To this was affixed a complete drawing of the “amoco,” or tattooing of Gunna’s face, done by Shunghie, on one side of which he set his mark.
We need scarcely remind the reader how closely this transaction resembles the famous contract of William Penn with the native Indians, by which he became possessed of Pennsylvania. Much and justly as Penn has been admired, Mr. Marsden’s conduct is even more worthy of respect. Penn sought to found a colony, to place himself at its head, and to associate his own name with it through generations to come. The chaplain of Paramatta had not even these motives of honest and laudable ambition; he sought nothing for himself, nothing for his country, nothing even for the church of which he was a member, and which he warmly loved. His one aim was to evangelize New Zealand; to bring a nation of cannibals from darkness into the marvellous light of the gospel, and from the power of Satan unto God. His own name appears on the instrument only as the agent or representative of a missionary society in whom the property was vested; and yet at the time the purchase was made he was uncertain whether the bare expenses of his voyage, or even the cost and charges of his vessel, would ever be repaid to him. He sought neither wealth, nor honour, nor preferment, but acted with a simple aim to the glory of God. The memorial of such a name can never perish amongst men; and should it be forgotten, still his record is on high.
Mr. Marsden returned from his first voyage to New Zealand accompanied by no less than ten chiefs, and landed at Sydney on the 23rd of March, 1815. He and Mr. Nicholas immediately presented themselves to the governor, who “congratulated them on their safe return,” from what, in common with all the colony, he regarded as a most perilous and rash adventure.
CHAPTER VII.
Death of Duaterra—Trials of Mr. Marsden in the Colony—Libel of Philo-free—Letter to Rev. George Burder—To Dr. Mason Good—Sympathy of his Friends in England—Congratulations of the 46th Regiment, and Mr. Marsden’s acknowledgment—Letters of Lord Gambier, Rev. C. Simeon, and Mrs. Fry.
It was not to be expected that a career of unbroken success and easy triumph should crown the infant mission in New Zealand. Reverses and delays were to be looked for; they were in the nature of the work itself; and for such trials Mr. Marsden was prepared. But he had scarcely arrived at Paramatta before he was involved in sharper conflicts. No doubt they were a part of God’s discipline of love: for if Paul required “a thorn in the flesh” lest he “should be exalted above measure,” meaner disciples may surely expect to meet with stern rebuffs, in their career of usefulness and honour; and they will even learn to accept them with a thankful and a joyous heart.
The first discouragement was the death of Duaterra. Mr. Marsden had left him sick; and four days after his departure he expired, surrounded by his heathen countrymen, from whose superstitions, even to the last, he was by no means free. “He appeared at this awful moment,” Mr. Marsden writes, describing his last interview, “not to know what to do. He wished me to pray with him, which I did; but the superstitions of his country had evidently a strong hold upon his mind; the priest was always with him, night and day. Duaterra seemed at a loss where to repose his afflicted mind; his views of the gospel were not sufficiently clear to remove his superstitions; and at the same time he was happy to hear what I had to say to him. What horrors do these poor people suffer when they come to die!” His favourite wife, Dahoo, was inconsolable; and while Shunghie and his near relatives cut themselves with knives till the blood gushed out, she sought and found an opportunity to put a period to her own life by hanging herself, at a short distance from the body of her husband. None of the natives, not even her relatives, appeared shocked or surprised. “Her mother,” Mr. Kendall wrote, “wept while she was composing the limbs of her daughter; but she applauded her resolution, and the sacrifice which she had made for the man she so tenderly loved. Her father observed her corpse without any apparent concern. I could not discover a tear at the time it was brought before him. Two of her brothers smiled on the occasion, and said, ‘it was a good thing at New Zealand.’ It is common for women to act thus when their husbands die; they think that they then go to them.” Mr. Marsden, for a time, was almost overwhelmed. “I could not but view Duaterra, as he lay dying, with wonder and astonishment; and could scarcely bring myself to believe that the Divine Goodness would remove from the earth a man whose life appeared of such infinite importance to his country, which was just emerging from barbarism and superstition. No doubt but he had done his work and finished his appointed course, though I fondly imagined he had only just begun his race. He was in the prime and vigour of manhood: I judge his age to be about twenty-eight years. In reflecting on this awful and mysterious event, I am led to exclaim, with the apostle of the Gentiles, ‘Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!’”
He was indeed a noble specimen of human nature in its savage state. His character was cast in the mould of heroes: at the very period of his death, after ten years of as much privation, danger, and hardship as nature could well bear, his courage was unsubdued, and his patriotism and enterprise unabated. He told Mr. Marsden with an air of triumph, “I have now introduced the cultivation of wheat into New Zealand; New Zealand will become a great country; in two years more I shall be able to export wheat to Port Jackson, in exchange for hoes, axes, spades, tea and sugar.” He had made arrangements for farming on a large scale, and had formed his plan for building a new town, with regular streets, after the European mode, on a beautiful situation which commanded a view of the harbour and the adjacent country. “I accompanied him to the spot,” says Mr. M.; “we examined the ground fixed on for the town, and the situation where the church was to stand.” Had he lived he would have been the Ulysses of his Ithaca—perhaps its Alfred; and nothing in his whole life gives us a juster idea of Mr. Marsden’s sagacity and keen perception than the fact of his singling out Duaterra, a sick and apparently dying common sailor on shipboard, and training him to be a powerful instrument, in God’s hands, for the civilization of New Zealand.