This Thing Of Darkness (90 page)

FitzRoy raised his newspaper aloft.

‘One final point, gentlemen. The feelings displayed towards the natives in this newspaper are condemned by myself in the strongest terms. This ...
publication
contains the most pernicious statements against the New Zealanders. Clearly, they are the work of a young, foolish and indiscreet man. I trust that, as its author has years before him, he will yet learn experience. That is all, gentlemen.’

FitzRoy stepped down from the table and entered Barrett’s Hotel. The bustling outrage that had greeted his initial remarks had receded, to be replaced by an insidious, creeping sense of hatred.

It was not a couple of minutes before he was confronted in his room by a raging Jerningham Wakefield. The young man, who could hardly have missed the references to himself at the end of FitzRoy’s speech, was scarlet with fury, his prominent Adam’s apple rocketing up and down his sapling neck. Although he towered over FitzRoy, he looked in every danger of being blown off his feet by the next gust coming in off the Cook Strait.

‘You
scoundrel!’
blurted Wakefield. ‘My uncle lies murdered and you side with his killers? You have not applied even the simplest principles of justice! You have not yet listened to the white side of the story because you were determined, even before your enquiry, to decide entirely in favour of the savages!’

‘I have
read
the white side of the story,’ said FitzRoy, coldly, ‘in this sorry rag you refer to as a newspaper.’

‘A newspaper that reflects the public feeling of this colony!’ shouted Wakefield.

‘I know my duty and I will do it, without caring for public feeling. I come here to govern, not to be governed.’

‘Do not speak to
me
as if I were a little middie on board your ship whom you can bully as you like. You treat our complaints as so much waste paper! I demand, on behalf of the New Zealand Company, that you take military action to apprehend my uncle’s murderers.’

‘Do you have absolutely
no
conception of how militarily helpless we are? I have but seventy-eight troops to put up against an entire nation. If we attacked the New Zealanders, they would retreat into their fastnesses, where no regular troops could follow. Thousands of warriors would join them. Hostilities against the settlers would then commence, and our ruin would inevitably follow. We should risk a sacrifice of life too horrible to contemplate. Wellington would be annihilated, and yourself and the company with it.’

‘You damned fool! You think they will respect you for not punishing them? That they are now your friends? You do not know the New Zealanders — they will take your unwillingness to fight back on behalf of your fellow man as a sign of your own weakness! All you are doing is planning your own downfall! Ever since Wairau, the savages have been different - thieving, plundering, impudent, trying to frighten people, firing off muskets, practising their stupid war dances, buying a deal of gunpowder, making tomahawks, telling white people that they are cowards and that their queen is but a girl. That is because
you
have given them confidence. If we are murdered in our beds, it will be because you have as good as given them permission to do it!’

‘And how much weaker would I seem, were I to launch a military attack that failed? Answer me that, Mr Wakefield. All I have done is to take the novel step of applying British law equally and fairly to both parties. If that scuppers some of your illegal land deals, then so be it.’

‘You risk the ruin of the company and the entire settlement with your folly!’

‘
I
risk the ruin of the company? It is not I who has flooded Wellington and Auckland with boatloads of angry settlers needing to be fed.’

‘Then give them the land that is rightfully theirs - instead of issuing to them your worthless paper money! You possess no currency reserves. Your notes will be worth nothing, and shall only cause disastrous inflation.’

‘I am well aware of the risks. I believe the risk that your settlers shall die of starvation to be the greater.’

Wakefield snorted. ‘Governor’s instructions forbid you to establish a paper currency without special permission of the Crown first given. Only the Union Bank of Australia is allowed to issue notes.’

‘You know nothing of the governor’s instructions.’

‘Don’t I? Who do you think is the major shareholder in the
New Zealand Gazette
and the
Nelson Examiner
besides the New Zealand Company? The Union Bank of Australia, that is who. The same Union Bank that part-owns the company itself. And your governorship is in debt to the Union Bank to the tune of many thousands of pounds, thanks to that fool Hobson. They - we - shall want our money back immediately, Captain FitzRoy, and in genuine notes, not your worthless scraps of paper.’

‘Do not try to blackmail me, you cur.’

‘I have had about enough of your arrogance, and your dictatorial quarter-deck manner. You take advantage of your high station to lay aside all the feeling and demeanour of a gentleman. You think your governorship makes you powerful? You do not realize who you are dealing with. The company has many an influential shareholder in Parliament, on both sides of both houses. At least forty MPs own a stake. Even Lord Howick is a shareholder.’

‘If the Queen herself were a shareholder it would not make one whit of difference.’

‘We are shortly to begin publishing the
New Zealand Journal,
a British edition of the
Gazette
. Then all in Britain will be able to read of your folly. Who do you think owns Barrett’s Hotel? I could have you turned out of your room at once, if I so chose, and I doubt you would find anyone else in Wellington to take you in.’

‘There will be no need for that, Mr Wakefield. I shall not deign to remain in your company’s settlement one day longer.’

‘My father warned me about you, Captain FitzRoy. He was right, as always. And together we will finish you. We will finish you right off.’

FitzRoy and his little retinue of paid clerks walked back to the
North Star
unattended and in silence. Nobody took off their hat or bowed. There was none of the frantic excitement that had accompanied their arrival. As luck would have it, a bitter gust of wind plucked the governor’s hat from his head and hurled it into the harbour. As he went aboard his brig, its crewmen busily trying to fish it out of the water, he could hear the sound of raucous laughter breaking like waves at his back.

‘Pappa, that looks like you.’

‘Yes Emily. It is a drawing of me.’

‘But, Pappa, the drawing is of a black man. You are not a black man.’

Emily had caught him red-handed, leafing through his latest batch of bad notices in the press. There were many more titles to choose from, these days: the
New Zealand Herald, the New Zealand Spectator,
the
Auckland Gazette,
all of them company titles, spreading the Wakefields’ pernicious gospel like missionary tracts penned by the Lord of the Flies himself. It was incredible that an immigrant population of just three thousand whites could sustain so many newspapers, but most of the settlers had nothing to do but read - or, in the case of the illiterate, have read to them - a rousing articulation of their burgeoning grievances. The object of their hatred, the governor who stood between them and the lands they believed to be rightfully theirs, had been caricatured as ‘The High and Mighty Prince FitzGig the First, One of the Kings of the Cannibal Islands’.

‘It is a funny drawing, Emily dearest. The artist wanted to make people laugh.’

‘Did you laugh at it, Pappa?’

‘Of course I did, when I first saw it. Now, my dear, forgive me, but Pappa is busy. Why don’t you go and play in the sunshine with Robert and Fanny?’

His daughter headed off obligingly, and his protective gaze shepherded her out on to the sunlit lawn. Little Fanny was waddling about in her long clothes, a huge, beaming smile on her face; Robert was wheeling in circles around her, a toy sailing-boat fashioned from coral in his outstretched hand. Behind them, the coarse meadows that swept down to the harbour had been plentifully seeded with mean thickets of wooden dwellings. Their numbers were increasing: in places they had clustered into discernible streets, as if huddled together, whispering and plotting. To the north and west of the town, dark, brooding clouds were gathering. On the wooded, volcanic hills that formed a natural amphitheatre on Auckland’s rim, long lines of native huts had appeared, each tribe allocated its own ridge. Ostensibly they were there to trade with the white man, but there was no doubting that there was a new ostentation, a new confidence in their behaviour: Wairau had unquestionably altered the psychological balance. An opposing army, thought FitzRoy, could hardly have encamped more skilfully or with a greater appearance of regularity.

Of course he had written to Stanley, the colonial secretary, requesting more money and more troops. Without money he could not build a school, or a church, or a hospital, or even any defences. The process of justice had been frozen, for there was no money to pay lawyers. Even legitimate land sales had stopped, for his administration had no funds with which to purchase land from the natives. He even had to keep a tight rein on his own currency issue, for fear of sending inflation spiralling out of control. Just a limited sum of money, he had told Stanley, would enable him to pay small salaries to friendly chiefs, to purchase their allegiance; as it was, the love of Christ instilled in some of the tribes by the Waimate missionaries was the only leash holding back the New Zealanders. The country was in a state of paralysis: all he could do was to keep the two sides at arm’s length for as long as possible.

It had taken ten months for Stanley’s reply to come back. No money and no troops would be forthcoming. The company had assured the government that New Zealand should be entirely self-supporting, which, of course, it could be, were its native population to be conveniently wiped out. Instead of troops, Stanley had commanded him to raise a defensive militia by arming the white settlers, an order so provocative and foolhardy that he had felt obliged to disobey it. The natives understood, at least, that the red-jacketed soldiers were there to defend the law and the status quo, that they were a neutral force. Arming the mob of settlers would lead only to a bloodbath that would put Wairau to shame. News of his disobedience, he knew, would soon reach London. The
New Zealand Journal
had without doubt arrived there long previously.

Wearily, he scanned the newspapers once more. ‘Remove our curse - the native curse - and replace it by a blessing: a rational governor!’ yelled one headline. He read on. ‘The policy adopted by Governor FitzRoy towards the natives has produced the effect which all who know the savages’ character foresaw and predicted - the same namely which is observed in spoiled and petted children, whom injudicious fondness renders presumptuous and impertinent - a pest to all around them.’ He picked up the
Herald.
It made the point that ‘the admission of the natives’ absolute right to their land raises innumerable obstacles to beneficial colonization. It creates in the breasts of the natives an insatiable cupidity, which condemns them to listless inactivity and a continuance in barbarous habits.’ Jerningham Wakefield, of course, expressed the strongest sentiments of all. Writing in the
Gazette
, he insisted that Governor FitzRoy had brought with him to New Zealand an illness that had infected the entire colony: ‘It is disgusting to remark the purulent and contagious nature of the disease. It appears as though the moral plague of aversion to the settlers is spread by the mere breath and odour of authority.’ ‘Why do you bother to read them?’

His wife stood in the doorway, leaning with one hand upon the jamb to ease the weight of their fourth child, which was slung low in her belly, just a few short weeks from making an entrance into the world. Somehow she managed to maintain her regal bearing, even when braced against the plain wood of the doorframe. He remained in awe of her, just as he remained in awe of the continuing miracle of childbirth. Her piety was so simple, so reassuring, he had come to see it as a beacon that might yet lead him to safety. She was almost worshipped, too, by the colonists. When she moved among them dispensing food, water and blankets, they saw only an angel in white, floating in their midst. There were, of course, none of the whispered insults, guffaws and threats that attended FitzRoy’s own progress about the town.

He put down the
New Zealand Gazette.
‘Why do I read them? Because London will read them. Because the chiefs will read them. Because the settlers will read them. And they will believe what is written therein about myself and about this colony.’

‘Anyone who knows you will not believe them. Anyone who knows you and loves you, as I do, will know that these journals are written with not the slightest regard for the truth.’

‘The settlers would appear to believe every word.’

‘My dearest, the settlers have no choice but to believe, for without the fantasy that the natives’ land belongs to them, what do they have? They are penniless and frightened and many thousands of miles from home.’

‘What is important, Mrs FitzRoy, is what London believes. Therein shall lie our salvation, or our damnation.’

‘London will choose to believe what it suits London to believe. I pray that God has granted Lord Stanley the wisdom to see the truth; but if that proves not to be the case, as indeed it may not, then you must be strong, my dearest, and endure, for the truth must always emerge in the end. Do not despond. We must both of us trust in a superintending Providence, in the knowledge that He must ultimately carry the day. Therein shall lie our salvation, and not our damnation.’

‘You are right as always, my dear. But I am failing in a husband’s duty, in leaving my beloved wife standing when she is with child! What has become of me?’ He took his wife’s arm and ushered her to a seat. ‘Please forgive me my self-absorption. My manners are become utterly remiss.’