An essay by Wakefield scholar Philip Temple
It gleamed alone in the foyer of the National Library. A superb mere, pounamu, mounted inside a raised glass case. The label read, "Te Heketua. The mere used to kill Arthur Wakefield at the Wairau, 1843." I bent forward to look more closely but there was no suggestion of blood or brains on its finely polished edge. I wondered what this had to do with the adjacent exhibition about Rangiātea Church at Ōtaki, nearly 150 years old, which had been burned down by an arsonist the year before (1995). This was to support an appeal to finance its reconstruction. Was marking, even celebrating, the death of Arthur Wakefield somehow intended to encourage the same bipartisan approach to the resurrection of Rangiātea that had marked its foundation? I was taken aback, even offended on behalf of Arthur Wakefield’s family. His great-great niece, now almost 90, should not know about this. He had, after all, been the ‘flower of the flock’ and this tall poppy had been cut down in his prime. But I was the one who knew about Arthur more than anyone, including his great-great niece.
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I was too small, too young at 10 years old, to be pulling an oar in a whaler on the River Thames. But our family friend, Captain Palmer, was a member of the Master Mariners Guild which had its HQ on HMS Wellington, permanently moored on the Embankment next to Captain Scott’s Discovery. It was also the Saturday morning base for the St Clement Dane’s Sea Cadets where I could learn morse code and semaphore; and how to row a navy whaler. Captain Palmer used his influence to get me in a year or more early and I was keen on the sailor’s uniform. The hat had the ribbon HMS Wellington and I was told that the three white stripes on the blue collar marked Nelson’s three great victories of the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. In Trafalgar Square, I squinted at him on his column but he was too far up - 170 feet - to see him properly.
Six-year-old Arthur Wakefield had been taken by his grandmother to witness Nelson’s funeral procession.His coffin was carried up the Thames from Greenwich to Westminster, escorted by scores of small boats and barges; the funeral procession to St Paul’s stretched all the way back to its starting point at the Admiralty. Did the experience convince Arthur of his destiny? Only four years later he was ‘married’ to the navy and spent the next thirty years at sea.
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Te Rauparaha told Te Rangihaeata that it was not a good idea to execute Arthur Wakefield as he stood defenceless before him. It might be Ngāti Toa custom, but Pākehā utu might prove pretty heavy. But one of Arthur’s men, in the deadly and shambolic debacle of the ‘Wairau Affray’ had shot Te Rongo, who was Te Rangihaeata’s wife and Te Rauparaha’s daughter. Whether this was accidental or not, Te Rangihaeata demanded utu right there. He had had enough of these Pākehā, acting as if they owned the place. He had always known it would come to something like this. He had warned them. Stoving in Arthur’s skull - and those of six others - would make a point long overdue. Whatever happened afterwards, he would fight them to the end. Ake, ake, ake.
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At school I was more interested in Spitfires and the more recent heroes of the Battle of Britain than Nelson. I read all the Biggles books; but I also read all the Swallows and Amazons novels by Arthur Ransome where naval discipline and the Nelson Tradition held sway. Later I spent days with the absorbing Hornblower novels by CS Forester.
Arthur became the Wakefield family’s hero, "an open-hearted good boy whom everybody loves"
The one strong thread running through school history lessons was the power of the Royal Navy, how it had fought the Spanish or the French or the Dutch, kept the sea lanes open for trade and established the biggest empire in the world. The maps on school room walls still showed a lot of red. The news from outside was disturbing, even discouraging, but we could all recite from the inscription at the foot of Nelson’s column. His last signal to the fleet before the Battle of Trafalgar: "England expects that every man will do his duty". It had been sent by semaphore and it was one of the first signals we practised on HMS Wellington. Apart from the three stripes on my sailor’s bib marking Nelson’s three great victories, the cricket score of 111 was called a ‘Nelson’ because the three stumps echoed the stripes, and it was thought to be unlucky because of Nelson’s tragic death. Not that it mattered much because our teams’ scores never reached 111.
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Arthur was a 14-year-old midshipman on HMS Hebrus during the War of 1812 when British troops sacked Washington and set fire to the White House. Cutlass in hand, he helped rout American militia and captured a regimental flag. Afterwards, he was given charge of a captured 28-ton American sloop and sailed it from Chesapeake Bay to Bermuda, 700 nautical miles away. Mentioned in dispatches, he became the Wakefield family’s hero, "an open-hearted good boy whom everybody loves."
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Te Rauparaha gained chiefly status and a high reputation as a Ngāti Toa warrior leader in the Kāwhia rohe during the 1810s. In continual attacks and counter attacks, engaging with Waikato and Taranaki warriors, he was among the first to employ muskets; but he also won encounters with the adroit use of subterfuge and trickery. As a child he was called Māui Pōtiki after the legendary Māori ancestor who represented the bold and the resourceful, the quick and the fearless.
By 1819, Ngāti Toa’s position at Kāwhia was becoming untenable and Te Rauparaha took a party, including his nephew, Te Rangihaeata, south towards Cook Strait, searching for a new home for his people. While there, he saw a sailing ship passing through the strait and was told by a chief with experience of Europeans in the north that he could become powerful by trading for muskets from these ships.
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Promotion in the Royal Navy was difficult after the end of the Napoleonic Wars; the fleet was reduced from 700 to 130 ships and nine out of ten officers were put ashore on half pay. Arthur Wakefield needed ‘preferment’, the sponsorship of a senior officer, and he was able to gain this, first by being picked by Nelson’s Captain Hardy to be his aide-de-camp on the South America Station. Later, an influential paper he submitted on the state of merchant ships led to service on the West Africa Station chasing slave traders. Cutlass in hand again, he led a boarding party that captured a Spanish slaver and freed 420 slaves. He was given his first command following this, the gun brig Conflict, in which he chased miscreants the full length of the West African coast. It suited his Christian faith and temperament.
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Admiralty papers are in the Public Record Office at London’s Kew. There is a ‘finder’ ante-room with a forbidding range of guides to help you find what you are looking for. A degree in navigation would help.
Eventually, I was able to extract the archive numbers I needed to order up logs of two ships Arthur had served on: the Hebrus, a fifth-rate frigate of the Scamander Class; and his own Conflict. As I waited for my order number to appear on the digital screen, I wondered how it would be possible to find the logs after all the time that had elapsed. Yet, no more than 20 minutes later, I was handed two dusty, brown paper parcels tied with string. I then realised that these ship’s logs had not been opened since they were handed in to the Admiralty, after the ships were decommissioned 170 years before. I was excited about what I might find.
I was turning the pages that Arthur had turned all those years before. I felt I was reaching back through time to touch his hand
But there was no drama in those pages, no insight into character, no descriptions of battle on the high seas. The daily entries in fine clear handwriting simply recorded position, weather and daily tasks; and deaths. When Arthur made landfall at Ascension Island with the Conflict in 1827 he noted prosaically that he buried a crewman and took on fresh water. Yet, although there was no drama, I was turning the pages that Arthur had turned all those years before. I felt I was reaching back through time to touch his hand; that rare sensation experienced by biographers seeking to understand their subjects.
The log for the Hebrus chiefly recorded the dreary aftermath of the Battle of Algiers in August 1816. A midshipman and three men had been killed, another midshipman and sixteen men wounded. For days, the log recorded that the crew were holystoning the decks clean of gunpowder, blood and soot and stopping shot holes at the waterline. This allowed the captain of the Hebrus time to write a note to Arthur’s father that could be sent with the battle dispatches to London: "He is the best boy in the World and will one day do you and the Service great Honour".
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Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata, with senior Ngāti Toa chief Te Pēhi Kupe, fought their way south along the North Island’s west coast. There was killing, treachery, massacre and tribal infighting. For security, Te Rauparaha established a base on Kapiti Island and, with Te Rangihaeata, successfully repelled a major waka-fleet attack in 1824, securing dominance over the iwi of the south-west of the North Island. Whalers and other European traders began visiting Kapiti and Te Rauparaha saw that controlling the market in arms and ammunition was the means of maintaining Ngāti Toa’s power over allied tribes such as Ngāti Raukawa. Captive slaves scraped the flax that he traded for muskets, powder and tobacco.
Pounamu was still the greatest treasure for Māori and, because it was found only in the South Island, Te Wai Pounamu, Ngāi Tahu had control of its mining and trade. But they had no muskets and Te Rauparaha saw his chance. He attacked pa at Kaikōura and Kaiapohia but inconclusively; so he hatched a plan in the spirit of Māui Pōtiki to capture Ngāi Tahu paramount chief Tama-i-hara-nui. In 1839, he chartered the brig Elizabeth, under Captain John Stewart, and sailed to Akaroa with Te Rangihaeata and a taua of 100 warriors. They remained concealed below decks while Stewart drew Tama-i-hara-nui aboard with his wife and daughter on the pretext of trading flax for muskets. While Te Rauparaha taunted Tama-i-hara-nui about his easy capture, the taua went ashore and killed many of the local inhabitants. Tama-i-hara-nui was taken back to Kapiti in chains, and he was tortured to death by the wives of Te Pēhi Kupe who had been killed at Kaiapohia while negotiating for pounamu.
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Arthur Wakefield was promoted to senior lieutenant on the frigate Winchester in Canadian and West Indian waters in 1828, serving under four captains in the years that followed. Despite jumping overboard three times in attempts to save seamen’s lives, and taking command after one captain died, younger officers were promoted above him; they were less qualified and experienced but better connected for preferment in the navy’s class-ridden system.
Yet he could not be completely overlooked after faultlessly overseeing the decommissioning of the Winchester, and inventing a machine for gunnery training at Portsmouth. In applying for a new post he could confidently declare that he had always "paid especial attention to the management and discipline of men". With this in mind, the Admiralty appointed him first lieutenant - second in command - of the new second-rate 84-gun ship of the line, HMS Thunderer, in charge of a crew of 700.
I was researching the career of a member of an upper middle-class family who, at best, might have employed me as a gardener
The 1830s were the last long summer of Royal Navy sail as the Thunderer cruised the Mediterranean keeping the sea lanes open for British trade. There were few guns fired in anger during the five years Arthur expertly managed this great ship in faultless displays of cruiser diplomacy; such as target gunnery exercises within sight of the biggest possible audiences of Turks, Italians or French. But it seemed the end of the line when he oversaw the paying off of Thunderer at Plymouth, again without "accident or irregularity". His friends in the service "cried out much" when his name did not appear on a list of promotions that followed. In February 1837, at a London dinner, his two older brothers, Dan and Edward Gibbon, assisted him in preparing what they considered a persuasive ‘memorial’ to the First Lord of the Admiralty. But in the likelihood this would be ignored, Edward Gibbon (EGW) had something else in mind.
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The pervasive, noxious class system was one of the reasons I left England young and settled in New Zealand. Yet there I was in Kew, 40 years later, researching the career of a member of an upper middle-class family who, at best, might have employed me as a gardener, possibly an illiterate one, and certainly without vote or influence. I knew that the romance of the "Nelson touch" drew me to Arthur, but his brothers were a dubious lot, involved in elopement, abduction and capitalist colonial schemes. Alongside these, however, was the enduring evidence of family involvement in reforms: of prisons, lunatic asylums, Ireland, schools, the currency, the franchise, all aimed for the betterment of society. The Wakefields were not my cup of tea. But no-one had researched and written about them properly although they had greatly influenced the early settlement of New Zealand. It took time for me to understand my underlying motive: if it were not for the Wakefields, I would not be in New Zealand at all.
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By the time Arthur had dinner in London with his brothers, Te Rauparaha, Te Rangihaeata and their allies had full control of the south-west of the North Island and the upper part of the South Island. When Ngāi Tahu acquired muskets, they repelled Ngāti Toa attempts to penetrate any further south.
Te Rangihaeata lived mainly on Mana Island. European traders and whalers had begun to settle the region and by 1837 there was a small whaling station on Mana and a sheep and cattle run. Yet European families lived in Te Rangihaeata’s rohe on sufferance. A commanding figure, he constantly demanded koha for the privilege of living and working under his rule and protection; demands which the settlers saw as extortion and bullying. But they were powerless.
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Edward Gibbon Wakefield had been involved in the scheme that led to the settlement of South Australia in 1835 and the establishment of self-government in Canada. He propagated the notion of Britain as the "workshop of the world", drawing raw materials from well-planned British colonies overseas that would be populated by the deserving but underemployed members of society. They would also serve as markets. A company would be formed to enable the enterprise. Capitalism with philanthropic purpose. New Zealand, EGW saw, was "one of the finest countries in the world, if not the finest, for British settlement". Neither he nor his backers considered that the locals would be a problem. The country was mostly unused "waste" land and Māori would benefit from the laws, systems, and technologies of the most advanced society in the world.
Arthur would be ideally suited to command the first expedition of the New Zealand Company and establish the first colony. In handling ships and men he had few peers. Morally he was without stain, unlike EGW. His piety and evangelism made him the kind of leader EGW could present to investors, settlers, missionaries, politicians and bureaucrats. Arthur was keen. Until, that is, promotion did come over the horizon, in the form of commanding the Royal Navy’s paddle steamer Rhadamanthus on the Mediterranean Station. His memorial had been persuasive after all.
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In 1985, I published a book about early European explorers of New Zealand, after I had physically retraced their journeys. Dramatised television documentaries were mooted and one explorer chosen was Ernst Dieffenbach. The German doctor and naturalist had been employed by the New Zealand Company to assess the country’s resources in the 1839 expedition under the command, in Arthur’s absence, of his younger brother, William. It had become a family business.
Dramatising my stories needed greater insight into the people surrounding Dieffenbach. I had not gone to school in New Zealand and had, therefore, missed history lessons that, until the 1950s, had described the Wakefields as founders of New Zealand. The worm had turned by 1990 and I was told they were a despicable lot, colonial villains. Intrigued, I went to the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington to see what they had on William Wakefield. I was handed a transcript of his 1839 diary and was astonished. Why had this story not been told before?
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Aboard the expedition ship Tory, William Wakefield recorded his imperial view of Māori soon after he arrived in Queen Charlotte Sound in August 1839. On the one hand, they were a "fine race of men … very intelligent and capable of being extremely useful to settlers". On the other, "They are suspicious and susceptible to the greatest degree, grasping and importunate, cunning, treacherous and revengeful". As he pursued his brief to acquire as much land about Cook Strait as possible, before New Zealand came under British jurisdiction as a Crown Colony, he decided to be firm and unflinching in his dealings with such people; and not to be disturbed by belligerence or threat. He had earned his rank of colonel facing potential death and defeat in recent Spanish wars. He also had the "benefits of civilisation" on his side, and Māori were eager to obtain the material fruits of these: blankets, ornaments, tobacco and, above all, muskets. He was determined to thoroughly explain what land they would be giving up in exchange for these. He would also point out the great advantages they would see from British settlement; the wealth gained by a tenth share of capital improvements. It was all perfectly logical.
But after the turmoil of invasion and counter invasion in the region, mana rangatira, who controlled what rohe, remained in dispute. When the Tory arrived off Kapiti, a battle on shore at Waikanae between Ngāti Raukawa and Te Āti Awa had just left sixteen dead. Te Rauparaha had encouraged the Raukawa to attack Āti Awa after they had reached a deal with Wakefield for the lands around Port Nicholson. His mana over the entire Cook Strait territories had to be upheld, especially when it came to dealing with William Wakefield. He recited the names of them so that Wakefield would properly understand his paramountcy.
Wakefield wrote, "It will be a most fortunate thing for any settlement formed hereabouts when Te Rauparaha dies"
Wakefield understood that he had to gain the consent of all chiefs from all local iwi and worked hard to achieve that. But none of them understood the concept of alienation of land through signed title and material payment. They thought putting their mark on Wakefield’s paper and taking what trade goods they could get hold of, would allow white people, like the existing whalers and traders, to settle; and not many at that. Te Rauparaha was up for whatever deal he could "extort". Wakefield commented, "It will be a most fortunate thing for any settlement formed hereabouts when he dies, for with his life only will end his mischievous scheming and insatiable cupidity".
Only Te Rangihaeata clearly understood what Wakefield was up to, that somehow Wakefield was aiming for control over the land, not simply use. At first he refused to sign the purchase document. He did so eventually to procure his share of the trade goods, but signalled his contempt for the deed’s validity.
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While the first New Zealand Company settlers came to Wellington and Hobson arrived to assemble the Treaty of Waitangi in the north, Arthur Wakefield continued to steam across the Mediterranean with messages, men and merchandise. Its peaceful waters were disturbed when the Pasha of Egypt attacked Ottoman Turkey and it took an alliance of Britain, Austria and Prussia with the Turks to finally defeat him at Acre in November 1840. Arthur was there with the Rhadamanthus and somehow fell out of favour with his commander-in-chief. By Christmas he was back in England, aged 41, out of a commission and with no further chance of preferment. Now that he was available, EGW enthused him to lead the NZ Company’s second expedition. Arthur told his sister that "A good body of colonists is forming & I think we shall have such party that never left Eng. before". The first colony had been named Wellington; with Arthur in charge, the second could only be Nelson.
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Arthur’s arrival in Wellington with his advance party in September 1841 coincided with the visit of Lieutentant-Governor William Hobson on his first tour of southern New Zealand. It seemed the ideal opportunity for William and Arthur to negotiate the best site for the Nelson colony. Hobson was hostile towards the Company, which he saw as "carrying on gambling speculations". Arthur and William wanted to site Nelson at Port Cooper with its nearby plains [Canterbury], but the governor said no and left them with Hobson’s Choice, a place within the region William had "purchased" from Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata: Whakatū and Te Taitapu [Tasman and Golden bays]. Arthur knew from earlier reports that these sites were not ideal.
There were practical problems, such as adequate fresh water supply, and a shortage of flat land suitable for large scale agriculture; and difficult times with local iwi who disputed Te Rauparaha’s mana rangatira. But Arthur and his surveyors pressed on with hard work and enthusiasm. One of his men later wrote that there "was a sterling uprightness in all his actions both public and private … always founded on the most rigid notions of justice and impartiality. He was humane, amiable, and kind to all alike, poor or rich, and always accessible to the humblest applicant". But he had spent almost all his life at sea and, while he was skilled in technical and man management, and command protocols, he knew nothing of business or politics.
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The Tuamarina River runs alongside State Highway One between Blenheim and Picton, a road always busy with traffic toing and froing from the Cook Strait ferries. Before it runs through the valley proper, Pioneer Place on its west side leads to a memorial that marks the place where the ‘Wairau Massacre’ (so named until the 1970s) or ‘Wairau Affray’ occurred. Beyond the east side of the highway, a rough gravel driveway leads up the hill to the local cemetery and the pyramid-shaped memorial that marks where the bodies of Arthur Wakefield and the other executed Nelson settlers were buried. It was designed by the youngest Wakefield brother, Felix. In the Tuamarina village there is a Wakefield Street.
Here was the end and the beginning in June 1843. Captain Arthur, beloved of the Nelson settlers, had finally made a wrong decision. Pressured by the need for more arable farming land for the settlement; facing unemployment problems; misled by brother William about land purchase; egged on by Hobson’s explosive police magistrate, Henry Thompson; dismissing threats from Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata as "all bounce"; he took a party of armed men to arrest them for destroying his surveyors’ huts at Tuamarina. There could have been only one end to it. The cobbled together group of unmilitary settlers were no match for the Ngāti Toa chiefs and their musket-armed taua, nursed in blood from a generation of fighting the length of the North Island. There is no need for euphemisms. It could only have been a massacre.
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William Wakefield never got over Arthur’s death. Four years later, at a public dinner in Nelson, when a toast was proposed to the Wairau fallen, those present were awed by his grief, in his "agony of recollection and retrospect". And no doubt his sense of guilt, shared by EGW, the ‘great spider’ architect of the New Zealand Company, who abandoned his political career in Canada and returned to England. There was no mending this.
There was also no sense of justice for many of the Nelson settlers who had lost their husbands, brothers, fathers. The governors succeeding Hobson deemed the company in the wrong and governor Robert Fitzroy managed to alienate the Nelson settlers with his lack of sympathy or any offer of aid. He also managed to offend both Ngāti Toa chiefs when he ignored customary protocols in declaring the settlers in the wrong and claiming no utu. Te Rangihaeata would not have been surprised if Fitzroy had taken the Wairau and handed it to Nelson. It had been paid for in blood. He spoke for both sides when he said, "The Governor is soft, he is a pumpkin".
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Colonel William raised a militia and tried to start a war against the Ngāti Toa chiefs but was held back by calmer heads and the newly arrived rule of law.Te Rangihaeata now asserted the Hutt Valley had never been included in William Wakefield’s ‘purchase’ of the region, and he supported the rights of allies Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Rangatahi to occupy the land. When the Wellington settlement continued to expand into the Hutt, conflict became inevitable. The government gave more money to Ngāti Toa but Te Rangihaeata and Te Rauparaha had, fatally, split on how to manage the conflict.
Tension and sporadic fighting occurred in the years following. Fitzroy had no money or troops to settle the matter and was distracted by Hone Heke’s war in the north. His recall in1845, partly caused by political action in London by the New Zealand Company, brought wild rejoicing in the Cook Strait settlements. His successor, George Grey, was a man of an altogether different mettle.
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Grey decided that the endless standoff would be resolved only by coming to a permanent settlement with the Ngāti Toa chiefs. Both were cautious and Te Rangihaeata refused to go aboard Grey’s ship on his first journey south, suspecting a plot to capture him. He and Te Rauparaha had worked that trick before.
After Grey sailed north again in May 1846, warriors allied to Te Rangihaeata attacked troops in the Hutt that had been stationed to protect settler farmers; and he built a redoubt at Pāuatahanui. An attack on Wellington was now feared as Whanganui warriors began moving south to support Te Rauparaha. Grey returned, determined to neutralise their power.
This time it was the ‘Old Sarpint’ who was tricked, in a manoeuvre that Māui Pōtiki would have delighted in. Grey made to sail past Te Rauparaha’s pa but returned in the night and put marines ashore who captured him as he slept, holding him by the balls so he could not escape. Te Rauparaha spent the next year as Grey’s ‘guest’, his mana reduced forever. Grey, with hundreds of men, next moved to destroy the Pāuatahanui redoubt. But Te Rangihaeata took off north with his followers and fought a successful fighting withdrawal to a fortified pa in the Poroutawhao swamp south of the Manawatū River. It was virtually impregnable and Grey left him to his fate.
Until 1846 the Wellington settlers had been living in a Māori world; now Māori had begun to live in a Pākehā one. When Grey dealt with other Ngāti Toa chiefs to finally purchase three million acres of the Wairau region, he told them to sign before he released Te Rauparaha. They said Te Rangihaeata’s mark had to be on the document, too, but Grey labelled him a rebel he would not deal with. They took the £3000 and Grey told William Wakefield that the NZ Company could now purchase Wairau land at whatever price the government set. William complained that the company’s original Wairau ‘purchase’ had never been legally tested and that there was no justice in this for Arthur and the other Nelson settlers slain at Tuamarina. But Grey knew that to re-open the four-year-old wounds could only provoke more conflict with Ngāti Toa and destroy Māori trust in the new justice system. It was over. Except in family grief that would endure a century or more.
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I first visited Rangiātea Church at Ōtaki in 1970. From the outside it looked like many other colonial churches scattered across New Zealand; but its interior was unique, a revelation. One gigantic tōtara beam, 26 metres long, was the ridgepole; huge tōtara pillars held it up. The rafters were decorated with a mangōpare pattern and the walls with ancient tukutuku panels. Yet it was Anglican, the altar cloth gifted by King George VI, replacing an original given by his grandmother, Queen Victoria.
In 1848, old Te Rauparaha, still no Christian, plunged into the ground a sword he had been given by Governor Grey and challenged Ngāti Raukawa chief, Te Pohotīraha, to build a church there at Ōtaki. Already, tōtara logs had been floated down from Te Rauparaha’s own reserve. Under his and Archdeacon Octavius Hadfield’s supervision, a thousand men laboured to complete the structure before he died a year later. Te Rauparaha was buried in the church grounds; although tradition has it he was re-interred on Kapiti.
Te Rangihaeata said, "Men, like women, used their tongues for weapons"
The church was named Rangiātea, after the mythical homeland of the Tainui people, Rai’atea in Polynesia’s Society Islands. Te Pohotīraha was guardian of sacred soil carried from there and he buried it beneath the Rangiātea altar. A plaque stated "E kore au e ngaro te purapura i rua Rangiātea. It shall never be lost, the seed was sown from Rangiātea". In October 1995 the church was burned to the ground by arsonists.
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It is said that, for the rest of his life, Te Rangihaeata was "an angry man", always opposed to the acquisition of land by the Pākehā. He wanted nothing from them, even refusing to wear European clothing. George Grey gave up any plans to winkle him out of his Poroutawhao stronghold. But when he charged tolls for the use of the Foxton-Levin beach road, Grey induced him to abandon the practice by giving him a gift of a horse and gig. In time Te Rangihaeata came to accept that peace not war had become the spirit of the times: "men, like women, used their tongues for weapons". He died in 1855, from pneumonia after lying in a stream to reduce a fever caused by measles. For him, this was the Pākehā utu.
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Three million dollars was raised to rebuild Rangiātea and the replica church was consecrated in 2003. In 2006, then governor-general Sir Anand Satyanand presented a new altar cloth from Queen Elizabeth II and, in his speech, commented on what could be achieved by people in a spirit of partnership, ‘when our differences are harnessed for the common good’.
The year before, one of the arsonists, Francis Shaw, a declared Māori radical, was sentenced to four years in jail. He said he had helped burn Rangiātea because it represented division between the Anglican church and Māori. And ‘God did not blow the flames out. I’m as patriotic as everybody else in the room but I do believe we have an unhealthy relationship with the Crown’. The judge understood Shaw’s passion but believed there were more constructive ways of improving society than burning down churches.
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I discovered that the mere pounamu in the National Library foyer was not the Te Heketua used by Te Rangihaeata to execute Arthur Wakefield. I was told that each hapū of Ngāti Toa had its own Te Heketua, a symbol of the past migration of the iwi. I was being a pernickety Pākehā trying to pin down the prosaic truth of that splendid object in the glass case: because myth and symbolism are as important as objective fact, as material evidence, in understanding our histories, our people, our heroes.
Young Arthur Wakefield, who was at the burning of the White House, who freed slaves off the west coast of Africa, is forever wrapped in the flag of the Nelson tradition. Te Rangihaeata, for his repeated challenges to the takeover of his people’s lands will forever hold Te Heketua in his hand. Both heroes did not understand each other and died from the consequences of their not understanding. In remembering them equally, Kaua e rangiruatia te ha o te hoe e kore to tātou waka e u ki uta. Do not lift the paddle out of unison or our waka will never reach the shore.
Philip Temple is the author of A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields (2002), a magnificent biography that was comically overlooked as best book of non-fiction at the following year's Montana national book awards in favour of a wine guide.
Tomorrow in ReadingRoom: "Speaking rights", a poem on Pākehā learning te reo, by Anahera Gildea, from her new collection Sedition (Taraheke / Bushlawyer, $30).
