From the Waikato to Vienna and back: how two Maori learned to print

Tu Tangata, Issue 29, 1 April 1986, Page 44

From the Waikato to Vienna and back: how two Maori learned to print

The world cruise (1857-9) of the Austrian scientific expedition on board the Imperial and Royal frigate Novara spent 18 of its amply documented voyage of 849 days in New Zealand waters. After celebrating, with the enthusiastic help of Bishop Jean Baptiste Francois Pompallier and his flock, a no doubt intensely nostalgic Christmas and New Year in Auckland, the Novara weighed anchor on 8 January 1859 and, homeward bound at last, set sail for Tahiti.

Already delayed by stormy weather, the smooth departure of the Novara on this first bright and sunny day of the New Year was briefly threatened by a small boat under the excited command of Pompallier’s red-haired Irish Vicar General who, clinging to the Jacob’s ladder and ignoring his windswept cloak, ‘wished to saddle us with some wonderfully tattooed Catholic Maoris’. Mindful of further delay, the Commodore Bernhard von Wullerstorf-Urbair (1816-83) regretfully declined this last-minute impassioned approach by the Very Reverend James McDonald (the ‘Apostle of the Maoris’) and the boatload of dusky would-be tourists was left rocking disconsolately in the Novara’s wake.

Another non-traveller for the Novara was the expedition’s official geologist Ferdinand Hochstetter (1829-84), retained and commissioned by an Auckland provincial government anxious for expert advice on suspected coal seams. With the Commodore’s agreement, Hochstetter was to remain in New Zealand at the government’s expense until 2 October 1859, when he would leave Nelson on the Prince Arthur for Sydney. After watching the Novara’s impeded departure, Hochstetter dejectedly wrote in his diary ‘Alone in the Antipodes!’, momentarily forgetting ‘several officials, also a photographer, a draughtsman, and 15 Maoris’ who had been selected to accompany him in his survey of ‘this little-explored England’. The ‘draughtsman’ incidentally was Julius Haast (1822-87) who had coincidentally disembarked from the Evening Star at Auckland’s Fort Britomart on 21 December 1858, the day before the arrival of the Novara.

Already during the Novara's brief stay at Auckland, Hochstetter had made cursory forays into the interior. It was he who had been instrumental in bringing to the Commodore’s attention the ambition of four Maoris and one halfblood of making the voyage to Europe. The Colonial Government exercised a circumspect watching brief and by Tuesday 4 January, the day of embarkation, the number had been whittled down to two. These were Wiremu

Toetoe Tumohe and Te Hemara Rerehau Paraone. They were rated in the ship’s books as seamen, first class, and this they remained until the Novara finally reached Trieste.

We find this last item of nautical nomenclature in the manuscript diary of K. Scherzer, official historiographer on board the Novara. Like Hochstetter, Karl Scherzer (1821-1903) was one of the seven members of the scientific commission appointed to sail with the 355 officers and crew of the Novara. Originally trained in Vienna as a printer, Scherzer founded in 1848 the Gutenberg-Verein, an early precursor of the modern printing unions. From 1852 to 1855 he travelled in North and Central America with the geographer Moritz Wagner. Despite his dangerously liberal convictions, Scherzer was, at the suggestion of Baron Karl Ludwig von Bruck, appointed to the Novara, and on his return, as Karl von Scherzer (cp. again Hochstetter), launched into a successful consular and diplomatic career.

His illustrated three-volume Reise der Osterreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde, in den Jahre n 1857, 1858, 1859, Vienna, 1861-2, remains today eminently readable for its relaxed yet graphic style and proved to be one of the success stories of the nineteenth century publishing world. In its various editions and translations, the Reise was exceeded in sales and impact only by the Kosmos, Stuttgart, 1845-62, of Alexander von Humboldt, under whose benign patronage, incidentally, the Novara expedition took place.

Of the Novara’s new crewmen, we find that Toetoe, a heavily tattooed 32 year old, had been baptised by English missionaries when he was 15. A chief of the small Waikato tribes of Ngatiapakura and Ngatiwakohike, his command of reading and writing and english had, by the time the Novara appeared, brought him the Government position of postmaster for the Auckland and Hawkes Bay circuit. Possibly this was partial reward for the active help and encouragement publicly offered by Toetoe to Government road-builders. A land-owner, he ran cattle and

horses on his pastures and had in 1846 married the mestiza daughter of an Englishman and a Maori woman, who had subsequently presented him with a son. His last act, before boarding the Novara and after having entrusted his postal position to a near relative, was to have his photograph taken.

His fellow-traveller Rerehau, without tattoos and aged about twenty, was the son of a wealthy Mohoaonui chief, who in turn was related to Toetoe. Rerehau too had been baptised and, the product of a missionary school, could read and write maori, had a smattering of schoollearning and was a competent sower, flour-grinder and baker. The Anglican baptisms of both Toetoe and Rerehau, needless to say, largely explain Father McDonald’s last-ditch attempt to board the Novara.

The two Maoris, after an initial bout of depression brought on by the combined impact of homesickness and mal de mer, soon became, as the ship settled down again to the routine of shipboard life, firm favourites of the Novara’s crew. There were more inner qualms and shrill complaints about the biting cold when the Novara made a rough passage around the Horn. No doubt Toetoe and Rerehau felt more relief than regret as the Novara, after a voyage of some 51,686 miles, glided up to its home anchorage in the harbour of Trieste on a golden evening in the August of 1859.

Promptly, the crew and officers of the Novara were whisked to Vienna, where they faced a hero’s welcome. With almost indecent haste, however, our two Maori were bundled into the throbbing recesses of the Imperial and Royal ‘Hofund Staatsdruckerei’ where they were slickly initiated into a nine-months' apprenticeship in the art of printing under the genial tutelage of the director Alois Auer (1813-69), then at the height of his fame as the entrepreneurial typographical maestro of Central Europe.

Their immediate mentor was one Herr Zimmerl, a member of Auer’s staff, who had, incredibly, ‘made the maori idiom a special study’ and it was he who taught the Maori english and german ‘as well as the manipulation of types and lithography besides copper-plate engraving and drawing from nature’. Further details of the Maori entry into Auer’s printing-works are to be gleaned from a letter (currently in the author’s possession) written by Auer to the Sydney printer J.N. Degotardi (1823-82) on 5 October 1859. Auer des-

cribes how Dr Scherzer ‘once arrived home, being uncertain what to do with the two Maoris, I offered to take the two men for the duration of their stay in Vienna into the State Printery, at the latter’s expense, as unpaid workers. I appointed them to the care of one of my foremen, who treated them like members of his own family.’

We learn too the real story behind the versatile Herr Zimmerl: ‘An intelligent and linguistically gifted young man, a member of our Institute, has been commissioned to teach the two Islanders german and for his part to acquire with their help a knowledge of the New Zealand language, in order to be able in due course to employ this knowledge in the interests of our Institute.’

With modest optimism, Auer could here prophesy that the two Maori ‘could well become on their return to their mother country not unworthy missionaries amongst their fellow countrymen of German culture and breeding’. Such thoughts led Auer in turn to conclude his letter in a mood of true nine-teenth-century evangelical fervour: ‘Who knows what sort of fruit will shoot forth in that distant latitude from the seeds that are being sown here! For I believe that within the truly perfect household of nature no seed is strewn in vain. Sooner or later the time must come for it to germinate, if not to the sower’s immediate profit then to that of mankind itself.’

In a later letter of 15 June 1860 to his Sydney correspondent J.N. Degotardi, Auer was to summarise Toetoe and Rerehau’s technical progress during their nine-months’ stint in the laconic way of the bustling executive. ‘Here in the Institute they have learned how to composit and print, and how to carry out lithography and copper plate engraving.’ As positive proof of his new apprentices’ expertise and in order to give Degotardi ‘an approximate idea of New Zealand rhetoric’, Auer forwarded along with his letter a copy of the address printed in maori delivered by Toetoe and Rerehau on their presentation to Emperor Franz Joseph I and the Empress Elisabeth, together with the two Maoris’ printed ‘valedictory salutation’. The imperial address was further accompanied by the ever competent Herr Zimmerl’s translation into German.

The specimens accompanying this letter have not survived, but they are printed in Hochstetter’s Neu-Seeland. The address to the Emperor and Empress (c. 160 words, in German only) is at p. 528, that to ‘The inhabitants of Vienna’ (in maori and german, c. 300 words each) at pp. 529-30. In the latter document Toetoe and Rerehau write: ‘We have seen the State Printery, where we spent our time here, learning your language and the craft of printing.’

The Maoris, now germanicised into one Wilhelm Toetoe and one Samuel

Rerehau, had in fact been presented at Court in the February of 1860. As winter gave way to spring, their social horizons broadened dramatically. From their lodgings in Ottakring, they were frequently to be seen strolling the thoroughfares of Vienna, often pausing to jot down in their notebooks ‘in legible writing’ touristic comments in maori. Inevitably they were sucked into the social whirl, became expert ball-room dancers, charmed many a lionising hostess by their intriguing entries in family autograph albums and possibly, as Hochstetter archly implies, ‘went on to develop still further “galant” propensities’.

There is little indication of these social circuits in the diaries separately kept in Vienna by Toetoe and Rerehau. Toetoe discourses on the make-up of the German Confederation and describes at length his peroration in maori in the Emperor’s presence at a second audience on 17 May 1860. This was read from a sheet prepared in the printing works by Rerehau and himself, a sheet in two columns, the one maori, the other german.

The account left by Rerehau is more detailed, comments on the ‘unpleasant and really rough’ work on the Novara, recalls Tahiti and Valparaiso and is not above the generalisation of the worldtraveller. Of their Austrian hosts he noted: ‘I would call their generosity

remarkable, unlike the English who are not generous at all.’ Of their early days in Vienna, Rerehau could write in the November of 1859, ‘Previously Roihi (Auer), the head of the printing works, had kept us out of sight. The Emperor had made a ruling pertaining to us that we were not allowed to go elsewhere...’ Their first public appearance was in fact on 10 November 1859, when they mingled with the crowds in the Prater, noisily and unchauvinistically celebrating the centenary of the birth of the German poet and dramatist, Friedrich von Schiller.

With understandable relish Rerehau dwells too on their growing popularity (‘all the onlookers shouted “Bravo, bravo, New Zealand!” ... and our fame was known throughout the empire’) but he also describes the visits dutifully made to various factories and government offices with the übiquitous Herr Zimmerl in tow. The most animated descriptions however derive from several trips made to the zoo, where the lions and tigers seem to have exerted a grim and constant attraction.

The return of Hochstetter however to Vienna from Trieste on 16 May 1860 heralded the end of Toetoe and Rerehau’s heady days in the Austrian capital. With Hochstetter they attended a reunion of the Novara’s officers in the venerable ‘Zum romischen Kaiser’ and

with him on 26 May 1860 they left Vienna for ever. Alois Auer accompanied them to the railway station where they took leave of their Austrian host ‘with expressions of unfeigned gratitude and with tears of emotion in their eyes’. Auer, no doubt reflecting on ‘the favourable impression which they made on me even during the first weeks of their stay and which was never consequently dispelled for a single moment’, could further report to his distant correspondent J.N. Degotardi: ‘At my suggestion His Majesty the Emperor has deigned to command that the Maoris should be given from the Imperial Printery the necessary equipment and tools which they will need for the further practice of the graphic arts, with which they were made familiar here in Vienna.’

While the printing-press, type fonts and tools were being freighted to Trieste for shipping to Auckland for their shortlived stay at Mangere, Hochstetter conducted his charges across Europe to London. In Stuttgart on 12 June 1860, the travellers were briefly received by Wilhelm I, the ageing King (1816-64) of Wurttemburg: they also stayed for several days with Hochstetter’s parents in nearby Esslingen. later that month, in London, the Maoris were granted an audience with Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace, where Toetoe, newly made aware of the recent Maori uprisings in New Zealand (at Waitara, in Taranaki), presented Victoria with a declaration of loyalty in Maori, prudently accompanied with an English translation.

Possibly Rerehau and Toetoe were amongst the ‘474 presentations at this my fifth and last levee today ... and it is so close today!’ (letter of 20 June I 860). One hopes that the sultry weather did not prove to be too much for Queen Victoria since she could also comment, two days later, to her first-born: ‘We received yesterday the 2 Moorish Ambassadors ... you would be charmed by their appearance.’ The present writer would have saved himself from this mischievous lese-majeste had he glanced instead at the issue of The Times for Wednesday, 20 June 1860. Here the Court Circular reports of the previous day that Toetoe and Rerehan (sic) ‘introduced by Professor Ferdinand von Hochstetter from Vienna ... were presented to the Queen at an audience by the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for the Colonies.’

The same dire news from New Zealand also had the immediate effect of concentrating Toetoe and Rerehau’s mind on returning home without delay. Already at the end of June, as Hochstetter was settling down to several months’ study of the geological and ethnological collection in the British Museum, Toetoe and Rerehau embarked at Southampton on the Caduceus, which providentially was bound direct for Auckland. Their return voyage was paid

for by the Austrian government. The two Maoris reached Auckland safely enough at the end of October 1860, after an absence of some 22 months. The Buckingham Palace protestations patently forgotten, both lost little time in becoming embroiled in the Kingite rebellion against the New Zealand government.

It was precisely to thwart such a reaction that the New Zealand government had granted Toetoe on his return, land at the confluence of the Mangatawhiri and the Waikato ‘in the hope that he would exercise a quieting influence on his neighbours’. A later commentator advanced the view that ‘it was thought that his mind would be so affected with the strength and resources of England that he would see at once how futile was any attempt to cope with them and that his influence would be exerted to keep his countrymen from taking up arms’, had however regretfully to concede, ‘as it is with Maoris as with Highlanders that blood is thicker than water Toetoe cast in his lot with his people’. The involvement and new interests of Toetoe and Rerehau were sadly noted by Hochstetter, who could also report that ‘according to a recent letter Toetoe, in an attempt to make gunpowder for the war against the English has suffered severe burns to his face’.

Rerehau was spotted early in 1862 at a church-parade in Hangatiki, acting as a commander of the forces under Reihana Te Huatare (later known as Wahanui). Gorst found him ‘a very smart young fellow’ with a smattering of European languages, in each of which he ‘took care to exhibit his proficiency in turn’, and sensed that ‘he was certainly much ashamed of the ragged regiment at the head of which we had caught him’. One wonders how much lingered in Rerehau’s mind of the etiquette of the Viennese salon as ‘towards the end of the sermon, when he caught sight of two (of his men) talking and laughing, he walked down the rank and boxed their ears with a hymn-book’.

Although the scar-faced Toetoe and the muscularly Christian Rerehau were to slip back into comparative obscurity against the confused background of the Waikato War, which began in earnest in July 1863 and simmered until 1881, the year in fact in which Toetoe died, one all too tangible result of their Viennese sojourn remained.

This was the Imperial Printery’s printing-press which with its varied equipment was used to print the newspaper of the Maori King movement, Te Hokioi o Nui Tireni e Rere atu na (‘The far-flying Hokioi of New Zealand’). Named after a mythical but noisy bird of ill omen, Te Hokioi appeared irregularly and unnumbered from 1861 until the last issue of 24 March 1863. Printed at Ngaruawahia, the often seedy, small quarto, four-page numbers were much redeemed by the ‘logical and trenchant’

articles written by the editor, Wiremu Patara Te Tuhi (1823-1910), cousin of King Matutaera Potatau.

The exact role of Toetoe and Rerehau and their typographical skills in the production of Te Hokioi remains unknown. James Cowan attributes the training of the Maoris involved in the actual printing to ‘one of Mr C.O. Davis’s nephews, who had learned the art of composing type at the New Zealander printingoffice’ and singles out Honana Maioha, brother of Patara, as one of the compositors.

Scherzer however reports: ‘The news we have received of Toe-toe since have (sic) been rather distressing. He issues from the press, presented to him at Vienna stirring publications, comparing the Maories to Pharaoh (?) (sic) and exciting them to declare their independence.’ This note is not in the first German edition (1861-2) but appears in all subsequent ones, until it finds its final form as: ‘According to the latest reports (January, 1864) from New Zealand the two Maoris have since their return home become the most outspoken op-

ponents of the English and are using the typographical equipment given them to enable them to follow a peaceful calling, to print fulminating proclamations and to issue demands for revenge and for the extermination of their friends, the English.’

In 1906, when Sir Eldon Gorst made his nostalgic return to New Zealand, he could after a fruitless search report that all copies of the Hokioi ‘appeared to have disappeared as completely as the Moa’. His inquiries were not prompted solely by idle curiosity. In 1863, as Native Commissioner in the Upper Waikato, Gorst had been charged by Sir George Grey to issue a counterblast in kind to the seditious screams of Te Hokioi. His Te Pihoihoi Mokemoke i Runga i te Tuanui (‘The lonely lark perched on the roof’) ran for five issues from 2 February to 23 March 1863. On 25 March 1863, while Gorst was absent in Te Kopua on the river Waipa, a warparty of Ngatimaniapoto under Rewi broke into the school buildings at Te Awamutu (on loan from the Church Missionary Society) and bore away in un-

opposed triumph the freshly printed sheets of the fifth issue, the type, the paper and the press itself.

Printed on a press ordered from Sydney, Te Pihoihoi was produced under the technical supervision of the youthful Edward John von Dadelszen (18451922), who had learned his craft printing for the Melanesian mission under Bishop George Selwyn. The ‘most forcible and idiomatic’ maori language used in the newspaper (distributed gratis) was the work of Miss Ashwell, born in New Zealand as the daughter of the missionary Benjamin Yates Ashwell.

The impeccable quality of Gorst’s printing team (the first issue was personally revised by Sir George Grey) did little to dissipate the anger of the chiefs of Ngaruawahia who claimed that ‘the “Sparrow” was written in a bad mocking style, nothing like the calm and reasoning tone of the Hokioi’. An (incomplete) set of Te Pihoihoi was, we may note, eventually turned up in Gorst’s search over 40 years later: it was located ‘in the collection of Mr Turnbull, a collector of Maori curiosities’.

Had the Right Honourable Sir John Eldon Gorst extended his memoryprovoking trip in 1906 along the river Waipa, tributary of the Waikato, he could well have stumbled against the rusting frame of the Austrian press given nearly half a century previously in Vienna to Toetoe and Rerehau. When in 1863 the Queen’s troops advanced up the Waikato, the press and type were taken by its Maori proprietors to Te Kopua. Cowan noted its derelict presence there in 1922, observed that ‘a settler ploughing his land at Te Kopua has turned up scattered type’ and (sic transit gloria praeli ) that ‘the local Maoris turned the old hand-press to account in another way to press their cakes of ‘torori’ or home-grown tobacco’.

Reprinted from the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.