“The lawless conduct of the crews of vessels must necessarily have an injurious effect on our trade, and on that ground alone demands investigation. In the month of April, 1834, Mr. Busby states there were twenty-nine vessels at one time in the Bay of Islands; and that seldom a day passed without some complaint being made to him of the most outrageous conduct on the part of their crews, which he had not the means of repressing, since these reckless seamen totally disregarded the usages of their own country, and the unsupported authority of the British resident.
“The Rev. J. Williams, missionary in the Society Islands, states, ‘that it is the common sailors, and the lowest order of them, the very vilest of the whole, who will leave their ship and go to live amongst the savages, and take with them all their low habits and all their vices.’ The captains of merchant vessels are apt to connive at the absconding of such worthless sailors, and the atrocities perpetrated by them are excessive; they do incalculable mischief by circulating reports injurious to the interests of trade. On an island between the Navigator’s and the Friendly group, he heard there were on one occasion a hundred sailors who had run away from shipping. Mr. Williams gives an account of a gang of convicts who stole a small vessel from New South Wales, and came to Raiatia, one of the Sandwich Islands, where he resided, representing themselves as shipwrecked mariners. Mr. Williams suspected them, and told them he should inform the governor, Sir T. Brisbane, of their arrival, on which they went away to an island twenty miles off, and were received with every kindness in the house of the chief. They took an opportunity of stealing a boat belonging to the missionary of the station, and made off again. The natives immediately pursued, and desired them to return their missionary’s boat. Instead of replying, they discharged a blunderbus that was loaded with cooper’s rivets, which blew the head of one man to pieces; they then killed two more, and a fourth received the contents of a blunderbus in his hand, fell from exhaustion amongst his mutilated companions, and was left as dead. This man, and a boy who had saved himself by diving, returned to their island. ‘The natives were very respectable persons; and had it not been that we were established in the estimation of the people, our lives would have been sacrificed. The convicts then went in the boat down to the Navigator’s Islands, and there entered with savage ferocity into the wars of the savages. One of these men was the most savage monster that ever I heard of: he boasted of having killed 300 natives with his own hands.’
“And in June 1833, Mr. Thomas, Wesleyan missionary at the Friendly Islands, still speaks of the mischief done by ill-disposed captains of whalers, who, he says, ‘send the refuse of their crews on shore to annoy us;’ and proceeds to state, ‘the conduct of many of these masters of South-Sea whalers is most abominable; they think no more of the life of an heathen than of a dog. And their cruel and wanton behaviour at the different islands in those seas has a powerful tendency to lead the natives to hate the sight of a white man.’ Mr. Williams mentions one of these captains, who with his people had shot twenty natives, at one of the islands, for no offence; and ‘another master of a whaler, from Sidney, made his boast, last Christmas, at Tonga, that he had killed about twenty black fellows,—for so he called the natives of the Samoa, or Navigator’s Islands—for some very trifling offence; and not satisfied with that, he designed to disguise his vessel, and pay them another visit, and get about a hundred more of them.’ ‘Our hearts,’ continues Mr. Thomas, ‘almost bleed for the poor Samoa people; they are a very mild, inoffensive race, very easy of access; and as they are near to us, we have a great hope of their embracing the truth, viz. that the whole group will do so; for you will learn from Mr. Williams’ letter, that a part of them have already turned to God. But the conduct of our English savages has a tone of barbarity and cruelty in it which was never heard of or practised by them.’”
But these are not all the exploits of these white savages. Those who have seen in shop-windows in London, dried heads of New Zealanders, may here learn how they come there, and to whom the phrenologists and curiosi are indebted.
“Till lately the tattooed heads of New Zealanders were sold at Sidney as objects of curiosity; and Mr. Yate says he has known people give property to a chief for the purpose of getting them to kill their slaves, that they might have some heads to take to New South Wales.
“This degrading traffic was prohibited by General Darling, the governor, upon the following occasion: In a representation made to Governor Darling, the Rev. Mr. Marsden states, that the captain of an English vessel being, as he conceived, insulted by some native women, set one tribe upon another to avenge his quarrel, and supplied them with arms and ammunition to fight.
“In the prosecution of the war thus excited, a party of forty-one Bay of Islanders made an expedition against some tribes of the South. Forty of the former were cut off; and a few weeks after the slaughter, a Captain Jack went and purchased thirteen chiefs’ heads, and, bringing them back to the Bay of Islands, emptied them out of a sack in the presence of their relations. The New Zealanders were, very properly, so much enraged that they told this captain they should take possession of the ship, and put the laws of their country into execution. When he found that they were in earnest, he cut his cable and left the harbour, and afterwards had a narrow escape from them at Taurunga. He afterwards reached Sidney, and it came to the knowledge of the governor, that he brought there ten of these heads for sale, on which discovery the practice was declared unlawful. Mr. Yate mentions an instance of a captain going 300 miles from the Bay of Islands to East Cape, enticing twenty-five young men, sons of chiefs, on board his vessel, and delivering them to the Bay of Islanders, with whom they were at war, merely to gain the favour of the latter, and to obtain supplies for his vessel. The youths were afterwards redeemed from slavery by the missionaries, and restored to their friends. Mr. Yate once took from the hand of a New-Zealand chief a packet of corrosive sublimate, which a captain had given to the savage in order to enable him to poison his enemies.”
Such is the general system. The atrocious character of particular cases would be beyond credence, after all that has now been shewn of the nature of Europeans, were they not attested by the fullest and most unexceptionable authority. The following case was communicated by the Rev. S. Marsden, to Governor-general Darling, and was also afterwards reported to the governor in person by two New Zealand chiefs. Governor Darling forwarded the account of it to Lord Goderich, together with the depositions of two seamen of the brig Elizabeth, and those of J. B. Montefiore, Esq., and A. Kennis, Esq. merchants of Sidney, who had embarked on board the Elizabeth on its return to Entry Island, and had there learned the particulars of the case, had seen the captive chief sent ashore, and had been informed that he was sacrificed.
“In December 1830, a Captain Stewart, of the brig Elizabeth, a British vessel, on promise of ten tons of flax, took above 100 New Zealanders concealed in his vessel, down from Kappetee Entry Island, in Cook’s Strait, to Takou, or Bank’s Peninsula, on the Middle Island, to a tribe with whom they were at war. He then invited and enticed on board the chief of Takou, with his brother and two daughters: ‘When they came on board, the captain took hold of the chief’s hand in a friendly manner, and conducted him and his two daughters into the cabin; shewed him the muskets, how they were arranged round the sides of the cabin. When all was prepared for securing the chief, the cabin-door was locked, and the chief was laid hold on, and his hands were tied fast; at the same time a hook, with a cord to it, was struck through the skin of his throat under the side of his jaw, and the line fastened to some part of the cabin: in this state of torture he was kept for some days, until the vessel arrived at Kappetee. One of his children clung fast to her father, and cried aloud. The sailors dragged her from her father, and threw her from him; her head struck against some hard substance, which killed her on the spot.’ The brother, or nephew, Ahu (one of the narrators), ‘who had been ordered to the forecastle, came as far as the capstan and peeped through into the cabin, and saw the chief in the state above mentioned.’ They also got the chief’s wife and two sisters on board, with 100 baskets of flax. All the men and women who came in the chief’s canoe were killed. ‘Several more canoes came off also with flax, and the people were all killed by the natives of Kappetee, who had been concealed on board for the purpose, and the sailors who were on deck, who fired upon them with their muskets.’ The natives of Kappetee were then sent on shore with some sailors, with orders to kill all the inhabitants they could find; and it was reported that those parties who went on shore murdered many of the natives; none escaped but those who fled into the woods. The chief, his wife and two sisters were killed when the vessel arrived at Kappetee, and other circumstances yet more revolting are added.”