The Museum at Waitangi

At Waitangi, the mini-capital of the Chathams, there’s a museum housed in the Council buildings. I decided to go and have a look.

BACK at Waitangi, the mini-capital of the Chathams, there’s a museum housed in the Council buildings, called the Chatham Islands Museum. I decided to go and have a look and find out more about how people lived in bygone days.

In the first of these posts, I showed a spectacular pointing of the blowing-up of the Boyd. Well, something similar happened in the Chathams in 1839. The Māori warriors who had lately invaded the islands and enslaved the Moriori destroyed a French whaling ship called the Jean Bart, after an affray apparently caused by the French crew thinking that aggressive Māori traditional greetings were the prelude to an attack.

The surviving crew of the Jean Bart fled in small boats and all seem to have perished at sea. Unable to handle the ship, its hijackers crashed it onto the rocks at Waitangi; where apparently its remains lie on the bottom of the harbour to this day.

The museum has a painting of the Jean Bart waiting to trade with the Māori, just before the incident, by the English-born artist Roger Morris: