The Sea Inside

experiment and an adventure. He also had a mission: something to gain and, perhaps, much to lose.

    When George Craik, a fellow Scot and noted writer, was working on his book
The New Zealanders
, he turned to his friend Dr Traill for information. As a contributor to the wonderfully named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Craik was unabashed by his lack of first-hand acquaintance with his subject; he knew how to pique the curiosity of his audience. ‘We are about to introduce to our readers a highly interesting native of New Zealand, who has recently visited our shores, but of whom, we believe, no account has yet been given to the public.’ There was more than a hint of the gothic to his account of the alien; of Romantic imaginings, of Walpole’s fantasies and Mary Shelley’s science fiction. It is why, perhaps, Melville (whose book was influenced by his reading of
Frankenstein
) would adopt the same figure as an evocation of the other in
Moby-Dick
, incarnate in the persona of Queequeg; the dark obverse to the apparent security of Western civilisation. Those cryptic marks on Kupe’s face evoked another world.
    But Mr Craik was not concerned with any inkling of metaphysics. ‘Of all the people constituting the great Polynesian family,’ he noted, ‘the New Zealanders have, at least of late years, attracted the largest portion of public attention … They present a striking contrast to the timid and luxurious Otaheitans, and the miserable outcasts of Australia.’ Masculine, independent, hierarchical and resistant – as opposed to the apparently complaisant, property-disdaining Aborigines – the M ā ori were deemed worthy opponents, like the Zulus of South Africa, warriors fit to fight the Empire. ‘From the days of their first intercourse with Europeans they gave blow for blow. They did not stand still to be slaughtered, like the Peruvians by the Spaniards; but they tried the strength of the club against the flash of the musket.’
    Nor were the indigenous people of the South Seas strangers to British streets. The first Polynesian, Omai, had been brought back on the
Adventure
in 1774, to be adopted as Joseph Banks’s ward and commemorated in a portrait by Joshua Reynolds, arranged in stately robes. The first M ā ori to visit Britain was Moehanga, brought from the Bay of Islands by John Savage in 1807. Arriving in London among the forest of ships’ masts on the Thames, he feared he might be lost, as he might lose his way in a kauri wood. Church steeples awed him. Coming from an island where a cloak of flax or bark might take months to make, and assumed a sacred status in the process, London’s unholy consumerism was shocking to him, with its shops full of clothes and houses stacked with furniture. In turn, the warrior aroused amazement, for all that he had exchanged his feather headdress for a silk hat. ‘It was extremely inconvenient to take Moehanga to public exhibitions, or even to walk with him in the streets, on account of John Bull’s curiosity,’ complained Mr Savage. And although the M ā ori expressed due incredulity at St Paul’s vast dome, when he met a missionary in New Zealand many years later, what he remembered most of London was its plumbing, and ‘how the water was conveyed by pipes into the different houses’.
    By then, Moehanga’s visit had been eclipsed by the celebrated chief Hongi Hika, who had arrived in England in 1820, along with his young warrior nephew, Waikato. They became the cynosure of high society, although Hika himself was more drawn to the wild beasts in the Tower of London’s menagerie, particularly the elephant. He was unfazed by his audience with George IV, declaring, ‘There is only one king in England, there shall be only one king in New Zealand.’ In honour of such ambitions, the British monarch gave his visitor a suit of armour, a somewhat impractical present, although it was claimed that in one battle his helmet protected the chief from a bullet.
    When the two M ā ori returned home, they promptly sold their gifts for guns and ammunition, weapons which allowed them to wage battles whose violence and subsequent cannibalism were so shocking that Waikato admitted he could not eat anything for four days. Nor would Hika’s armour protect him. During a skirmish he was shot through the chest, leaving a wound that took a year to kill him; the chief would invite his warriors to listen to the wind whistling through his lungs, and witnesses claimed