Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Descendants of Manuel José

The king of Spain, Juan Carlos I, had no trouble pronouncing Māori words during his recent state visit to New Zealand with his wife, Queen Sofia. The vowels are pronounced much the same in both languages so a guess is likely to be near the mark.

One of the words the king used in his speech at a state banquet at the Beehive on 23 June was ‘Paniora’, the Māori version of ‘Spaniard’. Today that word is generally used to refer to the New Zealand descendants of one particular Spaniard, Manuel José.

Manuel José abandoned his whaling ship in the 1830s to come ashore at Awanui on the East Coast of the North Island. There he lived for the rest of his life, working as a shore whaler and later as a trader. He also had an active home life, marrying five wives simultaneously from different subtribes of Ngāti Porou. Today the Paniora who can trace descent from Manuel José number more than 16,000, and include MPs Dave Hereora and Moana Mackay. Many still bear the surname Manuel.

Manuel José’s exact origins in Spain were eventually forgotten by his descendants. But in 2006 a documentary by the Wellington-based and Spanish-speaking journalist Diana Burns revealed that he came from a village called Valverde near the city of Segovia. There have since been several joyful reunions between the people of Valverde, where Manuel José’s house still stands, and the Paniora of the East Coast. They might not have been able to speak each other’s languages, but they were evidently delighted to re-establish a long-lost whakapapa connection.

Jackson Bay – no relation

Yes, it’s true. The talented artist sometimes disparagingly referred to as Wacko Jacko has heard the last trump, and he never got mentioned in Te Ara. It could still happen, of course, but it won’t do him much good now. Passed over by New Zealand’s national online encyclopedia, and now he’s passed over Jordan himself, it’s the final insult really.

And we tried. Search Te Ara for Jackson and you’ll get plenty of hits (just like Michael) but they’re mainly about Jackson Bay in South Westland. Not that it isn’t interesting – it was the site of a government special settlement in 1884. This was a complete fiasco. They shipped in Germans, Poles and Italians to work in farming and forestry, but the combination of extremely wet weather  (Jackson Bay has one of the highest rainfalls on the already wet West Coast), the rugged bush-clad landscape and the fact that they couldn’t understand each other’s languages, meant they soon shipped out.

One of the sodden survivors was Joseph Wladislas Edmond Potocki de Montalk, born in France of Polish heritage (and his mother was said to be the illegitmate daughter of King George IV of England) and notable as the grandfather of the card-carrying barking right-wing poet ‘Count’ Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (pretender to the Polish throne and briefly imprisioned in the UK for obscenity in the 1930s).

But I digress. Edmond de Montalk (as far as we know, no relation to Michael Jackson) had been teaching at the University of Otago in Dunedin until he spat the dummy in desperation and headed for the West Coast ‘to do the best I can for my family, as I could do nothing for them in the Scottish, cantish Dunedin, where it is useless to teach anything unless your mother has had the wisdom to give you birth north of the Tweed.’

What’s that got to do with Michael Jackson? Well, nothing, by the looks of it, but everyone else is blogging and twittering about him so let’s get on the bandwagon and see if our blog gets a few more hits this week.

A fleece (AKA a dead sheep) as featured on New Zealand's coat of arms

This post was inspired, not by our fiercely cold winter, but by my discovery the other day that a considerable number of New Zealand coats of arms include woolly fleeces on them.

Coats of arms were designs on medieval shields to distinguish one knight from another – just like a sporting uniform. In time the coats became insignia for individuals and families, and the shield was usually enriched with a crest sitting above a helmet, motifs along the side (‘supporters’) and a motto underneath. Often these insignia became transferred to seals for use on documents, and the heralds in the College of Arms in London were given powers to grant individuals and institutions official coats of arms.

As a loyal colony, New Zealand began to adopt these strange medieval customs from the late 19th century. New Zealand itself got one in 1911, and so did quite a number of schools, universities and cities, not to mention businesses.

There are a host of heraldic conventions governing coats of arms, and they are described in language which is only accessible to cogniscenti. The city of Dunedin’s arms are described in the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand as ‘Arms: Argent above a Fess Dancette Vert, a Castle Triple-Towered Sable on a Rock issuing from the Fess, Masoned Argent, with Windows, Vanes and Portcullis Gules.’ Its ‘supporters’ are ‘On the dexter a Scotsman Habited with Philabeg and Plaid of the Clan Cameron, supporting in His Exterior Hand a Cromach…’ Get all that?

What struck me looking at these New Zealand insignia was the high number with sheep or fleeces. The 1911 New Zealand Coat of Arms includes, on the right (‘in the second quarter’ is the technical term), a hanging fleece of wool. So do the cities of Wellington and Christchurch. Dunedin makes do with ‘a Ram’s Head Affrontee Horned Or between Two Garbs’. The University of Canterbury has three golden fleeces. Even more revealingly, the leading economic institution of the country, the Reserve Bank, has a fleece separated out from a bull’s head by two crossed keys.

The woolly symbol expressed, of course, the enormous economic importance of wool to the country. For over a hundred years – from the mid-1850s to the mid-1960s – New Zealand lived on the sheep’s back.  During those years the grasslands of the east coasts of both islands became sheep kingdoms. In most years wool comprised well over 40% of the value of our exports. The only exception was the depression years of the 1930s. Shearing became central to our mythology, knitting woollen jerseys became a national pastime, and in Australia – no stranger to the beast – we became known as ‘sheep-shaggers’.

Shrek the sheep and his enormous fleece

Well, the days when wool was king are well and truly past. The decline began in the mid-1960s, when synthetics began to have an impact and the Wool Board purchased thousands of bales in a vain attempt to hold up the price. Wool dropped to around 20% of the value of our exports. Then the bottom really fell out of the market. By 2008 wool constituted just over 1.7% of our exports. We still get briefly bemused by Shrek with his enormous fleece, and both Hastings (with its flock of sheep) and Te Kuiti (with its shearer) find new civic symbols from their woolly pasts. But these are more tributes to history than to present economic realities.

The other day I drove from Christchurch to Geraldine and didn’t see a single sheep - they were hidden by the herds of dairy cows. Is it time perhaps to redesign our coats of arms (bungy jumpers or 747s might look good on a shield)? Or are we, perhaps, old enough and brave enough to do without coats of arms at all?

NZ nurses who served in the Spanish Civil War (click to view on NZHistory.net)

Te Ara staff are always up to something. Not content with the interesting things we do in our day jobs, we’ve usually got some other kind of project or interest on the go.

Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War (Canterbury University Press, 2009), edited by Te Ara writer Mark Derby, is one such project which has recently come to fruition.

New Zealand is as far away from Spain as you can get – well, without heading into space. In the 1930s New Zealanders generally knew virtually nothing about Spain, and there had only been a handful of Spanish migrants. Nevertheless, this book tells the stories of a number of New Zealanders who cared enough about the Spanish Civil War that they volunteered as soldiers, doctors, nurses or journalists.

Some of the New Zealanders who joined up were already based overseas, while others travelled all the way from here. Mark says they were generally motivated by anti-fascist beliefs and concern about the overthrow of a legitimately elected government.

Kiwi Compañeros has contributions from leading academics and historians, but also includes a chapter by the daughter of two people who fought in the war. It grew out of a seminar in 2006 looking at New Zealander’s involvement in and attitudes to the Spanish Civil War.

Mark is pretty sure he’s tracked down all of New Zealand’s participants. One of his odder leads had the ring of an urban legend. A friend told him of a friend who had said that his primary school teacher had said he’d been in the Spanish Civil War. Mark thought it was pretty unlikely, but followed it up anyway. He found that the teacher was still alive and indeed had actually fought in the war.

In tandem with this book coming out, and all the new research it contains, NZHistory.net has published a new feature on New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War. And if that whets your appetite, come along to next week’s History Group talk by Mark and fellow-contributor Peter Clayworth about New Zealanders in the Spanish Civil War, and how studying them can provide insights into the New Zealand of the 1930s.

I was going to call this the ‘Best of…’ quiz, but I realised that idea will come in useful when I run out of ideas for the quiz and have to salvage questions from my previous posts and cobble them together as a ‘new’ quiz – like an episode of Friends when the actors are all on holiday. So, this is the superlative quiz.

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