JOURNEYS TO DUSKY BAY

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31209, 5 November 1966, Page 4

JOURNEYS TO DUSKY BAY

(Reviewed by R.D.) Dusky Bay. In the Steps of Captain Cook. By A. Charles Begg and Neil C. Begg. Whitcombe and Tombs. With the bicentenary of Cook’s first landfall, near Gisborne, on October 9, 1769, only three years away, the publication of this handsome and scholarly book which does credit both to the

authors, and to the publishers, is most timely. It is such a short, time since we became aware of the need for good format, crisp illustration, proper ascription, comprehensive index and expanded appendices in our scholarly books that it is a pleasure to welcome another excellent example. For their title the Begg brothers of Dunedin preferred Dusky Bay, a name in itself evocative of the voyages of James Cook, who is quite properly the authors’ hero. On his first voyage in the Endeavour in 1769, Cook entered the Pacific by Cape Hom, sailing via Pitcairn to Tahiti for the transit-of-Venus observation which was a major purpose of the voyage. From Ra’iatea he then drove south into the empty Southern Ocean. Seeking, and failing to find the southern contin-

ent, he turned north to pick up the east coast of the land reported by Tasman, and on October 7 saw the ranges behind Gisborne in Poverty Bay. This second discovery of New Zealand, definitive in the sense that it led to the British settlement of New Zealand and Australia, is an event so momentous that it demands appropriate national commemoration and a permanent memorial on or near the historic landing site at Kaiti Beach.

Cook circumnavigated and charted New Zealand, discovering it to comprise two major islands, and at a late stage in the survey, on March 14, 1770, noted the entrance of Dusky Bay as a safe haven for refitting ship and refreshing men. It was not until his second voyage, in the Resolution, three years later, that he was to avail himself of it. This time he entered the Southern Ocean from the Cape of Good Hope, and for 117 days traversed the waste of icy seas to narrow the search for the still continent of Antarctica and to predict that it did exist. From this voyage, having lost no men from scurvy, he set course for Dusky Bay, entering the sound on March 26, 1773, and a day later moored the Resolution in Pickersgill Harbour, stem first and so close that she could be secured by ropes to the shore. For five weeks the Resolution and her complement lay in Dusky Sound.

Nor were they the first men in this primeval wilderness. A Maori family, perhaps a fugitive remnant of Ngatimamoe, certainly astonished by the terrifying sight of these strange beings and their giant ship, made timorous and occasional contact, then disappeared as mysteriously as they first appeared. The authors speculate that they were killed by. tribal enemies from Preservation Inlet and list, in clinical detail, the pathetic tally of bones from a cave shelter discovered by Mr K. Sutherland in 1957. Cook’s artist William Hodges painted them, crew members describe their double-canoe, their clothing, their bivouac huts. But from George Forster, brilliant son of the chief naturalist, Johann Forster, some words of the

extinct dialect of these timid hunters and fishers are recorded in the names of the native birds which George Forster, a German, took down to accompany his superb coloured diagrams. The curious phenomenon of the transcription by Germans in basic English phonetics of the bird names of a lost Maori tribe was properly emphasised by the Doctors Begg. The first point to emerge from the authors’ listing of the names is confirmation of the Southern Maori substitution of “k” for ‘'ng,” as in Putakitaki (Paradise duck) for standard Maori Putangitangi. But the accurate Forster ear also noted the more explosive sound of certain other consonants, which our modern orthography fails to indicate, and rendered “P” as “B” “T” as “D” and “R” as “L.” This being understood, the Dusky Sound words are seen to be clear and standard Maori; so much so that where the authors suggested that the bird listed

as Toetoe might be Koekoea (Long-tailed Cuckoo), the reviewer confidently looked up the standard dictionary to find that Forster was rendering the name Toitoi, which is standard for the Brown Creeper. While the ship was refitted (the men refreshed), and Cook’s meticuously accurate charting was under way, William Hodges and William Anderson painted the scene, the Forsters and their Swedish colleague Anders Sparnnan recorded the natural history, and the astronomer, William Wales, set up his observatory to obtain an accurate “fix” of the latitude and longitude of this part of New Zealand. During the five weeks the Resolution lay in Dusky Sound this remote part of

New Zealand was recorded in words, pictures, and the “natural and artificial curiosities” which the voyagers took home to a wonderina Eurone. Such was the first and epic sojourn which the book commemorates. Indeed “Dusky Bay” is a record of journeys and sojourns; Vancouver (1791); the convict transport Britannia (1792) and returning (1793); the East Indiaman Endeavour (scuttled 1795); the solitary prospector William Docherty in the eighteen seventies; Andreas Reischek who spent the winter of 1884 systematically killing native birds; Richard Henry, who from 1894 to 1907, vainly endeavoured to save kakapo and kiwi which he transported to the sanctuary of Pigeon Island.

In many ways the most remarkable journey was that made by the Begg brothers (with Philip Dorizac and Alistair Begg) in March, 1963. Because the authors finally made in reality a journey they had already made many times in imagination, they were able during little more than two weeks to bring the past to life in a brilliant evocation which is the essence and soul of their book.

In the second portion of this excellent book, they cap the vivid retrospect of journeys which comprises the first part, by following and elaborating every lead which Cook commenced. They were able to identify the overgrown clearing where William Wales set up his observatory on Astronomer’s Point, and ta confirm that the stumps of the trees felled 190 years before were still recognisable. They located the site of the Maori canoe harbour on Indian island, and fixed a bronze plaque where the Resolution was moored in Pickersgill Harbour. Cook’s Natural History is compared with today’s; his place names spring to life and are peopled again; the melancholy record of the Maori family is followed to the bones, fish-hook points and rusty hoop iron of their cave burial. The trail of historical archive brings to light the remarkable journal of Robert Murray, officer on the convicttransport Britannia, in 1792. The search for “natural curiosities” collected by the Forsters led to the Soviet Union where Professor A. I. Ivanov of the Academy of Sciences, Leningrad, found, after many joumeyings in his own country, the pressed plants and botanical drawings made by George Forster in Dusky Sound. The authors illustrate a typical drawing from their Soviet search:

“Forstera Sedilfoiia, discovered by Anders Sparrman and named after his friend George Forster who drew this picture and wrote on the back this annotation In Latin: “Habitat In summits montium altissdmorum cacunnlnibus tn Nova Zeelandia insula austral!.” “It lives on the topmost peaks of the highest mountains of the South Island of New Zealand.” With this typical illustration of the scholarly documentation which marks the authors’ treatment in the second section of “Dusky Bay” the reviewer closes this review of a book which can be warmly recommended to all who have a feeling for the unique combination of natural and historical drama which isolation has produced in our land.