The Sea Inside

but always uncontrollable.

G REG D ENING ,
Islands and Beaches,
1968



T o reach Kapiti Island one must, if not in possession of a driver’s licence, board an early-morning train from Wellington. The line rumbles past colonial bungalows with verandahs and phormiums, New Zealand flax, staked by dead flower spikes, their blade-like leaves flapping in the ever-present wind. The day before, I’d stood at Island Bay to the south of the city, watching that wind bring with it one of the most violent storms seen in months.
    I’d gone there in search of orca; a pod had been spotted in the harbour. Instead I was greeted with a tempest. The darkening clouds set the sand into sharp relief. One, then two rainbows arched over the horizon, joining the land and the sky. The intensity of colour and the falling air pressure had a hallucinogenic effect. Speeding towards us across the water, the sky was sucking up the sea, creating curls of feathery vapour that seemed about to turn into tornados. The full force of the tropical Pacific was meeting the chill of the Southern Ocean. It was like watching a weather forecast simultaneously slowed down and speeded up. The storm was rushing towards me. In an instant, the atmosphere became supercharged, an almost tangible mass.
    I could practically feel the electricity crackling in the air. At the last moment, as the whirling wind rocked vehicles in the car park and fired perpendicular hail, catching up everything in its violent breath, I ran for cover. Waves which had rolled unobstructed over the ocean, gaining size and strength from immense gyres, were pummelling the rocks as if to tear them out of the sand. Nature was having a fit of hysteria, like an overactive child.
    The next day, unless you read the newspaper headlines, you would have been forgiven for thinking nothing had happened. In the calm of the morning the train trundled on, leaving the suburbs behind for a series of beach settlements. As the sea began to reappear, in the distance, lying low, was Kapiti Island, its dark-forested outline just visible across the narrow strait.
    New Zealand is one of the last places in the world to have been occupied by humans. In its sixty-five million years of isolation, it produced perhaps the greatest variety of bird species on any island, estimated at nearly two hundred. Like its whales, they too were a wonder and a resource to the M ā ori, who wove capes from their feathers, and threaded dead or living birds through their earlobes and kept them there till their wings stopped flapping and their bodies began to rot. When James Cook first arrived in 1769, he claimed that the birdsong, heard from the
Endeavour
at anchor in Queen Charlotte Sound, was almost deafening, as if a thousand finely tuned bells were ringing. But within a hundred years, animals introduced by the settlers were threatening that resonating abundance, and in 1897, in an early act of conservation to echo that of St Cuthbert on Inner Farne, Kapiti was declared a bird reserve. It has since witnessed the remorseless destruction, under the aegis of the Department of Conservation, of every mammal on the island, a violent means to a righteous end.
    First they came for the domesticated animals, the cows, the pigs, the goats; all shot or slaughtered. Then they turned to the rabbits; trapped and dispatched. Most persistent were the bush-tailed possums, imported from Australia in the late nineteenth century to start a fur trade on the island; more than twenty thousand were destroyed. Then work turned to the rats. Soon enough, Kapiti was predator-free, leaving only its autochthonous avian population.
    Human visitors are strictly regulated, and instructed to search their backpacks for any stray rodents. I check mine: no beady eyes down there, nor even a stray bit of fluff. A tractor tows our boat on its undercarriage, like a piece of artillery, over the grey sand and out into an uninviting sea. The wind in my face revives my hopes for the day. Every island, no matter how large or small, promises a story, a narrative of its own. ‘Every living thing on an island has been a traveller,’ wrote Greg Dening, the Australian Jesuit priest-turned-anthropologist. ‘In crossing the beach every voyager has brought something old and made something new.’
    Cook called it Entry Island. Its M ā ori title is scarcely less prosaic, meaning boundary – Kapiti marked the division between the
rohe
or territories of two
iwi
. But then,
M ā ori
itself