Family History Stories - John Clark Lidiard

In early January 1827, John was sawing boat planks for Captain Duke of the whaleship Sisters, when a brig sailed into the Bay. She anchored close to Sisters, and another whaler Harriet replenishing at Kororareka before returning to England. John watched as Duke rowed out and brought the vessel in, then took to his own boat with some local Maori and headed out to the ship. Looking around onboard John saw several men in military uniform, all on sentry, but nothing was shipshape. He lost no time in getting over to the Sisters to ask Captain Duke and first mate Philip Tapsell what they thought of the ship. A note was slipped off the brig and the convict captain confessed to the mutiny but was allowed to return to the Wellington. Duke wasn't keen to become involved in a dangerous confrontation with a ship full of bloodthirsty villans, but Tapsell and Lidiard went among the crew and rallied the men to recapture the pirated ship.

In 1823 Henry Williams had established a new mission station at Paihia directly across from Kororareka. He'd crossed paths before with John Lidiard as a midshipman aboard HMS Endymion in the squadron that captured USS President. Williams urged the whaleship captains to use their great guns against the mutineering convicts. Tapsell, who like John had been a sailor all his life, took careful aim at the Wellington, and sent a shot into her quarter before a second shot took out her top rigging. John was sent ashore to alert the Maori, evidently with much success, as the convicts agreed only to surrender if they could go ashore and on the condition the musket armed natives surrounding the ship in canoes would not harm them. The demands were agreed to and many convicts fled ashore causing great concern for the mission who were unable to protect themselves against desparate criminals. Captain Duke enlisted John to have the Maori find them and one by one they were recaptured, secured, stripped, taken back to the ship and exchanged for muskets and casks of gunpowder. A few escaped, one of which John sighted many years later living "more as Maori than European" in Port Nicholson, coincidently now known as Wellington. Five convicts already sentenced to death before the mutiny, ended their lives in the gallows after being taken back to Sydney. The large crowd booed as the men dropped, many sympathising with them for showing no violence during the mutiny and being tricked into surrender.

The following year Te Whareumu, known as King George, a good friend to the Europeans and current chief of Kororareka, was killed while trying to avenge the death of Pomare's son. Left under the protection of a less powerful chief, the Maori and European residents were susceptible to plundering by competing tribes from the northern Bay of Islands. About this time, the original settler John Lidiard, perhaps with nothing left to stay for, joined a ship and sailed away from the people with whom he'd made his home for so many years.