HEAPHY—Pioneer Without Peer

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30610, 28 November 1964, Page 5

HEAPHY—Pioneer Without Peer

(Specially written for “The Press” by NAYLOR HILLARY) QNE hundred years ago last February, Charles Heaphy took part in a minor skirmish in the Waikato which was later to earn him the Victoria Cross, the first such award to any soldier not a regular member of the British Army.

It is appropriate, therefore, that the Alexander Turnbull Library has issued three prints of watercolours by Heaphy this year as a reminder of the other achievements of this great New Tealand pioneer.

Heaphy was more than an artist-soldier. During 40 years in New Zealand he was surveyor, explorer, coroner, land court judge and member of Parliament. Few names in the early years of the colony shine so brightly. In his lifetime he saw, and often played a major part in the evolution of New Zealand from a handful of whaling settlements to a growing and vigorous nation. As a young artist and surveyor for the New Zealand Company he brought to the colony in 1839 something of the dash and glamour of his ancestry. Runaway Match In the 18th century the eldest son of an English nobleman had fallen in love with the daughter of an Irish clergyman. The noble father refused his consent to their marriage and the young couple ran off together. The noble son enlisted and fell in battle without ever seeing the son born to him. The nobleman protested the legality of the runaway marriage and the dispute was settled only when the son took the name of his mother—which was Heaphy. This was the grandfather of Charles. His son, Thomas Heaphy, was born in 1775. He became a well-known painter, as did both his sons, and was attached to the Duke of Wellington’s staff as artist. He also founded the Society of British Artists.

Young Charles was born in London about 1822. By 1835 he was exhibiting work at the British Institution. While still a teen-ager he went on to win bronze and silver medals from the Royal Academy. He might have won a gold medal too. But after a brief spell working on the London - Birmingham railway he signed a three-year contract with the New Zealand Company, sailed for Port Nicholson in the Tory with the company advance party, and his work which was up for academy approval had to be withdrawn. Charles Heaphy then was 17. For the next 12 years he served the company—sketching and writing, studying, surveying and exploring. His earliest travels were up the West Coast of the North Island from Wellington to Taranaki where he assisted in making the first accurate survey—and also painted two of the pictures . being printed this year—a ship scene on the Hokianga river, reproduced above, and a view of Mount Egmont. The next year he was in the Chatham Islands, assisting in the company’s purchase. The third print is from a painting done on this trip and shows the Nairn river in the islands. Here, too, Heaphy had his first taste of native violence when he received a spear wound. The company sent him home to England with despatches in 1842 and while in London he published his “Narrative of a Residence in New Zealand” which describes the founding and progress of the Wakefield settlement and has been called “the best description of early Wellington.” When he returned company interest had moved to Nelson.

Heaphy took part tn roadmaking and exploration, enduring much hardship and earning the commendation of Fox, chief agent of the company, later Sir William Fox, Premier of New Zealand.

Early in 1846, at the age of 23, with another young man, Thomas Brunner, and Fox, Heaphy left Nelson for the unknown hinterland. The tiny party reached and named the headwaters of the Buller river. The mouth of that river became the goal of the two young explorers. They set out again in March, 1846, but instead of trying to cross the rugged hinterland they followed the coast. Short Rations Each laden down with 851 b of provisions and instruments, and with one Maori guide, Heaphy and Brunner marched from Nelson through what is now Golden Bay, around Westhaven inlet in the northern tip of the South Island and down the West Coast. Often they only made three miles a day and when the mouth of the Buller was reached they had to patch an abandoned Maori canoe with clay before they could cross. They pressed on towards the Grey river. Winter was on them and they reduced their flour ration to a tablespoon a day. But at the river mouth they found a small Maori village and West Coast hospitality did not fail them. They were supplied with potatoes and whitebait, and were able to continue to the greenstone country at the Arahura river. There they turned back—but not before they had seen, for the first time from the West Coast, the towering peak of Mount Cook which the local Maoris called Te Hauraki. Heaphy noted that “the natives assert it is of the greatest elevation of any peak in the island.” Heaphy, of course, sketched the scene and the great mountain. Then, laden with potatoes and whitebait, they turned back for Nelson.

Before they reached Nelson on August 18 they were reduced to three potatoes a day each. They were away for 22 weeks. A small terrier had made the journey with them and Heaphy noted his thank-

fulness at “having preserved little Smutty uneaten.” Heaphy took up land in Nelson in the 1840 s but had to abandon it in the face of native hostilities. He went to Auckland in 1848 and was in the Coromandel goldfields as commissioner.

He married in 1851, Catherine Churton, daughter of the Rev. John Churton, first chaplin to the Wellington settlement.

Heaphy went on to become district surveyor in Auckland in 1858. The next year he helped Hochstetter with his geological survey of the province. When the Maori War broke out in 1863, Heaphy’s local knowledge was in great demand. He was attached to flying columns as a guide. As a lieutenant in the Auckland City Volunteer Company,

which he had joined in 1859, he helped erect St. John’s redoubt at Papatoetoe, as a Justice of the Peace he dealt with native murderers, and even performed post-mortems and acted as coroner.

Heaphy was acting as a guide near the Waipa river at Te Awamutu in February, 1864. His patrol was at Paerangi where a detachment of the 40th Regiment nearby was relaxing, bathing in a creek.

A Maori ambush opened fire on the bathers. Heaphy dashed forward under heavy fire to help a man lying wounded in the water. Shots tore his clothing and he was slightly wounded three times as 'he calmly stitched the bleeding artery of the wounded man in the creek. Five soldiers and 41 Maoris were killed in the clash, but Heaphy succeeded in bringing out the wounded man. Later he recorded “I got a volley into me at above five yards from the scrub ... I was only stunned for a time and later took charge of a party of the 40th in the absence of their officer. I did what I could for the wounded. . . .”

For his courage Heaphy was promoted to captain in the volunteers and awarded the New Zealand Medal.

Victoria Cross

General Galloway wrote to the Governor, Sir George Grey, that Heaphy had shown patience and gallantry. “A Victoria Cross for Heaphy would be an honour to the whole body of New Zealand guerrilla fighters,” he said. But the Victoria Cross, instituted in 1856, was reserved for British regular troops. Finally, after a special act had been passed in Britain, Heaphy’s bravery was marked by the award of the highest honour for valour. On May 1, 1867, Governor Grey told him. “Her Majesty has signified her intention of conferring the Victoria Cross on yourself for your gallantry at the skirmish at Mangapiko.” Heaphy was the only colonial soldier to receive the award in the Maori Wars. By then, the war was over. Heaphy was chief surveyor to the New Zealand Government, charged with the difficult task of apportioning

farm lands to volunteer soldiers who had served in the war. He took part then in the establishment of Hamilton and It is to his foresight that the city owes its magnificent town belts, now important as playing fields. He served three years as member of the House of Representatives for Parnell up to 1870, but resigned to become Commissioner of Native Reserves and, in 1878, a Judge of the* Maori Land Court. But the exertions of his youth had taken a toll. As his health worsened he retired from public life and went to Brisbane, in search of a warmer climate. There he died, on August 3, 1881, aged 59. Versatility As soldier and surveyor he had left his mark on the new land. His name had become part of the landscape with Heaphy street in Hamilton, the Heaphy river on the West Coast, and the rugged Heaphy track in Golden Bay. Yet it is as an artist of rare distinction that Heaphy is remembered today. It was he who extended to New Zealand something of the waning glory of the English landscape school. He was more than a conscientious and energetic draughtsman, and he did far more than would be expected from his modern equivalent, the official photographer with an expedition. From his works in the Alexander Turnbull and Hocken libraries it is possible to trace the evolution of the company’s operations in New Zealand. His sketches met official requirements admirably. They showed topographical detail, vegetation, the life of the natives —all that the company could wish. But many of them do more than this. E. H. McCormick in his centennial survey, “Letters and Art in New Zealand,” notes that “they portray experiences of an elusive kind, rarely to be expressed in words . . . which are the wrong medium.” Masterpiece Heaphy was a man “wrestling with the strange contours and colours of a new environment and attempting to define the peculiar quality of each part of New Zealand as he visited it in turn.” Occasionally he fails, when his work is blurred by the softer blues and greens of his English past; but when he leaves the conventions of his time and treats a subject in his own way the result is a small masterpiece. Such was his view of Mount Egmont in the present prints, which McCormick says “remains one of the few satisfying paintings of that inspiration—and snare—for New Zealand artists.”