WHEN THE FLORA LANDED at Wellington the next afternoon, the Clemenses and Smythe debarked, along with other disgusted passengers, rather than continuing on with her to New Plymouth and Auckland. They soon found another vessel, the Mahinapua, “a wee little bridal parlor of a boat,” as Clemens described her in Following the Equator, “clean and comfortable; good service; good beds; good table, and no crowding. The seas danced her about like a duck, but she was safe and capable.” The vessel would take them out of their way, to Nelson, on the South Island, before transporting them north to Auckland.
The vessel’s master, Captain W. J. Newton, took special pains to give the famous author the best possible treatment, which may explain Clemens’s favorable impression of the ship. Twelve years before, Newton had demonstrated exceptional ability by saving the passengers of the SS Niagara, which he had encountered in flames on the high seas. Despite a high swell, he managed to transfer its passengers to his ship, earning the gratitude of the American people along with a gold watch and chain awarded by the president.
Clemens experienced Newton’s seamanship firsthand. After the ship left Wellington, a terrible storm arose. The ship, wrote Clara more than thirty years later, was “as helpless as a cork on the water.” Unable to remain vertical, the passengers staggered to their beds. She recalled that her father came to her stateroom early in the evening to ask if she was frightened. “But he couldn’t stop to talk about it. For the first time in his life he capitulated to the agitation of the waves and lost his healthy digestion. ‘If you want anything —’ But the door slammed against him and he disappeared for good.”
The seas calmed in the early hours of the morning. About forty miles northwest of Nelson, the ship entered the French Pass, which leads to the bay on which Nelson is situated. The pass, wrote Clemens, seemed no wider than a street. “The current tore through there like a mill-race, and the boat darted through like a telegram.” In the bay, “noble vast eddies swept grandly round and round in shoal-water, and I wondered what they would do with the little boat. They did as they pleased with her. They picked her up and flung her around like nothing and landed her gently on the solid smooth bottom of sand — so gently, indeed, that we barely felt her touch it, barely felt her quiver when she came to a standstill The water was as clear as glass, the sand on the bottom was vividly distinct, and the fishes seemed to be swimming about in nothing.”
Clara remembered the incident differently. After the storm subsided, she reported, it was possible to rest, which was so delightful that nothing could rouse her father, who slept through the ship’s grounding. Passengers, many in their nightclothes, rushed to the lifeboats, but since the ship rested on a sandbank, there was no danger, and the captain ordered everyone back to their cabins. Clemens, his daughter wrote, “was disgusted to have missed the excitement.”
After about a half hour on the sandbank, the captain extricated the Mahinapua, which then sailed on to Nelson, where Clemens was reported to have claimed that the French Pass was the “most ‘tarnashun’ place” he had ever been. Before returning in the late afternoon to the Mrahinapua, which would take them to the North Island, the Clemenses spent the day in Nelson. There an interviewer found him holding a report of the Maungatapu Mountain murders, an atrocity committed about a dozen miles from Nelson almost thirty years before.
Maungatapu means “sacred mountain” in Maori. According to one account, a chief had prayed on its ridge before embarking on a successful surprise attack and then returned to the ridge to offer thanksgiving prayers. “Pass on,” he told his followers, “and henceforth let no man set foot on the mountain, for it is tapu!" Alas, if the white population had ever heard the story, they paid it no attention. In 1866, on a narrow pass over the mountain, four armed men ambushed, robbed, and killed four unarmed travelers known to be carrying cash and gold. The victims — a Frenchman, two Englishmen, and a Yankee from New York State — were traveling from the nearby gold-mining camp of Deep Creek, where the takings had been declining. They were on their way to Nelson, from which they planned to sail to the more prosperous diggings on the west coast. Sixteen days later, a search party found their corpses on a steep hillside. Three had been shot, one strangled. A fifth body, covered by about a half-inch of earth and leaves, was discovered nearby a few days later. It was that of an old farm laborer who had unexpectedly happened upon the gang as they waited for the party from Deep Creek. They strangled him for his pittance in wages.
Richard Burgess, the gang’s ringleader, confessed to the murders after one of his confederates, Joseph Sullivan, had turned state’s evidence in the hope of a pardon. Burgess, enraged by this betrayal, sought not only to revenge himself on Sullivan, whom he hoped to send to the gallows, but also to save his other confederates by claiming they had left the scene of the crime before the murders took place.
In Clemens’s account of the tragedy, he contrasted the arcadian town of Nelson with the nearby murder scene, a lonely track through a wild, primeval forest. Clemens, who quoted extensively from Burgess’s narrative, noted its businesslike tone. “Any one who reads that confession,” he observed, “will think that the man who wrote it was destitute of emotions, destitute of feeling. That is partly true. As regarded others he was plainly without feeling — utterly cold and pitiless; but as regarded himself the case was different. While he cared nothing for the future of the murdered men, he cared a great deal for his own.” Clemens was appalled by Burgess’s introductory remarks, which thanked a “faithful soldier of Christ” for helping him to see his “wretched and guilty state” and for assuring him that Jesus would receive him and cleanse him from sin. He died with classic highwayman bravura: unassisted, he ascended the steep flight to the gallows, selected the central noose, kissed it, and said that he regarded it as a “prelude to Heaven.” Burgess, commented Clemens, “was as jubilantly happy on the gallows as ever was Christian martyr at the stake … We have to suppose that the murdered men are lost, and that Burgess is saved; but we cannot suppress our natural regrets.”
Burgess insisted that he testifed in the interests of justice and religion, a claim that the trial judge characterized as a “fearful blasphemy.” Before pronouncing sentence, the judge admonished Burgess that “if you have flattered yourself with the idea of becoming the hero of a life of crime; if you have flattered yourself that you shall depart from this world with some share of fame which shall remain behind you, and your name be spoken of among wicked men as that of one to be admired as a hero of crime, disabuse yourself of the idea at once. I trust and believe that there are few men in this world whose imaginations are so depraved as that they could look on such a life and such conduct as heroic, when it is only brutal.”
Whether or not Clemens’s account of the Maungatapu murders contributed to the Burgess gang’s reputation, some share of fame has indeed remained behind them. At least two books about them have appeared within the second half of this century, an interest explained in part by their extraordinary trial, which saw two contradictory sworn confessions, both remarkably fluent and internally consistent, and in part by the puzzle of Burgess’s character. Burgess was a charismatic leader, a steadfast companion to his criminal colleagues (“I have ever been a faithful comrade in sin”), and a gifted writer whose confession and subsequent autobiography display a powerful narrative drive. Nonetheless, he was utterly heartless toward his victims, butchering them with as little compunction as he would a stolen turkey.
The party from Deep Creek spent their last night at Pelorus Bridge, at an inn where a traveler warned them about four suspicious-looking men he had passed on the track. Pelorus Bridge was simply that, a bridge, not a settlement, and so it remains. In place of the nineteenth-century inn are a teahouse, cabins, and tent sites. From that spot a road leads to the Maungatapu trail. A bookseller in Christchurch told us that when he was a teenager, he and some mates, on a bicycle trip, traversed the trail, thinking it a shortcut. Perhaps it was, but it saved them no time. The trail proved so steep they were forced to dismount and walk, both uphill and down, for much of the track’s five-mile length. His story inspired us to try to see the trail for ourselves.
At the teahouse, a worker informs us that a plaque set in stone marks the site of the Maungatapu murders and that it can be reached by a vehicle with four-wheel drive. Technicians who maintain the local power line use the track. Although we are driving a conventional car, we decide to travel along the trail as far as we can.
For much of the way, the valley on the left has been cleared for pastures, which are populated by sheep and deer, the latter molting, with velvet antlers. (The antlers will be harvested and sold to the Japanese, who view them as an aphrodisiac.) On the right is a forest planted in Monterrey pine. Soon the track takes us through a natural forest, its overarching greenery filtering the light. Purple lupines border the track. Beyond it, on the other side of the lonely valley, loom distant, forested hills. We leave the car and listen to the silence, broken by occasional birdsong and by the crackling of twigs as we walk to the edge of the track. Far below, next to a swift river, three men and a woman prepare for white-water rafting. We cannot hear them, nor can they see us, as we inspect them through a screen of leaves, but they are close enough for a marksman to hit, one by one. We return to the car and continue slowly along the secluded track. It narrows, becomes rougher, and finally leads to a railless wooden bridge about the width of our car — perhaps we should attend to the long-ago Maori chiefs ban on travel to the mountain. We turn around and head back to Pelorus Bridge.