BEFORE THE EXILE

Te Ao Hou, December 1957, Page 18

BEFORE THE EXILE I have notes of conversations held during the past thirty years with quite a number of old timers around the Poverty Bay district. Notable among them were members of the Burke and Dunlop families who occupied land on the Te Arai creek which belonged to Te Kooti or to his immediate family. These notes are supported by a manuscript, dictated in her later years, by Mrs. Captain Ross, of Opotiki.1Mrs Ross was formerly Sarah Dunlop, the eldest of the Dunlop girls whose father, James Dunlop, came to the Bay in 1849. Sarah Dunlop later married Lieutenant Ross who was the first soldier to be wounded in the Waerenga-a-hika flight. The Dunlops claimed some personal acquaintance with Te Kooti; apparently he occasionally worked for them, and he called around once or twice a year, according to Mrs. Ross's manuscript, to collect a calf or a pig as rent for the land, it being held in a sort of loose usehold. Mrs Sharpe, of Gisborne, told me that her grandmother, Mrs. Thomas U'Ren, who settled on the Arai River in 1841, would never, till the day of her death hear a word against Te Kooti.2Mrs Sharpe is the eldest daughter of Captain Thomas U'Ren, and the grand-daughter of the Mr. and Mrs. Thomas U'Ren referred to here. Mrs. U'Ren insisted that Te Kooti was a good worker, a fine ploughman with a good way with beasts (most unusual in a Maori at that time) and especially nice with the U'Ren children. The eldest of these children, Mrs. Sharpe's father, grew up to be one of those who took the field against Te Kooti, but his daughter says he never held any animosity against the old Maori warrior and always held that he was the victim of injustice and misrepresentation. There is reason to believe then, that Te Kooti grew up with some kind of pakeha education, and that, like most of his fellow tribesmen of Rongo Whakaata, maintained friendly relations with the pakeha settlers. Mrs. Ross, in her manuscript, says he had a good deal to say for himself, but was never cheeky, and Edward Burke, whose sister married Charles Dunlop, the eldest of Sarah's brothers, said Te Kooti was always asking questions and endeavouring to acquire pakeha skills. James Cowan, who has a way of unearthing information overlooked by other historians, tells us Believed to be an authentic portrait of Te Kooti Rikirangi te Turuki, this was given to the Gisborne Museum recently by Mrs Shaw of Haldane Street, Gisborne. It was in the possession of her father as early as 1873 and possibly earlier. The picture was presumably taken between the Poverty Bay Massacre in 1868 and 1873. It may even date from before the massacre. Te Kooti was believed to have been born about 1830 and would have been 43 in 1873. This photograph, until now unpublished, tallies with most descriptions of the great rebel leader. All writers who described him mentioned his peculiarly fierce eyes and the absence of tattoo.

that Te Kooti had some reputation as a sailor. He says that Te Kooti acted as supercargo on a Maori trading schooner for some voyages and later commanded another. This is supported to some extent by McKay who adds a note that he could trace no shipping list showing Te Kooti as a master mariner. This is not surprising. There must have been many Maori skippers of coastal craft who never bothered with the formality of registration. Ted Burke, whose family I have mentioned preiously maintained that Te Kooti, as a skipper, was a good business man, capable of acting in the interests of the Maori and of explaining to them the benefits they would obtain by trading directly with the Auckland merchants and not dealing with the local trader, Captain Reade. If these things are true, and there is no reason to doubt that they are, it is easy to believe that during this period Te Kooti established himself in a relation of some leadership among his people. The Dunlops, Burkes and U'Rens all stoutly insisted that it was this very championing of his fellow Maori which led to Te Kooti's downfall. Both Mrs. Ross and Mrs. U'Ren senior openly declared that it was Captain Reade's rum shops, “spread,” as Mrs U'Ren put it, “like spiders webs to catch flies,” which gave Te Kooti that taste for drink which was to take so strong a hold of him. Fergus Dunlop, a grandson of James, told me his grandfather always held that Reade encouraged Te Kooti to drink for the purpose of discrediting him. From what I have read and heard of the character of Captain George Edward Reade he was not a man lightly to take what he would undoubtedly regard as the officious meddling of a smart-aleck native, far too big for his boots. Mrs Ross states in her narrative that Reade opened a chain of rum shops, managed by pakehas, and aimed especially at the Maori trade. Frederick Williams, in “Through Ninety Years” states that the effect of this on the Maoris was so frightening to the settlers that a meeting of traders was held with the object of putting a stop to the selling of liquor to Maoris. The traders who attended the meeting, under the chairmanship of Captain Harris, agreed to refrain from serving the Maoris with liquor under penalty of a payment of fifty pounds, but, as Williams remarks, “it had little effect in checking this illegal practice and did not end it.” There is one point on which all evidence, published and unpublished, agrees. Having taken to drink, Te Kooti became a drunkard. Even Mrs Ross, one of his chief defenders, records that he Matawhero Presbyterian Church was one of the few buildings spared by Te Kooti and his followers during the Poverty Bay massacre in 1868. Built about 1860 it was originally a store for Captain G. E. Reade, the ‘uncrowned king’ of Poverty Bay whose enmity Te Kooti aroused. At the time of the massacre it was in use as an Anglican Church. Bought by the Presbyterian Church in 1872, it is still a parish church today. (Photo: Helen Todd) “became very troublesome and demanded rum, or the grape wine made by the settlers. When other means of obtaining it failed, he stole it.” It is said that Te Kooti was not popular with his fellow Maoris. This appears upon investigation to be a mis-statement of the case. He appears to have been a high spirited man, and on occasion a high handed one, with a liking for other men's women and a boldness in pursuing his liking. His adoption of pakeha ways would not endear him to the conservative elders, and his claims to leadership would tend to be resented by chiefs, for Te Kooti himself, though his whakapapa shows him to be affiliated with the leading lines of descent on the coast, was not himself of rangitira rank. Consequently there are many accounts of Te Kooti's brushes with other Maoris but these were matters they settled among themselves and by their own methods, both then and thereafter.