CHAPTER V. THE MAORIES.
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CHAPTER V.
THE MAORIES.
PARTING with my companions (who were going northwards) 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 Ruapehu and Tongariro, in the centre 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 pukeko, 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 quicksands, but I managed to reach Otaki before sunset, in time to revel in a typical New Zealand view. The foreground was composed of ancient sandhills, 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, bunch-like 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 snake-like creepers. The
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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 anti-Christian Maories, in the Otaki Pah. Some of these fellows had lately held a meeting, and had themselves re-baptized, 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 labours 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 sympathised, 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.
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A magistrate who knows the Maories well, told me that their Christianity is only on the surface. He one day asked Matene te Whiwhi, a Ngatiraukawa chief, "Which would you soonest eat, Matene--pork, beef, or Ngatiapa?" Matene 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 Matene, 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 begins 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
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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 sceptre of tribal rule--the greenstone meri, or royal club--is often entrusted to them by their warrior husbands, and used to lead the war-dance or the charge.
The delicacy of treatment shown by the Maories towards
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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 North-West, or if the Shoshones, 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 towards 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 towards savage neighbours 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
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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 defenceless, 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 Petatone, 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 Te Heke'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 "kingmaker," used to dress as any Englishman; Maories on board our ships wear the uniform of the able-bodied seaman; Governor Hunia has ridden as a gentleman-rider in a steeplechase, 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 then 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
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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."
