never find their way back, while below them the seas clash and the rocks grind.

  At sea level capes become mythical. Bernard Moitessier, the French sailor who saved his soul by refusing to finish the first non-stop round-the-world yacht race in 1968–69 and instead sailed half-a-globe more, saw them like this:

  A great cape is both a very simple and an extremely complicated whole of rocks, currents, breaking seas and huge waves, fair winds and gales, joys and fears, fatigue, dreams [. . .] A great cape, for us, can’t be expressed in longitude and latitude alone. A great cape has a soul, with very soft, very violent shadows and colours. A soul as smooth as a child’s, as hard as a criminal’s.

  Moitessier wrecked three boats, two on reefs and one on a beach, but none on capes, perhaps because he held them in such reverence.

  The world’s great capes are not just the circumnavigating sailor’s landmarks, but signposts of history. They form elegies, mnemonics: Horn, Good Hope, Leeuwin.

  New Zealand has added to the ballad in its own, no-nonsense way. Certainly we have Palliser, Maria van Diemen, Farewell, Foulwind, Turnagain, Reinga and Egmont. But our main capes, the ones at the very top and bottom of the mainland, are simply North and South. Both are named with a complete lack of romance and entirely in keeping with the nation’s love of practicality. North Cape lies at the top of North Island, South Cape at the bottom of Rakiura or Stewart Island (known as South Island, before it was renamed for an adventurous sealer).

  If North Cape is the head of the New Zealand universe, does that make South Cape the bottom end, with all its connotations? Or is it the other way round? Essentially, it depends on which one you’re tackling at the time, for both can be beguiling, and ferocious, and you round either one with fingers crossed or cursing.

  Other capes in New Zealand’s half of the world reflect the mystery and magic of their breed, and the conflicted souls of their explorers. The Cape of Good Hope in South Africa is a rocky, nasty place, home of the Flying Dutchman, crewed by more-than-usually unhinged sailors spending eternity trying to round it.

  Cape Horn in Chile, the most famous of them all, was ‘discovered’ by the Dutch navigator Willem Schouten, who rounded in a dreadful storm in January 1616 and named it after Hoorn in his homeland, a beautiful city with a civility entirely at odds with its namesake.

  Early explorers were typically arrogant: various groups of people already inhabited the Tierra del Fuego region, and doubtless had their own names for its most distinctive feature. So it was with North Cape. Maori called the cape at the end of their universe Otou, but Captain James Cook preferred sticking to the point: North Cape it was.

  Cook spied a pa on the cape, and even saw a few of its people, but a strong current was belting into the Endeavour and conspired with wind to carry the ship well to the north. On this brief acquaintance, North Cape it remained.

  When Cook rounded the cape at the bottom of Stewart Island, until then named Whiore, it duly became South Cape. Stewart Island itself was named after the first officer of the sealer Pegasus, who’d been busily charting the southern coast, his name supplanting Te Punga o Te Waka o Maui, ‘the anchor stone of Maui’s waka’, and the even more poetic Rakiura, ‘isle of the glowing skies’. So the northernmost and southernmost points of New Zealand were set in true two-by-four fashion without any of that nonsense of homesickness or demented sailors — nor any nod towards their inhabitants.

  Both North and South capes, essentially, are knobs of rock all but inaccessible by land and certainly best avoided by sea. The permanent population of both is zero, usually.

  I am not an intrepid sailor, nor even a very good one. But I have rounded both capes by sea, South Cape twice (see Chapter 9). The second time was accidental.

  My brother Craig owns a fine boat, the Crocus, which he built over two decades or so. It was shipped unfinished from his then home in the United States to his new one in Auckland, where he completed it, and has sailed happily ever since. The Crocus was based on a design by the Norwegian naval architect Colin Archer, famous for his seagoing yachts.

  So I was perfectly happy to entrust my life to it when Craig rang one day and asked if I would crew his boat on the second half of a North Island circumnavigation. We were to sail from Picton up the west coast of the North Island and yes, around North Cape. We would then sail down the east coast to Auckland.

  I’m not a very good sailor mainly because I can’t be bothered with the essential detail: I love boats but I muck around in them and let someone else handle chores such as making sure we’re heading in the right direction, commonly known as navigation. I follow Toad’s philosophy in The Wind in the Willows that ‘there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats’. My main talent, as a sailor, is that I don’t get seasick, although another common sailing dictum is that someone who hasn’t been seasick simply hasn’t sailed far enough.

  I travelled from Christchurch to Picton by bus, the only passenger from Kaikoura onwards, chatting with the driver. Picton lay dark that evening, the boat lying massively in the quiet water: the solidity of her, the romance of her mast and rigging. She looked as if she’d just come around the world, shaken off the salt water like a dog, and was ready to jump back in again. A determined-looking bowsprit jutted in front and her solid rudder hung off the canoe stern that Archer boats were famed for.

  Without any messing around, off we went up the knobbly Queen Charlotte Sound, past Blumine Island, and Pickersgill, and Long Island, and Motuara Island, where Cook raised the flag and took possession of the South Island for King George III, and Cannibal Cove where a boatload of sailors from the Adventure, sister ship to Cook’s Resolution, were cooked and eaten, and into a full gale blasted by the bellows of Cook Strait.

  Small-boat voyages are the stuff of dreams,
of sailing blue seas with one hand on the tiller and the other clutching a tall drink, one eye on the horizon and the other seeing palm trees beyond. I’ve yet to have one like that. The truth is that, particularly belting into a fresh wind and a short sea, you think of dice in a cup so sympathetically you fancy you may never play Snakes and Ladders again.

  You can experience your own offshore voyage by blindfolding yourself, getting someone to spin you around a dozen times then topple you into a cave, one of those with rocks dangling from the roof, sticking from the sides and lying ready to trip you at every step. A simple journey to the ship’s lavatory, full of pipes, tubes, valves and levers like a medieval torture chamber in which you cling to the nearest protuberance and balance as best you can, is the kind of wild journey that seldom makes the sailing pages.

  The most seaman-like way of dealing with the situation is to set the self-steering, which works through a wind vane and enables the boat to steer itself; check the radar detector, which detects other vessels’ radar and sets off an alarm; hop into your sleeping bag and put up something called a lee-cloth, which stops you from falling out of bed; and pop out every so often to check that all is well. And since by now it was dark, that is what we did.

  In this way we snored deep into the South Taranaki Bight until, on one of my trips into the cockpit to gaze blindly around, terrify myself with the masses of water which towered one moment then passed harmlessly underneath, and convince myself all was well, I noticed that we were sailing into the middle of a large city. I said so, loudly.

  My brother, a much better sailor, who knew exactly where we were and what lay ahead, told me these were oil rigs.

  Oil rigs? They were sea-borne skyscrapers, monsters full of lights and ill intent. Bugger the lee-cloth. If we were going to hit one of those, or its pipelines or the boats which I was sure were clustering around them like flies, I was going over the side like an undersize snapper when the fishing inspector comes by.

  I checked my inflatable lifejacket, which from that moment on was pyjamas and deck attire combined.

  The sun rose, and as it often does after dark and stormy nights, the wind died, the sea flattened and the oil rigs became well, just oil rigs. Taranaki took its graceful shape and Cape Egmont, whose every headland once boasted a pa, turned into its cracked and crenellated self.

  Six knots or so is quite a decent speed for a tubby, heavy boat in what was now a good breeze and a smooth sea. The rule of thumb for sailing ships was to calculate voyage times at 160 kilometres a day. The Crocus could do much better, but still, going around the coast on a yacht is rather like jogging beside a mountain range. Nothing changes very much for a long time, but the next time you take notice, everything is different.

  New Plymouth went by and there was sea, and more sea, all of it empty, and night fell again.

  We had a fair breeze, and everything was nice and quiet, and the boat moved easily through the water, making scarcely a sound. We divided the night into watches, which meant that one of us was responsible for the boat at certain times of the night, and it was during Craig’s watch that I got out of bed to go to the toilet and check the chart-plotter while I was about it. This was an excellent instrument which showed exactly where the boat was, and where it was going, and a red line showed where it had been. The line showed that at some point in the night the wind had changed and the vane had turned the boat through a neat right angle and we were now heading for Australia. I woke Craig and told him so. He seemed unimpressed. What was he going to do about it? I asked. He was thinking about that, he replied.

  I went on to the toilet and passed his bunk on the way back. He snored in a carefree sort of way. Oh well, I decided, it was his boat, and I went back to bed.

  The sun rose on a small boat out at sea with no land in sight. We turned around, and slowly, magically, New Zealand reappeared. I was relieved. There was always the possibility that those dark forces which inhabit dreams had spirited it away.

  We passed a fishing boat, quite close, but if we expected some salty camaraderie, some companionship on the ocean — for after all we were the only two boats in the world as far as we could see — we were disappointed. The crew worked on deck without so much as looking up. Were they poaching?

  Cape Maria van Diemen began to take shape, one of the world’s most beautiful capes, white sand reaching through bones of rock to a knuckle at its end and Motuopao Island settling just offshore, the remains of its old lighthouse symmetrical as a castle keep.

  Beautiful like a yellow-bellied sea snake.

  The sea rose up off this cape and swallowed the collier Kaitawa and her twenty-nine crew on 23 May 1966. The Kaitawa was not a big ship, but a ship nonetheless. That dark night she just disappeared, leaving a single, faint radio call for help hanging in the ether. No one knows what happened. The best guess is that a giant wave swept the ship and gulped her down, shoving the crippled hulk onto the awful Pandora Bank, which completed the job.

  Water frolicked over Pandora Bank today. We stayed away.

  Cape Reinga was now in sight. It is not New Zealand’s most northerly point, but it is the nation’s northernmost tourist attraction.

  Two great seas meet right there, the Tasman Sea on the west side, the Pacific Ocean on the east. It is not a friendly meeting. The two clash and bash.

  The result is often called a ‘confused sea’. I don’t think it is at all confused. The two staunch up to each other and, since neither will give way, turmoil ensues. White waters twist and whirl and dump like wrestlers.

  I stood up there on the cape once, sheltering beside the famous lighthouse with a busload of tourists in a gale, and all of us were awed. It was strange, and distant, as if we were in another place. We were peering into the devil’s hole, and we felt so light upon the ground that we looked for something to hold on to. No one so much as reached for a phone. The fury of it scared everyone. None of us stayed long.

  I resolved never, ever, to go anywhere near that place by sea.

  Yet here I was, sailing around it — and the frothing water leapt, danced around in the sun, and the tourists up by the lighthouse packed the fences and took photographs and were probably saying, ‘Look at that little boat down there. What a great view they must have, lucky things,’ and we passed by just as quickly as we possibly could.

  Now the perfect sweep of Spirits Bay lay on our starboard side. The Maori name for Spirits Bay is Kapowairua. It was once home to Tohe, a Ngati Kahu chief. He left his people to make a last visit to his daughter, who lived on the Kaipara, enjoining his people to grasp his spirit should he die. He did die before reaching his daughter, and the bay took the name he bequeathed, ‘spirit’. It’s said to be the place where spirits of the dead leave for the afterlife, and if that is so, then they’ll depart with fond memories.

  From the land, on a good day, the bay is a perfect curved beach, Northland’s bluey-green sea pumping delicious waves onto its pale sand. From the sea it is more mysterious. A Department of Conservation camp site, said to be one of the best in New Zealand, lies at its eastern end under Hooper Point. Beyond lies Tom Bowling Bay, and a light shone in its corner. A house? Here? Tom Bowling Bay is not only uninhabited, it is very hard to get into. I resolved to check later.

  Almost there. But the top of New Zealand has a quirk. Despite the mythology, North Cape to the Bluff and so on, North Cape is not the northernmost part of New Zealand.

  The Surville Cliffs occupy that spot. With the colonial habit of calling landmarks after European passers-by rather than using the names bestowed by the locals for centuries, these commemorate a French captain, Jean-Francois-Marie de Surville, who saw them just a few days before Captain Cook did.

  By now dusk was gathering and by any name at all the Surville Cliffs were gloomy. They rose sheer from the sea, white foam lighting their base. They are formed by rock called ultrabasic, which means, essentially, something pretty barren. It takes a special kind of plant to grow there, which from the sea seemed to be stunted cre
atures clinging desperately to life — and that is what they are, both rare and endangered.

  The cliffs looked a place no one wanted to go to, and that was true also.

  North Cape lay just around the corner.

  It was quite dark now. Some people are sanguine about approaching a coast in a small boat at night. I am not one of them. I find a dark coast frightening and a black cape truly terrifying, being both extremely hard by nature and difficult to climb by shipwrecked sailors, even scared ones with large waves up their backsides.

  North Cape, or Otou, seemed alarmingly close, and waves crashed and banged as they do. And what was that beyond? An island? No one had mentioned that. But here it was, Murimotu, where the cape’s lighthouse (a residual stump replacing the cast iron classic of old) flicked on and off.

  Many sailors welcome lights. They’re a symbol of hope, a metaphor for life, love, a path to salvation. They scare me. I know that beneath them lies something dark and savage.

  My grip on the tiller was firm, in the way a dead man’s clutch has to be pried loose. Below, in the cabin, Craig peered into his chart-plotter, and reeled off the course, a few degrees this way, a couple of degrees that. I halved the number of degrees towards the cape and doubled the number away from it. I was quite certain we were heading for the rocks.

  Surf rumbled. Black rock loomed. The light winked. Come closer, big boy.

  And we were round. We would anchor for the night, said Craig. My god, here?

  No, off a sandy beach that lay beyond. He’d anchored there before. It was good. Safe.

  We eased around the cape in darkness so deep, so profound: it was as terrifying as the small hours when you wake blind, not knowing where you are.

  Now the sound of the cape behind us was being drowned (oh, that awful word) by the noise of waves breaking on a beach. That was not good, I knew. Waves could suck in a yacht and spit it onto the beach in several bits. ‘Close, just a little closer,’ said my brother on the chart-plotter. But he could feel my nervousness.