ONE OF MY AIMS IN COMPILING THIS BOOK WAS TO PUT ON RECORD ALL THE extant material, written or pictorial, concerning Omai. On completing the typescript early in 1976 I reflected with a certain satisfaction that, for once, I had achieved my objective. That complacent mood soon ended. Shortly afterwards Michael Gill of the B.B.C. pointed out Omai’s part in a collection of letters between Martha Ray and her murderer, James Hackman (p. 262 above). Thus prompted, I traced three publications brought out soon after the sensational affair. Two were anonymous pamphlets, the first defending Hackman’s cause, the second Miss Ray’s, both alleging they had been lovers whose ‘familiarities’ Omai had observed and reported to ‘his friend and benefactor’, Sandwich.1 In the roles of voyeur and informer he again appeared in a more elaborate work, Love and Madness. This purported to be the love letters of the guilty pair but was in fact from the pen of a shady journalist, Herbert Croft. Rather implausibly Miss Ray is endowed with the author’s literary and philosophical interests. ‘Come then’, she urges Hackman, ‘… and surely Omiah will not murder love! … But, is a child of nature to nip in the bud that favourite passion which his mother Nature planted and still tends? — What will Oberea and her coterie say to this … ? …. What would Rousseau say to it … ?’2
Three more Grub Street trophies were perhaps of small moment. Not so a document that came to my notice while checking page proofs. I then learned that an eye-witness report of Omai’s presentation at Court (p. 96 above) was held not in some remote repository but among the family papers of Mr. Peter G. Markham of Tauranga. It was a letter (perhaps a copy) from George Ill’s second son Prince Frederick to his former tutor, Bishop Markham (later Archbishop of York and Mr. Markham’s ancestor). Writing on 18 July 1774, the prince gave his impressions of the ‘man from Ulatea’: he was ‘about five foot ten inches high, of a very swarthy complexion, the nose flat, and his upper lip turned up, and quite purple’; he was ‘tattooed upon the arms and other parts’; he wore native dress, ‘like the ancient toga’, but Mr. Banks ‘thought it would not be proper for him to come without stockings and shoes.’ When summoned to prayers the first Sunday on board, the letter continued, ‘he was much afraid, thinking that they were going to sacrifice him.’ As to the killing and eating of Captain Furneaux’s men, the prince remarked, it was ‘perfectly true’; the New Zealanders had been found ‘actually feasting upon the flesh of these men’.3
What other documents, I now wonder, still lurk in some unseen collection, perhaps in the city of Auckland?