Outrage on a Chinese

John Sizemore was almost certainly a troubled youth.  When he was eight years old his mother died of consumption, thereby gaining the dubious honour of becoming the first person to be buried in St. John’s Churchyard Waikouaiti.  Three years later when his father Richard died, John and his three sisters were left parentless but not without wider family support.  John’s father may have been an ex-convict and whaler with a fondness for Maori wives, but he was also well connected. His sister Sarah had married a streetwise Sydney Water-man who had done very well for himself.  John Sizemore’s uncle was Johnny Jones – arguably the wealthiest man in the province of Otago.                                             

The court report described “the boy named Sizemore” as having “mischievous propensities.” His actions certainly started the affray, but he was never called to account for them. On the 27^th of August 1867 another man stood in the dock of the Waikouaiti Resident Magistrate’s Court charged with assault.                                                                                                  

The small group of Chinamen had been eating their dinner near Anderson’s General Store at the northern end of the Main North Road, Hawksbury, when they were set upon by a group of boys led by seventeen year old John Sizemore.  Being pelted with mud and stones had “aroused the Tartar blood of the Mongolians” – the Chinamen gave chase, and John Sizemore was apprehended.   At this point an onlooker named John McClure intervened to prevent the boy from being “severely punished,” which (in the opinion of the Waikouaiti Herald) “would have served him right.”                                                                           
During the ensuing scuffle a Chinaman named Ah Chin was dealt a blow that “rendered him insensible.” With the aid of an interpreter Ah Chin alleged that McClure had struck him with a stick, his companions corroborated his story.  McClure claimed innocence alleging that the blow had been struck by one of the Chinamen.  
The principles of truth and justice were never going to prevail in this case. Local European witnesses, who had seen “more or less” of the affray, confirmed McClure’s version of the events and predictably, the case was dismissed.                                               

They were difficult times; the rush of miners to the province had dwindled as new goldfields were discovered in the West and Dunedin’s economy was suffering.  In 1865 it had been suggested that “painstaking, industrious and energetic” Chinese miners might be invited to travel from the depleted goldfields of Victoria in order to boost the province’s economy.  This proposal provoked hysterical outcries.  One correspondent to the Otago Daily Times countered the descriptors “painstaking, industrious and energetic” with the adjectives bestial, thieving animals. Various other contributors labelled the Chinese as immoral, diseased, cunning thieves.  Local Councillor J.G.S Grant petitioned administrators to “adopt stringent measures to save the Province from a threatened invasion of barbaric hordes of Tartars.” His efforts were futile; the Provincial Government had neither the means nor the desire to prevent Chinese immigration and in 1866, at the invitation of the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce, twelve Chinese miners arrived at Port Chalmers.  By the end of that year the Chinese population of Otago numbered twelve hundred.

A Cartoon published in the Dunedin Punch, September 23rd 1865, ridiculing the welcoming of the Chinese by members of the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce.

The Chinese immigrants suffered discrimination and intimidation.  Assaults were not condoned but neither were they discouraged.  Perpetrators went unpunished and until a correspondent of the Waikouaiti Herald wrote an account of an “outrage upon a Chinese” (published in the Evening Star), no official efforts were made to provide the Chinese Community with protection.                                                                                                     

The ‘outrage’ occurred a month before John Sizemore’s mischievous assault and involved an attack on a Chinaman in the township of Naseby.  The man, who had introduced himself as Ah Pak (meaning ‘uncle’ or ‘old man’) had earned a small sum of money on the goldfields and had travelled to Naseby with the intention of settling there and establishing a small garden (“an occupation to which the Celestials are peculiarly adapted” – noted the columnist).  Ah Pak was set upon by a gang of drunken men, who cut off his pigtail, “otherwise maltreated him” and then enclosed him in a large barrel which they rolled about the town.  Ah Pak, greatly distressed was left to wander around the town in the cold, having lost “the greater part of his clothing in the assault.” 
Thomas Sincock, Naseby's police Inspector ‘pursued inquiries’ but “found great difficulty in obtaining any information from the townspeople as to who were the persons principally concerned.” Ah Pak was escorted to the town lockup and allowed him to sleep there while summonses were obtained and subpoenas prepared; a court hearing was scheduled for the following Monday.  
Three days later, in the early hours of Sunday morning, Ah Pak arranged his blankets “so as to appear to be lying down” and fled.  Two men were sent (in opposite directions) in pursuit, but no trace of the Chinaman could be found; consequently the court case was dismissed. 

Perhaps hopelessly lost, Ah Pak wandered about the Maniototo plains until he encountered a sheep station, where someone mistakenly assumed that he was the front-runner of a much larger group of wandering Chinese.  A gun was discharged and a terrified Ah Pak fled.  Eventually he reached the Kyeburn Hotel, where the proprietor, Mr. John Malloch “tended to him as became a Samaritan” and ascertained that Ah Pak had friends in Hyde.  Ah Pak was given refreshments and directions to the township of Hyde but was soon found by a passing bank manager, wandering in completely the opposite direction.                          
A Constable Finnigan was sent to fetch Ah Pak and escort him back to Naseby.  Here he was interrogated by Inspector Sincock, who suspected that he had been bribed to leave town before his case could be brought to court. Pleading innocence, the directionally challenged Ah Pak was released and for his own safety was offered a police escort to his preferred destination.  Passing through the (now vanished) town of Hamiltons, Constable Finnigan and Ah Pak were surrounded by a group of a dozen or so European men and boys who “gathered to gaze at the first Chinese visitor to the township.” 
“Deranged by recollections of former brutal treatment,” Ah Pak made “several attempts to get away, uttering the most piercing shrieks and rather feminine-like cries so peculiar to his race.” 
Charged with ensuring the safety of a hysterically screaming man, Constable Finnigan quite wisely chose to return to Naseby where he reported to his superior that he was “afraid to let the man go, as he feared he was insane.” Inspector Sincock promptly charged Ah Pak with lunacy.  It was two weeks before a magistrate could be found to hear his case.                   

At his trial a local doctor maintained that the Chinaman would be “all right if he was sent down amongst his countrymen” Ah Pak was released and his passage to Dunedin was paid for by the Mount Ida Relief Committee.  In a rather self-serving letter to the Otago Witness Inspector Sincock justified his actions, reporting that the perpetrators of the original assault were “strangers passing through” and claiming that the matter had been “much exaggerated.  The Chinaman was a great liar, and I am strongly of the opinion that a good deal of his conduct was assumed, for purposes of his own."                                                    Soon after his arrival in Dunedin Ah Pak was confined to the Dunedin Lunatic Asylum.  Outraged letters were published condemning his ‘outrageous treatment’ and six months later James MacAndrew, Superintendent of Otago published a notice strictly enjoining the Police to keep a protective watch over the Chinese Population - unfortunately too late to prevent the outrage perpetrated upon the Chinese in Waikouaiti.                                                

An Elephant named Jenny Lind

In January 1868, for the sum of one shilling, visitors could view a menagerie that was temporarily housed inside Dunedin’s Polytechnic Hall.  Among the animals exhibited there was a female Asiatic elephant named Jenny Lind. Named after the famous Swedish Opera singer, Jenny the elephant had spent her entire life on display, firstly in America then in Australia.   When she arrived in Sydney in 1851 Jenny was the first elephant ever seen on the Australian continent and in 1868 when she disembarked from the brigantine ‘Swordfish’ in Port Chalmers Jenny became New Zealand’s first pachyderm immigrant.             Her exhibition can’t have been a success.   The March 16^th edition of the Otago Daily Times contained the following advertisement: 

 

Nine days later – a second advertisement appeared:

Jenny was sold, possibly at a knocked down price, to an owner who had probably never even seen an elephant before, let alone cared for one. Difficulties arose almost immediately. In 1868 there were limited options for transporting large, exotic animals – Railways were non-existent and roads were poorly maintained.  Jenny may have been obliged to pull her own waggon or at least disembark from it whenever rivers, bogs and ruts made the northern road impassable.                                                                        

Progress was made however and on the 21^st of April 1868, after travelling some considerable distance, Jenny and her keeper arrived at the Southern bank of the Waitaki River.  Here, the ferryman was unsurprisingly unwilling to allow an elephant to board his punt. The crossing was delayed and Jenny was turned loose.  The elephant keeper can be forgiven for not knowing that elephants are excellent swimmers, but can’t be forgiven for allowing his charge to forage on the river banks.  Fresh new foliage had emerged there after a previous season’s ‘burn off’ and among the sprouting vegetation was a fine crop of the native shrub Tutu – a plant that was easily identified and well known to be extremely poisonous.  Newly sprouted Tutu resembles asparagus fronds and Jenny must have found it palatable.  She browsed for around four hours on the riverbank, took a great drink of water from a nearby creek and then began to stagger.  Three hours later she fell and died  – becoming one of New Zealand’s more famous (and certainly the largest) victim of Tutu poisoning.                                                                                                                                   The plant had been the scourge of pastoralists ever since Cook’s first landing.  Cook released five goats, two ewes and a ram in Queen Charlotte sound in 1773 however his hopes of stocking New Zealand with livestock were soon dashed.  The sheep were promptly poisoned (probably by Tutu) and at least one of the goats was eaten by local Maori – thus preventing the earlier proliferation of one of New Zealand’s more harmful introduced species.    

      

Almost every part of the Coriaria plant is poisonous; livestock are attracted and poisoned by the foliage whereas humans are attracted by its shiny, sweet tasting black berries and are poisoned by its seeds.  The plant was well known to early Maori, who used the berry juice after cautiously straining out the seeds.  Following their example a few early European settlers used filtered and fermented ‘Toot’ juice to make wine but for the most part the plant was deliberately avoided.  Its victims were generally inexperienced or unaware, newspapers published ‘warnings to mothers’ when the berries ripened in November, because the majority of Tutu poisoning victims were children.                     

In comparison to the dozen or so recorded cases of human Tutu fatalities, stock losses were enormous. Tutu thrives in fertile coastal soils, - sought after locations for early settler farmers.  Animals that were in poor condition were especially susceptible to the toxin; hungry sheep and cattle that were offloaded from ships and allowed to forage died in their hundreds.  Stock losses of twenty five percent were common and some particularly unlucky run holders reported finding up to three quarters of their stock dead, poisoned, or ‘tooted.’

Human lives could be saved if vomiting was induced quickly, whereas poisoned cattle or sheep were bled in an effort to release the poison from circulation.  Sheep that survived were said to “lose their gregarious instinct,” becoming hermit animals that were slaughtered for ‘station mutton.’ No harm came to those who ate this meat – an effect that was noted by a Doctor Malcolm of the Otago Institute who carried out a series of investigations into the plant’s toxic properties in 1914.                  

Doctor Malcolm experimented on rabbits using the “painless method, sometimes employed with recalcitrant suffragettes” of feeding (poison in this case rather than food) through a stomach tube.  His choice of experimental subject was interesting, rabbits were known to be averse to eating Tutu, but Doctor Malcolm demonstrated that they were not immune to its toxic effects.  He determined the size of a fatal dose (between a half and a full pound of leaves), confirmed that the toxin passed into the bloodstream and discovered that transfusing poisoned blood produced different symptoms. Doctor Malcolm acknowledged that he “had expected to glean much more useful information” from his experiments.  An antidote had been hoped for, but the good Doctor was correct in presuming that there was not “much chance of getting a practical remedy” - none exists today.

Even in death Jenny Lind the elephant remained an object of curiosity.  Her skeleton was prepared by Doctor Hector, a member of the Wellington Philosophical Society and put on display in Wellington’s Colonial Museum.  While her remains may have taught a few generations of children a little about anatomy, her demise did not serve as a warning to circus owners.  In 1956, an elephant travelling with the Bullen Brothers circus died in remarkably similar circumstances – poisoned while foraging on the banks of the Mangawhero River.  Tutu’s second pachyderm victim was quickly and quietly interred in an anonymous grave, somewhere behind the railway houses at Ohakune Junction.

Remarkably, a third case soon followed.  In the nineteen sixties, two elephants were poisoned while being transported through the Tutu infested Buller gorge.  Their death was prevented by the quick thinking actions of a veterinarian named David Marshall who administered barbiturates and later reported (standing in?) spectacular waist high piles of elephant vomit. 

Pachyderm passing problematically prevented.

A Risky Business

On June 4^th 1861, an Australian prospector named Gabriel Read wrote to the Superintendent of Otago claiming that after ten hours spent working with “a butcher’s knife and a tin dish” on the banks of the Tuapeka River he had obtained seven ounces of gold.  His report was met with scepticism, other gold finds had been reported, none of which had proved to be viable.  The Chief Surveyor was despatched to examine ‘Gabriel’s gully’ and sensationally confirmed that Read and two others (now working with ‘proper’ tools) had gone on to extract nine pounds of gold in a period of fourteen days.  

   

The first rush had begun.  So many able bodied men left Dunedin that all public works had to be cancelled; the labour shortage was temporary however.  Within a short period of time Dunedin’s population doubled, and then trebled, until it became the largest city in New Zealand.  Experienced prospectors abandoned Victoria’s depleted gold fields and travelled East in their thousands.  Inexpert prospectors joined them, each man being confident that with luck and effort they could unearth the fortunes that lay within Otago’s stony soils.  No man could have expected reward without risk, however gold mining was a rather more dangerous occupation than most - and inexperienced prospectors soon learned that there were many ways to die on the goldfields - most were prosaic, while a few others were entirely unexpected.  

In order to expose hidden nuggets of gold it was necessary to dig out or sluice away soil or gravel. Excavation is a fundamentally dangerous activity and prospectors who dug, burrowed and drilled into hillsides or tunnelled beneath the ground died in circumstances that were entirely predictable. Rock fall, earth fall, landslides and tunnel collapses were among the more commonly reported causes of fatalities.  One particularly unlucky miner was buried in a collapse that was triggered by an earthquake while a few others were blown to bits due to “premature detonation of explosives.” Other deaths were attributed to slightly more unfamiliar mining practices, one man being killed by the “fall of a bucket” while another was “carried down a sludge channel.”  While it seems self-evident, some prospectors failed to consider that the processes that they used to extract gold, might also loosen tree roots - a surprising number were crushed to death when large trees fell on their huts or tents.  In 1865 the Marlborough Press reported “an awkward situation” and a lucky escape.  The newspaper described how two miners who were digging a deep hole in a remote location became trapped when a large tree unexpectedly fell with a “fearful crash, completely covering the entrance.” Having “hallooed and coo-eed until they were completely exhausted” the miners retreated to the bottom of their hole and sat considering “how best to extricate themselves” when they discovered that water was flooding in and rising rapidly.  With no other option available, the men “set vigorously to work, and through incessant labour excavated themselves from their inhospitable prison” which was more than twenty feet deep.                                                                                                                                                   

Goldfield deaths could often be attributed to stupidity or greed.  Men who could not swim drowned while crossing rivers and poorly equipped prospectors often froze to death in mountainous terrain.  Redeeming accumulated bullion could also be hazardous, those prospectors who did not trust their gold to the armed government escorts’ risked robbery and murder on the return journey to Dunedin. A surprising number of men perished while in “a state of intoxication,” while others simply had the misfortune to become ill or injured and died because of a lack of adequate hospital facilities. Suicide among the unlucky was also quite common.

In May 1862, a ‘Chinaman’ named Sue Kung who was suffering from incurable syphilis took opium and then hanged himself from a branch suspended over a hole in the Bendigo diggings.  He left a rather poetic suicide note which was translated and published verbatim as a “curiosity” by the Bendigo Advertiser.  Sue Kung wrote that a man should be “rich and noble, or poor and low in this life.”  His hopes for health and wealth being ruined he had chosen to “depart from life in this hole, if I suffer pain once, I will escape from all future sorrow.” Touchingly, Sue Kung’s last wishes were for his companions to “get the blessing of Heaven and plenty gold.”                                                                                                                                                                         

The vast majority of fatalities however, were simply caused by the environment.  1863 was the prospectors’ annus horribilus, hundreds died during the course of this year.  It began in July with a heavy snowfall, followed by unseasonably warm rain.  Melted snow flooded mountain streams that fed Otago’s rivers, violent floods ensued.  In one night the Clutha rose 20ft, the Shotover rose 35ft and the original settlement of Arrowtown was inundated and destroyed.  Dams burst, tents and diggings were swept away, thousands lost their possession and an unknown number of prospectors were caught unaware and drowned.  Worse was to follow. A month later snow fell again and continued to fall almost every day throughout August and into September.  Isolated and remote camps were buried and roads became impassable and then simply disappeared beneath the snow drifts.  Those who chose to stay to protect their claims against ‘jumpers’ froze or starved as fuel and food ran out.  Those who chose to leave lost digits or limbs to frostbite while trekking to civilisation.  Sergeant Garvey of the Otago Mounted Police became the second police officer in New Zealand to lose his life in the course of duty when he died in a blizzard near Ranfurly.   Weather conditions did not return to normal until Christmas.  It is likely that hundreds of prospectors lost their life during the course of that one year, although final numbers could never be confirmed.          

                      

As 1864 began the number of prospectors in Otago peaked and gold miners were beginning to look towards the West Coast for fresh opportunities.  In August that year, four hopeful young Scotsmen left Dunedin en route to the diggings. Arriving in Waikouaiti, they bought a tiny tent and provisions for an evening meal then set up camp at Hawksbury bush.  Pitching their tent beneath a large tree, they lit a fire, cooked their meal, and leaving their fire burning retired to sleep, side by side in their 8 foot by 6 foot tent.  Perhaps they should have known better, but “being ‘new chums’ they apprehended no danger.”  The tree roots caught fire and in the night the tree fell across their tent killing the closest man, trapping the next two and narrowly missing the fourth.  The uninjured man was able to drag his neighbour from the tent, together they ran for help. Passing two or three farmhouses on the way to the Waikouaiti police camp, they behaved in such “a frantic manner” that terrified settlers turned them away, not believing their story.  When Police Sergeant Burns and his constables arrived at the campsite they discovered a terrible scene.  The tree trunk was four feet in diameter, beneath it lay a dead man and another who was trapped, crushed and screaming in agony.  He remained conscious and suffering throughout the two or three hours it took to fetch a cross-cut saw and free him.  His condition was hopeless, and despite “receiving every attention,” death eventually “put an end to his indescribable agony.”  The inquest returned a verdict of “accidental death caused by the falling of a tree.”                                   

The two surviving ‘prospective prospectors’ were never named.   It would be nice to know whether they considered themselves to be supremely lucky and continued on to the goldfields, or if they decided that their recent brush with death might have exhausted their good fortune and chose to find safer occupations.