Brooking T. The History of New Zealand
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24
The History of New Zealand
suing their own agendas, in the years before 1840 Maori and the newcom-
ers they dubbed Pakeha served a long and troubled apprenticeship in race
relations. This painful learning process helped shape a complex and dis-
tinctive pattern of relations between European colonizers and indigenous
people.
EXPLORERS
The first European to discover New Zealand was a Dutchman named
Abel Janzoon Tasman. He sailed there in
1642
on behalf of the Dutch East
India Company, in pursuit of the so-called great south land. Many geog-
raphers still believed that the known world had to be balanced by a large
southern continent, and Dutch entrepreneurs hoped that its discovery
would open up new trading opportunities. But instead of a continent,
Tasman found only parts of the New Zealand coast. After a bloody conflict
with Maori at the top of the South Island, he retreated in haste. His reports
condemned this part of Statenlandt (as he called it) as dangerous and of
little interest to Europeans. Dutch cartographers later added the name
Nieuw Zeeland to acknowledge the contribution made to the Dutch East
India Company by investors based in Zeeland. A less appropriate name
is hard to imagine. New Zealand is, in Tasman's own words, "a land
uplifted high," whereas Zeeland in Holland is dead flat. Tasman's fleeting
visit also produced little impact on Maori, as the tribe he encountered
(supposedly Ngati Matakokiri) seemingly disappeared, and there is scant
record of Tasman in Maori oral tradition.
The world largely ignored Tasman's apparently insignificant discovery
until Lieutenant James Cook and the famous botanist Joseph Banks redis-
covered New Zealand for Britain and for science in 1769. The British Ad-
miralty sent Cook, Banks, and an astronomer, Charles Green, to Tahiti to
observe the transit of Venus (the passage of the planet across the sun), as
this celestial event would not be viewed for another 105 years. Cook was
also instructed to check out Tasman's findings to ascertain whether a great
south land indeed lay hidden behind Nieuw Zeeland.
After an apparently successful observation of Venus (the expedition
lacked the sensitive instruments to do the job properly), Cook sailed
southwest and sighted New Zealand on October
7,1769.
His and Banks's
account of the potential of the new land aroused much interest in Britain,
especially when popularized by author John Hawkesworth. Guided by
prevailing scientific theories of soil fertility, the navigator and the botanist
guessed that rich soils lay hidden beneath the dense rain forest that
seemed to cover the country. Parts of northeastern North America had
An Australasian Colony, 1792-1840 25
produced soils well suited for cropping once settlers had removed the
trees.
But Cook and Banks were not to know that New Zealand's forests
leach the soil of nutrients rather than improving it. Banks was also in-
fluenced by his father's success in draining his estates in swampy Lin-
colnshire and believed that New Zealand too might easily be drained
and converted to smiling farmland. Both explorers also favored New
Zealand's temperate climate over the heat of tropical Tahiti. They deemed
the big islands of the new
land—similar
in size to
Britain—to
be an ideal
place for British settlement. Banks later admitted that he found the pre-
dominantly green vegetation a little dull compared with the tropical lux-
uriance he was to find in Australia, and missed the opportunities to
discover unusual animals like marsupials. But New Zealand's mild cli-
mate and apparently limitless potential for farming held out enormous
appeal.
Cook possessed a number of advantages over Tasman that helped him
in mapping New Zealand's coastline with considerable accuracy. These
included more navigable ships than his predecessor and the ability to
calculate longitude (east-west) as well as latitude (north-south) instead of
relying on dead reckoning. Even so, it would be churlish to deny Cook's
great skill as both sailor and navigator, especially as he lacked accurate
clocks (or chronometers) until his second voyage of
1772-1775.
While circumnavigating the country on his first voyage, Cook claimed
the area of Mercury Bay southeast of Auckland and the tranquil waters
of the Marlborough Sounds (at the top of the South Island) for the British
Crown by right of discovery. He and Banks renamed many prominent
topographical features after fellow officers and scientists on board (in-
cluding Banks Island, which is actually a peninsula, Cook Strait, and So-
lander's Isle), patrons such as admirals of the Royal Navy (Hawke's Bay
and Mount
Egmont),
and familiar places in Britain (the Firth of Thames
and the River Thames). Sometimes the phlegmatic Yorkshireman indulged
in flights of whimsy or little jokes as he named the landscape (Cape Foul-
wind, Dusky Sound, the Poor Knights Islands, Hen and Chickens, and
Doubtless Bay).
Cook's first visit suggested that the existence of a great south land was
extremely unlikely. His second voyage in
1772
proved the matter beyond
reasonable doubt when he explored the edges of Antarctica. His remark-
ably measured observations on Maori, however, proved more influential
in firing the European imagination by confirming notions of the noble
savage influenced by the contemporary Romantic movement. Nonethe-
less,
Cook sailed to New Zealand as a man of the Enlightenment who
believed in the capacity of rational thought to overcome cultural differ-
26
The History of New Zealand
ence and who viewed all forms of humanity as dignified, even if not all
were equally civilized. He shared none of Tasman's fears of goblins, mon-
sters,
and giants and remained insatiably curious throughout his life. Al-
though he made criticisms, especially of cannibalism, and killed perhaps
20 Maori in the course of his travels, he nevertheless regarded them as an
intelligent, brave, modest, and healthy people who lived in harmony with
their environment. This positive response contrasted dramatically with
the negative image of ignoble savages promulgated by contemporary
French explorers.
In contrast to Cook, the French generally had a miserable time in New
Zealand. Scurvy ravaged the crew of Jean Francois Mare de Surville's ship
in 1770 as the leaky St. John Baptiste sailed around New Zealand in Cook's
wake. De Surville fell out with Maori on the northeastern tip of New
Zealand following the theft of a yawl or small sailing boat, and he re-
sponded by burning villages. In
1772,
in the northwest corner of the coun-
try, Captain Marion du Fresne offended Maori custom and overstretched
tribal resources, with the result that Ngai Puhi murdered him and 26 of
his men. The remaining crew responded by massacring 250 Maori villag-
ers.
Another French explorer, de la Perouse, disappeared at sea in 1788
soon after the first fleet reached Botany Bay in Australia. Artists on these
voyages portrayed Maori as strange, exotic, and debased savages, while
journals kept by crew members revealed only modest enthusiasm for New
Zealand's potential for trade and settlement. No equivalent to Hawkes-
worth emerged in France to promote New Zealand as ideally suited to
European settlement. In turn, Maori developed a deep suspicion of the
French after the excesses of de Surville and du
Fresne's
crew. British in-
terests later manipulated this mistrust in persuading Maori to opt for the
British rather than the French variant of colonization.
Later British explorers, such as Vancouver in
1791,
and
Malaspina,
the
Italian leader of a Spanish expedition in the same year, generally con-
firmed Cook's judgments. These expeditions produced little impact on
Maori beyond encouraging more extensive cultivation of the nutritious
potato and greater use of iron tools. Partly as a result, there occurred what
historians Gordon Parsonson and James Belich have labeled an agricul-
tural revolution, enabling iwi to move to new locations nearer whaling
stations, especially in the colder southern areas. The potato proved easy
to grow compared with the kumara and permitted more sustained military
campaigns. Carving also flourished as Maori craftsmen acquired metal
tools.
Thus sealers, and later whalers and timber workers, soon came to
play much more prominent roles in contact than explorers.
An Australasian Colony, 1792-1840
27
SEALING, WHALING, TIMBER FELLING, AND
FLAX
The sealing industry pulled New Zealand into the orbit of global capi-
talism from as early as 1792. American and Australian-based operations
slaughtered every animal they could find to supply the new Chinese craze
for felt hats. China also happened to supply the tea craved by the English,
thereby encouraging the growth of a truly international trade. Once the
seal population of Bass Strait (south of Melbourne) had been decimated
(by about 1802), attention turned to the chilly waters of southern New
Zealand, mainly around Stewart Island and the
sub-Antarctic
islands. The
reckless slaughter that followed peaked around 1806, when John Grono
gathered 60,000 skins. The same sealer sold another 35,000 skins to the
Sydney market in
1810,
when in a single week seals'-skins traded fetched
a record
£100,000
(about US$500,000). Not surprisingly, the rough sealers,
frequently ex-convicts, had hunted the seals of this hostile southern en-
vironment almost to extinction by the end of that year.
Numbers recovered a little as operations declined, and another burst
followed in the late 1820s. John Boultbee, one of few literate sealers, re-
corded details of this second wave of hunting in a journal in which he
described a life of extraordinary brutality. Captains treated their men
badly, often abandoning them to their fate by leaving them on lonely
islands without adequate supplies for months. The men, chronically un-
dernourished and frequently drunk, generally approached local Maori in
similar fashion. Fighting broke out constantly between the two groups. In
1817
Kai Tahu (the southern branch of Ngai Tahu) from Otakou near Dun-
edin attacked and killed two American sealers who had tried to buy the
shrunken and mummified heads of tribal enemies as curios for the amuse-
ment of English and American gentlemen. The Americans razed a village
close to modern-day Dunedin in revenge for an earlier attack. Thereafter,
an uneasy truce prevailed, with Maori remaining deeply suspicious of
sealers and their grisly tastes. The name of Murdering Beach encapsulates
the fragility of these early racial encounters. Even so, some sealers estab-
lished long-term liaisons with local Maori women, and many Ngai Tahu
families incorporate Europeans into their genealogies from the early 1800s.
This otherwise unhappy apprenticeship in race relations came to an end
by the early 1830s, when overhunting killed off the seals completely.
Whaling proved much more important in both economic and social
terms.
Compared with sealing, enormous fortunes could be earned through
whaling—specifically,
by gathering the fine-grained spermaceti oil used
28 The History of New Zealand
in precision machinery from the brain of the sperm whale and boiling
blubber down for fuel. Whaling also involved ships visiting from as far
away as Nantucket in New England, Britain, and Europe (especially
France, Norway, and Russia).
Whaling in New Zealand took two forms. The first was on the Bay of
Islands in the far north, where crews stopped for rest and recreation after
hunting the fast and dangerous sperm whale. Visits by whalers to the Bay
of Islands averaged
118
per year in the 1830s. Historian Harry Morton
estimated that about 26,000 men visited between 1820 and 1840, about
20,00 of them in the
1820s.
Visits by American ships declined in the later
period in contrast to the so-called British decade of the 1820s. Northern
tribe Nga Puhi responded to the obvious trading opportunities by becom-
ing expert wheat growers and supplied the visitors with food and pro-
visions. Many of the British and Australian crews drank heavily and
treated local slave women as prostitutes, a category of humanity unknown
in the pre-European Maori world. Chiefs manipulated these women to
exchange sex for iron tools, cloth, money, and sometimes muskets. Vene-
real
disease—hitherto
unknown to
Maori—spread
rapidly, especially gon-
orrhea, and lowered the level of Maori fertility. In contrast to the British
whalers, the Quaker captains on the American ships enforced strict dis-
cipline on their men.
As with sealing, careless exploitation involving the indiscriminate tak-
ing of cows and pups meant that the northern fishery was largely de-
stroyed by about
1840.
Historian and anthropologist Anne Salmond notes
that many Nga Puhi men worked on these ships and visited Hobart Town
in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) as well as Sydney on a regular basis.
Indeed, Maori first met Christian missionaries on such a journey to Syd-
ney. Some Nga Puhi traveled even further afield to America and Britain.
Such journeys convinced northern Maori that Western culture had much
to offer, especially in terms of useful technology. This Maori experience of
the wider world must not be overlooked in understanding why Maori
chiefs willingly signed a treaty with the British in 1840.
The second major form taken by the whaling
industry—shore-based
or
bay
whaling—was
carried out from about 80 stations down the east coast
of both islands from Mahia Peninsula in northern
Hawke's
Bay to Riv-
erton near modern-day Invercargill. This produced a much greater impact
than activities in the Bay of Islands because whalers stayed semiperma-
nently in these bases. Onshore whalers chased the slow southern right
whale, so named because it floated once harpooned and was the right
kind of whale to hunt. They then towed the animal back to shore and
boiled down the blubber for heating and lighting purposes. Clothing man-
An Australasian Colony, 1792-1840 29
ufacturers used whalebone for the corsets and undergarments that so re-
stricted the movement of nineteenth-century women.
Hunting could occur only during winter, when the hapless southern
right whales migrated down the coast, so that whalers had to commit to
farming during the summer months. Some, such as Johnny Jones, based
at Matanaka north of Dunedin, became expert farmers. Jones flourished
by combining the operation of seven whaling stations and substantial
farming
interests; he employed 280 men and later became a big landowner
in North Otago. Such endeavor also encouraged Maori farming, and many
hapu moved around the coast to supply these whaling-based settlements
with food. The potato spurred on a quiet but vital agricultural revolution
within the Maori world.
Long-term relationships inevitably developed between Europeans and
local women, especially among the southern Ngai Tahu. Some Ngai Tahu,
such as the prominent chief Tuhawaiki (called Bloody Jack by the whalers
because of his constant use of an expletive they taught him), actually ran
their own whale ships. The sharp-ended whale boats, in which crews of
five to eight men set out to harpoon their prey, also proved popular with
Maori. These strong and highly maneuverable boats proved more suited
to the rough seas of southern New Zealand than open waka (canoes).
Both Australian and Maori whalers made plenty of money before whale
numbers collapsed in the
1840s
in both the northern and southern fisheries
as a result of overhunting. Until then, the chief beneficiaries of the industry
had been its financial backers in Sydney (especially Thomas Campbell and
his family), Nantucket, and London, as whaling pulled New Zealand even
more firmly into the orbit of international capitalism. Although the total
returns from onshore whaling have never been calculated, in one good
year a middle-sized station like that at Cloudy Bay at the top of the South
Island could earn £20,000. Exports of whale products to the main receiving
port of Sydney grew from around £58,000 in 1830 to around £224,000 in
1840,
before collapsing dramatically. High overheads and wages offset
profits, and bankruptcies were as common as runaway successes. Esti-
mates of the capital required to run a station vary from £1,200 to £5,000
per year. Johnny Jones spent some £15,000 on his seven stations in 1839
alone. Skilled harpoonists and helmsmen could make up to £35 for three
months'
work—about
double the average wage.
Economic historians categorize whaling as a depletable industry be-
cause it self-destructed once the resource was exhausted. Consequently,
like all the other exploitative industries pursued in nineteenth-century
New Zealand, it acted as a tributary rather than a mainstream of devel-
opment. Even so, the major historian of the industry, Harry Morton, ar-
30
The History of New Zealand
gues that whaling played an important role in shaping race relations, in
stimulating economic activity, and in raising Maori expectations of greater
trade prospects and the advantages of contact with Europeans. Whaling
also left its imprint on the
landscape—boiling
pots and buildings survive
in many isolated and windswept parts of the country. It produced a major
environmental impact by virtually removing whales from New Zealand
waters until relatively recently, and a more subtle impact through the
introduction of rats, dogs, and cats that set about feasting on the slow
flightless native birds. And whalers, along with explorers, sealers, timber
workers, and traders, unintentionally introduced a host of exotic plants,
many of which would soon be viewed as weeds in this newly rediscovered
land.
TIMBER,TRADE,AND
RESOURCES
The tall trees reported with such enthusiasm by Cook and Banks seemed
ideally suited to meeting the demands of the British Navy, especially once
the supply of good timber from the Baltic area began to dwindle. New
Zealand appealed to naval authorities in much the same way that timber-
rich New England appealed to Britons in the seventeenth century. On
closer inspection, however, it became apparent that New Zealand's tall
native trees produced soft timber, while the hardwoods generally grew
too short for the tall masts required by vessels of the Royal Navy. (Masts
needed to be 74 to 84 feet long, 21 to 23 inches in diameter, and perfectly
straight.) Nevertheless, intensive milling of the giant kauri tree, whose
timber was ideally suited to building houses and boats, began as early as
1793 in the Thames area southeast of Auckland and took off in the Hok-
ianga (in New Zealand's northwest) in the 1820s. By the late 1830s millers
had also returned to the Thames area in strength.
Timber remained a major staple of the New Zealand economy through-
out the nineteenth century and won considerable prosperity for millers in
the Auckland area in particular. Production increased from 300,000 super-
feet (length, width, and depth) in
1843
to
1
million super-feet by
1847.
Life
proved tougher for the saw men and mill workers, who had to endure
harsh working conditions. Pit sawing was exhausting and dangerous
work, especially in the wet environments where trees grew in profusion.
There were other dangers to be faced. Australian and British millers
learned from American whalers the skill of building trip dams that could
be released in a flood so that the logs could be floated downstream to the
coast. As in New England, this proved a treacherous business. Accidents
happened frequently, and blood poisoning became a major killer in
An Australasian Colony, 1792-1840 31
nineteenth-century New Zealand. Loneliness, a very monotonous diet,
and lack of female company also encouraged drunkenness. Although
workers' wages stayed low, some entrepreneurs won handsome profits
down to the early 1900s, by which time they had cut out over 2 million
acres of kauri.
Flax milling also grew into a major industry in early New Zealand. The
abundant native flax (Phormium tenax) initially appeared to provide an
ideal resource for making rope, but it soon proved even less useful than
the tall but soft-wooded
kahikatea
trees. Traditional European methods of
converting flax to linen simply did not work, and the job of processing
the fiber was handed over to Maori. Flax became the subject of some
farcical incidents. As early as 1793 Lieutenant-Governor Gidley King of
Norfolk Island tried to promote this industry by kidnapping two Maori
men, Tuki Tahua and Ngahuruhuru, only to discover that they knew noth-
ing of cultivating or weaving flax, which was regarded as women's work.
Thereafter, flax continued as New Zealand's Cinderella industry, prom-
ising much and delivering little. Maori processed about
10,000
tons in
1830-1831,
an arduous process as buyers required that about 40 tons of
raw material had to be processed to produce
1
ton of dressed flax. Traders
shipped this hard-won bounty to Sydney, but supplies spluttered along
intermittently thereafter. Tough Pakeha workingmen later eked a living
out of cutting the course, fibrous plant but, although 300 mills were op-
erating in the peak years of the 1870s, flax never accounted for more than
about 2 percent of exports. More importantly for our story, Maori ex-
changed hard-won dressed flax for muskets, so escalating the intertribal
musket wars that dominated the 1820s.
Interaction between Maori and Europeans in this period yielded mixed
results. A mixed-race group known as Pakeha-Maori was involved in the
whaling and timber industries and played an important intermediary role
in the trading of goods. Although the Pakeha-Maori passed on a limited
knowledge of Maori beliefs to later settlers, they contributed little to a
more sophisticated understanding of Maori culture. A trader like Philip
Tapsell married into the Arawa tribe after setting Tauranga and founded
a important local dynasty. However, these half-caste families tended to
operate outside the mainstream of settler society until much later in the
nineteenth century.
Intermarriage also helps explain Maori demographic recovery from the
1880s,
although initially the influx of new genes occurred on too small a
scale to help build immunity to European diseases. Common infections
such as the cold, influenza, and measles wreaked havoc on some com-
munities at first. However, New Zealand's relatively large size and ex-
32 The History of New Zealand
treme
isolation (the sea journey from Europe was too long for the deadly
smallpox virus to survive) meant that imported diseases did not cause a
demographic catastrophe as in other parts of Polynesia or in Central
America. Maori population fell from around 100,000 to about 60,000 by
1840 as a consequence of both disease and the musket wars. Yet even at
its low point of 46,000 in 1896 (almost certainly a serious underestimate),
the decline of the Maori population never approximated that of Central
America or Australia, where population numbers fell by a factor of 12 or
more.
Although Maori health problems certainly escalated rapidly after con-
tact, these comparative statistics emphasize that the Maori adjusted better
than many other indigenous peoples to the onslaught of European colo-
nization. The milder impact of colonization also underscores the power
of Maori agency and their ongoing dominance down to around 1850 as
they continued to use potatoes, maize, and wheat as economic tools and
turn European technology to effective use, developing new skills in tra-
ditional areas such as carving and canoe-building. Many iwi also took
strategic advantage of their resident Europeans, "parking Pakeha in the
tribal garage," in the arresting phrase of historian James Belich.
DUAL COLONIZATION AND RESETTLEMENT
The major exception to the generally positive effects of contact stemmed
from a simple piece of European military
technology—the
musket. As a
result of its introduction, the
1820s
were marred by large-scale intertribal
fighting, and Aotearoa/New Zealand was effectively resettled in a number
of major tribal movements before full-scale European settlement began.
By the early 1830s Maori capacity for military engineering had largely
nullified the initial advantage given by the musket. After that, the older
balance of power seems to have been restored, but not before the musket
had brought about the deaths of some 10,000 Maori. For the first time in
Maori history, slaves were taken on a large scale during these wars, and
their eventual release would play a key role in the spread of the new
faith
of Christianity. Wandering bands of warriors (or toa) also strengthened
the genealogical links between many tribes that had formerly lived very
separately. As a result, alliances changed dramatically. All this fighting,
loving, and childbearing would prove critical to the eventual signing of
the Treaty of Waitangi and the Maori choice of British rather than French
imperial rule.
The first major musket wars spread
from
the north as the powerful Nga
Puhi tribe ventured south to avenge old grievances. Raids in 1818 under
An Australasian Colony, 1792-1840
33
Murupaenga pushed as far south as
Hawke's
Bay and stimulated the
emergence of another powerful tribe known as Ngati Kahungunu. Fight-
ing intensified after the northern warlord Hongi Hika traveled with the
missionary Thomas Kendall to England in 1820 and returned with over
300 muskets. Hongi then led devastating raids against his southern neigh-
bor, Ngati Whatua, driving the tribe out of the Auckland isthmus before
crushing two more tribes, Ngati Maru and Ngati Paoa, in the Thames/
Coromandel area. Arawa of Rotorua and the Tainui confederation of the
Waikato also felt
Hongi's
wrath before he lost support of powerful factions
within his own iwi around 1826. Hongi was wounded in inter-hapu skir-
mishing in 1827 and died in 1828. Although he failed to win any new
territory, he took many slaves and transformed the political landscape.
Some tribes were not beyond using Pakeha to gain their ends. Historian
Russell Stone has recently shown how Ngati Whatua were driven into the
protective and
all-too-often
manipulative hands of Tainui, who used Ngati
Whatua to win monies from the sale of Auckland to the settler govern-
ment. Once armed with the all-powerful musket, Tainui turned their at-
tention to harassing the small Ngati Toa iwi based at Kawhia as well as
making numerous raids southwest into Taranaki. Ngati Toa responded to
constant military harassment by moving south under the skilful leader-
ship of the formerly minor chief Te Rauparaha. Some of the northern
Taranaki tribe of Ati Awa and Te
Rauparaha's
inland allies and relations,
Ngati Raukawa, joined him. These migrations of the
mid-1820s
pushed
smaller iwi such as Muaupoko and Rangitane out of their traditional
homelands. Te Rauparaha eventually settled in the island fortress of Kap-
iti,
north of Wellington, while Ati Awa put down roots at Waikanae, and
Raukawa settled in Otaki.
After 1830 Te Rauparaha, who had grown rich from whaling and trad-
ing flax, turned his attention to the South Island and inflicted several
severe defeats on Ngai Tahu from 1830 to 1832. Thereafter, Ngai Tahu
fought back and confined Ngati Toa to the top of the South Island. Some
Ati Awa meantime traveled all the way to the remote Chatham Islands
and virtually wiped out the peaceful Moriori. Fighting also flared across
the central North
Island—involving
Tuwharetoa of Taupo, Arawa of Ro-
turua, and Ngati Kahungunu in
particular—until
exhaustion and the con-
struction of what Belich calls fireproof "fighting pa" restored some kind
of balance.
By the late 1830s skirmishing had taken on a ritual character; opposing
warriors stood so far apart that they were able to use boys to retrieve
spent ammunition for further volleys. It is understandable why some his-
torians have attributed the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi to the desire