by Michael King
Some of these actions involved considerable cruelty. In the wake of battles, for example, the captured killers of warriors might be turned over to the widows of the men they had slain, as happened to Tamaiharanui of Ngai Tahu. The resulting deaths were prolonged and painful. At Waitangi Beach on Chatham Island, the Ngati Wai hapu of Ngati Mutunga laid Moriori women staked to the ground alongside one another and left them to die slowly. Instances of gratuitous cruelty were certainly not universal. Maori probably had the same percentage of sadists and psychopaths as any other society. The fortunate victims were those who died quickly, even if they were then chosen for the ritual cannibal feasting that was believed to absorb the mana of the defeated. To outside witnesses, such as missionaries, these actions were profoundly shocking. To most of the Maori combatants, they were simply the tikanga or customs associated with fighting. Whether you won or lost, you knew what your expected role or fate would be. And you knew the truth of the whakatauki or proverbs that enshrined the values pertaining to war: ‘Kia mate ururoa, kei mate wheke’ (it is better to fight and die like a shark than an octopus), for example. But there are recorded instances of captives committing suicide or killing their loved ones rather than allowing themselves to be subjected to the customs associated with victory.
Several tribes were displaced by fighting, and such movements always had consequences for other peoples. The tribes of the Coromandel Peninsula, for example, virtually deserted their traditional rohe and moved inland, where room had to be found for them among their Tainui relations. The population of the Auckland isthmus was depleted, leaving a vacuum into which Ngati Whatua would spread from the north. Ngati Toa and Ngati Raukawa were pushed out of Waikato and made their way down the west coast of the North Island, fighting and defeating other tribes such as Ngati Apa, Muaupoko and Rangitane as they did so. Various Taranaki tribes joined them in actions against peoples in the far south of the North Island, such as Ngati Ira, who virtually disappeared at this time. Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama, having settled around Wellington and the top of the South Island in alliance with Ngati Toa, fell out with their allies and hijacked a ship to take them to the Chatham Islands in 1835. There they killed around 10 per cent of the Moriori population, which had stood at around 1600, and enslaved the survivors.
Those who wanted or needed to fight, for attack or anticipated defence, had to be involved for long periods in harvesting flax or producing pigs and potatoes. In 1814 in the Bay of Islands, the price for one musket was 150 baskets of potatoes and eight pigs. In 1822 it was 70 ‘buckets’ of potatoes and two pigs. In some instances by the late 1820s, Maori used the smoked heads of slain enemies to trade for further muskets. In the case of Ngapuhi, much of the agricultural labour was undertaken by slaves. By the early 1830s, too, some slaves were being tattooed and killed specifically for the trade in smoked heads – a trade which the then Governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling, attempted, with some success, to ban by law in 1831.
Once they had become accustomed to the need to rotate areas for planting, widespread production of the introduced potato also gave Maori more nutritious and more easily preserved and portable food than they had had previously (by the time of European arrival in New Zealand, Maori kumara were little larger than human fingers). This factor alone meant that taua or war parties could spend longer away from the home supply-base than in the pre-European era (2000 men carrying 1000 muskets at the height of Hongi Hika’s campaigns in the early 1820s), though many Maori were reluctant to carry cooked food in canoes, because this would destroy protective tapu. They could also now lay indefinite siege to defensive pa formerly regarded as impregnable. The effect of all these factors was to increase the number of people killed in fighting and the aftermath of fighting.
Hongi Hika of Ngapuhi is the fighting chief best remembered from this era. Hongi had been one of the survivors of the Ngapuhi defeat by Ngati Whatua at Moremonui in 1807 and replaced Pokaia, who died there, as war leader of his people. Despite the fact that muskets had not won the day for Ngapuhi on that occasion, Hongi recognised their potential value in attack and defence provided warriors were trained and drilled and chose battle locations and tactics that allowed such weapons to be put to best use. In the succeeding years Hongi organised the tribes that recognised his mana to grow the kinds of crops that could be used to barter for muskets and to do so on a larger scale than those whom he regarded as potential enemies. When the missionary Thomas Kendall met Hongi in 1814, he already had ten muskets of his own, one of which he had stocked and mounted himself (‘the performance does him much credit, since he had no man to instruct him’, Kendall said of the manner in which Hongi handled his weapons).
After spectacular military successes in 1818 and 1819, Hongi visited England and Sydney, initially in the company of Kendall. In England he helped Kendall and Professor Samuel Lee of Cambridge University compile A grammar and vocabulary of the language of New Zealand, the first such book and the one which laid the orthographic foundations of written Maori. Hongi also met King George IV and was sent home with a suit of armour which he subsequently wore into battle, the spectacle of which increased the terror of his opponents and led to the rumour that he was invincible under fire. He arrived back in the Bay of Islands with up to 500 additional muskets and his subsequent southern war campaigns took a heavier toll on opponents.
Like Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga, Hongi came to be known and respected for his tactical cunning. At Te Totara pa in the Hauraki district in 1821, Hongi’s representative sued for peace and asked for tatou pounamu (conciliatory gifts) in return for Ngapuhi’s departure. Late that night, while the Hauraki people were celebrating their deliverance, Hongi and his taua returned to attack under cover of darkness and killed some 60 people still within the pa.
However much he terrified his enemies and would-be enemies, Hongi at home was far more than simply a man of war. Missionary families under his protection at Waimate, like those at Kerikeri, knew him as a ‘mild, gentle and courteous man’. Samuel Marsden described him as ‘a very fine character … uncommonly mild in his manners and very polite’. Hongi personally supervised the planting of crops and participated in fishing expeditions. And yet his death, when it eventually occurred in 1828, was a vindication of the Biblical verse about those who live by the sword. While he was fighting his way into Whangaroa in an attempt to settle back on his father’s people’s lands his chest was pierced by the ball of a musket, the weapon whose use he had done so much to popularise. He died a year later from the infection of the wound.
Other men who acquired reputations as great fighting leaders over this period included Te Morenga, Pomare, Tamati Waka Nene and Patuone of Ngapuhi; Te Wherowhero of Waikato and Te Waharoa of Ngati Haua; Te Heuheu Tukino of Ngati Tuwharetoa; Te Rauparaha, Te Rangihaeata and Te Pehi Kupe of Ngati Toa; and Tuhawaiiki and Taiaroa of Ngai Tahu.
Te Rauparaha, credited with composing what would become the most famous of all haka, Ka Mate, Ka Mate, was driven out of Waikato by a confederation led by Te Wherowhero. As he fought his way down the west coast of the North Island at the head of his people, he was the cause of almost as much disruption and panic as Hongi. He battled and defeated such tribes as Ngati Apa, Muaupoko, Rangitane and Ngati Ira as he led his people to Cook Strait, where they made their headquarters on Kapiti Island (soon to be the location of several important shore whaling stations). Then he and Ngati Toa waged campaigns against Ngai Tahu in the South Island, winning notable and (for the home people) costly victories at Kaikoura, Kaiapoi and Onawe, among other places. Distracted from their own internecine wars, Ngai Tahu recovered their balance and pushed Ngati Toa back to Cloudy Bay at the head of the island, having defeated a combined Ngati Toa–Ngati Tama taua deep in Murihiku territory near Mataura. Unlike Hongi, Te Rauparaha, known to his whaling friends as ‘the old sarpent’, and his nephew Te Rangihaeata, lived on to become formidable players in the manoeuvres that accompanied organised European settlement.
The last of the tribal musket wars may hav
e been the clashes between Te Ati Awa and Ngati Raukawa in 1839, and between Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga on Chatham Island in 1840, though armed war parties were still moving round parts of the North Island in the mid-1840s. Over a period of 30 years these actions had been responsible for the deaths of at least 20,000 Maori, and possibly many more. Even this figure would make these wars the most costly of any in which New Zealanders previously or subsequently took part. They ceased eventually in part because a balance of terror was achieved once all the surviving tribes were well stocked with muskets, and in part because land sales to Europeans had the effect of ‘freezing’ tribal rohe and making future conquest and migration impossible. Another factor was the influence of Christianity and its message of peace, which had begun to spread among Maori outwards from the Bay of Islands and the Hokianga in the 1830s.
Maori had always been a highly spiritual people. They recognised atua or spiritual powers in nature: in Tane Mahuta’s offerings of food and shelter from the forests, in Tangaroa’s gifts of fish and shellfish from the sea, even in the cleansing storms and winds of Tawhirimatea. There were also atua who resided in and protected particular geographical features and places.
Nothing was taken from the domain of these atua without respect, propitiation and expressions of gratitude. Maori religious beliefs – about atua, tupua, mana, tapu, noa and mauri – harmonised the workings of mind and body and spiritual realities with physical ones. The whole of existence was bound up in a unified vision in which each aspect of life was related to every other. These beliefs and the practices and rituals associated with them affected human behaviour from Te Rerenga Wairua in the north to Rakiura in the south.
All of which meant that Maori – so-called heathen – were far more receptive to consideration and discussion of religious issues, once bilingualism made such discussions possible, than were, say, the secularised humanists of the European Enlightenment and their successors. Maori believed already in atua; it did not require a large movement of faith to accept belief in a single God, Te Atua (indeed, there is evidence for a supreme deity, Io, in some Maori cosmologies). Maori already believed that tikanga or codes of behaviour regulated the workings of communities; it was not such a big transition to consider an alternative code, even if it did outlaw such aspects of tikanga Maori as eating human flesh or keeping slaves.
The major points of Christian belief that would contrast with tikanga Maori were the notions that natural man was a fallen creature needing to be redeemed by Christ’s suffering and death; and that every human life – whether of rangatira, commoner or slave – was of equal value in the eyes of Te Atua and those who acknowledged Him.
Christian evangelising in New Zealand began in 1814. While the first Christian service in New Zealand had been the mass celebrated by Jean de Surville’s Dominican chaplain in Doubtless Bay in 1769, the Frenchmen were not there to convert Maori. In any case, their lack of an interpreter meant that they would have been unable to make themselves understood had they tried to do so. The first Christian mission to New Zealand, and specifically to Maori, was launched by Samuel Marsden on behalf of the Church of England’s Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1814. And it came about largely because of the number of Maori visiting Sydney in the early years of the nineteenth century.
Marsden, a bluff Yorkshireman with ‘heavy shoulders and the face of a petulant ox’, was both chaplain to the New South Wales penal settlement and a magistrate. He was severe in dealing with convicts who reoffended and became known as ‘the flogging parson’. But he went out of his way to meet and greet Maori in Sydney, and often had them to stay in his house and work on his extensive farm at Parramatta. He had even, in 1809, rescued the Maori sailor Ruatara, who was stranded in London, and taken him back with him to Sydney. It was this association in particular that led Marsden to set up the first CMS mission at Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands in 1814, on land that he would buy from Ruatara. Marsden conducted his first service in New Zealand on Christmas Day 1814. Preaching to a largely Maori congregation, he took his text from St Luke’s Gospel, ‘Behold I bring you tidings of great joy …’ In the New Year of 1815, Marsden visited Waimate and Omapere and thus made ‘the first significant journey of inland exploration by a European … and set a pattern for the missionary explorers who followed’.
Marsden left three lay workers at Rangihoua: Thomas Kendall, a schoolmaster, justice of the peace and self-appointed leader of the station; William Hall, a carpenter; and John King, a shoemaker and ropemaker. Marsden instructed them to institute a ‘civilisation first’ policy – that is, to instruct Maori in horticulture, agriculture and trade, in European manners and morals, and then seek to make them Christian. These three men and their families were unable to work together harmoniously, and were, in Marsden’s judgement, guilty of a range of offences, including trading muskets with Maori, drunkenness and, in Kendall’s case, adultery. At one point, in the course of his mission, Kendall confessed that the ‘sublimity’ of Maori ideas had ‘almost completely turned me from a Christian to a Heathen …’ This was not the purpose for which Marsden and the CMS had placed him there.
The Revd John Gare Butler arrived in the Bay of Islands in 1819 as the mission’s first resident clergyman and superintendent. He opened a second station at Kerikeri in the company of lay workers James and Charlotte Kemp. The house they built there was to survive as the oldest European residence in the country, and Kemp’s stone store alongside it, completed in 1836, as the oldest commercial building. The Rangihoua site was abandoned. Despite the infusion of new blood, by 1822 the mission had still achieved not one conversion.[2] No real progress was made until Butler, like his earlier colleagues, was dismissed, for drunkenness, and the Revd Henry Williams, a former naval officer, assumed leadership of the operation from Paihia in 1823.
Williams overturned the ‘civilisation first’ policy and took steps to ensure that all new missionaries, including his brother William, became proficient in the Maori language so that they could preach in it as soon as possible (indeed, William’s proficiency soon exceeded his older brother’s and he went on to compile what would become the country’s definitive Maori dictionary). Henry also prohibited further missionary involvement in the musket trade and took steps to reduce the mission’s dependence on Maori for supplies – by encouraging farming and acquiring a schooner. Soon his mana among Maori was such that he was intervening successfully to prevent disagreements between Maori turning into outright warfare.
In the late 1820s Bay of Islands Maori at last began to offer themselves for baptism, and the number of conversions rose rapidly through the following decade. By 1842 there were over 3000 Christian Maori in the region, and others further afield as a result of Henry Williams’s and Marsden’s periodic trips to other parts of the country and the opening of stations at Kaitaia, Waimate, Maraetai, Kauaeranga, Puriri, Matamata, Mangapopuri, Rotorua, Otaki and Waikanae. Te Atua, the God of the Bible, was on the move. From the 1830s too the momentum had been increased by the activity of Maori evangelists, many of them former slaves who had been converted in Ngapuhi territory and then allowed to return home when their masters also embraced the new faith and rejected slavery as an institution. One of these, Piripi Taumata-a-kura, brought Christianity to his own Ngati Porou people in 1836.
Why was progress made at this time and not before? The answers are complex. Initially Maori were, as early accounts of their beliefs show, content and secure in their traditional view of the world and their place in it, and in the efficacy of their own atua. In the early days of the CMS missions, Bay of Islands people were happy to select from the so-called civilising influences on offer. Rawiri Taiwhanga, referred to as ‘the first and the brightest jewel in the missionary crown of achievement’, became a wonderfully versatile and successful horticulturist prior to his conversion, and later the country’s first commercial dairy farmer. And yet, in the course of a decade spent in acquiring these skills, he and others initially retained and remained secure in their own cosmogra
phy. The erratic and petty behaviour of the original CMS workers at Rangihoua was never an example to inspire emulation, though Thomas Kendall acquired some mana through his friendship with Hongi Hika and his efforts to learn and write down the Maori language and spiritual beliefs.
By the late 1820s other influences were at work. The example of principled living set by the extended Williams family and the Kemps at Kerikeri did win Maori admiration, though Henry Williams was rather severe in his views on even rather innocent Maori customary practices. The literacy offered by the mission’s schools at Kerikeri and Paihia was embraced with enthusiasm by a growing number of Maori adults and children, especially after the mission printer William Colenso began producing scripture in Maori – starting with some of Paul’s epistles and moving on to William Williams’s translation of the New Testament – from 1835. The loss of Maori lives in the musket wars and the vulnerability to European diseases exhibited by, in particular, Maori in the Bay of Islands, where European whalers were calling more and more often through the 1830s, may also have been a factor undermining the confidence Maori had formerly had in their own atua and karakia (prayers or chants). For a combination of reasons, therefore, the high degree of spiritual energy which Maori had always shown, and their deep interest in religious questions and practice, came to be relocated in the practice of Christianity. Karakia Maori were increasingly replaced by karakia mihinare, although the point should be made that this often occurred without Maori relinquishing a belief in their own gods. In this sense, perhaps, Maori did not so much convert to Christianity as convert Christianity, like so much else that Pakeha had brought, to their own purposes.