The Sea Inside

they could see through his body.
    Such were the precedents for Dr Traill’s patient, whose presence in Liverpool was not as innocent as it seemed.

    On 26 February 1824, Richard Reynolds, captain of the merchant ship
Urania
, owned by the trading company of Stainforth and Gosling, was sailing in the Cook Strait when a formidable flotilla hove into view from Kapiti: three war canoes, loaded with eighty warriors.
    Reynolds and his crew prepared for imminent attack – and as a South Seas trader,
Urania
would have been well-armed. But they could not have expected what happened next. The largest of the canoes, with its tall prow, drew towards
Urania
’s bow, and a man – evidently the leader – stood up. In broken but clear English, he demanded to be allowed to board the ship. Reynolds declined, but as he could see no weapons in the canoe, he allowed it to come nearer.
    Was he inviting what happened next? The company that employed him was about to go bust; perhaps trade for
Urania
wasn’t going so well; perhaps this foreign intervention was a welcome diversion. Or maybe there was something more, something unspoken. Certainly, Reynolds had some deeper knowledge of New Zealand, since he appeared to be fluent in the M ā ori tongue.
    As the two vessels came to within touching distance, the gap between worlds and over oceans was broached. Kupe – I imagine his powerful legs bending, his muscular arms reaching out – sprang from his canoe and landed on foreign territory. It was a leap of faith.
    Once aboard, Kupe turned to his war canoes and ordered them to back off – a gesture of conciliation. He made signs as to what he wanted – guns – and was denied. But he had saved his key phrase, words he’d learned and understood, for his final, audacious demand: ‘Go Europe,’ he said, ‘see King Georgy.’
    Reynolds had had enough of this pantomime. He was neither an arms dealer nor the captain of a passenger ship. He ordered three sailors to throw Kupe overboard. As they tried to do so, the warrior threw himself on the deck, grabbing a pair of ring-bolts so powerfully that it was impossible to pull him away ‘without such violence as the humanity of Captain Reynolds would not permit’. Kupe read the situation correctly. He shouted to his canoes to turn back. He was on his way to Europe.
    Reynolds tried to put Kupe ashore at the next opportunity, but the wind was against him. Giving up, at least for the moment, the Englishman, exhibiting his good manners, decided to make his uninvited guest comfortable. He offered the chief a bunk in his own cabin, in recognition of his status. Kupe stayed on board as
Urania
sailed across the Pacific to South America, and by the time they reached Lima he and the captain were on the best of terms – a friendship consolidated in a dramatic incident at Montevideo when Reynolds fell overboard. Kupe jumped in and caught the captain as he was about to sink. Holding him tight above the waves, the warrior swam with Reynolds until the two men could be rescued. From one leap to another, the intimacy was sealed between M ā ori and Englishman. Like Truganini saving George Robinson from the river Arthur, Kupe’s plunge into the South Atlantic was a reversal of the usual roles of Westerner and islander, and all the more powerful for that.
    When he read it, as he must have done, twenty years later, this story had a powerful effect on Melville. Queequeg, a tattooed prince and hawker of human heads, is the most memorable figure in
Moby-Dick
, clearly based on a M ā ori warrior; the first Pacific islander in Western fiction. Like Kupe, he too saves a white man from drowning, diving from the deck of the
Pequod
. ‘Stripped to the waist, [he] darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam.’
    Queequeg hails from ‘an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.’ He is insular in the way the rest of the crew are: ‘They were nearly all Islanders in the
Pequod
,’ says Ishmael, ‘
Isolatoes
too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each
Isolato
living on a separate continent of his own.’ Unutterably other yet honourable even in his inky guise, Queequeg is an island in himself. Like Kupe, he is mysterious and brutal, his body a contour map