by Philip Hoare
For the native people of New Zealand, Pelorus Jack evoked an older myth, one which reflected their ancient relationship with the islands they called Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, a place shaped as much out of memory as from rock. To them, whales and dolphins were taniwha, shape-shifting spirits, and Jack was one in a long line of such animals to assist the human race. In the founding myth of their nation, a young man, Paikea, is nearly drowned by his jealous brother before the whale Tahoa appears and carries him on its back to Aotearoa. And while the West still saw cetaceans as monsters at the edge of the world, as living islands or spouting sea dragons, here at the real end of the world – according to occidental projections – their true nature was better known.
As a maritime people, the Māori were familiar with whales and birds and their movements. Attuned to the changing colour of the water and the direction of the prevailing winds, they navigated using their bodies; men even used their swinging testicles to sense the sea’s swell. The Polynesians’ first migrations followed those of cetaceans – what their Anglo-Saxon seafaring comrades called hwælweg, ‘the whale’s roads’. Even their physical attributes seemed to reflect one another: the islanders’ broad, muscular bodies – so valued in the rugby players that they export – provided the power to paddle their canoes, while generous body fat sustained them, like blubber, on those long voyages.
To ally oneself to a whale is not so strange; some might say it is perfectly reasonable. Throughout history humans have celebrated their animal affiliations. Earl Siward of Northumbria, an eleventh-century warrior who carried a raven banner and defeated Macbeth in battle, claimed descent from a polar bear; his father’s ears were said to be distinctly ursine. In my Children’s Hereward, a book I was presented with at primary school ‘for pleasing progress’, the flaxen-haired, handsome young Saxon hero fights a mighty white bear, ‘said to be of magic birth, and … related to the great Earl Siward himself’, which is kept caged in a courtyard along with other wild beasts. When the bear escapes, kills a dog and threatens a terrified maiden, Hereward leaps from his horse and, to his own astonishment, slays the animal. The medieval world entertained such cross-breeds: men with stags’ heads or trees growing out of their mouths, women with fishes’ tails; chimera caught between magic and science. Even evolution, in its fluidity, appeared to allow for these hybrids: witness the thylacine, or Darwin’s speculation that the fish-eating bears of the north-west Pacific coast might become entirely aquatic, ‘till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale’, although he later regretted his flight of fancy.
The scientist was only, if unconsciously, reflecting the beliefs of Northwestern Indians, for whom the world was torn between terror and beauty and who lived on the edge of the sea because they found the land more fearful. Their carved wooden figures, preserved in Vancouver’s airy Museum of Anthropology – where totem poles reach up to the glass roof and threaten to burst out of it like redwood trees – might as well be anatomical displays in the Hunterian. Outsized otters and mash-ups of whales and wolves blur reality with unsettling amalgams of claws and coiled tails. In one fantastical carving, multiple dorsal fins poke out of one lupine body, as if there were six whales inside, trying to break out. Meanwhile, over them all hovers the trickster Raven, mating with an oyster and delighted to discover, nine months later, that it had spawned mewling men to be let loose on the world.
The vast Pacific, which still seems so remote to the modern-day Western world, invoked such magical animal–human affinities. Its aboriginal cultures even seemed similar, as they reached from one coast to another. On a boundless, restive sea belied by its name, anything could become anything else. As Jonathan Raban wrote in Passage to Juneau, long before the white men arrived at the north-west Pacific shore – in journeys that connected Cook and Vancouver to the Antipodes – the native people had known what to expect from the flotsam washed up on their shores: bits of ships studded with nails that indicated an alien technology, much as if a modern beachcomber had found parts of a flying saucer.
The Māori’s arrival on Aotearoa only underlined the importance of its animals, especially whales, in a land that lacked any native mammals. Like Tasmania, these were ancient islands, with their own unique, pre-human populations. New Zealand was formed out of the supercontinent of Pangea, from which it had broken away sixty-five million years ago. Its only quadrupeds were reptiles, its largest animals, birds; and it was all the more Edenic for its dearth of fearsome predators. In such a place cetaceans were an important source of protein. (Western visitors would assume that the islands’ natives resorted to cannibalism out of that lack of flesh.) And while Europeans were still calling whales fish, the Mālori had a long-established taxonomy for the species they knew intimately, that they both used and venerated. It was an alternative classification, created centuries before Carl Linnaeus had begun to itemise the world.
Tohorā was the general name for whales, but also signified southern right whales. Hakurā or iheihe were scamperdown or beaked whales, many species of which swam in these deep waters; paikea was the humpback, pakake the minke, ūpokohue the pilot, and parāoa the sperm whale. Whale tribes had honorific titles, too, somehow more evocative, in their unfamiliar consonants and vowels, of the whales’ strange beauty than the ugly names Europe had bestowed on them: Tūtarakauika, te Kauika Tangaroa, Wehengakāuki, Ruamano, Taniwha, Tū-te-raki-hau-noa.
For the Māori there was no demarcation between the life of the land and that of the ocean; such distinctions made no sense. Trees and whales were as one. The god Te Hāpuku was ancestor of both whales and tree ferns, known as fish of the forest. As medieval bestiaries drew correspondences between animals on land and in the sea – the elephant and the whale, the wolf as a shark, the goose born of barnacles – so the Māori saw the sperm whale in the kauri tree, a podocarp that grows to a hundred feet or more and can live for thousands of years. They related that when the tohorā, or whale, asked the kauri to accompany him on his return to the ocean, the tree preferred to stay on the land. Instead, they shared skins. Hence the thinness of kauri’s bark, as oily as the whale’s blubber, both wrinkled in age and majesty.
Humans too were interchangeable with whales. Te kāhui parāoa meant a gathering of sperm whales, but also a group of chiefs. He paenga pakake or beached whales indicated fallen warriors on a battlefield, while men assumed the guise of whales in their warfare. The Ngāti Kurī tribe created a Trojan whale from dog skins in which were hidden one hundred warriors; when their besieged enemy came out to feast on its meat, they were killed and themselves eaten. Other warriors lay on the beach in black cloaks to lure those who thought they’d found a pod of ūpokohue. And the greatest of all chiefs, Te Rauparaha, sustained his army with blackfish that had been driven ashore and tethered by their tails using strong flax ropes, to be killed as required, like a living larder.
Like Australian Aborigines, the Māori did not actively hunt whales, but made good use of stranded animals. Unlike Westerners, they did not render the blubber into oil and discard the rest; the entire animal was a resource which could provide for the tribe. The meat was eaten immediately or dried for later use, and they drank the milk from nursing mothers. Whale oil supplied polish and scent. Teeth and bone became adornments, the most precious being the rei puta, a whale-tooth pendant. The sperm whales’ hard, dense bones also made broad blades and clubs that bore the power of the animal that had provided them.
Hundreds if not thousands of whales still beach themselves on the shores of New Zealand every year, and are regarded as tapu, sacred signs. When a pod of pilot whales stranded on the South Island recently, a Māori elder arrived with his sleeping bag to spend the night with them in order that they should not die alone. Solemn blessings are given to dead or dying whales. In one famous incident in 1970, fifty-nine stranded sperm whales were declared to be tangata, or human, and were interred in a communal grave, five hundred feet long. Their deaths were, paradoxically, seen as a good omen for an imminent visit from th
e Queen (and an Antipodean reflection of the medieval right to ‘royal fish’). The same incident also inspired Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Whale Rider – although his book was born in New York.
In 1985 the writer was working as a diplomat in Manhattan when a humpback whale swam up the Hudson as far as 57th Street. It seemed to Ihimaera to have come up ‘that dirty big black primordial river’ to see him, as one emissary to another. ‘I have never believed that the Māori world stops when you leave the country,’ he told me, ‘nor have I ever believed that the interconnectedness – that interface as you call it – stops simply because it’s dysfunctional now on the human side. Do whales have ancient memories? Sure they do.’ The New York whale represented all the whales that had been so important to his people; it was a symbol of the ineluctable past, the present and the future.
Orphan or guardian, Pelorus Jack was last seen in 1912, and probably died that year of old age, although some suspected that a visiting fleet of Norwegian whalers had harpooned him. Nowadays his legend is reduced to a company logo for the ferry line, a cute dolphin leaping over a wave in the shape of the national fern leaf. There is no need for cetacean guides now. As our ship reaches the narrow fjords of South Island, where a Nordic whaler would feel at home, it steers to signals bounced from unseen satellites. The tree-clad slopes plunge straight into the sea. It might almost be a pretty scene, with its fluttering yachts, were it not for the sense that the cliffs are closing in, as if to squeeze us in their grasp.
From the deck below me, I hear sheep bleating, caged in a truck.
At the end of Queen Charlotte Sound stands the town of Picton, itself a former whaling port. The ferry inches into dock, and I step out onto the street and walk over to the railway platform. The rackety train leaves on the dot of one, rattling through green valleys studded with vineyards. The last carriage is an open-sided observation car; I feel like a character from the Wild West as I lean out into the wind. We pass salt flats blushed pink by algae and sheep grazing in fertile pastures, negotiating the narrow corridor formed by the Southern Alps to the west, and the open Pacific to the east. Forced ever further south by their twin wildernesses, we arrive at Kaikoura. This former railway town was once busy processing sheep. Now it advertises its new fortune in a punning sign over the old ticket office: the Whale Way Station. But a wobbly horizon says no more boats today.
In a bar on the town’s main street at what he calls beertime, I meet Bill Morris, who has driven all the way from Dunedin to talk whales. He’s tall, in his twenties; his hair stands up in tufts from sleeping in his camper van. We climb into the front seats, with his clothes and guitars piled in the back, and drive down to the headland.
The landscape is so sharp and bright and brutal that it’s as if I’d administered eyedrops. At low tide, the plateau of rock is covered with seaweed of every shape and colour, a vivid herbaceous border of bladderwrack and coral-like fans. Bill and I walk out to the water’s edge, through swathes of bull kelp laid flat like a felled forest. New Zealand fur seals loll, their flashing eyes daring us to get closer. Their name, Arctocephalus forsteri, commemorates Georg Forster, who with his father Johann Reinhold Forster took Banks’s place as naturalists on Cook’s second voyage in the 1770s. Georg Forster brought back a sketch of what he called sea bears, an augury of Darwin’s confusion, as if they’d fused their paws into flippers and taken the plunge into the sea. By naming the beast Forster laid it open to its fate, as Paterson had done for the thylacine, as the Discovery scientists would do for the whales of the Southern Ocean. In just one season in 1824, eighty thousand fur seal pelts were taken from South Island. Their numbers remain a fraction of what they once were.
Back on dry land Bill shows me a lonely, pink-painted wooden hut with a tin roof. Whale ribs are scattered around its stoop; its foundations stand on vertebrae. Just as whales brought its first people here, this country’s foundation, as far as the West was concerned, lay in whaling. This tiny cottage was once part of the station established here in 1842 by Robert Fyffe. He and other whalers took up to fourteen thousand southern rights each year; to them the stink of rotting carcases was ‘the smell of money’. By the 1920s, ninety-nine per cent of the Southern Hemisphere’s right whales had been killed. All that remains of the factory is a single fireplace, standing like a wayside shrine on the shore, as if everything else had been washed away.
Inside the cottage, the cabin-like rooms are still covered in Edwardian wallpaper. The low southern sun forces through the windows. It feels like the last house in the world. There’s a sense of extinction and improbable life; of enormous animals and their equally vast absence. Here you might not be surprised to see a giant bird stalking through its cottage garden, and indeed, four centuries ago you might have seen just that. The largest moa egg ever found was discovered here, evidence of an earlier cull carried out on this shore.
The biggest of the moa species could reach twelve feet, twice the height of a man, but that did not prevent them from being hunted to extinction. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, while Tudor monarchs were squabbling in England, the moa had retreated to New Zealand’s South Island, just as the thylacine made its last stand in Tasmania. Here the most complete remains have been found, including the fearsome claws of Megalapteryx didinus, discovered in an Otago cave in 1878 with its feathers intact, like the hairy remains of giant sloths found in South American caves. In this sublime, scaled-up landscape, it is hard to believe that such large creatures disappeared so recently; their shapes seem to linger, like the after-image of the sun.
In 1844, Kawane Paipai, a Māori elder, told Robert FitzRoy, who had been captain of the Beagle during Darwin’s voyage and had subsequently become governor of New Zealand, of a moa hunt that had taken place on South Island fifty years before. In a scene that recalls one of Ray Harryhausen’s films, Paipai remembered the bird being harried and surrounded before it was speared, using weapons that, like whaling harpoons which bent as they entered the blubber, were constructed to snap once they struck. A frightened moa would fight back, using its huge feet to strike at its attackers – although this tactic left the bird unbalanced and easily toppled from behind. Yet more cruelly, other birds were killed by being made to swallow hot rocks.
Despite such depredations, many were convinced of the moa’s survival into the modern era. Whalers and sealers said they saw monstrous birds on the rocky shores. Bones were discovered with marks that, it was claimed, could only have been made by iron blades unavailable to the Māori – indicating that Europeans had not only seen moa, but had eaten them too.
In 1839, a shard of moa bone reached Richard Owen at the Hunterian Museum, where he was responsible for conserving the surgeon’s collections and expanding them in the name of science. This fragment was to become pivotal in the career of the man who coined the word dinosaur, who commissioned the Crystal Palace monsters, and on whom Charles Dickens would draw for Mr Venus, the melancholy taxidermist and articulator of bones in Our Mutual Friend.
It was not a speedy process. After four years’ deliberation, Owen decided that the bone belonged to a huge bird which he named Dinornis in a taxonomic echo of his terrible lizards (and, unbeknown to him, a nod to the future revelation that birds themselves were direct descendants of the dinosaurs): ‘So far as my skill in interpreting an osseous fragment may be credited, I am willing to risk the reputation for it on the statement that there has existed, if there does not now exist, in New Zealand, a struthious bird nearly, if not quite, equal in size to the Ostrich, belonging to a heavier and more sluggish species.’
Forty years later, celebrated and often criticised for such leaps of faith (and indeed for failing to credit others’ discoveries), the dome-headed professor was photographed alongside a giant moa skeleton at the British Museum, of which he was now the director, wearing a tattered gown which, along with his disconcertingly staring eyes, made him look rather like a moa himself.
Even before Owen ‘discovered’ the giant bird, tales of its apparent
survival were emerging. In 1823, George Pauley claimed to have seen a huge bird when he was walking near a lake in Otago: ‘I ran from it, and it ran from me.’ Later, in 1850, engineers prospecting a new railway line to Canterbury saw two large birds, bigger than emus, on the hillside. And in 1878 a farmer described a moa in the same countryside, its unmistakable shape – although no living human was supposed to have seen one – silhouetted ‘for fully ten minutes on the brow of the terrace, bending its long neck up and down exactly as the black swan does when disturbed’. Such stories, that moas might still be stalking their way through the wilderness, still persist, although little evidence exists to substantiate them, beyond blurred photographs, promises of plaster casts and rumours of giant nests in dead kauri trees.
As Bill and I look across to the ocean from Fyffe House, the sun is already sinking. Ahead of us, the Kaikoura Canyon plunges more than six miles down to the ocean bed, the tail-end of the great chasm that marks the meeting of the Pacific and Indo-Asian tectonic plates, an abyss into which whole volcanoes are dragged down by the inexorable movements of continental drift. Extensive biomasses have been identified in the canyon, one hundred times more than expected in such waters; massive accumulations of life, from burrowing sea cucumbers to spoonworms, testament to this meeting of cool and warm currents that encourages upwelling nutrients and the innumerable organisms which feed on them.