by Michael King
Despite such harsh realities, and despite tribal competitiveness, regional identities and periodic warfare, trading among Maori as an extension of the reciprocity principle was highly developed. By the fifteenth century South Island Maori exported greenstone to other parts of the country or facilitated access to it by emissaries of North Island tribes. Bay of Plenty settlers continued to oversee the distribution of Mayor Island’s fine-grained obsidian. Nelson and D’Urville Island residents quarried and distributed argillite. Food that was readily available in some districts but not in others, such as pigeon or titi (muttonbird), was preserved in fat in gourds or kelp bags and bartered. Maori were prepared to travel long distances for minerals and food. And, although ocean-going craft had disappeared from New Zealand by the eighteenth century, canoes were used extensively for river, lake or coastal transport in the course of trade.
That trade, as shown by the distribution of pounamu, basalt, obsidian and other minerals, extended the length of both major islands. And, by the seventeenth century, Maori had settled habitable parts of the country from Te Hiku-o-te-Ika, the Tail of Maui’s Fish in the north of the country, to Rakiura in the far south.
Northern tribes, descended from various origin canoes, sometimes came together as the Aupouri or (further south) Ngapuhi federations to undertake joint enterprises or celebrate their inter-connectedness. At other times constituent parts of both federations might be at war. South of their rohe but still north of Auckland, Ngati Whatua were dominant. The tribes of Tainui waka held mana whenua from the east coast to the west immediately south of Auckland. Their southern boundaries pushed close to Ngati Tuwharetoa in the central North Island and to other tribes of the Te Arawa federation to the east of Ngati Tuwharetoa. Mataatua waka descendants such as Ngati Awa and Tuhoe were the major peoples in the central Bay of Plenty and inland from that coast. Out to the far west of the island the Taranaki tribes sometimes federated under the name and protection of their mountain, which was still occasionally erupting into the eighteenth century. Ngati Porou and the related iwi Ngati Kahungunu were major tribes down the East Coast of the North Island. Ngati Tara and Ngati Ira held mana whenua on the northern side of Cook Strait, which they knew as Raukawa Moana.
In the South Island, Rangitane were dominant to the immediate south of Cook Strait, and Taranaki people would migrate to the north-western corner. But the island as a whole, south of Kaikoura, was the rohe of Ngai Tahu, who migrated there from the North Island and fought and intermarried their way south in the seventeenth century, eventually absorbing their predecessors Ngati Mamoe and Waitaha. On the West Coast, the section of the tribe who came to be recognised as the guardians of the pounamu were known as Poutini Ngai Tahu.
According to their own traditions, some of the North Island tribes, such as Te Arawa and Tainui, had occupied their respective rohe from the time that the ancestral canoes had deposited founding populations. Other groups, however, had obtained and secured their territories through migration and fighting. The Marutuahu federation of tribes on the Coromandel Peninsula, for example, who were of Tainui origin, had had to fight their way into the region in the sixteenth century in the face of strong opposition from older tangata whenua groups, Ngati Hei and Ngati Huarere. Ngati Huarere were virtually destroyed as an independent iwi by this martial holocaust. Their experience was not untypical of tribes who suffered heavy defeats and who were eventually absorbed by their victors – and so, having no one to tell their stories, disappeared from Maori oral tradition and therefore from history.
In total, the occupants of the physical domains of Te Ika a Maui and Te Wai Pounamu and the spiritual and cultural domain of Te Ao Maori probably numbered around 100,000 to 110,000 by the eighteenth century AD.[1] The competitiveness of the culture meant that there was a constant need to remain alert against possible attack, and hence the retention of fortified pa near most centres of population. But, 400 or 500 years distant from the era of widespread ocean voyaging, New Zealand Maori were now insulated by distance from Island Polynesia and from envoys from Europe who were beginning to intrude on the central Pacific domain. They were, in effect, the last major human community on Earth untouched and unaffected by the wider world.
Apart from the times of sporadic inter-tribal conflict, when existence was threatened by violence, enslavement or death, life would have been as culturally rich and as physically pleasant as anywhere else on Earth in comparably neolithic times. But the balances and certitudes developed over at least five centuries of occupation of New Zealand would be tested in the seventeenth century and seriously challenged in the eighteenth. Then at last Europeans would succeed in perforating the membrane of distance and introducing Maori to the rest of their species – and to all the cultural, technological and pathogenic impedimenta carried by humankind as a whole.
[1] 100,000 was James Cook’s estimate of the Maori population in 1769–70; it is also the estimate of modern demographer Ian Pool, who believes that, if this figure is not correct, it would be slightly on the high side. Extrapolating from other data, however, including the effects of the musket wars from 1818 to 1839, a slightly higher figure, 110,000, seems more likely.
Chapter 7
Distance Perforated
Had Maori known of the existence of the rest of the terrestrial world in the seventeenth century, they might have found it strange – indeed, unbelievable – that their isolation was about to be ended by citizens of small countries located on the opposite side of the globe.
What about the neighbouring Polynesians with their former traditions of widespread ocean voyaging? What about the ancient culture of China, which as recently as the fifteenth century had possessed an enormous navy? What of the Tamils, the Moguls, the great civilisations of the Middle East, all of them older and geographically closer to the South Pacific than Europe? Why was it Europeans who were extending and attempting to take control of the known world?
To all of which, of course, there is no easy answer. Most West European nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were gripped by an ethos of expansion every bit as powerful as that which propelled Polynesians out into and around the Pacific in earlier centuries. But with that ethos, in the case of Europe, came a post-Renaissance explosion of learning in philosophy and science, an evolving maritime and military technology that allowed the export and movement of weaponry superior to that in other parts of the world, a sense of God-given racial and cultural superiority over other peoples, and an immunity to the diseases they carried, which had the power to lay waste peoples whose long isolation from the Eurasian continent meant that they lacked such immunity.
To this volatile and powerful combination, reduced by one historian to the phrase ‘guns, germs and steel’, Maori would eventually prove to be as vulnerable as the peoples of North and South and Central America, the continent of Australia and the rest of the Pacific. Fortunately for Maori, and thanks only to the relative isolation of New Zealand and the vicissitudes of history, the full force of Europe’s colonising ethos did not arrive in one vast ocean swell. Instead it was ripples of the waves from other centres of military, commercial and scientific activity that lapped New Zealand’s shore. And that, initially, was a phenomenon with which Maori could cope.
The first ripple, and with it the first opportunity to open a datable, chronological history of New Zealand, was an eddy of the commercial aspirations of the Dutch East India Company in the string of large islands north of Australia then known as the East Indies. On 13 December 1642 Abel Janszoon Tasman, commander of a two-ship company expedition, sailed over the western rim of the sea that would eventually bear his name. ‘[Towards] noon,’ he wrote, ‘saw a large land, uplifted high … southeast from us about 15 miles, made our course … direct for [it].’ What he saw was the mountainous west coast of the South Island off a promontory now known as Perpendicular Point, a little north of Punakaiki.
Tasman and his 110 sailors and soldiers were 121 days out of the port of Batavia (Jakarta in post-colonial Ind
onesia). They had sailed west to Mauritius, then east towards the continent of Australia, then known to Europeans only by parts of its northern and western coasts. Their instructions were to find the Unknown Southern Continent (‘Terra Australis Incognita’) which cartographers and geographers believed filled the southern centre of the Pacific Ocean to balance landmasses in the northern hemisphere. But Tasman’s primary responsibility was not cartographical. It was to seek opportunities for trade in gold and silver, spices and fabrics. And if the expedition discovered precious metals and minerals, Tasman was to represent himself ‘not to be too eager for [them] in order to keep the wild savages unaware of the value of the same’.
Heading east from Mauritius, Tasman’s vessels had managed to miss entirely the southern mainland of Australia, but did brush the south and eastern coast of the island which the expedition called Van Diemen’s Land, after the governor-general of Batavia, but which would later be called Tasmania. There the crew found signs of human habitation but failed to see the ‘wild savages’, who appear to have concealed themselves. In any case, the Dutchmen had been warned by their East India Company masters that ‘no barbarous people are to be trusted [so] you must always be well armed and carefully on guard …’
Eight days sailing from Van Diemen’s land they then beheld the cloud-covered alpine spine of the island known to its inhabitants as Te Wai Pounamu. There too no ‘wild savages’ took to the water to greet them and, indeed, the coastline before them was harbourless and dangerous to ships under sail. The two vessels, Tasman’s flagship Heemskerck and an armed transport, the Zeehaen, then tacked north. Four days later, about two kilometres off Whanganui Inlet, Tasman ‘saw in various places smoke rise where fire was made by the inhabitants’. This was the earliest indication that the expedition had been sighted by Maori, who were about to become, for the first time, characters in narratives other than their own stories.
The following day, 18 December 1642, the ships rounded the massive sickle of Farewell Spit and anchored in the bay Maori knew as Taitapu. We have no record of what the people there, Ngati Tumatakokiri, made of the spectacle of the three-masted vessels and their billowing sails. What they saw would have been as unfamiliar to them as extraterrestrials approaching in spaceships, and possibly as frightening. Up to this time they had had no reason to suspect that there were people in the world who looked different, or who thought and behaved differently, from themselves. According to their own stories, they were humankind, and all of humankind. Who, then, were these strangers?
For what followed, we have only the accounts of the Dutch witnesses. Ngati Tumatakokiri, themselves originally invaders from the north, were attacked by waves of descending North Island tribes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and annihilated as an iwi. They left no descendants to transmit coherent versions of the first encounter between New Zealand Maori and European people whose beliefs and technologies had propelled them halfway around the globe to discover, explore, assert and lay claim.
The Dutch journals make the cause and course of what happened clear enough, however. In the thickening dusk of 18 December, two double-hulled canoes packed with Maori put out from shore to inspect the ships. ‘[They began] to call out to us in a gruff hollow voice but we could not in the least understand any of it; [they] blew also many times on an instrument which gave sound like the moors trumpets … [We] had one of our sailors … blow back to them in answer … those of the Zeehaen [did] likewise.’
Given what we know about similar encounters in the following century, it is likely that the locals were asserting their identity and mana and raising their own morale by challenging the visitors to fight. The Maori convention was to take the offensive in an uncertain situation so as to encourage themselves and discourage an adversary, and thus make their own survival more likely. It was by this time a long-established code of behaviour that would have been comprehensible to other Maori.
It was not comprehensible to Tasman’s men, however, who failed to recognise that a highly specific protocol had been set in motion. Dutch trumpeters from both vessels had returned the Maori calls made from pukaea, long wooden trumpets – imagining, perhaps, that this would establish a basis for congenial mutuality. In the Maori view, however, all that happened was that a challenge to fight had been issued and accepted. The outcome was inevitable but, as far as the Dutchmen were concerned, wholly unexpected.
On 19th in the morning early a vessel of this people having in it 13 men approached our ships … [They] were, as far as we could see, of ordinary height but rough in voice and bones, their colour between brown and yellow, had black hair [topknots] right on top of the crown of the head … upon which stood a large thick white feather … [Their] clothing was (so it appeared) some mats, others cottons [probably beaten bark] …
When the Zeehaen’s cockboat was being rowed from the Heemskerck back to its mother ship, another canoe also containing thirteen Maori rammed it. ‘[They] dashed over the same violently … on which violence 3 of the Zeehaen’s people were killed and the fourth through the heavy blow was mortally injured … After this … detestable affair we … diligently fired our muskets and guns … but we did not hit them …’
The body of one dead crewman was taken ashore by Maori, possibly to be cooked and eaten, a ritual means of absorbing the mana of a vanquished foe (‘the first of many European imports consumed in New Zealand was a dead Dutchman’, James Belich would write). Tasman’s instructions were specific about not engaging in warfare with local peoples, so he ordered his vessels to depart (‘we could not expect to make here any friendship with these people’).
As the crews raised anchors and sails, however, eleven more canoes, ‘swarming with people’, pushed off from shore and came at them with speed. The locals clearly thought that they had gained the upper hand and were keen to deliver the coup de grâce. When the first canoe got close to the Zeehaen the Dutch crew began to fire at it and felled a man standing in the bow. At which point the Maori flotilla dropped back and allowed the European vessels to depart without further pursuit.
Sailing away, Tasman called the place Murderers’ Bay. Two hundred years later British settlers renamed it Golden Bay – not after the beaches on the southern shoreline replete with golden sand, but after an accidental discovery of gold in the area, the very metal Tasman had been instructed to give priority to finding.
The Tasman expedition’s merchant and artist, Isaac Gilsemans, drew a sketch of the mortal encounter which, as an engraving, would eventually enter world literature as the first published representation of New Zealand Maori. To the modern eye, there is nothing especially Polynesian about the appearance of the men who fill the canoes (no women were sighted). This is not surprising. Gilsemans may not have been sufficiently close to the locals to recognise individual or detailed features (the faces, for example, are without tattoo). Other illustrations from the same voyage indicate that most of Gilsemans’s human figures tended towards the generic rather than the specific. What is clear is that some of the canoes, lashed together, were double-hulled for greater capacity and stability, at least one had a triangular sail, and the men, some bearded, some not, had their hair pulled upwards in topknots. Most were naked above some kind of loin covering. One man standing, perhaps the person of authority who had been shot, wore some kind of cloak from the shoulders.
Out of Murderers’ Bay, the Dutchmen failed to confirm the existence of the passage of water between the country’s principal islands, whose presence was suggested by a powerful flow of water. They sailed up the desert-like west coast of the North Island, sighting nowhere safe enough to risk a landing. There were harbours, including two major ones, the Manukau and the Kaipara. But Tasman was too far out to sea to recognise the entrances. Much of his map of this coast was reconstructed from sightings north and south of the features marked. Because of cloud cover, they missed Mount Taranaki, but did see Karioi south of Raglan. Gilsemans’s coastal profile drawings which accompanied the ship’s journal show that
the crews did sight the opening of Kawhia Harbour, but failed to investigate it as a potential entrance to sheltered waters. They did see Maori again, 30 to 35 of them on the ridge of Great King Island off the northern tip of the North Island. The reported gigantic size of these figures may have resulted from the use of early Dutch telescopes, which were insufficiently refined to give an undistorted view. Again crew members were unable to land, partly because of surf and currents and partly, perhaps, because the now-gigantic inhabitants, throwing stones and shouting at the Dutchmen, had become demonised in their European imaginations.
And so they abandoned the country on 6 January 1643 without having once set foot on it. Tasman took his expedition north and ‘discovered’ some of the islands in the Tonga group and others in the northern sector of Fiji. He eventually returned to Batavia via the northern coast of New Guinea. Having failed to step ashore on New Zealand, Tasman had no reason to suppose that it was the cornucopia of spices, precious metals and cloths that his principals in the Dutch East India Company had been seeking. Because of the supposed absence of exploitable and tradable resources, and the apparently intransigent character of the inhabitants, New Zealand would be left to its isolation by the envoys of Europe for more than a century – though Tasman’s map of the country’s west coast, bearing, as one historian put it, some resemblance to a ragged question mark, would now appear on charts of the world. Its location there would tantalise navigators of the future and leave open the possibility that Terra Australis Incognita spread further east and inland from the littoral the Dutchman had traced.
Tasman called the new country Staten Land, because he speculated that it might be the western extremity of the Staten Land off the south-west coast of South America named by his countryman Jacob Le Maire in 1616. When late in 1643 this was perceived to be impossible – the South American location having been identified by Hendrik Brouwer as an island – an anonymous cartographer in the Dutch East India Company renamed Tasman’s line of coast ‘Nieuw Zeeland’ or, in Latin, ‘Zelandia Nova’. This was clearly intended as a matching name for ‘Hollandia Nova’, by which the western coast of Australia was at that time known (Holland and Zeeland being neighbouring Dutch maritime provinces).[1] It was over the name Zelandia Nova that the newly recognised country appeared on European charts of the Pacific Ocean and the known world from the middle of the seventeenth century. By the late eighteenth century, this scratch of coastline would be identified variously as New Zeeland, New Zeland and, eventually, New Zealand.