As they went, the kuia who had wielded the walking stick turned to Te Whaea and asked curiously, ‘Did you see his fate, grandmother?’
Te Whaea said nothing for several moments, then nodded and replied, ‘Ae, I did.’ Then she shut her toothless mouth tightly and said no more.
August 1893
Joseph went to sea a month after his twelfth birthday. He thought it a wonderful idea and his father agreed it could do him no harm, but Tamar was not so enthusiastic. She felt he was too young, but eventually conceded he had to do something to fill in the time before he went to Te Aute, and an introduction to seamanship was as good as anything. The sea was in his blood, after all.
He sailed on the Whiri, a swift and handsome schooner and the pride of the family’s fleet. The Whiri had been built eight years before in the northern milling town of Aratapu by James Barbour, a renowned shipbuilder; Barbour himself had selected the timber from the bush. The keel came from a kauri log over a hundred feet long, the planking and spars were heart kauri, and the framing best quality puriri. It was generally agreed the Whiri was one of the finest schooners built in New Zealand. She had originally been engaged in transporting timber but Te Kanene had ordered her hold modified and now she could ship almost anything.
Joseph’s first visit to the Whiri had been on a wet and windy day in July, just after she arrived at the Port of Napier for minor repairs after encountering a cyclone in the Tasman. He had been introduced to Cassius Heke, captain of the Whiri and the man who would be charged with his welfare while he was at sea.
Cassius Heke was a huge man, a full-blooded Maori with chocolate-dark skin, a wide flat nose and permanently bloodshot eyes. When Joseph climbed out of the dinghy and scrambled up the rope ladder onto the schooner’s deck, his first sight was of Heke’s ugly face leaning towards him and a heavily muscled arm outstretched to help him over the bulwark. He took the offered hand and was almost flung across the deck by the man’s strength. As he steadied himself with as much dignity as he could muster, he noted Te Kanene and his father both declined Heke’s offer and negotiated the bulwark on their own. His father’s amused wink suggested that he too had once been tossed across the deck by the big man.
Te Kanene stepped forward and touched foreheads with Heke. Kepa flicked the sea spray off his coat and swept his damp hair off his face before he too leaned forward to hongi the captain and introduce his son. ‘Cass, this is my son Joseph.’ He turned to Joseph. ‘This is Captain Cassius Heke, boy, the best captain navigating southern waters.’
When Joseph stepped into the hongi he couldn’t decide whether the enormous seaman was scowling ferociously for a particular reason, or if he always looked like that. Then Heke’s face broke into a wide, gap-toothed smile that changed his countenance completely, and Joseph decided he must have been born with perpetually bellicose-looking features. He was so tall Joseph had to stand on his toes for the traditional greeting. Heke stuck out a large callused hand, took Joseph’s in a crushing grip, and said in moderately good English, ‘Welcome to Whiri, boy. She a good ship, but you got to remember who she named after. Treat her good and she behave, treat her bad and she do the same to you.’
Joseph nodded solemnly. Whiri was one of the youngest in the Maori pantheon of gods, usually depicted as a red or black lizard. He embodied all things playful or naughty, and was notorious for perpetrating unwelcome tricks. The schooner Whiri was painted black below her water line and deep red above, with a stylised lizard as a figurehead and an intricate Maori pattern carved across her bow. In full sail with her double masts, huge expanses of white canvas sail and long, lethal-looking jib boom she was a magnificent sight, the envy of many coastal traders. Joseph gazed around the tidy deck with mounting anticipation of the adventures to come.
‘Boy?’
‘Pardon?’ replied Joseph, snatched rudely from his florid imaginings.
‘I said sit down. Captain Heke wants to ask you some questions,’ said Te Kanene irritably. It vexed him greatly when Joseph went off into one of his dreams; inattention could be a dangerous thing.
Joseph and Kepa sat on a coil of thick rope while Te Kanene leaned against the foremast. Picking up a heavy, long-handled axe, Cass turned to several rounds of wood lying on the deck and delivered a mighty blow to the closest, grunting in satisfaction when it split neatly in two. He was wearing a sleeveless woollen vest and worn trousers held up almost under his armpits with a piece of string, and Joseph observed his bulging arm and chest muscles with awe. The light rain had stopped and Cass paused to remove a grubby handkerchief from his back pocket and mop his face.
‘You think you up to this, boy?’ he asked Joseph.
‘I believe so, e koro,’ said Joseph. ‘I have heard a lot about it from my father and uncle.’ This was true. ‘I think I know what to expect.’ This wasn’t.
‘Is that right?’ replied Cass in a kind voice. He had talked to Te Kanene and Kepa several times about taking the boy on and it had been made very clear that Joseph was to be treated no differently from the rest of the crew. The boy would be on board to learn the seaman’s craft, but his family’s primary motive was to toughen him and give him a taste of real life before he went to what Cass privately viewed as that milksop Maori boys’ college outside Napier. Cass didn’t approve of books and pretty clothes and the teaching of European manners; he believed life taught the greatest lessons, especially when that life was not always smooth or easy.
Cass smiled to himself. The boy looked a fine lad, even if he did have more than a drop of Pakeha blood; if his job was to teach the boy to look after himself, then that’s what he would do. A Ngati Koata from D’Urville Island, he owed nothing to Te Kanene’s family except respect, and that he was more than willing to give. For the past fifteen years they had paid him generously to captain their most valued ships, because he was the best. He might not look or behave like a conventional sea captain but he knew the waters around New Zealand and Australia intimately, and the crews he signed on — usually Maori but occasionally from other parts of the world — were always experienced and competent. The Whiri was his responsibility; now this boy would be too, and he didn’t mind, providing the boy was able to pull his own weight.
‘You get seasick?’ he asked Joseph conversationally.
‘No, e koro. Well, not so far.’ Joseph didn’t want to say he had never been more than a mile offshore.
‘Say to me Captain, eh, or Cass. Not e koro. I wish to speak my English better. Only speak Maori when we have to, eh?’
Joseph nodded. He was happy conversing in either tongue.
Cass said, ‘The work is hard and you got to be hard too. No puking soon as the swell comes, no moaning about sore hands, no being feared of the rigging, and no crying to go home.’
Joseph opened his mouth in protest, mortified to think anyone might consider him likely to behave in such a manner. ‘Of course not!’ he countered angrily. ‘A man would not do any of those things!’
‘Oh, you a man, eh?’ said Cass, amused. ‘Well, I tell you something, Joseph — the sea can be a bloody bitch, and so can Whiri. You learn, but you learn hard. You got to have the guts for it, boy.’
At this, he picked up his axe and resumed chopping. Joseph watched while he struggled to think of a suitable reply. With his eyes following the axe’s powerful arc as it swept down over Cass’s shoulder, he saw the exact moment when it embedded itself in Cass’s lower leg with a solid, sickening thwump.
The captain let out a bloodcurdling scream, staggered backwards and spun around, the axe’s long handle protruding at a ghastly angle from his shin.
Joseph’s gorge rose as he visualised the axe head smashing through muscle and bone, and before he could stop himself he let out a small cry of horror. Next to him Kepa sat motionless, and Te Kanene seemed frozen in his position against the mast.
Joseph leapt to his feet, his boots skidding as he lunged towards Cass. ‘Stand still!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t move! I’ll pull it out!’
Cass collapsed heavily to the deck moaning with pain, the axe handle jerking violently as he writhed. Without thinking Joseph stepped forward, planted one foot between Cass’s legs, the other on the man’s knee, grasped the handle and yanked as hard as he could.
Behind him Joseph could hear the sound of choking. He turned to see Kepa doubled over, his face in his hands and his shoulders jerking spasmodically. ‘It is out now,’ Joseph assured him in a shaky voice, wanting to sit down before his legs betrayed him. ‘Father?’
Kepa dropped his hands to his knees and raised his head. He was convulsed with laughter, tears of mirth running down his cheeks.
Joseph stared at him, then turned back to Cass. The captain was sitting up, both legs stretched in front of him, giggling and leaning forward to inspect the new hole in his trouser leg. ‘Eh?’ said Joseph in confusion as Cass glanced up, all evidence of his previous agony gone.
‘You done all right, boy, you got guts,’ Cass said, still giggling like a loon. ‘You be fine.’
He grasped both trouser legs and pulled them halfway up, revealing a well-muscled and scarred calf on the right, and an extremely battered wooden leg complete with its own boot on the left.
‘This my demonstration leg, eh,’ he said, and fell backwards again, hands over his eyes, overtaken by another fit of giggles.
‘That was a good one,’ said Kepa, wiping his eyes and struggling to contain his laughter. ‘You get better every time.’
Even Te Kanene was allowing himself a smile. The expression looked out of place on his customarily dour face. ‘He does that to all his crew before he signs them on,’ he said to Joseph dryly. ‘He says it takes the measure of a man, and he is usually right. Some men have been known to vomit.’
Joseph experienced a twinge of anger as he realised he had been tricked, then felt it subside almost immediately as he saw in his mind’s eye how horrified he must have looked. With a sheepish grin stealing across his face, he asked, ‘Did he fool you, Father?’
Kepa nodded. ‘He fools everyone, boy.’
‘Did you vomit?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Kepa.
This elicited renewed giggles from Cass. ‘No, but for a Maori you went very white, eh? You was one very pale Ngati Kahungunu.’
He was pleased. He didn’t perform the ‘demonstration’ so much to gauge a new crew member’s squeamishness, but to find out if the man could laugh at himself. Crewing a fast and temperamental schooner was a matter of dedicated teamwork, and a man who couldn’t laugh at himself would never fit in. He got laboriously to his feet and wiped his big hands on the seat of his trousers. ‘You be all right,’ he said again. ‘Welcome to Whiri.’
Joseph’s first voyage was a short run from Napier to Auckland, around the top of the North Island to Kaipara to pick up timber, then back to Auckland. When the Whiri sailed into rough weather on her second day, Joseph spent six windy, cold and very uncomfortable hours hanging over the stern rail behind the wheelhouse heaving his roiling guts out. He had started off near the bow but moved when the crew complained the contents of his stomach were ending up all over the deck. After those miserable first hours he gained his sea legs, accepting the crew’s teasing in the light-hearted vein it was intended.
He soon adapted to life at sea and his duties as ship’s boy. He tied his shoulder-length hair back, abandoned footwear in favour of bare feet, which made climbing the rigging much easier, and tacked his trousers up to stop the constant flapping of wet fabric around his ankles.
The crew numbered eight, including Joseph and Cass. They were all Maori — a mate, three able seamen and an ordinary seaman — except for the cook, a taciturn Irishman named O’Leary. His speciality was a tasty and filling boil-up, made from pork bones and watercress or puha, together with incongruously delicate bread rolls baked every second day in the small galley oven. On longer journeys when fresh green vegetables ran low, they would be substituted with potatoes and kumara, or succulent yams if the Whiri was sailing through the Pacific Islands. Fresh meat was always plentiful on the shorter journeys, and the crew often brought their own contributions of preserved mutton bird and other fowl.
They ate heartily but even so, Joseph noticed his waist band was loose by the end of his first week. He wasn’t surprised; he had never worked so hard in his life. He was on duty for eight hours, then had a meal and as much sleep as he could manage, woke to another meal and a further eight hours of scrubbing the decks, privy and sleeping areas, checking the cargo and hauling the thick ropes of the standing and running riggings for up to an hour at a time. By the end of the third day his hands were blistered and bleeding and his knees, inner thighs and buttocks raw from the chafing of his salt-soaked canvas trousers. His muscles and bones ached and the skin on his face was red and sore with wind and sunburn.
He was exhausted, in considerable pain and missed his friends and family, but uttered not a single word of complaint. Instead, he made sure he was out of his berth on time at the start of every shift, did everything he was asked, and volunteered for extra work on the rare occasions he had a few spare minutes. His crewmates were hard men, tough, resilient and given to occasional, if somewhat harsh, practical jokes, and Joseph won their respect and admiration. The mate, a wiry, wild-looking man named John Hohapeta with missing front teeth and a heavy moko covering his thighs and buttocks, gave him a jar of evil-smelling grease to heal and harden his battered palms, and a salve for his chafed skin. The rest of the crew showed him how to work the ropes in a way that minimised damage to his hands, and never gave him jobs beyond his size. And although he teased Joseph about his ‘poor colleen’s hands’, O’Leary took it upon himself to stuff him with as much extra food as possible, because he was ‘still fekkin’ growin’, to be sure.’
By the time Joseph realised he would probably not die from his physical exertions and fatigue, he was beginning to enjoy his new life. He began to feel comfortable within the camaraderie, and was mesmerised by the crew’s tales of strange, far off places. And the allure of the ocean herself was having a profound effect; at home, he had only been up the coast as far as Gisborne, and inland to Taupo, but now he became aware of endless new lands to be visited and explored.
Cass was pleased with Joseph. He had never doubted the boy would be up to the task, but now he would be able to report to Kepa when the Whiri returned to Napier that his son had both mental and physical stamina, and was more than capable of looking after himself on board ship. He had yet to be tried on shore. In fact, that had been the only point of contention; Joseph had wanted to go ashore in Auckland and Cass had denied him, pointing out they were only calling into port long enough to pick up a cargo for Kaipara and he would be needed to help load it. In truth, none of the crew would be available to chaperone Joseph, and Cass was sure Kepa wouldn’t want his son running about the Auckland waterfront by himself. Joseph shut up after that, but not before Cass glimpsed a look of determination on his young face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It took until December for Joseph to convince Cass he would be safe ashore. He had been home to Maungakakari twice since August and his family had expressed delight at his growth and obvious good health, although Tamar was unimpressed by the calluses on his palms and the wide pink scar on the back of one hand caused by the careless use of a sharp knife. During these short visits Joseph argued vehemently with his father about shore leave, pointing out that if he was old enough to sail with an experienced crew, then surely he was capable of going ashore in a strange town without too many problems. After all, there were gangs of children younger than himself living on the streets, and nobody worried about them. Kepa didn’t quite follow his logic but eventually agreed his son should be permitted ashore the next time it was appropriate, provided Cass approved, and at least one of the crew was with him.
The opportunity arose when the Whiri called in at Wellington on the way back from Dunedin. With the schooner berthed at Queen’s Wharf, the crew had an evening’s shore leave while they waited
for a cargo to arrive from Australia.
Cass and O’Leary stayed on board, while Joseph went into town with the rest of the crew. John Hohapeta and one of the able bodied seamen, Noho Reti, were charged with his care.
John, Noho and Joseph parted company from the others and headed for a favourite tavern of coastal traders, a nefarious premise in Willis Street named the Blue Lady. According to John, a drink at the Blue Lady was an essential part of Joseph’s education.
Inside, the dimly lit bar was crowded, the reek of sweat, tobacco and fish from the fishmonger’s next door almost as overpowering as the noise. John and Noho elbowed their way expertly to the bar, Joseph close behind.
‘What do you want to drink?’ asked Noho. Neither he nor John spoke English well and preferred Maori while not in the presence of their captain.
Joseph had no idea what to ask for. He shrugged apologetically.
John and Noho exchanged glances. ‘Better give him beer,’ said John, the more responsible of the two.
‘One beer, two rum,’ barked Noho to the man behind the bar.
As they waited, Joseph looked around. The room was packed: every table and booth was taken and people stood three deep at the bar. Most were seamen, although clearly not all were from New Zealand. Joseph saw several men whose skins were black, their white teeth shining unnervingly in the gloom, sailors speaking rapidly in strange languages, and what had to be an American Indian, a copper-skinned man at least six and a half feet tall whose long hair was braided and entwined with small blue feathers.
Noho elbowed him in the back, handed him a large mug of foaming beer, and pointed at a table whose occupants were rising from their stools. ‘Get over there and grab that table, boy,’ he said.
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