Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  In Sydney in 1798 Marsden met members from the London Missionary Society station on Tahiti and began to devote a part of his considerable energies to aiding the directors of the Society with their endeavours in the Pacific Islands. He also met Māori from New Zealand and these contacts in time led to his petition for the Church Missionary Society – affiliated with the Anglican Church – to support a mission among Māori. Marsden turned his attention to New Zealand at least partly because of his almost complete failure to proselytise successfully among the Aboriginal people of Port Jackson and surrounds. They were recalcitrant in the extreme and matters were not helped by the inability of anyone, anywhere in Australia, to translate the Bible into an indigenous language. Although the Lutherans managed to put parts of it into Central Desert languages in the late nineteenth century, there was not to be a full translation until 2005.

  When Marsden decided to attempt conversion of Māori he was consciously abandoning the uncivilisable Sons of Ham – he said they ate snakes – in favour of the more tractable Sons of Shem. For he believed Māori, and by extension all Polynesians, were Semitic people and perhaps even representative of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Māori were not averse to evangelisation, though subsequent events suggest they were at least as interested in the material advantages of having missionaries among them as they were in the spiritual benefits that were alleged to accrue. This dichotomy, if it is not in fact a contradiction, can be explored with reference to one of the earliest and most enthusiastic sponsors of Marsden’s mission to New Zealand.

  RUATARA WAS A MEMBER of the chiefly line of the Hikutū hapū of the Ngāpuhi tribe, a nephew of Hongi Hika and of Te Pahi. Te Pahi had been to Sydney in 1805 and met Marsden there; Hongi Hika would himself later go to Port Jackson and then to England to meet King George IV; and return with a vast store of muskets, perhaps 500 in all, which he may have purchased in England or, as most authorities assert, in Sydney in exchange for gifts he had been given by the king. In fact Ruatara had sailed up the Thames before his more famous relative, although without meeting the then king, George III. He is a crucial precursor to Marsden’s mission to New Zealand and, more generally, Māori adoption of European methods of farming and warfare.

  Ruatara’s history of voyaging, while extraordinary, was not unusual in the nineteenth-century Pacific. Aged about nineteen, with two companions he shipped in 1805 as a seaman in the whaling ship Argo when she put into the Bay of Islands for fresh supplies and water, and spent five months aboard hunting whales in the southern ocean. He was put ashore without pay or any other reward at Port Jackson and out of necessity shipped again aboard another whaler, the Albion, under a Captain Richardson, who treated him rather better. After a further six months cruising for whales around coastal New Zealand waters Ruatara returned to his people at Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands.

  He next joined a sealer, the Santa Anna, en route for the Bounty Islands southeast of the South Island of New Zealand. With eighteen others he went ashore on the uninhabited islands while the ship made its way back to New Zealand for supplies: whale oil, pork and potatoes. But the Santa Anna ran into a violent storm, lost most of her canvas and was blown far out into the Pacific Ocean; it was some time before she eventually made the Bay of Islands to carry out repairs. Meanwhile Ruatara and his fellows were near starving, living on seal meat and seabird eggs, without fresh water to drink. Three had died by the time the Santa Anna came back to fetch over 8000 sealskin pelts they had collected. The Santa Anna was returning to England and Ruatara decided to go with her, intending to visit King George III at his house. He was just twenty-two years old and his decision probably had as much to do with a desire to advance his people as it did to see more of the world.

  The ship sailed via Norfolk Island and docked in the River Thames in July 1809; but it was not a happy voyage for Ruatara, who alleged he was beaten by sailors when he was ill and couldn’t work. In London he asked the captain to take him, as promised, to see King George but the captain responded with ridicule: no one could visit the king without an invitation or go to his house unannounced. Ruatara was not even allowed to leave the ship. He spent the fifteen days it took to unload the Santa Anna as a virtual prisoner and was then informed he was to go back to New South Wales on the convict ship Ann, chartered by the British Government and now lying at Gravesend ready to put to sea. His request for his wages was refused: he was told that two muskets had been left at Port Jackson as payment for his services. He could collect them there.

  Samuel Marsden was also in London in 1809, in part to persuade his superiors in the Church Missionary Society of the desirability of establishing a New Zealand mission. He too was returning to Sydney aboard the Ann. Some days out from Gravesend, the story goes, Marsden noticed a dark-skinned sailor in the fo’c’sle, wrapped in an old great-coat, with a violent cough and spitting blood. Marsden adopted Ruatara, protected him and nursed him back to health. In Sydney he took him to stay at his farm at Parramatta until he was completely recovered. Here Ruatara became interested in European methods of farming and cropping, learning how to grow wheat and corn. He also studied smithying and carpentry, spinning and weaving, brick-making and building houses and in return taught Marsden basic Māori language. After eight months at Parramatta he asked to go back to his people at Rangihoua with the aim of introducing wheat cultivation and other things that he had learned – including musketry – among them.

  Marsden now had permission for his New Zealand mission but hesitated because of the recent massacre of the crew and passengers of the ship Boyd at Whangaroa, north of the Bay of Islands. The Boyd was a convict transport returning to England; she was carrying a cargo of sealskins home and stopped in New Zealand to take on kauri spars to be sold at the Cape of Good Hope. She too had a young aristocratic Māori aboard; he too alleged that he had been badly treated: flogged and humiliated, his wages unpaid and his property confiscated. The Boyd massacre may have been utu, revenge, for these insults. Or it may have been an act of Māori piracy that went badly wrong. The ship’s magazine exploded as she was being taken; all but four of the seventy people aboard were killed. Te Pahi, Marsden’s initial contact at the Bay of Islands, was implicated in the deaths and himself died soon after, following a revenge attack by European whalers. In some respects Ruatara became his replacement.

  He sailed for New Zealand in October 1810 on the Frederick, whose captain stole the tools and seed wheat Ruatara had been given at Parramatta then abandoned him on Norfolk Island. It was the Ann that rescued him from destitution and returned him to Sydney, where he remained with Marsden until late 1811 or early 1812, when he at last returned home bringing with him a large quantity of wheat – to the incomprehension of his people, who did not know what this new crop could be. Subsequently Thomas Kendall, sent by Marsden to begin organising the mission station, brought the hand-operated flour mill that finally convinced Ruatara’s fellow chiefs of the value of wheat and re-established his mana. By 1814 he had laid the foundations of a flourishing industry.

  Ruatara, Hongi Hika and a third chief, Korokoro, accompanied Kendall back to Sydney to make further arrangements for Marsden’s proposed mission station; Ruatara continued his study of European agricultural techniques and, on his final return to Rangihoua, took with him as gifts from Governor Macquarie a mare, a cow, other livestock and a military uniform. He also had a number of firearms, both muskets and pistols, some of which Marsden may have supplied him with. The missionary would later make the extraordinary claim that a musket has a greater tendency to give a civil feeling to a native mind than the use of a savage weapon. The land at Rangihoua that Ruatara gave Marsden for his mission was bare and hilly, inappropriate for agriculture: this was probably a deliberate stratagem to keep the mission dependent on Māori for food. Ruatara would grow wheat after the European fashion; but Europeans would have to come to him for their flour. Marsden himself was no stranger to such schemes, since he seems to have ensured the New Zealand mission also remained dependent upon his New
South Wales-based bounty.

  Ruatara was present with Marsden at the first Christian service in New Zealand on Christmas Day 1814, for which half an acre of land was fenced, a flag pole erected, a pulpit and a reading stand built. It was a Sunday. At 10 o’clock in the morning the English colours were raised as Marsden came ashore to be greeted by Ruatara, Korokoro and Hongi, all dressed in regimental uniforms given them by the governor of New South Wales. Each wore a ceremonial sword and carried a switch in his hand. The Europeans of the town, men, women and children in their Sunday best, gathered in a half circle in the enclosure. There was complete silence as Marsden rose up and began the service by singing the Old Hundredth Psalm – Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands / Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing. Māori stood up and sat down at the direction of Korokoro’s switch; or they were chastised by him for inappropriate behaviour. Marsden took as his text Luke 2:10 – Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy.

  Māori told Ruatara they enjoyed the service but didn’t understand a word that Marsden had said. Ruatara said he would explain the meaning of the sermon later; one suggestion is that he told them not to worry because the fat little goose – Marsden – had iron eggs and needed a safe nest to lay them in. Within three months, worn out at the age of twenty-seven, Ruatara was dead. His wife, who had earlier refused the gift of a red dress from her husband, followed him into death. Ruatara’s place in New Zealand history has perhaps, like Marsden’s, been sentimentalised: with him, it is said, died the first attempt at a peaceable, mutually respectful and advantageous colonisation of New Zealand. Guns not wheat would dominate the next decades.

  THE HOARY LEGEND of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is based upon events narrated in various books of the Old Testament. The Assyrian Empire under Shalmaneser V, and then Sargon II, in the eighth century BCE destroyed both the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and took the people into exile in Babylon. Of the twelve, perhaps thirteen, tribes (they are probably better seen as families, descended either from sons of Jacob or from Joseph by his Egyptian wife, Asenath), only three returned to the Promised Land and from these three, so it is said, Jewish people of today are descended. They were the tribes of Judah, Simeon and Benjamin, along with remnants of the priestly caste of the tribe of Levi. The others disappeared into the east and were lost in the desert lands beyond – perhaps where eastern Iran or Afghanistan is today. In some accounts they were driven across a great river, called Sambation, whose foaming waters rose up high into the sky to make a wall of fire and smoke that was impossible to pass through except on the Sabbath.

  Speculation as to the whereabouts of the Lost Tribes is vast and ancient and bewilderingly complex. They have been located all over the world – in Africa, in Japan, in the Americas. More persuasive, perhaps, is their identification with the Kurds or the Pashtun of Afghanistan. A persistent tradition, initiated by the Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century, identifies Native American peoples with the Lost Tribes and this notion, absurd as it sounds, has been treated seriously by some scholars; it is a probable basis for the Book of Mormon’s equally bizarre genealogy of Polynesians as descendants of Native Americans, specifically Lamanites, a branch of the original Semitic settlers of pre-Columbian America cursed by God with dark skin. Representatives of the Lamanites are said by Mormons to have landed in Hawai‘i in 58 BCE.

  Marsden’s case for the Semitic Maori, one historian has written, was based mainly on biblical precedents. He sought and found parallels between Māori customs and those of the Jews of the Old Testament and speculated that cannibalism might somehow be related to holy communion as preached by Jesus Christ: He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him. Marsden, who had a sharp eye for commercial opportunities, appreciated that Māori too were born traders and attributed this characteristic as well to their Semitic origins. He was not alone in this belief. One of his companions aboard the brig Active on that first missionary voyage to the Bay of Islands in 1814, J. L. Nicholas, thought Māori were descended from a people who were familiar with Mosaic law, had spent time in India on their way into the Pacific and had along the way degenerated from civilisation to barbarism. He adduces a Māori tradition of creation of woman from the rib of a man, and the Māori habit of sprinkling water on babies before naming them, as survivals of biblical customs. Nicholas, an iron founder whose book Narrative of Voyage to New Zealand was published in London in 1817, believed Polynesians came into the Pacific through the Malay archipelago and cited a people he called the Batta – most likely the Battak of central north Sumatra – as close relatives of Māori.

  Marsden, Nicholas and others began a quasi-scholarly tradition of the Semitic Māori that found its culmination in the work of Anglican missionary Richard Taylor who, in his 1855 book Te Ika a Maui, says Māori are one of the lost tribes of Israel, which … having abandoned the true God, and cast aside his word, fell step by step in the scale of civilization … became nomadic wanderers on the steppes of Asia … they finally reached New Zealand, and (have) there fallen to their lowest state of degradation … By 1865, during a bloody phase in the land wars, he could assert that Māori now stand apart as the rebellious children of Israel with their unhallowed censers ready for destruction. It was an unintended consequence of these missionary speculations about Polynesian origins that some Māori began themselves to identify with the Jews and in particular with the Jewish exile from the Promised Land and the concomitant covenant that God would return to them the land to which they belonged.

  Translation of Christian scriptures into Māori language began with Marsden’s original mission in 1814. The Ngāpuhi chief Hongi Hika, in England in 1820 with missionary Thomas Kendall, helped Professor Samuel Lee of Cambridge University compile A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of New Zealand, the book that established an orthography and a system of pronunciation for the language; by 1820 there was also a Māori version of the Lord’s Prayer. A small volume containing the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, the story of the Creation from Genesis and the first chapter of the Gospel of St John was printed in Sydney in 1827, running into several editions. Ten years later the entirety of the New Testament had been translated and printed by William Colenso at Paihia. Work continued over the next twenty years on the Old Testament, which was completed by 1858. The first full Bible in Māori was printed in 1868 by the British and Foreign Bible Society, the evangelical arm of Protestant Christianity, in London.

  Coincident with the Word was the emergence of prophetic movements, to some degree Christianised, among Māori. It has been estimated that there were as many as fifty of these movements in New Zealand during the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, from the Te Nakahi cult of Papahurihia, who was active in the region between the Hokianga Harbour and the Bay of Islands in the 1830s, to that of the Māngai or Mouthpiece, Wiremu Rātana, on the Whanganui in the 1920s. Papahurihia, who later renamed himself Te Atua Wera, the fiery god, identified Māori with the Jewish people and adopted the biblical serpent as his channel to the divine. While he must have derived aspects of his beliefs from the early missionaries, even from Marsden himself, he was not a supporter of the Protestant enterprise: they were murderers, who caused many deaths by means of witchcraft.

  Perhaps following the example of the fiery god, the mid- to late nineteenth-century Māori prophets Te Ua Haumēne, Te Kooti Rikirangi and Te Whiti o Rongomai all consciously saw themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, as Tius, Jews, exiled from the Promised Land. The first of these, Te Ua, the founder of Pai Mārire, the Good and Peaceful religion, usually known to contemporary Pākehā as Hau Hau, was given the name Zerubbabel who is in the Bible the leader of the inaugural group of Jews to return from the captivity in Babylon. Horopapera, as it was written in Māori, received his baptismal name from Wesleyan missionary John Whiteley at Kawhia; although from Taranaki, Horopapera was raised from the age of three as a slave among Waikato Māori af
ter he and his mother were captured during tribal wars. He was taught to read and write in his own language, not by missionaries or at mission schools but by Christian Māori. Whiteley had previously been stationed at the Hokianga and it is possible that Māori familiar with Te Atua Wera’s teaching accompanied him south to Kawhia.

  Horopapera made a careful study of the Bible; among his favourite books were the Psalms and the Revelation of St John the Divine; and some of the writings of Pai Mārire that survive are in fact rewritings of scripture that reposition the sacred texts in a contemporary Māori context. The ‘Lament for Tawhiao’, the Māori king who embraced Pai Mārire in 1864, is based upon chapter 49 of Genesis as translated by Robert Maunsell in 1845. Te Ua would sometimes sign his letters with a phrase that translates as a peaceable Jew. Other aspects of his theology reach back into the Polynesian past. Like the ‘Oro cult in Tahiti a century before, Pai Mārire recognised a dual aspect to divinity, of war and of peace respectively. In Pai Mārire this duality was expressed through two gods, Riki and Ruru; there was a time for each. There is an echo here of the occasion of Cook’s death at Kealakekua in Hawai‘i: he had been welcomed as an avatar of Lono, god of peace, but when he returned to fix a broken mast on his ship Resolution, Lono’s time had ended and the war god Ku was ascendant. Pre-contact Māori warfare was seasonal so that crops could be planted and harvested in peace; Horopapera did not deny Riki but strongly promoted Ruru, whom he identified with the Archangel Gabriel, the initiator of his visions.

  These revelations, given him at a village called Te Namu on the southwest coast of Taranaki in 1862, came in the context of an extraordinary event: the grounding of the Royal Mail steamer Lord Worsley along with its sixty passengers and its cargo of coal, planks, kegs of shot, bales of wool and 3000 ounces of gold dust. Among the passengers were three members of the New Zealand House of Representatives, a captain of the Madras infantry with his two Indian servants and a French sister of charity. Te Namu was at that time within the Aukati, the zone of exclusion of Europeans declared by Kingite Māori that survives today in the designation King Country; it was also in the territory of Wiremu Kīngi, not a Kingite, whose opposition to land sales had caused war to break out at Waitara in 1861. Also at Te Namu was Kingite leader Erueti, later known as Te Whiti o Rongomai, who would lead a campaign of peaceful resistance against settler encroachment upon traditional lands and, incidentally, identify his own people at Parihaka as Jews.