Ah yes, Pania. the New Zealand soprano in Gold Rush California. Too far fetched to believe, you think?
Very early in my research I stumbled across the intriguing figure of Mrs Henry Ray, a “celebrated tragedian from New Zealand” who performed at Sacramento’s Eagle Theatre in one of its very first shows in 1849. There’s a fascinating account of Mrs Ray’s performance by New York newspaperman Bayard Taylor* who reports that the play, The Spectre in the Forest, required Mrs Ray to rush in and throw herself into “an attitude” in the middle of the stage.
“Why she does it no one can tell,” Bayard reported. “The movement, which she repeats several times in the course of the three acts, has no connection to the tragedy; it is evidently introduced for the purpose of showing the audience that there is, actually, a female performer. The miners, to whom the sight of a woman is not a frequent occurrence, are delighted with these passages and applaud vehemently.” Bayard’s companion for the night, pioneer entertainer Stephen Massett, apparently found Mrs Ray’s Antipodean accent as curious as Bayard found her acting. “The Rays” – I guess Mr Ray was also in the cast – appeared three times a week for five weeks and got paid $1375 for their efforts…. And then the Eagle Theater was washed away in the January 1850 floods.
You can understand why I found this nub of history irresistible?
Mrs Henry Ray became – well first of all Ruatoria Hay – she also underwent a name change during the writing process – and then Mrs Pania Hayes. And a soprano rather than an actress, because so many Maori are gifted singers (think Dame Kiri Te Kanawa) and besides, a singer can move around more easily. Also – well the New Zealand accent…..
Five things you might not know about Pania
- She looks very like the gorgeous Salma Hayek, the Mexican American actress who broke barriers to become one of the first Latina actresses to establish a successful US film career. Once I saw Salma, I couldn’t imagine Pania as anyone else.
- She married Henry Hayes, the brother of an American missionary who visited her homeland of Rotorua, and returned with him to California. American-born CMS missionary Seymour Mills Spencer and his wife Ellen really did set up a mission in Rotorua in the early 1840s and stayed in New Zealand for the rest of their lives.
- I called her “Ruatoria” in my head from the very first pages without giving it too much thought – it sounded like “Victoria” and it had a musical flow. But I had second thoughts after my NZ editor pointed out it meant something like “Rua’s pit” – not very inspiring – and I discovered it wasn’t a name Te Arawa people would have given a young woman of high birth in the nineteenth century.
- She’s grateful for the doors her older husband Henry opened for her, and they had a stable, mutually supportive marriage. But Sir John is her “first true love.”
- She can be a diva, but she has a maternal heart and rejoices in encouraging younger performers – like Graysie and Isabella – in their careers.
* They Saw The Elephant, Women in the California Gold Rush, by Joann Levy, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992, Pages 137 – 138.
Footnote: The Eagle is famous. The first theater built in California, it was a simple wood and canvas building set up behind a gambling tent, constructed from timber and canvas taken from ships abandoned in San Francisco harbour, which washed away in floods three months after it opened.
