‘You will offer two times what the property is worth,’ Hawk tells him, ‘and allow six months or the next crop to come to the landowner before he must vacate. The name of the buyer must never be known, Mr Thompson, do you understand me?’
‘But how much shall I buy?’ asks the bemused Thompson. ‘Is there a limit? Five thousand acres? More? Farmland only?’
‘You must buy everything, valleys, fields, forests, hills, mountains, rivers and streams. If you can find a way to deal with the Almighty I wish you to buy the sky as well,’ Hawk instructs him, but then cautions Thompson, ‘The parcel must be clean, there can be no farms left unvacated in any part of the land you buy except at its perimeters. I shall return in a year and instruct you further.’
‘But, but . . .’ Thompson splutters, ‘such an undertaking will attract attention, if I have no name for the purchaser, how shall I answer?’
‘You will buy the land in the name of the Bank of New South Wales and they will hold the titles.’ By doing this Hawk has prevented any possibility of Thompson cheating him. Hawk returns to the tribe and informs Chief Tamihana that he must return at once to Australia. The old chief commands that a great farewell feast be held on the marae in his honour.
During the festivities and much to Hawk’s embarrassment, Chief Tamihana invites Hawk’s old friend, the one-armed, one-eyed Hammerhead Jack to tell the rangatira, the elders of the tribe, and the tohunga, and all those gathered at the hui about the time Hawk saved his life when the great sperm whale had overturned their whaleboat and his arm had been severed by the harpoon line.
‘I am not much Maori, with only one arm and one eye, but my mana is in my left eye and it would be my privilege to die for my brother, Ork,’ Hammerhead Jack concludes at the end of his talk.
The rangatira clap and shout their approval of Hammerhead Jack’s sentiments. Chief Tamihana has earlier reminded them of the contribution of General Black Hawk, who with his new guerilla tactics, which the Maori call ‘the running away war’, made the forces of Wiremu Kingi and General Hapurona achieve victories against the British. They have more to add to the collective memory of the giant black man they think of as one of their own.
It is an altogether grand farewell though Hawk is somewhat bemused at how his reputation as a fighting man and as a general has grown in his absence.
‘Chief Tamihana, I am honoured to be counted among you, to be accepted as rangatira, but surely you speak of a stranger. I have neither the wisdom nor the bravery you bestow upon me. Of the running away war, it was something I learned in books and I cannot take credit for it.’ Hawk walks over and stands beside Hammerhead Jack who is seated among the highest of the rangatira. ‘We have been brothers in war and I could ask for no braver man at my side. At the battle of Puke Te Kauere it was this man who was the true general when we fought outside the pa. Without him we could not have succeeded and without him Tommo would have drowned in the swamp. How can I merit praise when it is due so much more to others, to this man, my Maori brother?’
The rangatira clap, enjoying Hawk’s modesty and his copious praise for one of their own warriors. Hawk promises he will return each year to attend to the needs of Tommo’s daughter Hinetitama and to sit with his brothers in the marae. He tells them that he knows himself to be a Maori in his heart and is of the Ngati Haua tribe and he wears their moko on his face with great pride.
He thanks the rangatira and is careful to do the same to the tohunga. Priests, Hawk has observed, have long memories for small slights, and finally he thanks Chief Tamihana for the honour they have bestowed on Tommo by giving him the burial rights of a great warrior and for elevating him to the ranks of the rangatira.
Hawk will sail in the morning and it is late, with a full moon high in the night sky. Chief Tamihana sees him to the hut they have provided for him in the chief’s compound. ‘I shall leave you now my friend and we will sail you to Auckland in the morning, I have but one more gift for you which I hope you will enjoy.’
‘Gift? I have been honoured beyond any possible merit, Tamihana, I have been given the gift of brotherhood and of your friendship. With Tommo dead there is none I value more than yours and that of Hammerhead Jack.’
Tamihana chuckles softly. ‘Ah, Hawk, this is but the gift of one night, an old memory revisited.’ With this remark he bids Hawk goodnight and takes his leave.
Hawk is too tired to think what the old chief might mean and gratefully enters his hut. The night carries a cool breeze from the mountains and Hawk wraps a blanket about himself and is preparing to sleep when he becomes conscious of a shadow darkening the door of his hut, blocking out the moonlight.
‘Who is it?’ he says wearily. He has talked and listened too much for one night and wishes only to be left alone.
‘It is me, General Black Hawk, Hinetitama, whose name you have taken for the daughter of Tommo. Do you remember me?’
It is as if time has stood in the same place, for in the moonlight he watches as the woman loosens the neck cord and allows her feather cloak, the sign of a highborn Maori, to fall at her feet.
In the silvered air Hawk can see that she is still as beautiful as when she first came to him. He can remember almost every word Hinetitama said to him that first night so long ago. ‘Oh, Black Maori, I have wanted you so very long. I have eaten you with my eyes and I have tasted you in my heart a thousand times. I have moaned for you alone in my blanket and my mouth has cried out to hold your manhood. My breasts have grown hard from longing for you and I have brought pleasure to myself in your name.’
Hawk’s throat aches suddenly, for he can think only of Maggie Pye, her sweetness and her brash and unashamed love for him. Maggie so different to this beautiful shadow in the night.
Now the moonlight throws a silver sheen across her skin and he can see the curve of her breasts and stomach. It is as if he is within a dream repeated, each detail the same as before even though so much has changed in him.
Hinetitama crosses the small hut and she lifts his blanket and lies beside him. ‘I have never forgotten you, Black Maori,’ she whispers into Hawk’s ear. She begins to kiss him, as she did before, across his chest and belly, moving lower and lower. Hawk feels himself grow hard. ‘Oh, Maggie, forgive me,’ he moans silently, for Hinetitama’s mouth has reached his trembling hardness and now it engulfs him. Hawk thinks that he will die with the pleasure of her lips and, just when he feels he can bear it no longer, she withdraws and her hand guides him into her so that she now sits astride him. Hawk begins to moan softly.
‘Black Hawk, have you learned nothing from your pakeha women?’ she laughs. ‘You must wait for me, there is a twice greater pleasure when the moment is shared.’
‘Aye,’ Hawk gasps, and then adds in the Maori tongue, ‘But I am only a mortal man.’ He can see the flash of her white teeth as she laughs and the fine curve of her neck and the sheen of moonlight as it catches the rounded slant of her shoulder.
‘Ah, but did you say this to your Maggie Pye?’ She laughs again.
Hawk’s eyes open in sudden surprise. ‘Maggie! You know of Maggie?’ he exclaims.
‘See how I have caused you to wait.’ Hinetitama laughs again. ‘It is not so hard to contain your pleasure when your mind is distracted.’
‘Yes, but how? How do you know of Maggie?’ Hawk repeats urgently.
‘The Maori are everywhere, Black Hawk. Our men are sailors on the whaling ships and those that bring timber to Sydney. Many of our women are widows who have lost their husbands in the wars against the pakeha and so remain barren and unloved for lack of men, some have been taken by the pakeha sailing captains to Sydney.’ She laughs. ‘As a lover I can’t say you have improved, but you have become a great fighter since you left us, a great man who is known by all the Maori in Sydney. You also honoured my tribe when you took Johnny Heki to train you, he is a Maori with my moko. Ah, Black Hawk, there is much we know of you, for you are one of us and they are our Gods who protect you now and forever.’
&nbs
p; Hawk, taken by surprise at the mention of Maggie’s name, has lost much of his tumescence. Hinetitama’s voice takes on a mocking quality. ‘First you cannot wait for me, now you wait too long,’ she teases softly. ‘Black Hawk, if you do not make love to me better than this, I shall think your Maggie Pye has taught you nothing.’
With her words and her laughter and her permission to love her free of the constraints of Maggie’s memory, she withdraws and lies beside him and Hawk enters her again and now he releases his sadness and his grief for his sweet Maggie and for Tommo’s death in Hinetitama’s wild and generous loving.
‘Ah, Black Hawk, I was wrong,’ Hinetitama sighs at last. ‘The pakeha woman with the bird in her hair, this Maggie, has taught you well how to please a wahine.’ Her lips brush his face lightly and then she rises and picks up her feathered cloak from beside his rush bed and he watches as she moves silently out into the moonlit compound.
‘Thank you,’ Hawk calls softly after her. ‘Thank you, Hinetitama.’
Chapter Two
HINETITAMA
1881–1885
At twenty-one Tommo’s half-caste daughter is a great beauty with skin the colour of wild honey and hair dark as a raven’s wing. She is small, no more than five feet and one inch, but despite her diminutive frame she has a contralto voice of great power and of a most serene beauty. But from all these gifts from a generous God must be subtracted a spirit headstrong and wilful and a nature as wild as her father Tommo’s once was.
Hawk has kept his promise to Tommo that his daughter will be raised to maturity within the household of Chief Tamihana but when she is six years old Hawk’s dear friend and Hinetitama’s Maori guardian dies and Tommo’s daughter is cared for by Chief Mahuta Tawhiao, with the old chief’s daughter given responsibility for the young child’s daily care.
When Tamihana knew he was coming to the end of his life he wrote to Hawk. The letter is unusual because the old chief, in a missive so serious, appended a note mentioning women’s matters, in particular those of a child.
Though Chief Tamihana could well have instructed the letter be sent to Hawk in Tasmania, he wanted his old friend to read it on Maori land while he and his ancestors could look over his shoulder. Hawk was to receive it on his next annual trip to New Zealand to see Hinetitama and to supervise the purchase of more land. The letter, intended for posterity, had been carefully scripted while the note was in the old chief’s mission-taught handwriting.
April 1866
My friend Black Hawk,
We shall no longer sit together by the evening fire or eat again from the same pot. I have now seen sixty summers and it is time for me to join my ancestors.
I am writing this letter to you, Black Maori, so that you will hold my life on the page and be its custodian and then, perhaps some day, history will judge me for what I tried to do and failed.
I have had a long life for a Maori man, who does not often see his hair turn white, and who is usually dead while his seed is still strong in his loins. In my time too many of our brave young men have died for some foolish tribal war fought out of false pride or from seeking retribution for some imagined insult.
When I was a boy my father sent me to the missionaries to learn the white man’s language and his ways. ‘You must see if they have lessons for us,’ he instructed.
I studied hard and learned to read and write and spent much time with the pakeha’s Bible. I learned that it was a good book from a merciful God and I found it so myself. But I was soon to discover that it was the white man’s Sunday book only and all the remaining days of the week the pakeha felt free to disobey the commandments of his own God.
It was then that I first realised that the pakeha’s word could not be trusted, not even on Sunday, for it was not founded in his mana. That his God was good only for births and burials and his word was as worthless as a broken pot.
I knew then that the Treaty of Waitangi was like the white man’s word, and that the Maori would never have justice under the pakeha Queen Victoria or the laws she makes.
When I came to my manhood the Maori people had killed more of their own kind than the pakeha. They had taken the white man’s gun and turned it on their own. We have killed more than twenty thousand of our people while the pakeha stood by and watched the Maori die, thinking that soon there would be no Maori to come up against them and they could take all our land for their spotted cows.
And so I grew to be a man and I became the peacemaker among the tribes and then the kingmaker, joining all the Maori under King Potatau te Wherowhero so that we could speak with one voice.
Alas, the pakeha did not want us to stop killing our own and they forced us to go to war with them. It was here that you, Black Hawk, became a Maori warrior and gained great distinction, so that you became a rangatira to be forever honoured in the Ngati Haua tribe and among all the Maori people.
Though we fought with honour the pakeha had too many guns and too many soldiers and we forsook the clever ways of our previous guerilla war, the runaway fighting you taught us and we went back to defending the pa and so were beaten, but remained proud in defeat, a worthy opponent.
Now, as I lie dying, I know that the pakeha, in defeating us, has taken everything from us but one last thing. Our warriors still fight in the hills where no pakeha dare go. They have created a redoubt that holds within it the Maori pride. While we have our pride they cannot destroy our race. I pray that it is always there. Ake ake ake. You must speak for us, you must be my elbow and my backbone, General Black Hawk.
I shall die with a curse on my lips for the white man, for what they have done to my people. But there is one exception, Tommo Te Mokiri, who bought back for us, through your hands, the rivers and the streams, the mountains and the hills, the forests and the glades and the good tilling soil all of which once belonged to our people and which the pakeha conspired to take from us. It is for this that I now decree, having talked through the tohunga to the ancestors, that Tommo Te Mokiri’s daughter shall be made a true princess of the Maori people.
I go to my ancestors knowing that the Maori mana is the spirit of Aotearoa and that it will prevail. Ake ake ake. In our hearts we cannot be defeated until the earth sinks into the sea.
I go to my ancestors now, where I shall watch over you like a father watches over his beloved son.
Wiremu Tamihana,
Chief of the Ngati Haua Maori.
To this formal letter Tamihana penned his own note.
My friend Black Hawk,
I have kept my promise and now I deliver the Princess Hinetitama to the care of Mahuta Tawhiao, who will care for her as I have done and see that she is instructed in the Maori traditions befitting her high rank.
She is a Maori wahine in all things save one. She is yet a piglet barely weaned from the teats but already she is as stubborn as an old sow. On more than one occasion I have instructed that she be beaten by the old women in my household for disobedience, but she will not bend to their will, no matter how severe her punishment. I think she has this from her father, Tommo Te Mokiri.
When the time comes you must find her a strong warrior who will teach her to be a quiet flowing stream as a woman must be to a man if there is to be peace in his household.
Her singing has brought me great delight and her laughter is always among us. I thank you for the pleasure she has brought me in my old age, she will be a worthy princess of our people.
Your friend,
Wiremu Tamihana.
Hawk has kept his pledge to Tommo and visited Hinetitama every year of her life. Now that she has grown to womanhood he wants her to come home to Hobart, to be with Mary, who wishes above all things to have the company of her granddaughter at her side.
However, to his mortification, Hinetitama will hear of no such thing and asserts her independence, telling him she wishes to go to Auckland to become a nurse.
‘But you may do the same training in Hobart, we will find you an excellent opportunity and we will all be tog
ether?’ Hawk insists.
Hinetitama is silent, her eyes downcast, then she looks up. ‘I must stay here, Uncle. I want to go to Auckland to be among the poor.’
‘The poor are everywhere, my dear. You will find as many in Hobart as you wish to care for.’
‘Maori poor?’
‘The poor have no nation, or colour or creed, they are luxuries they cannot afford. Poverty is the one universal brotherhood, my dear.’
‘But I am a Maori. I must be with my own people.’
‘Only half, the other is pakeha. Grandmother Mary prays that she might have the pleasure of knowing you, of setting eyes upon your sweet face, before she dies.’
Hinetitama gives a soft deprecating laugh. ‘I cannot bring pleasure to one rich old woman when so many poor suffer for lack of attention.’
Hawk is shocked at the bluntness of her remark. ‘I would not have looked upon it quite like that. Your grandmother has known the worst of poverty and degradation, she will not condemn you for your desire to work among the poor. You must not judge her so harshly, she wishes only to know you as her only grandchild.’
‘Uncle, I mean no impertinence, you have always said I must obey my conscience.’
Hawk sighs. ‘Hinetitama, it is your duty to also obey me,’ he says sternly. ‘I wish you to come to Hobart. Your grandmother wishes it, that is all.’
Hawk sees the stubborn set of her jaw as Hinetitama answers. ‘Uncle Hawk, when we were young and you would come to New Zealand every year and we would take long walks, you told me about my father, how he wished me to remain among the Maori, among my mother’s people, and then when I came of age to make up my own mind.’ She looks defiantly at Hawk. ‘I have decided to work among my own people. My grandmother does not need me, they do.’
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