The story about Te Pahi, a tupuna rangatira who lived in Pēwhairangi the Bay of Islands around the turn of the 19th century, is filled with much mana, sadness—and mystery. One thing continues to elude me after publishing my new book The Chief and the Empire.
Te Pahi was the first rangatira of his status to cross the Tasman when he visited Sydney in 1805-06. He built close ties with the governor of New South Wales, Philip Gidley King, and was feted as a celebrity. His new alliances initially brought rewards for his people, but ultimately he was betrayed by Pākehā and was killed.
The life of Te Pahi reverberates today, with lessons about compassion, betrayal, and Māori-Crown relations prior to the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840. In searching for answers over the past three years, I’ve stood in awe of this man and his people, as well as his uri (descendants), some of whom have been researching him for decades.
Uri, including Professor Deidre Brown, Te Tai Tokerau rangatira and researchers, as well as historians such as Dame Anne Salmond and Vincent O’Malley, have long studied this haerenga (journey) and its implications.
But no one has solved the riddle of the missing medal, gifted to him by Governor King upon Te Pahi’s return to Aotearoa.
When he sailed from Sydney, on board the ship carrying Te Pahi were two gifts from King—a house (yes, an actual, kitset house; eat your heart out Ikea), and the silver medal inscribed with Te Pahi’s name (spelled full caps as TIPPAHEE) and King George III.
It was the first gift of its kind from the Crown to Māori, a mark of respect and mana.
Within years, though, the house was burned down and the medal had vanished—both a result of that disgraceful attack on his pā.
The medal was lost for more than 200 years until in 2014 descendants of Te Pahi spotted a small ad in the newspaper in Sydney. It had turned up for sale at an auction house.
Deidre Brown and the late Hugh Rihari, in conjunction with others, led a fierce battle to have the medal returned to Aotearoa. In the end, with the support of Ngāpuhi, Auckland Museum and Te Papa were successful bidders at the auction.
Brown describes the return of the medal as a momentous occasion, as if their tupuna had been returned.
As a researcher of Māori architecture and art history at Waipapa Taumata Rau (Auckland University), she got to work, trying to find out as much as she could about where the medal had been for all those years. According to her research, it was taken from Aotearoa after the attack on the pā by one of the leaders, James Finucane. When he arrived in South America on his way back to Europe, Finucane then gave it to a collector of “curiosities”, a British naval officer who was then based in Rio de Janeiro.
That officer, Admiral Michael de Courcy, eventually returned to Britain where Brown believes he kept the medal in his collection. After his death, the collection was sold, according to newspaper ads from 1830. None specifically mention Te Pahi’s medal; in fact the ads are generic, if offensive by today’s reading, offering the chance to purchase, “beautiful specimens of savage Weapons and Utensils”.
So, that was a bit of a dead end, halting at 1830.
As to the Sydney auction house, in 2014, there wasn’t much evidence to be found there, either. The seller was anonymous and the provenance was patchy.
It was noted that the medal had been mentioned in a will in Australia in 1899—that of Edward du Moulin. There was some suggestion it may have been connected to a man named John du Moulin, who, intriguingly, had come to Aotearoa around the time of the signing of Te Tiriti.
Peering into the gap between 1830 and 2014, there was more dark than there was light.
I remember the Sunday afternoon last year that I first pulled on the threads around the story of the medal’s history. I started by looking at John du Moulin. He was a surveyor and served in the colonial forces. During the wars in the north, du Moulin helped sketch the pā site at Te Ruapekapeka, a Māori fortress which had been a stronghold for Hōne Heke, and he was also in the Waikato and Taranaki wars. Later, in civilian life, he helped design the layout of Auckland, and was the first landowner to subdivide a section in Maungawhau-Mt Eden.
But there was nothing concrete there to pin him to the medal. And, besides, I couldn’t find any firm connection between him and Edward du Moulin. John was Edward’s uncle, but they’d lived in different countries and hadn’t had anything to do with each other for decades, at least, from what it seemed.
So I focused on Edward. He was a doctor who had studied in Scotland, then, apparently, returned to Australia in the 1890s, practising in the town of Dubbo. But there were no clues as to how he had come across the medal.
Maybe some of his descendants knew something? By a series of coincidences and lucky breaks, I found someone to email in Australia who I thought might be connected.
“Well done for tracking me down,” she replied. “Yes, Edward was my great-grandfather.”
The medal had been the source of a family rift before it was put up for sale by her uncle. So now I knew the vendor.
What’s more, she could tell me what the family knew about how the medal got into her great-grandfather’s hands. Edward had served as a ship doctor for a while and was one stage was apparently given the medal by a grateful patient.
In the family’s possessions with the medal was a card signed by a prince of the sultanate of Johor, a state of modern-day Malaysia ruled by a royal family since the 1500s. “Please accept this as a souvenir from me,” says the card.
Could the medal and the card signed by the prince be connected? It’s unclear.
But by using shipping records, we were able to place Edward and the prince together on a voyage in 1890. It still doesn’t prove the prince had the medal. But we now know much more about the passage of the medal than we previously did, how it was in Edward and his family’s hands from 1890 to 2014.
The gap in our knowledge is down to about 60 years. The search for answers goes on.
The Chief and the Empire by Eugene Bingham (Allen & Unwin, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
