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| ISBN-13: | 9781775581505 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 242 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Singer in a Songless Land
A Life of Edward Tregear 1846â"1931
By K.R. Howe
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 1991 Kerry HoweAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-150-5
CHAPTER 1
'The Fates remove me From human dwellings to the desert lands' 1846–1882
THE TREGEAR FAMILY name, according to Edward Robert Tregear's schoolboy notes, went back over 1500 years, a date in Cornish history which 'probably no other family can claim'. The name 'Tregear' meant honourable dwelling place and was located in Crowan, fruitful and green. The Romans had built a fort there. St Patrick's disciple, St Sampson, journeyed to Cornwall in A.D. 538 and converted the inhabitants to Christianity. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries members of the Tregear family at Tregear were sheriffs and royal receivers of land taxes; their coat of arms was 'argent, a fesse voided sable charged with three torteaues between three Cornish choughs proper'. Edward Tregear made tombstone rubbings of this crest. That particular family line died out in 1732. But other Tregear family branches had ensured that the name Tregear was common throughout England's southern Celtic realms.
His notes display a precocious interest in etymology, which remained a life-long passion:
The old Celtic Cornish 'tregar' is not the origin of our name. It is, like ours, from 'tre' a place, a house, a town — thence 'trega' means 'to dwell, to remain, to stay, to endure'. Tregear, however, means 'The Fortified place'; from 'ker' a fort. (welch 'caer', as in Caerinarthan, Carlisle etc) This was because at Tregear in Crowan, are remains of an old Roman fortress, still locally called 'The Camp' — probably a survival from 'Canipus'. I have this from good Cornish scholars. 'ker' takes a feminine form 'gear' in place names.
Edward was a sensitive and highly imaginative boy who steeped himself in medieval legend and Celtic mythology. He developed a strong sense of a living historical and mythological landscape from his fossickings among ancient ruins along England's southern coasts, and from tales he first heard in his nursery. Later in his life he pondered on the imaginative and historical consciousness that came when ancestors remained a 'living presence ... [in] cairn, and abbey, and ivy-covered tower', and on the
tender and subtle element in the endless romance of fairy, and dwarf, and giant, localised for almost every green knoll or running stream which youth loves to frequent. Pixy and brownie, sleeping princess and fairy godmother, for the noonday visions; banshee and werewolf, ghost and ogre, for delightful shudderings when the stories are told in the twilight or by the winter fire.
Edward was fiercely proud of his ancestry. In old age he still revelled in the belief that his pedigree went 'back to the mystic faery days of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round table', and he never lost an opportunity to attribute his 'dreams' to his 'Keltic blood'. Throughout his life he worked on a huge and elaborate family tree. He was a scholarly lad who could read and write Greek and Latin at the age of seven. He took particular delight in heroic tales of Greek gods and men. Similarly he was enthralled by Nordic legend and deeply influenced by his visions of the cold and whiteness of arctic realms.
Edward's immediate family had been seafarers for at least four generations, and there was at some stage a marriage connection with a Breton family. As a child he led a 'pampered' life in feminine family surroundings at very frequently changing addresses in Southampton. His mother, Mary (née Norris), was most 'delicate' and he had two younger sisters, Mary and Ellen. His father, William James, was seldom home. In 1840, two years before he married Mary, he joined P & O as mate on a river steamer on the Nile. Their first child, William Vincent, was born nine months after their marriage but died a year later. William James rose through the ranks. In 1844 he was first officer and sailed mostly on the Peninsula and Mediterranean runs. Edward Robert was born 1 May 1846, and Mary and Ellen in 1848 and 1850. William achieved the rank of captain by 1857. He was by now sailing further afield, to India and China. Edward marvelled at tales of the exotic East and treasures his father brought back, such as intricately carved ivory from China. A feeling for life beyond Southampton came too from the adventures of Captain Tregear's half-brother, Vincent. He was a soldier as well as a 'scholar, numismatist and archaeologist' at Meerut in India and allegedly was the first or second victim of the Indian mutiny in 1857. Edward also spent some time, he called it his 'playtime', at Le Havre, either on holiday or perhaps at school. Later in his life he described how he had had 'a place in the Rue de Paris ... and used to spend ... Sundays at L'Archet & at Honfleur and other sunny pleasances.'
The Tregear family was happy and financially comfortable. Captain Tregear earned a good salary and invested in East India Company stock. The studious and very bright Edward was sent to 'boarding school'. But his path to scholarly honours abruptly ended. Alleged financial 'corruption' saw the family 'almost penniless' — was it Captain Tregear's investments that went sour, or, more darkly hinted in family folklore, was the good captain caught in gambling debt? The misery was compounded when Captain Tregear took ill while transporting troops from Mauritius to Bombay. On 28 August 1859, the day after reaching Bombay, he died of a 'low typhoid fever'. The family moved into cheaper accommodation in Southampton and to help make ends meet Mary was forced to run a 'baby linen repository'. Eventually the family decided to emigrate to New Zealand. It is not known why they chose that colony. Edward, his mother and two sisters sailed as cabin passengers on the vessel War Spirit and arrived in Auckland in June 1863.
Apart from Edward's notes on his family ancestry, his only other early writings to survive are unpublished poems. Some of them contain conventional and predictable enough references to being torn away from a homeland, and from some real or imagined loved-one. His poem 'Onward' contemplates his future:
Onward and outward bound!
What shall I find in the days to be?
Strong brother-claspings from stranger-hands,
Respect and honour and growing fame,
Till men bow down when they hear my name
A wealth of love & a wealth of lands
In a nation that is free.
Onward and outward bound!
What shall I find in the days to be?
Green pastures stretching from hill to wave,
Red-fleck'd with cattle, white-fleck'd with sheep,
Or — a land that lies in a sunburnt sleep,
And proffers only a narrow grave
'Neath the shade of some tropic-tree.
....
What could a poor, chivalrous, scholarly, seventeen-year-old poet do in the raw colony of New Zealand? For some years he lived in total obscurity with his mother and two sisters in the tiny settlement of Warkworth, some sixty kilometres north of Auckland. Why the Tregears went there is unknown. Perhaps they were enticed there by sustained advertising of land at Mahurangi in Auckland newspapers of 1863 and the prospect of Crown grants liberally offered to immigrants by the Auckland provincial government during these years. Land records show that in 1866 Tregear's mother together with Henry Palmer applied for a Crown grant under the Auckland Wastelands Amendment Act 1862. Title to 183 acres was granted to them as joint owners in 1870. The details of the connection with Palmer are not known. Palmer and his wife and their numerous children were the local 'manor folk' who were at the centre of the fledgling civic and commercial life in the district and seem to have taken a paternal interest in new immigrants to the district. Tregear also applied for a crown grant in 1866 and in 1869 was granted thirty-nine acres further to the north near Whangarei Heads. He sold it almost immediately. Warkworth was a new and primitive town which bustled with the clearing of bush for farming, and the building of roads, bridges, a flour mill, shops, a church, library and school. The only way out was by small coastal vessels down the narrow muddy Mahurangi River to the larger tidal estuary and thence by sea to Auckland. It is not known what the Tregears did at Warkworth.
The family had arrived in Auckland barely a week before the first major campaign of the New Zealand wars took place — Governor Grey's invasion of the Waikato early in July 1863. The fighting took place well south of Auckland, but Mahurangi was not unaffected. Governor Grey had taken pity on some 180 Maori prisoners of war who were being kept in squalid conditions on a hulk on the Waitemata Harbour and had them transferred to his small island of Kawau, lying just off the Mahurangi coast. They soon escaped to the mainland and entrenched themselves on a hill not far from Warkworth. They raided local farms for food and supplies and in November 1864 some thirty descended on the town itself and demanded flour and boots from some of the inhabitants including Henry Palmer. There was very little or no violence but the European settlers of the district were in uproar until Grey arranged for the 'prisoners' to have safe conduct back to their Waikato lands.
Edward Tregear's existence is more readily traced after he joined the Auckland Engineer Volunteers in January 1867. This corps consisted of surveyors assisted by labourers and protected by armed scouts. Tregear was one of the latter and carried a carbine. Shortly after his joining, the Volunteers were sent to survey land which had been confiscated from Maori 'rebels' in the Tauranga district in the wake of their military defeat at Gate Pa and Te Ranga in 1864. The actual occupation of this land by Europeans was fiercely resisted by groups of Maori who inhabited the very rugged bushclad hills to the south and east of the Tauranga coastal lowlands — some of Ngai Te Rangi who had defended Gate Pa and were after vengeance, and the Piri Rakau ('the people who cling to the forest'). Many of these Maori had adopted the Hauhau religion and its guerilla tactics. Support came too from some of their traditional allies on the Coromandel Peninsula and the Waikato. Late in 1866 survey parties were sent into the area behind Tauranga to divide up the land for European settlement. The Piri Rakau and their allies sacked one of the surveyors' camps and killed a military settler who tried to occupy land allotted to him. In January 1867 the government ordered contingents of the Waikato militia into the region and they began skirmishing with the Maori forces at close quarters in the heavy bush. A contingent of Te Arawa Maori, eager to get at their longstanding enemies, joined forces with the European troops.
The Auckland Engineer Volunteers, including Tregear, joined the campaign in February for the push to Maori strongholds at Irihanga and Whakamarama. Tregear had his first taste of bush fighting and came under fire several times. He saw some of his compatriots shot and die. Most of the skirmishing, though, was undertaken by Te Arawa, led by Major William Mair, and within weeks the 'rebel' forces had been driven further inland, their crops and settlements destroyed. Tregear soon rose to the rank of corporal in the Engineer Corps, and later received the New Zealand War Medal for coming under fire in this Tauranga campaign.
Tregear did not stay long with the Engineer Volunteers and after 1867 stopped attending their parades in Auckland. But on the basis of his experience in the corps he decided to become a surveyor. This was a common enough occupation for well-educated migrants, since some mathematical knowledge was one of the few 'intellectual' skills then in any demand in the young colony. By this stage Tregear, along with his mother and sisters, resided in Parnell in Auckland, having apparently abandoned their Warkworth home. In September 1868 Tregear was licensed by the Auckland Provincial Government as a goldfield surveyor for the Thames district. Almost immediately he applied for a licence to survey under the Native Lands Act of 1865 and this was approved in August 1869. In 1871 his goldfield licence was extended to cover the Auckland Province.
Tregear's first surveying work was on the Thames goldfields. At one stage he briefly worked as a miner himself at Ponga Flat. He then moved to the Coromandel goldfields as a surveyor and was resident there during 1871. Like many goldfield surveyors he sometimes bought parcels of shares in mining companies. Between 1869 and 1872, when the Thames and Coromandel goldfields boomed, he invested in at least eight small companies. His total shares had a nominal value of almost £4,000, though as was the custom shareholders normally paid up only a fraction of this value. All these companies were soon officially wound up or simply disappeared. Seven of them paid no dividends and the shareholders' capital seems to have been lost. The one company which did pay a first and final dividend saw its shareholders recover 12s 6d in the pound. Tregear's nominal investment in this company was £90.
Tregear was a fastidious person. He loathed the harsh, drunken, violent life of the goldfields. For the rest of his life he was an ardent prohibitionist. Towards gold itself he seems to have had an ambivalent view. It was a great economic resource for the colony:
For fair New Zealand with her beauty-dower
Feels the sweet bridal-Kiss of mighty Gold,
And smiles with happiness and joy untold,
A new Danaë 'neath the dazzling shower.
Yet the promise 'Of wonderful riches & treasures vast' was also a 'goldlust [that] burnt ... like flame/A magic voice in ... fevered ears' and caused pain and ruin to so many.
During 1872–3 Tregear left the goldfield towns and was employed by the Land Purchase Department surveying Maori land on the rugged Coromandel peninsula at Thames, Coromandel, Whitianga and Mercury Bay. He then surveyed Maori lands on the swamps of the Hauraki Plains (Hangawera, Morrinsville, Paeroa), and further inland around the Tokoroa region and the edges of the pumice-lands. This work led Tregear into some of the remoter parts of the country where few Europeans had ever been and also into the heartland of many Maori communities. He had to come to terms with both a strange landscape and its inhabitants. The long periods he spent isolated and brooding amidst strange landforms and his discovery of Maori custom and myth were amongst his most formative experiences.
Tregear, now in his mid-twenties, was at the peak of his physical powers and seems to have been proud of the masculine pursuits in which he had been engaged in New Zealand — soldiering and travelling and living rough. Looking back to these days he reflected: 'I was once an athlete, especially at long distance walking and once at my best, at 24, all muscle and whipcord with long surveys, I walked 120 miles in 2 days in flat country — from Matamata in Waikato to Auckland.' But his physical exuberance was matched by periods of introspective gloom.
Voice of the forest Trees,
Whence comest thou, and whither dost thou go?
Whisper of fallen leaves
Why dost thou murmur in accents low
Thy notes of sorrow and speechless woe
As a spirit in anguish grieves.
What are the words of thy sad refrain
Thy hopeless burden of weary pain.
And the Voice replied
'Thou must live in the shadow great branches cast,
In the gloom of the woodland dwell,
And when my spirit hath o'er thee pass'd,
If that thou lovest me, I, at last
A part of my tale will tell.
But the whole of my secret, my burden of woe,
Not he that loveth me best may Know.
He sometimes saw himself as a poet cast into the wilderness.
... The Fates remove me
From human dwellings to the desert lands,
Where I must wander, loneliness above me,
And only thoughts of far-off friends who love me
To cheer my solitude with dream-wing'd hands.
The landscape of his mind is most vividly portrayed in 'Midnight', written at Te Whetu (between Rotorua and Tokoroa). He published it almost fifty years later, and it has been extensively anthologised by twentieth-century New Zealand editors who see in it the intellectually fashionable image of 'man alone' in an alien land.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Singer in a Songless Land by K.R. Howe. Copyright © 1991 Kerry Howe. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PROLOGUE,1. 'The Fates remove me From human dwellings to the desert landes' 1846–1882,
2. 'Every wood and hill, every lake and river is haunted by beautiful or dreadful beings' 1882–1885,
3. 'A gentleman well known in scientific circles' 1885–1891,
4. 'Apostle of bureaucracy' 1891–1896,
5. 'The moody man who pines for the voices in the mist' 1891–1896,
6. 'Practically I am the Minister of Labour' 1896–1906,
7. 'Islets of coral ringed with calm Farewell, farewell!' 1896–1906,
8. 'I look upon pessimism as mere disappointed egoism' 1906–1911,
9. 'I ... fight in the open now' 1911–1914,
10. 'To prepare ... for the Great Adventure' 1914–1931,
EPILOGUE,
ABBREVIATIONS,
REFERENCES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
PUBLICATIONS BY TREGEAR,
INDEX,