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CHAPTER V.
THE MAORIES

PARTING with 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 time out of instead of into the 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 could hardly 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 admit that 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 activity and 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 greenstone meri, 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 of idleness 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 arms in 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 the moa.”

CHAPTER VI.
THE TWO FLIES

 
“As the Pakéha fly has driven out the Maori fly;
As the Pakéha grass has killed the Maori grass;
As the Pakéha rat has slain the Maori rat;
As the Pakéha clover has starved the Maori fern,
So will the Pakéha destroy the Maori.”
 

THESE are the mournful words of a well-known Maori song.

That the English daisy, the white clover, the common thistle, the chamomile, the oat, should make their way rapidly in New Zealand, and put down the native plants, is in no way strange. If the Maori grasses that have till lately held undisturbed possession of the New Zealand soil, require for their nourishment the substances A, B, and C, while the English clover needs A, B, and D; from the nature of things A and B will be the coarser earths or salts, existing in larger quantities, not easily losing vigor and nourishing force, and recruiting their energies from the decay of the very plant that feeds on them; but C and D will be the more ethereal, the more easily destroyed or wasted substances. The Maori grass, having sucked nearly the whole of C from the soil, is in a weakly state, when in comes the English plant, and, finding an abundant store of untouched D, thrives accordingly, and crushes down the Maori.

The positions of flies and grasses, of plants and insects, are, however, not the same. Adapted by nature to the infinite variety of soils and climates, there are an infinite number of different plants and animals; but whereas the plant depends upon both soil and climate, the animal depends chiefly upon climate, and little upon soil – except so far as his home or his food themselves depend on soil. Now, while soil wears out, climate does not. The climate in the long run remains the same, but certain apparently trifling constituents of the soil will wholly disappear. The result of this is, that while pigs may continue to thrive in New Zealand forever and a day, Dutch clover (without manure) will only last a given and calculable time.

The case of the flies is plain enough. The Maori and the English fly live on the same food, and require about the same amount of warmth and moisture: the one which is best fitted to the common conditions will gain the day, and drive out the other. The English fly has had to contend not only against other English flies, but against every fly of temperate climates: we having traded with every land, and brought the flies of every clime to England. The English fly is the best possible fly of the whole world, and will naturally beat down and exterminate, or else starve out, the merely provincial Maori fly. If a great singer – to find whom for the London stage the world has been ransacked – should be led by the foible of the moment to sing for gain in an unknown village, where on the same night a rustic tenor was attempting to sing his best, the London tenor would send the provincial supperless to bed. So it is with the English and Maori fly.

Natural selection is being conducted by nature in New Zealand on a grander scale than any we have contemplated, for the object of it here is man. In America, in Australia, the white man shoots or poisons his red or black fellow, and exterminates him through the workings of superior knowledge; but in New Zealand it is peacefully, and without extraordinary advantages, that the Pakéha beats his Maori brother.

That which is true of our animal and vegetable productions is true also of our man. The English fly, grass, and man, they and their progenitors before them, have had to fight for life against their fellows. The Englishman, bringing into his country from the parts to which he trades all manner of men, of grass seeds, and of insect germs, has filled his land with every kind of living thing to which his soil or climate will afford support. Both old inhabitants and interlopers have to maintain a struggle which at once crushes and starves out of life every weakly plant, man, or insect, and fortifies the race by continual buffetings. The plants of civilized man are generally those which will grow best in the greatest variety of soils and climates; but in any case, the English fauna and flora are peculiarly fitted to succeed at our antipodes, because the climates of Great Britain and New Zealand are almost the same, and our men, flies, and plants – the “pick” of the whole world – have not even to encounter the difficulties of acclimatization in their struggle against the weaker growths indigenous to the soil.

Nature‘s work in New Zealand is not the same as that which she is quickly doing in North America, in Tasmania, in Queensland. It is not merely that a hunting and fighting people is being replaced by an agricultural and pastoral people, and must farm or die: the Maori does farm; Maori chiefs own villages, build houses, which they let to European settlers; we have here Maori sheep-farmers, Maori ship-owners, Maori mechanics, Maori soldiers, Maori rough-riders, Maori sailors, and even Maori traders. There is nothing which the average Englishman can do which the average Maori cannot be taught to do as cheaply and as well. Nevertheless, the race dies out. The Red Indian dies because he cannot farm; the Maori farms, and dies.

There are certain special features about this advance of the birds, beasts, and men of Western civilization. When the first white man landed in New Zealand, all the native quadrupeds save one, and nearly all the birds and river-fishes, were extinct, though we have their bones, and traditions of their existence. The Maories themselves were dying out. The moa and dinoris were both gone; there were few insects, and no reptiles. “The birds die because the Maories, their companions, die,” is the native saying. Yet the climate is singularly good, and food for beast and bird so plentiful that Captain Cook‘s pigs have planted colonies of “wild boars” in every part of the islands, and English pheasants have no sooner been imported than they have commenced to swarm in every jungle. Even the Pakéha flea has come over in the ships, and wonderfully has he thriven.

The terrible want of food for men that formerly characterized New Zealand has had its effects upon the habits of the Maori race. Australia has no native fruit trees worthy cultivation, although in the whole world there is no such climate and soil for fruits; still, Australia has kangaroos and other quadrupeds. The Ladrones were destitute of quadrupeds, and of birds, except the turtle-dove; but in the warm damp climate fruits grew, sufficient to support in comfort a dense population. In New Zealand the windy cold of the winters causes a need for something of a tougher fiber than the banana or the fern-root. There being no native beasts, the want was supplied by human flesh, and war, furnishing at once food and the excitement which the chase supplies to peoples that have animals to hunt, became the occupation of the Maories. Hence in some degree the depopulation of the land; but other causes exist, by the side of which cannibalism is as nothing.

The British government has been less guilty than is commonly believed as regards the destruction of the Maories. Since the original misdeed of the annexation of the isles, we have done the Maories no serious wrong. We recognized the claim of a handful of natives to the soil of a country as large as Great Britain, of not one-hundredth part of which had they ever made the smallest use; and, disregarding the fact that our occupation of the coast was the very event that gave the land its value, we have insisted on buying every acre from the tribe. Allowing title by conquest to the Ngatiraukawa, as I saw at Parewanui Pah, we refuse to claim even the lands we conquered from the “Kingites.”

The Maories have always been a village people, tilling a little land round their pahs, but incapable of making any use of the great pastures and wheat countries which they “own.” Had we at first constituted native reserves, on the American system, we might, without any fighting, and without any more rapid destruction of the natives than that which is taking place, have gradually cleared and brought into the market nearly the whole country, which now has to be purchased at enormous prices, and at the continual risk of war.

As it is, the record of our dealings with the Queen‘s native subjects in New Zealand has been almost free from stain, but if we have not committed crimes, we have certainly not failed to blunder: our treatment of William Thompson was at the best a grave mistake. If ever there lived a patriot he was one, and through him we might have ruled in peace the Maori race. Instead of receiving the simplest courtesy from a people which in India showers honors upon its puppet kings and rajahs, he underwent fresh insults each time that he entered an English town or met a white magistrate or subaltern, and he died, while I was in the colonies – according to Pakéha physicians, of liver complaint; according to the Maories, of a broken heart.

At Parewanui and Otaki, I remarked that the half-breeds are fine fellows, possessed of much of the nobility of both the ancestral races, while the women are famed for grace and loveliness. In miscegenation it would have seemed that there was a chance for the Maori, who, if destined to die, would at least have left many of his best features of body and mind to live in the mixed race, but here comes in the prejudice of blood, with which we have already met in the case of the negroes and Chinese. Morality has so far gained ground as greatly to check the spread of permanent illegitimate connections with native women, while pride prevents intermarriage. The numbers of the half-breeds are not upon the increase: a few fresh marriages supply the vacancies that come of death, but there is no progress, no sign of the creation of a vigorous mixed race. There is something more in this than foolish pride, however; there is a secret at the bottom at once of the cessation of mixed marriages and of the dwindling of the pure Maori race, and it is the utter viciousness of the native girls. The universal unchastity of the unmarried women, “Christian” as well as heathen, would be sufficient to destroy a race of gods. The story of the Maories is that of the Tahitians, and is written in the decorations of every gate-post or rafter in their pahs.

We are more distressed at the present and future of the Maories than they are themselves. For all our greatness, we pity not the Maories more profoundly than they do us when, ascribing our morality to calculation, they bask in the sunlight, and are happy in their gracelessness. After all, virtue and arithmetic come from one Greek root.