Tauranga’s Early Traders - Part III
There were many courageous and adventurous spirits among the sea captains and sailors who settled as traders in Maori communities around Tauranga Harbour from the late 1820s. One of the most remarkable was the red-headed, Irish Catholic, sea captain and adventurer Peter Dillon, who traded at Maungatapu Pa during 1835 and 1838. Described as a man of charm and wit, but prone to anger and violence, Dillon had been made a Chevalier (Knight) of the Legion of Honour by the French government in 1829. The honour recognised his role in discovering the fate of the La Perouse expedition which had been wrecked in the Santa Cruz (Solomon) Islands after departing Sydney in 1788. Given the title French Consul for the South Seas, Dillon was also awarded a pension of 4,000 francs (£160) a year and presented to King Louis X of France.1
Peter
Dillon, sea captain, explorer, chevalier, trader and author, 1788- 1847
Born to Irish parents in 1788, Dillon later joined the Royal Navy and claimed to have ‘had the honour to serve at the battle of Trafalgar’ on 21 October 1805 at the age of 17. After leaving the Navy, Dillon found his way to Calcutta in India where he began his career as a South Seas trading skipper for hire. Between 1808 and 1813, he visited Polynesia in East India Company ships like the Hunter to trade for sandalwood. At Sydney in 1814, Dillon was hired by Rev. Samuel Marsden to sail the missionary vessel Active to the Bay of Islands on an exploratory expedition. Among his other commands were the Sydney trading vessels Phatisalam (1821), his own vessels Calder (1825) and the St Patrick (1827), the ship on which he first located items from La Perouse’s long-lost ships La Bousolle and L’Astrolabe.2
After living in Paris and enjoying celebrity status for several years, Dillon returned to Sydney in October 1834. Wishing to take advantage of the New Zealand flax trade, he purchased the 77-ton British built schooner Jess. As an owner, Dillon was freed from many former duties by his captain Mr C. Wilson; one Sydney newspaper noting, that, ‘as a concession to his position as Chevalier of the Legion of Honor he no longer knocked the crew about himself’.3
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| Maungatapu headland and Pa Maungatapu Pa is located at the harbour end of the promontory on the left side of the photo, with the Matapihi Peninsula across the channel. Part of half tide Rangataua-Welcome Bay is in the foreground with Mauao-Mount Maunganui in the background |
At Tauranga’s Maungatapu Pa during 1835, Dillon and his ‘trade’ were welcomed and protected by Kiharoa, Te Mutu and Taupari, leading rangatira of the Ngati He clan of Ngai Te Rangi. A formidable headland fortress, located on the inner harbour between the Waimapu Estuary and Rangataua-Welcome Bay, the pa featured sheer cliffs on three sides above the harbour, topped by palisades, with a great outer ditch and stockade on the landward side.4 During the 1830s the pa was besieged by successive seaborne expeditions of Ngapuhi, Ngati Maru and Arawa. Described by the Otumoetai-based trader Joseph Isaac Montifiore as ‘the bravest and strongest’ of the Tauranga hapu’, Ngati He employed the muskets and munitions obtained from resident traders like Dillon to repulse every attempt by enemy tribesmen to storm their fortress.5
At the site chosen for the Te Papa mission station in 1834, Dillon found two empty raupo whare, one of which, much to the annoyance of the Anglicans, he requisitioned and shipped to Maungatapu as his home and trading base. An impressive figure at 6 foot 4 inches (193 cm) and heavily built, Dillon’s direct, assertive manner, soon afforded him status as a Pakeha rangatira and man of mana. As Tauranga iwi were fully armed with muskets by 1835, Dillon was obliged to locate markets further afield. Historian L.W. Melvin describes Dillon as a veteran trader who immediately ‘made it known that he had much powder and many muskets to trade for flax, and then sat back and waited as the news penetrated inland as far as the Waikato’.6 When Rev Alfred Brown visited Matamata Pa in July 1835, he noted that the leading Ngati Haua rangatira Te Waharoa had crossed the Kaimai Range to Tauranga earlier that month and, having conferred with Dillon at Maungatapu, was:
[U]nable to talk on any other subject other than the great riches of Peter Dillon who has arrived at Tauranga. Peter styles himself French Consul, but is occupied in the rather unconsul-like work of purchasing flax, pigs and potatoes for muskets and powder. It seems that he has prevailed upon the Natives to take down one of the houses which they built for the Missionaries at the Papa, and removed it for his accommodation to the Pa at Maungatapu – his present seat.7
Like this sturdy schooner sailing off the Isle of Wight in 1833,
Dillon’s Jess was British-built
Dillon delivered to Te Waharoa, within the space of about seven months, three additional consignments of flintlock muskets and munitions. At Maungatapu, Dillon accumulated cargoes of flax, pork and potatoes which the Jess’s skipper collected at pre-arranged times and disposed of, either at the Bay of Islands or Sydney before returning to Tauranga with further ‘trade’. At one point, the Chevalier’s ambitions placed the lucrative cross-Kaimai trade in jeopardy. After he promised to send a Pakeha trading agent to the Ngati Koroki people at Maungatautari in the Waikato, a party of their people set out, laden with flax for Maungatapu. As their path would take them through Matamata and Ngati Haua lands, Te Waharoa denied these competitor’s access. Both iwi prepared for war, which was only averted when Rev. Alfred Brown intervened.8
Dillon returned to Tauranga on the Jess to trade for flax during February-March 1838. By this time intertribal warfare and introduced diseases had reduced the population of Maungatapu Pa to just 300.9 Rev William Wade who visited Tauranga while travelling overland between Thames and Rotorua in 1838, noted: ‘While on my visit to the Papa [Te Papa mission station], the "Jess," Capt. Dillon was at anchor in the harbour, having on board an interesting Tonga chief, named Tubou Toutai, and nine natives of the Fiji Islands’.10
Boarding the Jess with the Te Papa missionaries, Wade was informed by Dillon that while sailing between Fiji and Tauranga he had encountered and rescued ‘eight men and a little boy, who had been driven out to sea by contrary winds and were in distress’. Now ‘entirely destitute of covering, and suffering greatly from change of climate’, the missionaries provided the Fijians with blankets.11
While at Te Papa in 1838, Wade recorded a description of the harbour as seen and sailed that year by the vessels of the traders, the Te Papa missionaries and Dillon’s Jess.
The harbours of Tauranga and Katikati may be regarded as parts of one inland sea, which is divided off from the main by a narrow, indented island [Matakana], fifteen or sixteen miles in length…There is often a dangerous sea between Tauranga and Katikati, occasioned by the conflux of rivers and meeting of tides; but the harbour of Tauranga itself is pretty quiet and secure. The eastern head of the Tauranga entrance is formed by Maunganui (great mountain), a steep and solitary hill, rising abruptly from a level tongue of land, and serving as a landmark to vessels off the coast. The entrance itself is narrow, and the harbour shoaly. The general appearance of the country, as you enter, is that of an uninteresting flat; and we found the land around the Papa so extremely destitute of wood, that our supply of fuel and fencing was usually brought by canoes from other parts and purchased from the natives.12
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| Mount Maunganui and Te Papa Mission Tauranga,
March 1839 |
When the Jess returned to Sydney on 14 April 1838 with a cargo of flax and oil, the authorities sent the nine Fijians home on another vessel. Dillon now aged 50, returned to Europe after selling the Jess which continued to be sailed out of Sydney into the 1840s.13 In Europe he sought, without success, appointment to an official position in New Zealand or the Pacific Islands, and turned to writing before dying in Paris in 1847.
A staunch Roman Catholic, Dillon’s vocal criticism of the Anglican missionaries, and his theft of their whare at Te Papa in 1835, may have been forgiven, but it was not forgotten. In a sermon at St Andrews Church Cambridge in the Waikato, more than a century later, Vicar C.W. Chandler referred to ‘unscrupulous traders such as Peter Dillon of Tauranga… whose desire to make money out of bloodshed, made the task of … pioneering missionaries like A.N. Brown even harder than it should have been’.14
At the Bay of Islands on the vessel Research in 1827, Dillon had been asked by the dying Ngapuhi musket general Hongi Hika to take his daughter as a wife. ‘The Chevalier, notwithstanding the charms of the lady, declined the proposal and proceeded on his voyage’.15 Dillon was not usually so reticent. He and his crews often sailed with Polynesian women on board as temporary wives. In 1839 the Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang reported seeing one of the Irishman’s daughters aged 11 or 12, ‘barefooted’, ‘bareheaded’, and ‘clad in a New Zealand mat’ on the banks of the Kauakaua River.16 New Zealand’s pre-Treaty traders were notoriously prolific breeders, some fathering as many as 40 children and the chevalier may well have left descendants in Tauranga.17
Image Credits
Pardon, Daniel, Travel Diary -1827. Dillon the Adventurer Who Located La Perouse, https://www.tahiti-infos.com/Carnet-de-voyage-1827-Dillon-l-aventurier-qui-localisa-La-Perouse
Welcome Bay, Tauranga. Postcard published by F. Duncan & Co, Auckland, Collection of Justine Neal, courtesy of The Tauranga Historical Society.
William Clark. A British topsail schooner inward bound off the Needles, Isle of Wight, with a cutter and other shipping in the distance, 1833, Public Domain
Taylor, Richard, ‘View of Maunga
nui & Papa Mission Tauranga. Mar. 1839’. Auckland War Memorial Museum. Ref.
PD-1961-14-p171-1
Endnotes
1 The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 5 August
1939: 10. J. W. Davidson, ‘Peter Dillon and the South Seas’, History Today,
Vol. 6, No. 5, May 1956: 307-17.
2 Ibid. McCauley, Debbie, Peter Dillon, WordPress.com, https://debbiemccauleyauthor.wordpress.com › biogra...
3 Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 13 May 1933: 5.
4 Jones, T. M; ‘HMS Pandora in the Bay of Plenty, 1852’, Extracts from the Journal of Lieutenant T.M. Jones, RN, Part II: 72-73, in Historical Review: Journal of the Whakatane and District Historical Society Inc. Vol. XVIII, No.2: 72.
5 Sydney Herald, 17 July 1937: 2.
6 Melvin, L.W; ‘Te Waharoa of the Ngatihaua’, in The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol. 71, No. 4, 1962: 368, 371 (361-378).
7 Journals of Alfred Brown, 27-28 July 1835 cited in McCauley, Debbie, Peter Dillon, WordPress.com
8 Vennell, C. W; Such Things Were: The Storyof Cambridge, NZ, Reed, Dunedin, 1939: 34.
9 Wade, William, A Journey in the North Island of New Zealand, Hobart, George Rolwegan, 1842: 135.
10 Ibid
11 Ibid: 134, 138.
12 Ibid: 134-137.
13 Tegg's New South Wales Pocket Almanac and Remembrancer, 1841: 6.
14 Waikato Independent, 19 December 1939: 4.
15 Woolls, W.A. A Short Account of the Character and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, B. Isaacs, Parramatta 1844: 76.
16 Dunmore Lang, John, New Zealand in 1839, Smith, Elder and Co, London, 1839: 58.
17 Bentley, Trevor, Pakeha Maori: The Extraordinary Story of the Europeans Who Lived as Maori in Early New Zealand, Panguin, Auckland, 1999: 204-205.
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