CAPTAIN JOHN NIVEN: A NEW ZEALAND ADVENTURE

Te Ao Hou, July 1973, Page 53

CAPTAIN JOHN NIVEN: A NEW ZEALAND ADVENTURE by Bernard Fergusson Collins, $1.25 reviewed by Sheila Natusch When the barque England's Glory, failing to pay off, struck the rocks at Lookout Point near Bluff in 1881, she had a pilot aboard; Bluff (then called Campbelltown) had been a borough with a mayor since 1878, and a port of entry for Invercargill since the '50s. Wohlers, the Ruapuke missionary, was near the end of his ministry; his community, mainly half-caste by then, had moved to the more sheltered fishing havens of Stewart Island, leaving a few hard-up nobles in ‘a state of proud poverty’. Southland was now sheep country—and unfortunately rabbit country. Government schools, churches, the post office, the Bluff train were all under way. ‘Our Maoris,’ wrote Wohlers, who had been painfully teaching them English for their own good, ‘could now step into the ranks of civilised people.’ But there were few Maoris proper left; the half-castes were the hale and hearty ones … ‘When they grew up they married; sometimes among their own people, sometimes Maoris, sometimes Europeans. They were far more fruitful than the Maoris proper’ … Surrounded by the even more prolific European settlers, and ‘changed into civilised Christians, who in no respect are inferior to ordinary Christians in old Christendom’, they considerably surpased ‘the converted natives of the North Island’, at least in the view of their pastor. Such was the society into which the real Captain Bollons, then a lad on board the England's Glory, was tossed by the sea. He elected to stay on with Foveaux Strait Maoris with whom he had made friends; then, five years later, he signed on as a seaman aboard the Government Steamer Stella. In 1892, when Bernard Fergusson's grandfather was Governor, Bollons was second mate on board the smart new Government vessel Hinemoa. Then, in the twenties, Captain Bollons commanded the Tutanekai, and young Bernard Fergusson, whose father was now Governor-General, spent an impressionable month on board, ‘storing up memories to last him all his days’. When I was three, the Tutanekai lay at anchor off Leasks Bay, and the deck of the Hinemoa, retired in Little Glory, was a wonderful playground for visiting children for many years. The names of Barney Buller and Captain Bollons had the same ring to me as Robinson Crusoe's. Lord Ballantrae's Captain John Niven may well join the ranks of real and fictional seagoing heroes. He is based on Captain Bollons. ‘I have also,’ writes the author, ‘taken many liberties with time and place’. Yes indeed. But it doesn't matter, because he tells a rattling good story, and much genuine feeling for the real man comes through. If, as some well-meaning people will keep saying, Maori-Pakeha integration is a joke and a bad joke at that, it is not the fault of the southern Maori, nor of people like Robert Murray, sealer, Captains Kent and Edwardson J. F. H. Wohlers, Captain Bollons, and the Fergusson family whose warm interest in the Maori people spans several generations and pervades this book. That there is an affinity between the Maori and the Gael is shown in the sympathetic and moving account of “Captain John Niven” 's going out on the ebb after the irirangi warning, and the episode of the house built on tapu land. But the main thing about any book, however grave or gay its message, is readability. Who could resist a book beginning ‘It was blowing great guns from the North-west’, and going on ‘A ship! A ship! Driving in on our beach!’? Nor does the action let up: adventure follows adventure, some fact, some fiction, some a bit of both. I would like to have seen the southerners using Southern Maori and eating non-sweet potatoes, but that won't worry young Geordie and his friends in Ballantrae. Nor will respectable Stewart Islanders be too fussy about having their forebears mixed up with claim-jumping at Pegasus, or rum-running on the Mainland.

Pinching land is a very ancient New Zealand tradition, from moa hunting times on. Pinching people's sense of humour, so that they take themselves over-solemnly, is the greater crime. Long live Maori humour, and the twinkle in Lord Ballantrae's monocle!