MURIHIKU

Evening Star, Issue 12307, 23 September 1904, Page 1

MURIHIKU

SOME OLD-TIME EVENT’S. [Bt Robert M’Nab, M.H.R.] No. 20., Toe, General Gates. 1819 to 1823; or a Yankee Captain’s Experience of Theft, Arrest, Imprisonment, and Fine under the Briton, and of, Capture, Escape. Murder, and Retribution under the Maori. It is hard to say under what designation to classify the voyage of the General Gates. One of the numerous baud of American vessels which frequented the Australasian coasts to whale and seal, she sailed from Boston in. November, 1818, and reached Sydney on June 4, 1819, under the command of Abimaleck Riggs. Then the fun started. After firing herself for the voyage, she sailed on the 29th of June for the 'Bay of Wands, in New Zealand. Among her "passengers were the Rev. Mr Marsden and several other clergymen, and some Maoris, all accredited to the Church Missionary Society. But she had on board other'than legitimate passengers. From the time when the master of the American scow Mercury incurred the ire of the Governor of Sydney for stealing a convict woman, the Americans had taken away a lot of convicts. Paterson, when Lieutenant-Governor, as far back as 1804, had attempted to stop the evil, and in a proclamation dated August 11, 1804, refers to “the numerous convicts that have escaped and been received on board American ships on their departure.” Rirgs beat all previous records. He enticed five convicts on board, and allowed another five to stow away. He also took away a freeman who had not obtained a clearance. Eleven men left in the one ship, and what made it all the more aggravating was that the very beat mechanics in the Government employ bad been selected. On arrival at the Bay iif Islands the men were formally put on "the ship’s articles and employed in ordinary work on board. On the 12th of April, 1820. H.M.S. Dromedary was in the Bay of Islands returning from Sydney, and on the look-out for a cargo of spars u> take to England for the navv. The General Gates was there too. Having received information of the state Of matters tnat prevailed on board the American ship Captain Skinner paid her a visit, and found’ as represented, that a large number of fcfvduey convicts were on board. These wore all gathered together and taken on iiu.iri ti." Dromedary. Tien it came out il.at lltv had been enticed away, concealed, and cruelly treated. Riggs, the captain, was therefore placed under arrest, and the ship, captain, and convicts sent to Sydnov under a British crew and under arrest, the captain was brought before the Sydney Court upon the usual bond under the Porl'Heiyula*r s - ( awa 7 a convict without the Governor’s permission, and fined twelve penalities of £SOO each, eleven for canyiim away so many persons, and one for quilting the harbor without a proper Heroin.'.-' In giving judgment, AH- Justice Field said :

It appeared by the evidence before the Ooiirt that the American, being suffered to refresh his ship here, while partaking of a valuable fishery, which we might, if Me pleased, monopolise to ourselves, instead of repaying the hospitality of the port with gratitude, acted more like a pirate than tho subject of a friendly civilised nation, and went about into low „ public-houses wKhicinjr some of our best convict mechanics. Tho learned Judge had no doubt that this was a breach of the laws of nations between friendly Powers, and mignt perhaps revive tho embers of discord in countries now hapnily at peace, and involve the defendant himself in consequences of which he was little aware. I he defendant pleaded he had now left seamen on sealing islands who if not relieved must starve, hoi" these serious consequences he must himself bo responsible. Although when he left their port, breaking through its regulations, he might not have expected to have been brought back by any other constraint than that of perils of the sea, yet he must be taken always to have contemplated these fatalities, and that necessarily might bring him once more within a jurisdiction which would detain him for the penalties of his bond. And then, and not now, be should have thought what would become of the fishing parties which he had left on islands. Upon proper representation the Governor of the (olony would take measures for the relief of these parties. All the Court had to do was to decide whether the bond was not forfeited. That judgment was given on September 15, 1820. On November 25 we. find the captain advertising the list of men'sealing with him. The record is ■ not clear about the General Gates’s next movement. From an account given by Polack it would look as if she returned to America, and in the folloM-ing year, 1821, sailed again for New Zealand. Up to now her captain had experienced the penalties of breaking the laws of a civilised community.' Now her crew were to experience the dire vengeance of the wild savage natives who at that time inhabited the southern portion of New Zealand. The material is scrappy, but, such as it is, tragic enough. Bhe went to New Zealand, and in the usual way set out scaling gangs at selected spots along the roast. Polack, in his work on New Zealand written in 1838, tells of the fate of ore of these gangs; In 1821 a vessel called the General Gates left Boston, in the United States of America, on a sealing voyage. On the 10th of August following five men and a leader, named Price, were landed near the south-west Cape of the district of Tc Wai Poonam'a for the purpose of catching seals. Within six Meeks the success of. tho men amounted to 3.563 skins, which had been salted and made ready for shipment. One night, about eleven o'clock, their cabin was surrounded by a horde of natives, who broke open the place, and made the Americans prisoners. The flour, salt provisions, and silt for curing s-kins were all destroyed, as their use and value was unknown to tho savages. After setting fire to the cabin and everyth ng else that was thought unserviceable, they forced the sealers to march M’ith them for some days to a place known by the name of Looking Glass Bay (to the north of Caswell Sound), from a remarkable perforation in a rock, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles from whence they set out. The only food they had was roasted fish. After resting a day at this place, thev were made to travel a further distance of two hundred miles in a northerly direction, until they came to a large sandy bay. The natives then ..took John Rawton, and, having fastened him to a tree,' they- beat in his skull with a club. The head of the unfortunate man w.i.s cut off «md buried in the ground; the remaining part of the body was cooked and eaten! Some of this nauseous food was offered to the sealers, who had been without sustenance for some time, and thev also .partook of the body of their late comrade. The five survivors were made fust to trees, well guarded by hostile natives, and each day one of the men was killed by the ferocious cannibals, and afterwards devoured —viz., Jas. White and William Rawton, of New London, in Connecticut; and William Smith, of New York. Jaa. West-, of the same place, was doomed to die also; but the night previously a dreadful storm, accompanied by thunder and lightning, frightened the natives away, and the two remaining Americans found means to'unfasten the flax cords

that bound them. At daybreak next morning they launched a small canoe that was within reach, and put to sea withoi.tnnv revisions or water, preferring death m this way to the horrid fate of their comrades. They had scarcely proceeded a few yards when a number of - natives came in sight, who rushed into the water to catch their prey; hut the Americans eventually eluded their grasp despair lending them strength to paddle beyond the reach of their pursuers. They I'cmained in this exhausted state three days, and were then taken up by the Margery, a flax trader and sealer of Sydney. -• ll\e site of the capture of this gang is pven as the South-west Cape, a promontory on the extreme south of Stewart Island, and near the South Cap. The only place liable to be confounded with it would be West) Capo near Dusky, but the distance given as 150 miles from Looking Gloss Bay would indicate the former rather than the latter. It must be admitted that the narrative is very vague, indicating that the partv proceeded on foot all the way, while they Fovgaux Strait, to say ■ V.'ft nf the various Sounds en route. If the distances are correctly given, the scene fiU h< L p i SCapo the men onld be about ty miles south of Hokitika, The two men who thus escaped in the Margery appear to have been restored to thfir comntdthe°by a r dergo a fre9h ,&fc of troubles at the hands of an over-zealoils skipper on the New Zea.and coast. The GcneralGales adtcr SP Sn en by Govemn, o n t colonial cutter Snapper. Captain Edwardson, on the 26th of December, 1823, and that gentleman reported that a, boat belonging to ,? leriCan vess ®l bad been captured, but that the crew escaped. Strange to say. one of the foremost of the savage Maori chiefs who led in this fierce attempt to exterminate the sealing gangs was himself of Eurojean blood, and the survivor of a massacre in htewart Island about the year 1807. The chief CaddeH, has already been referred to. On the 21st of January, 1823, Captain brought into Sydney the brig Ebzav i { m .. e SCalin g grounds off New /erdand ’ with 1,600 sealskins. In the Sidney Gazette of Thursday. Janua.-y appears the following: Mr Grono, master of the Elizabeth, colonial bng, appeared at the police oflije yesterday, together with seven men, five of whom were Europeans, one an American, and one a New Zealander. Mr Grono brought these persons from the VVost Coast of New Zealand, under the following circumstances; — Upon the Elizabeth making the coast, a boat came off, manned by seven men. They to’d the person in charge of the Elizabeth, the master then being absent, that the natives were very hostile to the crews of a esscls, and to the gangs in the vicinity • that a party of them had lately tilled four of their gang; and therefore advised them to be cautious. They further said that their boat, with themselves, belonged to the American ship General Crates', Captain Riggs, which was cruising off the islands, leaving the chief offitor, Burnham, with them. The latter individual is the American alluded to. When Mr Grono came to a knowledge of this occurrence, he proceeded on shore with a boat’s crew, and took the men prisoners, under the idea, as ho wished to impress the magistrates, that they were runaway convicts, and had now timed in rates in our seas. One of the men avowed himself to be an escaped prisoner of the Crown, but the others asserted (heir freedom, which no one was proparod to deny. They said there was not the sma lest doubt but that Captain Kigg would come after them to Port Jackson, as soon as information reached him of the event, which has before now occurred from the gang that Mr Grono stationed on the spot he took his party from. The free men were, directed to be remanded till ample satisfaction could be procured as to their actual freedom, and the prisoner was ordered into custody, to be dealt with in the usual way. With regard to the conduct of Captain Grono on the novel occasion, the magistrates, in this stage of the proceedings, could not withhold expressing their entire disapprobation at the perpetration of such an act. , , . Grono is our old friend who, in the Governor Bligh, in Thompson Sound, relieved the suivivors of the Active, ten years before, and who earlier still was in Foycaux Strait us soon os anyone. He got into trouble over this matter, and appearances suggest that he well deserved it. The fact that he left a gang where he took the others from suggests that they were taken away because thev had selected a good sealing spot which Grono wished to obtain possession of. Not long after this Grono gave up the sea, and. making his home for a family was growing up around him—upon the Hawke?bury River, went in for boatbuilding, turning out tins best craft ot that date at his yards. One cannot but be struck m reading the scattered fragment* of the narative of these early davs what a fine hardy class of men the skippers of these colonial craft were. Wherever vou turn you find men able at a moment’s notice to complete craft that* would brave the stormy Tasman Sea. On March 51, a schooner called the Samuel, commanded by Captain Dawson, arrived from the southern coast of New Zealand with some news of General Gates. The ‘Gazette, of April 8, says: Mr Dawson, comander of the Samuel, has brought with him this voyage a black native woman with a child two years old. She had been taken by the American ship General Gates from Kangaroo Island and left on the South Gape of New Zealand, with a gang of sealers. After these men had b3cn there some short t.nic, a. horde of savages came upon them, and nearly massacred ail (he party 'Hie poor native, with her little one, t<Ak shelter under a rock, till the New Zealanders .eft the RjKit. For eight months the mother and child lived, without lire, on buds and seals. They are vet on Imard the Samuel, and were in good health when rescued by Mr Dawson from danger.

In connection with the massacre, wc are in the fortunate position of beintr in possession of the Maori version of the onslaught, as well as the black woman’s, rile Rev J. F. H. Wohlers, who resided m Ruapnfce. Stewart Island, from 1844 until his death in 1885, gives the account of the incident ns nurrated to liiixx l>y isome of those who were present: It must have been about 1820-1830 T knew a. few who were prtsent*—when the Maoris in the south first came into touch with Europeans. The captain rf a whaling vessel placed a few of her ]«ople in an uninhabited bay in Stewart Island to catoh fur seals, wlii’.sl he went whale-fishing with the rest of the crew. The natives, however, did not approve of this. Soon a number of men and wom*p went across from Ruapuki to Stewart Island, fed upon the sealer* and killed and cooked them. They then looked for their provisions. At that time they were qmte unacquainted with European things. They took the -flour for white ash, and amused themselves with throwing it at one another and watching the white dust fly. Then they found something that looked like provisions, and they chewed it till foam came out of their mouths (it was soap), but it was .not to their taste. Still worse did the tobacco taste, which they, therefore, called Heaven’s gall (Aurangi). A vessel held some black seed gunpowder), which they scattergd about as a useless tiring. Then when they had satisfied themselves with tire flesh- of the

dead men and in the evening sat around a bright lire—oh, what a fright—lightning and flames of fire suddenly broke out amongst them. The lire had lit the povrder they had thrown away. Some time afterwards some canoes with all their crews were lost, and no one knew for a long time what had become of them, until later some whale fishers came from Australia, who became friendly with the natives, and these brought lire news that an American whaling captain known to them, when he found that the men he had left on Stewart Island had been killed end eaten, whilst sailing about, meeting some canoes, had sailed them down. do we loam that Captain Abimaleck Riggs took terrible revenge upon the natives for the murder of his men. Air Wohlers speaks of the natives having just tome in contact with the Europeans. Early and all as this date was, we have seen that ten years before Europeans traded with the natives in this same locality. (To be continued.)