by Michael King
There was another phase of the same industry, shore whaling, which involved harvesting mainly the southern right whale. Shore-based stations were established for this purpose from the late 1820s on the east coast of both main islands, around Cook and Foveaux Straits, and on the Chathams. They too reached their peak of activity in the 1830s, but had a much more marked effect on Maori communities than ocean whaling. The stations were mostly established close to Maori villages, or in some instances Maori moved settlements to be closer to them. Local Maori men worked alongside Pakeha, hunting whales in season and in the off-season growing vegetable crops for these small colonies and for trading. Maori women lived with or married European shore whalers, an association that founded some of the most prominent Maori families of the future – the Braggs, Solomons, Barretts, Loves, Keenans, McClutchies, Halberts, Manuels, and many others.
The impact of shore whaling was also more widespread than that of ocean whaling and of sealing. It had a considerable impact on Maori life on the East Coast of the North Island, in Taranaki, on both sides of Cook Strait and Kapiti and Mana islands, and on the south-east of the South Island. Communities there were introduced to European clothing, European technology in the form of tools, new varieties of domestic plants and animals, clinker-built boats, European-style housing and the English language – and, of course, to intermarriage.
Having said that, it needs to be stressed that the values and protocols of such communities remained largely Maori, that most descendants of mixed marriages identified as Maori, and that the whaling-based communities could not have been there at all if the local Maori chiefs and tribes had not permitted their presence. They were part of a gradually growing symbiotic relationship between Maori and Pakeha. Pakeha investors and workers gained access to raw materials for an industry that was highly profitable for the owners; Maori gained access to paid labour and to those aspects of European technology and culture that it suited them to have – and, on the whole, they did so without compromising their Maori cultural identity.
The very first shore stations were established in the late 1820s by Jacky Guard, a former convict and sealer, at Te Awaiti (‘Tar’white’, as it came to be called) in Tory Channel in the Marlborough Sounds, and by Bunn and Co of Sydney in Preservation Inlet in Fiordland. Guard later shifted his operation to Kakapo Bay, Port Underwood. His son John, born to Guard’s Australian wife Betty in 1831, is believed to be the first Pakeha child born in the South Island (though he had, of course, been preceded by children born of Maori–Pakeha unions). When members of the Guard family became hostages to Ngati Ruanui after a shipwreck on the Taranaki coast in 1834, the soldiers from Sydney who rescued them were the first British troops to engage in armed conflict with Maori.
Other shore whalers, such as Johnny Jones of Waikouaiti and Edward Weller of Otakou, became immensely wealthy through the 1830s and lived on to participate in the organised European colonisation of the country (though Weller chose to move to New South Wales when he was unable to get confirmation of his vast land purchases after British annexation). Dicky Barrett, after an adventurous introduction to life in New Zealand as a trader and whaler, which included fighting alongside his wife’s Ati Awa relations in their battles with Waikato Maori, was briefly the popular host of Barrett’s Hotel in Wellington. But he lost this business as a result of overreaching himself on his whaling operations. Philip Tapsell, a Dane who had originally come to New Zealand as an ocean whaler, eventually prospered as a trader based at Maketu in the Bay of Plenty and fathered one of the most influential and high-achieving Arawa dynasties. Weller, Barrett and Tapsell, and other whalers like the half-Aboriginal Thomas Chaseland, all had Maori wives and families. But they were not Pakeha Maori in the sense that they did not become or attempt to become culturally Maori, even if their children did.
Tapsell, like so many other European traders who arrived in New Zealand in the 1820s, became heavily involved in harvesting timber and flax. Most such operations were initially organised and financed from Sydney. James Cook had reported on what he judged to be the value of New Zealand timber for spars and ships’ hulls, particularly as a consequence of his journey inland up the Waihou River. As noted earlier, ships from the British East India Company had begun taking wood for spars and masts from the Hauraki district in the 1790s (at least five shiploads of timber were taken from the banks of the Waihou River between 1794 and 1801). But these early cargoes were of kahikatea, which rotted in water and did not find favour with ship-builders.
The timber industry did not burgeon in New Zealand until the 1820s, after expeditions to the Coromandel Peninsula by British naval ships seeking suitable wood for topmasts and spars that had formerly been available from North American and Baltic forests. Kauri, with perfectly straight, branchless trunks extending 30 metres or more, were ideal for the purpose, and flexible and enduring. These successful visits generated the systematic exploitation of kauri, which would continue unfettered for another century until the resource was almost entirely destroyed. Harvesting such timber, at first in Northland and on the Coromandel coast, also involved whole Maori communities in the cutting, shaping and removal of logs. And it brought traders to the country who eventually became leading New Zealand citizens in the era of organised European settlement, such as Thomas Poynton and Thomas McDonnell in the Hokianga and James Clendon in the Bay of Islands.
Similar synergies developed around the harvesting of flax, which was in demand in the maritime industry for the manufacture of ropes, canvas sails, nets and sacks. An early attempt to exploit Maori expertise in the preparation and working of flax occurred in 1793, when Lieutenant-Governor Philip King had two Northland Maori, Tuki Tahua and Ngahuruhuru, kidnapped and taken to Norfolk Island to train convicts in these skills. The experiment failed, however, because neither man knew anything about preparing flax, which, as products of their own culture, they considered was women’s work.
Sporadic cargoes were shipped out from the Hokianga and the Bay of Islands in succeeding decades, particularly once Maori realised that offering flax for barter was the easiest and most assured way of acquiring muskets. But, despite the early instructions given to Governor Arthur Phillip in 1788, it was not until the early 1820s that the Government of New South Wales made concerted efforts to develop the New Zealand flax trade. Those efforts were eventually fruitful and led to a boom in the industry between the mid-1820s and early 1830s, when flax exports reached a peak. The plant was harvested all around the New Zealand coast, but particularly successful stations were established in Foveaux Strait, the Hokianga, the Bay of Islands, Kawhia and the two harbours to the north of it, Aotea and Whaingaroa, the Bay of Plenty (under Tapsell’s direction) and the East Coast of the North Island.
In Kawhia from 1828, John Rodolphus Kent had married Tiria, daughter of the powerful Ngati Mahuta chief and later first Maori King, Te Wherowhero. He enlarged his flax trade to include cargoes of spars, pork and potatoes, which he ferried across the Tasman to Sydney. He would return with such merchandise as muskets, gunpowder and liquor. Kent later transferred the flax operation to Ngaruawahia, where he made good use of the Waipa and Waikato Rivers to bring large quantities of the harvested plant out of the interior of the Waikato valley and down to the Manukau Harbour for transport to Australia. This operation, in which he successfully directed a large Tainui labour force, was an anticipation of post-1840 projects which would see Waikato Maori become exporters of crops and goods to Australia and California.
William Webster, an American trader, operated a similar business from Whanganui Island at the mouth of Coromandel Harbour. Like Kent, he married the daughter of the most influential local chief, the same Horeta Te Taniwha of Ngati Whanaunga who had seen James Cook in 1769. Like Kent, too, he used his Maori kinship associations to encourage Maori communities to grow fruit and vegetable produce and pigs for export, and to harvest timber and flax. He extended his operations to Great Barrier Island and, when the European settlement of Auckland was established in 1840, Webst
er’s growers and workers supplied much of the town’s early produce and firewood, the only source of fuel until Huntly coal became available in the 1850s. By late 1840, however, he had taken out more loans than he could service – as part of a plan to begin exporting to Britain and the United States – and much of his extensive land claims were not validated after annexation. He returned to the United States in some bitterness in 1847.
Commercial activity in New Zealand’s frontier era between 1792 and 1840 thus highlighted a number of realities that had relevance for the country’s immediate and long-term future.
One was that, given direction and encouragement by Pakeha with the necessary expertise and associations, Maori turned out to be capable and competitive entrepreneurs who could grow produce and harvest commodities such as flax and timber on a large scale. In this context, the co-operative structure of internal tribal organisation and the system of mutual obligation implied by the custom of utu were distinct assets, as was inter-tribal competitiveness.
Second, there would always be some commercial and industrial activities – which in the early days included sealing and whaling – that could gain traction in New Zealand only with investment from overseas. Third, in an unregulated and untaxed era, some entrepreneurs stood to make enormous profits. Fourth, opportunities for prosperity in a country of New Zealand’s size would always depend to some extent on the state of markets with larger populations in other parts of the world. And, finally, it would become apparent from the unrestricted ‘quarrying’ of extractive resources – initially seals and whales, later timber – that unsustainable use of resources eventually annihilated the resource, a variation on the ‘future-eating’ phenomenon that had wiped out the country’s big game and destroyed forests in the early years of Maori settlement. New Zealanders were destined to repeat this pattern of behaviour many times over before necessary lessons were learned.
Apart from the potential for rich pickings by those who were European, well organised, hard working and lucky, however, little of this was apparent at the time. And the very absence of any kind of government bureaucracy that allowed profits to go untaxed also ensured an absence of planning or co-ordination in the development of the country’s resources. For some Maori, though, other forces were at work to encourage them to encounter and then reflect on the significance and potential value to them of a world beyond their own shores.
In addition to coastal contact with Europeans via harvesting and trading, there was another source of interaction between Maori and Pakeha in which Maori did, literally, discover the rest of the world. Having come themselves from a highly maritime culture, even though they had long since ceased to make ocean voyages by canoe, Maori turned out to be excellent crew members on European ships. They began to join ships’ companies in the 1790s, not long after Tuki and Ngahuruhuru’s voyage to Sydney and Norfolk Island at Lieutenant-Governor King’s behest in 1793. By the first decade of the nineteenth century Maori were visiting Sydney regularly, and from the following decade travelling on vessels around the Pacific – Herman Melville’s tattooed harpooner Queequeg in Moby Dick was in all probability based on a Maori crew member whom the author had met on the whaling ship Lucy Ann – and on to North America and England (at least two Maori, Matara and Ruatara, had visited London before 1810).
Successive governors of New South Wales encouraged Maori visits to the Australian colonies and had chiefs from Northland, such as Te Pahi, Ruatara and Matara, to stay with them, sometimes for long periods. One reason was that, by the early nineteenth century, governors had begun to understand the reciprocal nature of Maori society and felt that, if rangatira were made welcome in Sydney, Maori would in turn feel obliged to welcome Europeans, especially traders and missionaries, back home in New Zealand. And, by and large, that was what transpired, at least in the far north of the country. Another reason was that governors felt that extending their hospitality to chiefs was a way of introducing Maori to the values and refinements of civilisation and that, because of the hierarchical nature of Maori communities, if the chiefs were civilised, then the qualities of ‘civilised behaviour’ would trickle down to the rest of Maori society. This, by and large, did not happen – or at least not in the way that the governors expected it would.
The fact was that, despite the visits of European ships, despite the small number of Europeans choosing to remain onshore and live with Maori, despite the introduction of welcomed new commodities such as metal and domestic animals and plants, for many Maori the on-again, off-again nature of European presence was little more than ‘a travelling sideshow, a diversion from intertribal exchanges’. And for Maori who lived in the interior of the country and only heard about Maori–Pakeha interaction, those encounters would have had something of an unreal or mythical character, not unlike some of their traditions of patupaiarehe or fairy people. Other emissaries brought by Europeans changed Maori life more potently than the presence of Europeans themselves: these were muskets, disease and new ideas about spirituality.
[1] The reason for the brief gap in visits to New Zealand between the late 1790s and the early 1800s was the discovery of the Bass Strait seal colonies in 1797.
Chapter 10
God and Guns
One reason that many Maori were, after an initial phase of curiosity, all but oblivious to the growing frequency of European contact with New Zealand is that they were preoccupied with a more fundamental issue: their survival and the survival of their families and hapu. Some Pakeha-introduced commodities such as metals and tools had made the business of day-to-day subsistence less onerous, but the introduction of the flintlock musket into the intricately woven fabric of Maori tribal society was both an advantage and – for some – a disaster.
Maori acquisition of muskets began as a spin-off from early trade with Sydney-based merchants for flax and timber. A flood of cheaply produced European weapons in the early nineteenth century made them, on the merchants’ side, a favourite choice for goods to barter. For their part, Maori initially sought guns for hunting. Lacking projectile weapons – no bow and arrows, no slingshot, no boomerang – Maori had never found it easy to kill birds for food, particularly the smaller surviving forest birds, with traditional weaponry. And some sought guns simply for the mana of ownership, particularly when it was known that neighbouring rangatira had them.
Being still a martial people, however, it was not long before Maori began to use muskets in inter-tribal fighting. The first occasion appears to have been the defeat of a Ngapuhi war party by Ngati Whatua at Moremonui near Maunganui, between the Hokianga and Kaipara harbours, in 1807. In this instance, it was Ngapuhi who were equipped with muskets. But Ngati Whatua ambushed them and attacked with traditional weapons before Ngapuhi had sufficient opportunity to load or reload.
From that time, however, because of the nature of Maori kinship links, the custom of utu and the intense interest in how war was waged, the phenomenon of musket warfare spread. At first that spread was slow, but after 1820 it developed the momentum of an arms race. Those who did not have guns realised that they needed them to make their survival in warfare more likely. Those who did have them understood that they needed more of them to retain an advantage over their adversaries.
The experience of Ngati Korokoro was probably typical. Not long after the Moremonui action, 300 of them attacked Kai Tutae,[1] like themselves a hapu of Te Rarawa ki Hokianga. The defenders numbered only 30 but, thanks to their flax-trading activities, had muskets.
The 300 came bravely on, and seeing the insignificant band opposed to them, proposed to surround them and capture the lot. The Kai Tutae reserved their fire, but as the enemy advanced to within distance a gun was fired and the first of the attackers fell; and then one by one four others fell, and presently they fell in numbers, until a panic set in, and Ngati Korokoro fled to their boat. As they crowded into her they offered an easy mark and there was great slaughter …
Such inter-hapu skirmishes in the north of the country aside, the real horro
r of the musket wars began with large-scale Ngapuhi raids out of their own territory from the early 1820s. Every tribe against whom Ngapuhi had a real or imagined historical grievance became the target of a musket-era version of blitzkrieg; and, in many instances, the attackers had firearms while their opponents did not.
The carnage was considerable, and tribal balances of power were rapidly overturned in Ngapuhi’s favour. As one symptom of this, while these warriors and rangatira from the far north had no ambition to remain in the areas they subdued, they took back home with them a considerable collection of looted taonga (treasures and heirlooms) and slaves. As tribes to the south stepped up their own acquisition of weapons by organising intensive harvesting of flax and growing pigs and potatoes, they too – Ngati Whatua, Ngati Paoa, Ngati Raukawa, Ngati Maru, Ngati Tuwharetoa, Tuhoe – began to launch sudden raids of their own, though not, with the exception of Ngati Whatua, in the direction of Ngapuhi. With each of these actions, often justified by grievances that went back generations, they created grounds for further warfare on the part of those who survived attacks or who were absent from battles in which their relations were killed.
The fiercest fighting, historians estimate, took place between 1822 and 1836, and the level of violence peaked in 1832 and 1833. The whole country was affected, north to south, apart from the mountainous interior of what would come to be called the King Country and the remote bays and valleys of Fiordland. While, as Angela Ballara has argued, the musket wars may have been a continuation of Maori political and social interaction from the late eighteenth century, they were carried on with more efficient weapons. And they took a heavier toll because of those weapons. Indeed, if any chapter in New Zealand history has earned the label ‘holocaust’, it is this one. In some actions – Hongi Hika’s Ngapuhi against Ngati Paoa on the Auckland isthmus, for example, or against Te Arawa on Mokoia Island on Lake Rotorua – many hundreds of men, women and children were killed, and many more enslaved. Some small tribes were all but wiped out, with only one or two families surviving the fighting and its aftermath of executions.