The Enderby Settlement

By Conon Fraser

This book is a history of the British Enderby settlement on the Auckland Islands 1849–52 and its associated whaling venture. Isolation, a stormswept climate, unproductive soil, inexperienced crews, drunkenness and above all an unexpected shortage of whales meant the raw colony ran into trouble and the parent company found itself facing disaster. Two special commissioners were sent to either close the venture down or move it elsewhere, and a bitter struggle developed, with Charles Enderby refusing to admit defeat and Governor Sir George Grey reluctantly becoming involved. Nevertheless the settlement collapsed, and the few Maori settlers on the islands, who had preceded and benefited from the colonists’ presence, left soon after. Little trace of the colony remains, and the Auckland Islands are much as they were before Charles Enderby attempted to realise his dream: uninhabited, isolated, wild and beautiful, and now of World Heritage status.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Otago University Press
• Release date: May 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9780947522377

Book preview

For my dearest wife Jackie, to whom I dedicated my first boys’ adventure book some 60 years ago. Through all these years you have given me your own time and talent, support and encouragement. For this I give, in small return, my love and thanks.

Published by Otago University Press

P.O. Box 56 / Level 1, 398 Cumberland Street

Dunedin, New Zealand

[e-mail]

www.otago.ac.nz

First published in 2014

Text © 2014 Conon Fraser

Photographs © the photographers as named.

Where no photographer is credited, these photos are courtesy of the author

The moral rights of the author and photographers have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-877578-59-5 (print)

ISBN 978-0-947522-36-0 (Kindle Mobi)

ISBN 978-0-947522-37-7 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-0-947522-38-4 (ePDF)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

National Library of New Zealand.

This book is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or storage in any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Front cover: Detail from The Enderby Settlement in 1850, showing the peninsula dividing the two bays – Erebus Cove and Davis Bay (artist unknown). (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ref. 18971 d. 65)

Ebook conversion 2017 by meBooks

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Chapter One: Raw Beginnings

Chapter Two: Whaling South

Chapter Three: Settling In

Chapter Four: Mackworth and Munce

Chapter Five: Otago Interlude

Chapter Six: Sir George Grey’s Visit

Chapter Seven: Difficult Times

Chapter Eight: Rumblings and Rumours

Chapter Nine: Macquarie Island Episode

Chapter Ten: The Special Commissioners

Chapter Eleven: The Downs Crisis

Chapter Twelve: Enderby Under Siege

Chapter Thirteen: Rights and Wrongs of Passage

Chapter Fourteen: A Hollow Victory

Chapter Fifteen: End of the Dream

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

An aerial view of the Enderby Settlement site, from the Enderby Settlement Diaries. Note the coastal fringe of flowering rata.

J. Kendrick

Acknowledgements

This account of the Enderby Settlement began as a chapter in my 1986 book on New Zealand’s subantarctic islands, Beyond the Roaring Forties. The book followed the National Film Unit production of the same title, which I directed. I spent several weeks on the Auckland Islands, working at all the locations of importance to the Enderby Settlement. I am grateful to the National Film Unit and the Department of Conservation for that wonderful assignment.

In 1984 we went down as a small crew on the Acheron, skippered by the late Alex Black and his wife Colleen; and again in 1985 with accompanying scientists on HMNZS Monowai with its Wasp helicopter, piloted by Lt Cdr Dave Washer, which gave me the opportunity to take – and sometimes snatch! – aerial shots during trial runs for filming.

Considerable research had already taken place, and a great deal more was to follow, most of it well before the huge advantage of the Internet. Of the many people who helped me, I must give special thanks to Paul Dingwall for his support and input, and to Chris Robertson, who put me on to Mackworth’s diary, in the first place, and then Munce’s diary. Both were generous in passing on information.

In New Zealand, I would like to thank Jill Goodwin, Miranda Johnson and Diane Woods of the Alexander Turnbull Library and National Library; Kate de Courcy and Robert Eruera of the Auckland Libraries Sir George Grey Special Collections; Georgia Prince of the Auckland Libraries; David McDonald and Anne Jackman of the Hocken Library; Alistair Carlile of the Auckland War Memorial Museum; Baden Norris of the Canterbury Museum; Sandra Quinn of Taupo Library; National Archives Wellington; Gareth Winter of Wairarapa Archives; and Chris Edkins of DOC for originating the maps and Good Graphic Design for amending them. Also, Kay Beets, Richard Bruce, Wilford Davis, Des Downes, Barbara Enderby, Cdr Brett Fotheringham, Pauline Goodger, Sarah Howell, (the late) Hazel Lane, Wayne Marriott, Des Price, Rhys Richards, Ken Scadden, Rowley Taylor, Dr Murray Williams and Graeme Valpy.

In Australia, I would like to thank Susan Mercer and Judy Nelson of the Mitchell Library, NSW; State Library of Tasmania Archives; and Janet Denne, Judy Tadman and (the late) Harold Munce. And in Canada, Madelene Allen. In Britain, I’d like to thank David Prior of the House of Lords Reference Library (now Parliamentary Archives, Houses of Parliament); Bob Headland of Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University; Dr Leedham-Green of Cambridge University Library; Jonathan Smith of Trinity College Cambridge; the Public Record Office, Kew (now National Archives) and Dr M.K. Banton; Dr Carol Jacobi and Edward Smith of Westminster School records; Christopher Allan of Ede & Ravenscroft; the Royal Geographical Society; Admiralty Library, Ministry of Defence; and the National Maritime Museum Greenwich; also John Enderby, Barbara Ludlow, Sir Digby Mackworth and Professor James Mackworth.

Several of the above have died in the years since my researches first began and I am sad that they are not able to appreciate the results of their involvement.

My grateful thanks go to my editor, Gillian Tewsley, whose work has been sympathetic, perceptive and thorough. I am indebted to Otago University Press former publisher Wendy Harrex, who took on this project, and her successor, Rachel Scott, who saw it through to completion. My thanks also go to the rest of the team at Otago University Press.

Finally, special thanks to my wife Jackie for her careful and perceptive reading, encouragement and suggestions made over successive drafts.

Conon Fraser

Taupo

Author’s Note

A chance remark by Dr David Waite, while giving ornithologist C.J.R. Robertson of the Wildlife Service the required medical check before one of Christopher’s research trips to New Zealand’s subantarctic islands in 1974, was the beginning of my long involvement with the Enderby Settlement. Dr Waite happened to mention that an uncle of his, Des Downes, had come across an old diary written at the Enderby Settlement on the Auckland Islands, while he was clearing out the attic of a deceased aunt’s house. The diarist, William Mackworth, had married Juliet Valpy, Downes’ great-grandmother, and she had passed the diary down through the family after William’s early death.

The existence of a second diary, by William Munce, was discovered in 1994 by Madelene Allen of Canada,¹ great-granddaughter of Robert Holding, a survivor of the Invercauld, wrecked on the Auckland Islands in 1864. Following up on her early researches at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, Chris Robertson traced the original of the diary in 1998 through surviving relatives of William Munce to Winifred Davenport, Munce’s great-granddaughter. The two diaries were combined a year later as the Enderby Settlement Diaries (ESD); and I was involved with this project as a contributor and co-editor.

For most of the time between the discovery of these two diaries, virtually nothing was known about William Mackworth himself, and disappointingly little about daily life at the settlement. I had to read between the lines to understand Mackworth’s occasional outbursts of loneliness and frustration. He did not even mention meeting and falling in love with Juliet during a business trip to Otago from the settlement, or that his cousin, Digby Mackworth, on a visit from England, was with him at the time. We learn of such personal details from William Munce² and Juliet’s sister.³

The author filming a skua, with inquisitive sea lion (taken on Campbell Island in 1985). Bayly Watson

In June 1996 I was in London in the search room of the Parliamentary Archives, looking through the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers⁴ and other material for details on the break-up of the Enderby Settlement, and happened to mention I was having trouble gleaning information on William Mackworth. I had thought he might have settled in Dunedin, but I had already discovered that there was not a single Mackworth in the entire New Zealand phone directory, which was surprising, as it had not struck me as a particularly unusual name. My helper went away without comment, and returned a few minutes later with copies of Debrett’s and Burke’s Peerage: an old Burke’s volume of 1856 with a full account of the Mackworth family lineage, and a later volume of 1959 recording one of Herbert Mackworth’s sons as ‘William Augustus [Mackworth], b. 3 March 1825; m. 22 Sept. 1852, Juliet Anne, dau. of Francis Valpy,⁵ of Dunedin, and d. 4 Dec. 1855.’ So at the time of the Enderby Settlement Mackworth was a young man of 25, half Enderby’s age. And he had married Juliet within six weeks of the break-up of the Enderby Settlement! This information led to the discovery of valuable references to William and Juliet in her sister Caroline’s unpublished memoirs.⁶

Other lines of research led to correspondence with several of the settlers’ descendants, among them the late Pauline Goodger, who married the great-grandson of Thomas Goodger, the settlement’s storekeeper and Enderby’s valet. I began a correspondence with her after coming across a letter she had donated to the Canterbury Museum. The letter was from Charles Enderby to Tom’s wife Mary,⁷ and in it Enderby, after advising Mary to dissuade her son from serious gambling on horses, gave his somewhat spartan views on the cost that children put their parents to during their upbringing. This contact, like several others, led to valuable background information on several of the settlement’s families.

It took time to disentangle the numerous letters, reports and repetitions of the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, in particular, and to marshal events as they unfolded, from the initial optimism with which plans were laid and Enderby’s three ships left England to set up his whaling colony, to the hopeful and challenging early days of the settlement, and Enderby’s determination and belief that setbacks could and would be overcome – a determination which became increasingly desperate and indefensible in the face of gathering doubts and concern back in London. Finally came the bitter clash of personalities and loyalties involving the colony and the company, which led to Enderby’s departure and the end of the venture and of his utopian dream in just under three years.

The Enderby Settlement was notable as the smallest and most remote of British colonies. This must have caused the colonists some misgivings but also a certain pride as they set out from England, not knowing then that the settlement was also to prove the shortest-lived of all Britain’s colonies.

Enderby’s flagship, the Samuel Enderby, 422 tons, leaving Cowes in the Isle of Wight, where it was built, in 1834.

Artist: Huggins. Courtesy New Bedford Whaling Museum, Massachusetts

CHAPTER ONE

Raw Beginnings

After an often stormy passage, the Samuel Enderby finally reached the remote subantarctic Auckland Islands, just over 300 kilometres south of New Zealand, on 2 December 1849. It took a further two days after first sighting the main island to make the comparative shelter of Port Ross.¹

The largest and finest of three ships which had left England three and a half months earlier, the Samuel Enderby carried Charles Enderby, the Lieutenant Governor and Chief Commissioner of this raw new British colony and whaling settlement, together with the first lot of settlers. They had understood the islands to be uninhabited,² but as Thomas Younger, the colony’s civil engineer, recalled years later:

When we got close in, to our astonishment we saw a boat coming off from the point opposite Ocean [Ewing] Island … There were in it three or four Maoris completely naked with the exception of a bit of sealskin around the loins. They were painted and had feathers in their hair. There was one woman. One of them came on board. We were still outside. We had a Maori sailor on board. He asked him to pilot us in. From that day he was called Pilot Jack. A savage looking Maori he was. The sailors first took him and dressed him in some of their clothes. He took charge and took the vessel right in. We anchored between Shoe Island and the settlement.³

Enderby would have known that a small number of Maori and their Moriori slaves from the Chatham Islands were there from the reports of HMS Fly, which had visited the islands a year and two months previously, but not wishing to cause alarm, he had chosen to keep the information to himself.⁴ He felt the fact that Maori had been there for eight years and had no wish to be removed ‘speaks much in favour of the place’, and he believed that their presence could be mutually advantageous.⁵

This page and following page: Location maps of the Auckland Islands.

Enderby Settlement Diaries, p. xviii

Although he knew the location chosen for his settlement would be in or close to its natural state, it was still a challenging sight. A narrow pebble beach gave straight onto the dense and twisted rata forest that grew on this leeward side of the island. Behind the wind-cropped trees a drab and almost impenetrable scrub rose to bare hills lost in mist and cloud – wild terrain that might have seemed familiar to someone from Yorkshire or the Scottish Highlands; but these were people from the gaslit city streets of London and the mild pastoral countryside of southern England. They had naively expected a coastal plain with green grass, complete with the pigs, poultry, vegetables and gooseberry bushes introduced by Sir James Clarke Ross’s British Antarctic Expedition several years before. Instead, almost everything was new: the absence of any sort of clearing; the sea lions that accompanied the boats as they made their way from the ships to the land; the gnarled rata trees; and the tattooed, half-naked New Zealand Maori. It was all very daunting. They realised they would have to live aboard the ships while a clearing was made for the prefabricated cottages and buildings that were still in crates in the ships’ holds.

When they landed on the shelving beach, Charles Enderby delivered, as Lieutenant Governor, ‘a suitable address to those under his command.’⁶ In the following days, as land was laboriously cleared, he had meetings with the two principal Maori chiefs: Matioro, whose pa was in the throes of being moved from Enderby Island to just north of the settlement; and Ngatere, whose pa was at Ocean Point, facing Ocean Island⁷ – the pa from which Pilot Jack’s canoe had come out to guide in the Samuel Enderby. With some difficulty Enderby made the position clear to the chiefs, explaining that Abraham Bristow had returned the year after his discovery to take possession of the Auckland Islands for Britain back in 1807; and that the islands now belonged to the Southern Whale Fishery Company by Royal Charter from the Crown. The Maori would be compensated for their relinquishment of land and any claim to it, and would be allowed to continue their harvesting and growing of crops. Employment would be available to them, and they would be able to purchase clothing and provisions at the Company’s store. Enderby later noted: ‘I have found them strictly honest and willing, and also able boatmen, whilst some of them have [already] been engaged in the Whale Fishery.’⁸

On 14 December the Brisk, the second of the three ships which had set sail together, arrived under the command of Captain Thomas Tapsell. The ship’s first officer was George Cook, whose mother was ‘a native of New Zealand’ from the Bay of Islands. Cook spoke fluent Maori, and was able to explain to the chiefs the terms of an agreement along the lines of Enderby’s earlier discussions with them, before the document was ‘regularly drawn up and signed’.⁹ Not that Cook’s services were always needed: most Maori chiefs of the time spoke passable and often excellent English, while Matioro’s people became colloquial enough to refer to the Governor as ‘the old cock’!¹⁰ The Europeans, or Pakeha, on the other hand, had virtually no knowledge of the Maori language: they had considerable difficulty over the pronounciation and spelling of names, and of Ngatere’s in particular, calling him variously Nannaterri and Etteri; however, Matioro and Ngatere seem the most accurate.¹¹

Charles Enderby, about 1860.

Royal Geographical Society, London, PR/026545

Although only a quarter the size of Carnley Harbour – or the Southern Harbour as it was referred to by the Enderby settlers – Port Ross had been the harbour favoured by the three Antarctic expeditions of 1840: Ross’s, Charles Wilkes’s United States Exploring Expedition, and the French naval expedition under Dumont d’Urville. It would also be used later by the German expedition of 1874–75, which was based at Terror Cove to make observations of the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. Port Ross had excellent anchorages, and offered a more favourable approach from the west than the Southern Harbour with its treacherous Victoria Passage.

The two ships of d’Urville’s Antarctic expedition anchored by Shoe Island in Port Ross, March 1840.

Louis le Breton. Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref B.052.014

Bristow had named the harbour Sarah’s Bosom after the Sarah, in which he had returned a year after his discovery of the Auckland Islands to claim them for Britain. Ocean Island, well within the protection of the harbour, was named after Bristow’s whaling ship Ocean, in which he first came across the islands in 1806; while beautiful little Rose Island west of Enderby Island is named after Bristow’s sister Sarah Rose.¹²

Port Ross, like Carnley Harbour, is part of an ancient volcano, and can be recognised as such by outcrops of basaltic columnar rock on Enderby Island, Dea’s Head and at other points. It has the shape of a narrowing funnel, widest at its seaward end to the northeast, where it is sheltered from the ocean by Enderby Island, the group’s third largest, and by Rose and Ewing islands.

From Erebus Cove, the site of the Enderby Settlement, named like Terror Cove after Ross’s ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, the harbour narrows into the steep-sided inlet of Laurie Harbour, cutting deep into the island. Ross had noted that ‘after passing Ocean and Rose’s Islands, a ship may anchor in perfect safety in any part, but the most convenient will be found to be between these islands and Erebus Cove, where abundance of wood and water may be obtained.’¹³ Of Laurie Harbour, he commented that it ‘is well calculated for the location of an establishment for the prosecution of the whale fishery; many black and several sperm whales came into the harbour whilst we were there, and from such a situation the fishery might be pursued with very great advantage’.¹⁴ Ross had referred to the harbour as Rendezvous Harbour, but Enderby renamed it Port Ross ‘in compliment to our distinguished navigator’.

Terror Cove, the next bay north of the Enderby Settlement, has a double bay backed by rata forest and flat land similar to the settlement’s Davis Bay and Erebus Cove. The two coves were named after Sir James Clark Ross’s ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

On an overcast summer’s day, the brilliant red of the rata in flower (on the shore of Terror Cove) looks almost drab, its tropical brilliance hidden until the sun shines.

Ross’s suggestion of Laurie Harbour for the settlement site was quickly abandoned because of its steep sides and the force of the prevailing westerly winds that sweep down it. Instead, some hundred acres of more gradually rising land sheltered by Beacon Point and by inland hills was chosen, near the north bank of Laurie Harbour where it widens into Port Ross. The site comprised Davis Bay, a small peninsula and Erebus Cove. What appeared to be fertile and usable land lay towards Terror Cove and beyond, to the north.

Enderby recalls:

It is impossible to describe the confusion and excitement attending the first formation of a new settlement, where there was not a spot on which to pitch a tent; the land had to be cleared of timber of a very hard description, and to be levelled, which was by no means an easy task, preparatory to the erection of the storehouse and dwellings, which had been taken out in frame; these, with a miscellaneous collection of stores and goods, had to be taken out of the ships, to afford the means of getting at others stowed below them, and of sorting them, and landed, with great difficulty, at such places as were most contiguous to the buildings in the course of erection.¹⁵

Site of the Company’s settlement and intended town (colour added later).

From Abstract of Reports

One of Enderby’s more pleasant tasks, as the chaos of arrival settled in to some sort of order, was to conduct the marriage of 25-year-old George Cook, first mate of the Brisk, and 21-year-old Matilda Fawkes, a daughter of Gloucestershire tenant farmers, who is thought to have been a maid in Enderby’s household at Greenwich and had probably come out on the Samuel Enderby.¹⁶ They were the first to be married at the Auckland Islands, on board the Brisk on 22 December 1849.¹⁷

George and Matilda Cook, the first to be married at the Enderby Settlement aboard the Brisk, on 22 December 1849. It is thought Matilda was employed in Enderby’s Greenwich household. George, the Brisk’s first mate and later the colony’s ships’ husband, had a high-born Maori mother in the Bay of Islands and acted as the colony’s interpreter.

Courtesy descendant Des Price

George Cook had an interesting background. His father, who was English, had served with the British garrison holding Napoleon on St Helena, and came to New Zealand on a whaling voyage in 1822. At the Bay of Islands he met George’s mother Tiraha, a close relative of Tamati Waka Nene, one of the great Maori chiefs of the North. George Cook (or Hori Kuku), born at Orongo Bay near Russell in 1825, was the first of their twelve children: five boys followed by seven girls. The affinity with the sea that began with the father continued with the sons; whaling was in their blood.

On 27 December the third of the first three ships, the Fancy, under Captain Davidson, finally made Port Ross. William Mackworth, Enderby’s young Assistant Commissioner, was on board. Mackworth describes their near disastrous arrival at the Auckland Islands in a letter to his mother.¹⁸

My beloved Mother –

It has pleased that Almighty Protector, to whose care I daily commit you all, to guide me in safety to this distant land, and to give me health and strength to get through my most difficult duties. On 27th Dec. after a long voyage in which our two great achievements were, killing the first whale in the Company’s service, and keeping ourselves alive, we entered Port Ross and were boarded immediately by his excellency the Governor.

Four months and a half on board the ‘Fancy’ crowded to excess and battling against the furies of the sea, I shall never forget, nor think of without shuddering at the recollection. The patient resignation, particularly on the part of the women, at a time when we had good cause to doubt our making the island at all, I shall also never forget. Here let me relate an event which occurred on the morning of our sighting of the island.

For a long time before we reached the longitude of this place, we suffered severely from gales of wind, and for the last two or three days were visited by mists, and were consequently unable to obtain satisfactory observations – our only plan then was to run only by day (knowing ourselves to be in about the right latitude) and to lay to at night, with the fear (not pleasing) of drifting on a lee shore. At six o’clock on the morning of the 27th Dec. completely exhausted with watching, and dreading the probable fact of our having run past the island altogether, knowing how small was the chance of the ‘Fancy’ ever beating back against the prevailing winds of this latitude, I endeavoured to resign myself into the hands of an all-wise God, but to entreat him for the sake of you dear ones to hear and help me. My ‘Amen’ was uttered, and at that instant the shout of ‘Land oh!!’ was roared from the mast head and flew through the ship – the mist had partially cleared and shewed us our position; we were just running past the southern point of Adam’s Island and would have been altogether out of sight in an hour had it not been seen. Let any one who doubts the Omnipresence of God hear this.

By the time Mackworth arrived, three weeks of hard work had transformed the densely canopied forest – land ‘where there was not a spot on which to pitch a tent’¹⁹ – into a raw clearing that was being extended by axemen and sawyers, with the help of Maori labourers. Stumps had been removed from building sites, and work was well under way on several prefabricated cottages and two or three larger buildings, in spite of delays caused by bad weather and the difficulty of making firm, level foundations among hard, twisted rata roots and soft mud interlaced with root fibres.

The Manning Portable Colonial Cottage had already been widely used in the new Australian colonies of New South Wales and Victoria. Wall panels slotted in between grooved posts bolted to a continuous floor plate. Floor joists, tongue-and-groove boards, rafters and beams were all precut and numbered, with weatherboards to be fine-trimmed at the site. Windows were already glazed; and windowframes, doors and doorframes were prepainted.²⁰ Tarred roofing felt was used for insulation and to make the buildings waterproof until the wooden shingles were nailed on. Dressers, food safes, tables and furniture had been designed to pack inside each other to save space in the ships’ holds.²¹

With all three ships at anchor and the colonists able to go ashore – although they still had to sleep on board – New Year’s Day celebrations took place on 1 January 1850: halfway through the century and halfway around the world. Enderby had already given his ‘suitable address’ to the first lot of settlers on stepping ashore, but after everyone’s safe arrival this was the ideal occasion for him to be formally read into office by Mackworth proclaiming the Royal Charter