by Michael King
Other scientific or exploratory visits to New Zealand in the eighteenth century were brief and involved little or no contact with Maori: George Vancouver, who had been one of Cook’s junior officers, was in Dusky Sound with two ships in 1791 en route for the north-west coast of America; Alessandro Malaspina took a Spanish expedition into Doubtful Sound in February 1793; and, the following month, the Frenchman Antoine Raymond Joseph Bruni d’Entrecasteaux paid an equally brief visit to Northland as part of a voyage in search of the missing navigator La Pérouse.
Vancouver’s 1791 expedition had an unforeseen consequence: the discovery of the Chatham Islands, which would eventually become part of the fledgling state of New Zealand in 1842. Vancouver in the Discovery was accompanied by the brig Chatham commanded by Lieutenant William Broughton. As the two vessels headed away from New Zealand towards a rendezvous in Tahiti, they became separated by a severe storm. The Chatham was blown further east than its designated course, and early on the morning of 29 November 1791 the crew sighted the north-west corner of Chatham Island.
Broughton ordered the ship to sail eastwards along the island’s northern coast while he mapped and named its features. By late morning they were off the small harbour known as Kaingaroa, and Broughton decided to go ashore with eight men in the ship’s cutter. There, on that northern Chathams beach, they met a group of Moriori men and attempted to barter cloth and beads for Moriori tools and ornaments. A misunderstanding ensued and, when Moriori appeared to become threatening, Broughton’s men fired muskets and killed a local man, Tamakaroro. Broughton and his men returned to the safety of their ship and sailed on to Tahiti, and thence to the north-west coast of America, where they secured the right of British merchants to harvest sea-otter furs.
What is most interesting about their encounter with Chatham Islanders, perhaps, is that the Moriori view of what had occurred was a live part of the island’s oral history when Europeans settled there in the nineteenth century. The people who had met Broughton and his men were members of the Wheteina or north-eastern Moriori tribe, and they had named Broughton Manu Katau (right-handed bird) and referred to him and his companions as ‘people of the sun’ on account of their light skins. Like Maori on mainland New Zealand, they interpreted what they saw in terms of their known experience and mythology. They believed, for example, that the rigging of the Chatham was fish nets. When they saw sailors smoking they said, ‘See the fire of Mahuika proceeding from their throats.’ They likened the sound of muskets to the cracking of whips made from bull kelp.
Moriori were a peaceful people who had, generations earlier, outlawed warfare. They believed that it was they, not the visitors, who had been responsible for the violence. At a subsequent council of all Moriori on Chatham Island, it was agreed that future visitors would be greeted with an emblem of peace. And when the next European vessel arrived a decade later, a sealer out of Port Jackson in New South Wales, Moriori, according to one of their chroniclers, ‘laid down their spears and clubs … and placed one end of a grass plant in the hands of the captain’. The man who performed this ceremony also ‘made him a speech of welcome [and] threw over him his own cloak …’ This became the standard Chathams welcome for visitors until 1835, when two Maori tribes took terrible advantage of the custom and colonised and enslaved the islanders.
All these early encounters between Maori and Europeans, and between Europeans and Moriori, contained the seeds for future patterns of racial and cultural relations in New Zealand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In most respects, other than in technological development and knowledge of the wider world, Maori were more than a match for Europeans. They were lively and curious and the competitive dynamic of Maori tribal society, induced and sustained by the constant pursuit of mana, personal and corporate, made them versatile and adaptable and potentially strong allies, particularly when they managed to incorporate Europeans into their networks of mutual obligation.
But Maori would also be seen, as they were in the eyes of the surviving members of Marion du Fresne’s expedition, as inconsistent, unreliable, even treacherous. This was because their vivacity and versatility were matched by a set of preoccupations – especially those involving mana, tapu and utu – that were different from those held by Europeans. Maori would take up many of the gifts which Western culture and technology had to offer (initially, metal for tools and European clothing; later, agricultural implements, a wider range of fruit and vegetables, literacy, and even Christianity). They would experiment with these things and turn them to Maori purposes, meeting Polynesian standards of relevance, often with results which were, for Europeans, surprising. If these tools and concepts did not meet Maori expectations, they were discarded; if they did, they would be used in distinctively Maori ways, to strengthen Maori values and institutions. Not for nothing would a well-known twentieth-century New Zealand poem about New Zealand history, one of Allan Curnow’s, repeat the refrain, ‘it was something different, something/ nobody [meaning no Europeans] counted on’.
Oddly, some of the most negative episodes in the course of these early cross-cultural encounters may have worked to New Zealand’s long-term advantage. The deaths of Europeans on Tasman’s, Marion du Fresne’s and Cook’s voyages were among the factors that led the British Government to establish its new penal colony in New South Wales in 1788 in preference to New Zealand. Australian Aboriginal people were assumed to be less martial than Maori, less organised and vigorous, and therefore easier to control in the operation of a colonial enterprise. This decision protected Maori from a concerted attempt at foreign colonisation of New Zealand for a further 50 years and gave them time to better adjust to the implications – the advantages and the disadvantages – of what would initially be a small European presence in their country. And their country it was to remain, unequivocally, until February 1840.
Chapter 9
Maori Engage the World
Europe moved even closer to New Zealand with the establishment of the British penal colony at Port Jackson in 1788, and the satellite convict settlements on Norfolk Island (from 1789) and at Hobart (1803). But it was not simply the physical proximity of Europeans in those places that brought them into contact with the Maori world: it was very basic European needs in Europe. ‘Wars in Europe created a demand for timber and flax,’ Anne Salmond has noted, ‘while European cities and machines required sea-mammal oil for lubrication and lighting.’ She might have added the need for gentlemen in London to wear seal-fur hats. New Zealand just happened to be, at least initially, a rich source of all these commodities.
The consequences of both the new proximity of Europeans and the opportunities they brought for commercial activities were foreshadowed in the British Government’s instructions to New South Wales Governor Arthur Phillip in 1788: that he take immediate steps to procure New Zealand timber and flax, both of which were essential commodities for a naval power and whose potential in New Zealand had been commended with such enthusiasm by James Cook and Joseph Banks. And yet there were, initially, brakes on such developments. The British East India Company had been granted a Crown monopoly on all trade in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans, and only the Royal Navy was exempt from this arrangement. The number of naval vessels at Phillip’s disposal was limited, and it would take some years for independent entrepreneurs to establish themselves in the Australian colonies and to recruit labour from the small number of free workers available and the slowly growing pool of former convicts who had either earned their tickets of leave or managed to escape from servitude. The latter would eventually prove invaluable for such activities as sealing, because they wanted opportunities to work away from Hobart or Port Jackson (soon to be known as Sydney), where they might be recognised and apprehended.
As the eighteenth century merged into the nineteenth, Sydney and Hobart became major bases for sealing, whaling and trading throughout the wider region – either as home ports for Australian-based enterprises or for provisioning vessels from Britain, the United States a
nd France. Having these bases in their own colonies hosting Royal Navy ships gave the British a strategic advantage over the Americans and French, both of whom were sporadically at war with Britain up to 1815, and at the same time intent on increasing their influence in the south-west Pacific.
The first Europeans actually to live in New Zealand were seamen who jumped ship from vessels out of Sydney in order to escape from despotic captains, leaky ships or lives which had been characterised up to that point by crime or misfortune (most appear to have been undischarged convicts on the run). These individuals, who came to be known as Pakeha Maori, joined Maori communities in the Hauraki district, the Bay of Islands and Murihiku, and soon after in other parts of the country, took Maori wives, begat Maori offspring, lived according to Maori customary law and within the kinship network of mutual obligations. In some cases they took Maori moko or tattoo. Maori insulated them from the circumstances they wanted to turn their backs on. They gave Maori the benefit of whatever expertise they had in the arts of horticulture or animal husbandry, and they were available to act as mediators and interpreters when Maori communities were confronted with would-be traders, explorers or missionaries.
Few of the names of the earliest Pakeha Maori are remembered now, though some of them have contemporary Maori descendants. A handful of the next generation of their kind, Jacky Marmon and Frederick Maning in the Hokianga, John Rutherford in the Bay of Islands, Barnet Burns on the east coast of the North Island, ensured that they would be known to posterity by writing about their experiences (Rutherford with perhaps more fiction than veracity). Of the original Pakeha Maori, Thomas Taylor was one of four crew members who ran away from the Sydney-based vessel Hunter in the course of a timber-gathering expedition up the Waihou River in 1798. When he next saw Europeans, Taylor reported with some pride that he had taken a Maori partner and, thanks to his close association with the Ngati Paoa chief Te Haupa, he had accompanied Hauraki war parties inland in the intervening three years.
Two other known and early named Pakeha Maori were James Cavanagh, a convict who escaped from his ship near the Cavalli Islands in 1804, and George Bruce, another convict who absconded from the Lady Nelson in the Bay of Islands in 1806 and who became a ‘brutal and unfaithful husband’ to Atahoe, daughter of the Ngapuhi chief Te Pahi. There was at least one woman Pakeha Maori in the Bay of Islands at the same time, convict mutineer Charlotte Badger; and a Tahitian named Jem lived among the Aupouri people north of the Bay of Islands from about 1810.
It was seals in the south rather than timber in the north, however, that generated the first European commercial operation to New Zealand in the early 1790s. That too was driven by commercial considerations beyond New Zealand: in this case the willingness of the Chinese in Canton and Macau to accept sealskins in payment for the tea to which the English had become so addicted. James Cook had reported on the abundance of the New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri, named after one of the naturalists on his second voyage) on the south-west coast of the South Island. On the basis of that intelligence, the first Australian-based gang of sealers was dropped off in Dusky Sound by the vessel Britannia in 1792, a mere two decades after Cook’s visit. They built the first European-style house in New Zealand before being collected the following year with 4500 seal skins. Other gangs followed in the same area in 1793, 1795, 1801 and 1803, and dozens more on that coast and into Foveaux Strait and around Stewart Island between 1803 and 1810.[1]
The conditions to which the sealers were subjected were harsh. They would be dumped on often inhospitable coastlines with minimal supplies and left to fend for themselves for months at a time. It was expected that, in addition to killing and flensing seals and treating the skins, they would live off the land and shoot what game they could (the options being limited largely to seals and birds). Sometimes they were sufficiently long in one place to grow vegetables, but usually on exposed sites with poor soil. Sometimes they overlapped with South Island Maori who were also on foraging expeditions. After 1810 there were violent clashes in which people on both sides were killed, the worst of them at the so-called ‘Murdering Beach’ near Otago Harbour in 1814 and 1817.
Indirectly, sealing was responsible for the establishment of the first European community in New Zealand, albeit a transitory one. That first gang in Dusky Sound, fearing that they had been forgotten, began to build a vessel to transport themselves back to Sydney. They were collected in 1793, however, and left the half-built ship on blocks. In 1795 another vessel arrived in the sound, the Endeavour (not to be confused with Cook’s barque of the same name). Its master intended to finish the half-built boat and catch seals to finance the voyage. In the event Endeavour sank in Facile Harbour, thus becoming New Zealand’s first known shipwreck, and 244 people were stranded in Dusky Sound, an astonishing 46 of them convict stowaways, and at least two, Elizabeth Bason and Anne Grey, women. They were forced to live off the land, or more accurately the sea, in a far from hospitable environment. Most of the group got away the following year, by which time the uncompleted ship had been made seaworthy and Endeavour’s longboat converted into a second vessel. The remaining 35 half-starved survivors were not rescued until May 1797.
The peak time for successful sealing on the New Zealand coast was the first decade of the nineteenth century. The vessel Favorite took over 80,000 skins from Foveaux Strait in 1805. But ‘so ruthlessly and thoughtlessly’ was this slaughter accomplished that within a very few years there were no more large cargoes of skins to be taken from the former mainland rookeries. As one historian has noted, each operator reasoned that, if he did not take every animal he found, the next gang would. The sealers’ attention then turned to the Chathams and the sub-Antarctic islands, where the carnage continued – 8000 skins were taken from the Bounty Islands in 1807, and 250,000 from the Antipodes between 1806 and 1810. ‘Such was the rush to these new bonanzas’, wrote Rhys Richards, ‘that several marooned gangs got left behind and forgotten’: one on the Snares for seven years, another on Solander Island in Foveaux Strait for four and a half. This was exactly the circumstance in which Alexander Selkirk was abandoned for four years on one of the Juan Fernandez group of islands, giving Daniel Defoe his inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.
By this phase of the industry Maori too, mainly from Northland and Murihiku, were being recruited for sealing expeditions and taking their place alongside Englishmen, Irishmen, Scots, Australian Aborigines, Tahitians and Portuguese, and thus learning and carrying back to their own communities first- and second-hand information about a world beyond New Zealand. A sealing vessel aptly named Commerce was operating around Chatham Island in 1807 with a Moriori on board named Hororeka, who had already spent time living in the Bay of Islands and was able to act as an interpreter among Europeans, Maori and Moriori. And it was a Maori member of the abandoned Snares gang who eventually reported its privations and rescue.
From the early 1800s sealers began to defect to Ngai Tahu communities in the south of the country, some remaining there to raise pigs and grow vegetables to sell or barter to ocean whalers and other ships that were beginning to visit the ports of Foveaux Strait and Fiordland more often. One of the first was Thomas Fink, who settled near Bluff with a Maori wife in about 1805. Another was James Caddell, who in 1810 married Tokitoki, niece of the Ngai Tahu chief Honekai, and lived at Oue near the present town of Invercargill. Maori were again involved in a brief revival of sealing between 1822 and 1829, because the shortage of seals worldwide had raised the price of skins to a level where the industry seemed viable again. The English-born John Boultbee joined a Fiordland gang during this late resurgence and subsequently wrote a graphic account of the vicissitudes such men had to endure: both the good times – ‘a blazing fire, flapjacks, pork and a singsong’ – and the bad, as when the gang was attacked by Maori pirates from Banks Peninsula and had to fight literally for their lives.
There were insufficient animals left to sustain the revival, however. On the Chatham Islands alone, the numbers had dropp
ed from around 20,000 to ‘very few’, and the first permanent European settlers there were disillusioned sealers who jumped ship in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Another group, who wrecked their brig, the Glory, on Pitt Island in 1827, managed to sail a longboat back to the Bay of Islands, a journey of 1300 km – one of the great survival stories of the sealing era in New Zealand waters. By the 1830s, however, the industry on the Chathams had all but collapsed, a victim of ‘reckless efficiency’.
At the very time that sealing was undergoing its second decline, another industry based on the exploitation of marine mammals was growing locally and would eventually have a more enduring and far-reaching impact on New Zealand and its inhabitants. This was whaling. Initially it was primarily in pursuit of sperm whales and was carried out from ocean-going vessels, which needed ports near the whaling grounds to the north, south and east of New Zealand.
Like sealing, ocean whaling, which at first involved British vessels and later French and American ones, began to affect New Zealand in the 1790s. Unlike sealing, it peaked in the 1830s. It was to service this enlarging ‘fleet’ that the settlement of Kororareka developed in the Bay of Islands, making the bay the first major arena for prolonged and intensive Maori–Pakeha interaction. In 1830, for example, as many as 30 ships were at anchor in the port, with crews totalling 1000 men, of whom as many as 300 could be ashore at any one time. The presence of these sailors, and the need for ships to replenish their supplies, led to Maori growing vegetables and pigs for sale and offering prostitution, and to an ever-enlarging number of riff-raff Europeans on shore providing alcohol and tavern entertainment. It also led to a growing amount of disorderly conduct, with no police force or indeed any system of law and order to protect life and property. Such circumstances led to Kororareka becoming known, with perhaps only slight exaggeration, as the ‘Hell-hole of the Pacific’. Charles Darwin, visiting the Bay of Islands in the Beagle, in 1835, described its English residents as ‘the very refuse of society’. French navigator Dumont d’Urville reported similar conditions in Port Otago in 1840, ‘the Maori much degraded, the men undermined by alcohol purchased by coercing their wives and daughters into large-scale, very visible prostitution’.