Original caption: "Port Underwood, with Jacky Guard's house (centre on shore) and behind it the grave of Rangiawa (Kuika), native wife of Mr Wynen. Jack Guard was the pilot of the "Pelorus".
This picture of what is now known as Kākāpo Bay, but was then known as Guard's Bay, was drawn by William Fox in 1848, four years before Marlborough briefly became part of the Nelson Province. Later Sir William, Fox served as the New Zealand Company's second Nelson agent after Captain Arthur Wakefield was killed during the Wairau Affray in 1843, and later became New Zealand's second Premier, a position he held on four separate occasions during a turbulent period in New Zealand's political history. In his earlier years he was an inveterate traveller and often accompanied various surveyors and explorers on their arduous expeditions. He invariably took his trusty sketchbook with him, leaving a fascinating legacy of images of the places he visited, now held in the Hocken Collection at the University of Otago in Dunedin.
James Wynen was a local storekeeper and entrepreneur, whose story is told in the Prow article attached below. along with mention of the tragic loss of Wynen's family, a shocker even for the hardened Port Underwood whaling station, regarded by more civilised Nelsonians as a den of iniquity.
In December 1842, while Wynen was away on business in Nelson, his attractive young wife Kuika, a Māori woman of rank who was related to Te Rauparaha, was dragged from her home, attacked and raped, then both she and her 18 month old son murdered. Her 10 week old baby daughter was later found at the house in a distressed state and despite being tenderly cared for by Sarah Ironside, died soon after. A Pakeha ex-convict, Richard (Dick) Cook, was eventually taken into custody. He was believed to have broken into the dwelling, thinking that no one was at home and hoping to steal Wyvern's rumoured fortune. As it happens, all that he had found in the house was a bag of coins of little value, and perhaps this led him to take out his frustration and disappointment on Wyvern's hapless family. In an attempt to hide his crime, Cook had later gone back to Wyvern's home with another Port Underwood resident, Mr N.B. Robinson, professing to be concerned that Kuika was home on her own and hadn't been seen for a while. He then feigned shock and horror when they found the baby in a poor condition on a mat inside the house and a search around the property uncovered Kuika and her little son lying dead together outside in a patch of long, bloodied grass, so disturbed as to indicate a struggle having taken place, a harrowing sight as both had had their throats cut to the bone. Their bodies were carried into Wyvern's house to keep them from depredation by wild animals, and the alarm was raised.
Wyvern returned home the following day to discover the tragic fate of his family.
Cook was almost certainly the perpetrator - he was dobbed in by his own Māori wife, Kataraina, but her testimony was later disallowed on the grounds that her evidence was not equal to that of her Pākehā husband's. The call went out for utu, but the local Māori were dissuaded from taking matters into their own hands by respected Wesleyan missionary, the Rev. Samuel Ironside, who with his wife Sarah had established a church at Ngakuta Bay in 1840. Wanting retribution, James Wyvern pressed the authorities in Wellington to take speedy action, as did Ironside, who was concerned about growing local unrest around the event and the lack of action. However, time dragged on and it wasn't until March 1843 that a trial took place in Wellington.
To the shock and dismay of Kuika's friends and family who had travelled by canoe up to Wellington to attend the trial and see justice done, charges against Cook were dismissed because he hadn't been definitively identified. The general bitter feeling amongst the Māori present (with justification) was that the whole thing had been a sham, with those conducting the trial having been of the opinion that Māori lives didn't matter, confirmed by the Magistrate's overheard aside that "it was only a native girl, after all".
The resentment engendered by this case was amongst factors resulting in the Wairau Affray. The Rev. Samuel Ironside, who from early on had sailed on a regular circuit around Tasman Bay, preaching and meeting residents (both Māori and Pākehā) at Golden Bay, Motueka and Nelson. (The European settlers who arrived at Motueka a bit later were on the whole fervent Anglicans and rather put out to discover that Ironside had initially beaten them to it in the conversion stakes). Ironside knew the settlers in these areas well, and had warned Nelson hotheads against taking precipitate action over what was on their part an attempted land grab. Not lacking in courage, when he heard wild rumours swirling around about a massacre of Pākehā at Tua Marina, he sailed to Port Underwood and tracked down the chiefs Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata, whose wife had been the first person killed, possibly by accident.
A fluent speaker of te reo Māori, Ironside asked them: "Why did you kill Captain Wakefield and the other gentlemen when they had given up their pistols and surrendered?"
"Well", said Te Rangihaeata, "They had killed my wife, Te Rongo, and they did not punish Cook, the murderer of Kuika".
Ironside then asked for their permission to decently bury the bodies of the Nelson settlers, to which the chiefs, morose because they knew they had gone much too far, rather grudgingly agreed, despite mutterings that they should be left to the wild pigs. Ironside then travelled on down to Tua Marina to bury the 22 victims of the affray, being rowed across Cloudy Bay in stormy weather by men from Michael Aldridge's whaling station, who braved the wild Wairau bar and carried on along the Wairau River to Tua Marina.
Having reached the site of the Affray, and with help from his crew and several Nelson settlers who had soon arrived after hearing the bad news, Ironside buried the bodies found there, most of them, including Captain Wakefield, in a mass grave at the site where they had been killed, others singly as they were found. Knowing that the majority of the dead had been Anglicans, Ironside read the Church of England burial service over them. A memorial was later erected at the main grave site. However the Wairau Affray meant the end of Ironside's Cloudy Bay mission, as fearing retribution from British authorities, his congregation had slipped away, following their chiefs to safety in inland Manawatu. Ironside was then transferred to Nelson, where he continued his work as a Wesleyan missionary with both Pākehā and Māori until 1855, later describing this period as the happiest time in his life.
What happened to Richard Cook is unknown, but no doubt both thanking his lucky stars and fearing retribution at the hands of Kuika's relatives, he would almost certainly have made a quick exit after the trial and speedily moved to somewhere well away from the Cook Strait area.
Kuika's grave became part of the small private Kākāpo Bay Cemetery at the present Kākāpo Bay Scenic Reserve, where several members of the Guard family were later buried. This gravesite had become sadly neglected over the years, but in recent times has been comprehensively upgraded by Guard family descendants.
Note:
A number of the whalers had what were known as "Māori wives". Interestingly, Edward Jerningham Wakefield, who as part of his travels in 1840 visited Jacky Guard's whaling station known as Te Awaiti, at Tory Channel, later made the following comment in his book Adventure in New Zealand, which covered his journeys around the country.
"A very important part of the preparation for the whaling season was providing the party with native wives for the season. Those who remained during the summer were generally provided with a permanent companion".
While Kuika and Kataraina had been officially married to their respective partners by the Rev. Ironside, it seems that a number of these "wives" were in effect "comfort women", regarded as a commodity. This was clearly a common arrangement, made through the various local chiefs in exchange for trade goods, with the women concerned probably having little say in the matter.
The Rev. Ironside confirmed this practice, noting after setting up his mission at Ngakuta Bay that Māori women were traded by their chiefs as temporary wives to visiting seamen in exchange for such as a keg of tobacco, and that these temporary wives sometimes found it difficult to extricate themselves from the persuasions of unscrupulous Europeans.
References
Mitchell, Hilary & John
Te Tau Ihu O Te Waka / A History of Māori of Nelson and Marlborough
Volume 2, Chapter 2, The Coming of Christianity. See pg 83 for Kuika's story
Chambers, W.A.
Samuel Ironside in New Zealand, 1839-1857, pub. Ray Richards, Auckland, in association
with the Wesley Historical Society of New Zealand
Ch 7, Pioneering in Cloudy Bay 1840-1843 pp 101-145. Includes details about Kuika's murder (pg 28) and the aftermath of the Wairau Affray.
Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
The Prow website: Stories from the Top of the South
The Prow website: Stories from the Top of the South
National Library of New Zealand blog post
Wikipedia article
See also the book "Guards of the Bay" by Don Grady (pub. 1978), a history of the Guard family, whalers and sealers in the Cook Strait area who founded the Port Underwood whaling station at Kakapo Bay.
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