Henry was twenty-two years old when he took up working in his father’s sawmill. Not long after, the saw errantly ejected a block of wood like a cannonball and struck his younger brother Alexander dead. For Henry it was the final blow to what remotely passed as a family life. He fled the painful memory of the mill, disappeared into the Australian outback, and took up wandering as his chief vocation.
Henry would surface now and again, as a jackaroo on a sheep station, as a hired hand in a backcountry timber mill. But he would invariably get his fill of the foul workmen’s crews and steal away to the comfort of the wilds and the companionship of the Aborigine. “They were good-humored, jolly company, full of fun and activity and kindness towards each other,” he later wrote. “When I went home to the man’s hut at the sawmill and into the surly, overworked, blasphemous company, it contrasted unfavourably with that of the happy darkies.”
Henry came to master the art of self-sufficiency by way of many trades, as shepherd, sawyer, carpenter, and boatman, but above all as bushman. Given his druthers, he would be out there among the wild animals, pondering their beauties in one moment if then bagging their bodies in the next.
When Henry pulled up stakes again in 1870, he went this time for more than the average Australian walkabout. He “crossed the ditch,” sailing the stormy waters of the Tasman Sea to the shores of New Zealand.
He landed to find New Zealand in the throes of its rabbit plague. The rabbits had by then officially crossed the line from sportsman’s bright idea to national scourge, making fools of their liberators and a shambles of the sheep industry. And Henry the ever-handy bushman found quick if unfulfilling work in the Sisyphean task of shooting them.
Whenever Henry bored of rabbiting, he would wander on to a place or trade that better suited him. He did some boat building, some carpentry, more hunting and fishing, all ultimately leading him to open air and the wild creatures of the backcountry. Somewhere along the way, as he let on in his journals, he also met a woman, a woman he hoped to marry. Then, with merely a footnote dedicated to her subsequent rejection of him, Henry hurried on again in his retreat from civilization, in search of the next wildest place on Earth.
By 1880, Henry had retreated as far as men then went in New Zealand, to the southwestern corner of the South Island, on the shores of Lake Te Anau, gateway to Fiordland. To the east spread rolling pastures of sheep and cattle. To the west rose the white glaciers and crowded peaks of the Southern Alps, separating Lake Te Anau from the Fiordland coast, the last frontier in all of New Zealand.
Here he had finally found the place seductive enough to hold him. He had endless work at the sheep stations, where locals came to know him as Henry the rabbiter and Henry the shepherd. In the budding settlements he became Henry the carpenter and Henry the sawmiller. He learned the lake and practiced his sailing craft for pay, as Henry the boatman and Henry the guide.
The seasonal jobs financed Henry’s true passion. He would finish his work, pack his sailing dinghy and dog, and shove off on naturalist sabbaticals to the west and wild side of the lake. He would lie by night in camp and listen to “the perfect din” of birds calling from the bush.
Henry’s attentions came to narrow on the one bird dominating the symphony. From out of the hills came the haunting, gut-stirring vibrations of a bass drum slowly beating. Henry would set out into the hills, to creep within what seemed a few yards of the twilight percussionist, and release his dog. Then he would follow, scrambling through hill and brush to finally find his dog pinning the giant parrot of the night, the kakapo.
Henry beheld a soft and beautiful bird with feathers the foliage green of the surrounding scrub—an intricate plumage that camouflaged the kakapo as a beaked patch of shrubbery. The bird also came with a pleasantly conspicuous scent. Designed as a note to fellow kakapos, it was now received as a dead giveaway to the land’s new hunters. Henry’s dog could smell kakapo a quarter mile away; he caught them by the score and relished their tender meat. Henry could only shake his head at the bird’s helpless plight. “They are the easiest things in the world to exterminate,” he wrote with foreboding. “A few wild dogs would clear the country in a decade.”
Henry would cradle the endearing kakapo in his arms and, likely as not, then kill and stuff it. He had become one of the smaller operators in a bustling trade of bird skins, selling off the bizarre New Zealand avifauna to stock the international museums of academia and the display cases of the wealthy.
The killing presented no great moral dilemma for Henry. The virgin hills beyond Te Anau still ran thick with kakapo and kiwi. And ultimately, Henry the collector reported to Henry the naturalist. With every bird he would chase or kill would come hours of admiration and contemplation. Before shooting, he watched and listened. After shooting, he gathered and dissected his victims’ gizzards, recording their food habits as a good scientist might.
Such scientists, in Henry’s estimation, were too rare. His degree came hard-earned, from days and nights of dirt time in the kakapo’s kingdom; he questioned the wisdom of those pontificating from their professor’s chair. “When you turn to a big natural history book for information,” he wrote, “you find all the fine names and straw-splittings about their classification and species, but hardly a word about their life history or the life of the young ones—whether the mother takes any care of them or feeds them, or if they care of themselves, and what they live upon, though some of those items are of the first importance.”
Though ignored by academia, Henry the naturalist became legend among the locals. The wealthy sheep magnate Edward Melland, Henry’s part-time employer and steadfast champion, once said of his leading handyman and naturalist savant, “What he did not know about Lake Te Anau & the habits and habitats of its feathered population might truly be said to have not been worth knowing.”
In 1883, Henry saw the first signs that his bottomless well of birds had a bottom after all. The ferrets and weasels that had lately been loosed upon the rabbits were rapidly marching westward. “Some one has put ferrets across the Waiau, under Mt. Luxmore,” he wrote to those responsible at the Otago Acclimatisation Society. “I was trapping rabbits there and caught two ferrets, so that I think the end of the kakapo has already begun.”
For some time thereafter, Henry whistled past the graveyard. He continued his studies and hunts of the beloved birds whose doom he’d predicted. At home in his hut on Lake Te Anau, he would spend his evenings studying heavy works of New Zealand natural history. (That and fishing. He had rigged his line to a bell in the hut that rang when a fish took the bait.) By day he would fill the hut to the rafters with skins and stuffed specimens of the kakapos and kiwis and shorebirds he and his dog had hunted down in the endangered Eden of Te Anau.
To guard his skins while away, he had rigged a diabolical mousetrap, the gist of it recalled with morbid amazement by the wife of his employer, Katie Melland: “Dick took us to see his hut one day, and on entering I was met by an overpowering smell of decayed animal matter and quickly backed out.” The smell amounted to a month’s worth of dead mice that had been accumulating in Henry’s trap while he was away.
“He had a large, square, empty oil tin, with the top cut off, which he had filled three parts full of water,” reported Melland. “He made a tiny wooden wheel, like a treadmill, and fixed it across the top of the tin and baited it. The oil tin was sunk beneath the floor of the hut—which was on piles, only a hole cut in the boards to show the wheel. The mouse ran across the floor to the bait, stepped on the small wooden platform, the wheel revolved with the weight of the mouse, round it went depositing the mouse in the water, and was so nicely balanced that it set itself again ready for the next victim.”
By 1888, Henry was documenting the demise he had predicted. In the sheep station at Te Anau, where once he could count in one glance sixteen wekas and their broods of chicks patrolling the grounds like barnyard hens, all the wekas were gone. “There was no wanton destruction there, for everyone was friendly to ‘the p
oor weka,’ ” wrote Henry, “and now that they are gone, everyone without a single exception regrets their disappearance.”
Henry watched as the ferrets decimated broods of wild ducklings. And he listened as a countryside once chiming with the calls of wingless birds fell silent. “On the west, from the mouth of the Waiau for 25 miles of beach, there are neither signs nor sounds of kakapo, weka, nor kiwi, where they used to be numerous, but there are plenty of ferret tracks on the beach. Up the creeks in the bush grey teal and blue duck were plentiful, but now they are all gone, and the black teal are rapidly going also, and in all probability will soon be simply a memory of the past.”
By the end of the 1880s, within just a few years of the mustelids’ arrival in New Zealand, Henry’s observations of the birds’ demise in the lakes district were being echoed by explorers from across the country’s final bastions of wilderness, in the mountains of Fiordland. Weasels and ferrets had been caught and killed within one mile of the sea, far from any point of release. The little predators had crossed the Southern Alps. They had outpaced by many miles of mountain terrain the rabbits they had supposedly been set upon. It raised the obvious question of what, if not rabbits, the carnivores were eating.
“The ferrets and weasels, no doubt, came up the dividing range with the rabbits, but as soon as they discovered our ground birds—our kakapos, kiwis, woodhens, blue ducks, and such like—they followed up the more palatable game,” wrote the surveyor George Mueller. “They will continue to thrive until the extermination of our ground birds, now begun, is fully accomplished.”
Mueller voiced the bewilderment of explorers across the range, who had returned to their once-fertile mountains to find emptiness, and hunger. “In former times when camping near the head waters of any of the rivers the fighting of the kakapos amongst themselves, and the constant calls of the other birds around the camp often kept people from sleeping. This has all changed now. In the southern parts of the West Coast absolute stillness reigns at night, and there is nothing now to keep the traveller from sleeping except, perhaps (owing to the absence of birds), an empty stomach.”
As the birds vanished, Henry began penning articles on behalf of those “perfect fools regarding natural enemies,” and with blatant contempt for those now mindlessly obliterating them. “Some of our acclimatisation societies boast of the number of their importations, which may be roughly termed so many nuisances,” he wrote in 1889 for the Otago Witness, “and now that there is little else to shoot they seriously propose a gun tax, but have not a thought to spare for the preservation of our really valuable natives.”
Soon after, in 1891, with the kakapo’s demise now imminent, a plan was written to set aside a last resort on Resolution Island. If there were to be a caretaker of Resolution Island, the ultimate candidate would most logically be someone with the skills of an accomplished boatman, capable of crossing the stormy seas of Dusky Sound, someone able to carve a home out of the bush and steeled to the solitude of life in the wilderness. That candidate, most optimally, would also be experienced at capturing kakapos and kiwis. Resolution Island’s ideal caretaker described nobody so precisely as it did the eminent naturalist of Lake Te Anau, and nobody wanted the position more than he. No more sawing logs or herding sheep and tourists for a living. Richard Henry would be the bushman who saved the country’s inimitable kakapo.
Henry’s high hopes soon spiraled. When his unabashed advocate, Edward Melland, pushed for Henry’s appointment, the bureaucracy pushed back. There was political infighting among egos; there was talk of abandoning Resolution in favor of Little Barrier Island, farther north. Bureaucrats sniped and both islands sat, while the birds of the mainland continued their tailspin.
Henry had finally glimpsed the life of meaning he’d long searched for, just in time to see it fade from his fingertips. After two years of waiting on the job on Resolution Island, he gave up. He sold his dinghy, Putangi, left behind his sanctuary at Te Anau, and headed north.
He stopped occasionally to share his theories of kakapo breeding behavior with the luminaries of academia, to cool receptions. “He thinks more of a classical name than about a curious & wonderful fact,” Henry wrote of his meeting in Christchurch with the biologist F. W. Hutton. “He seemed not to take a bit of interest in my story about kakapos but was very anxious to explain to me some straw splitting difference that shifted a bird out of one class into another.”
Henry continued north. He tried again at the Auckland Institute, offering his theories of kakapo behavior. Again came the cold hand of the ivory tower, with its polite but patronizing dismissal.
Richard Henry had reached the end of his wanderings. He found himself an aging, unschooled fix-it man with a peculiar passion for the lives of a few odd birds that few others cared to understand. There was nowhere else to go. Biographers John Hill and Susanne Hill would later write of what was to be Henry’s final moment.
Quietly and rationally he carried out his plan. Certain that none would suffer by his action, that he had settled all his debts to the last shilling, and that his body would be unidentified, Henry crept shakily away like a wounded animal to die in a quiet corner apart. He stumbled across a bridge, somewhere, and scattered his last few shillings about, uselessly. Then he took out a six-chambered revolver and shot himself.
Next morning at first daylight, a man admitted himself into the Auckland Hospital. Richard Henry, the ultimate handyman and hunter, had somehow botched the job of killing himself. The first shot had left Henry standing there blinking, the bullet lodged benignly in his skull. He reconnoitered, put the gun to his head, and tried again. The gun misfired. Henry this time took the hint: “The remnants of superstition made me think I had better put it off to see what would turn up.”
A week later Henry received a telegraph from Melland, bringing news that he and his mates of the Otago lobby had finally pressured the government into putting a curator on Resolution Island. Two weeks after that, with ship fare wired by Melland and a resuscitated purpose in his heart, Henry was sailing south with hopes of a second life, as curator of Resolution Island, would-be savior of the kakapo.
TO THE RESCUE
In the New Zealand winter of 1894, the steamship Hinemoa delivered Richard Henry to Dusky Sound. But for a transient community or two of gold miners and sawmillers, plus one eccentric old prospector, he was the sole human inhabitant of a water-bound wilderness spanning 150 square miles. He set up shop on a little island to the west of Resolution Island, called Pigeon Island.
Amid the rocky shores of Pigeon Island, Henry found a sandy cove tucked between two sheltering harbors, which would be his port in the stormy seas of Dusky Sound. There he built a house, raised high upon pilings to thwart the periodic stormings of rats. He built a boat slip and a shed and planted a garden in soils mixed with the ancient ashes of the moa-hunting Māori. The forests of Pigeon Island chimed with the birdsong of tuis, kakas, and bellbirds. A cave just beyond the tide line harbored a rookery of crested penguins, where Henry would collect eggs for breakfast.
With his favorite terrier, Foxy, and a young assistant, Andrew Burt, and once again comfortably at the helm of his sixteen-foot dinghy, Henry set out into Dusky Sound, beneath towering snowcapped mountains, through waters breaching with dolphins and whales, headed for the mainland in search of kiwis and kakapos.
He found the wild folds of Fiordland still alive with them. He found the signs of the kakapos’ feeding, in the telltale husks and chewings of tussock. In the season of breeding, he felt the hillsides pulsating to the rhythm of their tympanic booming. On their first collecting trip, in May 1895, Henry’s little team sailed seventeen miles to the foot of Mount Forster. They returned ten days later (nine of which rained on them) with twenty-six kakapos and a kiwi, and stocked Resolution Island with the first hopes for their future. The rescue was under way.
The rescuers settled into a strenuous routine. They would load Putangi to the gunwales with supplies for two-week stints of camping and kakapo catchi
ng, and out into the wild sound they would sail.
Henry was careful to study his barometer, to wait out the threatening storm. But once underway, the winds funneling down the fjords of Dusky Sound came quickly and vehemently, forever sending Putangi fleeing for shelter in the closest cove. “The steep mountains along the sounds lead the wind, and their many peaks tangle it up so that … it is very awkward for a sailing vessel,” remarked the understated Henry. “A north-west gale will come down Breaksea Sound, meet the real nor’wester coming in from the sea …, and then both go whirling and snorting down together taking a strong current with them.”
“Wet and tempestuous” became the standard report in Henry’s weather diary. In his first month of residence on Pigeon Island, twenty inches of rain fell; in his first year in Dusky Sound, it rained on two hundred days.
Henry and Burt lived much of their lives in oilskin suits, and wishing they had better. “Our clothes are no use for this climate, and only a load of wet & misery,” Henry grumbled, “and the oilskin coat on top of the sweaty wool is a fit finish for a farce in clothing.” Seldom the complainer, Henry rued the lead weight of his soggy work boots, “pumping water after half a day in the wet moss & I am certain it would be healthier to go without but for the tender foot of civilization & stupidity.”
When Henry wasn’t running from a drenching squall, he was shooing marauding rats from his head as he slept and forever swatting the ubiquitous biting sand fly of Fiordland. The maddening swarms of flies had him burning damp moss in his tent to smoke them out. There would come a time when the only salvation for his sanity was revenge. Henry had left his dog tied at camp and returned to find him under siege: “The poor fellow’s head was swelled with their bites.” He coated his stove’s chimney with grease and watched with sadistic glee as the flies glommed on by the tens of thousands. “I was all the evening peeping out through the slit in the door, and greatly enjoyed their difficulties,” he recalled. “The woodhens found that sandflies soaked in fat were just to their taste, and they kept up a tapping on the iron that sounded quite musical, because we were sitting in peace for the first time for days.”
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