A bay where cultures met
As the decades after James Cook’s first voyage gave way to sealing, whaling and timber-felling, a small but growing Pa¯keha¯ population lived within and alongside a Ma¯ori world, often interacting closely. In Pa¯keha¯ Settlements in a Ma¯ori World: New Zealand Archaeology 1769-1860,
archaeologist Ian Smith tells the story of adaptation, change and continuity as two vastly different cultures learned to inhabit the same country. This is an extract.
Archaeology materialises the past, furnishing it with real objects that were made and used by communities of people who lived in specific places at defined points of time.
Beyond this, however, is a deeper importance, because objects reflect the material practices of everyday life: they are a product of what people actually did, which does not always correspond with what they said or wrote about their activities.
The materials recovered during an excavation are usually dominated by ‘‘rubbish’’: items discarded because they were waste from food preparation or tool-making, or once-useful objects that were broken, worn out or abandoned. These discards are direct evidence of the home life, work and leisure activities of past communities and provide the basis for identifying patterns of behaviour relating to such everyday processes as the acquisition, preparation and consumption of food; the spatial organisation of domestic, industrial and public activities within settlements; and broader economic interactions between localities, regions and nations.
Material objects are also relational. People use tools to interact with their surroundings, from acquiring food and constructing shelter to broader modifications of the environment.
Objects play a crucial role, too, in the relationships between people. The items a person possesses provide a signal to others of that individual’s position in society, and perhaps also their ethnic and other social affiliations. In these ways, the material objects recovered through archaeological investigations allow us to gain a deeper understanding of past lives.
Sealers Bay, Codfish Island/ Whenua Hou
The two names of Codfish Island/Whenua Hou, which lies just west of Stewart Island, reflect the mixed-race composition of a community that developed there in the early
1820s. Some 33 Pa¯ keha¯ men, at least 24 Ma¯ ori women and more than 40 children lived there at various times between about
1823 and 1850.
The men were sealers and sailors who had abandoned various gangs or ships, and in some cases were residing with
Ma¯ ori partners and causing disruptions in villages around Foveaux Strait.
For Nga¯ i Tahu leaders, the solution was to set aside a safe haven where the Ma¯ ori women could live with their Pa¯ keha¯ partners: a ‘‘new land’’, whenua hou. The sealers had already named this Codfish Island ‘‘on account of the number of fish around it . . . and the shape of their heads’’.
Most of the Pa¯ keha¯ men who resided at Sealers Bay appear to have been from the British Isles, with Englishmen more numerous than Scots and Irish, along with some from Australia and the USA and one from Portugal. There was at least one African-American and one Tasmanian.
They were not all there from the outset, with reported arrival dates ranging from 1824 to 1837. The women appear to have been mostly of Nga¯ i Tahu or Nga¯ ti Ma¯ moe ancestry. Several were daughters or nieces of highranking chiefs.
Excavations have revealed evidence of dwellings and gardens, along with food refuse and artefacts from the 19thcentury settlement, as well as remains from earlier Ma¯ ori occupation.
One of the 19th-century dwellings was excavated, revealing a rectangular structure about 4.5 metres x 3m, with a chimney extending another 2m from one end. The base of the chimney was constructed of loosely stacked stones, but its flue appears to have been wooden, judging from the lengths of timber that had fallen across the fireplace.
The dwelling itself was constructed of timber slabs set directly into the ground, with those along the side walls set at an angle, indicating that they rose to form an A-frame roof. The floor was made of wide planks, about 2.5 centimetres in thickness. Although several postholes were located, there didn’t appear to be any bearers or joists, suggesting that the floorboards rested directly on the underlying sand. No window glass was recovered, indicating that there were no glazed windows.
Cooking appears to have been conducted mostly outdoors, using traditional Ma¯ ori methods. Earth ovens were located in several parts of the site, and at least one of these had glass, ceramic and metal items mixed through its fill, and
yielded a radiocarbon date consistent with its use in the early 19th century.
Stone flakes were also represented here, indicating that traditional cutting tools remained in use. There were no remnants of the iron cooking pots or ceramic kitchen bowls, such as were used at the Hohi mission station in the Bay of Islands. This is undoubtedly a reflection of the dominant role of Ma¯ ori women in the preparation of food in Sealers Bay.
The meals that they prepared were mostly indigenous foods. Bones from the 19th-century occupation show that fish, especially barracouta and blue cod, were the most commonly eaten animals.
Muttonbirds and penguins were also frequently on the menu, along with occasional fur seals and sea lions. These were exactly the same local resources that had been harvested by early Ma¯ ori residents on the island in the 14th and 15th centuries.
The only addition to the 19th-century fauna was pig bone. Only two of these animals were represented, each by only two bones, raising the possibility that they were from salted-pork cuts rather than freshly butchered animals.
Introduced plants made a significant contribution to the diet. Sealer John Boultbee, who kept a journal, noted a garden of potatoes in 1827, and 13 years later Dumont d’Urville was informed that the ‘‘English seamen . . . settled on the coast of
Foveaux Strait . . . successfully cultivated the potato there, together with other vegetables and poultry, which they sold to the whale-ships’’.
The location of the potato gardens at Sealers Bay was identified on a low sandy flat, about 80m from the excavated hut, where the topsoil had been thoroughly mixed by repeated digging, and small pieces of charcoal were evenly dispersed to a depth of up to 25cm.
Around the edges of this flat were clusters of mint plants, an introduced species that spreads primarily by runners rather than seed dispersal, indicating that it too had been planted.
As well as selling garden produce to passing ships, the Sealers Bay residents traded seal skins and perhaps fish. The seal skins were acquired during long boat-based searches around Stewart Island, Solander Island and Fiordland.
However, seals were becoming scarce, and some of the men found seasonal employment at shore-whaling stations when these began to appear on the Foveaux Strait coast from 1829.
Nonetheless, much of their time must have been spent in fishing, gardening, harvesting birds and other subsistence pursuits. The Pa¯ keha¯ men in this community had a lifestyle that resembled more closely that of their Ma¯ ori neighbours than it did those people in the Pa¯ keha¯ settlements in the north.
The artefacts recovered from Sealers Bay provide material witness to this integration of Ma¯ ori and Pa¯ keha¯ cultural traditions. Along with the stone flakes used in food preparation, traditional Ma¯ ori artefact forms include adzes, fish hooks, a schist file, a bone awl and a pounamu pendant. Together these make up more than a third of all the artefacts from the 19thcentury occupation, contrasting markedly with the scarcity of such items at Hohi.
The European artefact forms at Sealers Bay are far more restricted than those found in the mission assemblage. Nearly three-quarters of the items are iron nails and spikes. Clay pipes and glass bottles are nearly twice as common as they were at Hohi. In contrast, ceramic vessels were comparatively scarce.
Most were plates, and there were no teacups. Clearly, the taking of tea, which played such an important social role at Hohi, was not a household activity at Sealers Bay, whereas drinking alcohol and smoking were.
Personal items were mostly buttons, but there was also a gold watch-hand. Among the tools was part of a grindstone, and there were at least three items of cutlery.
While it was probably the earliest permanent settlement of Pa¯ keha¯ in southern New Zealand, the legacy of the Sealers Bay community is felt most strongly in the Ma¯ ori world. During the 1840s its members gradually dispersed to other localities around Foveaux Strait and Otago.
The children from these early communities produced much larger families than did contemporary Ma¯ ori, rapidly expanding the size of the mixedrace cohort and transforming the composition of the southern Ma¯ ori population. Today, as the scholar Atholl Anderson notes, ‘‘the descendants of each of the founding Ma¯ ori mothers at Whenua Hou number in the thousands, and together include most of southern Ma¯ ori as a whole’’.