1830 - Craik, George L. The New Zealanders - Chapter I

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THE NEW ZEALANDERS.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

When we attempt to look into our own minds, with the desire to trace the progress of our individual knowledge, we are naturally enough surprised to find in how few cases the origin of our intellectual acquisitions can be referred to particular times or distinct circumstances. We may indeed assign a date to our first study of a language or a science; and sometimes, by the aid of powerful associations, we may recollect our first impressions of some great truth, which has had a permanent influence upon the conduct of our understanding. But still we feel that the bulk of our perceptions must have taken root in the mind before we were sufficiently aware of their importance to record and classify them;--and we confess that a large portion of the materials of our knowledge was collected at a period of our lives when we were unconscious of the process by which we acquired knowledge at all, or were acquiring it in a manner that now appears to us but the mere sport of a happy childhood.

It is the same with the education of a people. At the highest point of civilization we can trace back through a few centuries the influence of particular discoveries upon the intellectual condition of society.

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Thus, we can now have no difficulty in perceiving that the invention of the Steam-engine has let loose a vast quantity of human labour which was formerly employed as the moving power in manufactures--that the art of Printing has opened to allthose means for the cultivation of their minds, which were originally the exclusive possession of a few--that the Mariner's Compass has brought the remotest ends of the earth together, and, in thus giving to civilized man the possession of all that is valuable in distant climes, has ensured to every barbarous people the power of losing their barbarism, sooner or later, by contact with the all-pervading progress of civilization. But, to say nothing of the institutions and forms of society, which, like the winds that come we know not whence, must necessarily be derived from an obscure and distant origin, it is exceedingly difficult, even with regard to those common arts of life that mainly distinguish the civilized from the uncivilized state, to point out at what period in the education of the human race they have been introduced. For example, in the parts of Europe which have been the longest civilized, we have little beyond those traditions that belong more to poetry than history, to tell us of a state when the working of metals was unknown--when agriculture was unpractised among settled nations, or the keeping of flocks by wandering tribes--when the manufacture of clothing, however rude, was wholly neglected--when some mode of recording events, whether by written characters or hieroglyphical representations, was altogether uncultivated. In short, the first rays of knowledge that illuminate the infancy of the species are as difficult to be traced and recorded as those which dawn on the infancy of the individual.

To understand how that accumulative mass of information comes into the mind, to which, in our indi-

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vidual cases, we cannot assign a distinct origin, we should watch a child from the time when it first opens its eyes upon the light Its education begins the instant it is born; and all that it ever knows is acquired from that instant by observation and experiment. A naturalist, having broken the egg of a fowl from which the young one was just ready to emerge, observed that at the moment when the chicken escaped from the shell it caught a spider that was passing on the ground. This was instinct. But the human creature has all to learn from its experience, nor can it provide its own food for years, till it has been taught by the example of others. An indefatigable and patient observer, therefore, of the actions of a child up to the period when its education, in the usual sense of the term, begins, will learn how the commonest notions, which when they are established stand to us in the place of instinct, are gradually fixed in the understanding; and he will thus lay a foundation for those valuable observations upon human character in general, which constitute the science of Moral Philosophy.

What the Child is to us for the study of man as an individual, the Savage is also for the broader but not less difficult study of man as a species. The peculiarities of each are to be examined with a like degree of patience and candour. The customs of barbarous tribes are not to be explored in the spirit of fruitless curiosity. We are not to open the relations of voyages into savage regions merely to feed our wonder with stories

We are to look upon the manners of barbarians--their limited knowledge, their rude contrivances, their degrading superstitions--as exhibiting in many in-

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stances a picture of what we were ourselves in the infancy of our social state; and we are to regard their fierce passions, whether of love or hatred, as the materials with which the structure of the more equable affections and more systematic virtues of civilized life has been reared.

The intercourse of refined with barbarous nations has seldom been conducted under circumstances which allowed a right estimate to be formed of the peculiarities of savage life. In ancient times, when a few powerful governments more exclusively than even now held dominion of the earth, the conqueror bound his barbarous captives to the car of triumph, and his fellow-citizens gazed upon his slaves as upon the quadrupeds which also graced his procession. But conquerors and their followers rarely attempted to discriminate between one degree of barbarism and another. The individuals who then sought for a personal acquaintance with distant regions were few; and they were not generally very accurate observers. If we may credit Diodorus Siculus, who was a traveller as well as an historian, there were nations which had not the use of speech, and which lived promiscuously with other animals. Some, according to the same author, subsisted entirely in trees; not occasionally, like a tribe of South America, in order to escape the periodical inundations of the Orinoco--but habitually, like monkies. Herodotus tells us of Troglodytes, inhabitants of Africa, who, instead of speaking, made a noise like a bat, and were hunted as beasts by the neighbouring nations. It is probable that these, and similar descriptions, which are all wanting in the minuteness that characterises historical truth, may be classed with the exaggerations of later travellers, who have suffered themselves to be imposed upon by the ignorant or the designing. Even the acute Sir Walter Raleigh, in his History of Guiana, alludes to men

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"whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders;"-- in Hakluyt's Collection of Voyages, published in 1598, we find a nation "reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts;"--and as late as the time of Linnaeus, a well-compacted story of men with tails found place in that naturalist's highly valuable work, the "Amoenitates Academicae." Such relations doubtless belong to a state of infrequent and imperfect intercourse with distant countries; just in the same way that the belief that the elephant had no joints in its legs, and the hyaena no vertebrae in its neck, could only be received before Natural History was established as a science.

The pictures which the Roman writers, particularly Caesar and Tacitus, have left us of those neighbouring inhabitants of Europe, which the mistress of the world endeavoured to subjugate, are in many particulars not unfaithful representations of the barbarous condition which has most usually come under the observation of the moderns. A precarious supply of food, the natural result of an ignorance of the arts of agriculture and pasturage, gives birth to a life of adventure, in which many of the physical powers of the human animal are highly developed. Mutual wants producing mutual friendships, and knowledge being altogether oral and traditionary, tribes are formed, under the guidance either of hereditary chiefs, or of him who is most skilful and experienced. Then come wars, having as much reason in them as those of the most civilised nations, for the possession of a river or a mountain; and in these contests all the energies of the savage state are still further displayed. What the Germans, the Gauls, and the Britons were to the Romans, the North American and many similar tribes are to us. The influence of climate, the prevailing form of superstition, the total disregard or the

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imperfect recognition of the rights of individual property, the degree of respect in which females are held, and the amount of intercourse with civilized nations --are all circumstances producing great varieties in the condition of savage life. Then, again, as we shall have occasion to notice more fully, some barbarous tribes seem to retain obvious traces of their descent from nations that have been more civilized. Others, such as the natives of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, possess a different but very inferior sort of interest, from exhibiting human nature in its extreme state of debasement, in which not even the least appearance of civilization is discernible. Such also, in all probability, were the Troglodytes of Herodotus. But, looking at the aggregate of savage life, as we may trace its general features in the infinitely varied accounts of modern observers, we shall, perhaps, doubt if any portion of the world is in that condition of brutality which some ancient writers describe as having existed in their times, and which the poets and philosophers of antiquity generally point to as the original condition of the human race. Whether such descriptions were always exaggerations or mistakes, or whether the whole world has gone on improving, are questions to which no satisfactory answer can be given.

The splendid maritime expeditions of the moderns, to which the Portuguese led the way in the fifteenth century, and of which the greatest triumph was the discovery of America by the Spaniards, laid open to view a vast extent of savage and half-civilized life. The discoverers of South America and the West Indies first wondered at the native tribes, then admired, then persecuted, and lastly vilified them. Columbus, when he first encountered the South Americans, was in raptures with them. "So loving, so tractable, so peaceable, are these people," says the

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great discoverer in his journal, "that I swear to your majesties, there is not in the world a better nation nor a better land." And yet he sent these very people in chains to his native country, to be received as slaves. A quarter of a century after, when the conquerors had almost exterminated this unhappy race--and most unhappy because their gentleness rendered them little capable of resistance to oppression--they were denounced to the Spaniards as "barbarians, destitute of all morality, and almost without intelligence." 1 It was then convenient to degrade them, as some excuse for the barbarities to which they had been subjected. All European colonists have more or less been guilty of the same misrepresentations, in the same endeavour to mitigate the infamy of the oppression by which they have driven the native tribes from their own land, exterminated them like beasts of prey, or doomed them to slavery. Such are a few of the delusions which civilized men have wilfully kept up, as to the real condition and capabilities of their less fortunate fellow-creatures. They prevail for a time, are then doubted, next partially opposed, and at last swept away by the torrent of public indignation, which, however protracted, is sure eventually to lay prostrate every monstrous and crying injustice, with all the devices by which it has been supported.

A different spirit has sprung up in the civilized world, in judging of the characters of savage nations. We are now somewhat inclined to exaggerate their virtues, their skill, and their capacity for improvement. We are not, indeed, prepared to see in a savage, as Rousseau and other enthusiasts saw, a being with all his faculties perfect from the hand of heaven,-- with all his moral and physical powers

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developed as by enchantment--robust, muscular, defying the seasons, having no wants but those which he can easily satisfy, and possessed of a judgment and intelligence which leads him instinctively to despise the prejudices and artificial habits of the social state. These representations we believe to be agreeable fictions. Nor are we disposed to make the man in a state of nature reason like a French academician, as Buffon has done. Still many of us have a lingering notion that the perfection of bodily strength is to be found in the savage state;--that tribes without clothing are invariably models of the human form; -- that if barbarians are revengeful, they are always open and confiding;--and that if they are ignorant of letters, they possess a natural eloquence which a cultivated talent can scarcely surpass. These are all mistakes. Europeans, as experiment has proved, are upon the average stronger than barbarians; 2 -- Humboldt has indeed observed, that amongst the natives of South America instances of deformity are most remarkably uncommon, but the absence of deformity and the perfection of form are essentially different; and though exposure to light, and the absence of constraint, doubtless contribute to symmetry, many of the lowest race of savages are small and disproportioned;--cunning is a peculiar characteristic of all barbarians;--and the eloquence of the Indians of North America, which has been so vaunted, displays anything but intellectual power when translated into the language of common sense. The more we examine the various shades of barbarous life, the more shall we be satisfied that men are more virtuous, and skilful, and happy, exactly in proportion as they are advanced beyond the savage state:--and that those tribes are the most interesting who have the remains of an imperfect civilization in their manners and tra-

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ditions; or who, having come in contact with civilized nations, are learning to imitate their arts and their modes of life.

Many of the savage tribes which are now found in different parts of the earth appear, as has been remarked, to be the descendants of nations which had previously attained a certain decree of civilization. The semi-barbarous subjects of Algiers and Morocco are the same race that preserved the learning of the West when it was forgotten amongst the nations with whom it originated, that invented some of the most useful arts that the moderns have carried to perfection, and that reigned for several centuries the undisputed masters of one of the most beautiful countries of Europe. Much of the old learning of the East is lost;--and even the Turks, who have considerable intercourse with European nations, are less civilized now than they were three or four centuries ago. These are instances of the tendency of mankind to fall back, as well as to advance, both in knowledge and in social institutions, the perfection of which is the result of knowledge. When, therefore, we observe amongst a barbarous people any customs or traditions which assimilate with those of nations that have possessed a literature, and have made any progress in sciences and arts, we are not to be startled at the immense distance of the degrees of cultivation between the one and the other, any more than we should decide that the poor and ignorant Moor is not of kin to the splendid and intellectual race that exercised dominion in the palaces of Cordova and Grenada. Amongst the savages of North America and the South Seas, it is a prevailing tradition that their ancestors came from another country, from which they brought many wonderful arts that have since been lost. In many cases they deem these progenitors to have been so much their superiors in knowledge and wisdom, that

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they worship them as gods. The tradition itself is perhaps the best single proof that they are really descended from a more cultivated race. But the diligent observer of their customs will generally find many collateral evidences, whether of religion, or language, or arts which have been partially lost even among civilized nations, to shew some remote connexion, independent of time and geographical limit, between the men of whom we read as the former lords of the ancient world, and those whom voyagers describe as the thinly-scattered population of islands the very existence of which was almost unknown to Europeans half a century ago.

The descent of a race from civilization to barbarism may have been occasioned in a variety of ways. It is difficult to conceive such an event to be within the limits of possibility, since the establishment of the art of printing, and the consequent diffusion of knowledge amongst the mass of the community. But in ancient times, the possessors of any learning were the exceptions to the body of the people. The tendency to general barbarism, under such a state of things, was sufficiently strong to render it very properly the business of legislation to prevent it, in the absence of the only sure remedy, that of enlightening the great mass of the community. Many of the laws and customs of the earliest nations have evidently been established with the design of preventing the general population from sinking into savages. When the institutions, under the shelter of which a people had existed for ages, and grown to greatness, were suddenly swept away, as, for example, by foreign conquest, the civilization, which had thus lost its cover and defence, was exposed to the same danger of perishing as is a beleaguered garrison when its protecting bulwarks have been thrown down. Babylon, Egypt, Rome, Greece itself, are memorable

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instances of how rapidly the noblest fabrics of national refinement crumbled to pieces, when thus stripped of their encompassing supports. The civilization which they possessed in so high a degree ceased to exist when it came in contact with the strength of barbarism, because it was a partial civilization. It was a Corinthian capital without a base.

But the circumstances under which men have most frequently degenerated into savages appear to be those of early emigration and distant settlement. The independent, and, in some cases, probably compulsory transferences of such migratory hordes from their native land, were entirely of a different nature from the regular colonizations of the Greeks and Phenicians. They would in general carry away with them nothing more than a very imperfect image of their original institutions, which would frequently be still more defaced and mutilated during their rovings through successive deserts before they found another home; so that, when they did at last fix themselves in their new country, they must in most cases have lost everything except a vague and corrupted recollection of a few of the more remarkable peculiarities of their ancestral polity. The nature of their adopted abode, too, in respect of climate arid other physical circumstances, would generally oppose almost as insuperable obstacles to the complete re-establishment of their old usages as would even their own moral condition. In this way, the Oriental tribes by which Europe was peopled had all degenerated into barbarism before they readied the countries in which they eventually settled; and they had all, many ages after, to be re-civilized, in the only way in which we have any example, in the history of the world, of the first rudiments of civilization being acquired,--namely, by being brought into communication with other nations already civilized.

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But even where the emigrants cannot be supposed to have been barbarized by being obliged to lead for a long time a wandering life, before reaching their new country, it is easy to conceive how the same result would be produced in many cases, merely by the circumstances in which they would find themselves after their settlement. A numerous body of persons setting out under the conduct of their natural captains, and, after a voyage of a few weeks or months, meeting with a country favourably situated for colonization, might perhaps easily preserve such civilization as they brought with them, and succeed in forming themselves into a regular community. In this manner, in all likelihood, were founded the two great half-civilized American monarchies which the Spaniards found seated, in the sixteenth century, in the fertile vallies of Peru, and on the elevated table-land of Mexico. But suppose the case to be that of a few individuals, driven out to sea in one or more fishing-boats, and at last falling in with an uninhabited land, perhaps greatly too extensive for them fully to occupy, and at the same time offering facilities and temptations rather to the dispersion than the concentration of their numbers; it is easy to perceive that, under such circumstances, the authority and wisest regulations, even of a very able leader, should they chance to possess such, would certainly be insufficient to preserve them long from degenerating into barbarism. Destitute of all the accommodations, as well as emancipated from all the restraints, to which they had been accustomed, they would have neither inducement nor means to attempt the re-establishment, in their new home, of the institutions and arts they had left behind them; and, in little more than the lapse of a generation, almost their very memory would perish. And thus the night of barbarism would be begun,--more or less

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deep according to circumstances,--but certain to be perpetuated, till intercourse with the people of some more fortunate country should again introduce the extinguished light.

This is, in all probability, the history of the first occupation of the South Sea Islands, and the commencement of that savage life which, in one shade or another, is found to prevail among the inhabitants of all those that have been yet visited. Among one class of these tribes, the limited boundaries within which they have been confined have retained them under some show of national connexion and government; while the influences of a genial climate have, to a certain degree, softened the ferocity and rudeness natural to uncultivated minds. In another, a wider extent of territory has broken them down, as their numbers increased, into separate settlements, not only independent of each other, but in general mutually envenomed by a thousand jealousies and animosities, which array each chief and his dependants against their neighbours in almost unceasing hostility, and make war the great business of every man's existence.

The intercourse of European nations with the islands of the South Sea has afforded peculiar opportunities of contemplating the manners of savage nations in their more interesting gradations of character,--more complete, perhaps, than the relations of voyagers exhibit in any other part of the world. With the natives of Otaheite, of the Sandwich Islands, and of New Zealand, we were first rendered familiar by the narratives of our illustrious navigator, Captain Cook; and the interest which we felt in them was enhanced by their apparent possession of qualities which indicated that they were not in the lowest stages of savage life. The natives of New Holland, and of Van Diemen's Land, with whom we are more closely

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in contact, have, on the contrary, few attractions for our curiosity, for they are low beyond comparison, both in morals and intellect. They offer to us a mirror of that degraded state of man which it is painful to contemplate.

Of all the people constituting the great Polynesian family, the New Zealanders have, at least of late years, attracted the largest portion of public attention. Their character exhibits, with remarkable boldness of relief, many both of the vices and the virtues of the savage state. They present a striking contrast to the timid and luxurious Otaheitans, and the miserable outcasts of Australia. The masculine independence they at once manifested in their first encounters with us, and the startling resistance they offered to our proud pre-eminence, served to stimulate the feelings of curiosity with which we are now accustomed to regard them. The interest which they thus excite is probably created, in a great degree, by the prevailing disposition of our minds to regard with anxious attention any display of human power. The New Zealanders are not a feeble or a timid people. From the days of their first intercourse with Europeans they gave blow for blow. They did not stand still to be slaughtered, like the Peruvians by the Spaniards; but they tried the strength of the club against the flash of the musket. They have destroyed, sometimes treacherously, always cruelly, the people of many European vessels, from the days of their first discovery to our own times;--but it would be difficult to say that they had no justification in our aggressions, whether immediate or recollected--or at any rate that they did not strongly feel the necessity for self-defence on all such occasions. They are ignorant of some of the commonest arts--their clothing is rude, their agriculture imperfect, they have no knowledge of metals, writing is unknown to them;--and yet they exhibit the

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keenest sense of the value of those acquirements which render Europeans so greatly their superiors. Many of the natives have voluntarily undertaken a voyage to England, that they might see the wonders of civilization;--and when they have looked upon our fertile fields, our machines for the abridgment of human labour, our manufactories, they have begged to be sent back to their own country, with the means of imitating what their own progress enabled them to comprehend were blessings. Their passion is war; and they carry on that excitement in the most terrific way that the fierceness of man has ever devised;--they devour their slaughtered enemies. And yet they feel that this rude warfare may be assisted by the arts of destruction which civilized men employ; and they come to us for the musket and the sword, to invade, or to repel the invader. All these, and many more features of their character, shew an intellectual vigour, which is the root of ultimate civilization. They are not insensible to the arts of cultivated life, as the New Hollander is;-- or wholly bound in the chain of superstitions which control the efforts of the docile Hindoo, and hold his mind in thraldom. They are neither apathetic as the Turk, who believes that nothing can change the destiny of himself or his nation; nor self-satisfied as the poor Tartar, who said, "Were I to boast, it would be of that wisdom I have received from God; for as, on the one hand, I yield to none in the conduct of war, so on the other I have my talent in writing, inferior perhaps only to them who inhabit the great cities of Persia or India. Of other nations, unknown to me, I do not speak." 3 The New Zealander knows his own power as a savage; but he also knows that the people of European communities have a much more

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extensive and durable power, which he is desirous to share. He has his instruments of bone, but he asks for iron; he has his club, but he comes to us for a musket. Baubles he despises. He possesses the rude arts of savage nations in an eminent degree: he can carve elegantly in wood, and he is tattooed with a graceful minuteness which is not devoid of symmetrical elegance. Yet he is not insensible to the value of the imitative arts of Europeans, and he takes delight in our sculpture and our paintings. His own social habits are unrefined--his cookery is coarse--his articles of furniture are rude. Yet he adapts himself at once to the usages of the best English society, and displays that ease and self-confidence which are the peculiar marks of individual refinement. He exhibits little contradiction between his original condition of a cannibal at home, and his assumed one of a gentleman here. Add to all this, that he is as capable of friendship as of enmity,-- and we shall have no difficulty in perceiving that the New Zealander possesses a character which, at no distant period, may become an example of the rapidity with which the barbarian may be wholly refined, when brought into contact with a nation which neither insults nor oppresses him, and which exhibits to him the influence of a benevolent religion in connexion with the force of practical knowledge.

To gather and compare the scattered notices of this people, which have been given by many voyagers and residents in the country, and to contrast their condition with that of other uncivilized tribes, is the object of the present volume. We have also the advantage of consulting an original narrative, written by a sailor who was detained by them for several years. Such a work must possess considerable interest. Nothing can be more valuable to a philosophical inquirer, and nothing more attractive

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to a general reader, than a faithful picture of an energetic portion of mankind at a particular stage of their progress from barbarism to civilization. The skill which such a people have acquired, and the dispositions they manifest for a more abundant possession of the knowledge of civilized communities, throw a light over the wants of savage life, which may be highly useful, also, in guiding our future conduct towards every portion of the human race requiring to be led forward from the ignorance and misery of a barbarous state. From the great extent of the country, too, the probable value of some of its productions, its proximity to one of our most important colonies, and the convenience of its harbours for the resort of the ships engaged in a valuable branch of our trade, New Zealand has a strong claim upon our attention as a commercial people; and it is likely to become still more the subject of general interest as its resources develop themselves.

It will be convenient to begin our account of the New Zealanders by a short narrative of the first discovery of the country, and the adventures of some of its earlier visiters.