‘From the Black Rocks on Friday’: more than a bibliographical footnote

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XVI, Issue 1, 1 May 1983, Page 45

‘From the Black Rocks on Friday’: more than a bibliographical footnote

R. M. ROSS & A. G. BAGNALL

Shortly before her death Ruth Ross asked A. G. Bagnall to write up background material she had accumulated on the authorship of ‘From the Black Rocks on Friday’. Dr Bagnall has written the introduction and section II; section I is from Ruth Ross’s draft. Ed.

The late A. H. Reed, in 1950, republished under the auspices of the Dunedin Public Library Association two stories which had appeared in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round in May 1862 and April 1864. In his introduction to the first sketch, ‘From the Black Rocks on Friday’, Mr Reed discussed the two obvious problems which the work presents, the identity of the author, and of the island which is the setting for its principal event. The story describes how an English clergyman, as the narrator refers to himself, leaves the Bay of Islands in a small boat on a lone fishing expedition. By the evening of the following day wind and current have brought him to one of a group of islands of whose existence he knew from local Maoris. He is obliged to remain and after some months of Crusoe-like existence is eventually rescued by a Maori chief whom he knows.

Despite enquiries to a number of libraries with Dickens collections such as the Huntington, Mr Reed was unable to resolve the problem of authorship. Somewhat boldly he did enlarge on a theory of his own that the island to which the clerical fisherman had drifted was Raoul or Sunday Island in the Kermadecs. Such a hypothesis, if correct, would imply a journey that would have taxed the best navigational skills of an early Polynesian and required considerable luck; it also ignored the time constraints of the story itself which should have been apparent.

Reed’s reprint was included in the retrospective National Bibliography as FB3B, but beyond my display of scepticism concerning its author (in choosing to enter it under its title) I had nothing to add. Regrettably my probable over-reaction to Reed’s treatment led me to ignore customary bibliographic curiosity and hence fail to consult the one person who could have given an immediate lead by the time the volume concerned was going to press. In fact it was ten years later, on 5 December 1979, that,

during a brief visit, Mrs Ross identified the author as the Rev. Robert Carter. At the time a serious preoccupation prompted no more than a hasty pencil note in a ‘home’ set of the Bibliography. In late April 1982 Mrs Ross wrote at length on the matter, regretting that she had not gone over the facts with me at some earlier time. Over the years she had accumulated ‘ample material to write a very satisfactory little article but I’m afraid I’ll never write it . . .’ She asked that I write up the story as I thought best and later sent with background material the two drafts that failing strength prevented her from taking any further. The source material as Mrs Ross discovered it is in two categories; firstly, data relating specifically to Carter’s authorship and experiences which prompted the story; secondly, references to his background, character and life in New Zealand and elsewhere. The most fitting way to present it seemed to be to publish the first typed draft with an appropriate introduction and the minimal alteration necessary to keep the flavour of her successive discoveries and to give the background information as an integral but sequential narrative. Reed, for example, begins his story by describing how he bought a bundle of seventeen issues of All the Year Round at a Bethune’s auction in mid-1949 for the sum of seventeen shillings—hence the point of Mrs Ross’s note 11 on her own belated discovery of Reed’s effort in 1975 when she bought the little book from a Smith’s Bookshop catalogue for five dollars. To give coherence to the two sections of the narrative and to provide a summary frame of reference it should be mentioned that Carter arrived in Auckland on the Duke of Portland in July 1855 with Selwyn who was returning from a visit to England. Carter, in December, was appointed to the joint parishes of Otahuhu and Panmure acting as resident clergyman until the end ofjune 1858. He then went to the Bay of Islands where he appears to have remained for some two years under the circumstances dealt with in Mrs Ross’s draft before leaving for the United States in July 1861. He enjoyed ill health and suffered from an addiction to alcohol but his living with Maoris at Rawhiti and the boating expedition to the Poor Knights Islands and back would point both to a measure of competence and to reserves of strength.

I When the authorship of a work, published anonymously, has been the subject of such intense and, indeed, romantic speculation as A. H. Reed applied to ‘From the Black Rocks, on Friday’, 1 one could perhaps seem to have been a little sneaky in not making known sooner the identity of the writer. But what I know about the

authorship, and about the author, of this story first published in All the Year Round in 1862 comprises scraps of information picked up accidentally over the years, the sort of miscellaneous titbits which anyone who digs around in manuscript collections, old newspapers and the like inevitably acquires but which, because of their irrelevance to whatever one was searching for at the time, one tends to forget about until the chance discovery of a related bit of information stirs the memory.

The identity of the author of‘From the Black Rocks, on Friday’ is not in itself a matter of great literary moment —though I think it is worth putting the record straight that the story was not written by Charles Dickens—but the manner in which the various bits of the jigsaw have come to light is perhaps worth the telling as an answering piece to A. H. Reed’s speculations of over thirty years ago. I first went through the Clendon Papers 2 in the Auckland Public Library in 1944 but I doubt whether I actually read the William Clarke toj. R. Clendon letters therein 3 until the early to mid-19605. It is certainly to this latter period that my memory of reference to the Rev. R. Carter relates. I knew of Clarke, the writer of the letters, as a surveyor in the Bay of Islands and Hokianga in the late 1850 s. 4 He left New Zealand in 1860 and from Glasgow wrote gossipy letters about New Zealand affairs to his old friend J. R. Clendon who, when Clarke knew him, had been magistrate at Russell but was later moved first to Kerikeri and then to Rawene.

Clarke’s first mention of Carter was in his letter of 19 January 1862: ‘I have written twice to Ml Carters address but have got no answer —one of the letters was returned as the “party was not known” the other was kept. What a fellow he must be!’ But on 24 July 1862 Clarke wrote:

I must tell you a strange story now. Some short time ago I called for a friend in Glasgow. He asked me to pronounce a Maori word which he had seen in one of Dicken’s publication(s) called “All the year round” I looked at it and immediately saw the names “Mongonui” and “Rewarewa” & “ Wangamumu” &c. 11 struck me that the stile was like that of our old friend Carter but I couldn’t make out from it who wrote it so I addressed a letter to Charles Dickens to ask him if the paper in question was writen by the Rev d . R.D. Carter. He at once told me it was and gave me Carter’s address I wrote to him at once & heard from him in reply. Well on my return from London last week I went to pay him a visit at Heydour Vicarage, near Sledford, Lincolnshire. He was glad to see me, and I was I must say very glad to see his old face again. We had a very cosy chat of things now gone by and we learned each other’s views as to future movements —Would you believe it —he is actually going back to New Zealand and to the Bay of Islands. He only arrived in this Country in January last, having spent nearly a year in America. His adventures there are to be published. His story of his adventures at the Bay of Islands was very popular in this country. I will try to get a copy of it & send it to you. But it was very much coloured to make it “take”. For one thing he

said he was at one time forced to live on nothing but “Kiwi”, and this too on a very small Island I don’t know how many miles out to sea.—He is looking much healthier than he did at the Bay of Islands. At this time, I remember thinking it would probably be worthwhile to track down this story with a Bay of Islands background, assuming that a file of All the Year Round would be available somewhere in New Zealand. Then in 1967, looking for background material on Russell when researching the history of Pompallier House, I ran into Mr Carter again. Amongst a number of letters to Bishop Selwyn on Anglican affairs in Russell there was one on ‘rather a painful topic’ from R. C. Barstow who succeeded Clendon as magistrate at Russell. The Bishop was doubtless aware, Barstow wrote, that

the Rev 1 ! R. C. Carter formerly of Otahuhu has been residing among the Natives at the Rawiti for some eight or nine months: yesterday a party from that place informed that his acts for some time back had not been those of a person having the right use of his senses: that he was in the habit of going out alone in his boat to fish, and staying away for days at a time in bad weather, that on two occasions the boat had drifted on shore with M. r Carter in a state of exhaustion from want of food, when had the wind blown offshore, he must have perished, and I am aware that he has subsisted principally if not entirely upon the charity of the natives.

Barstow was convinced his lordship would agree that ‘whilst it would be sufficiently lamentable to see any person of respectable parentage and education similarly situated’, it was ‘doubly painful’ in the case of an ordained minister of the Church of England, ‘for the degradation of one must necessarily react to the disparagement of all’. He knew little of Carter personally, having met him only twice, ‘but from having heard him speak in familiar terms of people of respectability and high standing in different parts of Yorkshire’, supposed his friends ‘were in good circumstances’. He attributed Mr Carter’s conduct ‘in great measure to despair and remorse’, and had prevailed upon Mr James S. Clendon 5 ‘to receive him as a guest at Manawaora, an establishment I know to be conducted upon the most strict Temperance principles’. 6 The same collection contained a letter from Carter himself to the Bishop, written a year later and couched in the most humble tones. He had been acquainted with the Bishop’s decision ‘with regard to my application’.

I should not have troubled your Lordship from any desire of my own. the people here asked me to officiate and I reluctantly consented (subject to your Lordship’s approval) as the only means to quiet the unhappy dissensions of this place. Your Lordship thinks it better not. God’s will be done for I feel you are but an instrument in His Hands and I take it from Him as a sign that my discipline is not yet perfected, my chastening not yet over.

He had intended ‘offering myself once more for the Islands as I have learnt by bitter experience how to labour with mine own hands for my livelihood and I then hoped by my future conduct in some slight measure to try to blot out the past’. He now felt, however, that such an offer would be ‘useless and not accepted’. 7 Mr Carter’s acceptance of the Bishop’s edict was followed three weeks later by a petition to Selwyn from various inhabitants of Kororareka respectfully requesting ‘that the Rev d . Robert Carter be permitted to perform divine service in the Church of this parish during the absence of any other Minister’. 8 If any answer was received from Selwyn it was presumably in the negative, and in July 1861 Carter sailed for America in the whale ship Canton Packet. 9 When sorting out papers in the Clendon House at Rawene during Christmas 1972 I was delighted to find another letter from William Clarke to J. R. Clendon, written injanuary 1866, relating what was probably the final chapter in the life of the Rev. Robert Carter:

I had a long letter the other day from our old quondam friend Carter. It appears that after spending two years in England in the capacity of Curate—he went to New York when he took ill and when he wrote to me he was on his death bed—poor fellow —in an Hospital. He does not say what his ailment was but I think it must have been connected with the brain—to judge from the extraordinary style of the letter he sent me. 10

In all this time I had never carried out my intention of locating a file of All the Year Round in the hope of identifying Carter’s story therein, and had no idea what the title was. But in February 1975, when reading through the latest catalogue from Smith’s Bookshop, the entry no. 210 hit me in the eye: Dickens (C.) —Ed. From the Black Rocks, on Friday and A gold Digger’s Notes. Foreword by Professor W. P. Morrell, Introduction by A. H. Reed. 63pp Bvo boards. A very good copy in d/w. Reed 1959. $3.00 1:l

From the mention of the Black Rocks, it seemed obvious that this must be Carter’s story. And so it proved, as I found when the book arrived. I must confess that when I read the story my reaction was: the poor old fellow! I was not thinking of the Rev. Robert Carter but of Sir Alfred Reed. This sentiment seemed even more apposite not long afterwards when, searching the files of early 1860 s Auckland newspapers—l have forgotten what I was looking for —I came upon ‘From the Black Rocks, on Friday’, reprinted from All the Year Round in the Daily Southern Cross of 20 September 1862. A week later, the Russell paragraph ‘From our own correspondent’ read:

Since my last letter our neighbourhood has been, as usual, quiet and there is not much of interest to communicate. The people here have been both amused and astonished by the article reprinted from All the Year Round in your issue of 20th instant. The tale has grown wonderfully. The real facts of the case are something like this:—The person who is most likely to be the writer of the article, describes himself truly as a clergyman of the Church of England, and did live among the Maoris for a time; but his greatest adventure was his being blown off the land to the “Poor Knights”, where he remained two or three days, and returned with a favourable wind; but I don’t think he found any kiwi’s eggs. 12

II And so, as Mrs Ross has said, the last piece of the jigsaw was found and now in place. Before looking at one or two points on which further comment may be available the gap in the record between Carter’s arrival and his move north can be pencilled in. The Otahuhu Church Committee Minute Book which Mrs Ross found in the Auckland Diocesan Office when working on the Church’s property records provides an outline. Carter was appointed Resident Clergyman to Otahuhu and Panmure in Decenjber 1855, his terms of appointment being a guarantee by the Church Trustees to pay £IOO towards his salary during the first year and to provide a house; the ‘remainder’ of his stipend was to be made up by Panmure. A review in June 1857, eighteen months later, reported the ‘almost total cessation of subscriptions’ by the inhabitants for the purpose. Carter vacated the chair at this annual meeting of his congregation to allow discussion of the proposal that his appointment be renewed at the end of the year which prompted ‘a very unpleasant and storm[y] discussion

. . Charges against him were made, in part retracted and then rejected as ‘too frivolous to be entertained’ and a resolution in favour of reappointment was sent on. Nevertheless, in December, lack of funds compelled a reassessment and the meeting in February 1858, the last which Carter attended, noted that the sum of £30.3.0 was owing to him. 13 He was followed by the Rev. G. H. Johnstone whose incumbency, for quite different reasons, does not seem to have been any more satisfactory. On this point a related discovery by Mrs Ross, when searching for information about the building of the Melanesian College at Kohimarama, was a little clutch of thirteen letters from Patteson to Selwyn during the summer of 1858-9. In one dated 10 February 1859 Patteson informed the Bishop:

I fancy that Mr Johnson [sic] does not give satisfaction at Otahuhu, from a long talk I had with John Gordon. This began about Mr Carter, & I pressed him to speak quite plainly to you on your return, and not to let the Otahuhu people put you into

such an unfair position as before, telling you one day that they were perfectly satisfied & a few months afterwards bringing charges against their own nominee. 14

The next discovery by Mrs Ross, when working through the Panmure property records, was that Carter had come out on the same vessel as did Selwyn, a point to which we return shortly. The only Carter information she actually looked for was the Church Register in the Auckland diocesan office and that ‘delightful entry in Lush’s journal to which I picked up the reference in the AP [Auckland Public Library] New Zealand index’. This incident in a lengthy entry for 17 January 1856 describes how Lush when visiting Ashwell was obliged to eat two substantial mid-day dinners, the second, to which he could do scant justice, meticulously cooked by Carter (who had no servant) —‘Mr Carter seemed disappointed that his stewed fowl, fried pork & cherry tart were not done morejustice to’. 15 Mrs Ross thought it ‘very revealing’ that Carter was such an accomplished cook. The Panmure papers contained a letter written in June 1858 to the Bishop of Newcastle, William Tyrrell, by G. A. Kissling as Bishop’s Commissary in Selwyn’s absence. Carter had apparently applied for a position in this Australian diocese and Kissling was clearly embarrassed in drafting his comments:

The Rev. R. Carter came out to New Zealand in 1855 in the same ship in which our Bishop returned. He remained for a short time at St John’s College and was subsequently placed in charge of two small settlements of Pensioners, which gave him no more employment than what was thought suitable to his health and strength; but recently symptoms of pulmonary disease have in a great measure unfitted him even for his moderate duties and his clerical brethren have been obliged to assist him; he has therefore resigned his charge and is preparing to leave this Diocese. 16

Then followed the Bay of Islands interlude as already related. There were two further points which Mrs Ross would have liked to resolve, one of these being any possible early association between Carter, Selwyn and Tyrrell—an ‘old-boy network’. Apart from the coincidental passage of Selwyn and Carter to Auckland in 1855 on the Duke of Portland why did Carter approach Tyrrell? It was quickly established that the two bishops had been contemporaries at St John’s College but Carter at the moment has eluded us as he does not appear in Crockford or any available Cambridge university lists. Whatever the degree of prior acquaintance with Selwyn it seems unlikely that the stresses of a long voyage would not have shown up one or another of Carter’s weaknesses, accepting that as a lover of the seas he could have responded positively. The writer shares Mrs Ross’s feeling that there must have been some connection. With

luck a clue may surface in the still considerable amount of Selwyn correspondence unavailable to students. A further question which she was anxious to follow up was one of navigation —whether the Poor Knights would ever be visible from an open boat outside the Bay of Islands, a distance of some thirty miles. She noted that Carter had transposed the Black Rocks from the eastern end of Moturoa Island to the seaward side of Cape Brett and hence was ‘quite happy to play silly beggars with geography to make a good story’. It is relevant that the summit point, Puketuaho, of Tawhiti Rahi, the northern of the two main islands is 645 feet (197 m.) above sea level. Under favourable conditions the upper 140 feet should therefore be visible although Mrs Ross recalled that from Oakura Beach (Punaruku), a few miles closer, visibility depended on whether it had been raining or was about to do so. However, in view of wind and current the most remarkable aspect of Carter’s little voyage was that he returned, presumably unaided.

As suggested, it is possible that further detail on other aspects of Mrs Ross’s fascinating discovery may surface in overseas as well as local material. Again, Dickensians and the several Dickens libraries supposedly checked by A. H. Reed may now be able to unearth more from the knowledge of Carter’s authorship and correspondence with Dickens. Enquiries are being made from the Huntington Library.

REFERENCES 1 From the Black Rocks, on Friday, and A Gold Digger’s Notes, edited (or written?) by Charles Dickens. Foreword by Professor W. P. Morrell; introduction by A. H. Reed. Dunedin, 1950. 2 NZMS 478, AP. In 1936 these papers were borrowed from Mr T. Clendon Millar of Rawene by Professor J. Rutherford on behalf of the Auckland Centennial Historical Committee. After the latter body had gone into recess the Clendon papers had been sent by the Town Clerk to the Auckland Public Library for safe keeping and were later formally deposited in the Library by Mr Millar. See also note 10 below. 3 Five letters in Packet 4, dating from June 1861 to July 1872. 4 His survey plans of old land claims in this region are in the Lands and Survey Department, Auckland. 5 J. R. Clendon’s son. 6 R. C. Barstow to Bp Selwyn, 13 Sep. 1859, MS 60/31 AR. 7 R. Carter to Bp Selwyn, 16 Oct. 1860, ibid. 8 Dated 5 Nov. 1860, with 24 signatures appended, ibid. Neither Barstow nor J. R. Clendon, who was still living at Russell at that time, were among the signatories. 9 R. C. Barstow to Bp Selwyn, 24 Jul. 1861, ibid. 10 William Clarke to J. R. Clendon, 24Jan. 1866, Clendon House papers 5/7 AP. When the New Zealand Historic Places Trust purchased the Clendon House

and its contents from Mrs Marjorie Millar a large collection of family papers was found in the House, the other half, as it were, of those lent to Professor Rutherford in 1936. The Clendon House papers have been deposited by the Trust in the Auckland Public Library. 11 The date T959’ is a mistyping for 1950. And the price may also have been a mistake, for I note that the book itself has the price ‘5.00’ in it. I am amused now, on looking back through earlier Smith’s lists, to note that I missed seeing a copy advertised in 1971 for only $1.25. 12 Daily Southern Cross, 27 Sep. 1862, p. 3. 13 Minutes of meetings, Holy Trinity Church, Otahuhu, Church Committee, 1856-60, Auckland Diocesan Records, ACo. 14 J. C. Patteson to Bp Selwyn, 10 Feb. 1859, in St John’s College Library, Auckland. 15 V. Lush, Journal, 17 Jan. 1856, AR. 16 G. A. Kissling to Bp Tyrrell, 18 June 1858, MS 60/57 AR.