Edward Clementson, Castaway and Flax Agent, 1833-1838

Tauranga’s Early Traders Part IV
 

Like the South Shields collier Mary shown here in two views, Clementson’s vessels Elizabeth and Bee were British built brigs – vessels generally defined as square sailed, 2 masted vessels, often with one or more try sails between foremast and bowsprit and a fore-and-aft spanker boom sail off the main mast.

Edward Clementson enters New Zealand history in 1830 as a 23-year-old ship’s mate on Captain John Stewart’s 236-ton English brig Elizabeth, which sailed from Sydney to New Zealand in search of a cargo of muka or dressed flax.¹   In return for a promised shipload of this commodity, Stewart transported 100 of Te Rauparaha’s Ngati Toa warriors from Kapiti to Banks Peninsula. There, they surprised and slaughtered many Ngai Tahu people at Takapuneke and captured their leading rangatira Te Maiharanui and his wife. Both were later tortured and killed at Kapiti. The Elizabeth’s crew was reported by Ngai Tahu survivors to have actively participated in the attack. John Stewart was subsequently arrested and sent to trial in Sydney where the charges were dismissed. Although Clementson had led the party of three sailors who seized and chained Te Maiharanui and was described in NSW official documents as one of the two principal offenders, he was not prosecuted.²

By 1832, Edward Clementson was in command of the brig Bee, sharing with the first mate responsibilities for the deck crew, ship’s cargo and navigation. Despite its assorted crews and skippers (including Clementson), the 135-ton, square-rigged sealer-trader was sailed repeatedly and successfully between Hobart and New Zealand, and along the latter’s uncharted, unlighted, inshore “cannibal coast”, for more than 20 years.³

Between Abel Tasman’s visit in 1642 and the Treaty in 1840, Maori throughout New Zealand launched 111 recorded taua ito (blood vengeance) and taua muru (ritualised plundering) raids against ships, ships boats and shore parties, almost all retaliatory in accordance with tikanga Maori or customary law. Given these turbulent times, the Bee had a remarkably long period of service, particularly as most voyages were made during the Sealers War (1810-1822) and the most intensive years of the intertribal Musket Wars (1818 -1839).⁴ 

The journalist-historian James Cowan said of the Bee’s voyages during this era:

Under one owner and another, and a succession of hard-case skippers, this busy Bee knocked about New Zealand and its off-shore islands wherever there was a cargo of flax to be picked up from the Maoris in exchange for muskets and gunpowder, or a load of oil and bone from its shore-whalers, or a lot of skins from the seal-hunting gangs. In her spare time she went whaling, like many other South Sea traders of that day.⁵  

In 1833, a time served convict from Hobart town named William Cuthbert, also known as Lincoln Bill, managed to raise enough capital from creditors to charter the Bee and a cargo of “trade” intended for barter with coastal iwi. On boarding the vessel, he directed the Bee’s new captain, William Stewart to sail for New Zealand ostensibly ‘to trade for flax and pigs, oil and “general fixings”, which at that time included smoke-dried tattooed heads; trade term, “baked heads”.  Cuthbert first ordered Stewart to proceed to Tasmania’s Maria Island where he took aboard three escaped convicts from the penal settlement and their captive policeman escort.⁶     

William Stewart was a master mariner and navigator of some repute and Stewart Island is named after him. Clementson, who remained on the Bee in the role of first mate quarrelled with Cuthbert who planned to sail the brig to Peru where he hoped to sell the vessel and its cargo. In due course, the brig reached the New Zealand coast at Tauranga. Here, Cuthbert ordered Clementson ashore at pistol point on one of its beaches “with barely more than the clothes he wore”.⁷

In 1833 Edward Clementson was abandoned on one of Tauranga’s beaches by the Bee’s piratical master William Cuthbert

The Bee’s crew set sail for the Pacific Islands where Cuthbert later dumped the police constable and the three Maria Island convicts. For some months, he and his crew, which mostly comprised time expired convicts like himself, commenced an island hopping, drunken debauch with Polynesian women from various islands between, and including, Tahiti and Hawaii, on their way to Peru. However at Honolulu Harbour, William Cuthbert disappeared, perhaps forewarned that the Sydney authorities had declared the brig a pirated vessel, though the Maketu based trader Phillip Tapsell was later informed that the pirate had been hanged.⁸ The Bee was eventually returned to Sydney and sold for the benefit of Cuthbert’s creditors.

There were no missionaries resident in Tauranga in 1833 and Clementson was fortunate not to have been captured by Ngapuhi or Te Arawa, whose allied waka fleets often entered the harbour and occupied its shores that year to make war on local iwi. Clementson found refuge among Ngai Te Rangi’s trader Pakeha-Maori at Otumoetai Pa, where he was soon recruited as a flax buying agent by the Maketu based trader Phillip Tapsell. Led by Tapsell, Clementson and several Maori guides set out from Maketu to Rotorua, then on to Matamata Pa, the base from which the castaway Englishman was to conduct his trade. The journey and reception at Matamata must have been a strange experience for Clementson, a veteran seaman recently turned landlubber. Tapsell told his biographer, the Maketu Postmaster, Mr E. Little in 1869:

For a part of the way our journey was very severe, over a succession of steep mountains, the sides of which were like precipices, and though the forest of Patatere [sic], which was so dense, and obstructed with undergrowth and supplejack, that our passage through it was toilsome beyond measure. Matamata was at that time a very beautiful place, and provisions of all kind very abundant, A great feast was prepared on the arrival of our party from Maketu. Pigs were killed and roasted, baskets of eels prepared, and stacks of potatoes sufficient for a hundred men; in addition to which a large number of live pigs were sent for our party to kill for ourselves.⁹ 

When Tapsell had negotiated terms of trade with Te Waharoa and other leading rangatira, he and his guides returned to Maketu, leaving Clementson among Matamata’s Ngati Haua people.¹⁰   

Tapsell had already placed traders at Matamata Pa to exchange muskets, munitions and general trade goods for dressed flax. Appointed chief trading agent by Tapsell, Clementson appears to have been readily accepted by his fellows, while he adopted their Pakeha-Maori lifestyle and became fluent in Maori. When the Anglican missionaries Williams, Fairburn, Brown and Morgan ascended the Waihou for the first time in 1833, they were welcomed at Matamata by Te Waharoa. Williams noted that Ngati Haua’s traders were "very civil" Nevertheless, that evening when the missionaries and their christianised Maori porters commenced a hymn, Clementson and his three companions countered from within their whare with a voluminous version of Old King Cole.¹¹

This sketch by Henry Williams of missionaries crossing a swamp is based on his arduous traverse of the Matamata’s great Mangapouri swamp with Revs Fairburn, Brown and Morgan in 1833. The same swamp was traversed by Clementson’s great cross-Kaimai flax trains from 1833.

As arranged by Tapsell and Te Waharoa, for the next several years Clementson's consignments of flax were back packed or pikaued through the great korari or flax swamp known as Mangapouri (Dark Stream) and across the Waihou River, seperating Matamata and the Kaimai Range. They were then laboriously transported up the 1,600-foot range by long lines of women, older children and slaves who camped overnight on the broad summit plateau. Descending the ancient and deeply rutted Wairere track the following day, the porters crossed the Te Puna Peninsula to the Wairoa River mouth. There, they were met by the Otumoetai based Farrow brothers who supervised the consignments’ loading aboard vessels bound for Bay of Islands and those contracted to the Sydney merchant Richard Jones.

While Clementson’s consignments were intermittent, they were considerable. In a letter written to Henry Williams in on 11 September 1835, Alfred Brown who was visiting Tauranga reported: "Mr Clementson is just going to transport upwards of fifty tons of flax to Tauranga in two thousand back-loads. All this has been scraped by the natives since I have been here".¹²

A trader bartering with Maori for baskets of dressed flax and a pig during the 1830s

Despite his actions during the Elizabeth affair, Clementson established and remained on good terms with Tapsell, his fellow traders at Matamata Pa and the Bay of Islands missionaries during their temporary visits to Tauranga between 1833 and 1838. When Clementson learned that Te Waharoa was planning to attack Maketu Pa in early 1836, he twice sent one of his traders to warn Tapsell.¹³ When Rev John Wilson visited Tauranga on the little missionary cutter Kukupa in 1836, the year intertribal warfare in the region reached its apogee, Clementson sent him a bodyguard - a ferocious bull-dog cross, incongruously named Breezy.¹⁴  

Later that year, when Clementson and James Farrow visited the Bay of Islands, they joined the missionaries in supporting a petition to King William IV, by settlers, exasperated at the absence of law and order.¹⁵ Fortunately for Clementson, when he once cursed Te Waharoa “native fashion”, a curse associated with evil and death, a timely intervention by Alfred Brown saved his life. The utu (payment or compensation) demanded by Te Waharoa, and known to have been paid by Brown, while unstated, will have been substantial.¹⁶   

 

Te Waharoa died in 1838 and his Pakeha-Maori Edward Clementson, died soon after, during a voyage from Tauranga to Matata. His trader contemporary James Farrow who survived the voyage informed Phillip Tapsell:

 

       He [Farrow], his wife, Clementson and a young man named Jenkins had set out … with a view of meeting with Mr White [resident trader at Matata and later, a prolific boatbuilder], and when off the place, were overtaken by a gale of wind. It would have been easy for them to have run under the lee of Whale Island where they could have had smooth water, and there have waited till the storm subsided, but their young companion being inexperienced and very confident, was strongly desirous that they should at once land at Matata, which he was of the opinion they could easily do.

 

Yielding to this opinion, they pulled for the mainland, on approaching which, they found a very heavy surf breaking on the bar. Appearances were so threatening, that when near the entrance to the river, they laid on their oars to deliberate on the best course to pursue. They consulted so long that before they were aware, the boat drifted into the breakers and was capsized. Jenkins not being able to swim, went down like a shot. Clementson was a good swimmer, but was so encumbered by heavy boots and buttoned up to the throat with a pea jacket, that after a few strokes, he sank also.¹⁷  

 

James Farrow, who was also a good swimmer, almost succumbed to exhaustion, but encouraged by his Maori wife who swam by his side, he eventually reached the shore and safety.

 

References

¹ NZ pre-1846, Person page 791, Early NZ history, nzearlyhistory.com, http://www.nzearlyhistory.com › p791 

² Ogilvie, Gordon, Banks Peninsula, Cradle of Canterbury, GP Books, Wellington, 1990: 155. McNab, Robert, Historical Records of New Zealand, Vol. II, Government Printer, Wellington, 1914: 594.

³ Daily Southern Cross, 4 August 1869: 6. 

⁴ Bentley, Trevor, Pakeha Slaves, Maori Masters, New Holland, Auckland, 2019: 22-23, 25-26.

⁵ Cowan, James, ‘Rovers of the Brig “Bee’ – The Story of a Lawless Cruise in the Old Pacific’, in The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Vol. 13, Issue 3, 1938: 17-20.

⁶ Daily Southern Cross, 4 August 1869: 6. 

⁷ Auckland Star, 8 December 1928: 1. (Supplement). Cowan, JPS, Vol. 13: 18.

⁸ Daily Southern Cross, 4 August 1869: 6.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid. 

¹¹ Vennell, C.W; Brown and the Elms, D.H. Maxwell, Tauranga, 1984: 12.

¹² Gifford, W.H. and H.B. Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga, The Tauranga Centennial Committee and A.H. and A.W. Reed, Dunedin, 1940, Capper Reprint, 1976: 209.

¹³ Tapsell, P; ‘Reminiscences, 1777?-1873’. Ref. ½-005486, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ: 155-156.

 

¹⁴ Wilson, J.A; Missionary Life and Work in New Zealand, 1889: 56.

 

¹⁵ Polack, J.S; New Zealand, Vol II, Richard Bentley, London, 1838, Capper Reprint, 1974: 188.  

 

¹⁶ L.W. ‘Te Waharoa of NgatiHaua’, in The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol 71, No. 4 1962: 368.

 

¹⁷ Tapsell, P.  ‘Reminiscences’,155-156.

 

Illustrations

John Scott, The South Shields Collier Brig ‘Mary’ 1885, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org ›wiki › Brig

John Kinder, Mt Maunganui, Tauranga, 1874, 1937/15/46, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi O Tamaki.

Henry Williams, ‘Passing through a swamp in New Zealand’, PUBL-0031-1836-1. Alexander Turnbull library, Wellington, NZ.

John Williams, ‘A European male, thought to be Joel Polack bargaining with three Maori males’, [1845-1846]. A-079-017. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ>

Peter Dillon, Maungatapu Pa and the Jess, 1835, 1838

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

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

Mount Maunganui and Te Papa Mission Tauranga, March 1839

A view of Mount Maunganui, the harbour entrance and Te Papa mission station as seen by Rev Richard Taylor one year after Dillon’s last trading visit in 1838. Matakana and Karewa Islands are shown at far left with Tuhua-Mayor Island and Hopukiore-Mount Drury on the right

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.