The First Recorded Murder in Otago

A month before Johnny Jones’s pioneering farming families arrived in Waikouaiti, a shocking incident confirmed Otago’s reputation as a lawless and dangerous outpost. Otago’s first murder and its aftermath highlighted the perils of allowing an outpost to remain ungoverned.  

In 1835, Charles Darwin described the young colony’s European inhabitants as “the very refuse of society” and in the five years that followed very little had changed.  Before the arrival of settlers the European population of Otago consisted of around forty sealers, whalers and a few merchants who supplied the inhabitants with the necessities of life – predominantly grog and tobacco. Many local Maori followed the example set by these men, quickly becoming hopeless alcoholics.  The Reverent Watkin correctly observed that the “love of strong drink appears to be the source of much of the evil here”.

 At twenty four years of age Teuteraki Pauwa was a handsome young man who was well connected.  The son of a local chief, Teuteraki was described as being ‘well made’ and having a ‘pleasing expression of countenance.’ Unfortunately, newspaper accounts (written years later) also describe Teuteraki as a ‘libertine’ who possessed a ‘crafty and vengeful disposition’.  In an outpost where alcoholism and bigotry were common, it may have been convenient to attribute Teuteraki’s actions to a character defect, but they could more accurately have been ascribed to drunkenness; on the night of February 15^th, 1840, Teuteraki Pauwa had been drinking heavily.

For some years Teuteraki and a whaler-sealer by the name of James Brown had been in dispute, and on this night, Teuteraki made several unwelcome visits to Brown’s whare in the settlement of Otakou. Tempers rose and a brawl erupted, in the confusion a window was broken and Teuteraki was cut by flying glass.  The inhabitants of the whare brandished an unloaded musket to warn the enraged, drunken intruder away. He fled, but returned a short time later, firing his own weapon through the broken window.  

The bullet missed James Brown – the intended target, and lodged in the neck of a visiting ship’s carpenter. While the local population tended to the dying man as best they could, Teuteraki fled into the bush.  At daybreak the next morning a search party was dispatched but the fugitive could not be located.  It would have been better if he had remained hidden, but later that day Teuteraki returned and surrendered himself to the Europeans, thereby presenting them with an impossible dilemma.

The nearest judicial authorities were located in Sydney, or in the Bay of Islands.  Several American whaling ships were anchored nearby but no captain was willing to suspend commercial activities in order to transport a prisoner.  The captains were not unsympathetic however; an immediate American style lynching was suggested, but was rejected by the Europeans who preferred the penalty of shooting to hanging.  When the Europeans surmised that a volunteer executioner might himself eventually be tried for murder, one of the American captains offered free passage to America to any man who was willing to ‘dispatch the native.’

Since no volunteer could be found to immediately murder the prisoner, Teuteraki was locked in a small room until alternative transportation arrangements could be made.  His European visitors vividly described to him the shame that was associated with criminal conviction and transportation to the prison colonies in Australia and the brutal conditions that he could expect to encounter there.

Teuteraki begged his jailers to kill him, but he could persuade none of the Europeans to shoot him. No man was willing to act as his executioner no matter how hard he begged them to end his life.  There were easier ways to assist his suicide however.  While most of the Europeans were occupied elsewhere Teuteraki was provided with a loaded musket.  Dressed in his best clothes and accompanied by his wife he sat on the floor of his cell.  His wife positioned herself behind him with her chest pressed tightly against his back and her arms wrapped around his waist. He used his toe to pull the trigger.  The bullet passed through his chest and lodged in his wife’s heart.  They died together instantly.

This was not the end of the matter.  Local Maori were enraged by the manner in which Teuteraki and his wife had died.  When Johnny Jones's settlers arrived in Waikouaiti in March 1840, the European residents of Otakou were still expecting a Maori uprising in revenge for the deaths.  Happily the revolt never eventuated.  Discontent abated in April when James Brown and his wife were spirited away to the Bay of Islands by the French explorer d'Urville.  Soon after, the newly arrived Reverent Watkins began to exert his calming influence over the native population and the lawless European whalers.  Within a year the Reverent was able to report that "amid the wreckage of an ancient order a new life begins to emerge." 

Otakou in 1840