Maungahuka: the nearest Maori settlement to the South Pole – Part II

Tu Tangata, Issue 32, 1 October 1986, Page 60

Maungahuka: the nearest Maori settlement to the South Pole - Part II

na Buddy Mikaere Ngati Pukenga/Ngati Ranginui

□ NGA RA □ MUA

After the first European to land on the Chatham Islands told the world about the island and its resources, sealing parties began stripping the Moriori of their chief asset, the fur seal. Seals had fed them and their skins had provided warm clothes, but by the 1830 s there were so few left that the Moriori were obliged to find other ways to survive. Some of the men joined sealing gangs, and a few took passage on the visiting ships and settled in New Zealand. But most stood back, silently observing the ways of the newcomers, and fearful for the future. In early 1833 there arrived a sealing party which they had particular cause to remember, because a Taranaki chief was one of its members. A Moriori named Koche later told a whaler:

...to the surpise of every one, there landed among the men a New Zealand chief armed to the teeth. His hair carefully combed and oiled, was tied up on the crown of his head, and surrounded by a fillet of white feathers, and from his ears protruded bunches of soft down. Evidently a man of power accustomed to command, he inspired a mysterious dread, and would have been slain but for the protection he was under. The future darkened as he walked the beach, questioning the people on their politics and religion, manners and customs ... It was Mate-oro chief of the Nga-te-Motunga, who ... appeared amongst the simple inhabitants as Satan in Paradise the forerunner of troops of fiends.

Matioro was a seasoned sailor, one of a growing number of Maoris who had chosen a working life on board the ships plying the New Zealand coast. His wanderings had taken him to Maungahuka (Auckland Islands) and now to Wharekauri (Chatham Islands). Matioro found he had entered a whenua kai, a land of food. The seas and lagoon teemed with fish, and the broadleaf forests were filled with birds. Confident in his own fighting skills, Matioro tested the mettle of the local Moriori with a view to later conquest. Within days of his arrival he had killed one man and tortured a dozen others,

without reprisals. Convinced that the Moriori offered no threat, Matioro returned to New Zealand. Two years later he came again to the islands in the great heke of Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama. The Moriori were no match for the war-hardened Te Ati Awa. In a very short time the land was gained and the tangata whenua either killed or enslaved. But Matioro longed for new worlds to conquer, and in 1842 it was he who dreamed up the plan to settle Maungahuka. When he arrived there he was in a hurry to claim good land for himself. But while he was looking over the islands, the ship which had carried them there sailed away and whether he liked it or not, Matioro and his companions were marooned.

When the English arrived at the Aucklands in 1849, Matioro and his fellow chief Ngatere were sworn in as constables in the service of the British Southern Whale Fishing Company. The chiefs took their new duties seriously, even ordering the destruction of their own dogs for sheep worrying. The six foot tall, twenty-five stone Matioro could be seen casually escorting drunken sailors home. The jail the Maoris helped build was a white elephant, its only known occupant being the settlement’s surgeon, who was arrested for drunkenness. But while the constables were successful in keeping the peace between Maori and Pakeha, there was no one to keep the Maori apart.

Earlier arguments had already split the Maori castaways into two groups, each with their own separate pa. Now a feud broke out between Matioro and his cousin, Toenga Te Poki, who had killed and eaten one of Matioro’s precious pigs. Fearful of the consequences of his insult, Toenga decided to strike first, and gathering his slaves and supporters around him, attacked Matioro. In the gunfight that followed Toenga’s men were defeated, and a clumsy attempt to ambush Matioro’s father-in-law who lived on his own little island in order to avoid trouble, also failed. The alert old man, with his daughter loading his weapons, peppered his attackers with musket fire. Toenga vented his rage by killing two of Matioro’s Moriori slaves before hastily arranging to return to the Chathams on a passing ship. In 1850 Governor George Grey visited

In the first article of this series in Aug/Sep Tu Tangata Issue 31 on the Maori colonisation of Maungahuka, the Auckland Islands, their arrival and way of life was described. In the final article we follow the career of Tauru Matioro, the chief who inspired the adventure.

the fledgling colony to help celebrate the first year of Pakeha settlement. A public holiday was declared and, despite the constant driving rain, Maori and Pakeha joined in a sports day and regatta.

Governor Grey was admired by the Maoris as a chief of great mana. When, two years later, the English settlers announced that the settlement was to be abandoned and that the Maoris would be left behind to fend for themselves, it was to Governor Grey, together with Bishop Selwyn, the chief of the church, that Matioro appealed for help. He and Ngatere wrote hopeful letters on a single sheet of paper, asking the governor to take them off the islands. The first letter, by Ngatere, suggested that as Grey told him he should return home it was the governor’s responsibility to come and get him:

May 24 (1852) Auckland Islands

Go this my writing to Wellington, to George Grey. Greetings; great is my affection for you. My friend Governor Grey, as for your advice that I should return, it rests with you. Now I have decided to return to New Zealand, if you hasten here within the year, or in the summer. This letter is by Ngatere. That is all of this message to you.

Matioro’s letter: Go this my writing to Wellington, to Governor Grey. Greetings to you, to you and your younger brother Maori brother, and Pakeha. Be quick now, you and Selwyn! I Npw7pa^nd de tnP«rPw« B n^nm onr 0 nr New Zealand, to Parewa (Bluff) or Rakiura, (Stewart Island). We are eleven people who have decided to go to New Zealand. Do not exile us! That is all, by Matioro.*

While the letters themselves were businesslike, it was the traditional waiata which accompanied them into which the Maoris poured their feelings. The song Ngati Mutunga chose as a kinaki for their letters was based on a waiata aroha from their far off home in Taranaki. The Auckland Islanders watch the sea flowing from the west, driven by the prevailing gales, and it reminds them of their kainga tuturu and the people they have left behind. Their grief at their separation is compared to a woman’s sadness at being cut off from companionship by gossip. She answers accusations of sexual misdeeds with the declaration that the only lover she had was in her imagination: ‘But who can find you in the flesh?’ she says. In the last lines she makes reference to Ngamotu, one of the Sugar Loaf islands at New Plymouth, an ancient Te Ati Awa stronghold which was the scene of many victories. The paroa she refers to was a weapon made of whalebone:

The sea moving towards Te Uru brings me longing Longing for my people rises up within me. A sea that parts us is flowing to the west. You came in the night and sought my bed, But who Cn find you in the flesh? r When the limpet is pounded, it falls from The seas at Papanui flow out weeping, To the lover j approached we are separated by talk. oh the wretched status of a woman! My hand was not pierced With a paroa point on the heap of slain at Ngamotu.

Matioro managed to leave Maungahuka with his family three months after he wrote his letter to Governor Grey. He settled for a while on Rakiura. In 1856 a rescue mission to the Aucklands was organised by the Maoris at Wharekauri, and they picked up Matioro - s household and returned them to the Chathams. The restless Matioro stayed there only briefly before returning to Waikanae where he eventually died. By 1868, most Ngati Mutunga had also left Wharekauri and returned to their old homes around Urenui in Taranaki.

‘This letter is held in the Grey Collection, Auckland Public Library. “This waiata appears in Sir George Grey’s Nga Moteatea. I am grateful to Lyndsay Head and Margaret Orbell of the Maori Department, University of Canterbury, for translations.