Ghost story
The old wrestler clambers out of his dinghy, drags it on to shore. It’s not much of a beach, 30 metres wide at the most, and it’s stony, slippery as hell. He looks up the valley, dark and damp this winter’s morning, and breaks into a grin. “This is a truly special place,” he says. “You’ll see.”
He first came here in 1971. He was 37 years old, the British Empire professional wrestling champion. “There’s always someone in the family who’s got a feeling for ancestry. And I had the bug. I was the first to come back.”
Growing up on a Pukekohe sheep farm, the youngest of six, John da Silva had heard the stories about Mangati Bay. How his grandfather, a press-ganged whaler from Santa Catalina, Brazil, had washed up there. How he cobbled together a home from stray kauri logs and scavenged iron. How he and wife Polly Mary hacked out a farm, raising pigs, goats, ducks and nine kids.
These were good yarns, but for John it was incidental colour framing the real story: Mangati Bay as a place of magic and myth.
He’d pester his old man: tell me more. Well, Domingo Silva would say, when it was stormy and the wind howled down the valley, you’d sometimes hear the sounds of battle. “Now… shhhhhh,” he’d tell his rapt boy. “Listen. Listen carefully. Can you hear that? That noise? What is it?” A distant haka — the roar of a hundred warriors. But from where exactly? And then — thud, thud, thud — so regular, almost routine: the metronomic midnight chop of an axeman from deep in the bush. A ghost. But of whom?
More, John would say. Tell me about the spirits. Tell me about the voices that came out of the ground. And his father would smile, ruffle his hair and tell him he’d have to go there one day and find out for himself. Return to the island where I was born and where your grandfather is buried.
Now, John had decided, was that time. “I tried to get Father to come back and give us the lay of the land. ‘No boy, I can’t.’ He was too ill. And so I convinced my older brother, Bruce, a bushman, to come on the pilgrimage.”
They arrived by flying boat. Tall, broad-shouldered, straight-backed, the da Silvas stood out. And they’d worn their best clothes — suits, ties, fedora hats (though, incongruously, they lugged a tent and swag). City slickers. And isn’t that John da Silva — the wrestler? The locals, once they stopped chuckling, were curious. What were they here for?
But while the boys knew where they were going — well, they knew the name at least — they had no practical plan on how to get there. One thing’s
