My project investigates the mediation of the New Zealand landscape and the nation in print. It takes the form of a number of sharply focussed sections, or ‘slices’ through the connection of land- era-text Ian Wedde has suggested that landscape is an idea separated from its host; his phrase is ‘landscape separates land from a view of it’. In Country of Writing I am trying to look hard at ‘the view of it’-what is being seen, the layers of versions over time, wobbles and shifts in the medium. Today I am presenting part of the first chapter, ‘Captain Ceroni’s Watch’, which charts the narrative flow of an event, the attack on the ship Boyd in 1809

The implied transactions represented by the many versions of the story of the Boyd and its frequent appearance in print over nearly two hundred years are part of the process of print culture in which something is transmitted in print objects and filtered through narrative. Incomplete, overlapping, revised, reviewed, the story of the Boyd grows into a cultural history and a landscape of text, volatile, moulded and eroded by the pressure of competing discourses, narratives, interests, as powerful as glaciation or deforestation.

On November 5 1809 the Sydney Gazette reported the expected departure the next day of the ship Boyd, under Captain Thompson, for the Cape of Good Hope, carrying coals, timber and cedar in logs and plank. The notice of the Boyd’s sailing comes at the top of page 2, one of a number of apparently unrelated items of the colony’s business, including a short list of commodity prices, an account of the upcoming wheat harvest, and a notice of Police absentees, amongst whom are ‘several Persons of very abandoned character with a preference to an idle and criminal course of life’. It finishes with this note:

The Boyd resurfaces as an item in the Gazette in March the following year. On 10 March a letter appeared, from Alexander Berry, supercargo of the City of Edinburgh and sent to Sydney in the Ann . It announced the

Under Ship News on 31 March 1810 the Gazette reported that Captain Wilkinson of the Star brought confirmation of Captain Chace’s melancholy account of the capture of the Boyd.

Like previous Gazettes, the column in which the item about the Boyd occurs is a mix of sale advertisements and pricing lists, and various kinds of news mixed together- a flow of information which suggests both the principal currents of interest at work in the colony and a wash of information spilling over its many boundaries. The tide of information enters by sea. Each issue of the Gazette carries announcements of shipping arrivals and departures, passenger lists, mail waiting to be collected and debts discharged, items offered for sale, commodity price fluctuations, and the flows of population in and out of the port and in and out of its institutions and borders. There are also reports of small local events which suggest in themselves the many narratives of a penal and commercial colony, like the mysterious fire that afflicted His Majesty’s store ship the Dromedary. The story of the ship Boyd and how it was cut off in New Zealand is one of these narratives, an event that puts New Zealand into the flow of news and information the colony receives, generates and recycles, and which reaches out from it in a tangible movement of people and events circulating between certain points on the map.

Before the cutting off of the Boyd there are only five references to New Zealand over six years; in 1810 there were five substantial articles including a front page leader. The attack on the Boyd brought New Zealand into focus.

What happened to the Boyd took about three months to reach Sydney, and reached it principally by way of the letter dispatched by Alexander Berry, supercargo in the City of Edinburgh, to the ship’s owner, a letter which recounts the first version of events and was printed in the Gazette on 10 March 1810.

According to Berry, Captain Thompson had contracted with Te Pahi

[Tippahee ] for:

Tippahee [Te Pahi] was one of the few Maori names Sydney readers could be expected to recognise, as issues of the Gazette in December 1805 carried descriptions of his visit to Sydney and reaction to what the Gazette called an Aboriginal war spectacle. On the same page as Berry’s letter about the Boyd, the Gazette also carried a reference to the previous week’s notice of the death of ‘the Princess Atahoe, of New Zealand’, who with her husband George Bruce, was said to be returning to NZ for ‘the valuable purpose of collecting and cultivating flax’. Princess Atahoe, or Mary Bruce, was Te Pahi’s daughter, who had landed in Sydney after being taken, with her husband, from New Zealand against their will. No connection is made between Te Pahi and his daughter , nor is there any reference to the quite different circumstances of their visits to Sydney; they remain apparently unconnected narratives which lie intractably apart in the tidal flow of the Gazette’s information. I use that metaphor to suggest both the marine culture and economy in which the story of the Boyd exists, and the way in which the Gazette as a print medium reflects it. The Gazette seems to scoop events from the pool and wash available to it and report them in an unconnected and undifferentiated way, like objects randomly floating in on a tide, but brought there by ocean currents of displacement, colonisation, commerce, opportunism, and punishment.

On April 21 1810 the Gazette published on its front page the full text of a letter signed by Simeon Pattison, Master of the City of Edinburgh, Alexander Berry and James Russell, the Mate and opening with a warning to all Masters of Ships frequenting New Zealand not to admit many natives on board , ‘as they may be cut off in a moment by surprise’. Cutting off was made possible by the fact that all ships carried boarding nets. A longer account of the Boyd events follows, with Te Pahi remaining at the centre of hostilities, and additional detail of the City of Edinburgh’s visit to Whangaroa and the names of those rescued. The letter finishes by noting that:

We can glimpse here a cultural intervention– colonisation by literacy– in the form of those certificates and generally, colonisation as the introduction of a reward-based code of conduct. The tacit power of a written over an oral culture to document truth is evidenced on both sides of the Tasman and the racial divide - a warning certificate to shipping is distributed through the Gazette, and a good conduct certificate for the Maori of the Bay of Islands will assert the protective authority of a foreign written language against a punitive and foreign military power, in a tiny paradigm of what Foucault has called the power/knowledge episteme.

It wasn’t long, about four months, until Te Pahi’s role in the cutting off of the Boyd was revised, but for Te Pahi exoneration came too late. His death was reported by Captain Chace in the Gazette of 25 August together with the death of his son and destruction of his village in a punitive raid by several British ships.

The next week the Gazette carried another account entitled ‘The Destruction of the Boyd’, derived from Captain Chace who said he got it from an Otaheitan in New Zealand, who ‘as an alien, not being interested on the part of either the Bay of Islands or of the Whangarooans, may still more be entitled to credit’.

This new account, derived from a native who is not a native, begins with motivation. The four or five New Zealanders carried by the Boyd are said to have been displeased at their treatment on the passage and determined on revenge.

In its progression from oral reports in Maori and Otaheitan English to the front page of the Gazette, the story has been dramatised and reimagined from a British point of view. The Otaheitan, ‘Tom’, was later said by Alexander Berry to have been a defector from the City of Edinburgh from an earlier trip to New Zealand. Berry describes him as ‘a great favourite on board, who ‘ rendered considerable service from speaking both English and ‘the New Zealand language which is a dialect of his own’. Tom, the Otaheitan is all but invisible behind Capt. Chace’s report, but there is a dramatic investment in the narrative, missing from Berry’s account, which manages to suggest the presence of Maori as agents in the landscape, displaying for one thing a superior knowledge of it and ability to use it strategically, a comprehensible motive, retaliation, and sophisticated verbal behaviour (ironically pointing at decayed fragments).

By the end of 1810 the Boyd has appeared eight times in the Gazette, and twice on the front page, and is the only continuing narrative about New Zealand to circulate around a Sydney readership. As a narrative and a location New Zealand has taken its place in the commodity market that is the Gazette-both news-as-commodity and commodity news- and from this context , if you imagine the written over [Maori] point of view, there is a shadowed inversion: instead of New Zealand as a location of commodities, a place where you go to fetch certain cargoes, which has been its principal textual presence in Sydney and by inference the parent culture, it might also be seen as a place in which commodities arrive. Is the story of the Boyd a story about savages and treachery, maltreatment and revenge, the loss of cargo, or food and its consumption? As Greg Dening has said of Tahiti ‘Who possessed whom?’ The versions of the Boyd which have come to us preserved in the at once fragile and enduring medium of print, dramatise the Maori as participants in a story which shifts under pressure from competing European interests, from a dark landscape of savagery and inexplicable ‘treachery’ to an act of barbaric yet understandable reprisal.

By the end of 1810, the story of the Boyd exists in two versions through several mouths, neither of which speaks directly for eyewitnesses but implies their reporting presence, at least suggesting another place from which the story can be told. In the pages of the Gazette the story of the Boyd opens a window on a place where something has happened that has to be taken account of, a story that changes the spatial narrative of British colonisation, brings New Zealand into the regular flow of information and dramatises it as a landscape .

The Boyd was the subject of two broadsheets published in London in 1810, picked up by the Philanthropist in 1811, appeared in atrocity pamphlets, and evolved into a staple item of collections of exploration and adventure narratives, like the Constable’s Miscellanies of 1827 and 1855. It also became the general referent in the Sydney Gazette for any shipping casualty or report of cannibalism in New Zealand and a signal event for later travel accounts of New Zealand and 19th century histories. The Boyd goes on being mentioned in the Sydney Gazette until the 1830’s. It features in accounts of New Zealand for children from 1840 (Emily Bathurst) to 1907 (Reginald Horsley), is recounted and reassessed by various missionaries from Marsden on, has recently been reprised in the work of Anne Salmond, appears in guide books and tourist itineraries through both nineteenth and twentieth centuries and recurs in numerous recollections and accounts of travel in Northland during the nineteenth century. It was, and continues to be, a hot story- the kind of headline that sells-

In 1810 a broadsheet appeared in London entitled A Short Account of the most cruel and barbarous Murder of Thirty British Subjects, belonging to the ship Boyd, from Botany Bay, by Savages of New Zealand, who afterwards brutally devoured them.

Ferguson’s Bibliography of Australia records this and another broadsheet with the short title Cut of Ship Horrible Massacre! published in the same year. Between Peoples , Anne Salmond’s history of early contact, notes another broadsheet, Atrocious and Horrible Massacree, which reprints Berry’s warning letter published in the Gazette in 1810, finishing with a ballad about the Boyd, which Salmond says was ‘circulated to sailors’. For the serious reader, an account of the Boyd appeared in 1811 in the Philanthropist or Repository for Hints and Suggestions Calculated to Promote the Comfort and Happiness of Man. The contents list of the Philanthropist includes articles on abolition of the slave trade, the civilisation of Africa, the treatment of the Poor, and Vaccine Inoculation in Mexico.

The owner of the Boyd, Mr George Brown, was the brother-in-law of Mr. Constable, the Edinburgh publisher, who published Berry’s letter in the Edinburgh Magazine and eventually in the fourth volume of Constable’s Miscellany of 1827 - Adventures of British Seamen in the Southern Ocean displaying the Striking Contrasts which the Human Character Exhibits in An Uncivilized State.. Berry’s Particulars of the Destruction of a British Vessel on the Coast of New Zealand is substantially a letter written from the City of Edinburgh at Lima in October, 1810 and amplified with a preface and Berry’s further recollections written ten years later. Retrospectively the preface establishes a sensationalist context for Berry’s story of the Boyd which glosses ‘savage’ and pictures the location of savages as a landscape covered with human bones.

Berry’s longer version of the events of the Boyd written from Lima is a narrative of his own actions rather than the warning to shipping that returned to Sydney on the Ann. He says that on hearing a number of reports from the natives of a ship’s being taken at Whangaroa he determined, in spite of the danger to go round. At the second attempt they were successful:

Berry’s letter to George Brown, is focussed on the point of view of a ship’s owner. He is as concerned to describe the ship’s papers he manage to coerce by force from the Maori, which included some valuable letters of his own, as he is to investigate the event or talk about the survivors. However his initial letter is followed in the Miscellany by ‘additional particulars’ communicated at the request of the publisher, Mr Constable, Brown’s brother-in-law – some profit was to flow from the loss of the Boyd. These particulars include a prehistory of the events of 1809, especially the story of Te Pahi’s voyage to Port Jackson with Captain Ceronci or Ceroni, of the Commerce. At this point a completely different context and narrative point of view for what happened to the Boyd surfaces.

In May or June 1809 Captain Ceroni, master of a sealing vessel, called in at Te Puna, Bay of Islands. Te Pahi persuaded Ceroni to take him to Sydney to visit his friends (how deliciously the prospect of international social life opens here) and to go to Whangaroa where he said the stores were much more abundant than in the Bay of Islands, which was exhausted from the continual visits of whalers.

The careless Captain Ceronci turns up again in Berry’s narrative, as a passenger in a trip made by the City of Edinburgh to the Bay of Islands later in 1809, a trip in which friendly relations were established with Tara and Tupi, the local chiefs, and successful commercial transactions took place. Having extensively praised Tara and Tupi and their friends, Berry continues:

In the event the wind compelled the City of Edinburgh to enter the Bay of Islands where, with a half loaded ship, they learned about the Boyd.

The story of the Boyd as it filters through from the letter left at Kororareka to the Sydney Gazette and Constable’s Miscellany gathers layers, contexts and complications which suggest, among other things, like a widening of the sources of information and inferred narratives from unrepresented points of view, a broadening out from the initial tabloid headline, atrocity and massacre, to a story with dramatic actions and interactions, historical determinism, internal tribal politics, vested commercial interests, and cultural imperatives. The instability of the narrative speaks for the difficulty of comprehending, assimilating and detoxifying such a story, and for the contrary desires and impulses which it embodies. Similar stories about Maori cannibalism and their treatment of Europeans had reached the wider world before, the murder of Marion du Fresne is well known, and throwaway paragraphs such as the Sydney Gazette’s reference on November 5 1809 to the supposed fate of Ratty in New Zealand suggest that the association of murder and cannibalism with New Zealand is relatively commonplace. However the devouring of a Police Absentee by the natives of New Zealand is a peripheral event in the pages of the Gazette and suggests that from Sydney in 1809, New Zealand as a geographical location is a transgressive but little known space controlled by distance and an appropriately retributive boundary marker. Rats who leave sinking ships are asking for trouble. One of the things that happens as the story of the Boyd develops though, is to bring New Zealand into sharper , more particular and more disturbing focus. A transgressive space which has marked the broken edges of disciplinary control, a space confirming the boundaries of a self regulating colony, an opportunistic commercial space shaped by the profitability and irregularity of its transactions, has disclosed itself as retaliatory and damaging.

There is a noticeable shift in emphasis and a redramatising of the story of the Boyd over the several versions provided by Berry, the report from Captain Chace and other printed accounts. While the ‘massacre of the Boyd’, the usual phrase which referred to the attack, remained a marker of atrocity in broadsheets and other precursors of the tabloid press, a simplistically configured exchange of cruelty and vulnerability, other accounts work to redescribe Berry’s initial report in more acceptable terms, notably by the attribution of blame to the European Captain Thompson, and to relocate it in a discourse that recuperates the dark landscape that was too shocking to describe, a discourse characterised by a history of civilising encounters.

Alexander Berry’s ‘particulars’, written ten years after his decision to go to Whangaroa and investigate the rumours he’d heard, are very different from his first report. Much greater attention is paid to the Maori, and several people appear as actors in Berry’s narrative who were effaced from the earlier version, especially Tara and Tupi, from the Bay of Islands, who Berry was trading with. Berry’s previous acquaintance with Te Pahi, and his network of relations with the local community are recounted and contextualised, as are the local tribal politics. Berry’s own politics were strategic. He used the incident of the defected Otaheitan, Tom, to accuse a local chief and established friend-Metenangha- of deliberately enticing sailors to defect , and succeeded in coercing him to go to Whangaroa as a proof of his honour. Berry’s dealings with the chiefs at Whangaroa was facilitated and perhaps only made possible by the presence of Metenangha. On their arrival they were met by chiefs dressed in canvas from the Boyd.

Berry traded the prisoners for axes and muskets and in a show of strength compelled one of the Whangaroa chiefs to get into his boat and guide them up the river. They went up a ‘winding tide river, so narrow as hardly to leave room for a boat to turn’ between low banks covered in mangroves. ‘On our passage up, the natives, concealed among the mangroves, saluted us with their muskets, whether with a view to honour our arrival and celebrate their reconciliation with the white man, or to convince us that they were as well armed as ourselves, I did not know’.

Invited to stay the night, Berry ‘though perfectly assured of my own safety and the firm friendship of Metenangha and his friends’, still ‘thought it preferable to sleep with our own men on a small island near the remains of the Boyd.’

‘I had so much confidence in Metenangha and Towaaki that I believed we might have accepted their invitation to sleep in the midst of the natives with safety; but as there was nothing to gain by such a step, I thought it unwise to incur any risk. On the other hand we had just examined the miserable remains of the Boyd;-we had seen the mangled fragments and fresh bones of our countrymen, with the marks even of the teeth remaining upon them; and it certainly could not be agreeable to pass the night by the side of their devourers. The island where we took up our abode for the night was a small perpendicular rock, where we could have defended ourselves against any number of New Zealanders.’

In these later ‘particulars’ Berry’s recollections of his visit to Whangaroa have expanded into a narrative with complex nuances. For the first time he appears to ‘see’ the physical location, though the landscape he sees is dense with strategic and tactical signs, the winding river too narrow for turning, the peopled and sounding mangroves, the defensive island. Berry’s conversation with the Maori and his overt coercion and bullying of them reveal the cultural imperatives at work in his treatment of them-in his discourse he figuratively includes the massacre of the Boyd in British maritime warfare, therefore ‘naturalizing’ it, while in his coercion of both friend and foe he emphasises a boundary of race and forces a recognition of strength. However the vulnerability of his position, again a question of race and strength, is acknowledged in the choice of a perpendicular rock on which to spend the night.

In J.L.Nicholas’ account of a visit he and Samuel Marsden made to Whangaroa in 1814, the two men also accepted an invitation to spend the night and ‘feared not to close our eyes in the very centre of cannibals’. Marsden’s description of the visit in the Missionary Register for November 1816, comments:

In its telling and complicated retellings, the massacre of the Boyd marks the beginning of the colonisation of New Zealand as a textual practise. An event which registers itself first on the front pages of the Sydney Gazette and is then recycled in broadsheets, pamphlets, miscellanies, and travel accounts, takes its place among the newsworthy horrors of the world and scores whole chapters to itself in nineteenth and early twentieth histories of New Zealand, has begun a process of narration and cognition which brings the unfamiliar into discourse. Before the Boyd New Zealand appeared in the Gazette as the Bay of Islands, scene of the flax, spar, and seal trade, outfitter to whalers, convenient outpost for spillage from the penal society. After the Boyd, New Zealand was no longer a way station between fixed points of the map. Somewhere off the edge of major trade routes and regularised social and penal codes where anything might occur and often did, it became a location characterised by an event whose scale and incursion into spaces of social prohibition forced an effort of comprehension and assimilation, and a recognition of dialogue, action and consequence. Among other things, what the New Zealanders did in burning the Boyd and killing and eating its passengers and crew, was reply to the opportunistic and punitive behaviour of a liminal society. Before 1809 the liminality of New Zealand and what happened there is amply testified to in the Sydney Gazette. But like Captain Ceroni’s watch dropped into the waters of Whangaroa harbour, an event which seemed of little consequence to its perpetrator but of far-reaching personal and symbolic significance to the culture into which it had so carelessly sunk, the massacre of the Boyd was the splash which signalled a weight shifting, whose ripples spread outwards across the Tasman to London, a displacement charted in print culture for at least forty years.

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Last Updated : 31 March 1999