The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  Such was Scoresby’s admiration for Traill that he named an Arctic island for his Orcadian friend. The gesture was an acknowledgement of Traill’s own scientific cataloguing, not least as the first man to study the pilot whale, as Scoresby noted: ‘Delphinus deductor, defined by Dr. Traill … This kind of dolphin sometimes appears in large herds off the Orkney, Shetland, and Faroe islands. The main body of the herd follows the leading whales, and from this property the animal is called in Shetland the ca’ing whale, and by Dr. Traill the deductor … in modern times extensive slaughters have taken place on the shores of the British and other northern islands.’

  From slavery and science to mesmerism and whaling, these men were passionately interested in the issues of their age. And what more extraordinary case history than this tattooed figure from the other side of the world, whose story was as intriguing as any taxonomic study of a blackfish? Perhaps Traill – who would later assist John James Audubon in publishing his Birds of America – saw Kupe as an exotic coloured book plate. Yet in the role of doctor, he also understood that his new patient might be about to die. The Māori had been the subject of an experiment, having been inoculated with measles by a surgeon – possibly following the example of Edward Jenner, John Hunter’s pupil – and was now seriously ill.

  The measles morbilliviruses infected newly discovered islands with a ferocity beyond even venereal disease, halving the Māori population within two generations of James Cook’s first contact. Dr Traill used his lancet to blister the disease, an archaic and largely useless technique, widely adopted in lunatic asylums; Kupe’s recovery probably had more to do with his strong constitution and the ministrations of his friend, the sea captain Richard Reynolds. Fascinated by the Māori, Traill invited him to his home, with a view to finding out more about him and his countrymen. For Kupe himself, this too was an experiment and an adventure. He also had a mission: something to gain and, perhaps, much to lose.

  When George Craik, a fellow Scot and noted writer, was working on his book The New Zealanders, he turned to his friend Dr Traill for information. As a contributor to the wonderfully named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Craik was unabashed by his lack of first-hand acquaintance with his subject; he knew how to pique the curiosity of his audience. ‘We are about to introduce to our readers a highly interesting native of New Zealand, who has recently visited our shores, but of whom, we believe, no account has yet been given to the public.’ There was more than a hint of the gothic to his account of the alien; of Romantic imaginings, of Walpole’s fantasies and Mary Shelley’s science fiction. It is why, perhaps, Melville (whose book was influenced by his reading of Frankenstein) would adopt the same figure as an evocation of the other in Moby-Dick, incarnate in the persona of Queequeg; the dark obverse to the apparent security of Western civilisation. Those cryptic marks on Kupe’s face evoked another world.

  But Mr Craik was not concerned with any inkling of metaphysics. ‘Of all the people constituting the great Polynesian family,’ he noted, ‘the New Zealanders have, at least of late years, attracted the largest portion of public attention. They present a striking contrast to the timid and luxurious Otaheitans, and the miserable outcasts of Australia.’ Masculine, independent, hierarchical and resistant – as opposed to the apparently complaisant, property-disdaining Aborigines – the Māori were deemed worthy opponents, like the Zulus of South Africa, warriors fit to fight the Empire. ‘From the days of their first intercourse with Europeans they gave blow for blow. They did not stand still to be slaughtered, like the Peruvians by the Spaniards; but they tried the strength of the club against the flash of the musket.’

  Nor were the indigenous people of the South Seas strangers to British streets. The first Polynesian, Omai, had been brought back on the Adventure in 1774, to be adopted as Joseph Banks’s ward and commemorated in a portrait by Joshua Reynolds, arranged in stately robes. The first Māori to visit Britain was Moehanga, brought from the Bay of Islands by John Savage in 1807. Arriving in London among the forest of ships’ masts on the Thames, he feared he might be lost, as he might lose his way in a kauri wood. Church steeples awed him. Coming from an island where a cloak of flax or bark might take months to make, and assumed a sacred status in the process, London’s unholy consumerism was shocking to him, with its shops full of clothes and houses stacked with furniture. In turn, the warrior aroused amazement, for all that he had exchanged his feather headdress for a silk hat. ‘It was extremely inconvenient to take Moehanga to public exhibitions, or even to walk with him in the streets, on account of John Bull’s curiosity,’ complained Mr Savage. And although the Māori expressed due incredulity at St Paul’s vast dome, when he met a missionary in New Zealand many years later, what he remembered most of London was its plumbing, and ‘how the water was conveyed by pipes into the different houses’.

  By then, Moehanga’s visit had been eclipsed by the celebrated chief Hongi Hika, who had arrived in England in 1820, along with his young warrior nephew, Waikato. They became the cynosure of high society, although Hika himself was more drawn to the wild beasts in the Tower of London’s menagerie, particularly the elephant. He was unfazed by his audience with George IV, declaring, ‘There is only one king in England, there shall be only one king in New Zealand.’ In honour of such ambitions, the British monarch gave his visitor a suit of armour, a somewhat impractical present, although it was claimed that in one battle his helmet protected the chief from a bullet.

  When the two Māori returned home, they promptly sold their gifts for guns and ammunition, weapons which allowed them to wage battles whose violence and subsequent cannibalism were so shocking that Waikato admitted he could not eat anything for four days. Nor would Hika’s armour protect him. During a skirmish he was shot through the chest, leaving a wound that took a year to kill him; the chief would invite his warriors to listen to the wind whistling through his lungs, and witnesses claimed they could see through his body.

  Such were the precedents for Dr Traill’s patient, whose presence in Liverpool was not as innocent as it seemed.

  On 26 February 1824, Richard Reynolds, captain of the merchant ship Urania, owned by the trading company of Stainforth and Gosling, was sailing in the Cook Strait when a formidable flotilla hove into view from Kapiti: three war canoes, loaded with eighty warriors.

  Reynolds and his crew prepared for imminent attack – and as a South Seas trader, Urania would have been well-armed. But they could not have expected what happened next. The largest of the canoes, with its tall prow, drew towards Urania’s bow, and a man – evidently the leader – stood up. In broken but clear English, he demanded to be allowed to board the ship. Reynolds declined, but as he could see no weapons in the canoe, he allowed it to come nearer.

  Was he inviting what happened next? The company that employed him was about to go bust; perhaps trade for Urania wasn’t going so well; perhaps this foreign intervention was a welcome diversion. Or maybe there was something more, something unspoken. Certainly, Reynolds had some deeper knowledge of New Zealand, since he appeared to be fluent in the Māori tongue.

  As the two vessels came to within touching distance, the gap between worlds and over oceans was broached. Kupe – I imagine his powerful legs bending, his muscular arms reaching out – sprang from his canoe and landed on foreign territory. It was a leap of faith.

  Once aboard, Kupe turned to his war canoes and ordered them to back off – a gesture of conciliation. He made signs as to what he wanted – guns – and was denied. But he had saved his key phrase, words he’d learned and understood, for his final, audacious demand: ‘Go Europe,’ he said, ‘see King Georgy.’

  Reynolds had had enough of this pantomime. He was neither an arms dealer nor the captain of a passenger ship. He ordered three sailors to throw Kupe overboard. As they tried to do so, the warrior threw himself on the deck, grabbing a pair of ring-bolts so powerfully that it was impossible to pull him away ‘without such violence as the humanity of Captain Reynolds would not permit’.
Kupe read the situation correctly. He shouted to his canoes to turn back. He was on his way to Europe.

  Reynolds tried to put Kupe ashore at the next opportunity, but the wind was against him. Giving up, at least for the moment, the Englishman, exhibiting his good manners, decided to make his uninvited guest comfortable. He offered the chief a bunk in his own cabin, in recognition of his status. Kupe stayed on board as Urania sailed across the Pacific to South America, and by the time they reached Lima he and the captain were on the best of terms – a friendship consolidated in a dramatic incident at Montevideo when Reynolds fell overboard. Kupe jumped in and caught the captain as he was about to sink. Holding him tight above the waves, the warrior swam with Reynolds until the two men could be rescued. From one leap to another, the intimacy was sealed between Māori and Englishman. Like Truganini saving George Robinson from the river Arthur, Kupe’s plunge into the South Atlantic was a reversal of the usual roles of Westerner and islander, and all the more powerful for that.

  When he read it, as he must have done, twenty years later, this story had a powerful effect on Melville. Queequeg, a tattooed prince and hawker of human heads, is the most memorable figure in Moby-Dick, clearly based on a Māori warrior; the first Pacific islander in Western fiction. Like Kupe, he too saves a white man from drowning, diving from the deck of the Pequod. ‘Stripped to the waist, [he] darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam.’

  Queequeg hails from ‘an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.’ He is insular in the way the rest of the crew are: ‘They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod,’ says Ishmael, ‘Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.’ Unutterably other yet honourable even in his inky guise, Queequeg is an island in himself. Like Kupe, he is mysterious and brutal, his body a contour map of the unknown, carved by the bone of a whale. Both men are comet-like, almost extraterrestrial. Their miraculous appearances seem to foretell the future: in Queequeg’s case, the fate of the Pequod and her misguided crew; in Kupe’s case, the fate of his warring island nation. When he witnesses his crewmate’s heroic act, Ishmael is beyond admiration. ‘From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yes, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.’ So too Kupe and Reynolds were bound to one another.

  Te Pehi Kupe was born at Kawhia on the North Island around 1795, making him about thirty years old when he met Captain Reynolds and Dr Traill. He had two wives, one son and five daughters. In 1821 he had joined his nephew, Te Rauparaha – destined to become New Zealand’s most famous chief – in raiding the fortified pas of rival iwi. They took Kapiti in a vicious battle, only after four of Kupe’s own children were killed. The island became their stronghold, its warriors armed with muskets acquired from the whalers who continued to arrive in their thousands to kill whales even as these bloody land wars were in progress. And it was in pursuit of that internecine conflict, and perhaps to steal a march on his nephew, that Kupe left Kapiti, for England.

  Arriving in Liverpool, with a Māori in tow, Reynolds found himself out of work, his employers having declared bankruptcy. No one would have blamed him if he’d given Kupe a few shillings and left him at Prince’s Dock to fend for himself; or if he’d done as precedent suggested and exhibited his friend for a fee, much as one might do with a stranded whale. That Reynolds did neither was a measure of the two men’s attachment – one which Dr Traill witnessed for himself. On his visits, the doctor observed that Kupe became upset if parted from Reynolds for more than an hour; his loyalty was absolute, and he even moved the captain’s luggage into his own room, ‘for fear his friend and protector should be carried away from him’.

  On examination, the patient was found to be ‘yet in the vigour of life … His face was intelligent and pleasing, though so much tattooed that scarcely any part of its original colour remained visible. Indeed, every part of his body was plentifully covered with these marks.’ Like Queequeg, whose skin resembled a quilted bedcover it was so patterned (‘Good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplised, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares’), Kupe exuded a physical appeal in Traill’s admiring account: ‘His finely muscular arms, in particular, were furrowed by a great many single black lines; and these, he said, denoted the number of the wounds he had received in battle.’ And like Queequeg, too, Kupe’s usually equable temper could occasionally flare. When a sailor on Urania had insulted him, ‘he rushed upon the man, seized him by the neck and the waistband of the trowsers, and after holding him for some moments above his head, dashed him on the deck with great violence’. The scene recurs in Moby-Dick, when Queequeg catches a ‘young sapling’ mimicking him behind his back. He promptly tosses him in the air like a caber. Reprimanded by the captain for nearly killing the miscreant, the warrior prince replies, laconically, ‘Ah! him bery small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!’

  Dr Traill and Kupe went riding together, a remarkable enough image. For his part, it was claimed that the first time he saw men on horseback, Kupe appeared astounded, like the Aztecs when they first encountered the conquistadors; although, aware of his place in the drama, perhaps the visitor was performing to his role, too. In many of his reported reactions to English manners and customs, it seems as if the Māori was trying to please his hosts with his ‘savage ways’. When he found himself surrounded by immense crowds in the streets, Kupe acknowledged them by touching his hat and shaking their hands. He had become a personality, and his likeness was recorded by an artist, John Sylvester. The process fascinated the sitter, who insisted that his tattoos should be accurately copied. His moko was his identity, especially the markings over the upper part of his nose, which represented his name (although, ironically, that name was Westernised as Tupai Cupai). Kupe drew the mokos of his brother and son, and pointed out the differences between them. He knew every line on his body from memory, although the only mirrors in his native land were reflections in gourds of water.

  On his rides in the Lancashire countryside, Kupe was fascinated by agriculture and blacksmiths. One day Traill took him to see a review of a regiment of dragoons, ‘a spectacle of course altogether to his taste’, as George Craik reported. ‘The gay appearance of the troops – their evolutions in making a charge – and the command which the men exercised over their horses, – all drew from him the warmest expressions of wonder and delight.’ It was his cue to reiterate his true agenda. He asked if the king had many more such warriors; on being informed that he did, Kupe replied, ‘Why then he not give Tupai musketry and swordy?’ and offered to pay in spars and flax.

  This was no naïve barter. The spars of which Kupe spoke came from the kauris that, he told Traill, grew down to the shores of Kapiti as if full to bursting, and were valued for ship’s masts; plentiful spikes of flax furnished the raw material for sailcloth. Kupe knew just what he was offering to a naval empire (whose ambitions differed from his own only in scale and materiel). He even employed sentiment to persuade his friend. In a poignant scene, Kupe met Traill’s four-year-old son. Taking the boy onto his lap, he kissed him and began to weep, telling Traill that his own son had been the same age when he was killed and eaten, his eyes scooped out and devoured.

  Despite his wiles, Kupe failed to convince his hosts that it was a good idea to hand over the guns he wanted to wreak his utu, revenge. On 6 October 1825 he sailed from England, at the country’s expense, aboard the Thames. With him he took various agricultural implements donated by the government; doubtless it was hoped that these would encourage his people towards more pacific pursuits. But like Hongi Hika before him, Kupe quickly traded the tools and his Western clothing for guns as soon as he reached Sydney.

  Back in Kapiti, K
upe plunged into apocalyptic, intertribal war. And like Hika, his end came almost inconsequentially, in an argument over a valuable piece of nephrite. ‘Why do you with the crooked tattoo, resist my wishes?’ he is said to have told a rival warrior, ‘– you whose nose will shortly be cut off with a hatchet.’ Appearances were important, even unto death. Soon after this, Kupe’s forces were overwhelmed. As he resisted, his final words were ambivalent – ‘Don’t give it to the god, but to the Kakakura’ – but his fate was not. His flesh was cooked and eaten, and his warrior bones, which his country would not have, were made into fish hooks to be dangled into the ocean. Like Cook’s, his was a symbolic death, an island sacrifice to the sea; an end, and a beginning.

  The early-morning bus leaves from under the lee of the cathedral, which a year later would lie in ruins, and winds its way through the steep-sided hills of the Banks Peninsula to the sea. Next to me, a dreadlocked girl spends most of the journey deleting images from her digital camera, bleep-bleep-bleep, one by one, providing an electronic soundtrack to our descent to Akaroa – ‘long harbour’ – set inside a narrow rocky inlet.

  The Banks Peninsula was named by Cook in honour of his patron; or rather, he called it Banks Island, since that’s what his initial survey indicated it was. Then it was covered in trees, but these were soon shipped back to Europe for masts, leaving its hillsides bare. That sense of destruction was reflected by bloody warfare: it was here that hundreds of Māori died in a brutal attack by Te Rauparaha, abetted by a British captain, John Stewart, in 1830.