This Thing Of Darkness (88 page)

Little Robert, his son, pressed his nose to the porthole, staring at the blazing torches that glimmered on the Auckland shore. ‘Father, are the torches for us?’

‘Yes, Robert. Everybody is pleased to see us.’

‘Everybody is pleased to see their new
governor
,’ said Mary FitzRoy.

‘It’s my birthday on Thursday,’ Emily reminded them all.

‘Yes, dear. You shall be six.’

FitzRoy strode on deck to try to ascertain the real reason for all the torches. There was an agitation to their movements that appeared worryingly characteristic of a lynch mob. Auckland, he knew, was not safe at night, although the new capital was undoubtedly an improvement on Kororareka. There were no gas-lights and no hard footpaths. Everybody kept to their houses after sundown. Something was wrong.

A small boat was being rowed out energetically from the dock. In the stern, a pudgy, whey-faced youth in a lieutenant’s uniform was gesticulating inarticulately. ‘Are you the
Bangalore?’

‘Yes,’ shouted one of her officers.

‘Is the new governor on board?’

‘I am here. Captain Robert FitzRoy, at your service.’

‘Thank God,’ cried the youth, and made ready to climb aboard. Gasping, he struggled up the manropes and flopped on to the deck, where he removed his hat, revealing a cranium shaped like a potato. ‘Lieutenant Willoughby Shortland, sir, police magistrate and acting governor.’

‘You are the acting governor of Auckland?’ asked FitzRoy, with surprise.

‘No sir,’ said the youth. ‘I am the acting governor of New Zealand, these few years past.’

Good grief, thought FitzRoy. ‘Well, Mr Shortland, perhaps you can tell us what is afoot.’

‘There are the most terrible news, sir!’ gurgled Shortland. ‘Arthur Wakefield is dead, sir, and thirty-five others, butchered by the savages. Butchered in cold blood, sir, on the banks of the Wairau river in Cloudy Bay, while going about the pursuance of their legal business! The townspeople are demanding action, sir. They are demanding revenge!’

 

FitzRoy opted to spend one more night on the
Bangalore
for his family’s sake, and the following morning made what passed for a formal procession of arrival into Auckland. A hogshead of porter had diluted the previous night’s collective anger, replacing it with an air of dissolute celebration. Barrels of pitch had been rolled out by the townspeople to furnish a huge bonfire. A ragged guard of honour had formed up, headed by an officer of the native department carrying a pole surmounted with a crown of flax, from which the new flag of New Zealand hung limply Two drummer boys and a fifer struck up ‘The King Of The Cannibal Islands’. There were perhaps fifty spectators - all white, for the New Zealanders had understandably made themselves scarce - and a detachment of the 80th Regiment from the new barracks at Point Britomart. The little procession marched from the dock up to Government House: FitzRoy and Shortland walked in front, Mrs FitzRoy held the hands of her two eldest children, and a small retinue of servants brought up the rear, pushing a cartload of luggage and the baby-carriage containing little Fanny. A table had been erected before the house, where documents setting out the proclamation and the various oaths awaited. As they passed the bonfire, a limp effigy was hurled into the flames, to the sound of drunken cheers.

‘Look, Pappa,’ said Emily. ‘Guy Faux!’

‘I do not think it is Guy Faux, my dear,’ said FitzRoy. ‘It is not November the Fifth.’

actually,’ said Shortland with a grimace, ’I do believe it is meant to be me.’

 

Government House, even though it had been constructed by Captain Hobson but three years previously, was already falling apart. The walls were mildewed, the paintwork was peeling, the roof leaked and the room where Hobson had died still exuded the faint scents of calomel and death. FitzRoy might reasonably have expected his wife to appear crestfallen at such surroundings, but Mary FitzRoy stayed as determinedly serene as ever, simply applying herself without a word to making the place habitable for her children. All official formalities completed, FitzRoy surveyed his domain for the first time, gazing down across ragged green lawns to the wide sweep of the harbour: scruffy cottages had taken root here and there, like weeds that refused to be eradicated. The harbour was a good one, with four square miles of secure anchorage; but the bay was exposed to wind and rain, and - he noted with foreboding — would be almost impossible to defend against attack. There was nothing he could do to change matters now. It was Hobson’s choice indeed.

Half an hour later, he had his first official visitor: Mr Samuel Martin, the editor of the
New Zealand Gazette
. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and Mr Martin was already drunk. A burly, florid, red-faced man, he glared at the world from beneath eyebrows that resembled a pair of ferocious caterpillars; it took FitzRoy a while to realize that his apparently enraged expression was actually one of joviality.

‘There’s joy at your arrival, sir,’ announced the editor. ‘The rule of ignorance and stupidity has been terminated. Your governorship possesses the confidence of the entire European population.’ He belched. ‘That is, sir, on the presumption that a wise and rigorous policy is to be pursued with regard to the savages. That is what my readers expect.’

He threw down a copy of the
New Zealand Gazette
. It was quite unlike any newspaper that FitzRoy had seen before. It was half the size of a normal paper, and most of the front page appeared to consist of a giant, hysterical headline attacking Lieutenant Shortland. The acting governor was, according to the few brief paragraphs of newsprint left stranded at the bottom of the page, ‘the acknowledged plague-spot of New Zealand’.

‘What do you reckon, sir?’ asked Martin proudly. ‘It is a newspaper upon the new Australian model. One that speaks not just to but
for
the people.’

FitzRoy picked it up. Inside the cover was a large article by Jerningham Wakefield, demanding the extermination of the native population. ‘The Saxon blood of the settlers will not long forbear under its grievances,’ the son of Edward Gibbon Wakefield had written, ‘for final victory must soon be ours. The time is not far distant when the rising generation of Anglo-Saxons will want neither the nerve nor the skill to hold their own against the savage, and will take ample and just vengeance for the opposition we are now encountering. The savages shall be crushed like wasps in the iron gauntlet of armed civilization.’

‘Powerful stuff, ain’t it?’ grinned Martin, exhaling a ferocious cocktail of porter fumes and cheap tobacco smoke. ‘The people want action, Captain FitzRoy. Thirty-five men murdered in cold blood. They want the perpetrators brought to justice.’

‘You have my word I shall fully investigate the massacre at Wairau, Mr Martin.’

‘An investigation be hanged, Captain FitzRoy. The people don’t want an investigation - they want war.’

‘War, Mr Martin? Do you know how many New Zealanders there are on these islands?’

Martin looked bamboozled. The porter was taking its toll.

‘Upwards of a hundred thousand, as opposed to two thousand whites. There are a total of seventy-eight regular troops at my disposal - that’s one company of the 80th Regiment - armed with just fifty muskets and a few fowling pieces. There are no fortifications here, no defensible positions, no place of shelter for the women and children, and no ship of war. The wooden houses of Auckland, and all the other isolated white settlements, would burn like dry grass. For war read suicide. One thing I shall not be doing, Mr Martin, is starting a war.’

Martin struggled to focus. His newspaper’s point of view was not, it seemed to him, being taken very seriously. ‘The choice is yours, Mr Governor. Just remember - if you cross the
New Zealand Gazette
, you cross the people of this country. And I’ll tell you another thing — my proprietor ain’t going to like it.’

‘And who, pray, is the proprietor of the
New Zealand Gazette?’
asked FitzRoy, with ill-disguised distaste.

‘Why, sir, Mr Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the owner of the New Zealand Company.’

 

To the further astonishment of Mr Samuel Martin and the
New Zealand Gazette,
not to mention the majority of Auckland’s white settlers, Mr and Mrs FitzRoy invited the principal native chiefs of the entire Northland to dinner at Government House within the week, along with the senior missionaries of Waimate. They came not with the pomp and circumstance that would have attended a gathering of European rulers but, rather, they wandered in singly from the rain, each one uniformed in a stinking, second-hand European blanket wrapped tight about his body. They were large, powerful men, their luxuriant black hair oiled, and every inch of their faces minutely tattooed. In their physical strength their authority resided, for they had to prove their birthright on the field of battle. They were chiefs for life; only when they were too old to fight would they be replaced as rulers, but they would retain their status until death.

There was a seat for each chief around a long mahogany table covered with an immense white tablecloth, upon which were arrayed napkins, candlesticks, wine-glasses, silver knives and forks, bottles of Harvey sauce and cayenne pepper-shakers. In the centre of the table were bowls of mutton-chops, boiled beef, ham, tongue, veal patties, pigs’ trotters and potatoes, each dish topped rather prettily with snowflakes of plaster from the crumbling ceiling. Unlike the Fuegians, the New Zealanders did not attempt to eat the candles, but FitzRoy noted that their teeth were similar to those of their South American cousins, each tooth identical to its neighbours like those of a ruminant animal, quite unlike the wolfish selection that filled a white man’s mouth.

‘Friend Governor, salutations. This is our speech to you,’ announced Chief Te Wherowhero. ‘Let you not be a boy’ - everyone present unavoidably glanced at Shortland - ‘or a man puffed up. Let you be a good man.’

‘I shall endeavour to live up to your expectations, Chief Te Wherowhero.’

‘My husband is a very good man,’ promised Mary FitzRoy, ‘and he will treat all Europeans and New Zealanders exactly the same.’

‘Captain Hobson said that every man would be treated the same,’ retorted Hone Heke, an aggressive young chief with small, restless, deep-sunk black eyes, ‘but we are becoming suitors to the white man. The settlers come to our land and put up fences where all men should be able to pass freely. They say we are Queen Victoria’s slaves. They threaten us with English laws. They build prisons in the south, where our people are taken and beaten, even murdered. Is this the British justice we were promised?’

‘Hone Heke speaks rashly.’ An older chief, Waka Nene, his face daubed with red ochre, raised a hand in conciliation. ‘It is not British justice that is at fault, but those who administer it. This evil is increasing in the south, at Wellington and Nelson. The love of the New Zealander for the white man is growing cold.’

‘At Waitangi we gave the British only the right to control their own people - not the New Zealander,’ retorted Hone Heke, jabbing the air with his table knife. ‘Hobson promised us we would retain the rule of our chieftainship over our own people.’

‘I have a copy of the treaty of Waitangi,’ said FitzRoy, mystified. ‘The chiefs quite clearly cede absolute control of New Zealand to the British government.’

‘I fear that Captain Hobson may have been a little disingenuous,’ explained the Reverend Mr Davies, shamefacedly. ‘The New Zealand translation of the text given to the chiefs was not entirely the same as the English version sent to London.’

So
, thought FitzRoy,
they were duped out of their country
. He felt mortified; but he could not fail to admire Hone Heke’s fierce pride, his articulacy and intelligence. He could see in his wife’s expression that she, too, felt his grievances as a good Christian should.

‘My husband is a man of God, like the missionaries,’ she said. ‘Have the missionaries ever been less than honest with you?’

The chiefs had to admit that this was indeed not the case.

‘Then you know that my husband will also be fair and truthful with you.’

‘It is essential to the well-being of this colony that confidence and good feeling should exist between the two races of its inhabitants,’ FitzRoy made clear. ‘That is my goal. That is why the massacre at Wairau is such a tragedy.’

‘I think you will find, Captain FitzRoy, that the massacre at Wairau is not the simple matter portrayed in the
New Zealand Gazette
,’ muttered the Reverend Mr Williams, in an undertone that sounded at odds with his burly frame. ‘The blame of the whole affair rests on our own countrymen, who began with much indiscretion and gave much provocation to the natives.’

Chief Waka Nene took up the story. ‘The man called Arthur Wakefield arrived on the land belonging to Chief Te Rauparaha and Chief Rangihaeata. He built a hut to survey the land, to steal it for a white man’s farm. The chiefs came to him and ordered him to leave, and burned the hut upon their land. Arthur Wakefield went to Nelson, to the police magistrate, and got a warrant for to arrest Te Rauparaha and Rangihaeata, for the crime of burning his property.’

‘One of your police magistrates issued such a warrant, Shortland?’ asked a disbelieving FitzRoy. ‘I find that hard to credit.’

‘Not one of my magistrates,’ replied the youth, defensively. ‘The Nelson Police Department belongs to the company, and all its magistrates are appointed by them. It’s a company town.’

‘Arthur Wakefield came back with thirty-five men,’ resumed Waka Nene, ‘armed with muskets, bayonets, pistols, swords, cutlasses and many rounds of ball-cartridge. He said the men were special constables. He had two pairs of handcuffs. He tried to arrest Te Rauparaha and Rangihaeata, but the chiefs would not go. So the white men opened fire, and killed many of our people. Chief Rangihaeata’s wife and daughter were killed.’