Brighter Britain! (Volume 2 of 2) / or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand

by W. Delisle Hay

The Maori would seem to have degenerated from some more civilized condition, as is evidenced by the remains among them of astronomical knowledge, and of a higher political constitution, the basis of which is discoverable in their institution of the tapu. They brought with them to New Zealand the kumera (sweet potato), the taro (bread-root), the hue (gourd), the seeds of the koraka tree, the dog, the pukeko (swamp-hen), and one or two of the parrot tribe. They found in New Zealand an aboriginal race of men, inferior to themselves. They also found several species of gigantic birds, called by them moa, and by naturalists Dinornis, Aptornis, and Palapteryx.

The Maori, of course, made war upon both man and bird, the latter for food from the first, and the former probably for the same purpose eventually. They had succeeded in exterminating both before Europeans had a chance of making acquaintance with them. Bones of the moa are frequently found, and, till recently, it was believed that living specimens existed in the recesses of forest and mountain. But of the aboriginal race no trace remains, unless, as some have thought, there be an admixture of their blood in the few Maori of Otago and Stewart Island.

New Zealand was discovered by Abel Jan van Tasman, in 1642, to whom it owes its name—a name, by the way, that may one day be changed to Zealandia, perhaps, just as New Holland has become Australia, and Van Diemen's Land, Tasmania. The natives received the Dutch navigator with hostility, massacring a boat's crew. He, therefore, drew off and left, merely coasting for a short distance. No one else visited the country until 1769, when Cook arrived in it for the first time.

Captain Cook was likewise received with hostility by the Maori, on his first landing in Poverty Bay. But afterwards, in the Bay of Plenty, Mercury Bay, and the Bay of Islands, he met with better treatment, and was able to establish friendly relations with certain tribes. He spent altogether nearly a year in New Zealand, between 1769 and 1777, in which last year he left for Hawaii, to meet his death there in Kealakekua Bay. He circumnavigated the islands, which had previously been supposed to form part of a great Antarctic continent. He also bestowed upon the Maori the pig and the potato, and has left us some still interesting accounts of what he observed in the country.

Subsequently to Cook's last visit, and in the intervals between his voyages, other explorers touched here. De Lunéville, De Surville, Crozet, D'Urville, and Du Fresne, the French navigators, followed in the footsteps of Tasman and Cook. Then, too, whalers began to call along the coasts; and, by-and-by, traders from Sydney adventured hither for timber, and flax (phormium), and pigs, and smoked heads. But it was a risky thing in those days to do business with the Maori. Any fancied slight or injury was resented most terribly. Several ships were lost altogether, their crews being butchered and eaten; while boats' crews and individual mariners were lost by others.

In 1772, Du Fresne, with fifteen of his men, was killed in the Bay of Islands. He had aroused the wrath of the natives by trespassing on tapu ground; and they also avenged on him an action of De Lunéville's, who had rashly put a chief in irons. In 1809, the ship Boyd was taken in Whangaroa Harbour, and all her company killed, because the captain had flogged a Maori thief. Again, in 1816, we hear of the American brig Agnes meeting with a similar fate in Poverty Bay, or thereabouts.

From the end of last century down to 1840, a few individual white men took up their residence among the Maori here and there. These Pakeha-Maori, as they are called, were runaway sailors, or such as had been shipwrecked or made prisoners, or were wild, adventurous characters who preferred the savage life to the restraints of civilization. They married Maori women, raised families, and conformed to all the native customs, sometimes becoming chiefs and leaders in war. When some fitful intercourse was established with Sydney, these men were the medium of trade, and achieved immense importance in that way. It soon became the fashion among the chiefs of tribes for each to have his own special Pakeha-Maori. Force was sometimes resorted to to obtain these men. They were captured and compelled to remain, while wars between rival tribes were conducted for the possession of them. Rutherford, a survivor of the Agnes, was one such. His experiences of twelve years' residence among the Maori are recorded in Lord Brougham's compilation. Judge Maning has related the tale of another, at a somewhat later date.

In 1814, as has been elsewhere mentioned, the Rev. Samuel Marsden, together with some other missionaries, landed in the Bay of Islands; and from that event, New Zealand's real history may be said to commence.

The story of Marsden's interest in New Zealand is not without a certain romantic element. He was chaplain to the Government of New South Wales. At Sydney he had many opportunities of hearing of New Zealand, and of the terrible race of fighting man-eaters who inhabited it. Traders spoke freely of all they knew, and the barbarities, treacheries, and fearful deeds of the Maori, much exaggerated, no doubt, were matters of common report. Moreover, individual Maori sometimes shipped as sailors on board the vessels that touched on their coasts; and so Marsden was able to judge of the character of the race from the actual specimens he saw. We may be sure that he was favourably impressed by their evident superiority in every way to the black aborigines of Australia.