by Michael King
[In] came the husband, who most cordially shook me with his hand, as black as coal, with a face of the same complexion … [We had] a good repast … of wild pig as usual, with some capital potatoes, finishing with a pipe … [I was] in the company of two individuals whose blood contained the savageism of three distinct races, in a miserable little cottage … [But] the attention and hospitality that I received from these poor people made me solemnly feel the truth and beauty of the Scriptural declaration that God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth.
Thomas Cholmondeley, writing in 1854, was more taken by what seemed, by comparison with Britain, a spirit of ecumenism.
What then is the religious condition of the ordinary colonist? He finds himself struggling in a new country, not as he struggled in the old – in the midst of a town or village community trained and minded like himself. No; English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish are flung together … They compare thoughts, ways, actions and words; they discuss systems; exchange customs; sift, weigh and balance their arguments and positions one with another. From an old church catechism, down to some new method of planting potatoes, nothing escapes.
Even that most divisive element within British communities at Home and abroad – the Protestant–Catholic split – was observed less in New Zealand than in Britain itself. A Catholic aristocrat, Charles Clifford, became first Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament in 1854. Another Catholic, Frederick Weld, became Premier in 1864. An English member of the Religious Tract Society who visited New Zealand in 1880 was alarmed by the extent of Catholic–Protestant interaction he found. ‘One can’t help feeling that the spirit of tolerance is somewhat carried to excess when one finds Protestants patronizing the Roman Catholic bazaar. One admires their love more than their wisdom, their heart more than their head.’ This early ecumenism worked to the benefit of such charitable aid workers as the French-Catholic nun Suzanne Aubert, and set a healthy precedent for the colony – a sense in which it could indeed be viewed as a ‘Better Britain’. But it would be infected by a virus of anti-Irish and consequent anti-Catholic feeling in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The rate of immigration increased considerably after the 1840s. In the 1850s it was fuelled by provincial government schemes to entice new settlers in order to expand economic activity and to increase the political influence of the regions. In the 1860s the discovery of gold, first in Otago and then on the West Coast of the South Island and finally on the Coromandel Peninsula in the north, increased the population influx in those areas substantially. In the same decade military settlers were brought in from both Australia and Britain to defend colonists against perceived Maori challenges to British sovereignty and to settler safety. And, finally, central government campaigns in the 1870s and 1880s, devised by the entrepreneurial Premier Julius Vogel, attracted immigrants at a rate that swamped all previous experience and campaigns.
The net result was that, between 1831 and 1881, the Pakeha population of New Zealand had increased by 50,000 per cent. Of the 400,000 immigrants who came to the country, 300,000 remained there, while the number of births over the same period accounted for another 250,000 people. The character of New Zealand was changed for ever. Those who had to relinquish ground, literally and metaphorically, for this influx of ‘foreign’ people were the first New Zealanders, the indigenous Maori. And, in relinquishing ground, they would lose it.
Chapter 13
Tangata Whenua Respond
Most Maori had welcomed European settlers when they first encountered them. Because of tribal competitiveness, rangatira saw Pakeha as a means of consolidating local power: they would be a potential source of muskets, trade goods and useful advice, intermediaries in negotiations with other Pakeha, and enlarge the mana of the sponsoring chief, kainga and hapu. Many chiefs spoke with pride of ‘their’ Pakeha. As John Owens has pointed out, the achievements of the pre-1840 era of Maori–Pakeha co-operation – in economic development, race relations and social controls – had been considerable. It is likely that Maori who signed the Treaty of Waitangi expected these conditions to continue, ‘with emphasis on the small-scale community and the pressures of unwritten custom rather than the controls and legislation of [a] central government. Divisions, based … on race, class and sect would have had little meaning.’
The large-scale immigration beginning in the 1840s brought a shift in perspective, however. The Ati Awa chief Te Wharepouri told William Wakefield, brother of Edward Gibbon, that he had participated in the sale of land to the New Zealand Company expecting about ten Pakeha to settle around Port Nicholson, one for each pa. When he saw the more than 1000 settlers who stepped off the company’s first fleet of immigrant ships, he had panicked. The spectacle would have seemed like an invasion of extraterrestrials. It was beyond anything that Wharepouri had imagined.
Previous European settlement had taken place on Maori terms, with Maori in control of the process. Slowly, in the 1840s, Maori close to European coastal settlements began to realise the extent to which their identity and customs might be swallowed up by this mighty tide of strangers. Maori oratory of those years began to employ proverbs about the power of saltwater to contaminate freshwater (a nice metaphor, this, because Pakeha flesh was reputed to taste more salty than Maori), and the propensity of the kahawai for devouring the mullet.
It was from this time too that Maori began to display an increasing vulnerability to European-introduced diseases such as influenza and measles. As each new boatload of immigrants arrived, there was the possibility that they carried with them pathogens from the most recent strains of diseases prevalent in Britain or Europe. As Ian Pool notes, Maori were still ‘only building up their basic immune stocks. From every [modern] perspective their living conditions were appalling: overcrowded, damp, unhygienic dwellings; and limited access to food resources [if] their land had been … alienated through purchases … This should have been a period of calm and partnership, in which Maori would be protected by the Crown from the loss of all their resources, from social evils and from exploitation … [Instead it] resulted … in a more rapid decline in Maori numbers than had occurred prior to the Treaty … Maori almost failed to survive [the next] half century …’
Further, there was considerable dissatisfaction among Maori over the ways in which major land dealings were being conducted by some of the agents of colonisation, such as the Wakefield brothers. The first New Zealand Company land purchases in Wellington were carried out through the whaler Dicky Barrett, whose ‘pidgin Maori’ may not have been up to the task. Maori land was, of course, owned communally. On some occasions only one faction of the owners, whose claims might have been doubtful, were dealt with; others, less malleable, were bypassed. Sometimes the quantities of goods passed over in exchange were subsequently found to be inadequate. In the case of government agents, promises to set aside native reserves, even schools or hospitals in some areas, were not kept.
The most fertile seed for conflict in all this was mutual misunderstanding over what constituted land ownership. For European buyers it was a signed deed. For Maori it was a variety of factors, including inherited rights, rights obtained by conquest, and rights of occupation and use. Maori sometimes refused to recognise the validity of sales to Europeans which had been conducted with other Maori who were not authorised to act on behalf of the hapu or tribe as a whole, which were the result of trickery, or which had not resulted in subsequent occupation and settlement.
Almost all the mistakes that could have been made were made by the New Zealand Company land-purchasing agents in Wellington, Nelson and Wanganui. The Land Claims Commissioner appointed to investigate these purchases, William Spain, ruled that the company had to pay compensation to the Maori owners who had been inadequately remunerated at the time the land was sold. Spain was assisted by George Clarke junior, the Governor’s Sub-Protector of Aborigines, who was especially critical of the way in which the company had carried out those dealings and submitted that it ought to pay an additional
£1500 for the Wellington purchases, a demand that William Wakefield ignored. Wellington Maori did not want additional remuneration. Their argument[1] was that large parts of the land claimed by the company had never in fact been sold.
It was a fraudulent land deal which lay behind the first armed clash between Maori and Pakeha after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the only one ever to take place in the South Island. The major player, again, was the New Zealand Company. Captain Arthur Wakefield held a false deed to land in the Wairau Valley on the southern side of Cook Strait (he had bought it from the widow of a whaler who claimed in turn to have bought the land from Te Rauparaha of Ngati Toa). When a group of Nelson settlers, including Wakefield, attempted to clear Maori off the land in June 1843, fighting broke out and 30 Europeans were killed, along with about half a dozen Maori. The dead included Arthur Wakefield, who was executed by the Ngati Toa chief Te Rangihaeata in return for the death of his wife Te Rongo, who was also Te Rauparaha’s daughter.
The Governor, Robert FitzRoy, who had succeeded Hobson after the latter died of a stroke in September 1842, held that the greater blame for the ‘massacre’, as the Nelson settlers called it, lay with the settlers themselves, because the land in question belonged to Ngati Toa. The anger and contempt of Wellington colonists at this verdict turned to fear when Te Rauparaha and his nephew Te Rangihaeata moved back to the northern side of Cook Strait to build and occupy a new pa at Plimmerton. Over the next three years these chiefs and their supporters were drawn into land disputes in the adjacent Hutt Valley.
Te Rangihaeata took the view that the sale of the Hutt Valley by Te Ati Awa to the New Zealand Company was invalid because Ati Awa had settled the district under the mana of their allies Ngati Toa, and Ngati Toa had not been consulted about the sale nor paid anything from the proceeds. There were other complications too. Ngati Rangatahi from Whanganui and Ngati Tama had also been given cultivation rights there by Ngati Toa in recompense for their contributions to earlier wars, but they also had been paid nothing to vacate the district. Te Rangihaeata encouraged these tribes to resist Pakeha incursions into the Hutt Valley, even after he had been paid his long-delayed compensation for the sale. There were armed clashes at Taita and Boulcott’s farm in 1846, supported by Rangihaeata’s forces.
Ngati Toa built a new pa at Pauatahanui on the Porirua estuary, and the new Governor, Captain George Grey (soon to be knighted), moved troops into the area and built a naval fort at the mouth of the harbour. He arrested Te Rauparaha at Taupo Pa at Plimmerton, and then moved troops in to attack Rangihaeata’s position. Before they arrived, Rangihaeata had moved his forces up the Horokiri Valley and there, at what is now called Battle Hill, in August 1846 they stopped the advance of the government troops, with casualties on both sides. Rangihaeata was eventually allowed to retreat to the Horowhenua district, where he was left unmolested and died during a measles epidemic nine years later. Te Rauparaha, meanwhile, had been held by Grey without charge for 10 months and then returned to his people at Otaki, where it became apparent that, because of his arrest, his mana and therefore his influence had waned. Like Te Rangihaeata, he began to attend church services but declined to convert to Christianity. He died in 1849 and was buried first near the Anglican church Rangiatea, and then on Kapiti Island, his old stronghold.
While tension had been mounting in Wellington in 1844, more serious and extensive conflict had broken out in the far north. Hone Heke of Ngapuhi, the first chief to sign the Treaty of Waitangi, had become disenchanted with the effects of European colonisation. He lamented the shift of the capital from Kororareka to Auckland, which had reduced the importance of the Bay of Islands, removed many of its former economic benefits and, in conjunction with the introduction of customs duties and shipping levies, contributed to a depression. Heke was further incensed by a government ban on the felling of kauri trees and by the hanging of Maketu, son of the Ngapuhi chief Ruhi, for the murder of a European family. To Heke, it seemed that the rangatiratanga promised to the chiefs in the Treaty had been usurped, and he decided to strike at British authority.
On 8 July 1844, Te Haratua, Heke’s second-in-command, cut down the flagstaff at Kororareka. This had originally been a gift to the district from Heke, for the purpose of flying a Maori flag. Instead, it had been used by British forces to fly the Union Jack. Worried about the implications of this gesture, Governor FitzRoy requested additional troops from New South Wales but took no other immediate action. On 10 January the following year Heke cut down the replacement flagpole, and another on 19 January. FitzRoy then offered a reward for Heke’s capture and established a military presence in Kororareka. Meanwhile Heke gained the support of his fellow Treaty-signatory Kawiti of Ngati Hine and together they attacked Kororareka on 10 March 1845. After one day’s fighting – 600 Maori against 250 armed defenders – the Maori forces withdrew, leaving 20 Europeans dead and having lost somewhat more of their own fighters. In their wake a powder magazine exploded and set fire to much of the town. Maori and Pakeha joined in subsequent looting.
Two wars were waged in the months that followed, sometimes separately and sometimes simultaneously. Tamati Waka Nene and most Hokianga Ngapuhi chiefs attacked Heke and his allies in a revival of earlier tribal conflict. Then these kupapa or ‘friendly’ Maori (meaning friendly to the Crown) joined the imperial forces for joint action on Heke’s and Kawiti’s defended positions. The end came ten months later when Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Despard’s troops breached Kawiti’s pa at Ruapekapeka on a Sunday, after it had been deserted by the defenders.
James Belich, in his major revisionist analysis of the New Zealand Wars, argues that – in every sense that mattered – Heke and Kawiti won the Northern War. They were never defeated in any of its set-piece battles against imperial troops at Puketutu, Ohaeawai and Ruapekapeka (although Hokianga Ngapuhi succeeded in taking Heke’s pa at Te Ahuahu). Few of their men were killed (about 60, to the imperial forces’ 300). And Maori had succeeded in tying up the British forces in exactly the way they had sought to: ‘By building new pa in isolated locations, the Maori were able to channel military operations into economically unimportant areas. A British force attacking a new pa could not simultaneously attack Maori base areas.’
When Grey succeeded FitzRoy as Governor, Heke sent him a similar message to those he had addressed to his predecessor: ‘God made this country for us. It cannot be sliced … Do you return to your own country, which was made by God for you. God made this land for us; it is not for any stranger or foreign nation to meddle with this sacred country.’ Grey regarded this as provocative rather than conciliatory, and pressed on with plans to attack Ruapekapeka – though Heke, by then seriously injured, took no part in that battle.
Afterwards, Kawiti and Heke each made their peace with Grey. And Grey declined to seek retribution or confiscation, an implied recognition, perhaps, that neither chief had been defeated and that imperial forces would have found it difficult to maintain hostilities. Two years later Heke and Grey met at the Waimate North mission house and Heke handed over his greenstone mere to the Governor: ‘not so much as a mark of respect and an emblem of peace,’ Freda Kawharu has written, ‘but as a token of acceptance of Grey’s right to be in New Zealand and of Heke’s expectation that the Queen’s representative would honour the treaty. Symbolically, in Heke’s eyes, by accepting the gift Grey was also accepting the responsibility of trusteeship.’
Two years later Heke was dead from tuberculosis, and Kawiti, who was older, survived him by only four years. He too left a message about his expectations for the future of his country and the role of the Treaty of Waitangi as a mediating influence between Maori and Pakeha. Wait, he told his people, ‘until the sandfly nips the pages of the book [the Treaty]; then you will rise and oppose’. His descendants took this as an injunction to act when the promises of the Treaty were not kept.
The Northern War had several important consequences. It was followed by thirteen years of peace nationally, apart from some small-scale
tribal skirmishes. Imperial troops developed a far higher regard for Maori skills in warfare than they had held previously. In particular, admiration was expressed for the ingenuity of the fortifications at Ohaeawai and Ruapekapeka. In the space of around 30 years Maori had developed their pa from strongholds designed to withstand physical attack with hand-to-hand weapons to those designed to withstand attack by muskets, then cannon, and finally to enable virtual trench warfare. Major Mould of the Royal Engineers made detailed reports on the Maori rifle pits and trenches. The effect of those reports was seen in the use of trench warfare in the Crimea in 1853, and, of course, even more so in World War I, where the machine-gun made underground defences a necessity.
The decade that followed the Northern War was, on the surface, one of peaceful interaction between Maori and Europeans. The modes of interaction, of course, differed in different parts of the country. Some Maori, such as Tuhoe in the Urewera and Ngati Maniapoto in what was soon to be called the King Country, saw virtually no Europeans apart from itinerant missionaries and traders. There is evidence, though, that these tribes and others were beginning to be affected by a high rate of viral and bacterial diseases and that this factor, along with decreasing rates of fertility, was contributing to a further fall in the national Maori population.
The Waikato and Hauraki tribes, at first under missionary direction, were expanding crop production and supplying virtually the whole of Auckland’s flour and vegetable requirements. Some Tainui tribes began to export produce to Australia at this time, out of the ports of Auckland and Kawhia. Chatham Islands Maori too, helped by the fact that no one had, as yet, compelled them to release their Moriori slaves, were exporting potatoes to the United States (one vessel alone in 1850 bought 225 tonnes of potatoes for California, paid for in calico and printed fabrics). Missionaries were expressing the hope that, provided Maori eventually developed immunity to European diseases, the race had a bright future as an entrepreneurial people who could both support themselves agriculturally and earn a surplus to the benefit of cultural and community activities.