The duel
The Duel
Trouble was brewing in Kororareka in March 1837 and Joel Polack, the Jewish trader knew it. He had just returned from Sydney. There were whispers, rumours, curious looks. Joel Polack, was not liked and he didn’t care. He was an artist, an educated man. He was also a successful businessman, but this had come about almost by accident. He was sent over to New Zealand by one of the leading Jewish merchants in Sydney to see how far ships could sail up the Kaipara river. He was a young man, footloose, who relished an adventure, so he came, liked the place, liked the people, and came back.
With merchandise that he bought with a loan from his brother he started wheeling and dealing. He made a bit of money. What if the people around him thought that he didn’t fit in, he was not like them. The few hundred people living in Kororareka by 1837[1] were from an assortment of different nations, runaway and liberated convicts, traders, beach-combers, sawyers, traders, settlers and missionaries. It was the busiest port for whalers and shipping in the South Sea Islands, a lively place, with a church, five hotels, many grog-shops, a theatre, gambling houses, skittle alleys and billiard tables
In a drawing by Polack you can see a number of sailing ships and a good many Maori canoes in the Bay. The small group of houses in the distance was the European settlement. The large building in the foreground was Polack’s. He lived well apart from the other Europeans. He kept his distance. His large building and the surrounding cottages housed his two shops, from which he ran his business. He stocked everything the settlers and visiting ships needed, and more and more Maori too came to buy and sell. They also wanted whatever the Europeans had. You could buy there blankets, tobacco, sugar, molasses, bullet moulds, iron pots, beef, pork, spades, spy-glasses, all that sorts of merchandise. You could also equip a ship with anchor, cables, and a new set of sails. As well as the shops, there was a brewery on the premises. A couple of years earlier, Polack brought over an experienced brewer and brewing equipment form Sydney[2] The brewery rankled with both the numerous grog-sellers, who saw that as competition and the missionaries who feared that the natives would take to beer and drunkenness.
Polack stayed well away from the people of the small settlement. He had little in common with them. They were not people whose friendship he courted. They were crude, vulgar, uneducated men. As to their wives, big blowsy noisy women, drunk, violent, best avoided.
Polack’s neighbour, Benjamin Turner, took exception to him. ‘King of Kororareka’ was how Turner saw himself. He had done well. Stealing some cheese in Worcester, perhaps a few other things as well, gave him his lucky break. Were it not for that he would still be working the barges on the river Severn, and would never have had the opportunities he had. For this theft he was transported to Australia. When his time was up he went back to what he knew, working on ships. He jumped ship in New Zealand. Things were not always easy. He was shipwrecked and found himself on Stewart Island. You grab every opportunity you get, he believed, and he joined a sealing crew. Restless, he drifted North, traded in flax in Nelson, then in Wellington. There he crossed the fearsome chief Te Rauparaha, and had to scamper. He was lucky to escape with his life. He moved to the Bay of Islands. That was where Europeans were, people like him. There he would make his fortune. Turner married the sister of Chief Hone Heke, a useful connection. He had done well in a short time. He was the owner of two ships that sailed to Australia, he had two saw-mills, and a popular grog-shop, a great money maker. Not bad for a man who had never had a day of schooling, couldn’t read or write. He lived by his wits. He had no time for someone like Polack, who gave himself airs an graces, thinking that he was superior to others. Turner had left the notion that some people were better than others behind when he was shipped to Australia.
He and Polack fell out, possibly over land3. Polack might have claimed that Turner encroached on his land, or perhaps the other way around, boundaries were not well defined. Polack might have disputed one of Turner’s bills. It is likely that Turner was not above cheating his neighbour just to show him that though he had no schooling, he could outsmart the Jew. But the most likely cause of the dispute was Polack’s brewery, the first in New Zealand, which he established a while before, seeing new business opportunities. Turner didn’t like this upstart nobody, pretending to be better than others, taking his business away. He knew how to deal with such people.
Polack was a small man, meticulously groomed given the circumstances. There is a painting by the artist, John William, depicting Maori bargaining with a European.
The European trader is believed to be Joel Polack.
With his tailored suit, hat and plaid coat, he looked out of place in this small settlement on the shore in the Bay of Islands. He stood out, he was different from the other Europeans. But the natives and the officers of ships that visited the harbour saw in him a man of class, a Rangatira, a person of some distinction. He was widely travelled, had seen much of the world, and was a keen observer of everything around him. He asked questions, he listened, he made notes, sketched what he saw. Visitors who met him were intrigued. His brewery was a popular meeting place for natives and Europeans alike, but although he owned the brewery he was always sober. He was not like the men in black suits, missionaries, judgmental preachers who collected souls and disciples. Natives enjoyed conversing with him. He told them about the distant parts of the world that he had visited. They in turn told him about their customs, about their daily lives, their Gods, their Atua. He could talk with them in their own language, which he had taken the trouble to learn and speak with reasonably fluency. Not that there were no occasional misunderstandings. The meaning of words were at times unclear when natives tried to grasp European concepts. Who did the land belong to? Two Maori chiefs sold the same piece of land to Polack, then they disputed it. There were threats of violence, but Polack somehow diffused these by some peace offering, bribe, a little gift. And when natives ridiculed his European manners, the way he walked, the way he dressed, the way he ate, he laughed with them, always ready to see the funny side of the situation. Natives, naturally wily bargainers, enjoyed haggling with him. It was a game. Polack understood this, entered into its spirit. This way they had forged a kind of bond; not quite friendship, because Polack was not the sort of man who was open to friendship, but a sort of understanding.
The officers of visiting ships enjoyed his company. They were delighted to find a much travelled, educated man in this far off land. They appreciated the beer brewed by the master brewer in his brewery, a refreshing change from the course grog available from the many grog shops that abounded in this busy small Wild West settlement.
It was the envy of other settlers that the Polack had to confront, their envy and their resentment. They envied his success, the wealth he acquired in such a short time. He was a nobody, they said, a nobody pretending to be someone he wasn’t. He was a pauper, a man in debt who had been rescued by his brother. His brother had provided him with the merchandise for his trade. His brother, a convict who served his time, had made his fortune by sly practices, deception, speculation and exploitation. He was a publican, an auctioneer, a landowner. How did he, you may well ask, a convict transported to the colony, make so much money if not by trickery and dishonest means. It was connections. These Jews stuck together, backed each other, a network of shadowy entrepreneurs. They set up Polack, a Jew, sent him across the sea to this place, a young man with no means of his own to buy, to sell, to make his fortune by trading with worthless goods that they managed to get cheap for him. The Jew didn’t belong here. He was disliked by the missionaries, by the British Resident, by the other settlers.
Who knows what riled Turner or Polack. Polack came back from Australia. He might have said something that Turner didn’t like. Polack admitted that he had a rascally bad temper. Or Turner might have shouted obscenities. He was not given to subtlety. He threatened to hang Polack. He even made preparations to erect a gibbet for that purpose. When he was drunk he would shout and rave and would say anything. No ignorant drunken fool would threaten him, Polack thought. Bizarre as this seemed, Polack challenged Turner to a duel4. A duel, pistols at dawn, this was not the way people settled their differences in Kororareka.
In the middle of the night, on 10 March, Turner, drunk and accompanied by his two drinking companions, John Evans, a prize fighter and a man called Stewart, banged on Polack’s door. Polack told them to go away and come back at a more suitable time. At that Turner and his mates smashed the door down. Get out, go away you drunken fools, Polack might have shouted and when they threatened him, ready to lay a hand on him, Polack grabbed a pistol and shot Turner. The bullet hit him in the mouth.
At that the three intruders started throwing punches, hitting Polack, one after the other. A lifetime of humiliation went into each blow. In their drunken anger, they took out all their envy, their resentment, their frustrations in pummelling the little Jewish man. When Polack collapsed and was lying on the ground the three men gagged and tied him up. They dragged him to the beach and held him there while Turner’s wife kicked him.
‘Murder!’ Polack screamed.
Turner had threatened to hang him before, but even in his drunken fury he didn’t kill him. Violence was common in Kororareka, but murder was altogether a more serious matter and seldom happened even in this lawless wild frontier settlement. Ultimately Polack crawled away with a dislocated knee. He was rescued by the sailors of the barque Achilles, which happened to be anchored in the bay.
Turner probably thought ‘good riddance’. That jumped up little man would not be seen again in these parts. Next day he plundered Polack’s house. Polack was not likely to need those things any time soon.
There was little sympathy for Polack’s plight. Polack complained to Busby, the British Resident, but Busby’s response was unhelpful. ‘My instructions do not extend to disputes among Europeans’, he replied. Polack annoyed Busby, he criticised him at every opportunity. ‘He is a great knave,’ Busby told his brother. ‘He is universally detested here. The other low settlers know that he is as great rogue as the worst of them’. Busby said that Polack ‘tried to play the gentleman’ among the Kororareka rabble.
Polack was overwhelmed by a sense of despair after this attack . He had left his home, left his family, left London when he was only a teenager. The big wide world, with all its wonders awaited him, a world he had read about, a world beyond anyone’s experience in his comfortable London Jewish circle. He was already an accomplished artist. He could make use of his skill wherever he went. He travelled to Africa, to America, to Australia, then back to Madagascar. A whim, a chance had brought him to New Zealand, the opportunity to sketch the rich landscape and the intriguing, fascinating Maori people. He came to learn, to explore, and to record. What was he doing among despicable people like Turner, people he was glad to leave behind in England? People like Turner were ruining the idyll of the beautiful South Sea land that explorers wrote about. It was time he went back home. He learned that his father was ill. He had lived in New Zealand on and off for six years. He wound up his business, left it in the care of others. On May 15, 1837 sailed to Sydney on his way back home.
While in Sydney, he wrote an article for the The Colonist about his life in New Zealand. In this he described Turner, without naming him, as ‘a well-known runaway convict’ who had obtained his wealth through dubious means. No doubt, Turner, a boastful vain man would have been hurt by this description, but as he was illiterate he had probably never read it.
Polack, a wealthy successful businessman, returned to London that he had left as a very young man. There he wrote two books about New Zealand [5] and became a minor celebrity. He never fitted into society, neither into Jewish society, nor into the genteel middle class he came to know as an artist and writer, so after a few years he sailed back to New Zealand, settled in Auckland, operating as a general merchant, and came up with new successful business ventures, among them, exporting Kauri gum, and setting up his nephew in New Zealand’s first photographic studio. He ultimately in 1849, left Auckland for new opportunities in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush. He sailed in his own ship with a cargo of prefabricated houses, which he expected to be valuable commodities in the rapidly expanding city. Turner and the duel were things of the past. As to Ben Turner, He never learned to read or write. He didn’t need that. He prospered, moved to Auckland, served on the Auckland Provincial Council and lived to the ripe old age of eighty.
1 Wilson, O. (1990). Kororareka & other essays. Dunedin, John McIndoe.
Wolfe, R. (2005). Hellhole of the Pacific. Auckland, Penguin. Wilson2. Wilson3 Kerr, D. (2006). The smell of powder : a history of duelling in New Zealand. Auckland, Random House5 Polack, J. S. (1838). New Zealand; Being a Narrative of Travels and Adventures in the Country between 1831 and 1837 London, Richard Bentley. Polack, J. S. (1840). Manners and customs of the New Zealanders. London, James Madden.
