by Michael King
When the enormous fish reached the surface Maui left the canoe to find a priest who could make an offering to the gods and perform the appropriate ritual. He warned his siblings not to touch the fish until this was done. As soon as he was gone, however, the brothers leapt from the canoe and began to scale the fish and to hack bits off it. The fish raised its fins and writhed in agony. Then the sun rose and made the flesh solid underfoot, its surface rough and mountainous because of the brothers’ mutilation. It remained that way and the name given to it was Te Ika-a-Maui, the fish of Maui.
Both these stories are apt analogies for the tectonic shifts which, 80 million years ago, prised loose from Gondwana the land that would become New Zealand. The climax of Maui’s expedition is a poetic evocation of the upthrusting, downthrusting, volcanism, glaciation and erosion which sculpted New Zealand’s modern land forms. The whole process, from the formation of Gondwana until the human occupation of the country, took 680 million years, the age of its oldest rocks.
The rest of Gondwana eventually became the continents of Australia, Africa, South America and Antarctica, and the subcontinent of India, all of which would in due course undergo colonisation by mammals and hominids. The fragments that became New Zealand, however, lacked land mammals other than a few species of small bat. Those pieces of land made up an arc of primordial landscape, vegetation and creatures which largely disappeared elsewhere. This arc preserved Gondwana ferns and conifers. It carried at least two species of land dinosaur, theropods and hypsilophodonts, which, like all their kind, became extinct around 65 million years ago, and freshwater crocodiles that may have died out at about the same time. It also carried tuatara, a representative of the Rhynchocephalia order of ‘beaked headed’ reptiles which once inhabited Asia, Africa, Europe and North America but became extinct in those places more than 100 million years ago, along with ratite ancestors that evolved into the flightless kiwi and eleven species of moa, at least three kinds of primitive frog, and the forebears of weta insects and the worm-caterpillar peripatus.
All these latter creatures survived into the era of human settlement, together with other ancient species that crossed the ocean when the gap between what would become New Zealand and Australia was still narrow, as it was until around 60 million years ago – wattlebirds such as huia and kokako, ancestors of the New Zealand wrens, and bats.
What would ensure the uniqueness of New Zealand’s landscape, flora and fauna was the fact that the country had been torn loose from Gondwana prior to the evolution of marsupials and other mammals. All its vegetation and animal life continued to evolve in the absence of such predators. And the places that mammals would take in the ecosystems of other countries – all other major land masses apart from Antarctica – would in New Zealand be filled by birds, insects and reptiles. Weta, giant crickets, grew into the largest insects on earth and hunted like mice. Some of the birds – giant geese and rails, species of duck, the kakapo parrot, some of the wrens – joined the ratites as non-flying ground-dwellers. The largest raptor ever known, Harpagornis moorei or Haast’s eagle, weighed up to thirteen kilograms and developed a wing span of up to three metres; it preyed on giant moa, whose pelvic bones would be punctured by the eagle’s enormous talons. Of the moa, one species, Dinornis giganteus, was the tallest bird that ever lived, exceeding ostrich in both size and weight; others resembled ‘feathered forty-four gallon drums atop stumpy legs, their necks ending in absurdly tiny heads’. As ancestors of the Maori would discover, birds dominated this largely forested kingdom from coastal bush to inland ranges, and across grassy plain and alpine tussock.
The whole ecosystem, surrounded by 18,000 km of coastline that hosted fish, shellfish, seabirds and marine mammals, developed over a period of 82 million years into what one twentieth-century ecologist would call ‘a larder of protein’. And that larder was much better stocked for the fact that there was no predator – no thylacine, no bear, no wolf, no large cats – to raid it, and, of course, no humans. Even as recently as 10,000 years ago humankind had spread to and over every habitable continent on Earth, including New Zealand’s nearest neighbour, Australia. And this occupation and colonisation had major effects on the subsequent evolution of plants, animals and land forms. But not in New Zealand. In New Zealand, as an early geographer put it, ‘a land without people waited for a people without land’.
Taken literally, such an expression is of course anthropomorphic and inherently ridiculous. The land itself has never ‘waited’ for anybody or anything; it simply is. And life goes on in all its complexity in whatever biosphere evolves, whether or not humanity is present. Indeed, if a land without people could make a choice, it would most likely opt for continuing absence if people were to become the instrument of predation on plants and animals, destruction of habitats and, in general, the shredding of ecosystems and pitching many of the creatures in them towards extinction. And yet the aphorism has a point. New Zealand was a long time – 680 million years – in the making; its human inhabitants arrived a mere split second ago in geological time. And those who did eventually find a home there did so because many of them had been uprooted and displaced from other parts of the globe.
If the country’s geological, natural and human history were represented by an hour on a clock face, then the land began to detach itself from Gondwana at one second past twelve, its dinosaurs were gone by twelve minutes past, its cargo of Gondwana birds was being supplemented by avian immigrants from Australia by a quarter past, volcanic eruptions and uplifts of land were laying the foundations of modern ecosystems by half past, and the ice age that would shape much of the surface landscape of ‘modern’ New Zealand had begun at less than two minutes to and ended at half a second to one. This tiny fraction of time is all that is left for the redistribution of flora and fauna into the configurations that humankind would encounter. And then humanity itself arrives, Maori and European, within the space of 300ths of a second to one o’clock.
What those human colonists would find was a land that was ancient but, because of earthquakes and volcanic activity, geologically unstable. It was also ecologically unstable because of shallow soils, high rainfall and the limited range of species locked into its ecosystems. The fact that these creatures had no inherited defences against human predation, or against predation by other species that humankind brought with them, made them especially vulnerable. In the case of Maori, those introduced species were rats and dogs (and, perhaps, pigs and fowl, which may not have survived initial settlement). In the case of Europeans, a far wider range of people, animals, plants and pathogens was carried to the country as part of the process of establishing ‘neo-Europes’ – landscapes altered to remind settlers of their lands of origin and to enable them to generate livelihoods from the kinds of extractive or agricultural activities with which they were familiar.
So drastic was the impact of European settlement that one geographer was moved to note that human-sponsored modification of landscapes which had taken place over twenty centuries in Europe and four in North America had occurred in New Zealand in only one century. And an environmental historian, Alfred Crosby, likened the process to ‘giant viruses fastening to the sides of a gigantic bacterium and injecting into it their DNA, usurping its internal processes for their own purposes’.
Crosby’s view implies philosophical and moral questions. Are human beings to be viewed as part of nature, and therefore as a legitimate element of any ecosystem to which they choose to attach themselves? Or are they, because of their inherent selfishness, hubristic sense of superiority and unrivalled capacity for manipulation, an inevitably alien and malevolent ingredient in ecosystems that have evolved in their absence? Or is it simply that humankind has failed thus far to exercise its intelligence and technologies to ensure that natural resources are used sustainably and other species not sacrificed unnecessarily to human greed?
This history offers no absolute verdict on such moral questions. They will still be there at the end, hanging unanswered over the st
ory that follows. And that story will confirm that history occurs only because humankind has, for hundreds of thousands of years, sought congenial and secure places in which to live, eat, shelter, reproduce and build cultures. Those cultures have always been influenced most profoundly by human interactions with the environments in which they were located, and by competition among human groups for access to and use of the resources of those environments.
These realities point to some of the major themes of New Zealand history. Another set of themes arises from the mythologies that New Zealand societies – Maori and Pakeha – devised to explain and justify their presence in the country, and to give meaning and social cohesion to the lives of their peoples. What distinguishes New Zealand’s history from that of other human societies is that these themes have been played out in a more intensive manner, and at a more accelerated pace, than almost anywhere else on Earth. For this reason, their course and consequences have interest and relevance for human history as a whole.
[1] It is, of course, by no means certain that the phenomena observed in China and Italy were caused by the Taupo eruption. Scientists are not yet agreed on a date for its occurrence – although, oddly, they do know the month, March, because of berries preserved on trees toppled by the blast.
Part II: Settlement
Chapter 2
Seeds of Rangiatea
Despite a plethora of amateur theories about Melanesian, South American, Egyptian, Phoenician and Celtic colonisation of New Zealand, there is not a shred of evidence that the first human settlers were anything other than Polynesian. Physiological, genetic, linguistic, mythological, artefactual and botanic evidence blends into a symphony of accord on this conclusion. The only points in doubt are precisely where these people launched their expeditions of colonisation, when and where they arrived, and how many of them founded the New Zealand Maori population.
The search by such late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars as Edward Tregear and Stephenson Percy Smith for the origins of the Maori (were they Aryan? were they a lost tribe of Israel?) is now recognised as irrelevant. Maori people and culture as encountered by European navigators in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries evolved in New Zealand. And the forebears of Maori, the Polynesians, developed their culture in the central South Pacific, most probably on the islands of Tonga, Samoa, Uvea and Futuna. Antecedents beyond that point are more speculative, though increasingly the subject of scholarly consensus.
That consensus now accepts that several hominoid species evolved simultaneously in Africa, diverging from other primates around five million years ago. Fossil remains have revealed that one of those species, Homo erectus, reached Asia and Indonesia, the latter in the form of Java Man, some 1.8 million years ago. But these human-like creatures travelled no further geographically, though they may have survived until as recently as 50,000 years ago.
Less than 100,000 years ago another group, Homo sapiens, the ancestors of modern humankind, also emerged from Africa. Genetic analysis shows that part of this migration travelled north and east, into central Asia, and then westward into Europe. Another branch took an easterly route along the edge of the Arabian peninsula, around the perimeter of India and eventually on to the coast of South-east Asia and the archipelagos of Malaysia, Indonesia, New Guinea, New Britain and the Solomon Islands.
The section of this population that remained on the edge of the western Pacific Ocean became the first ancestors of today’s Melanesian people. The group who went south were the founding population of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia. Their movements were possible because the last ice age had shrunk sea levels and the Indonesian islands were attached to Eurasia in a geographic unit now called Sunda. And New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania were joined in a landmass now referred to as Sahul. The earliest migrants, therefore, both Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, had been able to travel largely on foot, requiring only short island-hopping voyages, probably by raft, to get from Sunda to Sahul.
By around 10,000 years ago the ice age was over and sea levels had risen, isolating the archipelagos of the Philippines, Indonesia and New Guinea, detaching Australia from New Guinea and Tasmania from the Australian mainland. Movements of populations through the region would then be possible only by people with well-developed maritime technology. And such a people emerged from the mainland of South-east Asia some 5000 to 6000 years ago and pushed out eastwards into the central Pacific, where no human beings had preceded them.
They are known from their language group as Austronesians. And the spread of that language shows that, astonishingly, some travelled as far west as Madagascar. Others went eastwards, along the Malaysian and Indonesian archipelagos, along the coast of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, first settled by Aboriginal colonists more than 30,000 years earlier, and eventually as far as Easter Island and the coast of South America.
These voyages, ranging around more than half the globe at a time when Europeans had not yet ventured beyond the Mediterranean or the coast of their continent, were analogous in daring and accomplishment to the later exploration of space. Indeed, the Pacific Ocean with its widely spaced islands dotted across a vast surface was a kind of terrestrial mirror for the galaxy, the Milky Way, which provided Polynesian sailors with stellar markers for celestial navigation. Peter Buck, the great Maori anthropologist, called his forebears ‘Vikings of the Sunrise’. He would have done them, and Northern Europeans, greater honour had he referred to the Vikings as Polynesians.
Beyond cultural imperatives, what made the prodigious voyages of the Polynesians and their Austronesian ancestors possible was the introduction to South-east Asia of the sail and the invention of the outrigger to stabilise dug-out canoes on ocean voyages. While their predecessors had, for the most part, walked, the Austronesian-speakers entered the Pacific and the Indian Oceans as mariners with the technology, the curiosity and the courage to carry them where no human beings had preceded them.
By 4000 years ago one section of these people was making distinctly incised Lapita pottery on the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago. The subsequent spread of that pottery, to New Caledonia (whence came the name Lapita), Santa Cruz, Vanuatu, Fiji, and ultimately to Tonga and Samoa by some 3000 years ago, has enabled archaeologists to trace the ‘footprints’ of these ancestral Polynesians. On Tonga and Samoa, a region that has come to be known as West Polynesia, the migrants appear to have paused for the best part of a millennium, developing, refining and consolidating that set of cultural characteristics we now recognise as Polynesian. They included the form of Austronesian language ancestral to New Zealand Maori, a pantheon of named gods, systems of kinship and rank, pervasive concepts such as mana and tapu, and distinctive shapes for their stone adzes. These people had also brought with them animals and plants, some of them transported from as far away as the South-east Asian mainland: pigs, dogs, rats, fowls; and cultivated plants such as taro, yam, gourds, bananas, breadfruit, pandanus, sugar cane and paper mulberry. They may also have carried with them the coconut palm.
Many of these things, the impedimenta of intellectual and material culture, would be carried forward in another migration, this time into the islands of East Polynesia, almost 1000 years after the colonisation of central Polynesia. There the culture would be modified further, linguistically, conceptually and artefactually, into forms more directly related to those inherited by New Zealand Maori. And it would be the identical shape in New Zealand and East Polynesia of contemporary artefacts and ornaments in stone and bone (adzes, chisels, fishhooks, harpoon points, pendants), together with a shared mythology, that would make explicit the immediate ancestry of the Maori.
East Polynesians had one more taonga or cultural treasure which they would bring with them to New Zealand, and which would, ultimately, prove crucial to the survival of their people and the further development of their culture there: the kumara or sweet potato. In contrast to everything else that these migrant people had lugged from island to island, the
kumara had not come from the west. It was a vegetable from Central or South America, originating probably in Peru. This uncomfortable fact is susceptible to one of only two possible explanations: either voyagers from South America carried the vegetable into Polynesia (which was the theory of the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl); or Polynesians themselves sailed as far east as continental America and returned with the kumara to Island Polynesia. The latter theory is more likely. It is given additional weight by the fact that the coconut seems to have been taken from South-east Asia to Central America, where it was flourishing in the time of Columbus – and the most likely explanation is that it was carried across the Pacific to the Americas by Polynesians. Apart from the kumara, there is no other unequivocal evidence of South American influence in Polynesia, and no trace of South American genes among Polynesians; but there is evidence that, by the first millennium of the Christian era, Polynesians were making extraordinarily widespread return voyages throughout the Central and South Pacific.
For many years Western scholars argued about whether the Polynesian colonisation of the Pacific – a stupendous achievement when one confronts their starting-point and the area of ocean enclosed by the triangular boundaries of Hawai‘i, New Zealand and Easter Island – was a consequence of deliberate or accidental voyaging. A careful study of available navigation techniques and computer simulations of voyages, allowing for prevailing winds, currents and weather systems, have led to the inescapable conclusion that Polynesian voyaging was wide-ranging and was deliberate. As they moved eastwards, navigators tacked and searched largely in upwind quadrants away from their points of departure, in directions from which they could most easily and most safely return downwind. This ensured three outcomes: that they had a means of getting home, whether or not they discovered new islands; that initial voyages were conventionally two-way; and that such voyages of discovery would precede voyages of deliberate colonisation, which would then make for a known and reported destination with appropriate navigational directions. This was the sequence and pattern of voyages that would have preceded the more difficult Polynesian discovery and colonisation of New Zealand.