On the evening of December 19, 1835, the crew and passengers of H.M.S. Beagle sighted New Zealand. They were four years into a voyage round the world and still one year away from England. Charles Darwin, then twenty-six years old, served as naturalist on this expedition. The coast of New Zealand was a welcome sight to those on board. The ship’s last stop had been Tahiti—” the island,” as Darwin described it, “which must for ever remain classical to the voyager in the South Sea”—and for weeks they had been out of sight of land. Darwin was weary and rather homesick. He had been charmed by Tahiti but now he was looking forward to the journey’s end.
Entering the Bay of Islands on December 21, Darwin noted some small villages scattered by the water’s edge, three whalers lying at anchor, and now and then a canoe, passing silently from shore to shore. “An air of extreme quietness reigned over the whole district,” he wrote. “Only a single canoe came alongside. This, and the aspect of the whole scene, afforded a remarkable, and not very pleasing contrast, with our joyful and boisterous welcome at Tahiti.” The “hovels of the natives,” he added, were “so diminutive and paltry that they can scarcely be perceived from a distance,” while the scenery was “nowhere beautiful, and only occasionally pretty.” There was, however, one aspect of the country that impressed him. ‘T should think,” he wrote,
that a more warlike race of inhabitants could not be found in any part of the world than the New Zealanders. Their conduct on first seeing a ship, as described by Captain Cook, strongly illustrates this: the act of throwing volleys of stones at so great and novel an object, and their defiance of “Come on shore and we will kill and eat you all,” shows uncommon boldness.
Darwin, I am sorry to say, did not much like the Maoris. He found them dirty and cunning, brutal and uncouth, and thought they compared particularly badly with the elegant Tahitians. The Maoris, while obviously “belonging to the same family of mankind,” were, he wrote, “of a much lower order.” And he was glad, when he finally left New Zealand, to leave behind “the land of cannibalism, murder, and all atrocious crimes.” But he was also an empiricist and a man of science and he was careful to substantiate his views.
On the second day, Darwin went out walking. “I was surprised to find,” he wrote, “that almost every hill which I ascended had been at some former time more or less fortified … These are the Pas, so frequently mentioned by Captain Cook.” Built as a rule upon hills, headlands, and islands and surrounded by high palisades, these defensive fortifications, were among the first things to be noticed by European visitors to New Zealand. When Joseph Banks, who sailed with Cook, caught his first glimpse of the New Zealand coast, he remarked that “on a small peninsula at the NE head we could plainly see a regular paling, pretty high, inclosing the top of a hill.” There was a good deal of discussion as to what this might be. “Most are of the opinion,” wrote Banks, “that it must be either a park of deer or a field of oxen and sheep.” But the fauna of New Zealand is what zoologists call “depauperate,” meaning that, as far as animals are concerned at least, there was almost nothing there.
New Zealand was isolated as a landmass for between eighty to a hundred million years and for all but a thousand of these it was unoccupied by humans. When the ancestors of the Maoris began arriving from the tropical islands to the north, they found a large, mountainous land heavily forested with giant ferns. The most significant creature was an enormous flightless bird, standing well over six feet tall, with a razor-sharp beak and tiny wings. They called it—perhaps jokingly—moa, after the bedraggled common fowls of central Polynesia, and quickly hunted it to extinction. There were other interesting creatures: enormous flightless ducks and swans and an eagle big enough to carry off a Maori child. There was a peculiar reptile called the tuatara, which, scientists now conclude, has been around for two hundred million years. But while the seas were teeming with mammalian life, there were no land mammals whatsoever, excepting, peculiarly, the bat. The first Polynesians brought dogs and rats, but while they ate both, they did not pen either, and the only use they had for palings was to keep each other out.
Many of the pa that Darwin saw were in ruins, but the sheer number of sites (there are thought to be thousands) and the extensive evidence of pits and middens suggested to him that they had been heavily used. This warlike spirit was also evident, he thought, in many of the Maoris’ customs. If a man were struck, even by accident, Darwin asserted, he was honor-bound to return the blow. In Paihia, he learned the story of Hongi Hika, the Ngapuhi chief who traveled to England in search of guns, and how “the love of war was the one and lasting spring of [his] every action.” In Kororareka, he remarked the “disagreeable expression” that tattooing gave the Maori face, and “a twinkling in the eye, which cannot indicate any thing but cunning and ferocity.”
All of this contributed to Darwin’s impression that the Maoris were a dangerous people. But if you look at the way he builds his case, Darwin’s principal claim for the Maoris’ belligerence rests, at least rhetorically, upon a sixty-five-year-old citation in translation of a sentence shouted by a nameless New Zealander across an open expanse of water at Cook. Come on shore and we will kill and eat you all is—like something in a child’s game of telephone—what Darwin said that Cook said the Maoris said at that interesting moment when the Europeans first appeared.
But the story does not stop there. For between Cook’s actual experience in New Zealand and Darwin’s version, there is still another figure: the editor of Cook’s Endeavour journal, John Hawkesworth.
Hawkesworth was the professional man of letters who had been hired by the British Admiralty to edit the journals of a group of explorers (Philip Carteret, Samuel Wallis, and John Byron, in addition to Cook) who had recently returned from voyages to the South Seas. His was the only edition of Cook’s first voyage for most of the nineteenth century; it went through multiple editions and was very widely read, despite the many liberties that Hawkesworth took with the original texts. Hawkesworth’s edition is larded with didactic remarks and philosophical digressions inserted for the edification and moral improvement of his readers. He lengthened the sentences, elevated the diction, added transitional material, and combined the words of different writers, most notably Cook and Banks. To add insult to injury, the entire thing was written in the first person. Cook, who set out on his second voyage before the edition went to press, was reputedly “mortified” when he caught up with it two years later.
What Cook had actually written was that whenever his ship was approached by Maoris who had not yet seen a European vessel, the natives would come out in their largest canoes and, as soon as they were within a stone’s throw, “they would there lay, and call out, Haromai hareuta a patoo age, that is come here, come a shore with us and we will kill you with our patoo patoo’s, and at the same time would shake them at us.”
Patu—Cook’s “patoo patoo”—is both a Maori verb meaning to strike, beat, thrash, subdue, ill-treat, or kill, and a noun describing a short, flat, paddle-shaped club with a sharpened edge made of wood, greenstone, or bone. It was worn stuck in a warrior’s belt and used to deliver the death blow to an opponent, first with an upthrust of the sharpened edge to the temple, neck, or ribs, followed by a downward blow with the butt of the weapon upon the enemy’s head. Banks described a “patoo patoo” he examined as weighing “not less than 4 or 5 pounds” and “certainly well contrived for splitting skulls,” while an early French visitor called it a “casse-tête,” literally a “head-breaker,” “parce qu’ils n’en font pas d’autre usage,” because there was no other use for it.
The Maori phrase is phonetically incorrect as reported—Cook’s ear for languages was not the best—and over the years several variants have been proposed. But there is little disagreement as to what it means. “In peace or war,” writes the anthropologist Anne Salmond, “strangers were greeted with the same ritual forms, because an unknown group might always be planning treachery, and a display of strength could dissuade them. Early observ
ers of these encounters remarked that it was almost impossible to distinguish peaceful overtures from warlike ones.”
“Come here, come ashore, and we will kill you” is clearly a challenge thrown out at the meeting of two groups whose relationship has yet to be established. It serves both to acknowledge the prestige of the visitors and to demonstrate the mana, or authority, of the people on shore. It is not so much a declaration of intent as an opening gambit. The emphasis is less on a particular outcome (the violent death of the visitors on shore) than on the initiation of negotiations. In other words, while the Maoris clearly intended to intimidate their visitors, they did not necessarily plan to kill them. And there is no mention anywhere of anyone eating anyone—which, in Maori terms, would certainly have been insulting.
Cook himself clearly grasped the basic import of the phrase. He noted that these words and gestures were not always followed by further displays of ferocity but often by conversation and trade. Banks, too, recognized their performative aspect. “Whenever they met with us and thought themselves superior they always attacked us, though seldom seeming to mean more than to provoke us to show them what we were able to do.” But Hawkesworth seems to have seen in this passage the makings of an epic encounter between savagery and civilization. “When they were at too great a distance to reach us with a lance or a stone,” he wrote,
they presumed that we had no weapon with which we could reach them; here then the defiance was given, and the words were almost universally the same, Haromai, haromai, harre uta a Patoo-Patoo oge: “Come to us, come on shore, and we will kill you all with our Patoo-Patoos.” While they were uttering these menaces they came gradually nearer and nearer, till they were close along side; talking at intervals in a peaceable strain, and answering any questions that we asked them; and at intervals renewing their defiance and threats, till being encouraged by our apparent timidity, they began their war-song and dance, as a prelude to an attack, which always followed, and was sometimes continued till it became absolutely necessary to repress them by firing some small shot; and sometimes ended after throwing a few stones on board, as if content with having offered us an insult which we did not dare to revenge.
The effect of Hawkesworth’s alterations is to recast the episode as a melodrama, heightening the tension of the standoff (“here then the defiance was given”) and accentuating the Maori threat (“uttering these menaces they came gradually nearer and nearer”), while simultaneously softening and legitimizing the British response (“till it became absolutely necessary to repress them by firing some small shot”). It was Hawkesworth, argues W. H. Pearson, who gave us “the prototype of that hero of Victorian boy’s sea fiction, the magnanimous British commander.” But he also, as if to accentuate the contrast, painted the Maoris as arrant cowards. They declare themselves from a safe distance, presuming “that we had no weapon with which we could reach them”; they hesitate to launch an attack until they are “encouraged by our apparent timidity”; and they retreat after a few vain and ineffectual gestures, “as if content with having offered us an insult which we did not dare to revenge.” So that, by the time Hawkesworth is done with them, the Maoris scarcely resemble the bold and enigmatic people described by Cook.
Of course, there was no way for Darwin to make this comparison. But what is interesting is the way in which he, too, modified the story. Darwin drops the reference to the patu but adds a suggestion of cannibalism that seems to be entirely his own. This is not to say that the suggestion that the Maoris might have eaten their enemies was a wild or improbable idea; on the contrary, it was well known in Darwin’s day that cannibalism was a traditional Maori practice. Cook and Banks are perfectly clear on the point, as is Hawkesworth, who, not surprisingly, found the subject fascinating.
It is perhaps to Hawkesworth’s account of Maori cannibalism that one should look for insight into Darwin’s thinking. Since the Maoris depended upon fish as their principal source of food, they must live in constant danger of starvation. This would account not only for their custom of fortifying their villages against marauders, but for “the horrid practice of eating those who are killed in battle.” But, although necessity might press a man to eat his neighbor, Hawkesworth argued, “The mischief does by no means end [there] … after the practice has been once begun on one side by hunger, it will naturally be adopted on the other by revenge.” Instituted in self-defense, the practice of eating human flesh eventually becomes a habit, which leads eventually to general moral erosion. “There is the strongest reason to believe,” he wrote,
that those who have been so accustomed to prepare a human body for a meal, that they can with as little feeling cut up a dead man, as our cook-maids divide a dead rabbit for a fricassee, would feel as little horror in committing a murder as in picking a pocket… so that men, under these circumstances, would be made murderers by the slight temptations that now make them thieves.
The Maoris are, thus, to be feared and mistrusted not because they are instinctively murderous but because they have lost the instinct that sanctifies human life. They are not immoral (which is remediable), but amoral (which is not).
For Cook, Banks, Hawkesworth, and Darwin, cannibalism was a profoundly difficult subject and they twisted themselves into knots whenever they tried to explain it. Today, the generally accepted view is that cannibalism among the Maoris was a form of mastery and a means of degradation, a way of turning something sacred into something base. As such, it was a kind of conquest, not unlike capture, enslavement, or death. But the point is not so much what cannibalism meant from the Maori point of view, as how the idea of it was used to enhance a particular image among Europeans. Darwin’s claim that the Maoris threatened not just to kill but to eat anyone who arrived unbidden was part of a story that could be traced right through to the article I had found in my father’s desk.
When Darwin arrived in 1835 things in New Zealand were already quite different from the way they had been in the days of Cook. There had been shipping and trade in the Bay of Islands for nearly three decades and missionaries in residence for more than twenty years. In the previous decade, the bay had become a major provisioning stop for the growing South Seas whaling fleet and an active center for trade in timber and flax. There were something like five hundred Europeans living there permanently, including an American consul, a British resident, a doctor, merchants and tradesmen of various descriptions, and an ever-shifting crowd of drifters, deadbeats, and deserters.
But there were fewer Maoris. It is hard to say exactly how many fewer, but the suggestion of native depopulation in Darwin’s journal probably reflects the combined effect of contagious disease and a deadly explosion of intertribal war, both of which were direct consequences of contact with Europeans. It was a melancholy period for the Maoris, these years leading up to annexation, and it would get worse before it got better. It is no wonder, really, that Darwin found New Zealand grim; a lot of Maoris in the 1830s probably felt the same way.
What is worth noting, however, is the tendency on the part of European chroniclers to locate this grimness in the Maoris themselves, as an essential component of their character, rather than to see it for what it was—the fallout of contact with Europeans. For, while there can be little doubt that the Maoris were a bellicose people, so, quite obviously, were the people who had suddenly materialized at their door. As the early colonialist Frederick Maning, who wrote under the pseudonym “A Pakeha Maori,” put it wittily in the 1860s:
If ever there should land on this shore a people who wear red garments, who do not work, who neither buy nor sell, and who always have arms in their hands, then be aware that these are a people called soldiers, a dangerous people whose only occupation is war.
9
Smoked Heads
In the Room that I called my study in the house down by the beach there were three pieces of furniture: an office chair scavenged from the university, a desk that Seven had made from a piece of plywood, and a two-drawer filing cabinet. At the very front of the
top drawer of this cabinet was a thick file marked “Illustrations” that contained a number of photographs that I used in my work. There was one showing the butt of a rifle that had been carved in the Maori style and another depicting an array of Maori weapons. There were several pictures of Maori men, reproductions, for the most part, of nineteenth-century paintings, in which the artist had carefully picked out the tattoos, some landscapes and seascapes, and several photos of groups of people posed in that stiff, old-fashioned way. There was one picture, however, that I kept carefully wrapped, both because I didn’t want any harm to come to it and because the subject was, well, difficult.
It was a picture of General Horatio Gordon Robley seated on a cloth-draped bench in front of a wall mounted with thirty-four Maori heads. The photo had no date but was probably taken when Robley was in his midfifties, about 1895. What remained of his hair had been combed carefully across the dome of his head, his eyebrows and mustache were slightly grizzled. His dress and posture were casual but correct; he wore a collar and tie and some kind of ornament in the buttonhole of his lapel. He was sitting, legs crossed, one hand slipped into a trouser pocket, his jacket open below the top button, a watch chain visible across his vest. In his other hand he held a wooden weapon, a short, fiddle-shaped Maori club called a wahaika, which lay casually across his lap. He was posed front-on to the camera, head turned slightly to one side, gazing into the middle distance with an expression that was difficult to read.
About half an inch to the left of Robley’s right eye, which due to some trick of the camera gleamed slightly, was the empty eye socket of a preserved Maori head, a particularly striking Maori head with a tousled mass of hair, broad cheekbones, and a square jaw. It was, in its way, a handsome face. It was clearly the head of a young man and there was something tender about it and ghoulish at the same time. Above, below, and on either side were more heads ranged in rough, uneven rows: grim, black, disembodied objects with hanks of hair and greenstone ornaments hanging from their ears. Their skin was dark and shiny like leather, on some you could just make out the moko, or tattoo. Their eyelids were sewn shut—except for one whose glass eyes gave it a mournful cast—but their lips were open, stretched back as far as they could go to reveal perfect sets of clenched white teeth. They looked as if they were snarling or sneering or maybe grimacing in pain, though one might almost have been smirking. Samuel Marsden, the missionary, had a name for it: he called it that “ghastly grin.” But it was Robley who captured the essence of the expression. They had, he wrote, a look of “life-in-death which once seen can never be forgotten.”
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 11