Chapter Twenty-One: Toby Was Splattered In Blood

He had the look of a mass murderer

Mar 02, 2024

The European place names of the entire area have frozen in time the historical events and personages that were influencing Europe when the first Pakeha settlers arrived in New Zealand, or of what were still important and recent memories for those first settlers:

§ The Marlborough Sounds are named for John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough;

§ Queen Charlotte Sound is named for the queen, the consort of the King of England, George III;

§ Picton, the little village at the bottom of the Queen Charlotte Sound, is named after Sir Thomas Picton, who was the military associate of the Duke of Wellington.

Picton was the most senior officer to die in the Battle of Waterloo, fighting against Napoleon;

§ Wellington is the capital of New Zealand and was named after Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington. It is just across the narrow, treacherous Cook Straits from the Marlborough Sounds, over on the North Island.

The North Island is only about fourteen miles away and can be clearly seen from the high hill on Toby’s old place on the topmost point of the South Island. That would be our next stop;

§ Cook Straits — named after the first Englishman to visit the islands, Captain James Cook, none other.

He who was killed, cut into pieces, cooked — Yes. ‘Cooked’ — and preserved, but not eaten.

All this after his men had introduced various venereal diseases into Hawaii;

§ Blenheim, the most important town in the Marlborough region of New Zealand, is named after Blenheim Palace, which was meant to be a gift from a grateful England to the Duke of Marlborough;

§ Nelson, just west of the Marlborough Sounds, is an important New Zealand coastal town. Named, of course, after Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who won the battle but lost his life in the Battle of Trafalgar, another British casualty in the desperate fight against Napoleon.

I might as well list here the rest of the main towns of the South Island so you can see the influence Great Britain and her concerns wielded on the early New Zealand imagination:

§ Christchurch, known as New Zealand’s most ‘English’ city, is the country’s second largest city and is located in the Canterbury region of the South Island.

A lovely little river runs through it — the Avon. Not as in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is named after the Scottish Avon River.

The name for Christchurch was suggested by J.R. Godley — Mr. Godley wanted to be from Christchurch! Well, sure, why not, Mr. Godley one? He had attended Christ Church, Oxford;

Queenstown—the origin of the name speaks for itself. Charlotte, she of the fifteen kids with Mad King George. Once again.

Now for Scotland. In the far south of the South Island, you will find the most remote cities in the entire world from Scotland and they have Scottish names. Dunedin and Invercargill:

§ Dunedin is the Scottish-Gaelic name for Edinburgh. Dùn Èideann. When Mark Twain visited Dunedin in the mid-1890s, he said, “The people here are Scots. They stopped here on their way to heaven, thinking they had arrived.”

Nota bene, Mark did not pass that way in the wintertime;

§ Invercargill — Inver comes from the Scottish-Gaelic inbhir, meaning “a river’s mouth.” Cargill comes from the superintendent of Otago, of which Southland was then a part. William Cargill he was.

With the exceptions of Mr. Cargill and Captain Cook, none of these events or people had even the slightest influence on, or interest in, New Zealand at all.

Oh, yes. The name of the entire country comes by way of Dutch cartographers in the seventeenth century, who named it Nieuw Zeeland — New Sea-Land, that is — after the Dutch island province Zeeland, which consists of a number of islands.

“They represent a part of England that no longer exists.”

The speaker was Owen, an Englishman we had met in Fiji on our way home from the Sydney Olympics on our first voyage Down Under, back in the year 2000. He was referring to the four Kiwis who were also vacationing that week on Turtle Island in the Yasawas.

There was a charming Kiwi couple, an elderly husband and wife, from New Plymouth, both in their eighties, and a serious, scholarly, more than elderly lesbian couple — leave me alone, people of Lesbos, Greece! — both of them botanists who delighted in pointing out to all the rest of us the fascinating tropical flora of the tiny Fiji island.

“A part of England that no longer exists,” repeated Owen.

“Or no longer exists in England, I should say. It has survived down there in New Zealand in fine people like these, nurtured there in splendid isolation.

“Like the flightless kiwi bird, I am afraid. No predators so the Kiwi people have lost their ability to fly too, in a manner of speaking. They are charming, delightfully Old World there in their newest of New Worlds. But frightfully provincial, lacking ingenuity, holding on to a past that has disappeared, has evolved elsewhere. But a past that is frozen in aspic in New Zealand.”

A part of England that no longer exists.

That explains one class, perhaps, in New Zealand. I was still thinking about that the following year, a sunny winter’s day in June of 2001 — our third scouting trip to the islands — when the mail boat dropped us off at Toby’s place at the top of Arapawa Island, the furthest point north on the South Island.

We had given up on Snake Point and decided to venture even farther into the wilderness this time.

Toby’s isolated sheep station was definitely not a part of old England but was an ultimate Kiwi frontier way of life. Another class of Kiwi folk entirely.

Toby’s spread comprised several thousand acres and was forty-five minutes by boat from Picton, if you motor up direct. In good weather. Which they sometimes have.

Back in Picton, we had been told stories about the quickly changing weather out here, the fierce winds and the rough waters as you approached the Cook Straits at the upper end of the Sounds.

We had seen pictures of some of the more recent disasters, the boats that had sunk hereabouts in recent years: The MS Mikhail Lermontov, the Soviet luxury ocean liner that had run aground on rocks on the opposite side of Queen Charlotte from Toby’s farm in 1986.

And photos of the interisland ferry, the grand, four-hundred-and-eighty-eight-foot-long Wahine, which went down in a storm near the entrance to Wellington Harbor in 1986 with a loss of fifty-three lives.

Now a windstorm was just coming up as we jumped off the mail boat and onto Toby’s decrepit wharf, which was three-quarters of the way to total ruin. Cap’n Stan had told us that Toby was desperate to sell his property and we had visions of a Garden of Eden lifestyle. Eden with no snakes.

Beau and I waved to Stan and his white mail boat, red and orange trimmed. Stan promised to pick us up the next day. Beau and I set out for Toby’s old house, situated up the hill, well back from the beach and sheltered from the windy Cook Straits by a huge boomerang-shaped hill that formed the top of Arapawa Island.

There was Toby, standing under a giant Macrocarpa tree, known in California as a Monterrey pine.

From the lower branches of the giant tree, a dead sheep, gutted and flayed, was hanging upside down from a rope. It was twisting and turning in the wind, like a hanged man in an old Hollywood western. Toby was splattered in blood and he smiled at us like a mass murderer as we came near. Not a happy omen, I thought.

“Go on up to the house, lads, I’ll be right along as soon as I finish up here with me pet sheep.” Toby grimaced. I didn’t know if he was joking or not.

“I’ll be along directly. I made some scones this morning and Jill will serve them up to youse with jam and butter and a cuppa while you’re waiting.”

“A cuppa?”

“Sure. Mates. A cuppa tea.”

Toby was a frontiersman who could bake scones and then slaughter a sheep before the morning was half over and fix anything, or at least make do, with a piece of the proverbial New Zealand No. 8 wire.

Now, I should explain that No. 8 wire is a certain gauge of wire that was incredibly popular for use as fencing wire around New Zealand’s farms. Because it was the one item in New Zealand that was always readily available, it was used to repair about anything and everything, and amongst Kiwis it became the number one symbol of Kiwi adaptability.

Kiwi ingenuity. As Kiwis are still very fond of saying, Jus’ gimme a piece a No. 8 wire and she’ll be right!

Ironically — and perhaps emblematic of Kiwi ingenuity — until 1963, No. 8 wire was always imported from other countries.

Late that afternoon, Beau and I stood on the very top of the South Island. On this side, Toby’s hilltop farm rose about fifteen hundred feet up above the Cook Straits. We looked across to the North Island and up along its western coast, the Kapiti Coast.

We turned and looked northwest across the South Island, across the peninsulas and islands stretching away into the distance, the bluish tops of the Marlborough Sounds’ forested ridges and islands, the beautiful, treacherous waters sparkling and gleaming to the ends of the earth.

Grand Canyon beautiful, Himalaya Mountains beautiful. Victoria Falls beautiful. Norwegian Fjords beautiful. Truly one of the most breathtaking sights in the world.

“Let’s climb down the fence line to the beach down there on the Straits,” said Beau.

I looked down. The incline stretched away from us at a dizzying incline of at least forty-five degrees.

“Then we have to climb back up,” I said.

“If Toby could build that sheep fence straight up this slope, then we can climb down and climb back up again.”

I couldn’t argue with Beau’s logic. Anyway, I thought, it’s not the mountains of Bhutan, it’s not the mountains of Ladakh. Both of which we had trekked and climbed.

We could do Toby’s fifteen hundred foot slopes!

Hours later, on our way back up, as we lay flat, clinging to the side of the hill, unable to stand up because of the winds, I changed my mind.

We didn’t know it at the time but the winds on the Cook Straits that day reached a force of ninety-five knots, gusting to one hundred and forty knots. These few years later, I have read that the highest winds ever recorded in New Zealand were registered at Oteranga Bay, just near here on the Straits.

Toby had a different take on things that day.

“Have a nice stroll, Boys?”

“Yeah, we did. Bit windy, though.”

“Not so much,” said Toby. “Now, I been thinking. If I were you Boys, I’d build my big American house right over there, on the other side of the hill, on the Cook Straits. What a view, eh?”

He was right. The view was as beautiful and dramatic as any you could find in the entire world.

“You don’t think it might be a bit windy over there, after all, Toby? For a house? For building a house?” Beau waited for his reply.

“Nah! And I been thinking about a fair price for you lads.”

He named a figure four times the price he had told Captain Stan he wanted for the place. I know you’re not in the business any longer, but bring me somebody with that sum, Stan, and I’ll sell the station the same day. On the spot!

But now, Toby had summed us up as a couple of Yanks with more money than brains.

“Who put that abalone shell, that paua shell, on the fence, Toby?”

“What?”

“We took a little stroll from the hilltop right straight down to the beach. I said to Aaron, ‘Why, if Toby could put in that fence straight up the steep hillside, why then we can walk down and climb back up.’

“It was a lovely stroll, Toby. Did you nail that paua shell, that gorgeous abalone shell, to the fence post halfway up the hill?”

Sheepish. There are twenty-five million sheep in New Zealand, and Toby looked, well, sheepish just then. It is the only appropriate word for the expression on the face of the tough Kiwi pioneer.

Sheepish. Caught out. He knew we really had climbed down and then back up in those winds. He didn’t think these two Yanks from California had it in them.

“You found that paua, did you? Yes, I put ’er there me’self.”

At that moment, I think Toby realized he had overplayed his hand and wasn’t going to get his big price. And he couldn’t back it down to his real price just like that.

He wasn’t going to sell his farm to us. Beautiful as it was. And it is one of the most beautiful places in the world.

And one of the windiest.

END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published soon.