As we drove down to the coast, we talked over the close resemblance of the Maori runanga to the Homeric council; it had struck us all. Here, as in the Greek camp, we had the ring of people, into which advanced the lance-bearing or scepter-bearing chiefs, they alone speaking, and the people backing them only by a hum: “The block of wood dictates not to the carver, neither the people to their chiefs,” is a Maori proverb. The boasting of ancestry, and bragging of deeds and military exploits, to which modern wind-bags would only casually allude, was also thoroughly Homeric. In Hunia we had our Achilles; the retreat of Hunia to his wahré was that of Achilles to his tent; the cause of quarrel alone was different, though in both cases it arose out of the division of spoil, in the one case the result of lucky wars, in the other of the Pakéha‘s weakness. The Argive and Maori leaders are one in fire, figure, port, and mien; alike, too, even in their sulkiness. In Waitéré and Aperahama Tipai we had two Nestors; our Thersites was Porea, the jester, a half-mad buffoon, continually mimicking the chiefs or interrupting them, and being by them or their messengers as often kicked and cuffed. In the frequency of repetition, the use of proverbs and of simile, the Maories resemble not Homer‘s Greeks so much as Homer‘s self; but the calling together of the people by the heralds, the secret conclave of the chiefs, the feast, the conduct of the assembly—all were the exact repetition of the events recorded in the first and second books of the “Iliad” as having happened on the Trojan plains. The single point of difference was not in favor of the Greeks; the Maori women took their place in council with the men.
As we drove home, a storm came on, and hung about the coast so long, that it was not till near eleven at night that we were able to take our swim in the heated waters of the Manawatu River, and frighten off every duck and heron in the district.
In the morning, we rose to alarming news. Upon the pretext of the presence in the neighborhood of the Hau-Hau chief Wi Hapi, with a war party of 200 men, the unarmed Parewanui natives had sent to Wanganui for their guns, and it was only by a conciliatory speech at the midnight runanga that Mr. Buller had succeeded in preventing a complete break-up of all the camps, if not an intertribal war. There seemed to be white men behind the scenes who were not friendly to the sale, and the debate had lasted from dark till dawn.
While we were at breakfast, a Ngatiapa officer of the native contingent brought down a letter to Dr. Featherston from Hunia and Hori Kingi, calling us to a general meeting of the tribes convened for noon, to be held in the Ngatiapa Pah. The letter was addressed, “Kia té Pétatoné té Huperinténé”—“To the Featherston, the Superintendent”—the alterations in the chief words being made to bring them within the grasp of Maori tongues, which cannot sound f‘s, th‘s, nor sibilants of any kind. The absence of harsh sounds, and the rule which makes every word end with a vowel, give a peculiar softness and charm to the Maori language. Sugar becomes huka; scissors, hikiri; sheep, hipi; and so with all English words adopted into Maori. The rendering of the Hebrew names of the Old Testament is often singular: Genesis becomes Kenehi; Exodus is altered into Ekoruhe; Leviticus is hardly recognizable in Rewitikuha; Tiuteronomi reads strangely for Deuteronomy, and Hohua for Joshua; Jacob, Isaac, Moses, become Hakopa, Ihaka, and Mohi; Egypt is softened into Ihipa, Jordan into Horámo. The list of the nations of Canaan seems to have been a stumbling-block in the missionaries’ way. The success obtained with Girgashites has not been great; it stands Kirekahi; Gaash is transmuted into Kaaha, and Eleazar into Ereatara.
When we drove on to the ground all was at a deadlock—the flagstaff bare, the chiefs sleeping in their wahrés, and the common folk whiling away the hours with haka songs. Dr. Featherston retired from the ground, declaring that till the Queen‘s flag was hoisted he would attend no debate; but he permitted us to wander in among the Maories.
We were introduced to Tamiana té Rauparaha, chief of the Ngatitoa branch of the Ngatiraukawa, and son of the great cannibal chief of the same name, who murdered Captain Wakefield. Old Rauparaha it was who hired an English ship to carry him and his nation to the South Island, where they ate several tribes, boiling the chiefs, by the captain‘s consent, in the ship‘s coppers, and salting down for future use the common people. When the captain, on return to port, claimed his price, Rauparaha told him to go about his business, or he should be salted too. The captain took the hint, but he did not escape for long, as he was finally eaten by the Sandwich Islanders in Hawaii.
In answer to our request for a dance-song, Tamiana and Horomona Torémi replied, through an interpreter, that “the hands of the singers should beat time as fast as the pinions of the wild duck;” and in a minute we were in the middle of an animated crowd of boys and women collected by Porea, the buffoon.
As soon as the singers had squatted upon the grass, the jester began to run slowly up and down between their ranks as they sat swinging backward and forward in regular time, groaning in chorus, and looking upward with distorted faces.
In a second dance, a girl standing out upon the grass chanted the air—a kind of capstan song—and then the “dancers,” who were seated in one long row, joined in chorus, breathing violently in perfect time, half forming words, but not notes, swinging from side to side like the howling dervishes, and using frightful gestures. This strange whisper-roaring went on increasing in rapidity and fierceness, till at last the singers worked themselves into a frenzy, in which they rolled their eyes, stiffened the arms and legs, clutched and clawed with the fingers, and snorted like maddened horses. Stripping off their clothes, they looked more like the Maories of thirty years ago than those who see them only at the mission-stations would believe. Other song-dances, in which the singers stood striking their heels at measured intervals upon the earth, were taken up with equal vigor by the boys and women, the grown men in their dignity keeping themselves aloof, although in his heart every Maori loves mimetic dance and song. We remarked that in the “haka” the old women seemed more in earnest than the young, who were always bursting into laughter, and forgetting words and time.
The savage love for semitones makes Maori music somewhat wearisome to the English ear; so after a time we began to walk through the pahs and sketch the Maories, to their great delight. I was drawing the grand old head of a venerable dame—Oriuhia té Aka—when she asked to see what I was about. As soon as I showed her the sketch, she began to call me names, and from her gestures I saw that the insult was in the omission of the tattooing on her chin. When I inserted the stripes and curves, her delight was such that I greatly feared she would have embraced me.