By-and-by, the Maori began to seriously argue the matter. They took their Bibles, which they had been taught to regard as the standard of right and wrong, and asked the missionaries to show them where polygamy was forbidden. Nay, was it not divinely sanctioned in many parts of the Old Testament?
The Maori is naturally an acute reasoner and casuist, and those missionaries who stood out so emphatically against polygamy now found themselves worsted on their own ground. The arguments that have prevailed throughout Christendom in favour of monogamy were not accepted by the Maori. They wanted direct Biblical ordinance, and as that was not forthcoming they assumed that polygamy was lawful, or, at least, some of them chose to do so. Then there was great joy. There were marriages and giving in marriage, after the good old custom. Probably, this controversy on the matrimonial question was one of the causes that afterwards eventuated in Hau-hau.
In these days polygamy is very rare, chiefly because the men outnumber the women, and because Maori find it expedient to conform to Pakeha custom. I visited a hapu once, whose chief had three wives; but he was an earnest Christian—à la Maori. He held prayers morning and evening in front of his wharè, at which all the people of the kainga attended. He conducted a long and lugubrious service every Sunday, expounding the Scriptures and preaching like a Spurgeon. He kept the Sabbath rigidly sacred, and interlarded his conversation with texts. Altogether he was a model man, never getting drunk except when he visited the township, never cheating anybody unless he was doing business with him.
Bonâ-fide marriages between white men and Maori women are seldomer contracted now than they used to be. I knew a man whose Maori bride brought him ten thousand acres of rich land as a dowry. She was a delicious little brown innocent, just such another as Mrs. Tangiao. Another man I knew married a Maori girl out of gratitude, she having saved his life from her own people in the early warlike days. She had acted towards him in a similar way to that in which Rahab of Jericho did to the Hebrew spies.
Alliances of a less enduring kind than these are matters of not infrequent occurrence. I have hinted at the hospitable customs of the primitive kainga, and the peculiar freedom, in certain respects, of unmarried Maori girls. It is not necessary to say any more on that head, I think. In justice to the race, it is only fair to say, that no more faithful or virtuous wife exists than a Maori one. Derelictions of conjugal duty both were and are very rarely known, in spite of somewhat arbitrary match-making. Such are a heinous crime in Maori eyes.
There are certain drawbacks that are apt to mar the conjugal felicity of the Pakeha who weds a Maori. He is received as a member of the hapu from which he has selected his bride, and is looked upon by all Maori as being in a closer relationship to them than other Pakeha. This adds other inconveniences to those arising from your wife's predilection for squatting on the drawing-room floor and smoking her pipe; her careless negligé in dress, except on state occasions; and her many little delightful and eccentric propensities. For, you have married not only your wife, but also all her relations and kindred.
They will visit you, twenty or thirty at a time, and stop a week or longer. They will slaughter your pigs and sheep, dig up your potatoes and kumera, and feed freely upon them. Your grocery bill will attain to frightful proportions; and the friendly mob will camp all over the house, just how and where it pleases them. If you resent these proceedings, your wife will cry and upbraid you, and might even desert you altogether, while the hapu would look upon it as the deadliest insult. As a per contra, your wife's tribe will stand by you in all difficulties and dangers. They will fight for you with pleasure, will die for you and with you if required; and a slight put upon you by anybody whatsoever, is put upon the tribe in equal degree.
You may cajole these ladies and gentlemen into helping you with any work that is going forward, but the perquisites they will take to themselves will be safe to ruin you. You may return their visits, as much as you like, but that will not reimburse you much. All that remains to you to do is to sell your land, and to remove to some distant part of the country, where there are no Maori. You must, in such a case, carefully prepare some artful and specious tale to satisfy your numerous relations-in-law, and mitigate their grief at losing you. Lastly, you must not take your wife out of New Zealand, for she will pine, and possibly die, if you do.
Although the old Maori are commonly spoken of as savages, they certainly did possess a degree of civilization of their own. They had a traditional history, a well-defined mythology, a code of laws based on the tapu, a perfect tribal organization, industries and arts of no mean kind. Among them were men, renowned long after their death in song and story, as great statesmen, warriors, poets, artists, and so on. Their dwellings are of simple construction, but they are superior to Irish cabins by a long way. Many of them were extravagantly decorated with carvings and ornaments. The fortified pa were planned with surprising engineering skill, and could be defended against English troops. Even where artillery was brought against the pa, the earthworks made the siege no light work. Sometimes our troops were actually repulsed from before these forts, as at Ohaeawae and Okaehau.
The Maori cultivations were often extensive, though, before the coming of Captain Cook, the articles cultivated were not of great variety. Taro, the farinaceous bulb of an arum; Kumera, the tuber of a species of convolvulus; and Hue, the calabash or gourd, were the crops; to which Cook and those who came after him added potatoes, maize, wheat, oats and barley, turnips, cabbages, peas, beans, fruit-trees, and many other things, which were sedulously grown and spread among their tribes by the Maori.