Uhura's Mazda
Banned
J. de Saint-Maurice, ‘Nouvelles Perspectives sur le Peuplement Courlandais de l’Autéaraux’, Revue de la Société de l’Antiquité de l’Autéaraux 78 (Berry-sur-l’Autaquarau, 1998) [1]
Notes
[1] – There are going to be a lot of footnotes. A lot of them are going to be linguistic. You have been warned.
For example, ITTL, the French eventually colonise New Zealand in place of the British, because of Butterflies. So ‘l’Autéaraux’ is a plausible French rendition of the Maori word ‘Aotearoa’, while ‘Berry-sur-l’Autaquarau’ is an ATL version of Christchurch (the Maori name for the River Avon is ‘Otakaroa’)
[2] – Couronian is an old-fashioned demonym for people from Courland (German: Kurland; Latvian: Kurzeme). It is reasonable to expect a British translator for a paper written in French to use this term, despite the French being ‘Courlandais’. Courlandish just sounds wrong.
[3] – Then the base for Dutch trade in East Asia. Now, it is Jakarta. In the late 17th century, this was the closest you could get to Western civilisation if you were in the non-American bit of the Southern Hemisphere.
[4] – The French word for Maori (‘Mauri’) is OTL, the French transliteration for ‘whakapapa’ is not. IOTL, it was English missionaries who first wrote down the Maori language, so they used English linguistic rules. However, their system was derived from a single Maori dialect. In the Far North, ‘wh’ is pronounced like an aspirated W, but in most of the rest, it is pronounced as ‘F’. As the French do not necessarily land in the same place as the first missionaries did IOTL, they would have no reason to write ‘F’ as ‘Wh’. As a side-note, Whakapapa genealogies are pretty much the entire basis for Maori oral history.
[5] – The Couronian colonisation of Tobago is OTL, but the PoD is that Jakob Kettler does not send an expedition to re-colonise it straight away. Instead, he focuses (more than OTL) on the economic development of his own Duchy, but the anger still rankles.
[6] – There was never a proposal for the Dutch to do anything with New Zealand, but there was some abortive proposal to settle Western Australia in the 1650s and 1660s IOTL. Kettler intended to beat them to it and settle Australia himself, but both ideas came to nothing in the end. Here, it is only the target and the timing which is changed.
[7] – This is the same complement as the ship which was sent to settle Tobago in 1654 IOTL.
[8] – This is a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but I couldn’t find the names of any more likely leaders. IOTL, Alexander became a Colonel in the Prussian Army and was mortally wounded in the Siege of Buda in 1686. So he was quite prepared to be put in harm’s way, at least.
[9] – Invented but plausible: named after a Grand Master of the Livonian Order. Again, there are very few records online of the names of ships in the navy of Courland.
[10] – OTL Kerguelen Islands. Jan Sobieski was, at the time, King of Poland-Lithuania and ultimate ruler of Courland, so it would have been a good idea to seek his patronage. The Kerguelens are pretty much barren except for seals, penguins and moss.
[11] – Right, more linguistics. As Kettler is transliterating these places, they appear as if written for German pronunciation, not the Latvian spoken by most of the settlers; meanwhile, we also have the French transliterations. ‘Ville-de-Caphie’ is what the French would call a town on the OTL Kawhia Harbour, while the German ‘Pauehre’ is a reasonable rendition of the Maori name ‘Pouewe’ which was the original name for their settlement there, but which has fallen into disuse.
[12] – French version of ‘iwi’
[13] – French version of Ngati Toa. This tribe originally lived in the Kawhia area until the 1820s, when the Musket Wars drove them to sail south to settle near what was to become Wellington. In the 1680s, then, they are still in the same region as the rest of the Tainui.
[14] – Tangattepfennua is my attempt at a German transliteration of Tangata Whenua. The author is correct as to what this means. Meanwhile, ‘Te Raiou Mauri’ is a French version of ‘Te Reo Maori’, which simply means the Maori language. It is often referred to as ‘Te Reo’ or, in this case, ‘Te Raiou’.
[15] – Hacquah means ‘haka’, while ‘Qua Maté’ is ‘Ka Mate’, which is today the most famous Maori haka, often used by the All Blacks. It did indeed originate from the Ngati Toa people.
[16] – i.e, a Tiki. These held a lot of significance with the Maori and were often used to mark boundaries.
[17] – This whole thing sprang into my imagination when I imagined what a Kumara-based borscht would taste like.
[18] – There is, in fact, a hot water beach a few kilometres from Kawhia. There is also a bit of mineral wealth, such as iron ore, but it is plausible that they would not find it.
[19] – Alexander Kettler did in fact lose his arm at one point, and was known as 'Der Einarmige'. There is no ATL in which he keeps both his arms – it is Fate.
[20] – Outou meaning ‘Utu’, which roughly means revenge, but in a more ceremonial way, almost. It’s complicated.
[21] – OTL Ngati Maniapoto and Ngati Raukawa.
[22] – IOTL, the Ngapuhi were the first tribe to acquire European settlers, and were mainly interested in acquiring muskets. The settlers, being missionaries, had other ideas, but eventually brought a tribal leader, Hongi Hika to meet King George III and do a little tour of the Universities. Hongi Hika promptly smuggled a few hundred muskets back on the boat and started the Musket Wars, which led to an imbalance in Utu and the migration of several tribes to escape from the Ngapuhi, including the Ngati Toa. ITTL, the Couronians are being very canny by not selling the Maori any bullets.
[23] – Actually now called a Marae.
[24] – This is as close as I can get to rendering Moko in German, but it’ll have to do. A moko is a swirly, full-face tattoo signifying manhood, while women just get their chins and lower lips done. I feel like Alexander Kettler would definitely give it a go.
[25] – Early British settlers used the spelling ‘Pah’ as well, but they are now known as ‘Pa’. The word means hill-fort, basically, and they were only used during times of strife. During the New Zealand Land Wars of the mid-late 1800s, these Pa were extremely innovative, and genuinely, properly foreshadowed the tactics of trench warfare in WW1. The British didn’t actually try to learn anything from their tactical defeats, of course.
[26] – Wellington, geddit?
[27] – Waikato, but with a lot more vowels.
[28] – Tainui, via ratatouille.
[29] – This was a bit complicated. In Te Reo Maori, the names Gulbis and Kettler become something like ‘Kulupisa’ and ‘Ketelera’ (sorry to any Te Reo speakers) which, when Frenchified, become something like ‘Couloupisse’ and ‘Quetelaire’. Double-transliteration is far too ambitious for any sane human being.
It is perhaps the most quixotic attempts at far-flung colonisation which attract the most interest in certain circles. While one learns of the relentless subjugation of the people of this world by British and Dutch and, indeed, French profiteers, at school; it is other ventures to which one is drawn – the foolhardy flights of fancy hundreds of years before even the invention of flight. Thus, when it is revealed to a person of Antiquarian leanings that the first permanent European settlers in Autéaraux were not the followers of Duquesne, nor even sailors accompanying Abel Tasman, but a single ship of adventurers hailing from an insignificant Duchy in Eastern Europe with no major ports and no access to the great Oceans except via the Oresund Straits which belong – and belonged – to Denmark… the imagination is fired by empathy with those few hundred men and women, stranded as far away as possible from their homeland with no way of communicating with their loved ones, or even returning home.
The only written record of what came to pass in the Couronian [2] colony which comes from a first-hand source is a pamphlet written by the common soldier Zilvinas Balodis, who managed to row his way to Batavia [3] in an open boat over a period of eight months in 1686, eating nothing but fish and seabirds. His work, ‘Six Years at the Edge of the World: an Account of the Fateful Expedition to the Great Southern Continent’ is written in a homespun style and is full of descriptions which we now know to be mistaken, such as his insistence that the land in which he resided was connected somehow to Australia and America – perhaps this was a mechanism to prevent a descent into crushing loneliness by imagining that it was only a matter of walking far enough to meet another white man standing on the same soil. Or perhaps he genuinely subscribed to the theory of the Great Southern Continent – he omits to explain his belief. At any rate, we can expand, correct and corroborate his story with Archaeological surveys conducted in the last decades, and with Mauri ‘facquapapah’ or oral genealogies. [4]
But first, the scene must be set: during the seventeenth century, the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, in present-day Latvia, was ruled by the German Kettler family who had enriched themselves with trade despite an inauspicious geopolitical position, surrounded by much stronger powers: Russia, which eventually conquered the Duchy; Poland-Lithuania, their nominal liege; and across the Baltic, the larger trading powers of Denmark and Sweden. Duke Jakob Kettler, however, had ambitions to break out of this solitary confinement, and outfitted in 1654 an expedition to establish a colony on Tobago, and thereby take a slice of the cake which the large Kingdoms of Western Europe were to gobble up so completely before long. This was not a success, as the Dutch almost immediately descended on the budding settlement during the Great Northern War, and it was no more. Jakob Kettler never forgot this insult, and secretly vowed revenge. [5]
In the late 1670s, then, he was in a strong enough position to give the Dutch a bloody nose. By chance, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had recently rediscovered the charts made by Abel Tasman several decades previously and began to talk of another expedition to Australia and what they called ‘Nieeuw Zeeland’. This, in the end, turned out to be idle chatter, and the small funds raised were spent on rebuilding forts in Ceylon. [6] But Jakob Kettler was already resolved to beat the Dutch at their own game. While the bureaucracy of the VOC trudged onward towards a dull compromise, the Duke of Courland outfitted a ship-of-the-line with 80 families of incredibly trusting settlers, together with 120 Couronian soldiers who were sent to defend these settlers from the natives, [7] who Tasman assured them were barbarous cannibals. Leading the expedition was his own youngest son, Alexander Kettler, who was to become Governor of the colony. [8]
Balodis describes the journey, which began in 1681, as one of much excitement – rather too much for some of the civilians, apparently. The main aspect of this excitement was the use of the Brouwer Route through the Roaring Forties to reach the Antipodes, which resulted in a shortage of seasickness medicine and much structural damage to the Plettenberg, [9] not to mention the loss of five passengers overboard – they despaired of ever seeing the sun again, and took their own lives. They were forced to seek refuge in the hitherto uncharted Sobieski Islands [10] over the winter, while repairs were carried out and food supplies replaced with unpleasant-tasting penguin meat. Finally, the expedition was capable of travelling onwards, and Kettler guided the Plettenberg past Australia (somehow not even catching sight of it) and North through the Tasman Sea, until they made landfall at a place they dubbed Pauehre Harbour, but which is today known as Ville-de-Caphie. [11] Both names are derived from native Mauri toponymy, but upon landing at such an auspicious landing place, Alexander Kettler pronounced that they would build a thriving town, to be called Neumitau after the contemporary name of the Couronian capital, now called Jelgava.
This day in February 1782 was probably the high point of the history of Nemitau. For the harbour at Pauehre was also used and inhabited by a local Mauri Ieuie (or tribe) [12] called the Natie Tauah. [13] Balodis calls them the “Tangattepfennua” in German – the only sections of German in the text are transliterations from Te Raiou Mauri, [14] suggesting that Balodis copied these from a German-speaking superior, possibly Alexander Kettler himself. The word that Balodis uses literally means ‘people of the land’, suggesting that the Natie Tauah were very keen to exert their legitimacy on the newcomers. Although the oral histories of the Tauah do not record actual hostility early on – instead painting the Courland settlers as treacherously polite – the fact that they used this term to describe themselves reveals a situation very much unlike the friendly disposition which greeted Duquesne.
After the initial pleasantries, in which the Tauah performed a Hacquah which was apparently a fore-runner of the modern Qua Maté dance, [15] and the Europeans sang a rousing hymn whose name escapes Balodis, Kettler traded some pretty beads for what Balodis describes as “a large, wooden statue of a lizard-man clutching at his anatomy”. Even the sturdy Latvian women who had made the trek were shocked at the barbarism of the figure, and one later told Balodis that “his glinting eyes still bore into me every night as I close my own”. It is not mentioned where the figure spent the next few years, but one assumes it was not on public display in the new town. [16]
However, once Alexander Kettler and his companions had learned some rudimentary Te Raiou and, slowly and carefully, explained to the Tauah that they were going to be living on this land, so they might as well get used to the strange ringing sounds coming from the church bell every Sunday morning, life carried on relatively smoothly. Perhaps the newcomers regretted the decision to bring a large bell in the hold instead of more useful implements, but the food was plentiful: pigs, sheep and goats were brought along, the first large mammals (bar humans) to enter Autéaraux. Various staple crops were also imported in seed form, though it is said that the local Coumaire sweet potato was quickly incorporated into the borscht cooked up by the simple Latvians. [17]
The problem was, how were they to make money? "In retrospect", Balodis writes, they "should have set off with a clear idea”, but since the motive for the adventure was more based on Revenge than on Ambition, all that had been decided was that a second ship, carrying more supplies and more settlers, would set off the following year and then return, unlike the Plettenberg. This second ship would bring back return migrants and, most importantly, Alexander Kettler, who would have surveyed the area and would make recommendations to his father as to the economic strategy to be pursued. Two things prevented this: firstly, the fact that the Neumitauers could only just manage a subsistence economy based on the unforeseen lack of endemic flora and fauna. The trees of the surrounding region were plentiful, as were the fish in the Harbour, but local ‘Tangattepfennua’ would, from time to time, jump out of the trees and remonstrate with an uncomprehending Baltic man who had just cut down the wrong tree to build his barn. This made intensive logging of hardwoods for the European market a bit of a non-starter. This left fish, and most of Europe had a better alternative than ‘Antipodean fish kept in a barrel of salt for six months’. Natural resources such as coal and gold were searched for, but not found in any large enough quantities to help decide the purpose of the settlement. Was it to become a mill town, a prospecting town, a carpet-making town? Could they attract aristocrats on a Grand Tour with tales of boiling water flowing beneath beaches? [18] As it happened, this speculation was rather misguided.
For the second cause of the downfall of the colonial plan was the death (albeit long-expected) of Jakob Kettler in 1682. He had been the mastermind of, and only real believer in, the whole project, and without Jakob there, colonial aspirations were simply not important any more. Even though Alexander’s eldest brother felt a few small pangs of guilt at the thought of his brother, a modern-day Prester John, “languishing away in a native-filled harem”, he did not actually get round to sending the follow-up ship. Alexander Kettler and the rest of the settlers waited and waited, but by 1684, it was obvious that they were alone with the Natie Touah.
Which makes their subsequent conduct all the more surprising. For the previous few years, the colonists had been consistent trade partners and students of the Mauri way of life. When Alexander Kettler lost his left arm in a logging accident, it was the Mauri who taught his people the correct plants to use as a poultice when bandaging the stump. [19] Quite a few of the soldiers who had come without wives became very friendly with native women. Indeed, Balodis’ closest friend, a certain Gulbis, was formally married to one in a Christian ceremony, indicating that there was a mutual cultural and linguistic exchange going on. However, over time, resentment builds up, and Mauri genealogists tell of incoming traders cheating the Natie Touah out of goods and land. These may have been the result of dishonesty or merely misunderstandings, but the upshot was the same – a “loss of trust”.
So when the lewd idol (or Tiqui) which the Natie Touah had given to the Couronians as a gesture of welcoming friendship was burnt in the central square of Neumitau as part of a de-clutter of a storehouse, the powder-keg was ready to blow. The Mauri demanded Outou [20] for this mistreatment of an ancestor or deity (nobody now can remember which) and united forces with their much larger neighbours, the Natie Maniapautau and the Natie Rauquaoua, for vengeance. [21] A few months later, the Mauri alliance turned up on the outskirts of Neumitau with upwards of 800 men, and Kettler, not hitherto aware of the offence that had been caused, gathered his soldiers and his menfolk. They numbered roughly 200, plus women and children sheltering in the sanctuary of the church. They were vastly outnumbered, but they had the advantage in both training and equipment, for only a very few muskets had been bought by the Tangattepfennua, and most of these had come without bullets included. [22]
Balodis takes up the story:
It is worth noting that in contemporary Mauri warfare, the aim was not to kill the opponent, merely to extract Outou from them. It was enough merely to make them apologise, or to disgrace them in some way, sometimes by killing a few and eating them in full view of the enemy Pah [25]. It is unlikely that the Couronians were in any vast amount of danger until they let off their pre-emptive volley.
But Balodis’ account moves swiftly on as he describes the death of Alexander Kettler:
Now, Balodis’ account becomes one of doom and gloom, as his companions, one by one, succumb to scurvy and suicide. He is only saved by the vague memory of the Sailing-Master of the Plettenberg, several year before, telling him that they were “South-East of the Indies”, and he eventually arrives there alone, albeit after a run-in with some cannibalistic natives in Papua and a lot of unpleasant dietary experiences.
So what is the Antiquarian value of the abortive colonisation of Neumitau? Well, we have musket balls and metal implements lying in glass cases in the local Museum, and in the Musee National in MacMahonville. [26] That is a start. But most importantly, we have a lesson that the race relations of our country have not always been peaceful – no, before the Mauri Wars of the 1890s, there was a colonisation attempt that failed because of issues of trust and cultural misunderstandings between colonisers and colonised. The lassitude of the metropolitan support network for the colonists, together with the youth and naivety of Alexander Kettler and his companions, together also with the evident lack of profitability, doomed the venture to failure, but it was simple, stupid ignorance – along, perhaps, with the reluctance of the Natie Tauah – which ended the most overlooked, yet the most evocative, foray by Europeans into the Great Unknown.
And what of the Natie Tauah? Well, they acquired a large number of working muskets, and quickly learned how to fire them. For a few decades, they were the dominant Ieuie in the Ouaïecateau region, [27] despite their low population, until their new super-weapons grew too corroded to use. They remain today hanging on the walls of their maraïes as a reminder of their former power and their former cruelty. And yet, that is not the whole story. For it is evident, when one knows what to look for, that a sizeable proportion of the Ngatie Tauah are substantially paler than their Taïenouille [28] relatives, and there are several ‘facquapapah’ which fondly recall the names of revered ancestors – ancestors with names like ‘Couloupisse’ or ‘Quetelaire’. [29] In every tragedy, we find… humanity.
The only written record of what came to pass in the Couronian [2] colony which comes from a first-hand source is a pamphlet written by the common soldier Zilvinas Balodis, who managed to row his way to Batavia [3] in an open boat over a period of eight months in 1686, eating nothing but fish and seabirds. His work, ‘Six Years at the Edge of the World: an Account of the Fateful Expedition to the Great Southern Continent’ is written in a homespun style and is full of descriptions which we now know to be mistaken, such as his insistence that the land in which he resided was connected somehow to Australia and America – perhaps this was a mechanism to prevent a descent into crushing loneliness by imagining that it was only a matter of walking far enough to meet another white man standing on the same soil. Or perhaps he genuinely subscribed to the theory of the Great Southern Continent – he omits to explain his belief. At any rate, we can expand, correct and corroborate his story with Archaeological surveys conducted in the last decades, and with Mauri ‘facquapapah’ or oral genealogies. [4]
But first, the scene must be set: during the seventeenth century, the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, in present-day Latvia, was ruled by the German Kettler family who had enriched themselves with trade despite an inauspicious geopolitical position, surrounded by much stronger powers: Russia, which eventually conquered the Duchy; Poland-Lithuania, their nominal liege; and across the Baltic, the larger trading powers of Denmark and Sweden. Duke Jakob Kettler, however, had ambitions to break out of this solitary confinement, and outfitted in 1654 an expedition to establish a colony on Tobago, and thereby take a slice of the cake which the large Kingdoms of Western Europe were to gobble up so completely before long. This was not a success, as the Dutch almost immediately descended on the budding settlement during the Great Northern War, and it was no more. Jakob Kettler never forgot this insult, and secretly vowed revenge. [5]
In the late 1670s, then, he was in a strong enough position to give the Dutch a bloody nose. By chance, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had recently rediscovered the charts made by Abel Tasman several decades previously and began to talk of another expedition to Australia and what they called ‘Nieeuw Zeeland’. This, in the end, turned out to be idle chatter, and the small funds raised were spent on rebuilding forts in Ceylon. [6] But Jakob Kettler was already resolved to beat the Dutch at their own game. While the bureaucracy of the VOC trudged onward towards a dull compromise, the Duke of Courland outfitted a ship-of-the-line with 80 families of incredibly trusting settlers, together with 120 Couronian soldiers who were sent to defend these settlers from the natives, [7] who Tasman assured them were barbarous cannibals. Leading the expedition was his own youngest son, Alexander Kettler, who was to become Governor of the colony. [8]
Balodis describes the journey, which began in 1681, as one of much excitement – rather too much for some of the civilians, apparently. The main aspect of this excitement was the use of the Brouwer Route through the Roaring Forties to reach the Antipodes, which resulted in a shortage of seasickness medicine and much structural damage to the Plettenberg, [9] not to mention the loss of five passengers overboard – they despaired of ever seeing the sun again, and took their own lives. They were forced to seek refuge in the hitherto uncharted Sobieski Islands [10] over the winter, while repairs were carried out and food supplies replaced with unpleasant-tasting penguin meat. Finally, the expedition was capable of travelling onwards, and Kettler guided the Plettenberg past Australia (somehow not even catching sight of it) and North through the Tasman Sea, until they made landfall at a place they dubbed Pauehre Harbour, but which is today known as Ville-de-Caphie. [11] Both names are derived from native Mauri toponymy, but upon landing at such an auspicious landing place, Alexander Kettler pronounced that they would build a thriving town, to be called Neumitau after the contemporary name of the Couronian capital, now called Jelgava.
This day in February 1782 was probably the high point of the history of Nemitau. For the harbour at Pauehre was also used and inhabited by a local Mauri Ieuie (or tribe) [12] called the Natie Tauah. [13] Balodis calls them the “Tangattepfennua” in German – the only sections of German in the text are transliterations from Te Raiou Mauri, [14] suggesting that Balodis copied these from a German-speaking superior, possibly Alexander Kettler himself. The word that Balodis uses literally means ‘people of the land’, suggesting that the Natie Tauah were very keen to exert their legitimacy on the newcomers. Although the oral histories of the Tauah do not record actual hostility early on – instead painting the Courland settlers as treacherously polite – the fact that they used this term to describe themselves reveals a situation very much unlike the friendly disposition which greeted Duquesne.
After the initial pleasantries, in which the Tauah performed a Hacquah which was apparently a fore-runner of the modern Qua Maté dance, [15] and the Europeans sang a rousing hymn whose name escapes Balodis, Kettler traded some pretty beads for what Balodis describes as “a large, wooden statue of a lizard-man clutching at his anatomy”. Even the sturdy Latvian women who had made the trek were shocked at the barbarism of the figure, and one later told Balodis that “his glinting eyes still bore into me every night as I close my own”. It is not mentioned where the figure spent the next few years, but one assumes it was not on public display in the new town. [16]
However, once Alexander Kettler and his companions had learned some rudimentary Te Raiou and, slowly and carefully, explained to the Tauah that they were going to be living on this land, so they might as well get used to the strange ringing sounds coming from the church bell every Sunday morning, life carried on relatively smoothly. Perhaps the newcomers regretted the decision to bring a large bell in the hold instead of more useful implements, but the food was plentiful: pigs, sheep and goats were brought along, the first large mammals (bar humans) to enter Autéaraux. Various staple crops were also imported in seed form, though it is said that the local Coumaire sweet potato was quickly incorporated into the borscht cooked up by the simple Latvians. [17]
The problem was, how were they to make money? "In retrospect", Balodis writes, they "should have set off with a clear idea”, but since the motive for the adventure was more based on Revenge than on Ambition, all that had been decided was that a second ship, carrying more supplies and more settlers, would set off the following year and then return, unlike the Plettenberg. This second ship would bring back return migrants and, most importantly, Alexander Kettler, who would have surveyed the area and would make recommendations to his father as to the economic strategy to be pursued. Two things prevented this: firstly, the fact that the Neumitauers could only just manage a subsistence economy based on the unforeseen lack of endemic flora and fauna. The trees of the surrounding region were plentiful, as were the fish in the Harbour, but local ‘Tangattepfennua’ would, from time to time, jump out of the trees and remonstrate with an uncomprehending Baltic man who had just cut down the wrong tree to build his barn. This made intensive logging of hardwoods for the European market a bit of a non-starter. This left fish, and most of Europe had a better alternative than ‘Antipodean fish kept in a barrel of salt for six months’. Natural resources such as coal and gold were searched for, but not found in any large enough quantities to help decide the purpose of the settlement. Was it to become a mill town, a prospecting town, a carpet-making town? Could they attract aristocrats on a Grand Tour with tales of boiling water flowing beneath beaches? [18] As it happened, this speculation was rather misguided.
For the second cause of the downfall of the colonial plan was the death (albeit long-expected) of Jakob Kettler in 1682. He had been the mastermind of, and only real believer in, the whole project, and without Jakob there, colonial aspirations were simply not important any more. Even though Alexander’s eldest brother felt a few small pangs of guilt at the thought of his brother, a modern-day Prester John, “languishing away in a native-filled harem”, he did not actually get round to sending the follow-up ship. Alexander Kettler and the rest of the settlers waited and waited, but by 1684, it was obvious that they were alone with the Natie Touah.
Which makes their subsequent conduct all the more surprising. For the previous few years, the colonists had been consistent trade partners and students of the Mauri way of life. When Alexander Kettler lost his left arm in a logging accident, it was the Mauri who taught his people the correct plants to use as a poultice when bandaging the stump. [19] Quite a few of the soldiers who had come without wives became very friendly with native women. Indeed, Balodis’ closest friend, a certain Gulbis, was formally married to one in a Christian ceremony, indicating that there was a mutual cultural and linguistic exchange going on. However, over time, resentment builds up, and Mauri genealogists tell of incoming traders cheating the Natie Touah out of goods and land. These may have been the result of dishonesty or merely misunderstandings, but the upshot was the same – a “loss of trust”.
So when the lewd idol (or Tiqui) which the Natie Touah had given to the Couronians as a gesture of welcoming friendship was burnt in the central square of Neumitau as part of a de-clutter of a storehouse, the powder-keg was ready to blow. The Mauri demanded Outou [20] for this mistreatment of an ancestor or deity (nobody now can remember which) and united forces with their much larger neighbours, the Natie Maniapautau and the Natie Rauquaoua, for vengeance. [21] A few months later, the Mauri alliance turned up on the outskirts of Neumitau with upwards of 800 men, and Kettler, not hitherto aware of the offence that had been caused, gathered his soldiers and his menfolk. They numbered roughly 200, plus women and children sheltering in the sanctuary of the church. They were vastly outnumbered, but they had the advantage in both training and equipment, for only a very few muskets had been bought by the Tangattepfennua, and most of these had come without bullets included. [22]
Balodis takes up the story:
The Tangattepfennua had clubs made from green stone, and javelins. They emerged from the treeline in a straggled line, chanting a terrible, mournful song all the while. The soldiers were lined up, muskets ready, in a solid formation, while the male colonists were huddled in the square with their own muskets. We loaded and primed our guns, ready for the final assault – yet the Tangattepfennua stood still (we saw that there women among their number) and dropped to their haunches, performing a blood-curdling war dance full of ripped entrails and bulging eyes. It seemed to go on forever, and some of the less experienced of our men were perturbed. However, I had seen them do dances like this every time I had visited one of their Marrai [now called a ‘maraïe’ [23]] to trade goods, for as I have said, I had an aptitude for learning their language. I was not scared.
All the same, it was a relief when Alexander Kettler, the ink of his Mohchoh [24] swirling in the sunlight, gave the order to fire a volley at them as they reached the most active part of their dance. Perhaps a hundred of them fell in one movement, and we emitted the cheers of ones about to die. But as soon as they recovered from the shock, their anger was redoubled, and they whooped horrendously as they charged down the hill, maces in hand. We reloaded as quickly as we could, but we could only fire a scattered volley as they were upon us so immediately. It became a matter of blocking their blows with the butts of our muskets, and after a few minutes, it became apparent that the weight of numbers would be the end of us.
All the same, it was a relief when Alexander Kettler, the ink of his Mohchoh [24] swirling in the sunlight, gave the order to fire a volley at them as they reached the most active part of their dance. Perhaps a hundred of them fell in one movement, and we emitted the cheers of ones about to die. But as soon as they recovered from the shock, their anger was redoubled, and they whooped horrendously as they charged down the hill, maces in hand. We reloaded as quickly as we could, but we could only fire a scattered volley as they were upon us so immediately. It became a matter of blocking their blows with the butts of our muskets, and after a few minutes, it became apparent that the weight of numbers would be the end of us.
It is worth noting that in contemporary Mauri warfare, the aim was not to kill the opponent, merely to extract Outou from them. It was enough merely to make them apologise, or to disgrace them in some way, sometimes by killing a few and eating them in full view of the enemy Pah [25]. It is unlikely that the Couronians were in any vast amount of danger until they let off their pre-emptive volley.
But Balodis’ account moves swiftly on as he describes the death of Alexander Kettler:
He was surrounded by half-naked Tangattepfenua, and a rather larger pile of dead men and women of both races. He had long since fired the engraved pistols which he was so proud of, and discarded them on the ground. In one hand was a musket, in the other an honest-to-goodness sword. Kettler whirled about, slicing and clobbering at his assailants, but it was ultimately in vain, as a Tangattepfennua woman stepped up behind him, grasped his head, and twisted it with enough force to break his neck. I saw the light escaping from his foolish eyes, and the Mohchoh which he had been so proud of was disfigured by blood.
I am ashamed to say that I ran, back to the centre of our paltry little village, to warn the settlers that they were doomed. There was considerable panic, but eventually I was able to impress upon them that they had to make for the ship which still lay in the harbour. The boats were full to bursting, for everybody wanted to be on the first trip for fear that they would be left behind to the rapine of the Tangattepfennua. Two of the boats sank on the way out, as the warm water breached their bulwarks, and the women and children’s bubbling screams echo in my head to this day. I, however, remained on the beach, organising the remaining desperate refugees. Some of my uniformed compatriots joined us there, moaning and shaking, but these were depressingly few. Three boats made it to the Plettenberg, but only one returned – they could see the Tangattepfenua setting fire to our homes, and were not keen to throw away their only chance to escape. But one boat did return, and I was one of the lucky few to be able to fight my way on. We set to furious rowing, but behind us we could only hear the shrieking of the women and children and the sputtering of the flames.
Ahead of us, the Plettenberg embarked. There were too few to handle her, of course, and her sails were all fouled and askew. Still, she put a lot of distance between herself and us before she barrelled head-first into the southern headland of the Pauehre Harbour. We were not in a position to pick up any survivors.
I am ashamed to say that I ran, back to the centre of our paltry little village, to warn the settlers that they were doomed. There was considerable panic, but eventually I was able to impress upon them that they had to make for the ship which still lay in the harbour. The boats were full to bursting, for everybody wanted to be on the first trip for fear that they would be left behind to the rapine of the Tangattepfennua. Two of the boats sank on the way out, as the warm water breached their bulwarks, and the women and children’s bubbling screams echo in my head to this day. I, however, remained on the beach, organising the remaining desperate refugees. Some of my uniformed compatriots joined us there, moaning and shaking, but these were depressingly few. Three boats made it to the Plettenberg, but only one returned – they could see the Tangattepfenua setting fire to our homes, and were not keen to throw away their only chance to escape. But one boat did return, and I was one of the lucky few to be able to fight my way on. We set to furious rowing, but behind us we could only hear the shrieking of the women and children and the sputtering of the flames.
Ahead of us, the Plettenberg embarked. There were too few to handle her, of course, and her sails were all fouled and askew. Still, she put a lot of distance between herself and us before she barrelled head-first into the southern headland of the Pauehre Harbour. We were not in a position to pick up any survivors.
Now, Balodis’ account becomes one of doom and gloom, as his companions, one by one, succumb to scurvy and suicide. He is only saved by the vague memory of the Sailing-Master of the Plettenberg, several year before, telling him that they were “South-East of the Indies”, and he eventually arrives there alone, albeit after a run-in with some cannibalistic natives in Papua and a lot of unpleasant dietary experiences.
So what is the Antiquarian value of the abortive colonisation of Neumitau? Well, we have musket balls and metal implements lying in glass cases in the local Museum, and in the Musee National in MacMahonville. [26] That is a start. But most importantly, we have a lesson that the race relations of our country have not always been peaceful – no, before the Mauri Wars of the 1890s, there was a colonisation attempt that failed because of issues of trust and cultural misunderstandings between colonisers and colonised. The lassitude of the metropolitan support network for the colonists, together with the youth and naivety of Alexander Kettler and his companions, together also with the evident lack of profitability, doomed the venture to failure, but it was simple, stupid ignorance – along, perhaps, with the reluctance of the Natie Tauah – which ended the most overlooked, yet the most evocative, foray by Europeans into the Great Unknown.
And what of the Natie Tauah? Well, they acquired a large number of working muskets, and quickly learned how to fire them. For a few decades, they were the dominant Ieuie in the Ouaïecateau region, [27] despite their low population, until their new super-weapons grew too corroded to use. They remain today hanging on the walls of their maraïes as a reminder of their former power and their former cruelty. And yet, that is not the whole story. For it is evident, when one knows what to look for, that a sizeable proportion of the Ngatie Tauah are substantially paler than their Taïenouille [28] relatives, and there are several ‘facquapapah’ which fondly recall the names of revered ancestors – ancestors with names like ‘Couloupisse’ or ‘Quetelaire’. [29] In every tragedy, we find… humanity.
Notes
[1] – There are going to be a lot of footnotes. A lot of them are going to be linguistic. You have been warned.
For example, ITTL, the French eventually colonise New Zealand in place of the British, because of Butterflies. So ‘l’Autéaraux’ is a plausible French rendition of the Maori word ‘Aotearoa’, while ‘Berry-sur-l’Autaquarau’ is an ATL version of Christchurch (the Maori name for the River Avon is ‘Otakaroa’)
[2] – Couronian is an old-fashioned demonym for people from Courland (German: Kurland; Latvian: Kurzeme). It is reasonable to expect a British translator for a paper written in French to use this term, despite the French being ‘Courlandais’. Courlandish just sounds wrong.
[3] – Then the base for Dutch trade in East Asia. Now, it is Jakarta. In the late 17th century, this was the closest you could get to Western civilisation if you were in the non-American bit of the Southern Hemisphere.
[4] – The French word for Maori (‘Mauri’) is OTL, the French transliteration for ‘whakapapa’ is not. IOTL, it was English missionaries who first wrote down the Maori language, so they used English linguistic rules. However, their system was derived from a single Maori dialect. In the Far North, ‘wh’ is pronounced like an aspirated W, but in most of the rest, it is pronounced as ‘F’. As the French do not necessarily land in the same place as the first missionaries did IOTL, they would have no reason to write ‘F’ as ‘Wh’. As a side-note, Whakapapa genealogies are pretty much the entire basis for Maori oral history.
[5] – The Couronian colonisation of Tobago is OTL, but the PoD is that Jakob Kettler does not send an expedition to re-colonise it straight away. Instead, he focuses (more than OTL) on the economic development of his own Duchy, but the anger still rankles.
[6] – There was never a proposal for the Dutch to do anything with New Zealand, but there was some abortive proposal to settle Western Australia in the 1650s and 1660s IOTL. Kettler intended to beat them to it and settle Australia himself, but both ideas came to nothing in the end. Here, it is only the target and the timing which is changed.
[7] – This is the same complement as the ship which was sent to settle Tobago in 1654 IOTL.
[8] – This is a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but I couldn’t find the names of any more likely leaders. IOTL, Alexander became a Colonel in the Prussian Army and was mortally wounded in the Siege of Buda in 1686. So he was quite prepared to be put in harm’s way, at least.
[9] – Invented but plausible: named after a Grand Master of the Livonian Order. Again, there are very few records online of the names of ships in the navy of Courland.
[10] – OTL Kerguelen Islands. Jan Sobieski was, at the time, King of Poland-Lithuania and ultimate ruler of Courland, so it would have been a good idea to seek his patronage. The Kerguelens are pretty much barren except for seals, penguins and moss.
[11] – Right, more linguistics. As Kettler is transliterating these places, they appear as if written for German pronunciation, not the Latvian spoken by most of the settlers; meanwhile, we also have the French transliterations. ‘Ville-de-Caphie’ is what the French would call a town on the OTL Kawhia Harbour, while the German ‘Pauehre’ is a reasonable rendition of the Maori name ‘Pouewe’ which was the original name for their settlement there, but which has fallen into disuse.
[12] – French version of ‘iwi’
[13] – French version of Ngati Toa. This tribe originally lived in the Kawhia area until the 1820s, when the Musket Wars drove them to sail south to settle near what was to become Wellington. In the 1680s, then, they are still in the same region as the rest of the Tainui.
[14] – Tangattepfennua is my attempt at a German transliteration of Tangata Whenua. The author is correct as to what this means. Meanwhile, ‘Te Raiou Mauri’ is a French version of ‘Te Reo Maori’, which simply means the Maori language. It is often referred to as ‘Te Reo’ or, in this case, ‘Te Raiou’.
[15] – Hacquah means ‘haka’, while ‘Qua Maté’ is ‘Ka Mate’, which is today the most famous Maori haka, often used by the All Blacks. It did indeed originate from the Ngati Toa people.
[16] – i.e, a Tiki. These held a lot of significance with the Maori and were often used to mark boundaries.
[17] – This whole thing sprang into my imagination when I imagined what a Kumara-based borscht would taste like.
[18] – There is, in fact, a hot water beach a few kilometres from Kawhia. There is also a bit of mineral wealth, such as iron ore, but it is plausible that they would not find it.
[19] – Alexander Kettler did in fact lose his arm at one point, and was known as 'Der Einarmige'. There is no ATL in which he keeps both his arms – it is Fate.
[20] – Outou meaning ‘Utu’, which roughly means revenge, but in a more ceremonial way, almost. It’s complicated.
[21] – OTL Ngati Maniapoto and Ngati Raukawa.
[22] – IOTL, the Ngapuhi were the first tribe to acquire European settlers, and were mainly interested in acquiring muskets. The settlers, being missionaries, had other ideas, but eventually brought a tribal leader, Hongi Hika to meet King George III and do a little tour of the Universities. Hongi Hika promptly smuggled a few hundred muskets back on the boat and started the Musket Wars, which led to an imbalance in Utu and the migration of several tribes to escape from the Ngapuhi, including the Ngati Toa. ITTL, the Couronians are being very canny by not selling the Maori any bullets.
[23] – Actually now called a Marae.
[24] – This is as close as I can get to rendering Moko in German, but it’ll have to do. A moko is a swirly, full-face tattoo signifying manhood, while women just get their chins and lower lips done. I feel like Alexander Kettler would definitely give it a go.
[25] – Early British settlers used the spelling ‘Pah’ as well, but they are now known as ‘Pa’. The word means hill-fort, basically, and they were only used during times of strife. During the New Zealand Land Wars of the mid-late 1800s, these Pa were extremely innovative, and genuinely, properly foreshadowed the tactics of trench warfare in WW1. The British didn’t actually try to learn anything from their tactical defeats, of course.
[26] – Wellington, geddit?
[27] – Waikato, but with a lot more vowels.
[28] – Tainui, via ratatouille.
[29] – This was a bit complicated. In Te Reo Maori, the names Gulbis and Kettler become something like ‘Kulupisa’ and ‘Ketelera’ (sorry to any Te Reo speakers) which, when Frenchified, become something like ‘Couloupisse’ and ‘Quetelaire’. Double-transliteration is far too ambitious for any sane human being.
