The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840

308 Pages·2012·3.935 MB·English

by  Vincent O’Malley

The Meeting Place
Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840
Vincent O’Malley
AUCKLAND
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
For my mother
contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations viii
1 Introduction 1
2 First Encounters 11
Becoming Māori, becoming Pākehā 12
Before the middle ground — Tasman and the time of mutual
incomprehension 14
Cross-cultural travels: Cook, Banks and Tupaia in Aotearoa 19
The French connection: Jean-François Marie de Surville in
Tai Tokerau 29
‘The tribe of Marion’: Marion du Fresne’s bloody encounter 31
3 Strangers Landing in Strange Lands 38
Kāwana Kingi and the Norfolk Island connection 39
A native abroad: Savage and Moehanga 50
A tragic liaison: George Bruce and Atahoe 55
Deepsea whalers and Māori 57
Clashing cultures: the burning of the Boyd 61
A regal visit: Hongi Hika in London and the aftermath 63
Kupe’s journey 65
4 On the Middle Ground 70
Importing missionaries: Ruatara and Marsden 71
The missionary challenge 78
Saving souls abroad: Tuai and Titere in England 83
Southern sealers and whalers 87
Middle New Zealand: early interactions in the Cook Strait region
and further north 93
Jumping ship: further European settlement in the north 98
Learning to get along with one another: the nature of Māori and
Pākehā relationships before 1840 102
5 Trading Relationships: The Commercial Frontier 110
Commerce and gift exchange 112
Trade and agriculture 122
Selling services 130
New wants and needs 133
Ownership and use rights 142
‘Tuku whenua’ and land dealings 146
6 Sex on the Frontier 148
Sex and sailors 149
The sexual politics of the frontier 158
7 Subverting Conversion? Religious Encounters 162
Understanding Māori ‘conversion’ 162
A unique form of Christianity? 169
Tapu and other customs 185
8 The Political World of Aotearoa before 1840 195
The evolving role of rangatira in the pre-Waitangi era 195
Taua muru 203
Rūnanga and komiti 208
A dying people? 210
9 The Impact of Cultural Encounter on the New Zealand
Frontier 215
10 The End of the Middle Ground 228
Notes 233
Bibliography 262
Index 277
acknowledgements
The supposed exceptionalism of much New Zealand history can
sometimes seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everything looks unique if
you fail to search for parallels elsewhere. This book draws unashamedly
on a wider international historiography of indigenous and European
encounters for its conceptual underpinnings. Greg Dening and Nicholas
Thomas are important here. But it is the North American historian Richard
White’s notion of a ‘middle ground’ that provides a key framework for the
book.
My debt of gratitude to a number of New Zealand historians, past and
present, will also be apparent in the many references to the works of (in
particular) Angela Ballara, James Belich, Judith Binney, J. M. R. Owens,
Ann Parsonson, Grant Phillipson, Anne Salmond, Kathleen Shawcross
and former Fulbright scholar Harrison Wright, amongst others.
Then there are those who have provided me with specific assistance
in the course of my research and writing of this book. I am particularly
grateful to Bruce Stirling, Redmer Yska and the anonymous reviewer for
reading and commenting on various drafts of this work. Others who have
helped, both directly and indirectly, include David Armstrong, Ian Barber,
Ben Dibley, John Hutton and Michael Keir-Morrissey.
An Award in History from the New Zealand History Research Trust
Fund in 2010 enabled me to spend some time working on this project other
than just during evenings and weekends, for which I am most thankful.
I am also grateful for the support of Auckland University Press.
Sam Elworthy’s insightful suggestions helped improve a rough initial
draft. Anna Hodge has been a model of professionalism and good cheer
throughout. Katrina Duncan’s clean and reader-friendly design is much
appreciated. Mike Wagg’s meticulous editing eliminated many mistakes
and clumsy wording on my part. Jacinda Torrance produced a stunning
cover, while Diane Lowther’s indexing efforts are also very welcome.
Finally, a big thanks is due to my family, friends and colleagues for their
support during the completion of this book, and especially to Joanna
Kidman for being there for me throughout the journey from inception to
publication.
VII
list of abbreviations
AJHR Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives
ANZ Archives New Zealand (Head Office, Wellington)
ANZ (Akl) Archives New Zealand (Auckland Regional Office)
ATL Alexander Turnbull Library
AWMML Auckland War Memorial Museum Library
CFRT Crown Forestry Rental Trust
CMS Church Missionary Society
DNZB Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
GBPP Great Britain Parliamentary Papers
HRNZ Historical Records of New Zealand
JPS Journal of the Polynesian Society
NZJH New Zealand Journal of History
WMS Wesleyan Missionary Society
VIII
one
Introduction
I
n 1642 Māori discovered Europe. It was a fleeting and
ultimately unhappy experience, probably dimly remembered (and
little understood) for the next 127 years. But with the rediscovery
of Europe in 1769 there was no escape. An irreversible relationship
between Māori and Pākehā was thereafter locked in, one in which both
parties came to define themselves by reference to the other. This is a
book about that process of mutual discovery, of contact and encounter
— meeting, greeting and seeing — in the period to about 1840. Its focus
is on the meeting place of two, quite different, cultures and peoples,
and the outcomes of these encounters. First meetings can be awkward,
especially if the parties involved have little in common, and are unable to
freely communicate with each other. Language obstacles can be overcome
quickly enough where there is a will, but the bigger cultural barriers might
remain. Customs and practices that came naturally to one group might be
regarded as ridiculous or even deeply offensive by the other. Law and lore
could clash. What was highly sacred to the first party might be profane in
the eyes of the second. A modus operandi would need to be found, but on
whose terms, exactly?
Conventional wisdom at one time had it that, after an initial period
of resistance, Māori underwent profound religious, political, socio-
economic and other changes. They became — to adopt the language of
anthropologists — acculturated into Pākehā society. Acculturation was
1
2 THE MEETING PLACE
unilateral, a one-way street. That Māori might impact upon or influence
Pākehā culture or thinking was virtually inconceivable. Māori were the
impediment that had to be removed — through a process of acculturation
or assimilation preferably, though physical elimination was also an option
under certain circumstances — before New Zealand’s destiny as a South
Seas Britain could be fulfilled.
It is sometimes said that the study of history attracts those who seek
to adopt a self-righteous pose towards their forebears. Our generation
knows so much better than its predecessors that things were rarely
so simple. And yet, in the period before 1840, few European observers
seriously doubted that Māori society had undergone radical and far-
reaching changes. The extent and timing of those changes was uneven.
Not every meeting place was identical. In the deep south, the local Ngāi
Tahu population mixed freely with whalers, sealers and traders. A small
number of Pākehā were sprinkled across the area north of the Cook
Strait region, where further whaling communities were to be found, and
towards the top half of the North Island. There, and especially in the
Bay of Islands across to Hokianga and north to Whangaroa, contact and
encounter had been early and sustained. By the late 1830s nearly half of
the estimated 2000 Europeans resident in New Zealand lived north of the
Waitemata Harbour, with another third or so occupying the various South
Island whaling stations. The remaining sixth was scattered in between.1
Pākehā were dwarfed by a total Māori population somewhere in the
order of 70,000 to 90,000, though this was overwhelmingly concentrated
in the North Island.2 Māori in both the South Island, and those parts of
Northland most heavily settled by Europeans, still remained numerically
dominant by the late 1830s, but not to the same extent as was the case in
other parts of the country. While the nature and extent of contact in the
north of New Zealand was hardly typical (and differed from its southern/
Murihiku counterpart), it can still be seen as a kind of hothouse of mutual
Māori and Pākehā discovery of one another. It is there that local Māori
were said by observers to be among the first tribes to embrace European
influences and ideas in consequence of their interactions with multiple
whalers, traders, missionaries and explorers in the pre-Treaty era.
Those ‘observers’ were hardly innocent bystanders, however, but
directly implicated for the most part in a wide range of interactions
with Māori. The problem of one-sided sources is a common one for
many historians grappling with aspects of nineteenth-century Māori
INTRODUCTION 3
history, but is especially acute for the earliest period of contact history,
given the absence of a written language before the 1820s. Almost all of
the key primary sources consulted for this work are therefore European
ones. And it is not as if such sources are especially representative even
of the Europeans to have visited or resided in New Zealand during this
period, having an inherent and obvious bias towards the literate, well-
educated and relatively well-heeled, over the poor and illiterate. Not too
many escaped Irish convicts or archetypal drunken Kororareka sailors left
journals recounting their experiences of Māori society. On the other hand,
there is no shortage of material from a missionary perspective — much of
it painfully pious, repetitious, seemingly devoid of real insight at times
and frequently prone to exaggerate the missionaries’ own influence over
Māori society.
Despite this imbalance, the missionaries were not without their
own literate critics, many of whom proved only too willing to expose
the supposed shortcomings of those described as ‘godly mechanics’ by
one historian.3 The writings of these contemporary detractors provide
a healthy antidote to the missionary sources, while sectarian divisions
between the missionaries (especially, but not exclusively, between the
Protestant and Catholic ones after 1838) further exposed some failings.
In other respects, too, there is just enough diversity in the sources to
provide a healthy insight into a range of issues. To take one example:
while most British sources were rather too coy to go into much detail as
to the nature of sexual liaisons with Māori women during this period, the
French had no qualms at all.
To some extent, then, such factors can help to mitigate the obvious
lack of Māori sources for this period. Yet, having said that, the limitations
surrounding a topic such as is explored here need to be acknowledged
from the outset. The evidence available to us from the pre-Treaty period
is overwhelmingly anecdotal in nature and frequently contradictory or
incomplete. Early nineteenth-century Europeans did not share the same
concerns as early twenty-first-century historians, and even when the
former did comment on such issues they frequently failed to agree on
the reality of the situation. Culture is not just (as many anthropologists
now agree) a contestable concept, but it is also a highly subjective one
in many respects. Different Europeans looked at the same things in
nineteenth-century Māori society and sometimes reached directly
contrary conclusions. Even with a supposed wealth of empirical data to