London’s Maori chief
For centuries, the people of the East End have been travelling to the four corners of the globe – as sailors, traders, missionaries and colonists.
And for centuries they have been returning from distant lands, bringing cargoes, customs, new words and new ideas that have enriched London and made it the cosmopolitan city it is today.
Many have returned with extraordinary tales and with new found riches from their travels but the story of Joseph Druce must be one of the most amazing.
Druce came from a humble enough beginning. He was born in 1777 in Shadwell, the son of a labourer in one the Limehouse distilleries.
The young Joseph moved from job to job, working on fishing boats out of the Thames and spending a short time in Bellamy’s Ropeworks.
But he fell into trouble when he turned to crime. And in March 1791, he was convicted of housebreaking and robbery at the Old Bailey.
The usual sentence for the crime was hanging – in the late 1700s literally hundreds of Britons, including children, were hanged every year for such petty offences as shoplifting and pickpocketing.
But Joseph was lucky to come up before a “liberal” judge. He was sentenced to death, but because he was only 13 years old the sentence was commuted to transportation to the colonies. So, like thousands of his fellow Englishmen in the 18th and 19th centuries, Druce began the long and perilous voyage to New South Wales, Australia.
Cheap solution
Transportation was seen as a cheap and final way of England getting rid of its problems. Many of the convicts did not survive the journey, with its storms, scurvy and sickness.
But Druce survived and did quite well in his new home, working as a bushranger and, ironically, a police officer.
But the sea soon beckoned again and he signed up on one of the many merchantmen ships running the route between Australia and New Zealand.
On one of his journeys, he met and befriended a Maori chief. His new friend became sick on the journey and Joseph nursed him back to health, returning him to his grateful family in New Zealand.
The Maoris had settled in New Zealand around a thousand years before after completing an epic sea journey from Hawaiki, in Polynesia.
They had lived peacefully for centuries but when the Euro-peans arrived, they brought conflict with them.
The Maoris found themselves driven from their traditional lands and suffered terrible massacres at the hands of the settlers.
But Joseph still found himself welcomed by a hospitable people – so welcome, in fact, that he married his new friend’s daughter. And the poor boy from Limehouse found himself created a fully-fledged Maori chief!
Sadly, his wife didn’t live long, and Joseph put their baby daughter into an orphanage. He was now a free man, having been pardoned in 1801, and he joined the HMS Porpoise, setting sail for London.
Back home, he soon fell on hard times again and, in 1851, there is a record of his entering the Shadwell Workhouse.
At the age of 40, the ailing Joseph was taken in to the Greenwich Seamen’s Hospital where he revealed a final string in his many talents – producing the story of his life, The Life of a Greenwich Pensioner.
In 1819 Joseph died. Sailor, policeman, author and Maori chief – in just 42 years he had lived enough lives for half a dozen men.