Chapter V
NO MAN'S LAND
"The wild justice of revenge."
The Maoris told Cook that, years before the Endeavour first entered Poverty Bay, a ship had visited the northern side of Cook's Strait and stayed there some time, and that a half-caste son of the captain was still living. In one of his later voyages, the navigator was informed that a European vessel had lately been wrecked near the same part of the country, and that the crew, who reached the shore, had all been clubbed after a desperate resistance. It is likely enough that many a roving mariner who touched at the islands never informed the world of his doings, and had, indeed, sometimes excellent reasons for secrecy. Still, for many years after the misadventure of Marion du Fresne, the more prudent Pacific skippers gave New Zealand a wide berth. When D'Entrecasteaux, the French explorer, in his voyage in search of the ill-fated La Perouse, lay off the coast in 1793, he would not even let a naturalist, who was on one of his frigates, land to have a glimpse of the novel flora of the wild and unknown land. Captain Vancouver, in 1791, took shelter in Dusky Bay, in the sounds of the South Island. Cook had named an unsurveyed part of that region Nobody-Knows-What. Vancouver surveyed it and gave it its present name, Somebody-Knows-What. But the chief act for which his name is noted in New Zealand history is his connection with the carrying off of two young Maoris—a chief and a priest—to teach the convicts of the Norfolk Island penal settlement how to dress flax. Vancouver had been asked by the Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island to induce two Maoris to make the voyage. He therefore sent an officer in a Government storeship to New Zealand, whose notion of inducement was to seize the first Maoris he could lay hands on. The two captives, it may be mentioned, scornfully refused to admit any knowledge of the "woman's work" of flax-dressing. Soothed by Lieutenant-Governor King, they were safely restored by him to their people loaded with presents. When in Norfolk Island, one of them, at King's request, drew a map of New Zealand, which is of interest as showing how very little of his country a Maori of average intelligence then knew. Of even more interest to us is it to remember that the kindly Lieutenant-Governor's superior officer censured him for wasting time—ten whole days—in taking two savages back to their homes.
For two generations after Cook the English Government paid no attention to the new-found land. What with losing America, and fighting the French, it had its hands full. It colonized Australia with convicts—and found it a costly and dubious experiment. The Government was well satisfied to ignore New Zealand. But adventurous English spirits were not The islands ceased to be inaccessible when Sydney became an English port, from which ships could with a fair wind make the Bay of Islands in eight or ten days. In the seas round New Zealand were found the whale and the fur-seal. The Maoris might be cannibals, but they were eager to trade. In their forests grew trees capable of supplying first-class masts and spars. Strange weapons, ornaments, and cloaks, were offered by the savages, as well as food and the dressed fibre of the native flax. An axe worth ten shillings would buy three spars worth ten pounds in Sydney. A tenpenny nail would purchase a large fish. A musket and a little powder and lead were worth a ton of scraped flax. Baskets of potatoes would be brought down and ranged on the sea-beach three deep. The white trader would then stretch out enough calico to cover them. The strip was their price. The Maoris loved the higgling of the market, and would enjoy nothing better than to spend half a day over bartering away a single pig. Moreover, a peculiar and profitable, if ghastly, trade sprang up in tattooed heads. A well-preserved specimen fetched as much as twenty pounds, and a man "with a good head on his shoulders" was consequently worth that sum to any one who could kill him. Contracts for the sale of heads of men still living are said to have been entered into between chiefs and traders, and the heads to have been duly delivered "as per agreement." Hitherto hung up as trophies of victory in the pas, these relics of battle were quickly turned to account, at first for iron, then for muskets, powder, and lead. When the natural supply of heads of slain enemies ran short, slaves, who had hitherto never been allowed the aristocratic privilege and dignity of being tattooed, had their faces prepared for the market. Sometimes, it is recorded, a slave, after months of painful preparation, had the audacity to run away with his own head before the day of sale and decapitation. Astute vendors occasionally tried the more merciful plan of tattooing "plain" heads after death in ordinary course of battle. But this was a species of fraud, as the lines soon became indistinct. Such heads have often been indignantly pointed at by enthusiastic connoisseurs. Head-sellers at times would come forward in the most unlikely places. Commodore Wilkes, when exploring in the American Vincennes, bought two heads from the steward of a missionary brig. It was missionary effort, however, which at length killed the traffic, and the art of tattooing along with it. Moved thereby, Governor Darling issued at Sydney, in 1831, proclamations imposing a fine of forty pounds upon any one convicted of head-trading, coupled with the exposure of the offender's name. Moreover, he took active steps to enforce the prohibition. When Charles Darwin visited the mission station near the Bay of Islands in 1835, the missionaries confessed to him that they had grown so accustomed to associate tattooing with rank and dignity—had so absorbed the Maori social code relating thereto—that an unmarked face seemed to them vulgar and mean. Nevertheless, their influence led the way in discountenancing the art, and it has so entirely died out that there is probably not a completely tattooed Maori head on living shoulders to-day.
Cook had found the Maoris still in the Stone Age. They were far too intelligent to stay there a day after the use of metals had been demonstrated to them. Wits much less acute than a Maori's would appreciate the difference between hacking at hardwood trees with a jade tomahawk, and cutting them down with a European axe. So New Zealand's shores became, very early in this century, the favourite haunt of whalers, sealers, and nondescript trading schooners. Deserters and ship-wrecked seamen were adopted by the tribes. An occasional runaway convict from Australia added spice to the mixture.
The lot of these unacknowledged and unofficial pioneers of our race was chequered. Some castaways were promptly knocked on the head and eaten. Some suffered in slavery. In 1815 two pale, wretched-looking men, naked, save for flax mats tied round their waists threw themselves on the protection of the captain of the Active, then lying in the Bay of Islands. It appeared that both had been convicts who had got away from Sydney as stowaways in a ship bound for New Zealand, the captain of which, on arrival, had handed them over to the missionaries to be returned to New South Wales. The men, however, ran away into the country, believing that the natives would reverence them as superior beings and maintain them in comfortable idleness. They were at once made slaves of. Had they been strong, handy agricultural labourers, their lot would have been easy enough. Unfortunately for them, one had been a London tailor, the other a shoemaker, and the luckless pair of feeble Cockneys could be of little use to their taskmasters. These led them such a life that they tried running away once more, and lived for a time in a cave, subsisting chiefly on fern-root. A period of this diet, joined to their ever-present fear of being found out and killed, drove them back to Maori slavery. From this they finally escaped to the Active—more like walking spectres than men, says an eye-witness—and resigned, if needs must, to endure once more the tender mercies of convict life in Botany Bay.
More valuable whites were admitted into the tribes, and married to one, sometimes two or three, wives. The relatives of these last occasionally resorted to an effectual method of securing their fidelity by tattooing them. One of them, John Rutherford, survived and describes the process. But as he claims to have had his face and part of his body thoroughly tattooed in four hours, his story is but one proof amongst a multitude that veracity was not a needful part of the equipment of the New Zealand adventurer of the Alsatian epoch. Once enlisted, the Pakehas were expected to distinguish themselves in the incessant tribal wars. Most of them took their share of fighting with gusto. As trade between whites and Maoris grew, each tribe made a point of having a white agent-general, called their Pakeha Maori (Foreigner Maorified), to conduct their trade and business with his fellows. He was the tribe's vassal, whom they petted and plundered as the mood led them, but whom they protected against outsiders. These gentry were for the most part admirably qualified to spread the vices of civilization and discredit its precepts. But, illiterate ruffians as most of them were, they had their uses in aiding peaceful intercourse between the races. Some, too, were not illiterate. A Shakespeare and a Lemprière were once found in the possession of a chief in the wildest part of the interior. They had belonged to his Pakeha long since dead. Elsewhere a tattered prayer-book was shown as the only relic of another. One of the kind, Maning by name, who lived with a tribe on the beautiful inlet of Hokianga, will always be known as the Pakeha Maori. He was an Irish adventurer, possessed not only of uncommon courage and acuteness, but of real literary talent and a genial and charming humour. He lived to see savagery replaced by colonization, and to become a judicial officer in the service of the Queen's Government. Some of his reminiscences, embodied in a volume entitled Old New Zealand, still form the best book which the Colony has been able to produce. Nowhere have the comedy and childishness of savage life been so delightfully portrayed. Nowhere else do we get such an insight into that strange medley of contradictions and caprices, the Maori's mind.
We have already seen that a lieutenant in Her Majesty's service thought it no crime in 1793 to kidnap two chiefs in order to save a little trouble. We have seen how Cook shot natives for refusing to answer questions, and how De Surville could seize and sail away with a friendly chief because some one else had stolen his boat. When in 1794 that high and distinguished body, the East India Company, sent a well-armed "snow" to the Hauraki gulf for kauri spars she did not leave until her captain had killed his quota of natives,—two men and a woman,—shot, because, forsooth, some axes had been stolen. If such were the doings of officials, it came as a matter of course that the hard-handed merchant-skippers who in brigs and schooners hung round the coasts of the Islands thought little of carrying off men or women. They would turn their victims adrift in Australia or on some South Sea islet, as their humour moved them. With even more cruel callousness, they would sometimes put Maoris carried off from one tribe on shore amongst another and maybe hostile tribe. Slavery was the best fate such unfortunates could expect. On one occasion the missionaries in the Bay of Islands rescued from bondage twelve who had in this fashion been thrown amongst their sworn enemies. Their only offence was that they had happened to be trading on board a brig in their own port when a fair wind sprang up. The rascal in command carried them off rather than waste any of the wind by sending them on shore.
An even more heartless piece of brutality was the conduct of a certain captain from Sydney, who took away with him the niece of a Bay of Islands chief, and after living with her for months abandoned her on shore in the Bay of Plenty, where she was first enslaved and finally killed and eaten by the local chief. The result was a bitter tribal war in which she was amply avenged.