26: Great Barrier Island Giants

There has been a long-standing fascination with old stories about very tall people or giants for centuries. Caananites get mentioned more than eighty times in the Bible and legends like "Jack the Giant Killer" have been handed down for centuries. Giants turn up in the English novel - Pilgrim's Progress - and have more or less refused to leave the stage since then. Even we are in search of the legendary ‘tall ones’ of the western Waikato many say do not exist and others say have been found but are secreted away by the authorities. On the surface of it, they all seem like crackpot stories. Yet even the Coromandel has a story of the Mohau monster. This creature is in Maori legend and has been for a long time. On Great Barrier Island in the outer Hauraki Gulf, the giant stories persist.

Dutch artist Isaac Gilsemans drew giant warriors at the Three Kings in New Zealand. Photo / supplied

It all started when an artist, Issac Gilsemans, present on Abel Tasman's ship, drew a picture of giants seen on Three Kings Islands. He created engravings of huge native warriors, towering over the islands, which was the expedition's next and final port of call in New Zealand. Did they see a race of tall ones there or was it a fanciful mock up of the islands but tall ones seen elsewhere, or ....?

The owners of the Great Barrier Lodge believe Gilsemans had probably seen the real thing. “Their huge bones and artefacts are said to turn up on the island to this day. And they occasionally appear as apparitions". Maori had talked of seeing "the guardians" lined up on ridges at the north end of the island, but only fleetingly, during lightening strikes. Meanwhile, a few years ago a dark-skinned woman, who was all of two-metres-tall and completely naked, had appeared at the foot of the bed of a woman visiting the island. The visitor to the Barrier, staying at Medlands while working as a locum at the Medical Centre, was stunned to see the giantess vanish a few moments after first appearing.

Now regardless of whether you believe these stories or not, these tales keep persisting. So let’s say we produced final evidence of skeletons of pre-Maori people that were 7.5-8’ tall, would some of the other stories then seem more of a possibility? I’d say there is every chance.

But a naked black giantess was a bit much, even in the context of tall tales from the backblocks. Is there nothing more than supposed visitations of ghosts? Well, yes. An island identity, the late Paddy McGeady, had come across tall skeletal remains while working with a gang building a road through the Kaitoke Swamp during the 1920s. "After draining part of the road they found in mud, lots of human skulls. These were at least one-and-a-half to two times the size of a human skull. Each one had a hole in the temple, which meant they'd been struck with a patu, which means they were probably killed as slaves."

The lodge owners, Murray and Jan, had seen giant adzes found by Paddy, and kept in a collection of artefacts by his widow, Mrs Bella McGeady. They were 300 to 400mm and obviously too big for a normal-sized human to use efficiently. Mr Stan McGeady, of Okiwi, has the adzes in storage. There is another Okiwi resident, who while pig hunting in Copper Mine Bay as a young man, had discovered a cave containing a full skeleton, over 2.1 metres tall. People on the island still find collar bones, femur and so on, that are at least one-and-a-half-times the size of normal human bones. It seems clear that a race lived here long before Maori, who were killed-off by Maori. Many elderly Great Barrier residents are convinced that giants once existed on their island. Alan Gray's father farmed a drained section at the headwaters of the Kaitoke Swamp. Here he had seen a giant skeleton, found on a nearby section of Crown land reclaimed from the swamp. He said the giants are no a legend - they're an actual fact. He has no idea what happened to the bones after they were found. His father had the impression that they were removed from the island.

Auckland University anthropologist, Professor Simon Holdaway is sceptical and says that the pre-Maori idea is in some old text books and it resurfaces ever few years. But while reports like these make a great story, there's no basis to them. How come none of the bones have survived to be examined? Ah ha! That is our point. So that is why our find will never be turned over to the authorities until full and complete documentation is done. Based on stories like these, they would just disappear like those in all the other stories. Murray, Jan, Alan Gray, they aren't idiots...they know what they have seen.

Mr Holdaway has a theory we've heard before..."There is no evidence to back any of these claims." (But if we found one?) "And even if a large skeleton had been found it wouldn't prove the legend true. There is a range of stature in all peoples, so undoubtedly in the past taller and shorter individuals. We don't go around looking for bones to examine, but in any case, I doubt that untrained people could accurately judge stature from examining some bones they may find. To me this is a nice story - but all a bit make believe."

So even to an anthropologist, a proven method of femur measurement, (an average femur is 26.74% of the height of the individual) can't be verified by an untrained person with a tape measure? Get real! But Mr Holdaway, For more than one skeleton in one place, say 14-28, would you believe it then? You be honest all I can hear people saying is "oh well, that was just a family of deformed humans". That's why we are doing DNA and dating. We will leave nothing to chance so no excuse can be made or our find dismissed easily.

One chaps scepticism was penned to a blog once. I agree with his sentiment because no evidence has escaped the authorities attention to date. No real testing has been done in secret and on the scale we are about to. Anyway, this is what he says:

"I’m open to the possibility that the facts of the history and prehistory of this country might one day have to be rewritten, but I think that there are some theories about our prehistory which have to be considered very unlikely to be true. It is highly unlikely that a very large population using advanced technology could have existed on these islands thousands of years ago, as the Celtic New Zealand circle claims, because such a population would have left a record of its presence which we do not find. Any large-scale settlement of these islands would likely be accompanied by the destruction of a considerable amount of forest by fires, and scientists can discover the date at which this sort of destruction began by testing pollen spores preserved in the sediment of lakes. Tests do not indicate any man-made destruction of the forests began until less than one thousand years ago, so the claims about mass settlement occurring five thousand years ago look rather unlikely. If huge numbers of European people lived here thousands of years ago, then we ought to be finding their skeletons, as well as burial items which reflect a distinct, non-Polynesian material culture. The oldest skeletons and burial items found so far are distinctively Polynesian, and are less than a thousand years old. Why have we never found any human skeletons or human artefacts under the layers of ash left by the massive Taupo eruption a couple of thousand years ago?"

Well Scott Hamilton, there are some obvious things you miss, but I agree with the sentiment. Proof is required, but that will not be provided by telling the authorities what we've found and where it is. It can only be provided in a very public way that current social media allows. So maybe we will be able to change your mind in a year or so?