1846 - Marjoribanks, A. Travels in New Zealand - CHAPTER V

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CHAPTER V.

When I mentioned, in a letter which I wrote on leaving New Zealand, that one of the native princesses there had appeared in a neat English dress, I was not then aware that this was one of the effects of Christianity, but Mr. Williams, in his interesting narrative of "Missionary Enterprizes to the South Sea Islands," shews its wonderful effects in ameliorating not only the spiritual but the temporal condition of the natives. From Tahiti, which is now Christianized, they export nearly 200 tons of sugar annually, furnish beef to ships at threepence the pound, and 200 vessels now anchor there annually, whereas, some years ago, it was not safe to land either there, or on almost any of the islands of these seas. Some of them, no doubt embraced Christianity from motives apart from religion, and the inhabitants of the Samoa Islands, in particular, held meetings for several months before doing so, at which the subject was discussed in all its bearings. At one of these meetings a venerable chief

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rose up and addressed them as follows---"It is my wish that the Christian religion should become universal amongst us. I look at the wisdom of these worshippers of Jehovah, and see how superior they are to us in every respect. Their ships are like floating houses, so that they can traverse the tempest-driven ocean for many months with perfect safety; whereas if a breeze blow upon our canoes, they are in an instant upset, and we sprawling in the sea. Their persons also are covered from head to foot with beautiful clothes, while we wear nothing but a girdle of leaves. Their axes are so hard and sharp, that with them we can easily fell our trees, but with our stone axes we must dub, dub, dub, day after day, before we can cut down a single tree. Their knives too, what valuable things they are, how quickly they cut up our pigs compared with our bamboo knives. Now I conclude that the God who has given to his white worshippers these valuable things, must be wiser than our gods, for they have not given the like to us. We all want these articles, and my proposition is, that the God who gave them should be our God."-- This speech, which throws all the logic of Locke and of Bacon into the shade, produced the desired effect. Talking of the dress of the inhabitants of Tahiti Mr. Williams says, "The females had long observed the dress of the missionaries' wives, but while heathen, they greatly preferred their own. No sooner, however, were they brought under the influence of religion than all of them aspired to the possession of a gown, a bonnet, and a shawl, that they might appear like Christian women. And if it be not already proved, the experience of a few more years will demonstrate the fact, that the missionary enterprize is incompar-

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ably the most effective machinery that has ever been brought to operate upon the social, the civil, and the commercial, as well as the moral and spiritual interests of mankind."

When the natives, some years ago, were in the habit of selling their land to Europeans, for muskets, blankets, &c. they used every possible method by persuasion and argument, to get as much value as possible in these articles, money being seldom given. "Can you compare," they would say, "the articles which you offer, and which must eventually perish, with the broad land before you, which can never decrease, but will survive beyond the lives of your latest posterity. What will become of your blankets? they must rot and be as nothing; and your muskets? they must wear out; and when you die, the land which you purchase will yet belong to your children; but what will fall to our children, when your payments have ceased to be serviceable to us?"

Almost immediately however after making the purchase and paying the price, it was necessary to take possession of the land, otherwise one was exposed to the risk of their selling it again; and instances have occurred, where they sold the same land two or three times over, from the purchasers not having taken possession of it. In this country, possession is said to be nine-tenths of the law, but in New Zealand, it was the whole law, and nothing but the law. This reminds me of an anecdote of an English lawyer, who lived in the days of William the Conqueror, and was introduced to that monarch shortly after his arrival in London, from Normandy, in France. William, by way of complimenting him on his great age, said to him, "I understand, my venerable friend, that you

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have outlived all the lawyers of your own day,"-- "Please your Majesty," replied this old lawyer, "had you not come over, I would have outlived the law itself."

Law is said to be like a country dance, where people are led up and down till they are tired, so that this old lawyer must have danced with a good many in the course of his day.

It is a remarkable circumstance in the history of man, that age, while it lessens the enjoyment of life, increases the desire of living. Dangers which he despised in his youth, assume new terrors as he grows old; --and though experience tells him that past enjoyments have yielded him no real happiness, and reflection must convince him, that from the infirmities of age, he must every day have less, yet hope, more powerful than either, still beckons him to pursue. New sources of happiness even at this the last, the. closing stage of all his wanderings, still open up to his imagination, and like a losing gamester, every succeeding disappointment serves only to increase his ardour to continue the game. He takes infinitely more care of his health than in the days of his youth, his caution increases as his years decline, and at the very moment that life becomes scarcely worth retaining, he is most taken up in useless efforts to prolong it.

Our attachment to every object in nature, seems to increase with the length of time we have known it. An old friend is a proverbial expression, and an old horse, and an old dog, attract much of our regard. Even the fall of a tree familiar to him from his youth, brings a tear to the eye of old age. --"A mind," says Goldsmith, "long habituated to a certain set of objects, insensibly becomes fond of seeing them; visits

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them from habit, and parts from them with reluctance. Hence proceeds the avarice of the old in every kind of possession; they love the world, and all that it produces; --they love life, and all its advantages, not because it gives them pleasure, but because they have known it long." Life, in short, would be insupportable to those who, beset with the numberless calamities of decaying nature, and the consciousness of having survived every pleasure, feared death no more than when in the vigour of manhood; and thus happily the contempt of death forsakes us when it could only be prejudicial; and life acquires an imaginary value, in proportion as its real value is no more.

There is one thing in which New Zealand women resemble the Chinese, the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, and some other savage nations, and that is, in destroying their children occasionally after they have a sufficient number, lest they should not be able to support them all; and sometimes from caprice or superstition, as if the mother had boasted that she would have a male child, and it turns out a female, it would be very apt to suffer in the cause. This however but rarely happens, as they have seldom so many as to cause them to have recourse to this remedy. Indeed, they seem to be fast decreasing from a variety of other causes, such as the wars among the different tribes which prevailed till within this year or two, and from the manner in which they are suffocated every night in their pahs or native villages, which are often heated to a temperature of 100 deg. Fahrenheit, from a large fire placed in the centre, with almost no opening for the smoke to get out, thus bringing on colds when they are ushered into the chilly air of the morning. Mr. Busby, the British resident at the Bay of Islands'

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in one of his despatches of 16th June, 1837, says, "the natives are perfectly sensible of this decrease, and when they contrast their own condition with that of the English families, amongst whom the marriages have been prolific to a very extraordinary degree of a most healthy progeny, they conclude that the God of the English is removing the aboriginal inhabitants to make room for them; and it appears to me, that this impression has produced amongst them a very general recklessness and indifference to life." At the date of Mr. Busby's despatch, the Church of England missionaries had been amongst them for twenty-three years, and had only lost one adult, and three infants, during the whole of that time, and were carrying on at a prodigious rate; so that I do not wonder at the New Zealanders being astonished at their exertions in the good old cause.

Mr. Polack, who has written so largely on that country, gives the following evidence before the House of Lords on this subject: --.

"Has the native population decreased? It has.

"Do you account for that chiefly by war? No; I think the principal cause is infanticide. I have seen many women who have destroyed their children, either by abortion, or after their birth, putting them into a basket, and throwing them into the sea, after pressing the frontal bones of their heads.

"Why have they done that? I have had conversation with them upon it. I saw a girl one day, and knowing she was pregnant, I said, "Where is the child?" The answer was, "Gone." "Gone where, where is it gone too?" "I killed it," was the answer, with the greatest apathy. I felt rather curious at the moment, and showed it. She said, "what a fool you

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are! it was not yours." I said, "I am aware of that." She then described how it was done. They destroy the children generally by pressing the nose until life is extinct. I said "How would you have liked if your mother had served you the same?" She said, "Oh I would have been pleased at it; I should not have been the poor miserable thing I have been, to be knocked about by a master or a husband.

"Is this woman a slave? A free woman; one of the middling class. Another woman was supposed to have killed eight children of her own. She had two children by the master of a whaler. Their principal reason is that they have not food to bring them up when unmarried; it is principally the unmarried women who have the trouble of procuring them food; they cannot go about their plantations, for they have nobody to take care of their children.

"Why should the trouble of getting food have increased in consequence of Europeans having settled there? I should not say the crime of infanticide has increased; on the contrary, it has decreased much since Europeans have been amongst them."

Mr. Polack is quite wrong however in this evidence, as there is no doubt, that in New Zealand at least, though certainly not in some of the other South Sea Islands, the wars among the different tribes were infinitely more depopulating than the small number of children whom they sacrificed.

Nayti, a New Zealand chief, from Cloudy Bay, in Cook's Straits, who came to France in a French whaler, in order, as they told him, to see the king, which, however, he never did, --was also examined before the House of Lords, on this and other subjects connected with his native country, after he had been in

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England for some time, and could speak the language; and the following is a portion of his evidence.

"New Zealand women kill their children sometimes; do they not? Sometimes they do.

"Why do they kill the children? Because they have too many.

"They kill boys as well as girls? Yes, they kill boy and girl when they have too many.

"They only kill them when they are quite little? Yes; he comes to-day, and then they kill him.

"Do the New Zealand women often kill their little children? No, some women do it; not many. They like eight or ten; they do not like any more; --then they begin."

We sometimes hear in this country of people being blessed with large families; and if a large family be really a blessing, then it follows, as a matter of course, that the larger the family, the greater must be the blessing. In this view of the case, a man with fifty children, must be ten times more blessed than a man with only five. The New Zealanders take a more enlightened and philosophical view of the subject, for though they consider eight, or perhaps ten, a blessing, they seem to think any more a perfect curse; and they get quit of this curse in a very simple and summary manner, by merely pressing their nose betwixt their fingers for a minute or two immediately after they are born; when the poor, innocent, momentary sufferer, makes, in my opinion, a happy change; being ushered, in the twinkling of an eye, from a world of care, of trouble, and of sorrow, into a state of everlasting felicity.

Among the savages of Guiana, in South America, when twins are produced, one of them is always de-

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stroyed, for two reasons; --first, from an idea they have formed, that to bring more than one at a time into the world, is to resemble rats, toads, opossums, and the vilest of animals; and secondly, because they consider that two children born at once, cannot belong to the same father; but how they select the proper one is more than I can tell. Those who are deformed, are also put to death; and those of a feeble constitution sometimes undergo the same fate, as the additional care which they require is very inconvenient to those who lead a wandering life.

Chambers, in his Edinburgh Journal of 1st August, 1840, says, --"Till about forty years ago, there was a comfortable doctrine in the world, that children were a good thing, and that it was desirable to encourage population. Louis XIV. actually went so far as to give pensions to men who had more than ten children; and there were few European states in which he who had three or four did not get a discount from his taxes. But since then, a most melancholy notion has taken possession of the brains of politicians, namely, that population requires rather to be checked than encouraged, seeing that, if allowed full head-way, it is apt greatly to outstrip the increase of the means of subsistence. It is not very likely that many marriages and births have been prevented in our islands by this doctrine. Somehow, people fall in love and marry without much regard to theory, and children come into existence in loud defiance of all that can be said to the contrary. Every day that rises on our islands sees a thousand more human beings squalling upon them than what were squalling the day before; and it is rather remarkable that our total numbers have increased more since this damping

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doctrine came out, than they did for perhaps a century and a half before."

It is a singular circumstance, that New Zealand women commence squeezing the noses of their children when they arrive at the precise number that the king of France began to give pensions to those who had any more; so that Louis the XlVth seems to have viewed the matter in a very different light from what they do.

But though the practice of the New Zealanders, the Chinese, the South Sea Islanders, of Otaheite when first discovered, of the inhabitants of Chili in South America, and some other nations, in destroying their children occasionally, appears to us very barbarous, laying the crime of murder altogether aside; yet we must bear in mind, that this arises not from any want of that instinctive love of offspring, which is as great among the mothers of these children, as it is with the queen-mother, or the mother of the queen, as they cut themselves and begin to howl for them like wolves, the moment after they despatch them; but solely from the exercise of those reasoning powers which providence has given them, unrestrained by any moral or conventional laws. These being of an overpowering nature, seem to have overcome their instinctive love of offspring, and led them to the conclusion, as they had not food to support them till they grew up, without starving themselves, that of two evils they must choose the least, and self-preservation being the first law of nature, --that the children must be sacrificed rather than the mother who bore them, seeing that one or other must go; just as sailors, in time of shipwreck, save themselves by pushing off in the boat, and leaving the passengers to their fate.

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They have no dislike whatever to the passengers, and indeed would make every exertion to save them, consistent with their own safety, but knowing that all cannot be saved, they naturally give the preference to themselves.

The New Zealanders were perhaps afraid also of their children reflecting on them afterwards, had they brought them up in misery and starvation, and must, no doubt, have studied with infinite care and anxiety those passages of the prophet Jeremiah, wherein it is thus written: --

"The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst; the young children ask bread and no man breaketh it unto them. They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger; for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field. Cursed be the day wherein I was born; let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying a man-child is born unto thee, making him very glad. And let that man be as the cities which the Lord overthrew and repented not; and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the shouting at noon-tide. Because he slew me not from the womb; or that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always great with me. Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame."

In every country where the population increases faster than the means of subsistence, --and this is the case in almost every country of the world, excepting the United States of America, and the pampas of Buenos Ayres, there are just four ways of remedying

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this evil, first, either by emigrating to some other country where a greater supply of food can he obtained, or, secondly, abstaining from breeding more children than are wanted; or, thirdly, destroying the supernumeraries at the time of their birth; or, lastly, suffering the overplus to die gradually by starvation. By the first process, that is emigration, the surplus population of this country is, to a certain extent, released, though not nearly to the extent required. In regard to the second, most people seem averse to follow the advice of that benevolent and enlightened philosopher the late Dr. Malthus, whose celebrated work on the principles of population goes to show the extreme importance of the principle of moral restraint, and the fatal consequences arising from bringing children into the world without a rational prospect of being able to provide for their subsistence and education, a doctrine which all admit to be remarkably sound in theory, though they complain bitterly of the difficulty of putting it in practice. Neither will the human race follow the example of that enlightened class the farmers, who breed no more cattle on their farms than they are capable of feeding well, as no farmer desires to have a numerous stock deteriorated in value by starvation. In regard to the third remedy, namely, infanticide, the New Zealanders, the Chinese, and some other nations, having no funds for emigration, and no place to which they could go without being even worse off than at home, and not having sufficiently studied Malthus and the other philosophers, who have endeavoured, with such praiseworthy zeal, though ineffectually, to introduce the principle of moral restraint to bear upon mankind; and above all, having been restrained by no law either human or

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divine, seem to have resorted to this as affording them a very simple and remarkably speedy deliverance from the evils of surplus population, infinitely preferable, they must no doubt think, to the fourth and last expedient, namely, bringing up their offspring in misery while young, to be starved perhaps altogether at the last. Now it is well known that among the Irish thousands die annually from starvation, and among the Hindoos tens of thousands, and many thousands are now unfortunately carried off every year, both in England and Scotland, from the same cause, particularly in the larger towns; and by the word starvation, I include all those diseases brought on, not only from deficiency of food, but deficiency of clothing, of fuel to warm them, and similar privations which generally accompany the want of food, bringing on fever and other diseases, and eventually death itself. In fact, emigration and starvation combined, contrive to dispose pretty comfortably of all the surplus population of these three kingdoms. Walton says, in reference to this important subject, "It has been observed that there is little chance of living comfortably in this country, unless by some sweeping mortality one-half of its inhabitants should be sent to their graves. The inhabitants of this country are too numerous for its means of subsistence. The feast is not large enough for those who require to partake of it. Some, indeed, occupy such good seats at the table as give them the command of the choicest dishes; but these are few, compared with the number who are very scantily provided for. So great indeed is the crowd pressing for admission to the table, that some cannot obtain seats at all, and hence the accounts with which we are every now and then horrified, of

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persons dying from absolute want of the indispensible necessaries of life."

But though the New Zealanders were in the habit of destroying their infants occasionally, when they became too numerous, from a dread of not being able to support them comfortably without starving themselves; yet in some of the islands to the north of it, particularly in the Tahitian and Society islands, the extent to which infanticide was carried on, previous to the missionaries going amongst them about the year 1830, was almost inconceivable, and that too from causes altogether apart from that motive. Mr. Williams, the missionary, mentions that he never met with a single female who had had children prior to the introduction of Christianity, who had not destroyed more or less--some five, some ten, and so on. The wife of one. chief, in particular, who sent for him, in great agony, when she was dying, confessed that she had killed no less than sixteen of her children. She was almost frantic, crying out--"Oh, my children, my murdered children,"--a striking proof of their natural affection.

At the examination of one of his schools in the islands of Raiatea, where 600 children attended, they had a number of flags prepared, with such mottoes as these written on them, --"Had it not been for the Gospel we should have been destroyed as soon as we were born." The parents also attended the examination, and their eyes were gleaming with delight, as the father said to the mother, or the mother to the father, "What a mercy it] is that we spared our dear girl." Others lamented in bitterness that they had not spared theirs, and the silent tear, as it stole down the cheeks of many, told the painful tale that all their children

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had been destroyed. In the midst of their proceedings a venerable chieftain, grey with age, an arioi of the highest rank, the laws of whose class required the destruction of all his children, arose, and with impassioned look and manner exclaimed, "Oh, that I had known that these blessings were in store for us, then I should have saved my children, and they would have been amongst this happy group, repeating these precious truths; but alas! I destroyed them all, --I have not one left." Turning to the chairman, who was also a relative, he stretched out his arm and exclaimed, "You, my brother, saw me kill child after child, but you never seized this murderous hand, and said, stay, brother, God is about to bless us, --the gospel of salvation is coming to our shores." Then he cursed the gods which they formerly worshipped, saying, "It was you who infused this savage disposition into us, and now I shall die childless, although I have been the father of nineteen children." He then sat down, and in a flood of tears gave vent to his feelings.

Mr. Williams also mentions that he had a female servant for fifteen years, who had been in the habit of practising infanticide as a trade; just as a female in this country would practise midwifery; and went about the country killing children, just as a man in this country would go about killing rats. Both he and Mrs. Williams often listened with feelings of agony to the details of the various modes in which it was done. Sometimes they put a wet cloth on their mouths --sometimes they pinched their throats till they expired, and occasionally they buried them alive. But perhaps the most brutal method of all was breaking the first and second joints of their fingers and toes the moment they were born. If they survived this,

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they next dislocated their ankles and wrists; and if that did not do, they then broke their knee and elbow joints; and failing, all these they finished them by strangulation. Mr. Owen would call these children the creatures of most unfavourable circumstances.

They assigned as one reason among others for this practice, the distress entailed upon those who had families, by their frequent and desolating wars; and another, that nursing impaired their personal attractions, and curtailed the period during which the bloom of their beauty lasted. Some people who are near-sighted have much difficulty in discovering any bloom upon a black skin, and are apt to exclaim with the Prophet Jeremiah, "Though thou clothest thyself with crimson, though thou deckest thee with ornaments of gold, though thou rentest thy face with painting, in vain shalt thou make thyself fair." The cause assigned by the New Zealanders for destroying their children may be considered rational compared to this, for though they occasionally were in the habit of doing so, yet this was but rare, and the children suffer much for want of proper food, from the time they are weaned till they are three years old. Mr. Clarke says that one-half of their children die during that time for want of proper nourishment, while many mothers hurt themselves by suckling them too long, from having no suitable food for them afterwards.

In regard to the language of the New Zealanders, though I only picked up a few words of it myself, yet my friend, Dr. Lang, who is a Hebrew scholar, discovered that many of their words were precisely the same as those of that language. The Doctor, and Mr. Williams the missionary, point out also the striking similitude between them and the inhabitants of that

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part of Asia where the land of Judea is situated, in respect of physical conformation, general character, Malay features, tapuing and caste, treatment of women, particularly in their being forbidden to eat certain articles of food, or to eat in the presence of men, -- a very proper regulation, --their polygamy, or plurality of wives, some of them having three or four; their polite attention to the sick, leaving them to recover the best way they can; the immolation of widows on the death of their husbands, and cutting their flesh, and tattooing or printing their bodies; and these combined, seem to leave no doubt that they came originally from Judea. I have taken the liberty of adding to this long catalogue, their wonderful rapacity and love of money, which may not inappropriately be called the innate Jewish propensity of their nature, and confirms the theory of these learned divines in a still more striking degree. The greatest difficulty which they had to overcome was, "How in all the world they got from Judea to New Zealand;" but this difficulty Mr. Williams has removed with his usual ingenuity, by bringing forward some remarkable instances of the drifting of canoes full of natives to a very great distance from their own shores. Mr. Williams fell a sacrifice to the treachery of the savages, in one of the islands of the New Hebrides in 1839.

The account which the New Zealanders themselves gives of their country is sufficiently absurd. Mawe, their divinity, they say was one day amusing himself fishing, a singular employment for a deity, -- and was for a long time very unsuccessful. At last however, when his patience was almost exhausted he felt a bite, and after great exertion pulled out his line, but to his great surprise, instead of a fish, which he

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no doubt thought must have been a whale, he found attached the three Islands of New Zealand. I wonder that Mr. Mawe did not continue fishing after such wonderful success, as the next bite he got might have been Australia. It is singular that the natives name of the Northern Island, is Ea-hei-no-Mawe, which when translated signifies the child of Mawe; and though our knowledge of the history and biography of Mr. Mawe be very limited and incomplete, yet as there are three islands, we are entitled to infer from this that he had three children.

The only other circumstance in the customs of the New Zealanders worthy of being made mention of, is, that the whole of the native race, men, women, and children swim well, and like the North American Indians, swim like dogs, not dividing the water as we do with the palm of the hand, but paddling along with each arm alternately. Those who swim in this way, can hold out much longer than those who adopt the other plan.