1974 - Williams, W. The Turanga Journals - NOTES [Turanga Mission stations, Land buying, Missionaries] p 144-157

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NOTES

Turanga Mission Stations

Kaupapa, 1840 to 1844
Whakato, 1844 to 1857
Waerenga-a-hika, 1857 to 1865

Unfortunately neither William nor Jane gave a sufficiently precise description of their first mission station, Kaupapa, for it now to be located from their records alone. The land that William Williams had set aside for a station on his April 1839 visit was 'contiguous' to Umukapua pa; 1 it was on this site that his raupo house was built. Williams never again in his Journals referred to this pa, Umukapua, by name; his and Jane's references were always simply to 'the Pa'. He did, however, call the Maoris living at the pa, Ngati Kaipoho. Ngati Kaipoho was a hapu of Rongowhakaata, and the people were the owners of both Umukapua and Orakaiapu--the latter pa being the older and more strongly fortified. 2 William Williams' son, W. Leonard Williams, stated that the mission station was, 'within a short distance of Orakaiapu, the large pa of the Rongowhakaata tribe'. 3 This description would equally well fit Whakato, the station to which Williams moved in 1844. Whakato was reasonably close to Kaupapa, but to avoid flooding was built further away from the river. Both houses were visible from each other. Leonard Williams also described the location of Orakaiapu: 'The pa was situated on the bank (about 20 ft high) of the Kopututea River, just below the junction of the Waipaoa and Arai, the area being about three acres'. 4

The task of identifying Orakaiapu, and thus Kaupapa and Whakato as well, has not been helped by the change of course of both the Waipaoa and Te Arai Rivers, and the silting up and consequent disappearance of the Kopututea River. There is, however, a sketch map of Poverty Bay drawn by W. L. Williams, which shows the original course of the Kopututea and Waipaoa Rivers, and which also marks the site of Orakaiapu. 5 No visible trace of the pa or of the two mission stations now remains, but they were all sited within Manutuke--a township

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about 8 miles south west of Gisborne. Orakaiapu pa covered the ground at the rear of the present Post Office and included the land on which the Mormon Church is now built; Umukapua was adjacent to Orakaiapu; Kaupapa was about half a mile below Orakaiapu, and Whakato was on the other side of the present road through Manutuke, near the Whakato meeting house. 6

James Stack's eldest son, James West Stack, was seven years old in 1842 when his father took charge of Kaupapa during Williams' absence at the Bay of Islands. Later in life he reminisced about the mission station: 'The orchard and vegetable garden were the largest and best kept that I had ever seen. I was particularly interested in the vines and clusters of grapes, the appearance of which, until then, I only knew from picture books. There was a good sized bee-house in one part of the garden, covered with climbing roses, which filled the air around it with their fragrance, and caused me afterwards to associate the perfume of roses with bees and honey.' (J. W. Stack, Early Maoriland Adventures, A. H. Reed (ed.), Dunedin 1935, pp. 141-2.)

The move to Waerenga-a-hika was made in 1857. Williams needed more land than Whakato provided for a projected Maori school and training college. This inland station was closed at the end of 1865 as a consequence of the Hauhau uprising. Some old trees, one of them a Norfolk Pine, still mark the site of this third and last of the Turanga mission stations.

LAND BUYING

There were four main groups buying land in New Zealand before 1840--European settlers, C.M.S. missionaries, both on their own and on the Society's account, New South Wales land speculators, and the New Zealand Company. It was this wholesale alienation and exploitation of Maori land, plus the vagaries inherent in 'systematic colonisation' and the possibility of expensive European and native outrages which would have to be sorted out by the despatch of gunboats and troops, which jarred the Clapham sect sensibilities of the Colonial Office and prompted British Government intervention in New Zealand and the beginnings of a system of control over land purchasing.

European Settlers (Poverty Bay)

Poverty Bay was not a popular area for settlement. When Land Commissioner Dillon Bell investigated the Poverty Bay land claims in February 1860 he wrote:

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Missionary Land Purchases

In a most revealing statement made in 1843, the old Tahitian missionary, John Williams, said to one of his younger colleagues:

It is obvious from the correspondence on land buying between the C.M.S. officials at Salisbury Square and the missionaries at the Bay of Islands, that the latter had adapted proceedings to circumstances, and that the London Committee knew very little about the extent of missionary private purchase.

The revelations which shook the C.M.S. in London were made in 1838 by a former catechist in the New Zealand mission, John Flatt, who in evidence before a Select Committee of the House of Lords, reported on the extensive private land holdings of Henry Williams, William Fairburn, Charles Baker, George Clarke, and James Kemp. The following year J. D. Lang's book appeared in which he accused the C.M.S. missionaries of extensive land jobbing. Dr Lang was a pugnacious Presbyterian who lost no opportunity of attacking the Anglican establishment. He relished his information:

One senses the embarrassment of Dandeson Coates, Secretary of the C.M.S., when he replied to a question put to him by the 1840 Select Committee, that because of the 'imperfect nature of the information which has yet reached them,' he called upon the public 'to refrain from coming to a conclusion upon a case as yet so imperfectly understood.' 10 He probably envied the position of his Wesleyan colleague, John Beecham, who was able to deny any similar land holdings by missionaries of his Society in New Zealand. The distinction, Dandeson Coates pointed out, was this:

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The crux of the matter was this provision for the future welfare of C.M.S. mission children. They formed a significant part of the European population; James Busby estimated in 1839 that the twelve missionary families at the Bay of Islands had 88 children between them; William Williams cited 141 C.M.S. children in 1841. From the beginning the London Committee had been uneasy about a specific land grant for mission children, but had agreed in 1830.

The Bay missionaries in April 1833 then recommended to the Parent Committee, 'that an allotment of 200 acres of land be given to each child, on arriving at the age of 15'. The Parent Committee was not happy about a fixed amount of land, and replied in July 1835;

As agriculture was the only non-missionary pursuit open to missionary sons, the assumption at Salisbury Square was that £50 would purchase 'a moderate extent of land'. Then came the shock of finding that, even allowing for his eleven children, Henry Williams had purchased approximately 11,000 acres at the Bay of Islands, William Fairburn 40,000 at Thames, Richard Taylor 50,000 at Motupao Island near Cape Maria van Diemen, and that other missionaries had also bought large tracts. In their defence the Bay missionaries pointed out that to acquire 200 acres of arable land, many hundreds of acres of poor quality land had to be purchased as well. Nevertheless the London Committee felt that 'a moderate extent' did not mean thousands of acres, and they were further perturbed that the land had been acquired without a word of reference to them. Approximately 150,000 acres held by missionary families for which the estimated payment in goods out of private accounts had been about £8,000, was no 'mere bagatelle'.

In December 1838 Dandeson Coates had written to the missionaries after Flatt's evidence, that he and his colleagues wished to give the missionaries 'entire credit for the purity of their motives', and he did not feel justified in 'assuming to lay down a prohibitory rule', 14 but by 1840 when the full extent of missionary land purchase was known, no such scruples were felt. In a letter of 18 February 1840 to George Clarke, Secretary of the Northern District, Dandeson Coates wrote:

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He also pointed out that the time was approaching when the developing social state of the Colony should give missionary children a choice of occupation, and that land-owning carried an inherent risk of 'withdrawing you from your duties in the mission, and secularizing your minds'. The letter concluded with a firm instruction: all purchases of land, except those under the resolution of 27 July 1830, were to be discontinued. This turned the wheel the full circle in as much as it was the ambiguity of the 'moderate extent' mentioned in this resolution that had begun the spate of missionary land buying. However, the second part of this resolution which missionaries had hitherto ignored, that the nature and extent of their purchase was to be in each case referred to the London committee for its sanction, made it obvious that large land purchases would not be sanctioned. Nor, for that matter, would they be sanctioned by the Land Purchase Commissioners in New Zealand, who in considering missionary private claims, granted a fraction only of the amount claimed.

Not all missionaries indulged in large scale land purchases. William Williams' claim at the Bay of Islands was a moderate one. 16 He was probably fortunate that when the storm broke over the extent of missionary private purchase, none of his children had yet turned fifteen, while his brother Henry had five over fifteen, four of them boys. William Colenso, William Wade, Benjamin Ashwell, Octavius Hadfield were almost as vehement in their attacks on missionary land buying as Dr Lang.

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One missionary, Henry Williams, was not too disturbed. 'We may receive orders to buy no more land and perhaps to give up what we now possess. I mean to hold mine whatever others do.' 21 But the C.M.S. Parent Committee had been made to look foolish at the Select Committee hearings; the memory rankled. Land holding and missionary vocation were seen as an unfortunate combination. This continuing attitude helps to explain the otherwise unlikely combination of Bishop Selwyn, Governor George Grey and the London C.M.S., which forced the dismissal of Henry Williams in November 1849. 22

Mission Reserves, New South Wales Speculators, and the New Zealand Company

There was one area of land purchasing in which William Williams was the leader, and about which he felt no qualms whatever--the buying of large tracts with C.M.S. funds, to be held in trust for Maoris. Governor Gipps' land regulations of January 1839 raised the price of waste land in New South Wales from 5/- to 12/- per acre. The increased price provided an additional stimulus to N.S.W. speculators to acquire tracts in New Zealand. Speculator claims in New Zealand by 1840 totalled 38,845,500 acres; W. C. Wentworth's claim was for 20,000,000 acres of the South Island. The particular speculative claim that trespassed on William Williams' East Coast pastorate was that of Daniel Cooper and James Holt, Sydney merchants, and their agent William Barnard Rhodes. In September 1839, Rhodes bought land at Table Cape estimated at 71,000 acres; in December he bought 345,000 acres at Wairoa, and at the end of the same month, 883,000 acres at Ahuriri (Hawkes Bay). Rhodes also had a trading station and land at Poverty Bay--the Karaua block of 321 acres--and employed an agent, Peter Simpson, at Wherowhero. This last claim was granted, but of all the other land, including claims at Kapiti and Waikanae, and estimated by Cooper to total 2,246,000 acres, Land Commissioner Dillon Bell recommended in 1860 a final grant of 2,560 acres only. In January 1840, however, William Williams was appalled by the sales to Rhodes, and protested vigorously, on behalf of the Maori proprietors, most of whom had not been consulted in the deals, to Willoughby Shortland, Colonial Secretary, and through the C.M.S. to Lord John Russell, Secretary of State for the Colonies, requesting that persons be appointed by government to investigate these 'pretended purchases of land, the only object of which is to aggrandize the purchasers, to the utter ruin of the

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aboriginal occupants of the soil.' 23 In addition to protesting, Williams urged on his colleagues a programme designed to thwart the speculators in which the missionaries themselves bought large tracts, theoretically for the C.M.S. and paid for out of mission funds, which were then to be set aside as 'native reserves'. ... it is necessary that Missionaries should be at every possible point and that land should be secured for natives by purchase on behalf of the Society', he wrote to Brown, and proposed himself 'to take extensive measures at Poverty Bay while there may be opportunity'. 24 The special C.M.S. meeting at Tauranga, 10 January 1840, resolved:

William Williams expended £200 of blankets, pots, etc., in 'saving' Poverty Bay.

In addition to the N.S.W. land speculators, another mission enemy was in the field--the New Zealand Company. In a letter almost breathless with urgency, Henry Williams wrote to Brown from Port Nicholson;

In a later letter he wrote, 'It therefore behoves us as "the Guardians of the Natives" to think for them and to act also.' 27 Actually the New Zealand Company was also prepared to act as the guardians of the natives, and had in mind its own system of reserves. E. G. Wakefield proposed 'to create a "native aristocracy or native gentry" by the simple device of returning to each chief a portion of the land which the colonizers had acquired'.

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The native reserves, Wakefield stated explicitly were not designed to support the whole tribe but only "the principal native families and their children". 28

William Williams, therefore, in buying the arable land of Poverty Bay 'in trust for the natives', acted from a well justified sense of urgency and in good faith. Such a procedure seemed to Dandeson Coates calculated to benefit the natives, although he thought the deed 'an instrument of very imperfect nature as to strict legal force'. 29

Government Regulation

In this welter and confusion of land trafficking, of documents of dubious legality, of questionable motives, and of equally questionable paternalism, one looks to the touchstone of the Treaty of Waitangi, only to find that what has now become a folk myth, was even in 1840, a spectacle, a symbol, a 'moral agreement', but not an instrument of policy. Over the next ten years the Treaty was attacked, it was defended, it was invoked, but it was never really used--possibly its use as native policy had never been really contemplated. Ian Wards aptly sums up the British Government's attitude: '. . . at the moment of action, Colonial Office policy was simply: obtain sovereignty, incur no avoidable expense, see what happens'. 30 Without doubt the Treaty was well intentioned; evangelicals and humanitarians both in New Zealand and in England had urged the guardianship of Maori land. But New Zealand land policy of the forties was based on expedient rather than on principle, and worked out in instructions and correspondence between Colonial Secretaries and Colonial Governors, in legislation allowed, disallowed and re-enacted, in schedules, and in appointment of Commissioners. Nevertheless when missionaries interpreted the Treaty to Maoris in order to gain signatures, 'sovereignty' may have seemed an elusive notion, difficult to translate; but with sentence 2, which embodied inviolate native rights to the whole land, the missionaries found no problem, it was quite literally translated, and by both Missionary and Maori quite literally understood. 31

In 1839, however, the immediate issue was control of land speculation. By Letters Patent issued on 15 June 1839, Governor Sir George Gipps of New South Wales was appointed Captain General and Governor-in-Chief over an enlarged territory which included any land which might be acquired within the islands of New Zealand. In August 1839, Captain Hobson accepted the appointment of Lieutenant Governor and Consul of New Zealand. In the first instance the Consul of New Zealand was to be attached to the New South Wales government, and New Zealand became a dependency of New South Wales. The first necessity was land control. Just before Hobson left Sydney for New Zealand, Gipps

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issued three Proclamations: the first, in conformity with the Letters Patent, extended the laws of N.S.W. to New Zealand, the second announced the appointment of William Hobson as Lieutenant Governor, and the third declared that no title to land in New Zealand would be valid unless derived from or confirmed by a grant in the Queen's name. To this end Land Commissioners would be appointed to examine claims, and all purchases of land after the date of the proclamation, 14 January 1840, would be null and void. Thus by this proclamation the extensive native reserve purchased by William Williams in Poverty Bay was also rendered null and void, although the £200 expended in goods for the transaction probably bought Maori goodwill. The substance of Gipps' proclamation was embodied in the New Zealand Land Claims Bill passed by the N.S.W. Legislative Council in July 1840. Land Commissioners were to examine and report on land claims in New Zealand, and they were authorized to make individual grants up to a maximum of 2560 acres only, unless special circumstances justified a larger grant. The three Commissioners, Francis Fisher, Mathew Richmond, and Edward Lee Godfrey were appointed a month later. There was also a graduated price scale. Land bought between 1815 and 1824 was assessed at 6d per acre, and rose gradually to 4/- per acre in 1839. In coming to this value, goods when given to the Maoris in barter for land were to be estimated at three times their selling price in Sydney at the time. When New Zealand became a separate colony, Gipps' Act was annulled, and as a regulating procedure, Lord John Russell authorised Hobson to pass a land ordinance based on the previous Land Act. Hobson also reappointed two of Gipps' Land Commissioners, Mathew Richmond and Edward Godfrey.

For the moment government regulation and the Treaty provided a breathing space and put a stop to land speculation; but in the process New Zealand became a British Colony, not a native protectorate nor a missionary theocracy. Colonies, among other things, attracted settlement; there was bound to be a conflict of interest between settlers and natives. For the missionaries it was to be a conflict of loyalties.

MISSIONARIES

Alfred Brown

The Bay of Islands was the headquarters of the C.M.S. mission, but for the 'southward' another focal point was Tauranga. Not only did the harbour provide a convenient staging post for mission journeys into the interior or to the Bay of Plenty, but one of the few ordained men-- until 1839--was stationed there, and he provided a safety valve for the often pent up feelings of the members of the overcrowded, inbred Bay of Islands settlement. The missionary letters to A. N. Brown which fortunately were preserved by his descendants and are now microfilmed, provide a most fascinating, intimate, even gossipy portrayal of missionary relationships which unfortunately is not found in the more formal correspondence with the London C.M.S.

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Brown and his wife Charlotte arrived at Paihia in 1829. His first appointment was master in charge of the English Boys' School. Somewhat to his surprise in 1833, he was chosen by his colleagues to superintend the C.M.S. extension to the south, although, 'shut up in the Eng. Boys School ever since I have been in the land', he knew very little Maori.

The 1833 trip which he made with Fairburn and Morgan was an exploratory one to the Thames to select a mission site--Puriri. In the meantime William Williams took charge of the school. In February of the following year Brown and Hamlin sailed from the Bay of Islands to Kaipara Harbour on a five month journey to the Waikato, visiting Whaingaroa and Kawhia and returning through Ngaruawahia and the Thames. Accompanied by William Williams he made another trip south in July 1834 and selected the sites for the Matamata and Mangapouri stations. To Brown's annoyance, Williams, after being pledged to the Waikato Maoris as their missionary at Mangapouri, was ordered to take charge of the English Boys' School at Waimate:

In April 1835, Brown arrived at Matamata and remained there until the station was abandoned in October 1836, after being plundered in the Te Waharoa war. Brown then returned to the Bay of Islands.

The station with which he was most closely associated was Te Papa, Tauranga, where he and his family arrived in January 1838. He remained here, apart from brief visits to Auckland, for the rest of his life. Bishop Selwyn created him Archdeacon of Tauranga on 31 December 1843--his archdeaconry included the Bay of Plenty-Rotorua district. Brown suffered from ill health, and particularly after 1840, from an eye disease. He was advised to avoid all eye strain, and this probably accounted for the fact that he, although a recipient of numerous letters, was himself a bad correspondent. His friend, William Williams, frequently chided him about this; Thomas Chapman from Rotorua was another close friend.

Thomas Chapman

He arrived at the Bay of Islands with his wife as a C.M.S. catechist in 1830. He made an exploratory trip to Tauranga and Rotorua with Henry Williams in 1831. On James Kemp's resignation as storekeeper at

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Kerikeri in 1832, Chapman took his place until September 1833 when he moved to Paihia to become a master at the Boys' School. In August 1835 he arrived at Rotorua to establish a station there. The station at Koutu was destroyed during the Te Waharoa 1836-7 war. The Rotorua mission was re-established by Chapman and John Morgan in January 1838 on Mokoia Island, and two years later transferred to Te Ngae on the mainland where Chapman, who before becoming a missionary had been a farmer, estabished a very fine orchard. After some misgivings on his part, he was ordained Deacon by Bishop Selwyn in 1844. On mission matters, Chapman, Brown, and William Williams generally saw eye to eye. Although he suffered from rheumatism, he was one of the more exuberant of the C.M.S. missionaries, and one of the few able to detach himself sufficiently from the burden of the day to look with some critical amusement at mission progress. His letters to his friend A. N. Brown are delightful. He was popular with his colleagues, and more surprisingly, much sought after by all the ladies of Auckland on a visit he paid there in 1850:

George Clarke {Senior)

He arrived at the Bay of Islands as a catechist in 1824 and was first stationed at Kerikeri; he later helped begin the Waimate farm. Hobson offered him the post, which he accepted with the approval of his colleagues, of protector of aborigines, May 1841. When Grey all but abolished the protectorate in 1846, Clarke rejoined the C.M.S. as New Zealand Secretary. Along with Henry Williams he was dismissed in 1849 for refusing to give up the title to his land holdings. His son, George Clarke, went with the Williams' family to Poverty Bay in January 1840. Both father and son were advocates of Maori land rights--George Clarke junior became a clerk in his father's office--and both became targets for the extreme hostility of New Zealand Company settlers.

James Hamlin

Hamlin was one of the first missionary trainees at the C.M.S. College at Islington, and he and his wife came to New Zealand with William and Jane Williams in 1826. He was employed as a catechist and also as a flax dresser and weaver, first at Kerikeri and later at Waimate. He accompanied Brown in 1834 on his five month trip to the south. It was Hamlin's house at Waimate that William and Jane moved to in May 1835, and it was to Mangapouri, the Waikato station intended for William Williams until plans were changed, that Hamlin went in

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the same year. When Robert Maunsell began the Manukau station in August 1836, he was joined a month later by Hamlin; Hamlin's place at Mangapouri was supplied by James Stack. In June 1839, when Maunsell shifted from Manukau to Maraetai on the Waikato River, Hamlin was left in charge at Manukau, and he shifted the station from the original site at Moeatoa to Orua Bay. He remained there until April 1844 when he left for St John's College to study for Deacons Orders. He returned briefly to Manukau and prepared to leave for Wairoa, Hawkes Bay, where he arrived, 26 December 1844. Bishop Selwyn gave the following reasons for ordering his removal from Manukau to the bush of Wairoa:

William Williams was pleased to have him.

John Morgan

He joined the C.M.S. at the Bay of Islands as a catechist in 1833, and later married Maria Coldham, Marianne Williams' sister. They had eight children. Before he went with Chapman to re-open the Rotorua station in 1838, he had already served at Puriri, Mangapouri, and Matamata, and was tired of being posted about:

But the Rotorua climate seemed inclement for Mrs Morgan--'the air of Rotorua', wrote Thomas Chapman, 'being too keen for her constitution', 37 and at his own request he was again moved, but not to the East Coast. The Southern District Committee decided much to William Williams' annoyance that it was too weak, with its ten members, to spare one for the Eastern District, where Williams was alone. In January 1841, Morgan shifted to the Waikato station of Otawhao. There he was able to 'sit down' for twenty years, teaching Christianity, and more successfully, farm husbandry, particularly wheat growing, to the Waikato Maoris.

James Stack

Stack joined the Wesleyan mission at Whangaroa in 1823. When that station was destroyed in 1827, he returned to Sydney and later to England, where in 1831 he was accepted as a catechist in the C.M.S.

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New Zealand mission. He returned with his wife to the Bay of Islands in 1833. Before his appointment to the East Coast Rangitukia station in 1842, he had served at the Mangapouri and Tauranga stations. Although he spoke Maori well, his relationship with Maoris was not very successful--both at Mangapouri and Rangitukia he found it difficult to win Maori cooperation.

He seems to have had an anxious and pessimistic temperament. When ill health and insanity forced him to leave Rangitukia and return to Auckland, he made 'a melancholy attempt ... to shorten his life'. 39 He evenutally returned to England in 1849.

Richard Taylor

A Cambridge graduate, he entered the C.M.S. service as a priest. Shortly after his arrival at the Bay in 1839, he accompanied William Williams on a trip to the East Coast and Poverty Bay, and after this agreed to take charge of the Waimate Boys' School thus freeing Williams and Hadfield for the mission fields of Poverty Bay and Kapiti. He does not appear to have been as conscientious a school-master as William Williams, and the attendance at the school fell away until it was taken under Selywn's charge in 1842. Taylor remained at Waimate until 1843, when at the end of April he moved to the Wanganui station of Putiki-wharanui to supply the place of John Mason, drowned while crossing the Turakina River. Taylor's pastorate was as extensive as William Williams', and he showed a similar walking ability on his journeys. In the stormy meeting of Maori and New Zealand Company at Wanganui, Taylor persuaded the chiefs to allow the immigrants to settle while Company claims were investigated. He annoyed the settlers by his support of the Maori objection to the reserves allocated to them. Taylor was one of the few C.M.S. missionaries genuinely interested in Maori life and customs.

John Wilson

Wilson was a catechist, but he was no 'godly mechanic', but an ex officer of the Royal Navy and married to a colonel's daughter. The London C.M.S. was careful to notify the Bay missionaries of this social fact when Wilson joined them in 1833. He helped begin the Thames' station at Puriri, and in 1835 assisted Brown at Matamata. After the death of his wife in 1838, he went to New South Wales for a

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brief period. He showed an interesting divergence from the prevailing missionary attitude towards obtaining signatures to the Treaty of Waitangi: in a letter to Brown he wrote,

In January 1840, Wilson was instructed to form a new station at Opotiki, but although he visited it several times from Tauranga in 1840, he did not take up permanent residence there until 1841. Wilson was at the top of the Parent Committee's list of recommended candidates for Holy Orders, but Selwyn considered him lacking in missionary zeal. He was not ordained deacon until 1852.