New Zealand is at present divided into nine semi-independent provinces, of which three are large and powerful, and the remainder comparatively small and poor. Six of the nine are true States, having each its history as an independent settlement; the remaining three are creations of the Federal government or of the crown.
These are not the only difficulties in the way of New Zealand statesmen, for the provinces themselves are far from being homogeneous units. Two of the wealthiest of all the States, which were settled as colonies with a religious tinge—Otago, Presbyterian; and Canterbury, Episcopalian—have been blessed or cursed with the presence of a vast horde of diggers, of no particular religion, and free from any reverence for things established. Canterbury Province is not only politically divided against itself, but geographically split in twain by the Snowy Range, and the diggers hold thewest-coast bush, the old settlers the east-coast plain. East and west, each cries out that the other side is robbing it. The Christchurch people say that their money is being spent on Westland, and the Westland diggers cry out against the foppery and aristocratic pretense of Christchurch. A division of the province seems inevitable, unless, indeed, the “Centralists” gain the day, and bring about either a closer union of the whole of the provinces, coupled with a grant of local self-government to their subdivisions, or else the entire destruction of the provincial system.
The division into provinces was at one time necessary, from the fact that the settlements were historically distinct, and physically cut off from each other by the impenetrability of the bush and the absence of all roads; but the barriers are now surmounted, and no sufficient reason can be found for keeping up ten cabinets and ten legislatures for a population of only 200,000 souls. Such is the costliness of the provincial system and of Maori wars, that the taxation of the New Zealanders is nine times as heavy as that of their brother colonists in Canada.
It is not probable that so costly and so inefficient a system of government as that which now obtains in New Zealand can long continue to exist. It is not only dear and bad, but dangerous in addition; and during my visit to Port Chalmers, the province of Otago was loudly threatening secession. Like all other federal constitutions, that of New Zealand fails to provide a sufficiently strong central power to meet a divergence of interests between the several States. The system which failed in Greece, which failed in Germany, which failed in America, has failed here in the antipodes; and it may be said that, in these days of improved communications, wherever federation ispossible, a still closer union is at least as likely to prove lasting.
New Zealand suffers, not only by the artificial division into provinces, but also by the physical division of the country into two great islands, too far apart to be ever thoroughly homogeneous, too near together to be wholly independent of each other. The difficulty has been hitherto increased by the existence in the North of a powerful and warlike native race, all but extinct in the South Island. Not only have the Southern people no native wars, but they have no native claimants from whom every acre for the settler must be bought, and they naturally decline to submit to ruinous taxation to purchase Parewanui from, or to defend Taranaki against, the Maories. Having been thwarted by the Home government in the agitation for the “separation” of the islands, the Southern people now aim at “Ultra-Provincialism,” declaring for a system under which the provinces would virtually be independent colonies, connected only by a confederation of the loosest kind.
The jealousies of the great towns, here as in Italy, have much bearing upon the political situation. Auckland is for separation, because in that event it would of necessity become the seat of the government of the North Island. In the South, Christchurch and Dunedin have similar claims; and each of them, ignoring the other, begs for separation in the hope of becoming the Southern capital. Wellington and Nelson alone are for the continuance of the federation—Wellington because it is already the capital, and Nelson because it is intriguing to supplant its neighbor. Although the difficulties of the moment mainly arise out of the war expenditure, and will terminate with the extinction of the Maori race, her geographical shape almostforbids us to hope that New Zealand will ever form a single country under a strong central government.
To obtain an adequate idea of the difficulty of his task, a new governor, on landing in New Zealand, could not do better than cross the Southern Island. On the west side of the mountains he would find a restless digger-democracy, likely to be succeeded in the future by small manufacturers, and spade-farmers growing root-crops upon small holdings of fertile loam; on the east, gentlemen sheep-farmers, holding their twenty thousand acres each; supporters by their position of the existing state of things, or of an aristocratic republic, in which men of their own caste would rule.
Christchurch—Episcopalian, dignified—the first settlement in the province, and still the capital, affects to despise Hokitika, already more wealthy and more populous. Christchurch imports English rooks to caw in the elm-trees of her cathedral close; Hokitika imports men. Christchurch has not fallen away from her traditions: every street is named from an English bishopric, and the society is that of an English country town.
Returning northward, along the coast, in the shade of the cold and gloomy mountains of the Kaikoura Range, I found at Wellington two invitations awaiting me to be present at great gatherings of the native tribes.
The next day I started for the Manawatu River and Parewanui Pah.
THEname “Maori” is said to mean “native,” but the boast on the part of the Maori race contained in the title “Natives of the Soil” is one which conflicts with their traditions. These make them out to be mere interlopers—Tahitians, they themselves say—who, within historic ages, sailed down island by island in their war canoes, massacring the inhabitants, and, finally landing in New Zealand, found a numerous horde of blacks of the Australian race living in the forests of the South Island. Favored by a year of exceptional drought, they set fire to the woods, and burnt to the last man, or drove into the sea the aboriginal possessors of the soil. Some ethnologists believe that this account is in the main correct, but hold that the Maori race is Malay, and not originally Tahitian: others have tried to show that the conflict between blacks and browns was not confined to these two islands, but raged throughout the whole of Polynesia; and that it was terminated in New Zealand itself, not by the destruction of the blacks, but by the amalgamation of the opposing races.
The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to New Zealand. The accounts of some of the migrations are circumstantial in the extreme, and describe the first planting of the yams, the astonishment of the people at the new flowers and trees of the islands, and many such details of the landing. The names of thechiefs and of the canoes are given in a sort of “catalogue of ships,” and the wars of the settlers are narrated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common to the legends of all lands.
The canoe fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth century it is believed, and the people landed chanting a chorus-speech, which is still preserved:
“We come at last to this fair land—a resting-place;Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our hearts for food.”
“We come at last to this fair land—a resting-place;
Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our hearts for food.”
That the Maories are Polynesians there can be no doubt: a bird with them is “manu,” a fish “ika” (the Greekἱχθυς, become with the digamma “piscis” and “poisson;” and connected with “fisch,” and “fish”), as they are throughout the Malayan archipelago and Polynesian isles; the Maori “atua,” a god, is the “hotua” of the Friendly Islanders; the “wahrés,” or native huts, are identical in all the islands; the names of the chief deities are the same throughout Polynesia, and the practice of tattooing, the custom of carving grotesque squatting figures on tombs, canoes, and “pahs,” and that of tabooing things, places, times, and persons, prevail from Hawaii to Stewart‘s Land, though not everywhere so strictly read as in the Tonga Isles, where the very ducks are muzzled to keep them from disturbing by their quacking the sacred stillness of “tapú time.”
Polynesian traditions mostly point to the Malay peninsula as the cradle of the race, and the personal resemblance of the Maories to the Malays is very strong, except in the setting of the eyes; while the figures on the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs have eyes more oblique than are now found among the Maori people. Strangely enough, the New Zealand“pah” is identical with the Burmese “stockade,” but the word “pah” stands both for the palisade and for the village of wahrés which it contains. The Polynesian and Malay tongues have not much in common; but that variations of language sufficiently great to leave no apparent tie spring up in a few centuries, cannot be denied by us who know for certain that “visible” and “optician” come from a common root, and can trace the steps through which “jour” is derived from “dies.”
The tradition of the Polynesians is that they came from Paradise, which they place, in the southern islands, to the north; in the northern islands, to the westward. This legend indicates a migration from Asia to the northern islands, and thence southward to New Zealand, and accounts for the non-colonization of Australia by the Polynesians. The sea between New Zealand, and Australia is too rough and wide to be traversed by canoes, and the wind-chart shows that the track of the Malays must have been eastward along the equatorial belt of calms, and then back to the southwest with the southeast trade-wind right abeam to their canoes.
The wanderings of the Polynesian race were, probably, not confined to the Pacific. Ethnology is as yet in its infancy: we know nothing of the Tudas of the Neilgherries; we ask in vain who are the Gonds; we are in doubt about the Japanese; we are lost in perplexity as to who we may be ourselves; but there is at least as much ground for the statement that the Red Indians are Malays as for the assertion that we are Saxons.
The resemblances between the Red Indians and the Pacific Islanders are innumerable. Strachey‘s account of the Indians of Virginia, written in 1612, needs but achange in the names to fit the Maories: Powhátan‘s house is that of William Thompson. Cannibalism prevailed in Brazil and along the Pacific coast of North America at the time of their discovery, and even the Indians of Chili ate many an early navigator; the aborigines of Vancouver Island are tattooed; their canoes resemble those of the Malays, and the mode of paddling is the same from New Zealand to Hudson‘s Bay—from Florida to Singapore. Jade ornaments of the shape of the Maori “Heitiki” (the charm worn about the neck) have been found by the French in Guadaloupe; the giant masonry of Central America is identical with that of Cambodia and Siam. Small-legged squatting figures, like those of the idols of China and Japan, not only surmount the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs, but are found eastward to Honduras, westward to Burmah, to Tartary, and to Ceylon. The fiber mats, common to Polynesia and Red India, are unknown to savages elsewhere, and the feather headdresses of the Maories are almost identical with those of the Delawares or Hurons.
In the Indians of America and of Polynesia there is the same hatred of continued toil, and the same readiness to engage in violent exertion for a time. Superstition and witchcraft are common to all untaught peoples, but in the Malays and red men they take similar shapes; and the Indians of Mexico and Peru had, like all the Polynesians, a sacred language, understood only by the priests. The American altars were one with the temples of the Pacific, and were not confined to Mexico, for they form the “mounds” of Ohio and Illinois. There is great likeness between the legend of Maui, the Maori hero, and that of Hiawatha, especially in the history of how the sun was noosed, and made to move more slowly through theskies, so as to give men long days for toil. The resemblance of the Maori “runanga,” or assembly for debate, to the Indian council is extremely close, and throughout America and Polynesia a singular blending of poetry and ferocity is characteristic of the Malays.
In color, the Indians and Polynesians are not alike; but color does not seem to be, ethnologically speaking, of much account. The Hindoos of Calcutta have the same features as those of Delhi; but the former are black, the latter brown, or, if high-caste men, almost white. Exposure to sun, in a damp, hot climate, seems to blacken every race that it does not destroy. The races that it will finally destroy, tropical heat first whitens. The English planters of Mississippi and Florida are extremely dark, yet there is not a suspicion of black blood in their veins: it is the white blood of the slaves to which the Abolitionists refer in their philippics. The Jews at Bombay and Aden are of a deep brown; in Morocco they are swarthy; in England, nearly white.
Religious rites and social customs outlast both physical type and language; but even were it otherwise, there is great resemblance in build and feature between the Polynesians and many of the “Red-Indian” tribes. The aboriginal people of New York State are described by the early navigators not as tall, grave, hooked-nose men, but as copper colored, pleasant looking, and with quick, shrewd eyes; and the Mexican Indian bears more likeness to the Sandwich Islander than to the Delaware or Cherokee.
In reaching South America, there were no distances to be overcome such as to present insurmountable difficulties to the Malays. Their canoes have frequently, within the years that we have had our missionary stations in the islands, made involuntary voyages ofsix or seven hundred miles. A Western editor has said of Columbus that he deserves no praise for discovering America, as it is so large that he could not well have missed it; but Easter Island is so small, that the chances must have been thousands to one against its being reached by canoes sailing even from the nearest land; yet it is an ascertained fact that Easter Island was peopled by the Polynesians. Whatever drove canoes to Easter Island would have driven them from the island to Chili and Peru. The Polynesian Malays would sometimes be taken out to sea by sudden storms, by war, by hunger, by love of change. In war time, whole tribes have, within historic days, been clapped into their boats, and sent to sea by a merciful conqueror who had dined: this occurs, however, only when the market is already surfeited with human joints.
In sailing from America to New Zealand, we met strong westerly winds before we had gone half way across the seas, and, south of the trade-wind region, these blow constantly to within a short distance of the American coast, where they are lost upon the edge of the Chilian current. A canoe blown off from the southern islands, and running steadily before the wind, would be cast on the Peruvian coast near Quito.
When Columbus landed in the Atlantic islands, he was, perhaps, not mistaken in his belief that it was “The Indies” that he had found—an India peopled by the Malay race, till lately the most widely-scattered of all the nations of the world, but one which the English seem destined to supplant.
The Maories, without doubt, were originally Malays, emigrants from the winterless climate of the Malay peninsula and Polynesian archipelago; and, although the northernmost portions of New Zealand suited themnot ill, the cold winters of the South Island prevented the spread of the bands they planted there. At all times it has been remarked by ethnologists and acclimatizers that it is easier by far to carry men and beasts from the poles toward the tropics than from the tropics to the colder regions. The Malays, in coming to New Zealand, unknowingly broke one of Nature‘s laws, and their descendants are paying the penalty in extinction.
“Here is Pétatoné.This is the 10th of December;The sun shines, and the birds sing;Clear is the water in rivers and streams;Bright is the sky, and the sun is high in the air.This is the 10th of December;But where is the money?Three years has this matter in many debates been discussed,And here at last is Pétatoné;But where is the money?”
“Here is Pétatoné.This is the 10th of December;The sun shines, and the birds sing;Clear is the water in rivers and streams;Bright is the sky, and the sun is high in the air.This is the 10th of December;But where is the money?Three years has this matter in many debates been discussed,And here at last is Pétatoné;But where is the money?”
ABANDof Maori women, slowly chanting in a high, strained key, stood at the gate of a pah, and met with this song a few Englishmen who were driving rapidly on to their land.
Our track lay through a swamp of the New Zealand flax. Huge swordlike leaves and giant flower-stalks all but hid from view the Maori stockades. To the left was a village of low wahrés, fenced round with a double row of lofty posts, carved with rude images of gods and men, and having posterns here and there.On the right were groves of karakas, children of Tanemahuta, the New Zealand sacred trees—under their shade, on a hill, a camp and another and larger pah. In startling contrast to the dense masses of the oily leaves, there stretched a great extent of light-green sward, where there were other camps and a tall flagstaff, from which floated the white flag and the Union Jack, emblems of British sovereignty and peace.
A thousand kilted Maories dotted the green landscape with patches of brilliant tartans and scarlet cloth. Women lounged about, whiling away the time with dance and song; and from all the corners of the glade the soft cadence of the Maori cry of welcome came floating to us on the breeze, sweet as the sound of distant bells.
As we drove quickly on, we found ourselves in the midst of a thronging crowd of square-built men, brown in color, and for the most part not much darker than Spaniards, but with here and there a woolly negro in their ranks. Glancing at them as we were hurried past, we saw that the men were robust, well limbed, and tall. They greeted us pleasantly with many a cheerful, open smile, but the faces of the older people were horribly tattooed in spiral curves. The chiefs carried battle-clubs of jade and bone; the women wore strange ornaments. At the flagstaff we pulled up, and, while the preliminaries of the council were arranged, had time to discuss with Maori and with “Pakéha” (white man) the questions that had brought us thither.
The purchase of an enormous block of land—that of the Manawatu—had long been an object wished for and worked for by the Provincial Government of Wellington. The completion of the sale it was that had brought the Superintendent, Dr. Featherston, andhumbler Pakéhas to Parewanui Pah. It was not only that the land was wanted by way of room for the flood of settlers, but purchase by government was, moreover, the only means whereby war between the various native claimants of the land could be prevented. The Pakéha and Maori had agreed upon a price; the question that remained for settlement was how the money should be shared. One tribe had owned the land from the earliest times; another had conquered some miles of it; a third had had one of its chiefs cooked and eaten upon the ground. In the eye of the Maori law, the last of these titles was the best: the blood of a chief overrides all mere historic claims. The two strongest human motives concurred to make war probable, for avarice and jealousy alike prevented agreement as to the division of the spoil. Each of the three tribes claiming had half a dozen allied and related nations upon the ground; every man was there who had a claim, direct or indirect, or thought he had, to any portion of the block. Individual ownership and tribal ownership conflicted. The Ngatiapa were well armed; the Ngatiraukawa had their rifles; the Wanganuis had sent for theirs. The greatest tact on the part of Dr. Featherston was needed to prevent a fight such as would have roused New Zealand from Auckland to Port Nicholson.
On a signal from the Superintendent, the heralds went round the camps and pahs to call the tribes to council. The summons was a long-drawn minor-descending-scale: a plaintiff cadence, which at a distance blends into a bell-like chord. The words mean: “Come hither! Come hither! Come! come! Maories! Come—!” and men, women, and children soon came thronging in from every side, the chiefs bearing scepters and spears of ceremony, and their women wearinground their necks the symbol of nobility, the Heitiki, or greenstone god. These images, we were told, have pedigrees, and names like those of men.
We, with the resident magistrate of Wanganui, seated ourselves beneath the flagstaff. A chief, meeting the people as they came up, stayed them with the gesture that Homer ascribes to Hector, and bade them sit in a huge circle round the spar.
No sooner were we seated on our mat than there ran slowly into the center of the ring a plumed and kilted chief, with sparkling eyes, the perfection of a savage. Halting suddenly, he raised himself upon his toes, frowned, and stood brandishing his short feathered spear. It was Hunia té Hakéké, the young chief of the Ngatiapa.
Throwing off his plaid, he commenced to speak, springing hither and thither with leopard-like freedom of gait, and sometimes leaping high into the air to emphasize a word. Fierce as were the gestures, his speech was conciliatory, and the Maori flowed from his lips—a soft Tuscan tongue. As, with a movement full of vigorous grace, he sprang back to the ranks, to take his seat, there ran round the ring a hum and buzz of popular applause.
“Governor” Hunia was followed by a young Wanganui chief, who wore hunting breeches and high boots, and a long black mantle over his European clothes. There was something odd in the shape of the cloak; and when we came to look closely at it, we found that it was the skirt of the riding-habit of his half-caste wife. The great chiefs paid so little heed to this flippant fellow, as to stand up and harangue their tribes in the middle of his speech, which came thus to an untimely end.
A funny old graybeard, Waitéré Maru Maru, nextrose, and, smothering down the jocularity of his face, turned toward us for a moment the typical head of Peter, as you see it on the windows of every modern church—for a moment only, for, as he raised his hand to wave his tribal scepter, his apostolic drapery began to slip from off his shoulders, and he had to clutch at it with the energy of a topman taking-in a reef in a whole gale. His speech was full of Nestorian proverbs and wise saws, but he wandered off into a history of the Wanganui lands, by which he soon became as wearied as we ourselves were; for he stopped short, and, with a twinkle of the eye, said: “Ah! Waitéré is no longer young: he is climbing the snow-clad mountain Ruahiné; he is becoming an old man;” and down he sat.
Karanama, a small Ngatiraukawa chief with a white moustache, who looked like an old French concierge, followed Maru Maru, and, with much use of his scepter, related a dream foretelling the happy issue of the negotiations; for the little man was one of those “dreamers of dreams” against whom Moses warned the Israelites.
Karanama‘s was not the only trance and vision of which we heard in the course of these debates. The Maories believe that in their dreams the seers hear great bands of spirits singing chants: these when they wake the prophets reveal to all the people; but it is remarked that the vision is generally to the advantage of the seer‘s tribe.
Karanama‘s speech was answered by the head chief of the Rangitané Maories, Té Peeti Té Awé Awé, who, throwing off his upper clothing as he warmed to his subject, and strutting pompously round and round the ring, challenged Karanama to immediate battle, or his tribe to general encounter; but he cooled down as hewent on, and in his last sentence showed us that Maori oratory, however ornate usually, can be made extremely terse. “It is hot,” he said—“it is hot, and the very birds are loath to sing. We have talked for a week, and are therefore dry. Let us take our share—£10,000, or whatever we can get, and then we shall be dry no more.”
The Maori custom of walking about, dancing, leaping, undressing, running, and brandishing spears during the delivery of a speech is convenient for all parties: to the speaker, because it gives him time to think of what he shall say next; to the listener, because it allows him to weigh the speaker‘s words; to the European hearer, because it permits the interpreter to keep pace with the orator without an effort. On this occasion, the resident magistrate of Wanganui, Mr. Buller, a Maori scholar of eminence, and the attached friend of some of the chiefs, interpreted for Dr. Featherston; and we were allowed to lean over him in such a way as to hear every word that passed. That the able Superintendent of Wellington—the great protector of the Maories, the man to whom they look as to Queen Victoria‘s second in command, should be wholly dependent upon interpreters, however skilled, seems almost too singular to be believed; but it is possible that Dr. Featherston may find in pretended want of knowledge much advantage to the government. He is able to collect his thoughts before he replies to a difficult question; he can allow an epithet to escape his notice in the filter of translation; he can listen and speak with greater dignity.
The day was wearing on before Té Peeti‘s speech was done, and, as the Maories say, our waistbands began to slip down low; so all now went to lunch, both Maori and Pakéha, they sitting in circles, each withhis bowl, or flax-blade dish, and wooden spoon, we having a table and a chair or two in the Mission-house; but we were so tempted by Hori Kingi‘s whitebait that we begged some of him as we passed. The Maories boil the little fish in milk, and flavor them with leeks. Great fish, meat, vegetables, almost all they eat, in short, save whitebait, is “steamed” in the underground native oven. A hole is dug, and filled with wood, and stones are piled upon the wood, a small opening being left for draught. While the wood is burning, the stones become red-hot, and fall through into the hole. They are then covered with damp fern, or else with wet mats of flax, plaited at the moment; the meat is put in, and covered with more mats; the whole is sprinkled with water, and then earth is heaped on till the vapor ceases to escape. The joint takes about an hour, and is delicious. Fish is wrapped in a kind of dock-leaf, and so steamed.
While the men‘s eating was thus going on, many of the women stood idly round, and we were enabled to judge of Maori beauty. A profusion of long, crisp curls, a short black pipe thrust between stained lips, a pair of black eyes gleaming from a tattooed face, denote the Maoribelle, who wears for her only robe a long bedgown of dirty calico, but whose ears and neck are tricked out with greenstone ornaments, the signs of birth and wealth. Here and there you find a girl with long, smooth tresses, and almond-shaped black eyes: these charms often go along with prominent, thin features, and suggest at once the Jewess and the gipsy girl. The women smoke continually; the men, not much.
When at four o‘clock we returned to the flagstaff, we found that the temperature, which during the morning had been too hot, had become that of a fineEnglish June—the air light, the trees and grass lit by a gleaming yellow sunshine that reminded me of the Californian haze.
During luncheon we had heard that Dr. Featherston‘s proposals as to the division of the purchase-money had been accepted by the Ngatiapa, but not by Hunia himself, whose vanity would brook no scheme not of his own conception. We were no sooner returned to the ring than he burst in upon us with a defiant speech. “Unjust,” he declared, “as was the proposition of great ‘Pétatoné’ (Featherston), he would have accepted it for the sake of peace had he been allowed to divide the tribal share; but as the Wanganuis insisted on having a third of his £15,000, and as Pétatoné seemed to support them in their claim, he should have nothing more to do with the sale.” “The Wangenuis claim as our relatives,” he said: “verily, the pumpkin-shoots spread far.”
Karanama, the seer, stood up to answer Hunia, and began his speech in a tone of ridicule. “Hunia is like the ti-tree: if you cut him down he sprouts again.” Hunia sat quietly through a good deal of this kind of wit, till at last some epithet provoked him to interrupt the speaker. “What a fine fellow you are, Karanama; you‘ll tell us soon that you‘ve two pair of legs.” “Sit down!” shrieked Karanama, and a word-war ensued, but the abuse was too full of native raciness and vigor to be fit for English ears. The chiefs kept dancing round the ring, threatening each other with their spears. “Why do you not hurl at me, Karanama?” said Hunia; “it is easier to parry spears than lies.” At last Hunia sat down.
Karanama, feinting and making at him with his spear, reproached Hunia with a serious flaw in his pedigree—a blot which is said to account for Hunia‘s hatred to the Ngatiraukawa, to whom his mother was for years a slave. Hunia, without rising from the ground, shrieked “Liar!” Karanama again spoke the obnoxious word. Springing from the ground, Hunia snatched his spear from where it stood, and ran at his enemy as though to strike him. Karanama stood stock-still. Coming up to him at a charge, Hunia suddenly stopped, raised himself on tiptoe, shaking his spear, and flung out some contemptuous epithet; then turned, and stalked slowly, with a springing gait, back to his own corner of the ring. There he stood, haranguing his people in a bitter undertone. Karanama did the like with his. The interpreters could not keep pace with what was said. We understood that the chiefs were calling each upon his tribe to support him, if need were, in war. After a few minutes of this pause they wheeled round, as though by a common impulse, and again began to pour out torrents of abuse. The applause became frequent, hums quickened into shouts, cheer followed cheer, till at last the ring was alive with men and women springing from the ground, and crying out on the opposing leader for a dastard.
We had previously been told to have no fear that resort would be had to blows. The Maories never fight upon a sudden quarrel: war is with them a solemn act, entered upon only after much deliberation. Those of us who were strangers to New Zealand were nevertheless not without our doubts, while for half an hour we lay upon the grass watching the armed champions running round the ring, challenging each other to mortal combat on the spot.
The chieftains at last became exhausted, and the Mission-bell beginning to toll for evening chapel, Hunia broke off in the middle of his abuse: “Ah! I hear the bell!” and, turning, stalked out of the ring toward hispah, leaving it to be inferred, by those who did not know him, that he was going to attend the service. The meeting broke up in confusion, and the Upper Wanganui tribes at once began their march toward the mountains, leaving behind them only a delegation of their chiefs.
As we drove down to the coast, we talked over the close resemblance of the Maori runanga to the Homeric council; it had struck us all. Here, as in the Greek camp, we had the ring of people, into which advanced the lance-bearing or scepter-bearing chiefs, they alone speaking, and the people backing them only by a hum: “The block of wood dictates not to the carver, neither the people to their chiefs,” is a Maori proverb. The boasting of ancestry, and bragging of deeds and military exploits, to which modern wind-bags would only casually allude, was also thoroughly Homeric. In Hunia we had our Achilles; the retreat of Hunia to his wahré was that of Achilles to his tent; the cause of quarrel alone was different, though in both cases it arose out of the division of spoil, in the one case the result of lucky wars, in the other of the Pakéha‘s weakness. The Argive and Maori leaders are one in fire, figure, port, and mien; alike, too, even in their sulkiness. In Waitéré and Aperahama Tipai we had two Nestors; our Thersites was Porea, the jester, a half-mad buffoon, continually mimicking the chiefs or interrupting them, and being by them or their messengers as often kicked and cuffed. In the frequency of repetition, the use of proverbs and of simile, the Maories resemble not Homer‘s Greeks so much as Homer‘s self; but the calling together of the people by the heralds, the secret conclave of the chiefs, the feast, the conduct of the assembly—all were the exact repetition of the events recorded in the first and second books ofthe “Iliad” as having happened on the Trojan plains. The single point of difference was not in favor of the Greeks; the Maori women took their place in council with the men.
As we drove home, a storm came on, and hung about the coast so long, that it was not till near eleven at night that we were able to take our swim in the heated waters of the Manawatu River, and frighten off every duck and heron in the district.
In the morning, we rose to alarming news. Upon the pretext of the presence in the neighborhood of the Hau-Hau chief Wi Hapi, with a war party of 200 men, the unarmed Parewanui natives had sent to Wanganui for their guns, and it was only by a conciliatory speech at the midnight runanga that Mr. Buller had succeeded in preventing a complete break-up of all the camps, if not an intertribal war. There seemed to be white men behind the scenes who were not friendly to the sale, and the debate had lasted from dark till dawn.
While we were at breakfast, a Ngatiapa officer of the native contingent brought down a letter to Dr. Featherston from Hunia and Hori Kingi, calling us to a general meeting of the tribes convened for noon, to be held in the Ngatiapa Pah. The letter was addressed, “Kia té Pétatoné té Huperinténé”—“To the Featherston, the Superintendent”—the alterations in the chief words being made to bring them within the grasp of Maori tongues, which cannot soundf‘s,th‘s, nor sibilants of any kind. The absence of harsh sounds, and the rule which makes every word end with a vowel, give a peculiar softness and charm to the Maori language. Sugar becomes huka; scissors, hikiri; sheep, hipi; and so with all English words adopted into Maori. The rendering of the Hebrew names of theOld Testament is often singular: Genesis becomes Kenehi; Exodus is altered into Ekoruhe; Leviticus is hardly recognizable in Rewitikuha; Tiuteronomi reads strangely for Deuteronomy, and Hohua for Joshua; Jacob, Isaac, Moses, become Hakopa, Ihaka, and Mohi; Egypt is softened into Ihipa, Jordan into Horámo. The list of the nations of Canaan seems to have been a stumbling-block in the missionaries’ way. The success obtained with Girgashites has not been great; it stands Kirekahi; Gaash is transmuted into Kaaha, and Eleazar into Ereatara.
When we drove on to the ground all was at a deadlock—the flagstaff bare, the chiefs sleeping in their wahrés, and the common folk whiling away the hours with haka songs. Dr. Featherston retired from the ground, declaring that till the Queen‘s flag was hoisted he would attend no debate; but he permitted us to wander in among the Maories.
We were introduced to Tamiana té Rauparaha, chief of the Ngatitoa branch of the Ngatiraukawa, and son of the great cannibal chief of the same name, who murdered Captain Wakefield. Old Rauparaha it was who hired an English ship to carry him and his nation to the South Island, where they ate several tribes, boiling the chiefs, by the captain‘s consent, in the ship‘s coppers, and salting down for future use the common people. When the captain, on return to port, claimed his price, Rauparaha told him to go about his business, or he should be salted too. The captain took the hint, but he did not escape for long, as he was finally eaten by the Sandwich Islanders in Hawaii.
In answer to our request for a dance-song, Tamiana and Horomona Torémi replied, through an interpreter, that “the hands of the singers should beat time as fast as the pinions of the wild duck;” and in a minute wewere in the middle of an animated crowd of boys and women collected by Porea, the buffoon.
As soon as the singers had squatted upon the grass, the jester began to run slowly up and down between their ranks as they sat swinging backward and forward in regular time, groaning in chorus, and looking upward with distorted faces.
In a second dance, a girl standing out upon the grass chanted the air—a kind of capstan song—and then the “dancers,” who were seated in one long row, joined in chorus, breathing violently in perfect time, half forming words, but not notes, swinging from side to side like the howling dervishes, and using frightful gestures. This strange whisper-roaring went on increasing in rapidity and fierceness, till at last the singers worked themselves into a frenzy, in which they rolled their eyes, stiffened the arms and legs, clutched and clawed with the fingers, and snorted like maddened horses. Stripping off their clothes, they looked more like the Maories of thirty years ago than those who see them only at the mission-stations would believe. Other song-dances, in which the singers stood striking their heels at measured intervals upon the earth, were taken up with equal vigor by the boys and women, the grown men in their dignity keeping themselves aloof, although in his heart every Maori loves mimetic dance and song. We remarked that in the “haka” the old women seemed more in earnest than the young, who were always bursting into laughter, and forgetting words and time.
The savage love for semitones makes Maori music somewhat wearisome to the English ear; so after a time we began to walk through the pahs and sketch the Maories, to their great delight. I was drawing the grand old head of a venerable dame—Oriuhia téAka—when she asked to see what I was about. As soon as I showed her the sketch, she began to call me names, and from her gestures I saw that the insult was in the omission of the tattooing on her chin. When I inserted the stripes and curves, her delight was such that I greatly feared she would have embraced me.
Strolling into the karaka groves, we came upon a Maori wooden tomb, of which the front was carved with figures three feet high, grotesque and obscene. Gigantic eyes, hands bearing clubs, limbs without bodies, and bodies without limbs, were figured here and there among more perfect carvings, and the whole was of a character which the Maories of to-day disown as they do cannibalism, wishing to have these horrid things forgotten. The sudden rise of the Hau-Hau fanaticism within the last few years has shown us that the layer of civilization by which the old Maori habits are overlaid is thin indeed.
The flags remained down all day, and in the afternoon we returned to the coast to shoot duck and pukéko, a sort of moor-hen. It was not easy work, for the birds fell in the flax swamp, and the giant swordlike leaves of thePhormium tenaxcut our hands as we pushed our way through its dense clumps and bushes, while some of the party suffered badly from the sun: Maui, the Maories say, must have chained him up too near the earth. After dark, we could see the glare of the fires in the karaka groves, where the Maories were in council, and a government surveyor came in to report that he had met the dissentient Wanganuis riding fast toward the hills.
In the morning, we were allowed to stay upon the coast till ten or eleven o‘clock, when a messenger came down from Mr. Buller to call us to the pah: the council of the chiefs had again sat all night—for the Maoriesact upon their proverb that the eyes of great chiefs should know no rest—and Hunia had carried everything before him in the debate.
As soon as the ring was formed, Hunia apologized for the pulling down of the Queen‘s flag; it had been done, he said, as a sign that the sale was broken off, not as an act of disrespect. Having, in short, had things entirely his own way, he was disposed to be extremely friendly both to whites and Maories. The sale, he said, must be brought about, or the “world would be on fire with an intertribal war. What is the good of the mountain-land? There is nothing to eat but stones; granite is a hard but not a strengthening food; and women and land are the ruin of men.”
After congratulatory speeches from other chiefs, some of the older men treated us to histories of the deeds that had been wrought upon the block of land. Some of their speeches—notably those of Aperahama and Ihakara—were largely built up of legendary poems; but the orators quoted the poetry as such only when in doubt how far the sentiments were those of the assembled people: when they were backed by the hum which denotes applause, they at one commenced with singular art to weave the poetry into that which was their own.
As soon as the speeches were over, Hunia and Ihakara marched up to the flagstaff carrying between them the deed-of-sale. Putting it down before Dr. Featherston, they shook hands with each other and with him, and swore that for the future there should be eternal friendship between their tribes. The deed was then signed by many hundred men and women, and Dr. Featherston started with Captain té Képa, of the native contingent, to fetch the £25,000from Wanganui town, the Maories firing their rifles into the air as a salute.
The Superintendent was no sooner gone than a kind of solemn grief seemed to come over the assembled people. After all, they were selling the graves of their ancestors, they argued. The wife of Hamuéra, seizing her husband‘s greenstone club, ran out from the ranks of the women, and began to intone an impromptu song, which was echoed by the women, in a pathetic chorus-chant:
“The sun shines, but we quit our land: we abandon forever its forests,its mountains, its groves, its lakes, its shores.All its fair fisheries, here, under the bright sun, forever we renounce.It is a lovely day; fair will be the children that are born to-day; butwe quit our land.In some parts there is forest; in others, the ground is skimmed overby the birds in their flight.Upon the trees there is fruit; in the streams, fish; in the fields,potatoes; fern-roots in the bush; but we quit our land.”
“The sun shines, but we quit our land: we abandon forever its forests,its mountains, its groves, its lakes, its shores.
All its fair fisheries, here, under the bright sun, forever we renounce.
It is a lovely day; fair will be the children that are born to-day; butwe quit our land.
In some parts there is forest; in others, the ground is skimmed overby the birds in their flight.
Upon the trees there is fruit; in the streams, fish; in the fields,potatoes; fern-roots in the bush; but we quit our land.”
It is in chorus-speeches of this kind that David‘s psalms must have been recited by the Jews; but on this occasion there was a good deal of mere acting in the grief, for the tribes had never occupied the land that they now sold.
The next day, Dr. Featherston drove into camp surrounded by a brilliant cavalcade of Maori cavalry, amid much yelling and firing of pieces skyward. Hunia, in receiving him, declared that he would not have the money paid till the morrow, as the sun must shine upon the transfer of the lands. It would take his people all the night, he said, to work themselves up to the right pitch for a war-dance; so he sent down a strong guard to watch the money-chests, which had been conveyed to the missionary hut. The Ngatiapasentry posted inside the room was an odd cross between savagery and civilization; he wore the cap of the native contingent; and nothing else but a red kilt. He was armed with a short Wilkinson rifle, for which he had, however, not a round of ammunition, his cartridges being Enfield and his piece unloaded. Barbarian or not, he seemed to like raw gin, with which some Englishman had unlawfully and unfairly tempted him.
In the morning, the money was handed over in the runanga-house, and a signet-ring presented to Hunia by Dr. Featherston in pledge of peace, and memory of the sale; but owing to the heat, we soon adjourned to the karaka grove, where Hunia made a congratulatory and somewhat boastful speech, offering his friendship and alliance to Dr. Featherston.
The assembly was soon dismissed, and the chiefs withdrew to prepare for the grandest war-dance that had been seen for years, while a party went off to catch and kill the oxen that were to be “steamed” whole, just as our friends’ fathers would have steamed us.
A chief was detached by Hunia to guide us to a hill whence we commanded the whole glade. No sooner had we taken our seats than the Ngatiraukawa to the number of a hundred fighting-men, armed with spears and led by a dozen women bearing clubs, marched out from their camp, and formed in column, their chiefs making speeches of exhortation from the ranks. After a pause, we heard the measured groaning of a distant haka, and looking up the glade, at the distance of a mile saw some twoscore Wanganui warriors jumping in perfect time, now to one side, now to the other, grasping their rifles by the barrel, and raising them as one man each time they jumped. Presently, bending one knee, but stiffening the other leg, they advanced, stepping together with a hopping movement, slappingtheir hips and thighs, and shouting from the palate, “Hough! Hough!” with fearful emphasis.
A shout from the Ngatiraukawa hailed the approach of the Ngatiapa, who deployed from the woods some two hundred strong, all armed with Enfield rifles. They united with the Wanganuis, and marched slowly down with their rifles at the “charge,” steadily singing war-songs. When within a hundred yards of the opposing ranks, they halted, and sent in their challenge. The Ngatiraukawa and Ngatiapa heralds passed each other in silence, and each delivered his message to the hostile chief.
We could see that the allies were led by Hunia in all the bravery of his war-costume. In his hair he wore a heron plume, and another was fastened near the muzzle of his short carbine; his limbs were bare, but about his shoulders he had a pure white scarf of satin. His kilt was gauze-silk, of three colors—pink, emerald, and cherry—arranged in such a way as to show as much of the green as of the two other colors. The contrast, which upon a white skin would have been glaring in its ugliness, was perfect when backed by the nut-brown of Hunia‘s chest and legs. As he ran before his tribe, he was the ideal savage.
The instant that the heralds had returned, a charge took place, the forces passing through each other‘s ranks as they do upon the stage, but with frightful yells. After this they formed two deep, in three companies, and danced the “musket-exercise war-dance” in wonderful time, the women leading, thrusting out their tongues, and shaking their long pendant breasts. Among them was Hamuéra‘s wife, standing drawn up to her full height, her limbs stiffened, her head thrown back, her mouth wide open and tongue protruding, her eyes rolled so as to show the white, and her armsstretched out in front of her, as she slowly chanted. The illusion was perfect: she became for the time a mad prophetess; yet all the frenzy was assumed at a whim, to be cast aside in half an hour. The shouts were of the same under-breath kind as in the haka, but they were aided by the sounds of horns and conch-shells, and from the number of men engaged the noise was this time terrible. After much fierce singing the musket-dance was repeated, with furious leaps and gestures, till the men became utterly exhausted, when the review was closed by a general discharge of rifles. Running with nimble feet, the dancers were soon back within their pahs, and the feast, beginning now, was, like a Russian banquet, prolonged till morning.
It is not hard to understand the conduct of Lord Durham‘s settlers, who landed here in 1837. The friendly natives received the party with a war-dance, which had upon them such an effect that they immediately took ship for Australia, where they remained.
The next day, when we called on Governor Hunia at his wahré to bid him farewell, before our departure for the capital, he made two speeches to us, which are worth recording as specimens of Maori oratory. Speaking through Mr. Buller, who had been kind enough to escort us to the Ngatiapa‘s wahré, Hunia said:
“Hail, guests! You have just now seen the settlement of a great dispute—the greatest of modern time.
“This was a weighty trouble—a grave difficulty.
“Many Pakéhas have tried to settle it—in vain. For Pétatoné was it reserved to end it. I have said that great is our gratitude to Pétatoné.
“If Pétatoné hath need of me in the future, I shall be there. If he climbs the lofty tree, I will climb it with him. If he scales high cliffs, I will scale themtoo. If Pétatoné needeth help, he shall have it; and where he leads, there will I follow.
“Such are the words of Hunia.”
To this speech one of us replied, explaining our position as guests from Britain.
Hunia then began again to speak:
“O my guests, a few days since when asked for a war-dance, I refused. I refused because my people were sad at heart.
“We were loath to refuse our guests, but the tribes were grieved; the peeple were sorrowful at heart.
“To-day we are happy, and the war-dance has taken place.
“O my guests, when ye return to our great Queen, tell her that we will fight for her again as we have fought before.
“She is our Queen as well as your Queen—Queen of Maories and Queen of Pakéha.
“Should wars arise, we will take up our rifles, and march whithersoever she shall direct.
“You have heard of the King movement. I was a Kingite; but that did not prevent me fighting for the Queen—I and my chiefs.
“My cousin, Wirému, went to England, and saw our Queen. He returned....
“When you landed in this island, he was already dead....
“He died fighting for our Queen.
“As he died,wewill die, if need be—I and all my chiefs. This do you tell our Queen.
“I have said.”
This passage, spoken as Hunia spoke it, was one of noble eloquence and singular rhetoric art. The few first words about Wirému were spoken in a half indifferent way; but there was a long pause before andafter the statement that he was dead, and a sinking of the voice when he related how Wirému had died, followed by a burst of sudden fire in the “As he died,wewill die—I and all my chiefs.”
After a minute or two, Hunia resumed:
“This is another word.
“We are all of us glad to see you.
“When we wrote to Pétatoné, we asked him that he would bring with him Pakéhas from England and from Australia—Pakéhas from all parts of the Queen‘s broad lands.
“Pakéhas who should return to tell the Queen that the Ngatiapa are her liegemen.
“We are much rejoiced that you are here. May your heart rest here among us; but if you go once more to your English home, tell the people that we are Pétatoné‘s faithful subjects and the Queen‘s.
“I have said.”
After pledging Hunia in a cup of wine, we returned to our temporary home.
PARTINGwith my companions (who were going northward) in order that I might return to Wellington, and thence take ship to Taranaki, I started at daybreak on a lovely morning to walk by the sea-shore to Otaki. As I left the bank of the Manawatu River for the sands, Mount Egmont near Taranaki, and Mounts Ruapéhu and Tongariro, in the center of the island,hung their great snow domes in the soft blue of the sky behind me, and seemed to have parted from their bases.
I soon passed through the flax-swamp where we for days had shot the pukéko, and coming out upon the wet sands, which here are glittering and full of the Taranaki steel, I took off boots and socks, and trudged the whole distance barefoot, regardless of the morrow. It was hard to walk without crunching with the heel shells which would be thought rare at home, and here and there charming little tern and other tiny sea-fowl flew at me, and all but pecked my eyes out for coming near their nests.
During the day, I forded two large rivers and small streams innumerable, and swam the Ohau, where Dr. Featherston last week lost his dog-cart in the quick-sands, but I managed to reach Otaki before sunset, in time to revel in a typical New Zealand view. The foreground was composed of ancient sand-hills, covered with the native flax, with the deliciously-scented Manuka ti-tree, brilliant in white flower, and with giant fern, tuft-grass, and tussac. Farther inland was the bush, evergreen, bunchlike in its foliage, and so overladen with parasitic vegetation, that the true leaves were hidden by usurpers, or crushed to death in the folds of snakelike creepers. The view was bounded by bush-clad mountains, rosy with the sunset tints.
Otaki is Archdeacon Hadfield‘s church-settlement of Christian Maories; but of late there have been signs of wavering in the tribes, and I found Major Edwardes, who had been with us at Parewanui, engaged in holding, for the government, a runanga of Hau-Haus, or Antichristian Maories, in the Otaki Pah. Some of these fellows had lately held a meeting, and had themselves rebaptized, but this timeout ofinstead ofintothe church. They received fresh names, and are said to have politely invited the archdeacon to perform the ceremony.
Maori Church of Englandism has proved a failure. A dozen native clergymen are, it is true, supported in comfort by their countrymen, but the tribes would support a hundred such, if necessary, rather than give up the fertile “reservations,” such as that of Otaki, which their pretended Christianity has secured. There is much in the Maori that is tiger-like, and it is in the blood, not to be drawn out of it by a few years of playing at Christianity.
The labors of the missionaries have been great, their earnestness and devotion unsurpassed. Up to the day of the outbreak of Hau-Hauism, their influence with the natives was thought to be enormous. The entire Maori race had been baptized, thousands of natives had attended the schools, hundreds had become communicants and catechists. In a day the number of native Christians was reduced from thirty thousand to some hundreds. Right and left the tribes flocked to the bush, deserting mission stations, villages, herds, and fields. Those few who dared not go were there in spirit; all sympathized, if not with the Hau-Hau movement, at least with Kingism. The archdeacon and his brethren of the holy calling were at their wits’ ends. Not only did Christianity disappear: civilization itself accompanied religion in her flight, and habits of bloodshed and barbarity, unknown since the nominal renunciation of idolatry, in a day returned. The fall was terrible, but it went to show that the apparent success had been fictitious. The natives had built mills and owned ships; they had learnt husbandry and cattle-breeding; they had invested money, and put acre to acre, and house to house; but their moral couldhardly have kept pace with their material, or even with their mental gains.
A magistrate, who knows the Maories well, told me that their Christianity is only on the surface. He one day asked Maténé té Whiwhi, a Ngatiraukawa chief, “Which would you soonest eat, Maténé—pork, beef, or Ngatiapa?” Maténé answered, with a turn up of his eyes, “Ah! I‘m a Christian!” “Never mind that to me, you know,” said the Englishman. “The flesh of the Ngatiapa is sweet,” said Maténé, with a smack of the lips that was distinctly audible. The settlers tell you that when the Maories go to war, they use up their Bibles for gun-wadding, and then come on the missionaries for a fresh supply.
The Polynesians, when Christianity is first presented to them, embrace it with excitement and enthusiasm; the “new religion” spreads like wildfire; the success of the teachers is amazing. A few years, however, show a terrible change. The natives find that all white men are not missionaries; that if one set of Englishmen deplore their licentiousness, there are others to back them in it; that Christianity requires self-restraint. As soon as the first flare of the new religion is over it commences to decline, and in some cases it expires. The story of Christianity in Hawaii, in Otaheite, and in New Zealand, has been much the same: among the Tahitians it was crushed by the relapse of the converts into extreme licentiousness; among the Maories it was put down by the sudden rise of the Hau-Hau fanaticism. A return to a better state of things has in each case followed, but the missionaries work now in a depressed and saddened way, which contrasts sternly with the exultation that inspired them before the fresh outbreak of the demon which they believed they had exorcised. They reluctantly admitthat the Polynesians are fickle as well as gross; not only licentious, but untrustworthy. There is, they will tell you, no country where it is so easy to plant or so hard to maintain Christianity.
The Maori religion is that of all the Polynesians—a vague polytheism, which in their poems seems now and then to approach to pantheism. The forest glades, the mountain rocks, the stormy shores, all swarm with fairy singers, and with throngs of gnomes and elves. The happy laughing islanders have a heaven, but no hell in their mythology; of “sin” they have no conception. Hau-Hauism is not a Polynesian creed, but a political and religious system based upon the earlier books of the Old Testament; even the cannibalism which was added was not of the Maori kind. The Indians of Chili ate human flesh for pleasure and variety; those of Virginia were cannibals only on state occasions, or in religious ceremonials; but the Maories seem originally to have been driven to man-eating by sheer want of food. Since Cook left pigs upon the islands, the excuse has been wanting, and the practice has consequently ceased. As revived by the Hau-Haus, the man-eating was of a ceremonial nature, and, like the whole of the observances of the Hau-Hau fanaticism, an inroad upon ancient Maori customs.
There is one great difference which severs the Maories from the other Polynesians. In New Zealand caste is unknown; every Maori is a gentleman or a slave. Chiefs are elected by the popular voice, not, indeed, by a show of hands, but by a sort of general agreement of the tribe; but the chief is a political, not a social superior. In the windy climate of New Zealand men can push themselves to the front too surely by their energy and toil, to remain socially in an inferior class. Caste is impossible where the climate necessitates activityand work. The Maories, too, we should remember, are an immigrant race; probably no high-caste men came with them—all started from equal rank.
Like the Tongans, the Maories pay great reverence to their well-born women; slave women are of no account. The Friendly Islanders exclude both man and woman slave from the Future Life; but the Maori Rangatira not only admits his followers to heaven, but his wife to council. A Maori chief is as obedient to the warlike biddings, and as grateful for the praising glance or smile of his betrothed, as a planter-cavalier of Carolina, or a Cretan volunteer; and even the ladies of New Orleans cannot have gone further than the wives of Hunia and Ihakara in spurring on the men to war. The Maori Andromaches outdo their European sisters, for they themselves proceed to battle, and animate their Hectors by songs and shouts. Even the scepter of tribal rule—the greenstonemeri, or royal club—is often intrusted to them by their warrior husbands, and used to lead the war-dance or the charge.
The delicacy of treatment shown by the Maories toward their women may go far to account for the absence of contempt for the native race among the English population. An Englishman‘s respect for the sex is terribly shocked when he sees a woman staggering under the weight of the wigwam and the children of a “brave,” who stalks behind her through the streets of Austin, carrying his rifles and his pistols, but not another ounce, unless in the shape of a thong with which to hasten the squaw‘s steps. What wonder if the men who sit by smoking while their wives totter under basketsful of mould on the boulevard works at Delhi are called lazy scoundrels by the press of the Northwest, or if the Shoshonés, who eat the bread ofidleness themselves, and hire out their wives to the Pacific Railroad Company, are looked upon as worse than dogs in Nevada, where the thing is done? It is the New Zealand native‘s treatment of his wife that makes it possible for an honest Englishman to respect or love an honest Maori.
In general, the newspaper editors and idle talkers of the frontier districts of a colony in savage lands speak with mingled ridicule and contempt of the men with whom they daily struggle; at best, they see in them no virtue but ferocious bravery. The Kansas and Colorado papers call Indians “fiends,” “devils,” or dismiss them laughingly in peaceful times as “bucks,” whose lives are worth, perhaps, a buffalo‘s, but who are worthy of notice only as potential murderers or thieves. Such, too, is the tone of the Australian press concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of Queensland or Tasmania. Far otherwise do the New Zealand papers speak of the Maori warriors. They may sometimes call them grasping, overreaching traders, or underrate their capability of receiving civilization of a European kind, but never do they affect to think them less than men, or to advocate the employment toward them of measures which would be repressed as infamous if applied to brutes. We should, I think, see in this peculiarity of conduct, not evidence of the existence in New Zealand of a spirit more catholic and tolerant toward savage neighbors than that which the English race displays in Australia or America, but rather a tribute to the superiority in virtue, intelligence, and nobility of mind possessed by the Maori over the Red Indian or the Australian Black.
It is not only in their treatment of their women that the Maories show their chivalry. One of the most noble traits of this great people is their habit of “proclaiming” the districts in which lies the cause of war as the sole fighting-ground, and never touching their enemies, however defenseless, when found elsewhere. European nations might take a lesson from New Zealand Maories in this and other points.
The Maories are apt at learning, merry, and, unlike other Polynesians, trustworthy, but also, unlike them, mercenary. At the time of the Manawatu sale, old Aperahama used to write to Dr. Featherston almost every day: “O Pétatoné, let the price of the block be £9,999,999 19s.9d.,” the mysteries of eleven pence three farthings being far beyond his comprehension. The Maories have, too, a royal magnificence in their ideas of gifts and grants—witness té Héké‘s bid of 100,000 acres of land for Governor Fitzroy‘s head, in answer to the offer, by the governor, of a small price for his.
The praises of the Maories have been sung by so many writers, and in so many keys, that it is necessary to keep it distinctly before us that they are mere savages, though brave, shrewd men. There is an Eastern civilization—that of China and Hindostan—distinct from that of Europe, and ancient beyond all count; in this the Maories have no share. No true Hindoo, no Arab, no Chinaman, has suffered change in one tittle of his dress or manners from contact with the Western races; of this essential conservatism there is in the New Zealand savage not a trace. William Thompson, the Maori “king-maker,” used to dress as any Englishman; Maories on board our ships wear the uniform of the able-bodied seamen; Governor Hunia has ridden as a gentleman-rider in a steeple-chase, equipped in jockey dress.
Savages though they be, in irregular warfare we are not their match. At the end of 1865, we had of regulars and militia seventeen thousand men under armsin the North Island of New Zealand, including no less than twelve regiments of the line at their “war strength,” and yet our generals were despondent as to their chance of finally defeating the warriors of a people which—men, women, and children—numbered but thirty thousand souls.
Men have sought far and wide for the reasons which led to our defeats in the New Zealand wars. We were defeated by the Maories, as the Austrians by the Prussians, and the French by the English in old times—because the victors were the better men. Not the braver men, when both sides were brave alike; not the stronger; not, perhaps, taking the average of our officers and men, the more intelligent; but capable of quicker movement, able to subsist on less, more crafty, more skilled in the thousand tactics of the bush. Aided by their women, who, when need was, themselves would lead the charge, and who at all times dug their fern-root and caught their fish; marching where our regiments could not follow, they had, as have the Indians in America, the choice of time and place for their attacks, and while we were crawling about our military roads upon the coast, incapable of traversing a mile of bush, the Maories moved securely and secretly from one end to the other of the island. Arms they had, ammunition they could steal, and blockade was useless with enemies who live on fern-root. When they found that we burnt their pahs, they ceased to build them; that was all. When we brought up howitzers, they went where no howitzers could follow. It should not be hard even for our pride to allow that such enemies were, man for man, in their own lands our betters.
All nations fond of horses, it has been said, flourish and succeed. The Maories love horses and ride well. All races that delight in sea are equally certain to prosper,empirical philosophers will tell us. The Maories own ships by the score, and serve as sailors whenever they get a chance: as deep-sea fishermen they have no equals. Their fondness for draughts shows mathematical capacity; in truthfulness they possess the first of virtues. They are shrewd, thrifty; devoted friends, brave men. With all this, they die.
“Can you stay the surf which beats on Wanganui shore?” say the Maories of our progress; and, of themselves: “We are gone—like themoa.”