Old New Zealand: Being Incidents of Native Customs and Character in the Old Times

by Frederick Edward Maning

The proper line of conduct for the pakeha in the above case made and provided, supposing him to be of a hospitable and obliging disposition, would be to lay hold of some vessel containing about two gallons of water (to allow for waste), and hold it up before the native's face; the native would then stoop down and put his hand, bent into the shape of a funnel or conductor for the water, to his mouth; then, from the height of a foot or so, the pakeha would send a cataract of water into the said funnel, and continue the shower till the native gave a slight upward nod of the head, which meant "enough:" by which time, from the awkwardness of the pakeha, the two gallons of water would be about expended, half, at least, on the top of the native's head; but he would not, however, appear to notice the circumstance, and would appreciate the civility of his pakeha friend. I have often drunk in this way in the old times: asking for a drink of water at a native village, a native would gravely approach with a calabash, and hold it up before me ready to pour forth its contents; when I, of course, cocked my hand and lip in the most knowing manner. If I had laid hold of the calabash and drunk in the ordinary way, as practised by pakehas, I should have at once fallen in the estimation of all by-standers, and been set down as a tutua, a nobody, who had no tapu or mana about him—a mere scrub of a pakeha, whom any one might eat or drink after without the slightest danger of being poisoned.

These things are all changed now; and though I have often, in the good old times, been tabooed in the most diabolical and dignified manner, there are only a few old men left now who, by little unmistakable signs, I perceive consider it would be very uncivil to act in any way which would suppose my tapu to have disappeared before the influx of new-fangled pakeha notions. Indeed I feel myself sometimes as if I had somehow insensibly become partially civilized. What it will all end in, I don't know.

This same personal tapu would even hold its own in some cases against the muru; though not in a sufficiently general manner to seriously affect the operation of that well-enforced law. Its inconveniences were, on the other hand, many, and the expedients resorted to to avoid them were sometimes comical enough. I was once going on an excursion with a number of natives; we had two canoes, and one of them started a little before the other. I was with the canoe which had been left behind, and just as we were setting off it was discovered that amongst twenty stout fellows my companions there was no one who had a back!—as they expressed it: consequently there was no one to carry our provisions into the canoe. All the lads, women, and slaves had gone off in the other canoe,—all those who had backs,—and so there we were left, a very disconsolate lot of rangatira, who could not carry their own provisions into the canoe, and who at the same time could not go without them. The provisions consisted of several heavy baskets of potatoes, some dried sharks, and a large pig baked whole. What was to be done? We were all brought to a full stop, though in a great hurry to go on. We were beginning to think we must give up the expedition altogether, and were very much disappointed accordingly, when a clever fellow—who, had he been bred a lawyer, would have made nothing of driving a mail coach through an act of parliament—set us all to rights in a moment. "I'll tell you what we must do," said he, "we will not carry (pikau) the provisions, we will hiki them." (Hiki is the word in Maori which describes the act of carrying an infant in the arms.) This was a great discovery! A huge handsome fellow seized on the baked pig and dandled it, or hiki'd it, in his arms like an infant; another laid hold of a shark, others took baskets of potatoes, and carrying them in this way deposited them in the canoe. And so, having thus evaded the law, we started on our expedition.

I remember another amusing instance in which the inconvenience arising from the tapu was evaded. I must, however, notice that these instances were only evasions of the ordinary kind of tapu,—what I have called the personal tapu; not the more dangerous and dreadful kind connected with the mystic doings of the tohunga, or that other form of tapu connected with the handling of the dead. Indeed, my companions in the instance I have mentioned, though all rangatira, were young men on whom the personal tapu had not arrived at the fullest perfection: it seemed, indeed, sometimes to sit very lightly on them, and I doubt very much if the play upon the words hiki and pikau would have reconciled any of the elders of the tribe to carrying a roasted pig in their arms; or, if they did do so, I feel quite certain that no amount of argument would have persuaded the younger men to eat it: as for slaves or women, to look at it would almost be dangerous to them.

The other instance of dodging the law was as follows. I was the first pakeha who had ever arrived at a certain populous inland village. The whole of the inhabitants were in a great state of commotion and curiosity, for many of them had never seen a pakeha before. As I advanced, the whole juvenile population ran before me at a safe distance of about a hundred yards, eyeing me, as I perceived, with great terror and distrust. At last I suddenly made a charge at them, rolling my eyes and showing my teeth; and to see the small savages tumbling over one another and running for their lives was something curious: and though my "demonstration" did not continue more than twenty yards, I am sure some of the little villains ran a mile before looking behind to see whether the ferocious monster called a pakeha was gaining on them. They did run! I arrived at the centre of the village and was conducted to a large house or shed, which had been constructed as a place of reception for visitors, and as a general lounging place for all the inhabitants. It was a whare noa, a house to which, from its general and temporary uses, the tapu was not supposed to attach: I mean, of course, the ordinary personal tapu or tapu rangatira. Any person, however, infected with any of the more serious or extraordinary forms of the tapu entering it, would at once render it uninhabitable. I took my seat. The house was full, and nearly the whole of the rest of the population were blocking up the open front of the large shed; all striving to see the pakeha, and passing to the rear from man to man every word he happened to speak. I could hear them say to the people behind, "The pakeha has stood up!" "Now he has sat down again!" "He has said, how do you all do?" "He has said, this is a nice place of yours!" &c. &c.

Now there happened to be at a distance, an old gentleman engaged in clearing the weeds from a kumera or sweet potato field, and as the kumera in the old times was the crop on which the natives depended chiefly for support, like all valuable things it was tapu, and the parties who entered the field to remove the weeds were tapu pro tem. also. One of the effects of this temporary extra tapu was that the parties could not enter any regular dwelling-house, or, indeed, any house used by others. The breach of this rule would not be dangerous in a personal sense, but the effect would be that the crop of sweet potatoes would fail. The industrious individual I have alluded to, hearing the cry of "A pakeha! a pakeha!" from many voices, and having never had an opportunity to examine that variety of the species, or genus homo, flung down his wooden kaheru or weed exterminator, and rushed towards the town house before mentioned. What could he do? The tapu forbade his entrance, and the front was so completely blocked up by his admiring neighbours that he could not get sight of the wonderful guest. In these desperate circumstances a bright thought struck him: he would, by a bold and ingenious device, give the tapu the slip. He ran to the back of the house, made with some difficulty a hole in the padded raupo wall, and squeezed his head through it. The elastic wall of raupo closed again around his neck; and the tapu was fairly beaten! No one could say he was in the house. He was certainly more out than in; and there, seemingly hanging from, or stuck against the wall, remained for hours, with open mouth and wondering eyes, this brazen head; till at last, the shades of night obstructing its vision, a rustling noise in the wall of flags and reeds announced the departure of my ingenious admirer.

Some of the forms of the tapu, however, were not to be trifled with, and were of a most virulent kind. Of this kind was the tapu of those who handled the dead, or conveyed the body to its last resting-place. This tapu was, in fact, the uncleanness of the old Jewish law; it lasted about the same time, and was removed in almost the same way. It was a most serious affair. The person who came under this form of the tapu was cut off from all contact, and almost all communication, with the human race. He could not enter any house, or come in contact with any person or thing, without utterly defiling them. He could not even touch food with his hands; which had become so frightfully tapu, or unclean, as to be quite useless. Food would be placed for him on the ground, and he would then sit or kneel down, and, with his hands carefully held behind his back, would gnaw it in the best way he could. In some cases he would be fed by another person, who, with out-stretched arm, would manage to do it without touching the tapu'd individual; but this feeder was subjected to many and severe restrictions, not much less onerous than those to which the other was subject.

In almost every populous native village there was a person who—probably for the sake of immunity from labour, or from being good for nothing else—took up the undertaking business as a regular profession, and, in consequence, was never for a moment, for years together, clear of the horrid inconveniences of the tapu, as well as its dangers. One of these people might be easily recognized, after a little experience, even by a pakeha. Old, withered, haggard, clothed in the most miserable rags, and daubed all over from head to foot with red paint (the native funereal colour), made of stinking shark oil and red ochre mixed, keeping always at a distance, silent and solitary, often half insane, he might be seen sitting motionless all day at forty or fifty yards distance from the common path or thoroughfare of the village. There, under the "lee" of a bush, or tuft of flax, he gazed silently, and with "lacklustre eye," on the busy doings of the Maori world, of which he was hardly to be called a member. Twice a day some food would be thrown on the ground before him, to gnaw as best he might, without the use of hands; and at night, tightening his greasy rags around him, he would crawl into some miserable lair of leaves and rubbish; there, cold, half starved, miserable, and dirty, to pass, in fitful ghost-haunted slumbers, a wretched night, as prelude to another wretched day. It requires, they say, all sorts of people to make a world; and I have often thought, in observing one of these miserable objects, that his, or hers, was the very lowest ebb to which a human being's prospects in life could be brought by adverse fate. When I met, or rather saw, a female practitioner, I fairly ran for it; and, believing my readers to be equally tender-hearted, I shall not venture on any more description, but merely say that the male undertaker, such as I have described him, would be an Apollo, in comparison with one of these hags.

What will my kind reader say when I tell him that I myself once got tapu'd with this same horrible, most horrible, style of tapu? I hold it to be a fact that there is not one man in New Zealand but myself who has a clear understanding of what the word "excommunication" means: indeed I did not understand what it meant till I got tapu'd. I was returning with about sixty men from a journey along the west coast, and was a short distance in advance of the party, when I came to where the side of a hill had fallen down on to the beach and exposed a number of human bones. There was a large skull rolling about in the water, and I took up this skull without consideration, carried it to the side of the hill, scraped a hole, and covered it up. Just as I had finished burying it up came my friends, and I saw at once, by the astonishment and dismay depicted on their countenances, that I had committed some most unfortunate act. They soon let me know that the hill had been a burial-place of their tribe, and jumped at once to the conclusion that the skull was the skull of one of their most famous chiefs; whose name they told me. They informed me also that I was no longer fit company for human beings, and begged me to fall to the rear and keep my distance. They told me all this from a very respectful distance, and if I made a step towards them, they all ran as if I had been infected by the plague. This was an awkward state of things, but as it could not be helped, I voted myself tapu, and kept clear of my friends till night.

At night when they camped, I was obliged to take my solitary abode at a distance under shelter of a rock. When the evening meal was cooked, they brought me a fair allowance, and set it down at a respectful distance from where I sat; fully expecting, I suppose, that I should bob at it as Maori kai tango atua, or undertakers, are wont to do. I had, however, no idea of any such proceeding; and, pulling out my knife, proceeded to operate in the usual manner. I was checked by an exclamation of horror and surprise from the whole band—"Oh, what are you about? You are not going to touch food with your hands!" "Indeed, but I am," said I, and stretched out my hand. Here another scream—"You must not do that: it's the worst of all things. One of us will feed you: it's wrong, wrong, very wrong!" "Oh, bother," said I, and fell too at once. I declare, positively, I had no sooner done so than I felt sorry. The expression of horror, contempt, and pity, observable in their faces, convinced me that I had not only offended and hurt their feelings, but that I had lowered myself greatly in their estimation. Certainly I was a pakeha, and pakehas will do most unaccountable things, and may be, in ordinary cases, excused; but this, I saw at once, was an act which, to my friends, seemed the ne plus ultra of abomination. I now can well understand that, while sitting there eating my potatoes, I must have appeared to them a ghoul, a vampire; worse than even one of their own dreadful atua, who, at the command of a witch, or to avenge some breach of the tapu, enters into a man's body and slowly eats away his vitals. I can see it now, and understand what a frightful object I must have appeared.