THE LETTERS OF TOOI AND TEETERREE

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 2, Issue 2, 1 October 1969, Page 62

THE LETTERS OF TOOI AND TEETERREE

F.H.'

Ormond Wilson

1818-19

The Bay of Islands during the years of early European settlement is a stage lit with surprising brilliancy by the voluminous missionary records and by the books of explorers and travellers, but a stage on which the spotlight plays with somewhat haphazard and erratic intensity on leading and minor characters. One of those on whom it shone most frequently was a young chief of Paroa Bay who signed himself‘Thomas Tooi’. In relation to his importance among the Maori community of his day he received more than his share of the spotlight and this, as in other cases, exposed more enigmas than it clarified. Those of whom we have but brief glimpses emerge more often as simple and straightforward characters; those whom we see more often and more clearly become more complex and difficult to understand. Thomas Tooi, the most conspicuous of lesser chiefs, remains the most enigmatic of all. Even the correct rendering of his name is still open to debate. The ‘Thomas’ seems to have been adopted, or given to him, only during his visit to England in 1818, and to have been used only there. But, oddly enough, his fellow voyager, young Titeri, acquired no English cognomen, but was invariably referred to (and signed himself) solely by his Maori name, rendered in the orthography of the time as ‘Teeterree’. Thomas’s proper name was rendered by different writers in forms as various as Tui, Toi and Touai as well as the more usual Tooi. 1 Among more recent writers Percy Smith used the form Tui, while in editing works in which his name appeared J. R. Elder, A. G. Bagnall and L. M. Rogers have preferred Tuhi. 2 Judith Binney, in her biography of Thomas Kendall, has reverted to Tui. She does so on the grounds that J. L. Nicholas identified the name of the passenger on the Active with the bird common in New Zealand. 3 William Williams, who admittedly did not know the man (he had died before Williams arrived in New Zealand) but often heard him spoken of, rendered his name as Tuai. 4 Because this appears to be more consonant with the general usage of the -i ending for Maori words as used by Marsden and his contemporaries, and because William Williams would seem to be a sounder authority than Nicholas, the somewhat ungainly Tuai is probably to be preferred to the mellifluous Tui.

The resolution of a satisfactory spelling of his name is merely or pedantic or bibliographical interest. The variations are however typical of the contradictory reports about the man himself They are offered us when he first appears upon the scene, at Parramatta in 1814. Marsden and Kendall then both refer to his fine qualities and intelligence, but

while Marsden reported that he had learnt to repeat the Lord's Prayer Kendall referred to his friendship with the convict Richard Stockwell and to his use of bad language. 5 The contradictions reappear in the accounts of Tuai when after much travelling abroad he settled again among his tribe. In 1820 Major R. A. Cruise of the Dromedary described him as 'without exception the greatest savage, and one of the most worthless and profligate men in the Bay of Islands'. 6 Dumont d'Urville, however, while sceptical of Tuai's motives, reported that during the visit of the Coquille in 1824, the captain, officers and men 'had nothing but praise for him; and I have often admired the tact and shrewdness which enabled this native to realise with whom he had to deal and by what means he could commend himself to all'. 7

When Tuai boarded the Dromedary and Coquille in 'gentleman's attire' and cocked hat, Cruise wrote that he might have been a foreign officer and d'Urville took him for an Englishman. Tuai could be all things to all men. The most notable illustration of this adaptability (which was not peculiar to him) and this instinctive tendency to assimilate himself to his surroundings and to the society in which he found himself is now provided in a series of letters recently presented to the Alexander Turnbull Library by Dr G. C. Petersen. They were written by the Reverend George Mortimer of Madeley, Shropshire, with whom Tuai and Titeri stayed for some months in 1818, by Francis Hall and by the young men themselves, to the Reverend Josiah Pratt, secretary of the Church Missionary Society. In 1817, after Tuai and Titeri had spent a couple of years at his Parramatta school, Marsden sent them to London under the care of the C.M.S. 8

The account of their stay in England, from the spring of 1818 till the end of January 1819 when their homeward bound ship finally cleared the Downs, is recorded mainly in various letters in, or from the archives of the C.M.S. Those presented by Dr Petersen are dated February to October 1818 and refer to the months spent at Madeley. Microfilms of these letters, made when they were in the possession of the late Mr K. A. Webster, were acquired by the Library in 1961, together with additional letters from Francis Hall. Some further letters from Tuai and Titeri, written from London in October 1818 and from the Baring in January 1819, and some drawings of Maori motifs done by Tuai, were acquired by the C.M.S. in 1965, and microfilm copies were then sent to the Turnbull Library. 9 Unlike Moehanga who travelled to England with John Savage in 1805 and Hongi who went with Kendall in 1820, Tuai and Titeri do not seem to have been introduced into the upper ranks of English society, and no record of any public attention to them has so far been noted. They spent their time under the protection of the C.M.S. and its friends. Francis Hall, an earnest young man who had for several

years been pleading with the C.M.S. to allow him to go to New Zealand, was given the privilege of escorting them to Madeley. They made the journey about the end of May and Hall remained with them till they returned to London in October. (His wish to go to New Zealand was subsequently fulfilled when he sailed with the Reverend John Butler, James Kemp, Tuai and Titeri in January 1819.) Before their arrival in Shropshire the Reverend George Mortimer expressed delight at the prospect of entertaining the young New Zealanders in his home and forthwith set about making plans for the profitable employment of their stay with him. A study of the iron smelting process at the local works was high on his list - ‘Mr Kendall &Mr Nicholas both seem convinced that they have iron & if so it wd. if worked contribute very materially towds. their civilization.’ The young men proved to be properly impressed by both iron and china works, exclaiming “‘Dearee me dearee me- New Zealand man no believe’”. They also delighted in the exercise of their manual skills, showed proper respect for the Sabbath, performed private devotions and endeavoured to instruct Hall in their own language. They reported however that there were at least seven or eight different dialects spoken in New Zealand, most of which they could not understand. Titeri won special praise for his rejection of the advances of a beautiful and accomplished but immodest young lady who pursued him into his bedroom, and Tuai was admired for the tales of his own heroic exploits with which he regaled his hosts. Mortimer repeatedly sang their praises and Hall wrote enthusiastically of ‘the agreeable manner of these interesting young men, so far superior to what might be expected of them’. Nevertheless, despite their many virtues, Tuai and Titeri gave some cause for anxiety and disappointment. Titeri suffered repeatedly from a ‘complaint in his bowels’ which at one time was so serious as to cause fear for his life. A spiritual defect however proved more intractable than this physical one. Though they liked to go to church and say their prayers they were uninterested in spiritual instruction, and when religious topics were introduced they tended to change the conversation. Hall was not without hope that the Holy Spirit would in the end prevail, but when it came to intellectual effort he was forced to admit defeat. As Mortimer reported on 13 June, despite every effort and inducement - even the promise of a workshop for their own use as a reward for regular study - they could not be persuaded to interest themselves in learning ‘ay b, ab - & b, a, ba’, thereby acquiring the art of literacy. On 26 June Hall wrote: ‘They are contented and happy, and all goes well till they are brought to abc: They do not like their book, notwithstanding the good advice they have received from various persons in this respect; they come to it with reluctance, and soon weary, and leave it with

pleasure. There are times indeed when they really appear to have a desire to learn; at others, the enemy of Souls seems suddenly to get an advantage over them, they become fretful and obstinate, they scowl, and act in a manner which grieves me.’ In September, not long before returning to London, he reported that in church the young men liked to look over the hymnal when singing, though they could not read it. And yet, extraordinarily, on 26 June he had also written that Titeri had of his own accord written out the Lord’s prayer, and dated that same day we find two letters written in copperplate handwriting, signed respectively ‘Thomas Tooi’ and ‘Teeteree’, and then others written similarly in August. The June letters convey Tuai’s regret that he is unable to read and Titeri’s self-condemnatory remark: ‘I am very bad boy and cannot read the Book’, and again, in August, ‘Cannot yet understand to read the Book: some words very easy, some very hard; make my head ache’.

Until recently I had not located Micro MS 303, acquired by the Library in 1961, on which these letters appear. In 1965, being then interested in the career of these young men, I made some efforts to establish whether the later letters, received by the Turnbull on microfilm from the C.M.S., might be supposed to have been written by Tuai and Titeri themselves, or written for them, in language and handwriting which they might have been supposed to adopt. A Maori scholar pointed out that the style of expression and construction were those which a Maori with some knowledge of English might be expected to use. At the same time the impeccable spelling pointed to some considerable assistance, as in Titeri’s account of a visit to the Tower of London: ‘I see plenty guns, thousands. I see lion and tiger, and cockatoo; I talk to cockatoo he know me very well. I see Elephant quite astonished my countryman no believe if I tell him.’ So likewise the letter headings (’London Oct r 28, 1818’ and ‘Baring in the Downes Jan y 16 th 1819’) could hardly have been composed by Tuai and Titeri themselves. An English graphologist, to whom I submitted photocopies for comment, could make no suggestion as to the identity or character of the writers other than to remark that they were probably written by adult Maoris of the time and that one bearing the signature of Teeterree was in a different hand from that bearing the signature of Thomas Tooi. On the other hand, Tuai himself, in 1824, told the Frenchman R. P. Lesson that he could neither read nor write, and had no idea what the missionaries had passed off in his name. 10 To suppose however that these letters were merely a hoax perpetrated by officials of the C.M.S. seemed nonsensical in that they were exchanged merely within the small inner circle with whom alone Tuai and Titeri had dealings, and though one letter, sent across the world to Samuel Marsden, eventually found its way back again into the pages of The

Lady's Magazine 11 there is no hint anywhere that these epistolary efforts, or hoaxes, were used to impress the outside world. So the mystery remained unexplained. The fact that the solution had all along remained hidden in Micro MS 303 provides this student with a salutory lesson in the need to search for even the most hidden clues, and to scrutinise even the most indecipherable microfilm. In this case however negligence, not virtue, has been rewarded. Thanks to the miracle of modern techniques of reproduction I now have before me Xerox copies of the manuscripts presented by Dr Petersen which are more legible than the original and far less tiring to the eyes than the difficult microfilm version. With this assistance a faint note added to Tuai's letter to Pratt of 26 June 1818 becomes transparently clear. It is apparently written by someone in the C.M.S. office, and reads: Note by Mr Hall: 'The words of these Letters are their own. I was their amanuensis, & put them down on a slate, from which they copied them; but they

cannot read what they have written.'

Maori skill in mimicry and imitation was attested by many visitors; Hongi Hika's carving of a bust by himself won general admiration; but there could surely be no more remarkable illustration of patient workmanship than the achievement of these two young men in transcribing exactly, down to the last punctuation point, a script which they did not understand. If the explanation of how the letters came to be written is hardly more credible than the suspicion of a hoax it does nevertheless explain the distinctive difference in handwriting between the letters written at Madeley and those from London and the Baring; it confirms the graphologist's assertion that the letters by Tuai and Titeri, though copied from one man's careful script, were themselves written down by different hands it supports Tuai's statement that he could neither read nor write - even though he exaggerated (after his usual manner) when he professed ignorance of what the letters contained.

There is another, perhaps even more remarkable, aspect of the affair. By the middle of January 1819 when the last letter was written, Tuai had spent most of the preceding five years in Australia and England and Titeri all the previous three. They were both of above average intelligence. Perhaps, by the end of their stay in England, they could read a few more words than they had learnt after three or four months at Madeley (and after their longer periods under Marsden’s care). Probably the business of copying had become easier: the writing has certainly become more flowing, though whether this merely represented a more flowing style on the slate one does not know. But the

fact remains that they acquired no real literacy in the English language. A decade later, when the efforts of the missionaries to teach literacy in the Maori language began to produce spectacular results, young men like Tuai and Titeri were as quick and eager to learn as these two had been slow and unwilling. This in itself seems to justify the missionaries as against their critics who contended that their efforts should have been directed towards the teaching of English, not to literacy in the vernacular.

REFERENCES I For references see Ormond Wilson in Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 72, p. 268. 2 S. P. Smith History of the Maori Wars. J. R. Elder (ed). Letters & Journals of Samuel Marsden. A. G. Bagnall (ed). Cruise's Journal. L. M. Rogers (ed). Early Journals of Henry Williams. 3 Judith Binney The Legacy of Guilt 23 n (c.f. J. L. Nicholas Voyage to New Zealand I 241 n) 4 William Williams 'Journal' (Typescript in Auckland Museum Library and Alexander Turnbull Library) 13 April 1829. s Missionary Register 111 (1815) 103, 198. 'Journal of Thomas Kendall, 1814' (Typescript in Alexander Turnbull Library) 5 August 18 14. 6 A. G. Bagnall (ed). Cruise's Journal 108. 7 Dumont d'Urville Voyage de la Corvette Astrolabe 111 678 (Translation by Olive Wright). 8 Missionary Register VI (1818) 72-3. 9 Tuai Titeri: Correspondence from and concerning Tuai and Titeri 1818 (MS Papers 288). Mortimer, George: Correspondence 1818 (Micro MS 303) [same as above]. Hall, Francis: Letters 1813-1818 (Micro MS 314). Tuai & Titeri: Letters and drawings (Copy Micro 109). 10 R. P. Lesson Voyage autour du Monde II 313. 11 The Lady's Magazine Vol. 1 (March 1820) p. 143.