Part 5 (1/2)

Chapter VI

MISSION SCHOONER AND WHALE BOAT

”Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy.”--_Text of Samuel Marsden's first sermon at the Bay of Islands, Christmas Day_, 1814.

Maoris, s.h.i.+pping before the mast on board whalers and traders, made some of the best seamen on the Pacific. They visited Sydney and other civilized ports, where their fine physique, bold bearing, and strangely tattooed faces, heightened the interest felt in them as specimens of their ferocious and dreaded race. Stories of the Maoris went far and wide--of their fierce fights, their cannibal orgies, their grotesque ornaments and customs, their lonely, fertile, and little-known country. Humane men conceived the wish to civilize and Christianize this people. Benjamin Franklin had planned something of the kind when the news of Cook's discovery first reached England.

Thirty years later, Samuel Marsden, a New South Wales chaplain, resolved to be the Gregory or Augustine of this Britain of the South.

The wish became the master-pa.s.sion of his life, and he lived to fulfil it. How this resolve was carried out makes one of the pleasantest pages of New Zealand history. The first step was his rescue of Ruatara. In 1809 a roaming Maori sailor had worked his pa.s.sage to London, in the hope of seeing the great city and--greatest sight of all--King George III. The sailor was Ruatara, a Bay of Islands chief.

Adventurous and inquiring as he was intelligent and good-natured, Ruatara spent nearly nine years of his life away from his native land.

At London his captain refused to pay him his wages or to help him to see King George, and solitary, defrauded, and disappointed, the young wanderer fell sick nigh unto death. All the captain would do for him was to transfer him to the _Ann_, a convict s.h.i.+p bound for Sydney.

Fortunately Marsden was among her pa.s.sengers. The chaplain's heart was touched at the sight of the wan, wasted Maori sitting dull-eyed, wrapped in his blanket, coughing and spitting blood. His kindness drew back Ruatara from the grave's brink and made him a grateful and attached pupil. Together they talked of the savage islands, which one longed to see and the other to regain. Nor did their friends.h.i.+p end with the voyage. More adventures and disappointments awaited Ruatara before he at last reached home. Once in a whale s.h.i.+p he actually sighted the well-beloved headlands of the Bay of Islands, and brought up all his goods and precious presents ready to go on sh.o.r.e. But the sulky captain broke his promise and sailed past the Bay. Why trouble to land a Maori? Ruatara had to choose between landing at Norfolk Island or another voyage to England. Cheated of his earnings and half-drowned in the surf, he struggled ash.o.r.e on the convict island, whence he made his way to Sydney and to Marsden's kindly roof. The whaling captain went on towards England. But Justice caught him on the way. He and his s.h.i.+p were taken by an American privateer.

Ruatara gained his home at the next attempt. There he laboured to civilize his countrymen, planted and harvested wheat, and kept in touch with Marsden across the Tasman Sea. Meanwhile the latter's official superiors discountenanced his venturesome New Zealand project. It was not until 1814 that the Governor of New South Wales at last gave way to the chaplain's persistent enthusiasm, and allowed him to send the brig _Active_ to the Bay of Islands with Messrs. Hall and Kendall, lay missionaries, as the advance party of an experimental mission station. Ruatara received them with open arms, and they returned to Sydney after a peaceful visit, bringing with them not only their enthusiastic host, but two other chiefs--Koro Koro and Hongi, the last-named fated to become the scourge and destroyer of his race.

At last Marsden was permitted to sail to New Zealand. With Kendall, Hall, and King, the three friendly chiefs, and some ”a.s.signed”

convict servants, he reached New Zealand in December, 1814. With characteristic courage he landed at Whangaroa, among the tribe who had ma.s.sacred the crew of the unhappy _Boyd_. Going on sh.o.r.e there, he met the notorious George, who stood to greet the strangers, surrounded by a circle of seated tribesmen, whose spears were erect in the ground.

But George, despite a swaggering and offensive manner, seems to have been amicable enough. He rubbed noses with Hongi and Ruatara, and shook hands with Marsden, who pa.s.sed on unharmed to the Bay of Islands. There, by Ruatara's good offices, he was enabled to preach to the a.s.sembled natives on the Sunday after arrival, being Christmas Day, from the text printed at the head of this chapter. The Maoris heard him quietly. Koro Koro walked up and down among the rows of listeners keeping order with his chief's staff. When the service ended, the congregation danced a war dance as a mark of attention to the strangers.

Marsden settled his missionaries at Rangihu, where for twelve axes he bought two hundred acres of land from a young _rangatira_ named Turi.

The land was conveyed to the Church Missionary Society by a deed of sale. As Turi could not write, Hongi made the ingenious suggestion that his _moko_, or face-tattoo, should be copied on the deed. This was done by a native artist. The doc.u.ment began as follows:

”Know all men to whom these presents shall come, That I, Ahoodee O Gunna, King of Rangee Hoo, in the Island of New Zealand, have, in consideration of twelve axes to me in hand now paid by the Rev. Samuel Marsden, of Paramatta, in the territory of New South Wales, given, granted, bargained and sold, and by this present instrument do give, grant, bargain and sell,” etc., etc.

The deed is not only the first New Zealand conveyance, but has an interest beyond that. It is evidence that, at any rate in 1815, a single Maori, a chief, but of inferior rank, could sell a piece of land without the specific concurrence of his fellow-tribesmen, or of the tribe's head chief. Five and forty years later a somewhat similar sale plunged New Zealand into long years of war.

After this Marsden returned to Sydney. The _Active_ took back spars and dressed flax to the value of 450. The flax was sold at 110 a ton. Kauri timber brought half a crown a foot, and the duty charged on it at the Sydney customs house was a s.h.i.+lling a foot. The day of Free Trade there was not yet. One cloud was hanging over the mission when Marsden sailed. Ruatara lay dying. He had been seized with a fever, and the natives, believing him to be attacked by a devouring demon, placed him under _tapu_, and kept food, medicine, and his white friends from him. When Marsden, by threatening to bombard the village obtained access to the sick man, it was too late; he found his friend past hope. Thus was the life of this staunch ally--a life which might have been of the first value to the Maori race--thrown away. Though the missionary's friend, Ruatara died a heathen, and his head wife hung herself in customary Maori form.

Such was the setting up of the first mission station. Its founders were sterling men. Kendall had been a London schoolmaster in good circ.u.mstances. King, a master carpenter, had given up 400 a year to labour among the savages. Marsden, though he made seven more voyages to the country, the last after he had reached threescore years and ten, never settled there. Henry Williams, however, coming on the scene in 1823, became his chief lieutenant. Williams had been a naval officer, had fought at Copenhagen, and had in him the stuff of which Nelson's sailors were made. Wesleyan missionaries, following in the footsteps of Marsden's pioneers, established themselves in 1822, and chose for the place of their labours the scene of the _Boyd_ disaster.

Roman Catholic activity began in 1838.

It took ten years to make one convert, and up to 1830 the baptisms were very few. After that the work began to tell and the patient labourers to reap their harvest. By 1838 a fourth of the natives had been baptized. But this was far from representing the whole achievement of the missionaries. Many thousands who never formally became Christians felt their influence, marked their example, profited by their schools. They fought against war, discredited cannibalism, abolished slavery. From the first Marsden had a sound belief in the uses of trade and of teaching savages the decencies and handicrafts of civilized life. He looked upon such knowledge as the best path to religious belief. Almost alone amongst his cla.s.s, he was far-sighted enough to perceive, at any rate in the latter years of his life, that the only hope of New Zealand lay in annexation, and that any dream of a Protestant Paraguay was Utopian. Quite naturally, but most unfortunately, most missionaries thought otherwise, and were at the outset of colonization placed in antagonism to the pioneers. Meanwhile they taught the elements of a rough-and-ready civilization, which the chiefs were acute enough to value. But the courage and singleness of purpose of many of them gave them a higher claim to respect. To do the Maoris justice, they recognised it, and the long journeys which the preachers of peace were able to make from tribe to tribe of cannibals and warriors say something for the generosity of the latter as well as for the devotion of the travellers. For fifty years after Marsden's landing no white missionary lost his life by Maori hands. Almost every less serious injury had to be endured. In the face of hards.h.i.+p, insult, and plunder, the work went on. A schooner, the _Herald_, was built in the Bay of Islands to act as messenger and carrier between the missionary stations, which--pleasant oases in the desert of barbarism--began to dot the North Island from Whangaroa as far south as Rotorua among the Hot Lakes. By 1838 there were thirteen of them.

The ruins of some are still to be seen, surrounded by straggling plots run to waste, ”where once a garden smiled.” When Charles Darwin, during the voyage of the _Beagle_, visited the Bay of Islands, the missionary station at Waimate struck him as the one bright spot in a gloomy and ill-ordered land. Darwin, by the way, was singularly despondent in his estimate both of Australia and New Zealand. Colonial evolution was clearly not amongst his studies.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CARVED GATEWAY OF MAORI VILLAGE

_From a Sketch by_ GENERAL ROBLEY.]

Colonists as a rule shrug their shoulders when questioned as to the depth of Maori religious feeling. It is enough to point out that a Christianity which induced barbarian masters to release their slaves without payment or condition must have had a reality in it at which the kindred of Anglo-Saxon sugar-planters have no right to sneer. Odd were the absurdities of Maori lay preachers, and knavery was sometimes added to absurdity. Yet these dark-skinned teachers carried Christianity into a hundred nooks and corners. Most of them were honest enthusiasts. Two faced certain death in the endeavour to carry the Gospel to the Taupo heathen, and met their fate with cheerful courage. Comic as Maori sectarianism became, it was not more ridiculous than British. It is true that rival tribes gloried in belonging to different denominations, and in slighting converts belonging to other churches. On one occasion, a white wayfarer, when asking shelter for the night at a _pa_, was gravely asked to name his church. He recognised that his night's shelter was at stake, and had no notion what was the reigning sect of the village. Sharpened by hunger, his wit was equal to the emergency, and his answer, ”the true church,” gained him supper and a bed. Too much stress has been laid on the spectacle of missionaries engaging in public controversies, and of semi-savage converts wrangling over rites and ceremonies and discussing points of theology which might well puzzle a Greek metaphysician. Such incidents were but an efflorescence on the surface of what for a number of years was a true and general earnestness.

The missionaries, aided by Professor Lee, of Cambridge, gave the Maori a written language. Into this the Scriptures were translated, chiefly by William Williams, who became Bishop of Waiapu, and by Archdeacon Maunsell. Many years of toil went to the work, and it was not completed until 1853. In 1834 a printing press was set up by the Church Mission Society at the Bay of Islands, in charge of Mr. William Colenso. Neither few nor small were the difficulties which beset this missionary printer. At the outset he got his press successfully from s.h.i.+p to sh.o.r.e by las.h.i.+ng two canoes together and laying planks across them. Though the chiefs surveyed the type with greedy eyes and hinted that it would make good musket-b.a.l.l.s, they did not carry it off. But on unpacking his equipment Colenso found he had not been supplied with an inking-table, composing-sticks, leads, galleys, cases, imposing-stone, or printing-paper. A clever catechist made him an imposing-stone out of two boulders of basalt found in a river-bed hard by. Leads he contrived by pasting bits of paper together, and with the help of various make-s.h.i.+fts, printed on February 21, 1835 the first tract published in New Zealand. It consisted of the Epistles to the Ephesians and Philippians in Maori, printed on sixteen pages of writing-paper and issued in wrappers of pink blotting-paper. Much the most capable helpers whom the lonely printer had in his first years were two one-time compositors who had turned sailors and who, tiring of foc'sle life under Yankee captains, made up their minds to resume the stick and ap.r.o.n in the cannibal islands. Impish Maori boys made not inappropriate ”devils.” With such a.s.sistants Colenso, working on, had by New Year's Day, 1838, completed the New Testament and was distributing bound copies to the eager Maoris, who sent messengers for them from far and near. Pigs, potatoes, flax were offered for copies of the precious volume, in one case even that rarest of curiosities in No Man's Land--a golden sovereign.

Not the least debt, which any one having to do with New Zealand owes the missionaries and Professor Lee, is a scholarly method of writing Maori. In their hands the spelling of the language became simple, systematic, and pleasant to the eye. What it has done to save the names of the country's places and persons from taking fantastic and ridiculous shapes, a few examples will show. For sixty years after Cook's discovery every traveller spelt these names as seemed good to him. The books of the time offer us such things of beauty as Muckeytoo (Maketu), Kiddy-Kiddy (Keri-Keri), Wye-mattee (Waimate), Keggerigoo (Kekerangu), Boo Marray and Bowmurry (Pomare), Shunghee and E'Ongi (Hongi), Corrorad.i.c.kee (Kororareka). The haven of Hokianga figures alternately as Showkianga, Sukyanna, Jokeeangar and Chokahanga. Almost more laughable are Towackey (Tawhaki), Wycaddie (Waikare), Crackee (Karakia), Wedder-Wedder (Wera-Wera), and Rawmatty (Raumati).

These, however, are thrown into the shade by some of the courageous attempts of the two Forsters, Cook's naturalists, at the names of native birds. It must have taken some imaginative power to turn pi-waka-waka into ”diggowaghwagh,” and kereru into ”haggarreroo,”

but they achieved these triumphs. Their _chef-d'oeuvre_ is perhaps ”pooadugghiedugghie,” which is their version of putangi-tangi, the paradise-duck. After that it is not so easy to smile at the first sentences of an official statement drawn up by Governor King, of New South Wales, relative to the carrying off to Norfolk Island of the two New Zealanders before mentioned, which begins: