by Michael King
As for the Moriori people who, according to Smith and his colleague Elsdon Best, had come to New Zealand between Kupe and the Great Fleet and greeted Toi and Whatonga, the basis for their existence turned out to be even shakier. Moriori, according to (again) the School Journal,
were a race inferior to the stalwart Maoris, and … were of Melanesian, not Polynesian origin … No one knows whence they came, nor why they came … They were ocean waifs occupying three canoes that had been carried away by a storm from some island to the westward … As time rolled on they increased in numbers, until they occupied many parts of the island … They were slight in build, and had dark skins, upstanding or bushy hair, flat noses, and upturned nostrils. They had a habit of looking sideways out of the corners of their eyes, and were an indolent and chilly folk [who] afterwards settled the Chatham Isles … In their new home they became peace-loving, timorous and lazy [and] as hopelessly isolated as Robinson Crusoe on his island.
Precisely who the Moriori of the Chatham Islands were and where they came from is dealt with in the following chapter. Suffice it to say now that almost everything said about them here – that they were Melanesian, that they preceded the ancestors of the Maori, that they were driven off the mainland to the Chatham Islands, that they were ‘timorous and lazy’ – is demonstrably wrong. But for hundreds of thousands of New Zealand children, the version of Moriori history carried in the School Journal and other publications which drew from that source, reinforced over 60-odd years by primary school teachers, was the one that lodged in the national imagination.
The Great New Zealand Myth, synthesised in the early years of the twentieth century, was demolished in the last decades of the same century. The principal points of demolition were that the country had been settled far earlier than the fourteenth century date given for the Great Fleet migration (c. 800 AD became a consensus among prehistorians in the 1970s), that there had been no ‘Moriori’ settlement from Melanesia, and that there had been no ‘Great Fleet’ in 1350 AD.
By the early twenty-first century, however, the pendulum of scholarly hypothesis was swinging back to a point closer to the Great New Zealand Myth. While the bulk of the New Zealand Maori founding population had clearly come from East Polynesia, there was some evidence of early contact with Fiji and West Polynesia. While the Great Fleet concept remained suspect, it became increasingly clear that a significant number of migration canoes had set out from an East Polynesian ‘interaction sphere’ at about the same time. And that time, while probably not around 1350 AD, may have been within 100 years of that date – and considerably later than the dates which the first professional archaeologists in New Zealand had initially proposed.
So the Great New Zealand Myth was, if not rehabilitated, at least credited with a renewed degree of plausibility. The story of the Polynesian settlement of New Zealand assembled with the tools of modern scholarship, however, is more complex than the Percy Smith narratives, more difficult, and infinitely more interesting.
Chapter 4
Landfall
All verifiable evidence – from archaeology, genetic analysis, carbon dating, burnt pollen remains and disposition of volcanic ash showers – points to New Zealand having been first settled in the thirteenth century AD, during the era of widespread Polynesian ocean voyaging. This probability is confirmed by the discovery of Mayor Island obsidian on Raoul Island in the Kermadec group, halfway between New Zealand and tropical Polynesia, which can have been left there only in the course of return journeys to one or more Pacific islands. The genetic diversity of Kermadec kiore is further confirmation that those islands were a staging-point for multiple voyages from both directions.[1]
It seems most likely that, matching the pattern elsewhere, New Zealand was located during a voyage of discovery and settled as a result of subsequent and deliberate voyages of colonisation by several, possibly many, canoes. Geneticists and demographers have calculated that a population of 100 to 200 founding settlers, including at least 50 women, was needed for the Maori population to reach its estimated size of 100,000 by the eighteenth century. Analysis of kiore mitochondrial DNA suggests that there were multiple colonisations by the rat in New Zealand – meaning many introductions, which in turn indicates a number of canoe settlements. The likely sequence of discovery and then settlement is also suggested by elements common to Maori tribal traditions, almost all of which speak of primary discoverers preceding the canoe voyages of organised colonisation. The question of whether those named figures were responsible for the discoveries themselves, however, is complicated by the fact that, like Maui’s, some of their names appear in Island Polynesian traditions in similar roles.
Thanks to the well-preserved evidence of material culture – stone adzes, bone fishhooks and harpoon points – there is no doubt that the major source of Polynesian immigration to New Zealand was the islands of East Polynesia. Precisely which islands may never be known for certain. The distribution of tools and materials uncovered by archaeologists reveals that, at the time of the settlement of New Zealand, those islands – the Society, Marquesas, Astral and Cook groups – were part of what anthropologists call a ‘regional interaction sphere’, meaning that contact among them was extensive and frequent. It is likely too that emigrants heading for New Zealand set out within a short space of time from more than one of those island homes. Such a scenario is confirmed by the fact that New Zealand kiore display genetic markers that link them to both the Society Islands and the Cooks, though not to the Marquesas.
More than one scholar has suggested that pervasive differences between the pronunciation of North and South Island Maori, retained even as successive North Island tribes migrated to the south, may be another indication of different sources of migration from different islands. This diffusionist theory, however, overlooks the possibility of just such variations developing over time and with a degree of isolation within what might have been, originally, a more homogeneous migrant group. More marked variations in dialect developed on the Chatham Islands after they were settled from New Zealand in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
There is a single piece of evidence at variance with the hypothesis that New Zealand was settled from East Polynesia. Part of the DNA record of New Zealand kiore indicates a link with the rats of Fiji and West Polynesia. This suggests to Lisa Matisoo-Smith, who undertook the analysis, that ‘rats may have been introduced to New Zealand from a more westerly location before the successful human settlement from central east Polynesia’. No evidence of West Polynesian culture has yet been found in the archaeological record, which supports the view that this contact may have been fleeting and not part of the organised settlement of the country.
Nominating a date for the initial settlement of New Zealand is rather more problematic. A revision of carbon dates for the earliest New Zealand sites thus far investigated by archaeologists reveals none earlier than the thirteenth century AD. And one such site, at Tairua on the eastern side of the Coromandel Peninsula, dated to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, also contained the single unequivocally Island Polynesian artefact found in New Zealand in an archaeological context: a pearl-shell fish lure. Identical lures had been picked up previously from eroded middens in the same coastal region. While the latter have been detached from a datable habitation site, their presence increases the likelihood that the eastern Coromandel was one of the sites of first settlement and that the first people there either came from tropical Polynesia themselves or were closely associated with or descended from those who did.
The Kaharoa eruption, which originated from Mount Tarawera and cast ash over 30,000 square kilometres of the North Island, has been reliably dated at 1314 AD, plus or minus 12 years. And the first fossil pollen associated with significant deforestation as a result of fire in the North Island has been found at the same level and just below Kaharoa ash – indicating that the fires occurred just before and at the same time as the eruption. Other fossil pollen remains increase in the fourteenth and f
ifteenth centuries and coincide with the destruction of large areas of forest on the eastern coast of both the North and South Islands, particularly in Hawke’s Bay and Canterbury. Given a human presence, and with it a greater likelihood of both accidental fires and fires lit to provide easier access to game such as moa, and given the sharp decline in the numbers of moa and other flightless birds over the same period, it is reasonable to associate these fires with human agents. It is also reasonable to date from these fires the first major human-sponsored modifications of the New Zealand landscape, and with them major modifications to flora and fauna.
A thirteenth-century date for the initial settlement of New Zealand is later than those given previously for the beginning of the Maori era of settlement – 800 AD is cited most frequently in the previous literature. But the earlier carbon dates on which this conclusion was based turned out to be verifiably wrong, and a decision to trace such settlement from the 1200s is more soundly based on the range of evidence currently verifiable. It is still an informed guess, however, and there is always a possibility that new evidence will provoke a further twist of the kaleidoscope that will move the settlement pattern towards different configurations.
Where in New Zealand were the first landings made? The inevitable absence of concrete archaeological evidence for such an event – original habitation sites were probably at river mouths or in sand dunes and likely to have eroded or been built over in the era of European colonisation – makes the question impossible to answer confidently. The discovery of the pearl-shell lures on the eastern Coromandel establishes a connection with these early colonists, but not necessarily their place of arrival. Maori canoe traditions may have some relevance here, although the purpose of such traditions was to establish connections with specific places, resources and people, not to recount a disinterested history, and some of them may have referred to internal migrations within New Zealand, not to the journey from a former island home.
Descendants of at least four traditional canoe groups – those of Tainui, Mataatua, Horouta and Nukutere – name the eastern Bay of Plenty as their place of first landfall (and some go further, naming Whangaparaoa on the cusp of the East Cape as the place their ancestors first stepped ashore). And the unplanned arrival at the same part of the coast of one of the late twentieth-century canoes accomplishing a repeat voyage from the Society Islands increases the possibility that ancestors too may have first come ashore there. Other canoe traditions (three) tell of fetching up on the eastern side of North Cape, and (two) off the northern Coromandel Peninsula. All are consistent with possibilities allowed by wind and tide, and with modern computer simulations. The fact that at least some of the crops that the colonists brought with them survived the voyage and initial settlement suggests that colonisation from at least some canoes occurred in the warm upper half of the eastern North Island.
Clusters of earliest known habitation sites – the north-east of the North Island from Houhora to the Coromandel Peninsula, both sides of Cook Strait, and the south-east of the South Island – provide another basis for speculation. Archaeologists such as Jack Golson and historians such as Belich have suggested that these might represent ‘resource islands’, regions where early settlers chose to hunt, garden and gain access to mineral resources, for as few as three separate canoe groups which arrived in the country at more or less the same time. Such an explanation would solve the problem of how a group of colonists managed to spread so rapidly and apparently simultaneously from one end of the country to the other. One could then speculate that, as the early abundant resources of large birds and seals were exhausted, these three groups later joined forces and reproduced, only to divaricate subsequently into the dozens of groupings of the tribal era as populations grew and previously co-operative exploitation of remaining resources became instead increasingly competitive.
Against that possibility, closer analysis of artefacts (fishhooks, for example) has shown subtle differences in the material culture of the Houhora and Coromandel settlers. The growing consensus among prehistorians is that there are likely to have been considerably more than three foundation groups, that these groups would have explored the whole of the country rapidly to locate its mineral and food resources (in addition to the Auckland Islands in the south, people had visited Jackson Bay in South Westland by the early fourteenth century); and that they probably arrived within a short time of one another.
Discussion of such possibilities will never amount to more than a juggling of hypotheses. But some certainties remain. The first New Zealanders were East Polynesian immigrants. They began organised settlement of the country around 800 years ago. Their descendants were the New Zealand Maori encountered and described by Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And a much larger group of descendants still identifies as Maori, celebrates its identity and nurtures its confidence with Polynesian cultural memories, some of which date back to that time of arrival: ‘For I shall not perish, but as a seed sent forth from Rangiatea I shall flourish.’ In the thirteenth century, such messages served to prepare a people for a journey of migration; in the twenty-first century, they fortify the descendants of those same people for the journey of life.
Far as it was from tropical Polynesia, New Zealand did not represent the terminus of 5000 years of Austronesian/Polynesian migration. There were still further journeys to be launched. Mention has been made of a way station on Raoul Island in the Kermadecs established from New Zealand, and of the extraordinarily close similarity of adzes found on Pitcairn Island to those found contemporaneously in New Zealand. There is also evidence that a short-lived Polynesian attempt to settle Norfolk Island may have originated from New Zealand.
But the major voyage still to be made after East Polynesians reached New Zealand was on to the Chatham Islands, some 800 km east of the South Island. Some time in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, possibly after no more than a century’s occupation of the mainland, a group of New Zealand Polynesians transferred themselves by canoe to this cluster of isolated low-lying islands directly in the path of the Roaring Forties. Here again analysis of kiore DNA is helpful. The tightly clustered nature of the genetic data suggests a single settlement of people at one time, and provides proof that the source of migration was New Zealand. By the time that New Zealand Maori and the indigenous settlers of the Chathams came into contact with one another again in the early nineteenth century, thanks to European vessels, neither people had any surviving knowledge of the other nor of their common origins in East Polynesia and on the New Zealand mainland. As a result of this encounter, the Chatham Islanders began to refer to themselves as Moriori, their dialectal version of the word Maori (from ‘tangata maori’: ordinary people).
The Chathams culture had by this time diverged from that of Maori in several important respects. The islanders had a ‘level’ society, with no distinction between aristocrats and commoners; they had developed their own version of the Polynesian language; they had no horticulture, because the climate would not allow the root vegetables Polynesians carried with them to grow there; and, perhaps most significant, they had discarded warfare as a means of settling group disputes and substituted the practice of dual hand-to-hand combat, which would cease as soon as one party drew blood. Their material culture lacked the elaborations of so-called classic Maori culture, in particular intricate carving and a wide range of tools and ornaments; but was, in its pared-down simplicity, adequate to meet the needs of Chatham Islands’ inhabitants.
Of the fact that Moriori were Polynesian and shared ancestry with Maori there was – or should have been – no doubt. Their language was Polynesian and, despite differences in pronunciation, shared many words with Maori and no other languages. They appeared Polynesian in their stature and features and their skulls revealed the classic Polynesian ‘rocker’ jawbone. Not only were their tools of the same East Polynesian style and variation as those of early Maori, but some of those found on Pitt Island would turn out to be made from New Zealand materials (ob
sidian and argillite).
Despite this overwhelming volume and weight of testimony, some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars convinced themselves and a gullible New Zealand public that Moriori were not Polynesian. Professor J. H. Scott of the Otago University Medical School reported that skeletal evidence showed that Moriori resulted from an interbreeding of Polynesian and Melanesian antecedents and that the Melanesian element was stronger because the ‘cranial capacity is somewhat less’. A group of German scientists published a paper proposing that Moriori most closely resembled the ‘extinct’ Aboriginal people of Tasmania. John Macmillan Brown, a professor of classics and English and a dabbler in ethnology and history, dismissed the idea that Moriori had any Polynesian ancestry at all.
The most coherent statements about the relationship of Moriori to Maori – and, as it turned out, the most erroneous – came from the amateur ethnologists who were the founding members of the Polynesian Society: Stephenson Percy Smith and Elsdon Best. Smith proposed in his second volume of The Lore of the Whare-Wananga (1915) that Moriori were an ‘inferior’ and ‘dark-skinned’ people who occupied New Zealand prior to Maori, and that they were subsequently partly absorbed and partly driven out by the more intelligent and more enterprising later-comers, who had arrived in New Zealand as part of a ‘fleet’ migration from Island Polynesia. Best, in a 1916 article in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute that revealed collaboration with Smith, filled in further details. He claimed that Moriori were ‘a people much inferior to the Maori in appearance and general culture [with] thick projecting lips … bushy frizzy hair, dark skin and flat nose[s] … with upturned nostrils. Their eyes were curiously restless, and they had a habit of glancing sideways without turning their head.’