The Sea Inside

means ‘normal’. And though its names may be workaday, the island is not. Tui, stitchbirds, bellbirds sing and whistle in the forest. Tree ferns erupt from the dense undergrowth, turning the light itself green. It’s like walking on the bottom of the sea.

    After an hour’s climb I break out of the gloom, onto the top of the mountain. As I sit to eat my picnic, a weka, sleek and brown, a cross between a turkey and an enormous starling, calmly walks up my legs in search of crumbs. I look over the trees to the sea far below, swirling around the island’s rocky skirts.
    I’m on my way down when I hear someone singing ahead. Who would disturb this forest, the kiwi sleeping in their burrows and the toutouwai pecking in the dirt? As I turn the corner, I realise the sound is coming from the M ā ori guide who’d accompanied us on the boat over. She’s calling to a kakapo, a flightless parrot, invisible in the canopy above; and it seems to be calling back in return.
    Back on the beach, I pick my way over bits of bleached driftwood, shattered
paeko
shells and cable-thick kelp, trepidatious yet determined to swim. Further down the strand stand two rusting try-pots. A fur seal slides into the sea and rolls onto its back, pressing its flippers together like a praying monk. These places smell of whale.
    As I wait for the boat, a kaka peers at me from the lower branches of a tree, cocking its head in the questioning, almost mocking manner that parrots have. Fixing me with its eye, it declines the invitation to perch on my arm, and flies off into the canopy.

    One afternoon – or it may have been an evening, or a morning, I don’t know – in 1824, an eminent physician made an unusual house call in Liverpool. He was to attend a case of measles, a common enough disease. But his patient could hardly have been more unusual, since the entirety of his face, like much of his body, was tattooed, to the extent that from a distance his features appeared to be blue-black, inhuman. He looked more like a demon.
    Even in the streets of a great port such as Liverpool, this man’s appearance was remarkable. His name was Te Pehi Kupe, and in his homeland he was a celebrated warrior; yet here he was, tailored in Western dress, a dandy’s cravat around his neck. It was clear to the doctor that there was a strong attachment between this exotic figure and the sea captain in whose house he was lodged. Something had happened to bind these two men together. Their visitor was intrigued – not least, perhaps, because he was an islander himself.
    Thomas Stewart Traill was born in 1781 in Kirkwall, Orkney, far off the north Scottish coast, where he had grown up with whales and seals and seabirds; Orkney means ‘seal islands’ in Norse. Its neolithic houses, whose stones are still embedded in its turf, were built of whale bones and held sacred objects carved from whales’ teeth. Like the M ā ori, their inhabitants had relied on the sea, rather than the land, and knew its animals well.
    As a young man, Traill had studied in Edinburgh, famous for its Enlightenment spirit, and he now practised medicine in Liverpool. But he was no mere physician. In the vital issues and debates that concerned educated men of the age, Dr Traill was one of the inner circle that Sir William Roscoe, Member of Parliament, banker, historian, penal reformer and abolitionist, gathered around himself. Liverpool, from where my own ancestors would leave for America or arrive from Ireland, had been ‘the chief seat of the odious traffic’ of slavery, the starting and finishing point in the terrible triangle that bound Africa to the Caribbean and Britain. It was a horror in which one of Roscoe and Traill’s contemporaries saw an equivalence with the way we treated other species. Jeremy Bentham accepted that man might kill them for food, ‘But is there any reason why we should be suffered to torment them? Not any that I can see. Are there any why we should
not
be suffered to torment them? Yes, several.’
    The philosopher and reformer was certainly eccentric in his ideas. In 1824, the same year that Traill met Kupe, Bentham had become fascinated by the M ā ori method of preserving human heads, and ordered that his own should be displayed after his death as an Auto-Icon, along with his soft body parts, labelled in decanters in the same cabinet. As the inventor of the Panopticon, Bentham had addressed the keeping of humans; now he extended his gaze to animals, in this age