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Check to Your King

Chapter Nineteen — The Smithy in the Woods

Chapter Nineteen
The Smithy in the Woods

There is one thing never likely to be forgotten by the man who has witnessed it. That is the spectacle of the earth, just before some natural calamity, an earthquake, a hurricane, or a great drought, comes upon it.

The structuralists of language have their own term for the poetic conceit which figures the earth in sympathy with the moods and passions of men. But what of that other mood, in which no man seems more than a straw? That atmosphere of dreadful impatience, pouring out of ground and sky, as disturbing as the difficult breath of a man dying of fever? Men, beasts, bending trees, become infected with a shadowy fear. Familiar landscapes are suddenly weird and harsh, with the mocking lineaments of a dream, whose sign-posts seem to have a significance that always escapes the dreamer. Among human quarrels and attachments there is a dividing sense of awe. The puppets almost realise that their voices are too squeaky for the immense stage.

Incidentally, a land overthrown by this sudden unfair mastery by Nature is frequently an excellent theatre for war. The survivors among the pigmies must forget their insignificance, so they rush into heroism. It was so in the Hokianga, and farther north, which first suffered flood, then famine and war.

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1841… 1842. Black years for many, drifting by in confusion of argument and disappointment. Mr. Willoughby Shortland writes from the Colonial Secretary's office, advising the Baron de Thierry that in due course his land-claims will be investigated. The Commissioners, Mr. Richmond and Mr. Godfrey, are selected; the date of the sittings fixed. To Mr. Richmond goes a fee of £6 for the service of investigating the de Thierry claims, to Commissioner Godfrey, £3 10s. 0d. Tamati Waaka Nene opposes the claims, which are cut down by the Commissioners to 1,500 acres. of which, according to their overlord, only ten acres are any good for cultivation, without the expenditure of far more money than he possesses.

In retort discourteous, the Baron de Thierry formally opposes the claims of white settlers to lands originally part of the 40,000 acres. Of these settlers, Mr. William Young, of Terawera, shows remarkable forbearance, declaring that if the others give back the lands purchased through Mr. Kendall, he considers it will be his duty as a Christian to follow suit. Unfortunately, his duty as a Christian does not impel him to take the lead, and there the matter rests.

“A little thing in swaddling-clothes got its 2,560 acres,” writes Charles of the land-grants acquired by certain missionaries for their children. “One old missionary, King, a contemporary of Mr. Kendall, got 25,000 acres for his family of nine.” To be fair, by no means all the missionaries were as acquisitive as the so-prolific Mr. King. Numbers made no attempt to claim any land at all, and the really rapacious were, if anything, more frequently catechsists and lay assistants than the actual clergy. None the less, for generations the catch-phrase among the Maoris has been, “The missionary told us to turn our eyes to heaven. When our eyes were turned to heaven, he took our land.”

Government Houses in New Zealand seem to have been burned down almost as a habit in early days. The old house in Russell flared up first. Governor Hobson, in September, 1840, removed his capital and seat of residence to the settlement of Auckland, on the Waitemata Harbour – a town named after his friend and patron, Lord Auckland. Here, seven years later, the portable house shipped from England also went up in smoke, but Hobson was not there to see it. By that time he was safely in his grave; and the country, which ran through its governors as quickly as through its Government Houses, had also wrecked the career of his successor, Captain FitzRoy, formerly of the Beagle. The wild mare of the Tasman Sea had an unpleasant knack of bucking all comers off her page 178 rump. Hobson died at Auckland in September, 1842, worn out, lonely, misunderstood, with little to leave behind him but the tradition of his infuriating fairness over land-deals. Mr. Willoughby Shortland, as stop-gap, stepped into the shoes of Acting-Governor.

Troubles began to be dreaded through the north, in consequence of the barbarous murder of Mrs. Robertson and her family by the natives, near Paihia. This was no chance outrage, but the first omen of stormy weather. In the Hokianga, where civilisation and trade had ebbed deplorably as Auckland moved towards closer settlement and prosperity, there was as much consternation among the natives as in the isolated houses of the whites. The Hokianga tribes dreaded the attack of stronger northern warparties. War pas were being built and fortified everywhere in the district, and a desultory trade in muskets strengthened and extended inland. The poorer of the settlers, cut off from the world, and with two days' heavy going before them if they wanted to dispatch or pick up a letter, lost heart over their stubborn little farms. Many of them actually took refuge with the Maoris, huddling into the war pas. There was the strangest mingling of white men and brown, a refuge of forest creatures uneasy in the far-off crackle of the fire drifting slowly towards them.

Mr. Shortland, our fine new Acting-Governor, purses his lips and shakes his head over a rather engaging letter from the Baron de Thierry, who wants to raise in Her Majesty's service a combined militia of Hokianga's white settlers and friendly natives. He points out that hundreds of the Maoris harbour brotherly sentiments, and that these browner brethren should be caught young. Himself, he has held a commission in His Majesty's 23rd Light Dragoons, and will very willingly act as drill-master over such a militia, not for reward, but for the pleasure of serving his country. “I can offer three grown sons, two European labourers and myself, and am very willing to take charge of forming such a militia.” He is dying for brass buttons and gold braid again. Who knows? Perhaps some of the sky-blue and scarlet cloth, the plumage and swords bought at St. Thomas, are here eating their heads off at Mount Isabel, where moth and rust do corrupt. Incidentally, also, the idea of the militia was not such a bad one.

Alas! Mr. Shortland is like the rest, unimpressionable. He does not even answer the letter.

Across the stage walk the new and terrible actors, beasts of a nightmare, the seven lean kine.

Crops fail, prices soar. From the few ships putting in at the page 179 river-mouth they buy vile flour at £100 a ton. Potatoes, which were bought for a fig of tobacco a few years before, now cost 10s. a kit, and as the stilt-legged native store-houses become empty, to obtain them at all is almost impossible.

“Fern-root,” chant the tribes. “We have fern-root.” This is by no means a grace before or after meals. Fern-root is the most despised food, eaten only when the store-houses are empty. Native logicians wax eloquent. The white man is here, you have given him the land. “Fern-root, we have fern-root.”

The plight of the Hokianga Maoris becomes desperate, and their manner threatening. They capture and drag in the few remaining pigs, offering them for tremendous prices at the back door. Charles dares not retort aggressively, though it wrings his heart to pay fifteen golden sovereigns for three of his own hogs – and in such an apologetic condition, too. The family are driven to kill off their poultry and some of the unhappy goats, which having furnished them with milk and cheese all these years, have a genuine place in their affection. The labourers subsist on a scrawny fowl per day. Green-stuffs and potatoes are beautiful dreams. The steel flour-mill is always silent now. Four acres of wheat promised well, but torrential rains came in the autumn. “And where one day there was a field of ripened gold, on the next it was a sea of bright green. The wheat had begun to germinate.”

For three days the household lived on a pottage made from dock-leaves – not so far removed from Nebuchadnezzar's grass, that – but the vile stuff made them deathly sick. Isabel and Will came in with a fantastic tale of seeing the side of a hill disintegrate into silent, brown, moving forms, like loping forest beasts. They had been playing at carriages on the stranded old gig which had lost one wheel in the mire of the Long Bush. They were mud to the tops of their high boots, boots so often soled and repaired at home that they scarcely looked like footwear at all. The little boy ran about in tattered woollen jersey and home-made breeches. He was brown as a native and spoke more frequently in Maori than in English. Often, commencing reasonably enough with a sentence, he got excited, and out tumbled the native words, helter-skelter. Then he would be annoyed, and stamp his foot.

The little girl – she was fourteen now – wore a long shabby frock of strawberry-coloured print. Her black hair fell in ringlets over this garment. She was beautiful, Charles told himself, but if you deprive a plant of sunlight, of course it looks white and strange; of course, its beauty is seen under an opaque glass. Her pointed face, with its odd, knowledgeable smile, pricked at his heart.

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He was responsible for these children; he took their docility for granted. But they were not quite the same as himself, as the older children, who were reared in civilisation. What were they? He did not know. At present, they must certainly be hungry and physically wretched, but they gave no sign of it. They merely went on playing carriages in the Long Bush, and spinning yarns about a hillside which was all brown and moving.

On the third day of their semi-starvation, a native came from the Long Bush, bringing with him a fine double-barrelled Menton gun. The weapon was out of repair, no spark flew from the flint. The native offered potatoes in payment if “Te Parena” – “The Baron” in Maori, and the name Charles tried assiduously to substitute for their “Te Pokeno” – would mend the gun.

He was Jack-of-all-trades here, but the gun was a delicate job for which he had no proper equipment. Potatoes, however, were potatoes. He sent the boys out to cut firewood in the bush.

“My Isabel helped me to collect some old shoes and bones. Margaret brought out a fry-pan and an iron pot. I took off the hammers, filed smooth faces on them, wrapped them in leather, and carefully placed them in the iron pot, which I filled with old shoes and bones. I took the blacksmith's tongs, and turned a hook at the end of a round bar of iron half an inch thick. Here we placed the pot on the brushwood pile that the boys had made ready, and set the whole blazing. In two hours, I called to my sons to bring a bucket and a tub of water. The whole contents of the iron pot were emptied into the tub, and I drew out the hammers and wiped them clean. Then the gun-flint, with the aid of my hooked iron bar…”

A second's waiting, while the fire smouldered down among the manuka-sticks. Then the smithy's first triumph is complete.

“Lo, the sparks flew! I kissed my Isabel. ‘Cheer up, my darling. There, thank God, we are safe again.’”

Somebody once said that the most significant moment in time occurred when Robinson Crusoe found the print of a human foot on his island sands.

Perhaps, in early New Zealand history, the most significant moment arrived when Charles, probably with a smut on his nose, and stinking of burning leather and cremated bones, drew forth the gun-flint. “Lo the sparks flew!”

The owner of the gun had eights kits of kumaras brought up before light had faded that day. This was the beginning of a period which seemed, after the menace of sheer starvation, more blossomy than anything in the past.

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Was it moral that Charles de Thierry should turn gun-smith for the natives? Probably not. Everyone knew perfectly well that there was a scrap coming, though it took longer to eventuate than was expected.

On the other hand, which really was his side. The French were out of it, the English wouldn't let him form a militia, and otherwise sat on him. This left him again the Nation of One; its customers, a conglomeration of tribes, some of which had every intention of marching with the war-parties, whilst others preferred to remain friendly with the white man who was supported by the powerful forces of Tamati Waaka Nene. Most likely Charles was as impartial as the armament manufacturers of every civilised nation today.

In six weeks he had earned eight hundred kits of potatoes and maize, several of his stolen hogs, smoked shark and eel. “The little steel mill worked merrily on, and our household had an abundance of Johnny-cakes and corn bread once more.”

The Johnny-cakes were all very well for the de Thierrys, but the Maoris were still tightening their belts. Their food-stores were so low that they had not enough both for themselves and for their normal trade, which was all in return for produce. If they sold, they had to go hungry. If they remained unarmed, they were at the mercy of possible war-parties from the north; or would be prevented from marching out to glory when Hone Heke, the leader of the rebels, showed the white man his hand.

The Maoris chose tight belts. They sold their produce, got their muskets repaired, then, half-starved, begged at the doors of Mount Isabel for food. That they were never turned away, or unkindly treated by the de Thierrys, is illustrated by what came next.

Summer, and the natives were setting out from the whole Hokianga district for a great meeting at the Bay of Islands. The northern tribes would be represented there more fully than at Waitangi, and the fate of hundreds of white settlers might depend on what the native leaders had to say. But for a night and a day there was no time at Mount Isabel to speculate over the issue of the meeting. On the Utoia side of the house, columns of smoke moved tall and threatening as great genii, sprung from the brass bottles of the valleys. Night brought a magnificent and unforgettable scene. The fire was marching upon Mount Isabel from the far side of the river, the whole sky an immense crater of molten gold. The wind was up, blowing straight towards the house. In frantic haste, the supplies of gunpowder were dragged out and dampened.

From the Long Bush, where a brushwood pile had seen the page 182 beginning of the smithy in the woods, came a sound that made Charles catch his breath. Before the natives were in sight, he heard them shouting and singing, as they tramped up the red-lit road. He wondered for a moment if the native humour was come to enjoy the fall of King Pokeno's castle. But the party of five hundred natives, men and women, running together settled his doubts. Naked to the waist, the Maoris tied their old mats about their loins, and dipped their blankets, their most valued possessions, in the stream that ran through Mount Isabel's holding. The women snatched boughs from the Long Bush. In a moment, they were swarming over house and outbuildings, blanketing the thatch with the dripping felt. The air was bright and dangerous with rosy sparks, and the great pantomime of the fire moved splendidly a few yards away, across the sluggish water. One wing caught, and a room was charred out, but they were able to keep the blaze from spreading. There was something breath-taking in the coppery limbs, naked in that beautiful and terrible light. Animals, panting for breath and conscious that humanity was their friend for the night, had run from the bush and crouched close to the house.

“This vast illumination, which seemed laid out by the hand of Art to celebrate some great event, was magnificent beyond words. And I watched them there on the roofs of my house and outbuildings.”

Dawn rose coppery over a world where the columns of flame had whirled past on their solemn way. The natives, their hands blistered, their precious blankets stained and spoiled, would accept no payment but a fig of negro-head apiece for what they had done. They filed past, chattering and laughing. The western house was badly charred; a case of books and documents was burned. For the rest, Mount Isabel's wattle-and-daub integrity remained – for what it was worth. And, although the fire had devastated hundreds of acres, flood and famine had so despoiled the land beforehand, and Hokianga trade had dwindled so pitiably, that nobody had much to lose.

But that dawn was the happiest Charles had known since Nukahiva. Dangerous happiness – he might have guessed it. The flagstaff stood, lean and bare, its colours hidden inside the house. Once again there was a great circle of squatting Maoris about its base. He was stiff, exhausted, weary, moving among them. Somehow everyone was carried away; bosoms, brown and white, suffered an expansive moment. They made speechs. So did Charles. They gave him the impassioned and yet childish greetings he had so much wanted.

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In the Long Bush, the great kauri tree, known on account of its proboscis as the Elephant Tree, had been burned to cinders. This was a pity, as it was the landmark and corner-stone of the thatched temple where he explained the movements of the stars to Isabel. But the air in bushland where kauri has been burned off holds a wonderful fragrance. It smelt as though a thousand censers had been swung, making the cathedral ready for that long-delayed coronation service.