Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, of Paramatta, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales; and of His Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti

by Samuel Marsden

“Since writing this letter, I have determined to keep the Active in my own hands.”

Let us now turn to the New Zealand mission, which occupied, from this time, so large a portion of Mr. Marsden’s public life.

We have mentioned the designation of two laymen, Messrs. Hall and King, for this mission by the Church Missionary Society in 1808. They sailed from England, with Mr. Marsden, in 1810, and were soon after followed by Mr. Kendall, and the three assembled at New South Wales, intending to sail thence without delay for the scene of their future work. But here fresh difficulties arose. Mr. Marsden’s intention was to accompany them, and in person to meet the first dangers, and lay, as it were, the first stone. But this the new governor absolutely forbade. To him, and in fact to most men in his circumstances, the whole scheme seemed utterly preposterous. The idea of converting the savages of New Zealand was the chimera of a pious enthusiast—a good and useful man in his way, but one who was not to be allowed thus idly to squander the lives of others, to say nothing of his own. Nor in truth were the governor’s objections altogether without foundation. The last news from New Zealand was that an English ship, the Boyd, had been seized and burned by the cannibals in the Bay of Islands, and every soul on board, seventy in all, killed and eaten. The report was true, save only that, out of the whole of the ship’s company, two women and a boy had been spared to live in slavery with the savages. A New Zealand chief had sailed on board, as it afterwards appeared, and had been treated with brutal indignities similar to those which Duaterra suffered from the captain of the Santa Anna. He smothered his resentment, and, waiting the return of the Boyd to the Bay of Islands, summoned his tribe, who, on various pretences, crowded the deck of the ship, and at a given signal rushed upon the crew, dispatched them with their clubs and hatchets, and then gorged themselves and their followers on the horrible repast. All then that Mr. Marsden could obtain at present was permission to charter a vessel, if a captain could be found sufficiently courageous to risk his life and ship in such an enterprise, and to send out the three missionaries as pioneers; with a reluctant promise from the governor that if on the ship’s return, all had turned out well, he should not be hindered from following. For some time no such adventurous captain could be found. At length, for the sum of 600l. for a single voyage, an offer was made, but Mr. Marsden looked upon the sum as far too much; and this, with other considerations, induced him to purchase his own missionary brig, the Active, in which Messrs. Hall and Kendall finally set sail for the Bay of Islands. They carried a message to Duaterra, entreating him to receive them kindly, and inviting him, too, to return with them to Paramatta, bringing along with him two or three friendly chiefs.

Duaterra, after his visit to Mr. Marsden, on his way from England, had again suffered great hardships from the perfidy of the master of the Frederick, with whom he had embarked from New South Wales under an express engagement to be set on shore at the Bay of Islands, where his tribe dwelt. He was carried to Norfolk Island, and there left; and, to aggravate his wrongs and sorrows, the vessel passed within two miles of his own shores and in sight of his long lost home. He was defrauded too of his share of the oil he had procured with his companions, worth 100l. A whaler found him on Norfolk Island, almost naked and in the last stage of want, and brought him once more to Australia and to his friend and patron Mr. Marsden. A short stay sufficed; he sailed again from Sydney, and soon found himself, to his great joy, amongst his friends in New Zealand. On the arrival of the Active with its missionaries—the first messengers of Christ who landed on its shores—he was there to greet them, and to repay, a thousandfold, the kindness of his friend the minister of Paramatta, in the welcome he secured for these defenceless strangers. They carried with them too a present which, trifling as it may seem, was not without its share of influence in the great work; the story is suggestive, and may serve a higher purpose than merely to amuse the reader.

Duaterra had been provided by Mr. Marsden with a supply of wheat for sowing on his return to New Zealand. No such thing as a field of grain of any kind had yet waved its golden ears on that fertile soil. To this accomplished savage the honour belongs of first introducing agriculture into an island destined, within forty years, to rival the best farms of England both in the value of its crops and the variety of its produce. The neighbouring chiefs and their tribes viewed with wonder first the green ears and then the growing corn. The wild potato, the fern, and a few other roots were the only produce of the earth they were yet acquainted with, and when Duaterra assured them that his field of wheat was to yield the flour out of which the bread and biscuits they had tasted on English ships were made, they tore up several plants, expecting to find something resembling their own potato at the root. That the ears themselves should furnish the materials for a loaf was not to be believed. Duaterra meant to impose upon them, or else he had been duped himself, but they were not to be cajoled with the tales of a traveller. The field was reaped and the corn threshed out, when Duaterra was mortified with the discovery that he was not provided with a mill. He made several attempts to grind his corn with the help of a coffee-mill borrowed from a trading-ship, but without success; and now, like the inventor of steam navigation, and other benefactors of their species nearer home, he was laughed at for his simplicity. It is strange that the ancient Roman quern, a hollow stone in which the grain was pounded, the rudest form in fact of the pestle and mortar, should not have occurred to him; but the total want of invention is an invariable characteristic of savage nature. At length the Active brought the important present of a hand-mill for grinding corn. Duaterra’s friends assembled to watch the experiment, still incredulous of the promised result; but when the meal began to stream out beneath the machine their astonishment was unbounded; and when a cake was produced, hastily baked in a frying-pan, they shouted and danced for joy, Duaterra was now to be trusted when he told them that the missionaries were good men. And thus the first favourable impression was made upon the savage Maories, whose race was in the next generation to become a civilized and Christian people.

Messrs Hall and Kendall, having introduced themselves and their mission in New Zealand, now, in obedience to their instructions, returned to Sydney accompanied by Duaterra and six other chiefs, amongst whom was Duaterra’s uncle the famous Shunghie, or Hongi, the most powerful of New Zealand chieftains; such was the confidence which Mr. Marsden’s name, together with the good conduct of the missionaries, had now inspired. The Active reached New South Wales on the 22nd of August, 1814. Nothing could exceed the joy which Mr. Marsden experienced on the successful termination of the voyage, and being filled with an earnest desire to promote the dissemination of the gospel amongst the New Zealanders, and having obtained the governor’s permission, he determined to accompany the missionaries on their return to the Bay of Islands. To his friend, Avison Terry, Esq., he wrote just before he sailed, Oct. 7, 1814—“It is my intention to visit New Zealand and see what can be done to promote the eternal welfare of the inhabitants of that island. I have now several of the chiefs living with me at Paramatta. They are as noble a race of men as are to be met with in any part of the world. I trust I shall be able, in some measure, to put a stop to those dreadful murders which have been committed upon the island for some years past, both by the Europeans and the natives. They are a much injured people, notwithstanding all that has been advanced against them. The time is now come, in my opinion, for them to be favoured with the everlasting gospel; and I trust to hear the joyful sound in those dark and dreary regions of sin and spiritual bondage. I have long had the most ardent wish to visit these poor heathen, but have never till the present time obtained permission. I have submitted my views to the Church Missionary Society, and solicited their aid. The expense of establishing a mission here will at first be very considerable.” ... [Here he mentions his purchase of the Active, etc.] “Should the Society approve of my views, no doubt they will give their support, but if they cannot enter into them in the manner I do, I cannot expect that assistance from them which may be required. My own means will enable me to set the mission on foot in the first instance, and I have little doubt but it will succeed.” Zeal such as this, tempered with discretion and guided by the “wisdom which cometh from above,” in answer to many believing prayers, could scarcely fail of its sure reward.

On the 19th of November, 1814, he embarked on his great mission, with a motley crew, such as (except perhaps on some other missionary ship) has seldom sailed in one small vessel—savages and Christian teachers and enterprising mechanics, their wives and children, besides cattle and horses. Of this strangely assorted company he gives the following description: “The number of persons on board the Active, including women and children, was thirty-five; the master, his wife and son, Messrs. Kendall, Hall, and King, with their wives and children, eight New Zealanders, (including Duaterra and his uncle the great warrior Shunghie or Hongi) two Otaheitans, and four Europeans belonging to the vessel, besides Mr. John Lydiard Nicholas and myself; there were also two sawyers, one smith, and a runaway convict whom we afterwards found on board, a horse and two mares, one bull and two cows, with a few sheep and poultry. The bull and cows have been presented by Governor Macquarie from his Majesty’s herd.” On the 15th December, they were in sight of land; the next day, the chiefs were sent on shore, and a friendly communication was at once opened with the natives. But even before they had landed “a canoe came alongside the Active, with plenty of fish, and shortly afterwards a chief followed from the shore, who immediately came on board.” Mr. Marsden’s fame, as the friend of the New Zealanders, had arrived before him. “I told them my name, with which they were all well acquainted.... We were now quite free from all fear, as the natives seemed desirous to show us attention by every possible means in their power.” The Active dropped her anchor a few days after at Wangaroa, near the Bay of Islands, the scene of the massacre of the Boyd’s crew, and there amongst the very cannibals by whose hands their countrymen had fallen so recently the first Christian mission to New Zealand was opened. A fierce and unholy revenge had been taken, in the murder of Tippahee, a native chieftain, and all his family, by an English crew who had visited Wangaroa after the Boyd’s destruction, and Tippahee, as Mr. Marsden always maintained, suffered unjustly, having had no share in the dreadful massacre. But thus it was; and amongst a people so exasperated did these servants of the most high God venture forth as the heralds of the gospel. Seldom since the words of the prophet were first uttered have they had, in reference to missionaries, a more significant, or a more correct appropriation than they now received. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation.”

Mr. Marsden’s journal of this his first visit to New Zealand is a document of singular interest, and when published at the time in England, it made a deep impression. It is written in plain and forcible language, and is characterized by that vein of good sense and practical wisdom which so distinguished him. There is no display of his own sufferings, trials and privations, no affectation of laboured and studied expression, no highly coloured and partial representation of the savage condition of the natives. All his aim is to lay the truth before the Society and the friends of missions, and in doing so he has written with a degree of accuracy and honest feeling, which while they inform the understanding at once reach the heart. From this unpretending record, a few selections will be laid before the reader. And here, too, we would, once for all, acknowledge our obligations to his “companion in travel,” J. L. Nicholas, Esq., to whose manuscript journal of the visit to New Zealand, as well indeed as for other communications of great interest on the subject of Mr. Marsden’s life and labours, we shall be much indebted through the future pages of our work.

Duaterra and Shunghie had often told of the bloody war, arising out of the affair of the Boyd, that was raging, while they were at Paramatta, between the people of Wangaroa (the tribe of Tippahee) and the inhabitants of the Bay of Islands, who were their own friends and followers; the Wangaroans accusing the people of the Bay of Islands of having conspired with the English in the murder of Tippahee. When the Active arrived, several desperate battles had been fought, and the war was likely to continue.

Mr. Marsden was determined to establish peace amongst these contending tribes. He was known already as the friend of Duaterra and Shunghie; he now felt that he must convince the other party of his good intentions. He did not come amongst them as an ally of either, but as the friend of both; he resolved therefore to pass some time with the Wangaroans; and with a degree of intrepidity truly astonishing even in him, not only ventured on shore, but actually passed the night, accompanied by his friend Mr. Nicholas alone, with the very savages who had killed and eaten his countrymen. After a supper of fish and potatoes in the camp of Shunghie, they walked over to the hostile camp distant about a mile. They received the two white strangers very cordially. “We sat down amongst them, and the chiefs surrounded us.” Mr. Marsden then introduced the subject of his embassy, explained the object of the missionaries in coming to live amongst them, and showed how much peace would conduce in every way to the welfare of all parties. A chief, to whom the Europeans gave the name of George, acted as interpreter; he had sailed on board an English ship, and spoke English well. Mr. Marsden tells us how the first night was passed: “As the evening advanced the people began to retire to rest in different groups. About eleven o’clock Mr. Nicholas and I wrapped ourselves in our great coats, and prepared for rest. George directed me to lie by his side. His wife and child lay on the right hand, and Mr. Nicholas close by. The night was clear; the stars shone bright, and the sea in our front was smooth; around us were innumerable spears stuck upright in the ground, and groups of natives lying in all directions, like a flock of sheep upon the grass, as there were neither tents nor huts to cover them. I viewed our present situation with sensations and feelings that I cannot express, surrounded by cannibals who had massacred and devoured our countrymen. I wondered much at the mysteries of providence, and how these things could be. Never did I behold the blessed advantage of civilization in a more grateful light than now. I did not sleep much during the night. My mind was too seriously occupied by the present scene, and the new and strange ideas it naturally excited. About three in the morning I rose and walked about the camp, surveying the different groups of natives. When the morning light returned we beheld men, women, and children, asleep in all directions like the beasts of the field. I had ordered the boat to come on shore for us at daylight; and soon after Duaterra arrived in the camp.”