On my October travels to the South Island this year, on a clear,
sunny day I walked through the sand hills south of Riverton, west of Bluff, to
one of the most southern lookout points of the South Island.
It was a lovely warm day, blue skies with Persil white
clouds above. The ocean beneath the
sandhills was a deep azure blue with mild rippling waves. I stood on the mound for some time and looked
across the glorious blue water to the horizon and the unmistakable shape of
Stewart Island. An island many of my
fellow New Zealanders have never set foot on.
Not far from where I was standing there was a handsome, middle
aged couple who were also enjoying the warmth of the day and admiring the
awesome scene in front of us. The lady
turned to me and asked, “Have you ever been to Stewart Island?”
“Yes,” I replied, “twice.”
“We went once,” she said, “not a lot there though. Once was enough.”
Part of my soul sunk a little at the comment, ‘not a lot
there’. I held my tongue as from my
perspective it’s a glorious independent little island that has held onto its
semi-isolation feel yet has kept up with all the modernisation that anyone
needs when going there for a holiday.
I have not explored all of the island. I will, one day. I will return and with some good fortune may even
be able to share this special place with others.
My first visit was many years ago; Mr J and I planned to go visit merely to tick
it off our ‘to do’ list of places in New Zealand we have been. Stewart Island was one of only a few left on
the list.
It was not until we had driven from Auckland to Wellington
and spent a night’s rest with my little sister and her partner in their
Wellington home that I learnt there was more to our trip of going to the island
than to just ‘tick it off’ and say, “been there, done that.”
On learning of our plan to visit the island sister Tina casually
mentioned that I should take a trip to the island's museum as she had been told
there was information about the area our great-great grandfather and his wife
had lived.
Somewhere in my many decades of adulthood I had completely
forgotten there had been any family ties with Stewart Island.
The moment she mentioned it the recollection neurons in my
brain began to regurgitate the stories from my father about our family links to
that land. That sometime in the early
1800’s his great-grandfather and his family had lived, or more descriptively,
survived living on Stewart Island. My
father had told me of how his great-grandfather, William Cook, who in the early
1820’s was living in Korerareka (now known as Russell) in the Bay of Islands with his wife Tiraha and
their first born son, George, when he had been erroneously persuaded into
sailing from that glorious area of the Bay of Islands and move temporarily to
Stewart Island to begin building a 100 ton ship for future trading uses between New
Zealand and Australia.
At that stage William Cook was well settled in the Bay of Islands,
more by accident than by planning. In New Zealand in those early pre-settler
times of 1818-1819 he had visited the Bay of Islands on ships from Sydney which
were sailing to New Zealand to drop off sealers and whalers and to trade goods
with the Northland Maori tribes – the usual cargo returning to Sydney being products
of the whalers and sealers and timber for ship building and flax for the
manufacture of rope.
On one such journey William had become very ill in
Kororareka and the ship’s captain decided to not delay the ship’s return to
Sydney so left William in the Bay of Islands in the care of the local
missionaries. William recovered, decided
he would remain in the area and very soon had taken as his wife a whangai niece
of Tamati Waka Nene, her name being Tiraha Papa Harakeke. Tiraha being of Ngapuhi and Kapotai
descent. Tamati Waka Nene, being a noble
Maori chief in the area meant the union of the two individuals was one of
respectability to both the tangata whenua and the local missionaries and Europeans. Indeed, I have learnt this was the first
official interracial marriage between the Europeans and Maoris in New
Zealand. Married by Henry Williams in the Anglican church on the Paihia waterfront.
Within a short time the first born came along, to be
eventually followed by twelve others over the next two decades. As was common in those times, two did not
survive.
William, a Battle of Waterloo veteran, was an Englishman who
had departed Portsmouth, Great Britain in a ship bound for Australia, carrying
prisoners who became the original Europeons of that land.
Over the many decades, indeed it is now two centuries, there
have been many descendants of William and Tiraha’s who believed that William
was a direct descendant of James Cook, the unique explorer who had spent many
journeys to New Zealand, naming many sites and mapping out the country. It was in 1769 that James Cook first visited
and when one looks at the navigational maps he so adeptly drew it makes one
realise what a highly skilled and clever man he was.
Who would not want to be a descendant of such a renown
explorer?
I visited the Russell Museum archives five years ago,
accompanied by my older brother who had already spent some hours scouring
through the amazing amount of historical records of the original Cook
family. Even among these papers there
were notes relating to the family link to James Cook. However, being the cynic I am, unless we had
DNA from Cook, or written form of the gene tree, then I find it more fanciful
than accurate of there being a direct link.
James Cook sailed from Portsmouth when departing for his trips to the Pacific, but he grew up in
the northern areas of England. When he
was murdered in the Pacific he left behind a wife and two children who were
living somewhere in England at that time.
Whilst we know William Cook departed the UK via Portsmouth, we can find
no record of where William Cook’s childhood was spent or anything of his parentage.
Therefore, I shall claim no link to James Cook but proudly
put my hand up when asked about William and Tiraha.
Once William had recovered from his illness that found him
domicile in Korerareka he earned his living working as a carpenter working
mostly on the many ships that came into the Bay of Islands and required
repairs. Indeed, the ship from which he
sailed from Sydney on has his occupation listed as ‘shipwright’. Shipwright being their term for carpenter,
ships carpenter.
Many of the ships coming to New Zealand at that time were
carrying sealers and whalers to be left along various parts of New Zealand’s
coastlines to capture and kill seals and whales for the by products they proffered. Within a few years the sons of William turned to
whaling as their main occupation.
It was whaling that eventually put that particular Cook
family forever into the country’s history books. William and his sons had worked as carpenters in Korerareka but had also become skilled whalers. It was three of William and
Tiraha’s grandsons (George, William & Herbert) who, in 1893 established their
whaling operations on the Raukaumangamanga peninsular in the Whangamumu
Harbour. The beautiful Whangamumu Harbour can
easily be seen when walking the Cape Brett walk beginning north of
Russell.
This particular whaling station had quickly become renown
for being the only one in the world that caught whales with nets, as opposed to
spearing, and this station became Northland’s longest successful operational
station, with three generations of Cook descendants manning it until
approximately the late 1930’s.
Meanwhile, from William and Tiraha, and their ten children
and the next two centuries, the Cook family begat and grew considerably,
exponentially.
And here I am. A
proud Cook member.
I’ll now link back to Stewart Island. In 1826 William and Tiraha,
plus seven other ‘carpenters’ and their wives from Kororareka were talked into
sailing to Stewart Island by a ship’s Captain, William Stewart, to build a 100
ton boat for future whales and traders.
Captain Stewart had promised them he would take them there to settle,
leaving them with six months of supplies and would return to Sydney to stock up
on further supplies and return within six months. He agreed
to do this until the 100 ton boat was completed. The group would then be sailed back to the Bay of Islands.
William and Tiraha and their then only child, George, sailed
with their compatriots to Stewart Island to carry out their agreed contract. In April 1826 Stewart sailed them into the area which is now known as Cook's
Arm. Cook's Arm has for many years been mistakenly thought was named after Captain James Cook. Not so. It is is named after the William Cook family and clearly obvious as the whole harbour area is known as Shipbuilders Cove.
Captain Stewart who took them to the island bid farewell to them with the promise of returning with supplies, departed, never to return. Indeed, he ended up in a Sydney jail, on what
we would now call fraud charges.
There is a written account from 1825 from a John Boultbee
who had sailed a ship into the area these abandoned families were in but stated
‘unfortunately we were unable to assist them’.
Boultbee wrote in his 1825 journal, “We found a shipwright
named Cook and 8 men and 9 women from the Bay of Islands. They had been greatly distressed for food and
we were unfortunately unable to assist them.
Cook had engaged with the Captain Stewart at the Bay of Island to go to
Pegasus to build a vessel of 100 tons burthen.
The party commenced working and sawing planks and had got the ship’s
timbers all ready. No relief came and when
I came across them they were 12 months without seeing or hearing of
Stewart. The people had to look out, as
well as they could, for such as they could get to eat – cockles, muscles &
fern root. The men looked lean and
haggard but the women stood hunger well, and the fern root seemed to keep them
in as plump a condition as if they had the best food to live upon. It is remarkable how the New Zealanders
(Maoris) can stand hunger. I have seen
them for 2 days with scarcely any thing to eat, and still retain their good
humour. Not so the Europeans, they
invariably grow clamorous and quarrelsome.
Cook has children; his eldest boy could write and spoke
English very perfectly.”
Boultbee had to leave William, Tiraha and their settlers but
returned some months later and found they were living “most wretchedly”
They had abandoned work on the 100 ton boat and begun work
on a smaller craft of about “25 tons” to take them home to the Bay of
Islands. “They had no iron nails so used
wooden pegs instead and the women has set to work cheerfully to make mats for
sails and ropes of flax.”
In 1829 the group of settlers were asked to construct
buildings and boats for the whaling station in an area now known as
Preservation Inland. This they did,
returning to their original place to work on their schooner.
It wasn’t until sometime after 1833 that Cook and others finally completed their schooner (which ended up with it's own history) and departed Port Pegasus to return to the Bay of Islands. From those original Cooks came the renown Bay
of Islands Whangamumu Whaling Station.
I knew most of the history of the Cooks and Bay of Islands
and the whaling station, but little of the above connection to Stewart Island. –
despite recalling my father telling me William, Tiraha and others had been
swindled into going to Stewart Island it seems I never absorbed the reasons why
or any other facts. Indeed, when my
sister Tina reminded me of the link she too had little recollection of these
facts but had been told by a friend of hers of the local museum in Oban, on
Stewart Island that had a photo of our great, great grandfather. Wow, thought I, how fascinating, the weird connection of travelling to Stewart Island and on the way accidentally learning
things I never knew of those I descended from.
Tony and I arrived at Stewart Island after choosing to fly
into the area rather than take the ferry boat.
We had been informed by others that the boat trip is regularly an
upside-down affair with most trips having passengers vomiting over the sides,
suffering from awful sea sickness. We
chose to go the more expensive, but less turbulent way.
How wrong that was.
The planes from Invercargill to Stewart Island are small and
seemingly held together with zip ties and loose rivets. The flight is only 15 to 20 minutes, but the
same winds that create the horrendous waves for the ferries also create
horrendous drops and turbulence for the very small aeroplanes above. I thought I was going to die. I thought it might be less painful to
actually make myself die by jumping out of the emergency exit mid flight. I was terrified. The one hour ferry ride of vomiting seemed a
far, far more pleasant option.
That aside, we landed at the Oban airstrip and were taken to
the town.
Whilst we waited for our accommodation to be ready we walked the few
streets of Oban and came across the local café, a rustic café. We enjoyed a superb coffee and toasted
sandwich and noted the only other customer in the establishment. Clearly a local resident, a man in his 30’s
who spent his breakfast time concentrating on reading the mainland newspapers
the aeroplane had delivered to the town.
As we rose to leave the café the newspaper reading gentleman
passed polite pleasantries on where had we travelled from, why were we here and
other usual general chit-chat quips we Kiwis so often exchange.
Tony informed the man we were staying only 3 days and were
wanting to find the local museum as we had been informed there could be information
there on some forefather of mine who had been reported as living there in the
previous century.
The café man asked if we knew the name of the forefather, “Cook,”
said Tony, “William Cook.”
With that the man reeled quite a conversation in telling me
all he knew about William Cook, his wife, his family, his fellow shipbuilders,
what they had been doing there, how, and where their actual living site was on
the island – accessible by boat only. I
was enthralled. Here we were, only just
arrived on the island and the second person we meet (the first being the café owner)
gives me all this information about my family history that I never knew
about. Turns out he was not a born local, had moved there some years earlier but enjoyed absorbing Stewart Island history and was well aware of Cook, Cooks Cove and their life there.
This was an unrealistic, almost illusory situation.
We enquired how we could get to the area those settlers had
set up their homes in and the man informed us of the local tour boat who could
accommodate such a trip.
The next day we motored, just Tony and I, plus the 3 crew on
the tour boat, to Shipbuilders Cove, to Cooks Arm.
I was still somewhat enamoured with what was happening. So many times in our lives we have almost
surreal events, this was one very big one for me. How opportune for me to have all this
happening.
Later that day we returned to our motel accommodation and
sitting on a table in the motel room was a book, Stewart Island Explored, with
a specific chapter ear marked, Chapter 5, The Shipbuilders’ Colony which had a
photo of William and Tiraha. I enquired
with the motel’s owner how it had come to be in our room. She informed me a local she knew had popped
in earlier in the day and asked if it could be left for me to ‘borrow’ and read. She gave me the man’s name and email address,
he being our café acquaintance.
I read the book, learnt my forebearers Stewart Island
history, returned it to the man, purchased a copy from the local museum and
have it sitting beside me now.
So on that day in October, when the lady enquired if I had
ever visited the island and then proclaimed “.. not a lot to do there. Once was enough,” I smiled, said nothing and
thought how nice it is for me to have such valuable family history in this
country of ours and how I will visit again, maybe one day with my own off
spring, and walk them through the trials and tribulations their great, great,
great grandparents had on Stewart Island.
