We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“JOURNEY TO A HANGING” by Peter Wells (Vintage / Random
House, $NZ44:99)
I am
sometimes so taken with a book that when I come to review it I feel the urge to
rush to judgement before I do an analysis of it. This is the case with Peter
Wells’ latest book Journey to a Hanging.
I was so absorbed in it that I found it very hard to put it down, and galloped
through its substantial text (about 400 closely-printed pages, before endnotes)
in a couple of days. It is a vivid, insightful narrative and analysis of a set
of tragedies in 19th century New Zealand. It is the product of close
research and makes extensive use of the diaries, letters and testimonies of the
people involved. It presents a credible set of arguments. And it is very, very
readable.
Journey to a Hanging once again involves the printer, polymath,
erstwhile Anglican missionary and gadfly William Colenso, of whom Peter Wells
wrote his idiosyncratic biography The
Hungry Heart two years ago. [Look up
on the index at right my review of The
Hungry Heart – as well as my reviews of two other books concerning Colenso
by other people: Give Your Thoughts Life
and William Colenso – His Life and
Journeys]. As in The Hungry Heart,
Wells sometimes places himself at the centre of the narrative. Among the many,
mainly historical, photographs and illustrations that pepper the book’s glossy
pages, there are the shots that Wells took while visiting sites where the
historical events happened. He speaks of his “contrapuntal method of working.” (p.8) He notes that “my modus as a writer is to go to places, and
pitch the historical past against the vagaries of the present” (p.9)
Again as in The Hungry Heart, Wells does not hesitate to speculate on people’s
motives and to dramatize what he believes their intentions to have been. This
time, however, he is more sparing in his speculations and is more restrained in
his facetious asides. For these reasons among many others, I think Journey to a Hanging is a much stronger
book than The Hungry Heart.
Despite his presence, William
Colenso is not the focus of Journey to a
Hanging. By rights, the book should be called Journey to Two Hangings, as that is what it is really about.
The first is the hanging and then
the mutilation of the body of the Rev Carl Sylvius Volkner on 2 March 1865. Volkner,
a German clergymen working for the Anglican Church Missionary Society, was murdered
near his Hiona Church in Opotiki by Maori who were influenced by the Pai Marire
(“Hauhau”) religion.
The second hanging is the
execution (or perhaps judicial murder) of Kereopa Te Rau nearly seven years
later, after his trial in Napier in late 1871. Kereopa was clearly only one of
the people involved in Volkner’s death, and his role was indeed murky, but he
had been pursued for years as the chief murderer and had taken refuge in Tuhoe
country. The Tuhoe, tired of being harassed by government soldiers in search of
him, handed him over to the Pakeha authorities and Kereopa’s trial and death
followed. The cover blurb refers to these as “the events that set back New Zealand race relations by a century”,
a phrase which is sourced to the historian Edmund Bohan on p.131.
Peter Wells is aware that this
story has been told many times before, but through the lenses of different
ages’ preconceptions and assumptions. Volkner was once seen as a martyr by
Pakeha Christians (years after his death, his church was renamed St Stephen the
Martyr). His murder, including the decapitation of his corpse and the eating of
his eyes, was no more than an outbreak of cannibalistic barbarism. But then
along came the Maori renaissance in the 1970s, and suddenly Volkner was recast
as a government spy and his murder was the just retribution of Maori people
then at war with colonisers and land-grabbers. As Wells writes:
“the longer I worked on this story, the more I became aware that, even
in the present, the interpretation of the ‘facts’ had an inherent instability.
If Volkner had been regarded in the nineteenth century as a martyr, by 2014 he
was dumped into the bin of political correctness: he was simply a spy and his
death was, by implication, completely valid. He no longer had any narrative
use. Kereopa Te Rau, in the same ever-balancing, ever-tilting narrative scales,
was now viewed as unjustly hanged for a murder he did not commit. He was the
leader of a rational political order whose anti-colonial drive was expressed
through traditional Maori tikanga.” (p.12)
However, continues Wells, “The situation is complicated, much more so
than the simple opposing points of view (Maori innocent and wounded, Pakeha
evil and corrupt) that the contemporary interpretation allows.” (p.14)
Clearly one motivation for
writing this book was Wells’ dissatisfaction with currently acceptable views of
the events, which do not allow for nuance and which refuse to take seriously
the worldviews of people in a past age. He quotes with approval Adam Gopnik
when he said that “Historical criticism,
which is ostensibly about trying to understand things as they were seen then,
too often spends its time hectoring the dead about not having seen things as we
do now.” (p.94)
In a chapter tellingly called
“Rinsing Away the Blood”, Wells credits Paul Clark’s 1975 book Hauhau: The Pai Marire Search for Maori
Identity for the view that
“Rev Volkner’s death was a rational political act carried out with, so
to speak, all due diligence in terms of Maori tikanga. Clark conceptualised the
killing as ‘an execution’ by way of further meshing it in postcolonial
political correctness. His analysis did have the value of removing the stain of
barbarity and irrationality from the death, but he may have over-emphasised the
spy charge and under-emphasised Te Rau’s role in the killing. What his account
also left out – understandably, as it was the very force he was trying to
provide a corrective against – was what Bishop Williams called the ‘phrensy’.
Clark, a dispassionate academic, downplayed it entirely. Yet witness after
witness used a single adjective to define the tenor of the events of the first
and second of March 1865 – and this word was ‘mad’.” (p.149)
In effect, Wells is saying here
that the revisionist view of the event prettifies it and cleans it up – “rinses
away the blood” – and refuses to see that it was an act of violence carried out
in conditions of near hysteria by people who had somehow been inflamed. This is
of a piece with other of Wells’ warnings against prettifying or
sentimentalising Maori history. For
example in his considered “Postscript” he notes “Once again I get a sense of how Maori life and history was [sic] so powerfully informed by the effects of
the inter-tribal killing fields – almost as much as by colonisation, if we are
all being honest.”(p.366)
None of this means that Wells
wants to return to the simplistic view of Volkner as martyr, any more than he
wants to see Kereopa as helpless victim. He wants to enter the minds of all the
major participants in this story, and establish some balance by determining the
worldview each had
He does this by dividing his
narrative into two parts.
The first 150-or-so pages of Journey to a Hanging are called “Walking
at Night Without Stars” and concern Volkner. He is characterised,
sympathetically, as an outsider in colonial Pakeha society. Offered no funding
or livelihood by the North German Missionary Society, which had sent him to New
Zealand, he switched to the Anglican CMS. But he was at first offered no parish
and had to play something of a servant role to missionaries like Robert
Maunsell. Like so many missionaries, he
was often isolated and lonely. One conspicuous “success” in his life, in
worldly terms, was marrying Emma Lanfear, ten years older than he was and a
woman who brought money into the marriage. Wells does not caricature this
marriage, as I feared he might, but presents it as a harmonious one, noting:
“Carl
Sylvius, in marrying her, may have hoped for late children. More practically,
both may have chosen each other, seeing in it a union which offered to the
other individual gifts. That is was not a great romance does not mean that
deeper feelings did not develop. Many an arranged marriage ends better than
those that start off in a full cacophony of love and its intoxications. Indeed
there is every evidence, in the careful actions and tender sentiments that Carl
Sylvius and Emma Lanfear later expressed, that they had found in each other a
soul mate.” (p.62)
Wells’ chief interpretation of
Volkner is that, as a German, he often misread the intentions of his English
colleagues, and sometimes pushed himself forward in rather tactless ways. He
appears to have lobbied and volunteered for the Opotiki parish, especially at a
time when the Anglican mission was worried at how well Catholic missionaries
were then doing in that area. When war came to the Waikato in the 1860s,
Volkner did indeed send letters to Governor George Grey informing him of the
movements of Maori forces (the “spy” charge). But, argues Wells, this was very
much the action of a German who was still trying to establish his loyalty to an
English polity. Besides which, the information he sent to Grey was no more than
that which he shared with other CMS missionaries and they with him.
Volkner went to Auckland with his
wife when the war sucked the local Whakatohea people in and placed the
missionaries’ lives in danger. Wells says Volkner returned to Opotiki for
genuinely religious and pastoral reasons. The Whakatohea had suffered defeat
and Volkner saw it as his duty to comfort his parishioners at that time.
Unfortunately for him, and partly encouraged by Pai Marire (“Hauhau”)
missionaries, the Whakatohea now saw Pakeha missionaries like Volkner as part
of the reason for their defeat. And so he returned to his own death. Wells
quotes in detail the many graphic – and conflicting – accounts of how Volkner
died.
The second part of Wells’
narrative is headed “Journey to a Hanging”. For 200-plus pages it examines the
circumstances of Kereopa Te Rau’s trial and death. A year after the murder of
Volkner, five Maori men had already been tried and executed (in Auckland) for
their part in Volkner’s killing. At that trial, no witness gave a leading role
in the killing to Kereopa. But by 1871 Kereopa, largely because he was the Pai
Marire missionary who arrived in Opotiki just before Volkner was killed, was
generally seen by Pakeha as the man who had incited Volkner’s killers to
murder. And he had eaten Volkner’s eyes. (Wells is unflinching about this fact,
much as it has been “rinsed away” in some other accounts.)
Wells spends much time
characterising the Pakeha society of Napier where the trial took place, and the
difficulties of making the trial a fair one. He notes that:
“the dangers of creating a jury in a small town were great. But what
made things even more difficult was that many of these men [on the jury] occupied positions in the quasi-military
volunteer units of which the town proudly boasted. In Te Rau’s case, many of
the men sitting in judgement on him held positions in either the Napier Rifles
or the Napier Artillery. Pakeha men had a double presence, an invisible shadow
in the small town. They were not only civilians, they were semi-conscripted
fighters in a colonial war.” [pp.170-171]
As to the Crown’s case against
Kereopa, he writes:
“there was a problem with the case; a whole lot of problems. Let’s call
them eyewitnesses. It was shockingly unclear as to who did what to whom in the
actual event in which Rev Volkner was killed. Like the hanging of Mussolini or
the killing of Saddam Hussein, these were crowd events, a tumult of people
carried along by a wave of emotion. There were many hands arising from the
crowd, and the precise problem was, looking back over the span of six years, it
was no longer clear who was responsible for the act of murder itself. This was
complicated even further by this extraordinary detail: the eyewitnesses being produced
had actually participated as perpetrators. It was impossible to be present
without, in a sense, being an accomplice. The problem of war is that there is
no innocence. ‘A dirty period requires dirty men’ is a saying in contemporary
war-torn Syria and this was definitely a dirty period in New Zealand’s brief
history.” [pp.244-245]
The witnesses the Crown produced
had, in effect, their own reasons to dissociate themselves from Volkner’s
murder and to load the blame onto Kereopa. Wells does not present Kereopa as
blameless. As he languished in Napier’s claustrophobic little prison before,
during and after the trial, it is clear that Kereopa tried to ingratiate
himself with the authorities, and evade the gallows, by dobbing in other
people. He wrote a memo telling the Crown exactly where they could find the
“rebel” Te Kooti if they wanted to capture him [p.331]. In the end, though, Wells
presents Kereopa as asserting his identity in a very Maori way and as a man who
clearly had some part in the killing of Volkner, but was not the chief
instigator of it.
Naturally Wells spends time
characterising the major Pakeha players in Kereopa’s trial, the judge (biased
and unfair), the prosecuting counsel (experienced, tricky, and given all the
advantages by the judge) and the defence counsel (willing but inexperienced,
and not allowed to introduce evidence that would have established the context
of the murder). He is more concerned, however, with three Pakeha who did not
appear in the courtroom.
First, the defrocked former
Anglican clergyman William Colenso. Colenso, as the trial got underway, wrote
an extensive pamphlet “Fiat Justitia”, arguing that there was no real case
against Kereopa, that the trial was excessive Pakeha “utu” when others had
already been hanged for Volkner’s death, that the trial was unnecessary, would
inflame Maori feeling and was based on unreliable evidence. Wells notes that
Colenso’s arguments were never raised at the trial, but it is clear that the
prosecution was aware of them and (without ever mentioning Colenso by name)
that the prosecution attempted to quash any sympathy for Kereopa that Colenso
may have aroused.
Second, the Anglican Bishop
William Williams of Waiapu, in whose notional diocese the murder and trial took
place. Wells does not characterise Williams very sympathetically, seeing him as
longing nostalgically for the settled, paternalistic relationship of missionary
and Maori that had existed before the wars. Williams had, however, been brave
at a time when Pai Marire first arrived at his mission station. Says Wells:
“Whatever
else one can say about Williams – that he was a land thief, a hypocrite, a
political animal, a church functionary – he was certainly not a coward. He
displayed remarkable calmness in a frightening situation. He is also all for
clarity and certainty – in a situation in which absolutely nothing is clear.”
(p.214)
By this, Wells is implying
ironically that Bishop Williams tried hard to reach a clear-cut decision about
Kereopa’s case, but extensive letters he wrote to Donald McLean and others show
that he was in fact very troubled in his mind about the trial. But he never broke
ranks publicly with majority Pakeha opinion.
Bishop Williams was severely
antagonistic towards the third Pakeha figure upon whom Wells focuses. This was
the French Catholic nun Sister Mary Joseph (Suzanne) Aubert. Under the sincere
impression that Kereopa had been either baptised or confirmed a Catholic –
before he became Pai Marire – the bustling 36-year-old Aubert gained access to
Napier jail and tried to arrange for a Catholic priest to hear Kereopa’s
confession and accompany him to the gallows. She was, as she saw it, trying to
save his soul. News of this outraged Bishop Williams, who saw Aubert’s
intervention as the interference of a denomination which he detested anyway (as
did the Low Church Colenso).
In the event it was Williams’
son, the Rev Samuel Williams, who accompanied Kereopa to the gallows,
willy-nilly.
Wells’ own attitude towards
Christianity is ambiguous at best (in the introductory chapter there is a
slightly ironical smirk as he tells of his participating in an Anglican
communion service at the Opotiki church). An element of farce creeps into the
way he presents Aubert’s manoeuvres and Bishop Williams’ counter-manoeuvres on
the night before Kereopa was hanged. Nevertheless, Wells’ sympathies are more
on the side of Aubert and of Colenso than on the side of Bishop Williams. Like
Volkner and like Kereopa, the French nun and the defrocked gadfly are to him
“outsiders” from the mainstream of Pakeha opinion. Or perhaps they show that
Pakeha colonial society was more diverse than recent revisionist history has
allowed? Wells writes:
“It
is only too common to dismiss New Zealand’s colonial society in terms of its
worst aspects but at times it is also necessary to expand our understanding and
include the alternative universes of remarkable individuals like William
Colenso and Mary Joseph Aubert. They were also members of colonial
society.” (p.263)
Wells, by the way, has another
reason to say positive things about colonial Pakeha society. After all, it was
literate and “the entire trail of deceit
and obfuscation of the Kereopa Te Rau trial is only available to us today
because of the excellence of a nineteenth-century colonial bureaucracy.” (p.325)
I found this book completely absorbing
and its nuanced arguments quite persuasive.
I save a few misgivings for the
end.
There are times when Wells does
rather overdo the pictorial scene-setting and the dramatization, allowing his
imagination to get the better of him. I find this in passages such as:
“But first we must creep along those dark, echoing hallways. It is
another hot day, close, even though occasional showers skitter across the
ground. We have to stand outside a cell and wait patiently for the turnkey,
perhaps Thomas Maloney, to select the correct key, enter it into the lock, turn
the lock then pull it back” etc. etc. (p.325)
I am a little dissatisfied at the
way Wells presents the (small and incidental) role of the French Catholic
priest Fr Garavel. Some months before Volkner’s murder, Garavel, coming to
Opotiki from the Waikato, carried to the Whakatohea people a letter from Wiremu
Tamihana, which turned out to be urging them to join the war against the
British. It is highly unlikely that Garavel (who was quickly hustled out of the
country by his superior Bishop Pompallier) was aware of the specific contents
of the letter, but Wells leaves the matter painfully ambiguous. He says that
Garavel “either wittingly or unwittingly”
carried Tamihana’s incitement (p.85). On p.235 this becomes “either knowingly or unknowingly”. This
is an odd statement from a writer who is elsewhere so ready to reach
conclusions about people’s motives.
I would also express my dissent
from Wells’ characterization of Pompallier as “in person profligate and seemingly dishonest” (p.236). At least
I’m glad that Wells included that word “seemingly”
there, but this judgement is still glib to say the least.
I must declare a personal interest at this point. Five
years ago, I was commissioned to write a biographical history of the Catholic Diocese
of Auckland, which was published under the title Founders and Keepers in 2011. I included a detailed and documented
chapter on the changing reputation of the far-from-perfect Pompallier. I will
say, however, that Wells’ attitude towards Pompallier and Catholic missionaries
in general is far less negative than that of Paul Moon in his various
writings. In fact, for all his sincere efforts to reach into the worldviews of
all parties, there are times when Wells is equally dismissive of all Christian denominations in
their endeavours. Repeatedly he uses the term “franchise” for each Christian denomination, as if he is naming
nothing other than a set of commercial companies. This shows a certain failure
of empathy when, as far as both Protestant and Catholic missionaries were
concerned, they were engaged in life-and-death matters of profound spiritual
importance.
In this connection I must arraign
one dopey wisecrack by Wells when he is considering some of the evidence of
Sister Aubert’s and Bishop Williams’ activities the night before Kereopa was
hanged. He remarks:
“they
help us to plot the dance of the night, move by move, as Catholic sought to
outwit Protestant and Protestant sought to outwit Catholic. And as Te Rau, too,
used the competing religions to create a space for himself in which neither
could actually ever completely reach him, appropriate him and hence claim him
as – I am afraid I have to write this – a scalp.” (p.336).
Well actually no, Peter Wells,
you do not have to write something so insufferably facetious and I don’t think
you’re really “afraid” of having written it either. In fact, I suspect you
think you have written a king-hit bon mot.
But here I admit that in all my
misgivings over the last few paragraphs, I have been nitpicking.
Journey to a Hanging is an extraordinary book. Despite the few
failures I’ve noted above, Wells’ sympathies are wide and he recreates a whole
society vividly. How we conceive of the past is always changing. There is no
“final” history. But in reading Journey
to a Hanging I felt that the wheel had turned, and that we are at last
moving on from the type of postcolonial history that overcompensated for
earlier triumphalist colonial histories by equally un-nuanced imaginings of the
past.
If this does not make it into the
finals of New Zealand’s next round of book awards, then I will say that
somebody goofed badly.
A Few Silly Footnotes:
I am interested to learn that Robert
Maunsell, having translated the whole of the Old Testament into Maori, had to
re-translate it all after his only draft of the translation was destroyed by
fire (p.48). This puts me in mind of Thomas Carlyle’s heroic feat of
re-writing, from memory, the first volume of his The French Revolution after the only manuscript copy of the volume
was accidentally burnt by John Stuart Mill’s maid. Open fires were very
destructive things in the nineteenth century.
If I were Peter Wells I’d have a
quick word with my proof-reader or copy-editor. On p.293 he refers to a
non-existent work called the “St. James Bible”. Obviously this is the King
James Bible, and I have seen the mistake made by other hasty writers. However,
it’s the type of thing that an alert copy-editor should pick up. Other than
this, the production of Journey to a Hanging
is excellent
HOWEVER, I would have preferred a
full and conventional bibliography at the end, rather than only the
source-giving endnotes.
It’s a great pleasure to read a
short story that is perfectly proportioned, closely observed and conveying
powerful emotions without hysterics or striving for effect. 
“Katherine”, the last story in
the book, won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award for short story writing in
2011, when the chief judge was Owen Marshall. The eponymous first story in the
book, “The Red Queen”, won the Sunday Star-Times
short story award in 2010, when Charlotte Grimshaw was the chief judge. (It was
originally published in the Sunday
Star-Times under the fuller title “The Red Queen Hypothesis”).
Appropriately, the short story writer at the beginning of her literary career
has already been saluted by two established short story writers who know their
stuff.
