The Sea Inside

been washed away.

    Inside the cottage, the cabin-like rooms are still covered in Edwardian wallpaper. The low southern sun forces through the windows. It feels like the last house in the world. There’s a sense of extinction and improbable life; of enormous animals and their equally vast absence. Here you might not be surprised to see a giant bird stalking through its cottage garden, and indeed, four centuries ago you might have seen just that. The largest moa egg ever found was discovered here, evidence of an earlier cull carried out on this shore.
    The biggest of the moa species could reach twelve feet, twice the height of a man, but that did not prevent them from being hunted to extinction. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, while Tudor monarchs were squabbling in England, the moa had retreated to New Zealand’s South Island, just as the thylacine made its last stand in Tasmania. Here the most complete remains have been found, including the fearsome claws of
Megalapteryx
didinus
, discovered in an Otago cave in 1878 with its feathers intact, like the hairy remains of giant sloths found in South American caves. In this sublime, scaled-up landscape, it is hard to believe that such large creatures disappeared so recently; their shapes seem to linger, like the after-image of the sun.
    In 1844, Kawane Paipai, a M ā ori elder, told Robert FitzRoy, who had been captain of the
Beagle
during Darwin’s voyage and had subsequently become governor of New Zealand, of a moa hunt that had taken place on South Island fifty years before. In a scene that recalls one of Ray Harryhausen’s films, Paipai remembered the bird being harried and surrounded before it was speared, using weapons that, like whaling harpoons which bent as they entered the blubber, were constructed to snap once they struck. A frightened moa would fight back, using its huge feet to strike at its attackers – although this tactic left the bird unbalanced and easily toppled from behind. Yet more cruelly, other birds were killed by being made to swallow hot rocks.
    Despite such depredations, many were convinced of the moa’s survival into the modern era. Whalers and sealers said they saw monstrous birds on the rocky shores. Bones were discovered with marks that, it was claimed, could only have been made by iron blades unavailable to the M ā ori – indicating that Europeans had not only seen moa, but had eaten them too.
    In 1839, a shard of moa bone reached Richard Owen at the Hunterian Museum, where he was responsible for conserving the surgeon’s collections and expanding them in the name of science. This fragment was to become pivotal in the career of the man who coined the word dinosaur, who commissioned the Crystal Palace monsters, and on whom Charles Dickens would draw for Mr Venus, the melancholy taxidermist and articulator of bones in
Our Mutual Friend
.
    It was not a speedy process. After four years’ deliberation, Owen decided that the bone belonged to a huge bird which he named
Dinornis
in a taxonomic echo of his terrible lizards (and, unbeknown to him, a nod to the future revelation that birds themselves were direct descendants of the dinosaurs): ‘So far as my skill in interpreting an osseous fragment may be credited, I am willing to risk the reputation for it on the statement that there has existed, if there does not now exist, in New Zealand, a struthious bird nearly, if not quite, equal in size to the Ostrich, belonging to a heavier and more sluggish species.’
    Forty years later, celebrated and often criticised for such leaps of faith (and indeed for failing to credit others’ discoveries), the dome-headed professor was photographed alongside a giant moa skeleton at the British Museum, of which he was now the director, wearing a tattered gown which, along with his disconcertingly staring eyes, made him look rather like a moa himself.

    Even before Owen ‘discovered’ the giant bird, tales of its apparent survival were emerging. In 1823, George Pauley claimed to have seen a huge bird when he was walking near a lake in Otago: ‘I ran from it, and it ran from me.’ Later, in 1850, engineers prospecting a new railway line to Canterbury saw two large birds, bigger than emus, on the hillside. And in 1878 a farmer described a moa in the same countryside, its unmistakable shape – although no living human was supposed to have seen one – silhouetted ‘for fully ten minutes on the brow of the terrace, bending its long neck up