The blowing up of the Boyd

The 1809 Boyd incident is probably the single most notorious event in the pre-colonial history of New Zealand, widely considered to have delayed the British annexation of the country. A rangatira, or chief, returning from Sydney was wrongly accused of onboard theft and punished with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Arriving at Whangaroa to take on a shipment of kauri timber, the ship and its crew faced utu, or payment, for this wrong. The four survivors included two children, but some seventy crew lost their lives and the ship itself perished in the conflagration that followed the accidental ignition of its cargo of gunpowder. At the time, entire responsibility for the massacre was placed on Māori, and retribution was inflicted on communities that had played no part in the event.

The Auckland Academy of Art was founded in 1889, with Louis John Steele as president. Like the equally short-lived New Zealand Art Students’ Association earlier in the decade, this was a determinedly patriotic group intent on promoting New Zealand content in New Zealand art, set up in opposition to the Auckland Society of Arts. Steele and Watkins’ large-scale depiction of the Boyd disaster enjoyed pride of place at the Academy’s inaugural exhibition of April 1890, held in the artists’ studio on the fourth floor of the Victoria Arcade. Steele was responsible for painting the figures, while his colleague Watkins executed the landscape. The exhibition, which enjoyed an extremely lively opening party, was carefully orchestrated to upstage the Society of Arts’ showing of the following month.

In their decision to depict the explosion rather than any other aspect of the Boyd incident, Steele and Watkins exercised the history painter’s strategic task of choosing the most telling point of the story. It was the task of viewers, already familiar with the story itself, to interpret the scene before them. Echoing colonial emphasis on aspects such as the associated cannibal feast, the results were predictably sensational: ‘The “rascals”, as Judge Manning [FE Maning, author of Old New Zealand] would say, have just turned out in a brave war canoe from the well-known Waipuna Creek, their stomachs evidently full and greedy for more human “kai”. They have been quite flabbergasted by the explosion. The expression of terror in the faces, and the panic-stricken attitudes, are finely rendered by Mr. Steele.’1

Roger Blackley

1 ‘Academy of Art: First notice’, Auckland Star, 30 April 1890, p. 5.

At the time The Blowing up of the Boyd was produced, there was an enthusiastic market for sensationalised pictures of such ‘historical’ events. Louis John Steele and Kennett Watkins, both established New Zealand artists, made this work in that European history-painting tradition.

The attack
The subject is the attack on the brig Boyd by Ngāti Pou in Whangaroa Harbour in 1809. It is estimated that seventy crew and passengers were killed, with five survivors. The Boyd had been sailing from Sydney Cove to London, via Cape Horn, carrying hardwood, coal, whale-oil, and fur skins. The owner had instructed the brig’s master to stop at New Zealand and take on kauri spars. While the crew were on shore collecting the timber, they were attacked by their Māori guides who then returned to the Boyd and killed those on board. The guides also looted the ship and inadvertently caused an explosion of gunpowder. The resulting fire burned the brig down to its copper sheathing.

Utu
The primary motive for the attack appears to be utu (retaliation) for the crew’s harsh treatment, including flogging, of the Ngāti Pou chief Te Ara who had travelled with them from Australia. Most of those who survived had shown him kindness. The resentment that led to the incident may have been further fuelled by the visit from an earlier ship that had brought disease to local people.

These reasons for the attack were pieced together, some years later, by missionary Samuel Marsden. At the time of the incident, however, it was seen as a senseless and barbaric act. This attitude led to general acceptance of an account from a Sydney merchant and trader, Alexander Berry, who cast blame on a Bay of Islands chief, Te Pahi. Berry’s story was based on hearsay from information relayed back to Sydney. A year after the attack, Te Pahi paid a high price for this misinformation when the crews of six whaling vessels came to take revenge. The chief’s village was attacked and set on fire and more than 60 inhabitants were killed.

After the fact
The Blowing up of the Boyd was painted eighty years after the event. Then, many New Zealanders believed that Māori were disappearing as a people, and that the destruction of the Boyd demonstrated their inability to embrace ‘civilisation’. This painting has been described as an example of ‘racist mythmaking’ because it misrepresents events for a political purpose - to show Māori ‘getting the just desserts of their depraved condition by blowing themselves up through their own foolishness’.(1) As a painting of an ‘historical’ subject, the work is a melodramatic ‘blow-up’ of the event. Steele was more given to this kind of exaggeration than Watkins, whose other paintings of Māori show he had a genuine interest in his subjects.

1. Simpson, Tony. (c. 1993). Art and Massacre: documentary racism in The Burning of the Boyd. New Zealand: Cultural Construction Company.