There was once a papakainga, or village, at Whareakeake, a small bay on the north side of Otago Peninsula 25km north east of Dunedin. If you’re ever down that way just look for Murdering Beach Road and follow it all the way to the sea. Surfers know how to get there. The bay features an excellent right-hand point break, especially when a Northeast swell conspires with a brisk Southerly breeze. Rad barrels Bro! But you can see how a village might have set itself easily in the landscape beside the winding stream, gentle in the lee of bluff and hillside. Archeological evidence strongly suggests that this village specialised in working pounamu.

In December 1817, after prolonged tension and escalating violence between sealers and local Māori, matters came to a head with the arrival in the vicinity of the brig Sophia out of Hobart, Tasmania. Under the command of her master, Mr James Kelly, the Sophia left Tasmania on November 18th, 1817 and arrived back in Hobart 19 weeks later on the 22nd of March 1818 with 3000 seal skins and a tale of grim and bloody misadventure. 

Arriving in ‘Port Daniel’ (an early name for Port Otago, here referring to an anchorage in a bay near the substantial Māori settlement of Otakou) on or around the 11th of December 1817, there numbered among the crew a man named W. Tucker, called ‘Wioree’ by the local Māori. Tucker had lived at Whareakeake and had in fact built a house there some years before (around 1810 it is thought). He’d involved himself in the greenstone trade, selling souvenir pieces of New Zealand jade in Sydney. It has also been alleged that it was Tucker who took the tattooed head of a chief from the Riverton area to Sydney in 1810 or 1811, also for sale, thus beginning the business of trade in Mokomokai. Quite the entrepreneur, Mr Tucker, even without the head, though his business activities quite probably cost him his own.

Upon arrival at Otakou the welcome is said to have been cordial enough. The following day saw Captain Kelly, Tucker and five other crewmen take the ship’s boat around to Whareakeake, ostensibly to trade for potatoes. Kelly is said to have made ‘…a small present of iron…’ for the chief there. At Whareakeake Kelly and his party were met by a ‘Lascar’, that is, a seaman of Asian descent, who told the men of the Sophia he had been left behind some years before (around 1813) by the brig Matilda out of Sydney bound for Tahiti. We are not given the Lascar’s name but it seems he’d fared well among the Māori of Whareakeake, unlike a gang of sealers who’d come to a sticky ending some years earlier, this news being imparted to Captain Kelly by the Lascar. Nonetheless, it seems that Captain Kelly and his men felt confident enough to seek an exchange with the Whareakeake locals. That would very soon turn out to be a fatal misjudgement. 

No sooner had Kelly’s party reached the chief’s house that ‘…in an instant an horrid yell was raised by the natives…’ And the men from the brig Sophia were immediately set upon. Remarkably, Kelly and four other men, including Tucker, made it back to the boat, presumably fighting all the way. The melee continued as the men struggled to gain the boat and put to sea and safety. Kelly and three other men named as Dutton, Wallon and Robinson made it. The unfortunate Tucker did not. He was knocked down in the breakers and was heard to cry ‘Captain Kelly, for God’s sake, don’t leave me.’ before being ‘cut limb from limb and being carried away by the savages.’ Two others of Kelly’s crew, Griffiths and Viole, were also terribly taken down and never seen again. Such are the ways of history.