Joel Polack, 3 Move to the Bay of Islands
The Bay of Islands presented new commercial opportunities. The intertribal wars that bedeviled New Zealand and Maori society were coming to an end. More and more whalers and trading ships visited the Bay of Islands, which provided a sheltered deep-water harbour. There they could obtain provisions: pork, fish, potatoes, onions, water, wood, and chandlery. Ships could be refitted if necessary. Maori women were available for the crew, who had been at sea for months, deprived of female company1. In 1830, 29 ships visited the Bay of Islands, by 1833 this number increased to 96, and from then on the numbers grew, until by the end of the decade, 1840, there were 212 ship visits.2
Polack saw that money was in supplying the needs of visiting ships, and more and more, as the European settlement grew, the needs of settlers and the increasingly diversified needs of Maoris, rather in the fickle trade of timber and flax. He set out to establish a trading post in Kororareka.
Kororareka was at the time a wild place. A.S. Thompson, an early historian of New Zealand, noted that ‘In 1832,there were one hundred white settlers permanently located in Kororareka’, 3and the place was then described as the Cyprus of the Southern Ocean, in which life was one unceasing revel. Chiefs in the neighbourhood lived in affluence by pimping for the crews of whale ships, and Pomare kept a harem of ninety-six slave girls for this pandemonium. The missionaries in the immediate vicinity of Kororareka magnified and widely circulated glowing accounts of the scenes which daily occurred; and stated that the Resident, although he had the British flag flying over his house, had no power to put down the floating brothels which polluted the bay under its protection. Kororareka was described as ‘a filthy looking miserable place’, where ‘Satan maintains his dominion without molestation.’
It was here, on the foreshore of the small settlement that Polack purchased land from a group of Maori chiefs headed by Hone Heke. Heke’s signature appeared on most of Polack’s land purchases. In all likelihood Heke saw himself as both a protector and a trading partner of the young Jewish merchant.4 But setting up a base in Kororareka was not without its problems. In April 1833 Henry Williams noted in his journal that he had ‘a call from Mr. Polack a settler who came with a party of natives, being in treaty with them for some land and in need of a little interpretation5. By July Polack was in trouble. He went to Henry Williams again. ‘The news of the day,’ Henry Williams noted in his journal, [was that] ‘Mr. Polack [was] stript of the whole of his property by small party of Natives from Waiomio; The assigned reason, that he swore at them.’6 James Busby, the British Resident, tried to resolve the issue. He called the Maori leaders together for a conference. The attack was justified, they said, as Polack had cursed them, saying he would cut off the head of a certain chief and cook it in a frying pan. From the Maori point of view no greater insult could be imagined7. Henry Williams’s sympathy for Polack was not very great. ‘This person is one of those free and independent men, full of threats and great boastings as to his treatment towards these people; as he had expressed himself thus to me upon one occasion.’8 Perhaps the freewheeling, young Jewish adventurer, confident in his superior education and knowledge of the world could hardly expect sympathy from the dour, self-righteous elder statesman of the missionary community. He was certainly a ‘free and independent man’, he admitted that he had a bad temper, but his plain spoken, assertive behaviour did not harm his status among Maoris, who were themselves not that averse to some aggressive expressions of disapproval. Unlike the missionary and the British Resident, Polack had a sense of humour, enjoyed laughing at, but also with Maoris. Though at times he made demands on his Maori companions that they were reluctant to fulfil, and when the occasion arose, he lost his temper and hit them, they seemed to put up with these outbursts and remained loyal to him, and made the most of his company.
But there was probably more to this incident than the bad language and idle threats to which the party of Maoris took exception. Polack had built a house on the land that he had bought from Heke, but other Maoris, notably Rewa, the Waiomio chief, disputed Heke’s right to sell the land. That was their reason for destroying Polack’s house. Again Henry Williams noted in his journal ‘In the afternoon went over with Mr. Fairburn to see Mr. Polack who had sent a note requesting a call; found him in much disconcolation (sic), having lost every fraction of his property.’9 Polack expected Williams to take some action, but when he did not get satisfaction, Williams recorded that ‘Mr. Polack was very profuse in abusive speeches because we did not exert ourselves more to his satisfaction in the case of the New Zealanders v. Polack.10 Polack had to find other ways of resolving the dispute.
Heke confronted Rewa’s allegations, claiming that the land was his through right of conquest as well as family connections through his uncle, Toi Tapu11. The real issue for these Maori chiefs was not the ownership of a piece of land that none of them needed, but their influence over the European merchant. ‘Good well-to-do pakehas, traders, ship-captains, labourers, employers of labour, these were honoured, cherished, caressed, protected and plucked. Plucked judiciously … so that the feathers might grow again.’12 As Judith Binney noted, ‘By the early 1830s, from the Maori perspective, the most valuable thing to acquire was a resident European. Whether missionary or trader, his value was the hapū’s source of supply.’13 Many successful European agents married into the Maori community, which protected them. Polack had such an offer of marriage during his travels through the Hokianga and Kaipara, and he was rather taken with the 15-year-old daughter of the chief, but he declined the offer and preferred to maintain his independence.14
Polack persevered, and managed to get the permission of Rewa and other disputants to take up the land that he purchased and to rebuild his house. His access to merchandise from Sydney was useful for Maoris. It also helped that by then Polack learned to speak their language. Maoris enjoyed trading, bargaining, and saw this as a game, a challenge. That this European was not a missionary, that unlike some of the missionaries, he didn’t want to acquire vast tracks of Maori land, and wanted nothing more than to do business with them, probably enhanced his usefulness. Boundaries were vaguely defined; Maoris were predisposed to selling the same piece of land over and over again to anyone prepared to pay for it. They did not have the same concept of land ownership as Europeans had, and Polack became well aware of that. He went to a great lengths to establish ownership of the land he had acquired within the framework of British law as applied in the colonies, and in particular, New South Wales. He had all the interested parties to the sale sign the document that was witnessed by local European settlers, which included on the various deeds: J. McDiarmid, N. Lewyn. T. Spicer, Jas. Livings. T. Kemp, John T. Montefiore,William Abbott, commanding the ship “Clarkston “ of Sydney, Wm. Powditch, William Alexander, Thos. S. Trapp, Robert Hookey, W. D. Brind, Commander of the “Howard Castle”, and Willm. Hindson, Master of “Cape Packet.”
1 Grady, Don (1986) Sealers & whalers in New Zealand waters. Auckland, Reed Methuen, p. 60
2 Chisholm., R. R. a. J. (1992). Bay of Islands shipping arrivals and departures, 1803–1840. Wellington, Paremata Press.
3Thomson, A.S. The Story of New Zealand, Vol 1, p.285, quoted in Lee, Jack, I have named it Bay of Islands, p.196.
4 National Archives OLC 638–42
5 Williams, H. (1961). The Early Journals of Henry Williams. Christchurch, Pegasus Press.
6 Williams, Early Journals, p.322
7 Ramsden, E. (1942). Busby of Waitangi : H.M.’s Resident at New Zealand. Wellington, Reed.
8 ibid.
9 Williams, Early Journals p. 322
10 Williams, Early Journals p. 324
11 OLC 638–42
12 Maning, F. E. (1863). Old New Zealand : a tale of the good old times / by a Pākehā Māori. Auckland, Robert J. Creighton & Alfred Scales.
13 Binney, J. (2010). Stories without end. Wellington, Bridget Williams Books.
14 Polack, New Zealand: Being a Narrative, p.123–5
Chapter 4 Polack’s Store
https://stevensedley3.medium.com/joel-polack-an-outsider-in-pre-colonial-new-zealand-21e2306ef324
