CHAPTER XV.

Mana -- Young New Zealand -- The Law of England -- "Pop goes the weasel" -- Right if we have Might -- God save the Queen -- Good Advice 174

HISTORY OF THE WAR IN THE NORTH OF NEW ZEALAND AGAINST THE CHIEF HEKE 181

INTRODUCTION.

In the good old times of Conquest and Colonization (I like to be particular about my dates and places), the civilized nations of the day followed a simple policy in regard to the savage races with whom they came in contact, which may be roughly described as going their own way, and punishing the natives if they didn't conform to it, without troubling themselves much about what the aforesaid natives thought or felt on the subject. If they understood the meaning of it so much the better for them, if they did not it could not be helped. Holding themselves to be morally and intellectually far superior to the savages, they maintained that it was the savage's business to understand and conform to their notions, and not their business to regard the savage's. As for giving savages the rights of civilized men it was seldom thought of; savages were to be treated as such.

I do not exactly know when this sort of native policy was first practised, but I know that it has lasted, with modifications, even to our day, and is to be seen in full working order in more than one part of the globe.

And let me remark (pace the Philanthropists) that it is not always the unwisest or cruellest policy that can be followed, for this reason, that it is simple, consistent, and easily understood. The man or the nation that consistently follows its own path, turning aside for no consideration, soon becomes at least thoroughly known if not intelligently understood. And misconceptions and misunderstandings are the most fruitful of all causes of bloodshed between civilized and savage races.

Let me confess, moreover, that there have been moments when I have felt certain carnal hankerings after that same old native policy. When, for instance, I had just left the French colony of New Caledonia, where amicable relations with the natives were preserved, and the country made as safe as Italy from end to end by the simple expedient of regularly and invariably executing a certain number of natives for every white man that they disposed of, without much inquiry into the motives of the murderers; and had returned to New Zealand to hear of a most lively massacre at Poverty Bay, perpetrated by three hundred Maori gentlemen, very well up in their Old Testaments and extremely practical in the use of the New,[1] who having satisfied the more pressing demands of their appetite upon the field of their exploit, had shown the sacred light of civilization that was burning within them by _potting the remainder of the corpses in tins_ and sending them as presents to their friends in the country, and had then departed to the mountains, filled with the comfortable conviction that nothing worse than imprisonment would follow the improbable event of their capture, that after a year or two of most enjoyable skirmishing the matter would be allowed to drop, and that they would most of them go to their graves well-honoured and unhung.[2]

[Footnote 1: They made cartridges of them. These were the Hau Haus, a sect of Maories who, when the prestige of Christianity first began to wane in the native mind, abolished the New Testament, retained the Old, which was more to their taste, and by mixing with it a large quantity of their old heathenism, produced a religion entirely devoted theoretically and practically to plunder and blood.]

[Footnote 2: I regret to say that the strict propriety (according to the received code of that day) with which the Poverty-Bay massacre, and the fighting which followed it, were prosecuted on both sides, was marred by the scandalous behaviour of a settler whose name I forget; this man's wife and child were mutilated, killed, &c., at the massacre; it was done in a most correct way, but somehow made him most unaccountably and unreasonably angry. He joined the expedition that was sent in pursuit of the murderers, and in one of the first engagements some dozen of them were made prisoners. At night he approached them, and, taking treacherous advantage of their guileless confidence, asked them if they had participated in the massacre, feast, &c.; and they, never dreaming that they had anything to fear from the admission, innocently answered in the affirmative, whereon this monster, knowing well that the poor fellows would escape capital, or even very serious, punishment, on the grounds that they were prisoners of war, or had brown skins, or excellent motives, or a deficient moral sense, or a defective education, deliberately shot the whole lot with his revolver. I need hardly mention that had this act been performed by a Maori upon white men by way of "utu" (revenge, payment) for some of his tribe that had been killed, it would have been quite "tiku" (correct, proper); but for a white man so to behave was scandalous. I forget what punishment was awarded him: let us hope he got what he deserved; and may this story be a warning to those who let their angry passions rise.

The leader of the Hau Hau expedition was a ruffian called Te Kooti. The chief of the native contingent that joined in their pursuit was a Maori, of the old-fashioned sort, named Ropata. A friend of mine asked him one day what he thought would be done with Te Kooti if he were taken. "Oh, you'll make him a judge," answered Ropata, coolly. "What do you mean?" asked my friend. "Well," said Ropata, "the last two rebels you caught you made native assessors, and Te Kooti's a much greater man than either of them; so I don't see how you can do less than make him a judge. But you won't if _I_ catch him," he added, with a grin.]

At moments like these I have had ideas on native policy that I dare not utter in the latitude of Exeter Hall, and the era of the nineteenth century.

But when New Zealand was colonized the feeling of the English public was distinctly philanthropical towards native races (especially at a distance), and the old policy was thoroughly discarded, for one, in its general theory and intention at least, more enlightened and more humane. Speaking broadly, I think one can see all through the chequered course of our Maori policy an earnest desire to treat the native as a man and a brother; to give him the status of a civilized man whenever it was possible to do so; and when not possible to consider and make due allowance for the fact of his being uncivilized, and to guide and lead him towards civilization by just and generous treatment, and appeals to his moral and intellectual faculties.

I do not wish to dwell upon the dangerous extravagances into which such a policy might and did occasionally run--such as letting off one native cut-throat by treating him as a civilized prisoner of war, and reprieving the next on the ground that he was a poor untutored savage who knew no better, to the utter destruction and confusion of all sense of power, justice, and security--great as was the amount of mischief that they did, but will confine myself to what I believe was the main cause of the almost total failure of this noble and, in the main, plausible policy.

It is quite evident that to give it a chance of success it must have been founded on a thorough understanding of the native character. It is no use making signs to a man who cannot understand them, it is no use uttering the most lovely moral precepts in language that is sure to mislead him. It was in this first necessary step that I hold that we failed, with brilliant individual exceptions no doubt, who, however, only served to make the confusion worse with their gleams of light.

Narrow-minded Enthusiasm, Ignorance, and Carelessness all contributed their quota to the mischief, and their favourite blunder consisted in jumping at conclusions concerning native character from certain analogies with our own. It did not occur to many of us that actions which marked the presence of certain qualities in the English character, might mark the presence of very different ones in the Maori, and _vice versâ_, or that qualities which marked the presence of certain other qualities in the Englishman might be very differently accompanied in the native; we did not realize the fact that the Maori reflected, argued, and acted in a way that was often as incomprehensible to us as our way was to him.

When we observed a band of native converts singing a hymn before advancing to battle we were filled with admiration at their piety, without perceiving that those deeper religious feelings which alone could have produced such a manifestation amongst Englishmen were entirely absent.[3] When Christianity spread through the tribes with amazing rapidity, we rejoiced over their capability for accepting the doctrines of high and pure religion, never perceiving that they accepted it simply because they thought from our superiority in ships, arms, tools, and material prosperity in general, that the "Mana" (_i.e._, luck, power, prestige) of Christianity must be greater than that of their old superstition, and would be quite ready to leave it again when they found out this was a mistake, their minds being as void of the higher religious elements as those of many savages far below them in intellectual powers. When we heard of a native chief supplying his enemy with food or ammunition to enable him to carry on the war we were charmed with his generous chivalry, and immediately endowed him with all the virtues that usually accompany such behaviour in an Englishman, blind to the fact that the chief simply liked fighting as we might like eating or sleeping, and furnished his enemy with arms and ammunition just as we might furnish one's cook with money to buy meat with.[4]

[Footnote 3: The Maori notion of prayer reaches no higher than the thing we call an incantation. One day I was talking to the old Pakeha Maori (_i.e._ a white man who lives amongst the Maories) on the subject of missionary labour. At last he said, "I'll tell you a story that will establish your name for ever at Exeter Hall, only you musn't tell it quite the same way that I do. I was here at the time when both the Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries were first beginning to make their way in the country; and the Maories of my tribe used to come to me and ask me which had the greatest 'mana' (_i.e._ fortune, prestige, power, strength)--the Protestant God or the Romanist one. I was always a good Churchman, and used to tell them that the Protestant God could lick the other into fits. There was an old Irish sailor about five miles from me who used to back up the Roman Catholic God, but I had a long start of him, and moreover _was the best fighting man_ of the two, which went a long way. In a short time I had about two hundred of the most muscular, blood-thirsty, hard-fighting Protestants you could wish to see.

"Well; it so happened that one day we had a little difference with some of our neighbours, and were drawn up on one side of a gully all ready to charge. I liked the fun of fighting in those days, and was rigged out in nothing but a cartridge-box and belt, with a plume of feathers in my hair, and a young woman to carry my ammunition for me; moreover, I had been put in command of the desperate young bloods of the tribe, and burned to distinguish myself, feeling the commander of the Old Guard at Waterloo quite an insignificant person in regard to myself in point of responsibility and honour.

"Lying down in the fern, we waited impatiently for the signal to charge; had not we, on the last occasion worth speaking of, outrun our elders, and been nearly decimated in consequence? Shall it not be different now? See! there is the great war-chief, the commander of the 'Taua,' coming this way (he was a real 'toa' of the old stamp, too seldom found among the degenerate Maories of the present day). Little cared he for the new faith that had sprung up in the last generation; his skill with the spear, and the incantations of his 'Tohungas' (_i.e._ priests or magicians), had kept him safe through many a bitter tussle; his 'mana' was great. Straight to me he came and addressed me thus:--'Look here, young fellow! I've done the incantations and made it all square with my God; but you say that you've got a God stronger than mine, and a lot of our young fellows go with you; there's nothing like having two Gods on our side, so you fellows do the proper business with him, and then we'll fight.' Could anything have been more practical and business-like than this? But I was quite stuck up; for though I could have repeated a prayer from the liturgy myself, my worthy converts, who philosophically and rightly looked upon religion merely as a means to an end (_i.e._ killing the greatest possible quantity of enemies), were unable to produce a line of scripture amongst them.

"There was an awkward pause; our commander was furious. Suddenly one discovers that he has a hymn-book in his pocket. General exultation! 'Now!' cries the old chief, foaming at the mouth with excitement, 'go down upon your knees (I know that's the custom with your God) and repeat the charm after him. Mind you don't make a mistake, now, for if one word is wrong, the whole thing will be turned topsy-turvy, and we shall be thrashed.'

"And then, having repeated one hymn word for word on our knees, I and my converts charged, and walked into the Amorites no end; but whether it was the hymn or the fighting that did it is of course an open question to this day."]

[Footnote 4: Of the Maori's passion for fighting for its own sake, with the chivalrous appearance that it somewhat misleadingly bore, I will give an instance. A certain chief had a missionary whom he desired to get rid of. Whether he was tired of his sermons, disliked his ritual, or what, I cannot say. However, he forwarded him on to another chief, with his compliments, as a present. Chief number two not being in need of a chaplain, having no living vacant, and having perhaps, too, a suspicion that the missionary was unsound in some respect from the careless way he was disposed of, declined him, and returned him untried. Chief number one was insulted, and declared that if chief number two had not known his superiority in arms and ammunition, he would not have dared to behave in such manner. When this came to the ears of number two, he divided his arms, &c., into two halves, and sent one to the enemy, with an invitation to war.

A distinguished friend of mine in New Zealand once asked a Maori chief who had fought against us on the Waikato, why, when he had command of a certain road, he did not attack the ammunition and provision trains? "Why, you fool!" answered the Maori, much astonished, "If we had stolen their powder and food, how could they have fought?"

Sometimes two villages would get up a little war, and the inhabitants, after potting at each other all day, would come out of their "pas" in the evening and talk over their day's sport in the most friendly manner. "I nearly bagged your brother to-day." "Ah, but you should have seen how I made your old father-in-law skip!" and so on. After one or two had been really killed, they would become more in earnest.

I have heard old Archdeacon ----, of Tauranga, relate how in one of these petty wars he has known the defenders of a pa send out to their adversaries to say they were short of provisions, who immediately sent them a supply to go on with. Also how he has performed service on Sunday between two belligerent pas, the inhabitants of which came out to pray, and met with the most perfect amity, returning to their pas when service was over, to recommence hostilities on Monday morning. The fact is, that they were, as the Pakeha Maori says, a race so demoralized by perpetual war that they had got to look instinctively upon fighting as the chief object in life. How difficult it was for the average Englishman to see this at first, and how misleading traits such as I have mentioned might be to him, it is not hard to imagine.]

By radical misconceptions, such as these, we succeeded in creating in our imaginations an ideal Maori about as true to the life as a Fenimore Cooper Indian. And then we proceeded to impress the real Maori with moral lessons that he could not understand, and with practical examples that he interpreted all wrong, to appeal to qualities and ideas that he did not possess, and ignore those that he did possess, till in spite of our patience and goodwill we became puzzled by and disgusted with him, and he contemptuous of and utterly bewildered by us. I have heard several comments upon us and our policy from intelligent natives, none of them very flattering to our sagacity or consistency, but I will only give one which struck me as being a most striking comment upon a policy that aimed at conciliation, forbearance, and patient improvement of the Maori.

"You are a good people, but you have no fixed plan and no understanding either in matters of peace or war. No man can tell when you will fight or when you will give presents to buy peace, or at what sudden moment you will stop doing one and begin the other. No man can tell your reasons nor the meaning of what you do." This man had evidently caught some vague glimmerings of the meaning of our policy which only confused him the more. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

From the faithful pictures of Maori character, ideas, and feelings contained in these two little books, the observant reader will easily perceive how mistakes and misconceptions as to what they were, and might become, and as to how they should be treated, sprang up in the English mind. It is true that the Maori question, with all its hopes and fears, has practically come to an end. The bubble of Maori civilization has burst, the idea, that seemed at one time not unlikely to become an actual fact, of a native race becoming truly Christianized and civilized, and prospering side by side with their white brothers, has gone where many a noble and well-fought-for idea has gone before. The true level of the Maori, intellectually and morally, has become tolerably well known; moreover, his numbers are diminishing year by year.

But the English nation is, and I hope always will be, in contact with many nations of different blood and various forms and degrees of civilization, and as long as this is the case it cannot be too much impressed upon that extremely powerful and somewhat hasty and headstrong body, the British public, that human nature is not the same all over the world, that one man's meat is another man's poison, that there is no code either of logic or of feeling or of morals universally accepted by humanity, that every difference in custom makes some difference in mind; so that (if that public wishes, as I believe it does, to manage the races with whom England comes in contact, not so much by force as by intelligent and beneficial moral influence) the first thing to be done is to gain an unwarped, accurate, and thorough knowledge of the customs, character, and opinions of the races in question.

If these two little books should suggest to any careless Englishman that foreigners of dark complexion are not all like either those white men who seem to have got into brown or black skins by mistake, whom one reads about in anti-slavery books and some missionary reports, or those equally tiresome black dummies whom one reads about in another sort of book who have no marked characteristic or intelligible custom except shooting spears and arrows at people for no apparent reason, I shall be glad to have introduced them to an English public; and let me assure those who care more for amusement than instruction that they will be amply repaid by their perusal.

I hope the Pakeha Maori will pardon my impertinence in giving a personal sketch of him to his English readers on the plea that his writing would not be complete without one.

He was, I believe, sixty years old when I first saw him, but, in spite of his age, looked the finest man for strength, activity, and grace I had ever seen. Six feet three in height and big in proportion, with a symmetry of shape that almost disguised his immense size, I felt I could well understand the stories I had heard of his popularity and his feats amongst the Maories, especially when I watched the keen, bright expression of his humorous Irish face.

In manner and conversation he was the very opposite of what one would expect of a man who had lived since his boyhood among savages. With a real love, and a considerable knowledge of literature, a keen appreciation of all intellectual excellence, and a most delightful humour, I think I never came across so charming a talker as the man whom I may not inaptly christen the "Lever" of New Zealand.

PEMBROKE.

PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION.

To the English reader, and to most of those who have arrived in New Zealand within the last thirty years, it may be necessary to state that the descriptions of Maori life and manners of past times found in these sketches owe nothing to fiction. The different scenes and incidents are given exactly as they occurred, and all the persons described are real persons.

Contact with the British settlers has of late years effected a marked and rapid change in the manners and mode of life of the natives, and the Maori of the present day are as unlike what they were when I first saw them as they are still unlike a civilised people or British subjects.

The writer has therefore thought it might be worth while to place a few sketches of old Maori life on record before the remembrance of them has quite passed away; though in doing so he has by no means exhausted an interesting subject, and a more full and particular delineation of old Maori life, manners, and history has yet to be written.

OLD NEW ZEALAND;

A TALE OF THE GOOD OLD TIMES.

BY A PAKEHA MAORI.

"Of Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow BETWEEN their shoulders."

OLD NEW ZEALAND.