by Michael King
The Anglicans no longer had the field to themselves by this time. Wesleyans had arrived in 1822 and, with help from the CMS workers, William White, Nathaniel Turner and John Hobbs established a mission station at Whangaroa the following year. Their instructions were to ‘propose the Gospel in its simplest and most explicit truths’, and to refrain from owning land personally or trading with local Maori. They had a difficult time in this locality. According to one Maori historian, the Wesleyans ‘taught domesticity, agriculture and … prudery with little success, and Christianity with less …’ In 1827 their mission was sacked by Maori in the course of Hongi Hika’s battles to fight his way back into Whangaroa. Turner and Hobbs abandoned the station and eventually set up a new one at Mangunu on the southern shore of the Hokianga Harbour, which was later relocated to Waima. In this district they made better progress. Throughout the 1830s the Wesleyans worked their way down the west coast of the North Island through regions that the Anglicans had not yet evangelised. They set up new stations in Tangiteroria on the northern Wairoa River, and in Raglan and Kawhia; they eventually established their largest Maori following among Tainui Maori of the Waikato.
Whereas the Wesleyans and Anglicans co-operated in the early years of their mission (the Turners and the Hobbses stayed with the Kemps at Kerikeri after the destruction of the Whangaroa station, for example), Protestants and Catholics did not. The Catholic missionaries, who arrived in the northern Hokianga from France in 1838, were the last of the major denominations to reach New Zealand (barring Presbyterians, whose presence had to await the Scottish colonisation of Otago and Southland from 1848). As Papists and as citizens of a country so recently and for so long at war with Britain, they were not welcomed by either of their predecessors. Nathaniel Turner told his southern Hokianga Maori congregation that Bishop Jean-Baptiste Pompallier and his Marist workers represented ‘the Great Whore of Babylon’, and sent them across the harbour to sack the first Catholic station on Thomas Poynton’s property at Totara Point. Te Rarawa Maori protected the new arrivals. Even William Williams, in other circumstances an equable man, described Pompallier as a ‘shrewd clever active man who … hesitates not in the use of any means, whether lying or the employment of profligate Europeans in order to accomplish his purpose’.
Part of this prejudice was generated by the fact that many of the 40 to 50 Pakeha Catholics already living in the Hokianga in the 1830s, and some of their co-religionists in the Bay of Islands, were rough Irishmen ‘given to drink and fornication’. They were the kind of Pakeha who, in the eyes of the Protestant missionaries, set a bad example to Maori. Most of them, however, like Jacky Marmon and Thomas Cassidy, eventually had their unions with Maori women formalised and worked their way towards respectability.
Pompallier and his slowly growing band of priests and brothers set to work initially with as much enthusiasm as had their Protestant counterparts. They achieved notable successes in the northern Hokianga, where the respected timber merchant Poynton had already laid Catholic foundations among his Maori neighbours, and in the Bay of Islands, where Pompallier relocated his headquarters in 1839. From these bases they worked their way south and established further stations in the Bay of Plenty, the central North Island and the south-east coast of the South Island. By 1841 Pompallier reported that he had set up twelve stations throughout the country and baptised some 1000 Maori. This was fewer than his CMS rivals, but considerably more than the Wesleyans. Many of these ‘converts’ dropped away, however, especially during the Northern War in the mid-1840s.
As missionaries, the French had an advantage over their Protestant counterparts: they were celibate; they did not have wives and families to support; they could roam large areas of the country without having to worry about how families were faring in their absence; they appeared to refrain from sexual activity with Maori rather more successfully than their brethren (and Wesleyan William White and Anglicans William Yate and William Colenso were three more who would succumb to what their colleagues regarded as sins of the flesh). Before long, however, the Catholic clergy were complaining bitterly to Jean-Claude Colin, their religious superior in France, that Pompallier was withholding from them the financial resources that would have allowed them to feed, clothe and transport themselves with a minimal degree of comfort.
Pompallier himself, however, enjoyed certain personal advantages over his critics both inside and outside the Catholic fold. He was 36 years old when he arrived in New Zealand, handsome, intelligent and eloquent (thanks to Poynton’s tuition he was preaching in Maori three months after his arrival). He was also the first bishop of any denomination to set foot in New Zealand[3] and was an especially ‘commanding figure in long purple soutane and sash, episcopal ring and great tassled hat’. Unlike most Europeans in New Zealand at this time, and certainly unlike some of his more Calvinist-inclined rivals, Pompallier looked like the Maori idea of a rangatira Pakeha – like the kind of person Hongi Hika and other fortunates had reported seeing at the courts of monarchs. It was as a result of this striking impact that Maori would soon characterise Maori Catholics as Pikopo (from the Latin episcopus for ‘bishop’) to distinguish them from Mihinare (from ‘missionary’) for Protestant Maori.
With all the discussion of religion and religious concepts generated by competitive evangelising – and some Maori were intensely interested in talking of such matters, as the French clergy reported exhaustedly – it was scarcely surprising that the first syncretic religion composed of Maori and Judaeo-Christian ingredients emerged in the Bay of Islands and the Hokianga in the 1830s. This was the movement known as Papahurihia. There would be many more such examples in the course of the nineteenth century. The followers of such movements, made familiar with Christian scripture, identified strongly with the Israelites of the Old Testament as a disinherited but Chosen People promised deliverance and fulfilment by God. They represented a belief by Maori in the existence of Te Atua, the God of the Bible. But that belief did not, in Maori eyes, preclude belief in the pantheon of Maori gods. Syncretic or ‘Maori religions’ represented a specifically Maori path to God and a rejection of the missionary assumption that European civilisation ought to accompany conversion, even if it was no longer necessary to precede it.
Papahurihia was so named after its founder, a Ngapuhi matakite (seer) and tohunga. Judith Binney, who has studied his beliefs more closely than any other scholar, writes that Papahurihia’s identification of Maori with the Jewish people, and the use of the Biblical serpent as his channel, became important beliefs for his followers. As ‘Jews’, those followers were not Christian. ‘[They] were the chosen of God … [He] hated the Protestant missionaries; they were said to be murderers, causing many deaths by means of witchcraft.’ For some reason he was less judgemental about the activities of Catholic missionaries after their later arrival.
Papahurihia’s impact was intensified by his skill as a ventriloquist who could conjure up ‘spirit voices’ from various directions, some of them making what was described as a ‘whistling sighing’ sound. He changed his own name to Te Atua Wera – the fiery god – and retained a following until his death in 1875, even though he had converted to Christianity 20 years earlier. In the southern Hokianga he still has adherents in the twenty-first century.
Earlier writers have suggested that one major reason for Maori to embrace Christianity in the 1830s, and to be attracted to syncretic religions such as Papahurihia, was the confusion and anxiety that arose from deaths caused by epidemics. Maori had no immunity to Pakeha-introduced diseases, the argument goes, and the prayers and rituals of their ancient religion had no beneficial or palliative effects on these illnesses; therefore they turned to new religions in an effort to mitigate their effects and protect individuals still living.
If there is any truth to this scenario, it probably applies only to the Bay of Islands and the Hokianga, where Pakeha contact with Maori was reasonably continuous over the two decades preceding the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and where European ships came and
went from foreign ports with some regularity. The vast majority of Maori in other parts of the country, however – especially those living in interior regions such as Waikato, the King Country, Urewera, inland Hawke’s Bay and Wairarapa, and those in the South Island north of the area around Foveaux Strait – had only indirect contact with Pakeha up to 1840. There is no evidence that periodic epidemics of ‘rewharewha’ – most probably influenza – reported in the Bay of Islands and Mercury Bay affected Maori outside those areas. Similarly, outbreaks of whooping cough in the Bay of Islands in the 1820s and 1830s and influenza in Foveaux Strait some time between 1817 and 1820 almost certainly spread no further than those places.
Demographer Ian Pool writes:
[The] Maori population was dispersed and had a low density. European contact was mainly restricted to ports and other coastal areas … Thus care should be taken not to extrapolate from the experience of Northland … nor to assume that the reported outbreak of any disease was nationwide. The necessary pre-conditions for the rapid transmission of disease throughout the entire population just did not exist in New Zealand prior to the Treaty of Waitangi [which would] open the way for the rapid influx of Pakeha population and thus inadvertently … set up the mechanisms for the widespread exposure of Maori to imported diseases … New Zealand before 1840 would have experienced therefore rather different conditions from some of the small islands of the Pacific …
As Pool notes, this situation would change after 1840. Before then, however, it is likely that the combined effects of the musket wars, some infertility as a result of venereal disease, and localised epidemics reduced the Maori population from its 1769 level of 100,000–110,000 to around 70,000. For Maori, the real population plunge – and crisis – would occur from around the middle of the nineteenth century.
[1] The name means ‘eaters of excrement’. It originated in an assertive chant in which members of the tribe warned their adversaries that when they defeated them they would eat every morsel of the dead, ‘including their tutae’. Ritual cannibalism was known as whangai hau – destroying the mana of the victim and thus leaving their kinsfolk without ancestral protection.
[2] This astonishing record was, however, well exceeded by the German Moravian missioner in the Chatham Islands, Johann Gottfried Engst, who laboured in the field for 68 years without a conversion.
[3] His Anglican counterpart, George Augustus Selwyn, every bit a sartorial competitor, would not arrive in the country until 1842.
Chapter 11
A Treaty
The establishment of the New South Wales penal colony in 1788 had given many Maori an opportunity to engage gradually and largely on their own terms with a minimal and, in the case of visiting traders or missionaries, sporadic European presence. As a result, prior to 1840, they were at no point overwhelmed by this presence as were, say, the Aboriginal people of Tasmania and parts of south-east Australia.
Everything that unfolded in New Zealand over the following 50 years – the trade, the sealing and whaling, the missionary activity, the number of Maori who visited Sydney and Hobart and eventually London – brought New Zealand into a progressively closer relationship with Europeans and, in particular, Europeans from Britain. And the only authorities outside New Zealand who revealed themselves to be genuinely interested in the welfare of Maori, and in particular how well Maori were faring in their interaction with Europeans, were successive governors of New South Wales, not to mention Colonial Office officials, leaders of the Anglican and Wesleyan mission societies and members of the Aborigines Protection Society – all the latter based in London. A consequence of all this was that, throughout the 1830s, New Zealand was pulled steadily towards a permanent and constitutional relationship with Britain.
The first formal step acknowledging that this process was in motion was the appointment in 1832 of the New South Wales viticulturist James Busby as the first British Resident in New Zealand: in effect, the representative of British law and order and diplomatic interests in the country. He arrived in the Bay of Islands to assume these responsibilities in May 1833 and was greeted by a missionary-organised Maori welcome at Paihia, a seven-gun salute and a hakari or feast. Busby himself added to the sense of occasion by distributing gifts of blankets and tobacco to the 22 chiefs in attendance. Nothing quite like this had happened in the Bay of Islands before and Busby took the opportunity to create an impression that his appointment was akin to a diplomatic posting and that he was the personal representative of the authority of ‘the King’.
Several factors had led to his commission, which was initiated by the British Government but administered, parsimoniously, from New South Wales. One was the need to protect New Zealand’s trade with the Australian colonies (the value of New Zealand exports to New South Wales and Tasmania was around £20,000 by the early 1830s). There was also the need to protect the lives and interests of the growing number of British subjects living in New Zealand, including the families of the CMS and Wesleyan missionaries. And there was the fact that northern Maori had twice sent letters to the King of England asking for British protection: once when an armed French vessel visited the Bay of Islands in 1831 (though it turned out to be innocent of aggressive intention), and again in response to the participation of British seamen in Ngati Toa’s kidnapping of the Ngai Tahu chief Tamaiharanui the previous year (Maori in the north feared that southern tribes might use the same tactics to punish Ngapuhi for their raids in the musket wars).
Busby’s instructions from Governor Richard Bourke of New South Wales specified that he was to protect ‘well disposed’ settlers and traders, guard against the exploitation of Maori by Europeans and outrages committed against them, and recapture escaped convicts. He was given no means of enforcing his authority, however, and eventually came to be referred to as the ‘Man o’ War without guns’. He was also instructed to encourage Maori towards a more settled form of government, and in this limited respect, at least in his own mind, he did make some progress.
In March 1834 Busby organised a meeting of northern chiefs outside his house in Waitangi to choose a national flag, so that New Zealand-built and -owned ships could be properly registered and freely enter other ports. If his own despatches are to be believed, this task was carried out in a dignified and constitutional manner. An independent eyewitness account, however, by the visiting Austrian naturalist Baron von Hugel – sent abroad to recover from the defection of his fiancée to Prince Clemens von Metternich – made it clear that the ceremony was little short of a farce.
The assembled chiefs were not given a comprehensible account of why they were there and expressed much puzzlement that King William of England, who was kind enough to invite them to select a flag for New Zealand ships, was sufficiently unkind as to threaten to punish mariners who did not display such a flag. Then, asked to choose from one of three flags on offer, the chiefs politely proceeded to vote for all three. It took the intervention of one of the Williams family’s Maori servants to compel each chief to opt for only one flag, write down the preferences as votes, then announce a result. One flag, an ensign that became known as the ‘Flag of the Independent Tribes of New Zealand’, was left flying and the alternatives hauled down. A naval officer called for a ‘triple hurrah’ while the frigate Alligator fired off a 21-gun salute. Europeans present were then invited to sit down for an elegant lunch, while the assembled chiefs were given a cauldron of cold porridge, which they were obliged to eat with their fingers.
A second and equally contrived ceremony took place again at Waitangi in October 1835. This time, in exchange for a second cauldron of porridge, Busby persuaded the same chiefs and some additional ones to sign ‘A Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand’ by a ‘Confederation of United Tribes’. This document, into which Maori had had no input, was designed specifically to thwart the French adventurer Charles de Thierry, who planned to establish an independent state in the Hokianga. It proclaimed, in English and Maori:
We, the hereditary chiefs and heads
of the tribes of the Northern parts of New Zealand … declare the Independence of our country, which is hereby constituted … an Independent State, under the designation of The United Tribes of New Zealand.
All sovereign power and authority within the territories of the United Tribes of New Zealand is hereby declared to reside entirely and exclusively in the hereditary chiefs and heads of tribes … who also declare that they will not permit any legislative authority separate from themselves … nor any function of government to be exercised within the said territories, unless by persons appointed by them, and acting under the authority of laws regularly enacted by them in Congress assembled.
The document also thanked King William for acknowledging the Maori flag, and asked him to continue to act as the ‘Matua’ or parent of their infant state. It was signed initially by 34 chiefs, and subsequently by a further 18.
The Governor of New South Wales, who was by this time growing tired of what he regarded as James Busby’s whining requests for naval ships, policemen and other resources he was unable or unwilling to supply, called the declaration ‘a paper pellet fired off at Baron de Thierry’, who had already declared himself ‘king’ of Nuku Hiva Island in the Marquesas group. When de Thierry eventually arrived in New Zealand in 1837, it was to discover that his previous purchase of land in the Hokianga from Thomas Kendall was not recognised and that local Maori had no enthusiasm for accepting him as their monarch. Instead, he ended his days as a music teacher in Auckland.