Monday, 1 June 2015

Famous Feet


Thomas Chaseland, half caste Aboriginal, sealer, whaler and pilot was a giant of a man.  His acts of brutality and bravery and his skills as a seaman are well documented but he is also remembered for a stumble on a beach which resulted in one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century.                            
Perhaps it was inevitable that the man who was considered to be the ‘best whaler in New Zealand’ should eventually be employed by Johnny Jones, (once) the richest man in Otago.  Jones once owned seven whaling stations and must have been willing to employ the legendary Tommy Chaseland.                                                                          
In the 1820’s and early thirties Tommy survived brutal skirmishes with Maori in Fiordland and had endured two (or possibly three) shipwrecks. On one occasion Chaseland and his wife Puna navigated a passage to Moeraki in an open whaleboat after having being shipwrecked in the Chatham Islands; on another he swam six miles in the freezing Southern Ocean to seek rescue after his whale destroyed his boat. In 1835 at Preservation inlet in Fiordland Chaseland and another man took eleven whales in seventeen days – an act that was described at the time as the “greatest feat of its kind ever performed in this country.”  It could also have been described as the most wasteful; at that time the station had no barrels; and with no means of storing the oil, none was harvested, whalebone alone was collected and mountains of blubber were left to rot.                                                      
Two years later Johnny Jones purchased this station from a man named Edwin Palmer whom Jones persuaded to stay on as station manager; Chaseland was promoted to ‘chief headsman.’  Among the whaling crew at the station was a young runaway sailor named Charles Denahan.  Denahan had been instructed to take care of one of the station’s whaleboats, but let it drift onto rocks where it was destroyed.  Chaseland gave the boy an initial beating, which was followed by a ‘ropes ending’ administered by Edwin Palmer.  The beatings must have been brutal – when Denahan died his body was described as being “black, yellow and blue from the ankles to the shoulders.” Chaseland escaped punishment but Palmer was eventually charged with manslaughter and tried in Sydney. Johnny Jones ‘fixed’ the matter by offering bribes to one crown witness and arranging for two others to be shipped out of Australia before they could be called to give evidence.  After an adjournment that lasted half an hour the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.  Jones had illustrated the lengths he was prepared to go to, to protect valued employees and they in turn, found ways to repay his loyalty.                                                                                   
In 1843 Chaseland signed an agreement to work at Jones’s station in Waikouaiti and on the 14th of August that year his marriage to Puna was formalised by Waikouaiti’s resident missionary the Reverend James Watkin.                                       
Chaseland’s particularly acute eyesight was legendary – he was known to have sighted a whale that was invisible even with a telescope and was rumoured to be able to see a mile beneath the ocean. His near vision may not have been as good however, while walking on the beach near Waikouaiti he struck his foot on a bone projecting from the sand. It was identified as belonging to a Moa.        
                                                           
They were not the first Moa bones to be discovered (that find had occurred in 1837) but they were the first to be uncovered in an area that was once a swamp.  The whalers of the Waikouaiti station were well aware of the value of the bones and set about trying to discover more. Unfortunately, not being palaeontologists they chose to dig with a pickaxe creating “sad havoc.”  More bones were exposed with each receding tide and at some point Tommy Chaseland discovered (and carefully excavated) a perfectly preserved pair of Moa feet standing erect and about a yard apart.  He presented his prize to his employer Johnny Jones.                                           
Some years later Jones presented (or perhaps sold) these “splendid and unique fossils” to a visiting naturalist named Walter Mantell who examined the holes from which they had been dug and sketched the orientation of the feet. He also described the rough excavation and handling of the specimens as “hunnish behaviour.”


“Bones of the right foot of the moa, or extinct colossal ostrich-like bird of New Zealand.” Found at Waikouaiti by Walter Mantell.  –From a Pictorial Atlas of Fossil Remains (London, 1850) 

Mantell’s notes read: “This unlucky Moa, happily for science, must have been mired in the swamp and being unable to extricate himself, has perished on the spot.” 

“The location of this bed is in a little bay, on the side of the bar of sand that unites the headland called Island Point with the mainland at the entrance of the river Waikouaiti”         The bone-bed is an ancient swamp or morass, in which the New Zealand flax once grew luxuriantly; it is now covered by a layer of sand, and is submerged at high water being visible only when the tide has receded. 
                                                                                                                                              
Walter Mantell was not the first person to excavate bones from the site, but he made the largest collection of specimens there and provided the best description of the area in which they were found. His tactic seems to have been to harvest and remove as many specimens as quickly as possible.  Between 1847 and 1850 he collected “more than 1000 separate bones and also fragments of eggs, which shipped in bulk to the British Museum with little attempt made to document details of individual specimens.  The Waikouaiti Moa feet were unique in that they were perfectly intact, and their location and orientation were carefully recorded. This sketch of Mantell’s made in 1852 shows his party leaving a site in North Otago carrying enormous bundles of specimens.  He named the site ‘Awamoa’ – meaning moa stream.                                                                                                                           
The specimens provoked intense debate.  Evidence of Moa hunting was incontrovertible, but the central question remained – who were their hunters and when did their hunting occur?  In the absence of carbon dating great importance was given to traditional Maori Folklore.  Elaborate anecdotal accounts were recorded.  The Reverend Watkins reported fables about “immense birds which were formerly said to exist.” Unfortunately his report also referenced “an immense serpent of the water species."                                                         

Watkins’s son Edwin added to the debate. In 1892 he wrote a letter to the Otago Daily Times in hopes that his contribution “may be of interest to those scientific men who hold that it is not long since the Moa became extinct.” He wrote:  “I remember when a little boy seeing daily ‘Kawko’ the old chief, at Waikouaiti.  He had all the appearance of a very old man.  I judge that he was quite 70 years of age.  He told my father that when he was a very little boy he saw a live moa that was as tall as a horse.  Being afraid, he hid himself in the fern.”


A tall tale? Or a true account of an encounter with a tall bird?

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