The Sea Inside

differences between them. He knew every line on his body from memory, although the only mirrors in his native land were reflections in gourds of water.

    On his rides in the Lancashire countryside, Kupe was fascinated by agriculture and blacksmiths. One day Traill took him to see a review of a regiment of dragoons, ‘a spectacle of course altogether to his taste’, as George Craik reported. ‘The gay appearance of the troops – their evolutions in making a charge – and the command which the men exercised over their horses, – all drew from him the warmest expressions of wonder and delight.’ It was his cue to reiterate his true agenda. He asked if the king had many more such warriors; on being informed that he did, Kupe replied, ‘Why then he not give Tupai musketry and swordy?’ and offered to pay in spars and flax.
    This was no naïve barter. The spars of which Kupe spoke came from the kauris that, he told Traill, grew down to the shores of Kapiti as if full to bursting, and were valued for ship’s masts; plentiful spikes of flax furnished the raw material for sailcloth. Kupe knew just what he was offering to a naval empire (whose ambitions differed from his own only in scale and materiel). He even employed sentiment to persuade his friend. In a poignant scene, Kupe met Traill’s four-year-old son. Taking the boy onto his lap, he kissed him and began to weep, telling Traill that his own son had been the same age when he was killed and eaten, his eyes scooped out and devoured.
    Despite his wiles, Kupe failed to convince his hosts that it was a good idea to hand over the guns he wanted to wreak his
utu
, revenge. On 6 October 1825 he sailed from England, at the country’s expense, aboard the
Thames.
With him he took various agricultural implements donated by the government; doubtless it was hoped that these would encourage his people towards more pacific pursuits. But like Hongi Hika before him, Kupe quickly traded the tools and his Western clothing for guns as soon as he reached Sydney.
    Back in Kapiti, Kupe plunged into apocalyptic, inter-tribal war. And like Hika, his end came almost inconsequentially, in an argument over a valuable piece of nephrite. ‘Why do you with the crooked tattoo, resist my wishes?’ he is said to have told a rival warrior, ‘– you whose nose will shortly be cut off with a hatchet.’ Appearances were important, even unto death. Soon after this, Kupe’s forces were overwhelmed. As he resisted, his final words were ambivalent – ‘Don’t give it to the god, but to the Kakakura’ – but his fate was not. His flesh was cooked and eaten, and his warrior bones, which his country would not have, were made into fish hooks to be dangled into the ocean. Like Cook’s, his was a symbolic death, an island sacrifice to the sea; an end, and a beginning.

    The early-morning bus leaves from under the lee of the cathedral, which a year later would lie in ruins, and winds its way through the steep-sided hills of the Banks Peninsula to the sea. Next to me, a dreadlocked girl spends most of the journey deleting images from her digital camera, bleep-bleep-bleep, one by one, providing an electronic soundtrack to our descent to Akaroa – ‘long harbour’ – set inside a narrow rocky inlet.
    The Banks Peninsula was named by Cook in honour of his patron; or rather, he called it Banks Island, since that’s what his initial survey indicated it was. Then it was covered in trees, but these were soon shipped back to Europe for masts, leaving its hillsides bare. That sense of destruction was reflected by bloody warfare: it was here that hundreds of M ā ori died in a brutal attack by Te Rauparaha, abetted by a British captain, John Stewart, in 1830.
    By that point, this peninsula had become a profitable shore-whaling centre for the Europeans who first settled here. Around its headlands, in remote coves, lie the crumbling remains of whaling stations, lingering evidence of early deals done for this place’s resources. In 1838 Akaroa nearly became a French colony under another captain, Jean-François Langlois, sailing on the Le Havre whaler
Cachalot
. He bought most of the peninsula’s land from the local M ā ori, who received, in part payment, two cloaks, six pairs of trousers, two shirts, twelve hats, two pairs of shoes, some pistols and a few axes. At one point Langlois suggested the peninsula as a penal colony for his motherland. He set sail from France with his first group of free