Chapter Four
Nobody is Bored in Cambridge

Nobody is bored in Cambridge; it is the thing, in the execrable idiom of the inhabitants, that is not done. One becomes, perhaps, a little set in one's ways. It is said that the first five hundred years page 24 are the worst. Everything is under magnificent discipline. The lean, narrow face of Erasmus looks down, as Holbein the Younger caught it; Elizabeth Woodville's painted face has quiet eyes. The bluebells, their stems brave as ships' masts, thrust up azure through the pale tidal wash of grass among the flowers of the Cloistered Court. They look fragmentary, part of an old Roman mosaic telling the story of Flora's passing through this earth. But when you inspect them more closely, you see that they are regimented most carefully. In long garden-plots, the roses, white Yorks and crimson Lancastrians, come later to march side by side. It is forbidden that they argue. Everyone contributes — contributes what little of an air he may have. We are all poured into this mighty vessel of the past.

“But suppose that is just the trouble? Suppose one wishes to be not merely a shadow, disciplined by the hoariness of the sun-dial on which one is cast, but one's own vigorous self?”

“Come, then, my brave young man. Apart from a pair of chestnut side-whiskers, a pair of not inelegant pantaloons, what is this self?”

“I am a baron, son of émigré parents. Charles Philip Hippolytus, Baron de Thierry, now, in this year of 1820, attained to twenty-six years.”

“The Charles Philip Hippolytus doesn't make things any better. As for the title, it may be ornamental, but your continental nobility were always so profuse. What are you, in yourself?”

“At eighteen I was attaché to the French Legation at London…”

“There is a career in diplomacy, for the duller sort of scoundrel.”

“But I gave that up.”

“You did well. What then?”

“I was attracted to the military career. Owing to the favour of the Duke of York, I received a commission in His Majesty's 23rd Light Dragoons.”

“Not so bad. To sit a cavalry charger on a frosty morning is an invigorating thing.”

“However, I resigned my commission. I found that I liked horses, but could not endure the monotony of my brother officers.”

“What hat did you try on next?”

“I am an author. I wrote a novel called Isabel. My heroine was a paragon of the virtues, a hecatomb of the tragedies. A London firm made arrangements for publication. It was not, however, a popular success. Frequently the publishers send me accounts… page 25 a matter of £50. I decided, therefore, to regiment my abilities under the discipline of university life, and entered Oxford as a gentleman commoner.”

“A noble university.”

“But shortly afterwards, I married my wife Emily, who is daughter to the Archdeacon Thomas Rudge, of Gloucester, a divine of eminence in the Church of England. A solid papa-in-law, I can assure you of that. Always we enjoy roast beef on Sundays. Always he scatters snuff on the carpets. It was his idea that I should come to Cambridge and apply myself to the study of theology and law. ‘Charles,’ he declared, ‘Nature herself has made a talker of you. There are offices where eloquence is not misplaced… the pulpit, or even the bar. You will be better applied in these directions than in galloping about Oxford, with some Quixote maggot for ever in your brain. It is due to my daughter Emily that you should settle down.’ (This I recognised, for, at the time, Madame the Baroness was already expecting.) So I entered Cambridge as a fellow commoner. But…”

“It can't be that you are tired of it already? Nobody is bored in Cambridge.”

“I appreciate that. The trouble is, I'm only twenty-six; Cambridge is so many centuries. It doesn't leave one much scope for initiative. And my wife is once again expecting….”

Love, in itself, is a university of tradition. Before ever Charles was settled in life as the husband of fair-haired little Emily Rudge, daughter of the snuff-taking Archdeacon, there was also Eliza.

A leaf whirls for an instant on its bough, then, with a dry and tiny sound, like an infinitesimal fairy sigh, it is fallen to grass. That was Eliza. It was a funny little name, which should have belonged to a very old-fashioned flower, loved by all the bees. But then, Eliza was a funny little girl. It is hard to extract from Charles's records any account of her other than purely sentimental reference. “My lost love, Eliza….” And then, years later, when his baby daughter at last arrived, there was that business about the poppet's christening.

When she slipped away from him — after a quarrel in which he had been stigmatised, with justice, as a stupid, conceited boy, who did nothing but ride horses and tell fairy-tales — it was as if she had gone into another room, a strange room; but not out of the dear, warm house of memory and life. He had been hurt and angry after he said good-bye. He could just remember her black-and-cerise shoes, showing under a looped petticoat of three enormous flounces, her hands curled up like squirrels in the prodigious fur page 26 muff, as she ran up the stairs of her house in London. A door had flashed open for a moment, a beam of light slanted out, dusty gold, over her cheek and bonnet, both a little wet from the sprinkling of summer's rain. Then she was gone. And it was no use waiting, he learned that.

He had paid court like a schoolboy. And she, white now, no longer the gay Columbine, had fled away from such clumsy loving, away from any human love at all.

Thrust them out of sight, the useless thoughts; drown them in the brittle white sunshine of Cambridge mornings. At twenty-six it becomes a duty to have established one's self in life, to have a professional and an assured future, disciplined like the bluebells. One must be a rational part of the mosaic. If one is bored, the evidence must be controlled….

A piece of orange-peel on a pavement may alter the physical circumstances of a man's life. But to take a mind and its armada of dream, to set the sails moving into the blue… that seems more difficult. In Charles de Thierry's case, the wind of destiny blew, the gates of the ocean were unlocked, when, at the far end of the world, an English missionary named Thomas Kendall seduced two cannibal chieftains into an itching desire to look on the face of His Majesty, King George IV of England. A cat, thought Mr. Kendall, may look at a king; why mayn't a cannibal? Besides, he wanted the trip himself. Things were getting hot for him in New Zealand, it was convenient to run before the storm.

In the younger of his two charges, Shunghie, paramount chieftain of the warlike and energetic Ngapuhi tribes, whose might went for law in the northern parts of New Zealand, the Rev. Thomas Kendall beheld an intelligence, a shrewd power of reason. The more Shunghie learned from his English visit, the more he consolidated his powers in that wild and feud-tangled North Island, the better Mr. Kendall would like it. Mr. Kendall had plans*….

The second chieftain, Waikato, was a man of dignity and reputation, physically a tattooed and mahogany-brown giant, who could no more fail of making an impression in England than a double-headed giraffe. He was, moreover, a leading agriculturist in a nation which possessed considerable primitive skill in this art. Agriculture, everyone knew, was particularly close to the heart of His Britannic Majesty. There was little chance that Waikato should not prove a great attraction.

Our forefathers were, above all things, unselfconscious. On the modern stage, Mr. Kendall, with his dives into intrigue, his passionate declarations of independence, his affairs of the heart — page 27 mostly, one regrets, with pretty little Maori maidens — and his orgies of repentance, in which he would do everything but thump his head on the floor, would be received as rather exaggerated. But in 1820 his confidence was invaded by no foreknowledge of times when professional sinners and penitents would not be encouraged to take themselves so seriously. So, the perfect bear-leader for his chiefs, Mr. Kendall strides on to the Cambridge stage. He has at least one unexceptionable pretext for bringing Shunghie and Waikato to London, though he has dispensed with the formality of getting the Church Missionary Society's permission for this step. There is no Maori grammar or vocabulary in existence, and Professor Lee, of Cambridge, is anxious to compile one;^* Shunghie and Waikato are willing to supply requisite material. The three of them will be the guests of Cambridge, received with interest, honour, and curiosity. Nobody is bored in Cambridge, but cannibal chieftains are a novelty, especially when so good-looking.

Behold then, a thick-set gentleman in early middle age — dark hair, a proud brown eye, complexion pleasantly tanned by years of open-air life. (Thomas Kendall was one of the first missionaries to settle in New Zealand.) He looked like anything in the world rather than a churchman… something of the explorer, something of the dreamer. Missionising, in New Zealand, was a man's job in those days. It was essential that the missionary should be craftsman, tutor, labourer, mechanic, diplomat, nurse, general. All of these things Mr. Kendall was, to a degree a little too outstanding for his general popularity. Already he had incurred the distrust of old Samuel Marsden, father of the New Zealand Mission — though Mr. Marsden was now stationed in New South Wales, and only occasionally swooped down on the New Zealand fold. Smaller fry among the whites envied Mr. Kendall, feared his influence with the powerful chief Shunghie, and pretended to be scandalised at his behaviour. Contradicting the roughness of his personality — a manner deliberately assumed — was the slow, musical voice. The only educated man, and the most rebellious one among the first batch of missionaries sent to New Zealand by Samuel Marsden, Kendall could talk like a book.

In Sydney, where Thomas Kendall and his charges arrived in March 1820, aboard the sturdy little coastal barque Captain Monro, Shunghie and Waikato explained their intentions freely to the editor of the Sydney Gazette. These were, to see His Majesty the King of England; also to observe the number of his people, their different occupations, and the manufactures and produce of the country. On arrival, they were introduced by Mr. Kendall to the Honourable Committee of the Church Missionary Society, and, after a few days, journeyed on to Cambridge,

where they were entertained in the most obliging manner by Professor Lee, and were introduced by him to the Vice-Chancellor, Rev. Dr. Clarke, the Rev. Mr. Mandell, the Rev. Mr. Gee, Professor Farish, Mr. Farish, Surgeon, the Baron de Thierry, and many other distinguished officers and members of that university. They had the opportunity of taking a survey of the county in time of harvest, and were entertained by many, including William Mortlock, Esquire, and Lady Jane Pym.^*

For better, for worse, the deed is done. Our Charles, through the instrumentality of the Rev. Mr. Thomas Kendall, has become acquainted with the people of Captain Pete's unforgotten stories. Here he is, his abandoned professions trailing like beggars at his heels, suddenly in his element as companion, part-time host, and eager listener to a couple of authentic and ornamental chieftains, accompanied by a suspiciously eloquent interpreter. The period of Mr. Kendall's stay in Cambridge was one of the happiest times in Charles de Thierry's life.

Mr. Kendall has his plans, and it is not impossible to fit one so young and ardent as Charles into the exact centre of those plans, particularly as, just then, Charles was in possession of a loose thousand or two. (Don't ask me whether he had borrowed it from his father-in-law, the Archdeacon. It was there, though not for long.)

During his Cambridge holiday, however, Thomas Kendall had no intention of going into a fit of penitence, much less of being drowned. His idea was to consolidate his own doubtful position by inducing a few gentlemen to buy from Shunghie and Waikato, or their relatives, some of the enormous land-tracts available in that wild and lawless country, the No Man's Land of the southern world. There may be complications, perhaps, with the Church Missionary Society. But if there is at hand a colony of white men, a colony wanting the services of an educated man with a thorough understanding of the natives, a strong influence with Shunghie, the most powerful chieftain of all… It was not a bad idea.

From the first, at all events, Mr. Kendall talked New Zealand colony into the head of the most willing audience that a shrewd businessman, interesting himself in land deals under cover of much talk about the welfare of the natives, could have wished to meet. As for Shunghie and Waikato, there is reason to think they had a very friendly mind to the young Baron de Thierry. The Maori, for a while, stood hesitating on the brink of white civilisation. The pakeha in New Zealand had an almost supernatural prestige, when he had sense enough to go in peace among the natives. Even the most miserable and squalid of escaped convicts from Van Diemen's Land and Botany Bay were sheltered, adopted, and enriched. One writer has described the white new-comer to Maoriland of that day as “a tame god”. White men's law, white men's institutions… these were eagerly and hopefully watched.

“During the two months of Mr. Kendall's stay in Cambridge, page 30 I saw much of them, meeting with the chieftains almost daily. Mr. Kendall's representations were such as would have excited less sanguine persons than myself. I gave my deepest attention and consideration to all that Shunghie and Waikato wanted me to do for them….”

Hours of listening to Mr. Kendall, while Professor Lee gathers crumbs of information for that Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of New Zealand, published late in 1820 by the Church Missionary Society. There is talk of the whalers, standing in from far parts of the world; of outrages among the natives, cannibal vengeance, reprisal charring the flax-thatched villages out of existence. From Sydney the Church Missionary Society reaches forth, but its outpost in the northern part of the country remains a lonely venture. The rest belongs to nobody.

“We live, my dear Baron, because the Maoris also worship not idols, but a spirit… something invisible. They build carved houses for temples, very elaborate. From the grim faces and squinting shell-eyes patterned on these, you'd take them to be idolatrous enough, but not the most intricate shrine means anything to the Maori until it has been consecrated by their tohunga, or priest. Then, no money will purchase such a shrine. Among the whites there are good and bad. Some love the native just as the slave-owner loves his slaves — not that the Maori will ever work as a serf, but the provisions resulting from his labour come in useful when they can be bought for next to nothing. Other whites pare off free land for themselves and their families…."

Charles learned of the continual escape to New Zealand of convicts from the penal settlements, safe from justice in these wild islands, where neither British law nor that of any other civilised country had sway. Around the missionary outposts grew up the defiant stores and settlements of the white traders, some of them white men gone Maori. Not a few took advantage of their prestige as whites to drag the native women down to vice and disease. Men had nothing to lose but their lives, and the lives of many were forfeit already, or branded by the chains and brutality of their prisons. There was no law other than the infamous club-law system, which allowed a few powerful whites to dominate all.

Yet behind this little rum-swilling, dangerous world stretched the green place of old dreams. Great kauri trees, tallest of the pine family, soared up, ready-made ships' masts. Under the bloodshed and the cannibalism was a simplicity of lovely legend, of natural poetry and music.

“Crushed between the upper and the nether millstones, poor page 31 souls. Behind them is the blackness of their own cannibal customs; in front, if we were honest enough to admit it, a white civilisation which without law must remain a mere cesspool of the vices. The Church does what it can, but what is the Church without law? What control has the Church over the riff-raff of our own race and the other whites when no law exists? White colonists could soon establish law. Why do reputable Englishmen shrink from such an adventure, and such a humane interest? Surely England had more spirit a few years ago?”

Charles discovered that land which would cost a fortune in the Old World went cheaply in the new.

“Trade, my dear Baron, and such trade. Gimcrack, bright cloth, a sniff of gunpowder, an antiquated musket. There's nothing they won't do for muskets. A warlike race, the New Zealanders. What will be the end? Will they exterminate one another, tribe against tribe, or will the white man swallow them all and name his crime civilisation?”

“Do live in huts like bee-skeps, and wear great cloaks of feathers,” thought Charles, wishing he could see Shunghie and Waikato as Captain Pete had described the race. A loathing of their European clothing came over him. Was it indeed true that these bronze bodies, and thousands like them, must be vitiated and spoiled by the contact of a degraded civilisation? Was there to be no equal footing of speech and thought?

“Teach English, all English, and nothing but English,” runs an outburst in his monumental record. “One universal language for the races of the South Seas, raising them to a level where they can properly meet civilisation.” And long after the last shred of his English affinities has been torn away, and he is the hated “French aggressor” of English settlers' nightmares, he continues to urge that the native dragged into a civilised world should be given the language of civilisation.

The friendship between the queer quartette, white and brown, continues. Before Mr. Kendall has shepherded his flock to London, where the King is pleased to grant them an audience, the rough outline of a New Zealand colony, a little Utopia to be peopled with strictly respectable Englishmen and Maoris, settled, if possible, under British protection, and at all events a model of British institutions and justice, has been designed.

“Mr. Kendall took with him to New Zealand a well-drawn-up deed, with blanks, promising to purchase all that part of New Zealand from the narrow neck of land in the North Island upwards. To this end, I entrusted to him considerable property, and page 32 gave many presents both to Shunghie and Waikato and to Mrs. Kendall, who was in New Zealand. My last gifts to Shunghie and Waikato were a gun for each, engraved with their names and my own on silver plates. And with a copious flow of tears, which the New Zealanders can so readily command, and which Mr. Kendall also managed to shed, and with mutual expressions of due regard, we parted.”

They have seen many things, the old Cambridge towers: Milton mooning under his mulberry-tree, kings and queens with their prodigious trains, poets casting their eyes to heaven or their fists at their persecutors. But Our Charles, Mr. Thomas Kendall, and the two enormous bronze chieftains, all in tears, such large tears… that, also, must have been worth a spire's craning its neck a little.

Not immediately did Mr. Kendall leave for New Zealand. John Mortlock, Esquire, created a sensation by presenting the two handsome savages to the House of Lords. They had private interviews with half the peerage, and more public intercourse with the lions in the old Strand menagerie, which probably pleased them a great deal better. Their visit reached its climax when Mr. Mortlock had the honour of presenting them to His Majesty,

who treated them with the greatest condescension and affability, conducted them to his armoury, gave them several valuable presents, and allowed them the honour of kissing his hand. They also visited the Tower of London and the Museum, and sailed for home on December 10th, in the best of health and spirits.^*

On his visit to the royal armoury, Shunghie was invited by His Majesty to choose some token of the kingly regard. He settled on a suit of armour. In Sydney, the warrior chief declared that lesson which his English visit had taught him: “One people, one king.” He sold all the gifts he had received in England, with the sole exception of this suit of armour, receiving muskets in exchange. Returning to his native land he immediately put his new creed into practice, slaughtering vast numbers of enemies, and eating a very handsome collection of them. In his every battle shone the armour given him by the English George. On the day when he left it off, fortune deserted him, and he fell mortally wounded… an end to a reign of blood and terror not easily surpassed in minor history. Incidentally, Shunghie's ardour, as well as the remonstrances of Samuel Marsden, may have had something to do with Thomas Kendall's acute fits of penitence. It takes self-possession to ride a cannibal whirlwind.

“It is Mr. Kendall's intention to re-establish a school among the natives, having been given supplies for that purpose by the Church Missionary Society, and by several private ladies and gentlemen,” hopefully states the Sydney Gazette, having interviewed Mr. Kendall on his homeward journey. Unfortunately, Mr. Kendall's good intentions fell by the wayside. He lasted just long enough in New Zealand to drag Charles de Thierry, among other people, into the whirlpool.

A curious two years must have been spent by Emily de Thierry. She had married a lovelorn youth, was a mother almost in girlhood, and before they left Cambridge was manufacturing lordly white long-clothes for another defenceless male, Richard de Thierry, born two years after little Charles Frederick. She was linked now with Quixote, firmly seated on his hobby-horse. He took her to Paris, introduced her to Court circles. She curtsied, as became a modest lady. He set her in a canoe and dragged her, with a baby in her lap and other infants frisking at her side, up the fever-ridden river Chagres, over the Isthmus of Panama, where everyone warned them that they must certainly fall victims to the yellow pest, and thus perish ingloriously, with none but glum Indians and tobacco-chewing peons to put up a show of lament for them — which they would not do, if paid in advance for their services. She remained in excellent health, nursed her baby, and pulled through the Panama fever an extremely unpleasant, quite useless smuggler from the Demarara coast, whom her lord had gathered into their party.

I think Emily de Thierry loved her husband with a most gentle and tolerant love. There is a curious pathos in one relic preserved in a New Zealand home — a bunch of flowers, pressed for so long between the pages of an old book that they have quite lost their colour. Nobody would dare to handle their dry and brittle fragility, but it is obvious that they were violets. Round their stalks was twisted a scrap of paper on which a woman's hand had written:

Gathered at Bunthorpe Hill, March 1826. Good-bye, England.

Early in 1823 came the letter which Charles had long expected. It was dated from the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, December 2nd, 1822.

My Dear Baron,

Owing to the wars of the natives and various other disturbances, I have not been able to procure you any land before this. I have, however, at length done as well as I could for you. The page 34 chiefs mentioned in the deed are friends to Shunghie and Waikato. The heads of the river are in latitudes 35–32 on the west coast of New Zealand, opposite to us. I have walked through part of the woods, which are very extensive, but the boundaries cannot be better described than by giving the names of the districts or townships. I cannot recommend you to send your brother, because I should not think it prudent for any person or small number of persons to settle themselves now under a heathen government. I shall, however, be happy to serve your brother if you determine on making the attempt. I hope the Baroness is in good health. Be pleased to favour me with a line when you receive this.

And am, dear Sir,

Your faithful servant,

Thomas Kendall.

The letter lay folded in a package of gifts which made Charles's eyes glisten; for they were from Shunghie and Waikato. Shunghie's gift was a princely one, his greenstone war mere, a weapon with a notorious history of bloodshed behind it.

But the thing he could not weary of reading, the thing he fingered as though its sheets were jade, beautiful to touch, was the deed enclosed with Mr. Kendall's letter.

In 1823, Baron Charles de Thierry, noted in this deed as “of Queen's College, Cambridge, and Bathampton, Somerset”, became, by purchase from the chiefs Nene, Mudi Wai and Patuone, absolute owner of about 40,000 acres in the North Island of New Zealand, land lying on the western banks of the Hokianga River — quaintly spelled in the deed as “Yokianga"—deep-wooded with kauri, and threaded with streams whose fishing-rights were carefully preserved for its new lord.

The deed was signed aboard the ship Providence, with Thomas Kendall, James Herd, master of the Providence, and William Edward Green, first officer, as witnesses. Nene, Mudi Wai, and Patuone made their mark, as was customary in all land transactions with the Maoris.

In all, the property entrusted by Charles to Mr. Kendall – chosen, he says, according to lists made out by the missionary and the two chieftains of the trade best likely to warm the cockles of native hearts – was worth a little over £1,000. That was Charles's account, and, as the modern heathen say, he stuck to it, with few divagations. The Abbot Vaggioli, for instance, says Mr. Kendall was a terrible robber, he deprived Charles of many thousands of pounds. However, by that time a certain amount of incoherence page 35 was justifiable. And, in his half-finished memoirs and other documents, the figure £1,000 crops up so persistently that one feels there's something in it.

In the deed, the price mentioned as paid to the chiefs for their 40,000 acres was thirty-six axes.

From a benefactor of the natives, does that look well?

Over and over again, Charles says, he asked himself about this point. But what could he do? Here he was, the deed in his pocket. Mr. Kendall, Nene, Mudi Wai, and Patuone were all of them thousands of miles away. Mr. Kendall must have done something with the rest of the £1,000. Maybe he gave it in palm-oil among important chiefs. As for the deed, there's nothing wrong with that. Look at it back, front, or sideways, it's a lovely deed. It preserves even the fishing-rights. Fishing-rights and rights of man…. “I'll be careful of those,” Charles assures his fire.

Utopia, Utopia, you are no longer between the pages of an old book, a thing that one takes gently down from the library shelf and as gently puts back again. You are between two arms of land, widening to embrace a blue sea. You are the rounded bosom of a hill in an unknown land. Faces, brown-eyed as rabbits, peer out from the undergrowth.

He sees it, sitting there watching the little phoenix-wings of flame mount and tumble in the gullet of a vast sooty chimney. It is intriguing, this occupation. And does it not prove what we have said? It is dangerous, it is tempting Providence, to be bored in Cambridge.