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)
“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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