SIR JOSEPH BANKS (1743–1820), 1st Baronet, Naturalist and Botanist on Cook’s first voyage
[Tupaia] asked them . . . whether or not they really eat men which he was very loath to believe; they answered in the affirmative saying that they eat the bodies only of those of their enemies who were killed in war.
The boys’ terror was existential in scale. They weren’t simply horrified at the thought that they might be slaughtered and devoured. It was a great deal more than that. To be consumed by their enemies meant their honour – their prestige – would be extinguished.
Tupaia was aghast. Here was one key difference between the Polynesians of the Tahitian archipelago and the Māori of Aotearoa. As the Ra’iatean priest travelled around New Zealand on board the Endeavour, whenever he had the chance he spoke out against the practice of cannibalism, attempting to convince his Māori brethren to cease and desist.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS
I was loath a long time to believe that any human beings could have among them so brutal a custom . . . we have never failed wherever we went ashore and often when we conversed with canoes to ask the question; we have without one exception been answered in the affirmative . . . Tupaia who had never before heard of such a thing takes every occasion to speak ill of [it], exhorting them often to leave it off . . . [T]hey eat none but the bodies of their enemies who are killed in war, all others are buried.
It has been suggested that Tupaia’s reaction may have been motivated, in part at least, by the fact that human sacrifice in the Tahitian archipelago was a privilege of the gods. To partake of human flesh was, according to Tupaia’s belief system, a grave sacrilege.
As for the Europeans on board the Endeavour, they couldn’t credit it. Were these just tall tales, concocted to terrify the foreign arrivals?
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Their worst fears wouldn’t be confirmed until January 1770, in the place that would become Cook’s favourite spot to drop anchor in the whole Pacific: Tōtara-nui, which Cook named Queen Charlotte Sound.
The ship was careened on shore and the crew set to work doing what they did on such occasions – removing barnacles, scrubbing the hull, and recaulking the ship with a sticky mix of oil and tar.
Cook, Banks and Tupaia took off to explore in the ship’s pinnace (a light sailing boat carried on the Endeavour), marvelling at the picturesque vista of heavily forested islands and inlets fringed with golden beaches. Spying a small family group on shore partaking of what seemed to be a beach cook-up, the men approached. Any thought they may have had of joining the feast was quickly put to rest when the three visitors saw a pile of bones sitting on the beach, picked clean but for a few tendons. Cook was in no doubt about what he saw. Amongst the bones was a human forearm. Not quite wanting to believe it, the men sought confirmation from the Māori. Yes, they insisted, a few days prior the arm had been attached to one of their enemies. When he fell, they dismembered him. And, yes, they had eaten the flesh off his bones.
When Cook, Banks and Tupaia returned to the Endeavour and reported what they had seen, it caused an uproar. Many of the sailors were deeply shocked.
The ‘learned gentlemen’ and officers were more philosophical, drawing on Enlightenment thinking in an attempt to rationalise something they had no way of understanding.
JAMES MAGRA (1746?–1806), Corsican/American Midshipman, Cook’s first voyage
Perhaps they thought, like a celebrated philosopher, that it was as well to feed on the bodies of their enemies . . . as to leave them to be devoured by crows. It is however certain that they had no belief of any turpitude in this practice, because they were not ashamed of it; but, on the contrary, when we took up an arm for examination, they imagined us to be desirous of the same kind of food, and with great good nature promised that they would the next day spare a human head ready roasted, if we would come or send to fetch it.
While his men were universally horrified, Cook himself was remarkably sanguine, writing: ‘They eat their enemies slain in battle – this seems to come from custom and not from a savage disposition – this they cannot be charged with.’ As commendable as this open-minded attitude might seem to us today, it would come back to haunt Cook on his third voyage.
As the Endeavour sailed away from Queen Charlotte Sound, an all-new terror had been added to the list of perils on the high seas. As Joseph Banks put it, ‘the almost certainty of being eat [sic] as soon as you come ashore adds not a little to the terrors of shipwreck’.
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The confirmation that the Māori did practise cannibalism shocked the men on board Cook’s ship. But there was another exchange that occurred in Queen Charlotte Sound that would snowball and ultimately have an enormous impact on Māori – and New Zealand – society.
It all started with Tupaia, who asked an old Māori man whether or not they collected – and ate – the heads of their slain enemies. Not the heads, the man told him. But they did eat the brains. To demonstrate, he brought a selection of preserved heads out to the Endeavour. When they first arrived in New Zealand, Cook and his men were intrigued by the elaborate facial tattoos – moko – worn by the Māori. The preserved heads displayed these tattoos and Banks was determined to get his hands on one – all in the name of science, of course. He cajoled and attempted to barter, offering the old man a pair of his white linen undershorts in exchange for one of the heads.
EMERITUS PROFESSOR NGAHUIA TE AWEKOTUKU, Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Waikato Tribes, Academic
The notion of a pair of old white underpants being exchanged for a human head seems really heinous. But those underpants were white linen, and to the Māori they were an interesting shape. No Māori textile could equal white linen. You could put one leg in one side, and the other leg in the other, and they were warm. And you also had something that no one else in the village, or in the community, or even on the island, had ever seen or worn. I don’t want to defend what Banks did, but I do think it’s important to get a sense of the perspective of what was being offered, and what was being received.
The old man was reluctant, but when Banks ‘enforced my threats by showing him a musket’, he handed the booty over. Because who can say no when a loaded gun is shoved in your face?
When Banks returned to England bearing his macabre, tattooed souvenir, he unwittingly kicked off a new fad.
EMERITUS PROFESSOR NGAHUIA TE AWEKOTUKU
From a distance they wouldn’t have actually seen the moko [facial tattoos]. But as they approached they would have realised those white flashing eyes and bright flashing teeth were actually ornamented and surrounded by a swirl of colour – of black lines. Moko can be menacing and fearsome and ugly. But it can also be erotic . . . desirable . . . appealing. There’s a mixed aesthetic. Even today people meet moko Māori, and they don’t know quite where to look. It’s very funny.
Before long, no fashionable home was complete without a preserved and tattooed Māori cranium above the fireplace. The booming trade in toi moko, as they were called in New Zealand, reached its peak in the early 1800s when it’s believed hundreds of preserved Māori heads were exported to Europe. But these relics weren’t stolen – they were traded by Māori who bartered with the heads of their enemies to supply this gruesome demand. This was the crowning insult and ultimate debasement to a defeated adversary, piling shame on their iwi and taking the gloss off their mana.
EMERITUS PROFESSOR NGAHUIA TE AWEKOTUKU
Not all heads were preserved. Only those of the aristocratic, or the revered, or the admired. Certainly the particularly handsome. The moko – the ornamentation of the human face – were made using a technique no other people in the world actually achieved. That is the intense and ridged scarification of the facial skin with very fine and razor-sharp instruments that cause furrows and made the skin ridges. It’s a creative and aesthetic response to what is beneath the skin, which is why each moko is so different and unique. Each individual’s musculature, bone structure and sinews – what’s underneath – brings out the design. Just as no two faces
are the same, no two moko are the same.
The most highly prized heads were those that were embellished with the ornate and masterful tattoos that made such an impression on Cook and the men on the Endeavour as they travelled around New Zealand.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
The marks in general are spirals drawn with great nicety and even elegance . . .. [T]hey resemble the foliage in old . . . convolutions of filigree work, but in these they have such a luxury of forms that of a hundred which at first appeared exactly the same no two were formed alike.
Both men and women were tattooed, although men were given designs that covered much of their face while women were tattooed only on their lips and chin. The traditional Māori method of tattooing is brutal and effective. The design is chiselled into the skin, with ink rubbed into the grooves, creating an effect that looks as if it were carved out of the bearer’s flesh. An elaborate facial tattoo sent a very clear message to the beholder: its bearer had superhuman endurance and a very high pain threshold.
In Māori culture, where the head is the most revered part of the body, facial tattooing enhanced its sanctity. The design was formulated to complement and highlight the bearer’s facial features, and it was also highly formalised.
GORDON TOI, Hokianga, Ngāti Wharara Tribes, Artist and Actor
Tattoos are a map of somebody’s life. That’s why it is so personal. That separates it from the Western tattoo tradition. Māori tattoo is connected to the importance of knowing who you are and where you come from. For us it’s really important. It makes you who you are and if you don’t know that then you’re just lost.
Māori tattoos incorporated information about genealogy and hereditary rank in the most permanent and obvious manner imaginable. Because the ornate Māori tattoos were unique and acted as an anthology of an individual’s family history, a deceased person’s head had the potential to become a deeply significant and treasured object. For that reason, when important chiefs died, their heads were removed and preserved, often by smoking them and then drying them in the sun. The heads could then be displayed and revered, and the deceased chieftain would remain a part of the iwi. If that sounds ghoulish to you, pause for a minute to consider the Catholic Church’s obsession with reliquaries containing body parts from Christian saints.
Head preservation wasn’t reserved for those deemed worthy of veneration. Fallen enemies were also often decapitated and their skulls preserved, although in that instance those toi moko were treated as trophies of war and perched on posts where they became the focus of derision and mockery. This was where the heads that entered the global market came from.
In the early nineteenth century, demand outstripped supply. And so when fallen warriors were unavailable, slaves and even captured children were tattooed and killed, sometimes to order. Because ta moko were only given to Māori who had reached maturity, reports that children’s heads were sold with facial tattoos suggest that at times tattooing occurred in a strictly commercial transaction. The same is true of heads that bore tattoos with iconographic blunders – these weren’t venerable chieftains; they were slaves who had been marked up for sale. But don’t think for a moment that this was customary practice; it only occurred after British colonisation and because the new arrivals had an apparently insatiable appetite for these morbid curios.
EMERITUS PROFESSOR NGAHUIA TE AWEKOTUKU
Today, we tend to romanticise and idealise how Māori were. So often we’re portrayed as being either stolen from, or exploited, or somehow hard done by, or gifted with diseases and despair by Cook and the French. But the truth is, we had agency. We had control of our lives. In the harvesting of heads, we were in control. Māori were conscious of what they were doing, even though now we have taken the more righteous view of the preyed upon. But we were predators too. And that’s important to say.
Once the trade in toi moko was up and running, it didn’t take long for the Māori to realise they could exchange their unwanted heads for something they were very keen to get their hands on: guns.
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When Cook sailed into Iripiri (soon to be renamed ‘Bay of Islands’) on his first voyage, he unwittingly introduced the local Ngāpuhi iwi to the weapons that would wreak such havoc on the local Māori population in the following century. The Endeavour faced off against eight of the intimidating Māori waka. These massive boats required at least seventy-six warriors to paddle them. The aggressive greeting didn’t come as any surprise to Cook, as his reception elsewhere in New Zealand had been almost universally combative.
The six hundred or so ferocious warriors on board the canoes in Iripiri lived in a permanent state of war-readiness. As far as they were concerned, Cook and his men were yet another bunch of enemies planning to attack them. The Māori brandished their weapons but didn’t strike. Then, Cook gave the orders. He commanded his men to fire above the warriors’ heads. It was a lightning-bolt moment for the Māori of the Ngāpuhi iwi. After they retreated, they planned to do whatever was necessary to get their hands on the British weapons, one way or another.
A Maori, holding a gun, Alexander Sinclair, 1842–1853. The trade in muskets destroyed the existing balance of power between Māori tribes, redrawing boundaries established over centuries. Bridgeman Images, BL3291426
To some who first saw the awesome power of the British guns, it was a deeply affecting experience. Te Hōreta – who as an old man gave an account of meeting Cook – remembered the supernatural terror he and his friends felt when they saw the sailors shoot a bird.
TE HŌRETA TE TAHIWHA, Ngāti Whanaunga Tribe, Te Mateawa Hapū
The goblins had walking-sticks which they carried about with them, and when we arrived at the bare dead trees where the shags roost at night . . . the goblins lifted the walking-sticks up and pointed them at the birds . . . thunder was heard to crash and a flash of lightning was seen, and a shag fell from the trees . . . [we] handled the bird, and saw that it was dead. But what had killed it?
But for the warriors in Iripiri, it was a transformative moment.
From the early 1800s when whalers began plying their trade in New Zealand, the Ngāpuhi began to exchange goods that the whalers needed, in order to build an almighty arsenal and settle scores with neighbouring iwi. Trading toi moko was the most effective and lucrative way of securing weaponry; two preserved heads could buy one gun. This started an arms race as the other Māori tribes rushed to accumulate their own weapons. So began the Musket Wars, which spread across New Zealand and decimated the Māori population between 1818 and the early 1830s.
This intertribal warfare made it much easier for Europeans to exploit the turmoil and populate the land, and the conflict was encouraged by the agency of the whalers, who settled in and around Iripiri and ran the arms trade as a lucrative side business.
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Today the Bay of Islands ranks as one of New Zealand’s most delightful locations, which is no small claim in a country that enjoys an embarrassment of picturesque vistas. The Māori had always known this; when Cook arrived, Iripiri was one of the most densely populated areas in Aotearoa, its residents living in and around heavily fortified hilltop refuges, or pahs.
KIHI HOWE-RIRINUI, Ngāpuhi ki Tauranga Moana Tribe, Tour Guide
It still is as beautiful as it was back in those days. Few more honey bees on the land and a few more houses. Before Cook came here, the land was just like the line where the sky meets the sea – that feeling, it was like the feeling of a sunrise . . . the feeling of a sunset . . . just calm and beautiful.
Just twenty-two years after Cook’s visit, the whalers who arrived in what they called the Bay of Islands weren’t interested in its scenic qualities.
Cook could not have known of the eventual outcome of his activities in New Zealand. He might well have strenuously objected to what would occur in his wake. But the fact remains: he was responsible for putting Aotearoa on the map – quite literally. The exceptionally accurate charts he produced provided a maritime pathway for the Western exploit
ation that followed.
The first whaling vessel to visit Kororāreka in the Bay of Islands, or Russell as it became known, was the William and Ann piloted by Captain Eber Bunker, which anchored in Doubtless Bay in 1791 while taking a respite from hunting sperm whales in the Pacific.
The amenity of the area and its capacity to accommodate many large sailing vessels drew whalers to Russell. The men who dedicated their lives to the rather messy and pungent hunt for whale blubber were not, as a rule, drawn from the more reputable corners of society. These were hard men – escaped convicts from across the Tasman Sea, deserters and adventurers amongst them. For a while in the first half of the nineteenth century, Russell had the dubious honour of being the biggest whaling port in the southern hemisphere.
Although it’s impossible to give a precise figure for the number of whaling ships that visited New Zealand in the peak year of 1839, it’s estimated that a hundred and fifty or so American vessels and over fifty belonging to other nations arrived during a twelve-month period.
KIHI HOWE-RIRINUI
Māori got involved in whaling because it was arranged work – just like the arranged marriages. Two of my great-great-grandfathers were a part of that. My first Pākehā ancestor was Captain John Howe, an American captain. He arranged to be with my great-great-great-grandmother, Heni Nuka. She was black as the ace of spades, and he was white with blue eyes with a pointy nose. That arranged marriage worked for my Māori ancestors because we had lost power and we needed to gain some. When they married, it was arranged to keep the land. The white man could look after us and provide all his goodies that he brought with him. When I see you, Sam, do I see a coloniser? Yes and no. Yes, I see a coloniser. But I see colonised when I look at me. When I look at you again, I see a great relationship building, or starting to build. With a conversation, we find a little bit more understanding. And I see someone who is trying to find the other piece of the story. My piece of the story.
The Pacific Page 10