Beyond the Edge Beyond the Bar: 13.11 The Coromandel: White Cliffs Here & There

A Promontory on Mercury Bay

This past weekend Jean and I went on a mini-exploratory visit of New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula, in the North Island. To the west of the peninsula is the Hauraki Gulf, flanking Auckland (some 55 kilometers west of the Coromandel), and to the east lie the open waters of the Pacific.

Almost 250 years ago Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand, on the first of his three voyages of exploration and mapping of the Pacific. He had been commissioned by the Royal Society to observe a transit of Venus (across the sun’s face) in Tahiti. After visiting Tahiti he sailed his ship, HMS Endeavour, southward to New Zealand to observe a transit of Mercury. That observation was accomplished at a Coromandel beach near Whitianga* on what is now named Mercury Bay. Capt. Cook subsequently circumnavigated New Zealand and had a number of mutually beneficial dealings with the Māori.

New Zealand was so named by the Dutchman Abel Tasman, who was the first European to arrive in these far islands (13 December 1642). He didn’t hang around. But the British did, or rather waves of Brits—English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish—followed in the path of Capt. Cook. Many came to the Coromandel Peninsula (which acquired its present name from an 1820 visit by the Royal Navy’s HMS Coromandel to a harbor adjacent to what became Coromandel Town).

New Zealand has a profusion of names. Always and everywhere there are Māori names, most of which are still in common use by Māori and Pākehā (Europeans or non-Māori). Hence in traveling from Te Awamutu (= ‘the river’s end’) to Tairua (=’two tides’ or ‘second tide’), where we stayed, Jean and I traveled through towns and villages bearing names like Waitoa (= 'brave water'?), Te Aroha (= 'the love'), Paeroa (= 'long ridge or range'), and past geographic features, like the Waihou (= 'fresh water'?) River and the Kaimai Range. While I often resort to Wikipedia or to the online Māori Dictionary to discover underlying place name meanings, it’s not always possible, not least because more than one translation is possible, especially with a novice like me. With many Māori names there is a story and, that being so, this is a multistoried land.

The Māori for New Zealand is ‘Aotearoa’, often translated ‘land of the long white cloud’. There’s a story there and that’s a relatively short name. Thanks to the Māori, New Zealand bears the longest (non-hyphenated, single-word) place name in the world, with 85 letters in all. The locals shorten their reference to the hill on the North Island that bears the name, but here’s the name in full:

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu. It would probably be easier to climb the hill than to say its full name, at least for us non-locals. Anyway, there's a story in the hill's name (no surprise).

It’s impossible to conceive of New Zealand bereft of its Māori heritage, not least because of the abundance of Māori names across the land. But likewise it’s impossible to conceive of New Zealand bereft of its European heritage, especially its British heritage. Here are names resonating from an island halfway round the world: Dunedin, Christchurch, Marlborough, Nelson (all on the South Island) and Wellington, Hamilton, Cambridge, and Thames (all on the North Island). Given Cook’s contribution to humanity’s knowledge of the Pacific, the Cook name festoons New Zealand, as well as other Pacific places. New Zealand’s highest mountain (3764 meters or 12,316 ft) is Mt Cook, also known as Aoraki (='cloud piercer'?). The water separating the North and South Island is Cook Strait. And back on the Coromandel we encounter Cooks Beach (no apostrophe), where Capt. Cook observed the transit of Mercury.

If Cooks Beach marks, as it does, the onset of the British (and European) footprint on New Zealand / Aotearoa, where might the first Māori landfall be marked? So far as I’ve learned, the site of the first landfall (now believed to be around 1280 AD) is either unknown or open for debate. Māori oral history, however, points to the Māori as having come from 'Hawaiki', which sounds suspiciously like 'Hawaii'. Linguists have identified the Māori language and the Hawaiian language as being related, more like cousins than sisters, if I may so describe them. They are both members of the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages. But linguistic evidence and DNA studies strongly suggest that the Māori came from the Cook Islands. By way of the Marquesas the Hawaiians also came from the Cook Islands (which are about 3000 km [or 1870 miles] northeast of New Zealand). More generally, the Polynesian peoples (based on DNA evidence) are thought to have descended from aboriginal groups who lived on Taiwan before 3000 BC.

There's a community today at Cooks Beach. That this community lives with that name rather than, say, 'Cookton', suggests, as it should, that the beach has long been a comparatively out-of-the-way place that never grew into anything other than the resort community that it now is. Almost no place on the peninsula is easily reached by land. But places are easily accessed by water. In the 1800s there was a veritable bonanza of mining, including gold mining. The mining activity drew numerous individualists and speculators, as might be expected in a gold rush. And while mining may return in a big way to the Coromandel, a return is adamantly opposed by at least a number of locals and presumably by many of the ‘seasonals’ who maintain summer homes on the peninsula. One sees anti-mining signs throughout the Coromandel.

The Coromandel along its coasts has become an immense leisure and recreation magnet, not only for Kiwis, but also for foreigners. Tairua, where we stayed, has apparently become a resort especially popular among Germans, some of whom have stayed and opened businesses (including 'The Pepe', one of the superb Tairua restaurants we patronized). No doubt some of the anti-mining sentiment is motivated by the stake that so many locals have in the shops, restaurants, guide services, outfitters, and so forth that are geared to the tourists and seasonals. But some of that sentiment may stem from fears about what mining might do to this place of great beauty. If mining returns to the Coromandel, it will presumably be done with great care, not least because of public sentiment.

The Coromandel is its own place. Of course it's comparable to other places. What place isn't? But all too often comparisons either diminish or exaggerate. By resorting to comparisons we fail to get at the essential nature of a place or person. A novelist—I've done so myself—will write a whole book just endeavoring to open eyes (and ears) to the essential mystery of a person or place. Neither you nor I have the luxury of such verbiage in this blog. And so I'll return to Capt. Cook, to find a place to end this post.

Capt. Cook found Mercury Bay to be a special place and I don’t mean because of the transit of Mercury. He reportedly said the white cliffs he saw there were like the White Cliffs of Dover. That's kind of a stretch, I'd say. The Dover cliffs are made of chalk. In the Coromandel the 'Cook Cliffs' (if I may call them that) are made of pumice, a product of volcanism. But that would draw me into next week’s post, which I’ll be sending (God willing) from the South Island, which Jean and I expect to tour the week of Easter.

Suffice it to say now that Capt. Cook may have been a tad homesick when he pulled into Mercury Bay. Should he be blamed for seeing the White Cliffs of Dover in the beauty of the cliffs along Mercury Bay? His was an implicit comparison, but one tempered by joy, by a joyful remembrance from the past. Emotion ties us to the unseen, the remote, and the past, yes, but emotion can also tie us to what is before our eyes. And I like to think that Capt. Cook wasn’t diminishing the cliffs before his eyes. He saw the beauty that was before him and fell back on a beauty of his past to describe it. God bless us everyone when we do that, even if we can't quite hit the mark.

I’m not on the Coromandel as I prepare this post, but Jean and I will never forget the place, thanks be to God.

Warm regards,

Tim (& Jean)

* Māori has its variations but as it's become embedded in everyday Kiwiese, the 'wh' found in Māori words is pronounced like an 'f'. 'Whitianga' would, thus, be pronounced something like 'Fiteeyánga'.