Tuesday, 31 March 2009
....Kicking and Screaming...
The Yucky Bits
Last week I said I'd found some stuff that was a bit too yuck to read in class. So if you continue don't say you weren't warned!
In Michael King's "New Zealanders at War"...
- A small canoe with the dead bodies first approached the shore: the war canoe and those taken in fight, about 40 in all, lay at a short distance. Shortly after, a party of Young Men landed to perform the war-dance and song usual on their return from fighting: they yelled and jumped and brandished their weapons, and threw up human heads in the air in a shocking manner; but this was but a prelude ...
An awful pause and silence ensued. At length the canoes moved slowly and came into contact with the shore; when the widow of Tettee and other women rushed down upon the beach in a frenzy of rage, and beat in pieces the carved work at the head of the canoes with a pole: they then got into a canoe and pulled out several prisoners-of war into the water and beat them to death: except one boy who swam away and got into another canoe. The frantic widow then proceeded to another canoe and dragged out a woman prisoner into the water and beat out her brains with a club with which they pound fern root. We retired from this distressing scene.
- ... the party who took the pa stayed in it, keeping all the women they could, and killed all the men. The children under 3 years they cut their heads and arms off and cooked the trunk, taking the inside out and then beating it up to a pulp which, he said, was the best food to eat with roi [fern root]. The women they ran sharp sticks through their feet to prevent their escape. A man moe'd [had intercourse with] any one of them and ara kau ano i te aii [the moment he finished the act] killed her and stuck her up and komo tia ana te anganga [thrust the head] of any tangata mata kite tapa [dead person against her vagina] or the hand of any dead man ... They ate the women when the men were eaten, and that after they had them to wife.
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Look and Listen!
Monday, 23 March 2009
Musket Wars - Ron Crosby
- Te Wherowhero and Tukorehu of Waikato;
- Pomare, Te Wera and Te Morenga of Ngapuhi (Northland);
- Te Rohu and Tuterangianini of Ngati Maru (Thames);
- Te Heuheu of Ngati Tuwharetoa (Taupo);
- Te Waharoa of Ngati Haua (Matamata);
- Murupaenga and Apihai Te Kawau of Ngati Whatua (Kaipara),
...by and large warfare in Maoridom before the musket was much more limited to inter-hapu clashes of a localised nature. All iwi and hapu were equally armed with the same rakau Maori, or Maori weapons of war: it was usually too dangerous to contemplate longdistance raiding, as such taua were likely to be outnumbered and destroyed.
In contrast, the campaigns of the Musket Wars, because of the superiority the musket provided, were prodigious in numerous respects:
- Their duration, sometimes lasting twelve to eighteen months
- Their physical length and difficulty, always involving huge distances by foot or waka (war canoe) in hostile and physically demanding country.
- Their brutality and ruthlessness, often resulting in the depopulation of large swathes of the country through which they passed, with the remnant survivors living in slavery or fear.
- Their frequency, each summer often seeing up to ten major campaigns in various parts of the country with sometimes two, three or four campaigns occurring at once.
While there was one major factor which gradually brought the Musket Wars to an end, there were a range of others that, particularly in the closing stages of the wars, combined fortuitously to hasten that end.
The first and primary factor was the spread of muskets throughout the country. Whereas in 1818 Ngapuhi could campaign with impunity with relatively small numbers, creating havoc throughout the North Island, by 1826 they were facing foes who were equally well-armed. From then on their victories were few and hard earned. Defeats were often encountered, and in human terms the cost of campaigning became too great.
A more direct factor in bringing the wars to an end was the sudden arrival of large numbers of European settlers at the end of the 1830s. Europeans began to buy significant areas of land, particularly in places that had been temporarily abandoned by iwi during the Musket Wars, and they immediately started to settle in large numbers. Once that occurred Maori rangatira knew they had to deal with a major new political force, and that the musket alone would be unlikely to prevail against the firepower to which the Europeans had recourse.
Another important factor in the cessation of hostilities was the gradual conversion of many Maori to Christianity and its message of peace, later in the 1830s. The influence of Christianity on the rangatira involved in the early years of the Musket Wars was very small, certainly during the major raids of the 1820s. The missionaries' influence in reducing the impact of the musket at that time could only be described as minimal or nil, and indeed some of the early missionaries such as Thomas Kendall were actively involved in trading muskets with Ngapuhi.
An additional factor which had a localised effect on the ability of some iwi to pursue their war aims was the onset of disease in the form of measles, influenza and other illnesses such as tuberculosis. In some areas European diseases caused great mortality, with more severe effects even than the musket. There is little doubt that in 1835, for example, a major clash between Ngai Tahu and Ngati Toa was prevented in large part by a measles epidemic suffered by Ngai Tahu.
But the final factor in bringing the Musket Wars to an end was the Treaty of Waitangi. Whatever arguments existed then and now as to what Maori thought it meant, the treaty was regarded in a general sense by both Maori and European settlers as imposing a system of order that would protect against raiding.
Sunday, 22 March 2009
CMaps: The Whalers & Missionaries
Saturday, 21 March 2009
A working podcast!
I hope this will make things easier for you especially Matthew and Sophie!
Unfortunately it has limited storage (100mb) so I will have to drop off posts as we move forward.
Cheers
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Revenge is a dish best served cold
It could be called the UTU wars. Hongi sought revenge for “The Feast of Seagulls’ at Moremonui (1808) and the capture and sale of his kinswomen by the Venus in 1806. It seems that his fostering of relations with the Missionaries and trip to England was fuelled by the desire to acquire some of the “thousand, thousand muskets’ kept in the Tower (of London).
Te Rauparaha’s rampage against the Nagi Tahu appears to have been as much a grab for the riches of Pounamu, but it was also in revenge for the death of a Ngati Toa chief at Kaiapoi . His capture of a Ngai Tahu chief who was subsequently tortured and killed (including the drinking of blood and eating of eyes). The use of the Elizabeth would of course add to British worries about New Zealand.
The Musket Wars - Wright and Ballara
Monday, 16 March 2009
CMaps are Coooooooool
And here is video on them! Unfortunately you may not be able to view this at school - there seems to be a network issue with some of these Youtube videos. IT should work at home!
Thursday, 12 March 2009
Missionary Influence and the Maori Reaction
Missionary Intentions
Civilise then convert.
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Also from Belich... Missionaries
God also came to
Marsden set up the first mission station at Rangihoua, in the
It is often as difficult to empathise across times as it is across cultures. From some modern perspectives, the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching, in which the love of God was often dwarfed by the fear of sin. Marsden forbade his daughter to read novels, and showed a certain lack of human sympathy. 'Mrs. Hill is very low spirited and a few days ago she cut her throat - and has not been able to swallow anything since.' He provided a curious reference for a
Satan surrounded the early missionaries in the form of naked Maori bodies. Marianne Williams spent her first night in
We should not deride the missionaries' efforts, or sneer too hard at their self-defined failures, but we should equally avoid accepting their account of their own impact, which claimed the wholesale religious conversion and partial 'civilisation' of Maori by the 1840s. Even when their interpretation of results is not accepted, they are still often portrayed as the main agents of contact, largely because they dominated the written record. In 1990, an academic biographer claimed that Marsden 'transformed the Maori economy and laid the foundations of
Making Peoples
James Belich
Pp 134-137
A video for Sophie
Thursday, 5 March 2009
James Belich - Agents of Contact
The largest group of European agents of contact, ocean whalemen, is also the most elusive. They did not settle, they scarcely even sojourned, but merely visited New Zealand for a few weeks. Ocean whaling 'was the eighteenth-century equivalent of today's petroleum industry" - Moby Dallas. Initially, the only New Zealand content of the whaling industry was the vast, intelligent, gentle animals themselves: fixed to a boat by harpoons, pursued to exhaustion, lanced to death, then left to rot in rough weather, and tried or fried into oil in calm.
But whaleships, years from home, regularly needed water, to soak salt meat into edible form, as well as to drink; fresh food to keep the crew from rotting with scurvy; firewood and charcoal to cook and start the fires under the trypots until scrap whale blubber could take over; and time ashore to maintain and repair the ships. The crews also believed they desperately needed sex with women. Self-restraint, self-abuse and the Yate solution in the crowded stinking holds of whaling ships were not seen as adequate alternatives. There was also social pressure.'If they see you reading or writing,' wrote an unusually scholarly whaler, 'or know that you have not got a girl aboard, you must then be a missionary man ... a most opprobrious name.”
From 1800, ocean whaleships began to call at New Zealand harbours to obtain all these things. From the first, the various harbours of the Bay of Islands in Northland were the favoured ports of call. We shall see in the next chapter that Maori combined with nature, Governor King and the whalers to make this choice. About 50 ships visited the Bay between 1806 and 18 10.` The Anglo-American War of 1812-15, lower prices for oil, and two Maori attacks on ships stemmed the flow somewhat, but between 1815 and 1822 some 92 ships called at the Bay, mostly whalers. At one point in 1827, a dozen lay at anchor there at the same time. These numbers were dwarfed in the 1830s, when several hundred whaleships visited, each with a crew of about 30 men." Visits were seasonal, mostly between November and April. Ocean whaleships stayed only two to five weeks. But the Bay was often their first well-serviced port of call after many months at sea. Each visit was an intensive burst of contact with Maori, many months of purchasing and recreation crammed in to one.
Portuguese, Dutch, Canadian, German and Danish ocean whaleships visited New Zealand, but the main players were the British, French and Americans. Helped by a government subsidy, duties on competitors' products and the expertise of American captains who were more interested in whaling than independence, Britain held the early lead. But in the 1830s it was overtaken by the Americans, and possibly by the French as well. France featured large from 1836 to 1845. Virtually the whole French whaling fleet of about 60 ships called at New Zealand in the late 1830s, preferring Banks Peninsula to the Bay of Islands. About a hundred of their crews deserted during the 1840s, some intermarrying with Maori and forming little Franco-Maori communities at Banks Peninsula and the Bay of Plenty." The first American whaler to visit New Zealand waters came in 1797, and no fewer than 271 New England whaleships called at the Bay of Islands alone between 1833 and 1839, as against 126 British Visits.
The decline of the British industry has been attributed to its over-regulation and to an American competitive edge similar to that of Japanese over American industry today. Whatever its causes, the decline of British and the rise of French and, especially, American whaling in the 1830s has intriguing implications. ' It seems that the most numerous national category of European visitors to New Zealand before 1840 may have been American whalers, and that whalers were particularly prone to engage in sexual relations with Maori women. Maori descended from early European-Maori liaisons are quite likely to have the Stars and Stripes in their whakapapa. Certainly, the intensity and sheer numbers of ocean whaler visits compensated for their brevity; and their role in bringing Europe to Maori remains to be fully explored. The importance of French and American whalers as agents of contact has been underestimated, partly because they were ships passing in the night, but also because of the tendency to Anglicise New Zealand history.
Another shadowy but possibly important set of agents of contact were nonEuropeans. They were important less for their numbers than for what they suggested to Maori about the diversity of the world and about Europe's usual relations with it. In some cases, they were also better able than Europeans to communicate with Maori. We have seen that, from the Maori perspective, 'Cook's expedition' was more like 'Tupaia's expedition' Tupaia was succeeded by other Pacific Islanders who sojourned and even settled among Maori, as a few Maori sailors did in their home islands, reopening pan-Polynesian links that had been closed for centuries . De Surville's and Marion's expeditions contained African and Asian slaves and sailors, as did many subsequent ships, and like their white crewmates some deserted in New Zealand. Maori sometimes spared black sailors in attacks on European parties, intriguing indications of their perceptions of graduated difference.` There were Australian Aboriginal men - and at least one woman - among the sealers." A brilliant Tahitian known as Jem, after a sojourn in Sydney during which he worked for Macarthur and learned how to read and write in English, set himself up as a chief at North Cape. Jem, a classic 'transculturite', was managing European-Maori contact in the region in 1814. Like his predecessor Tupaia, he believed the Maori people were 'inferior to his own' * ` Europe has no monopoly of ethnocentrism. A Bengali 'lascar' settled in Northland about 1810, and remained there for at least ten years - the first known Indian settler. He advised Europeans in 1820 'not to appear alarmed' at anything Maori did. Like the missionaries, he believed that 'the firm and undaunted demeanour of, a white man will keep many natives at bay"' Whether he defined Bengalis as white is not dear.
Whalers, sealers, escaped convicts a -rid deserting seamen, as distinct from the small but growing minority of 'respectable' settlers such as missionaries, were consistently portrayed as agents of vice and fatal impact. They themselves mixed pragmatic acceptance of the Maori terms of economic and cultural trade with spasmodic racial contempt. Some expected recognition of superiority; to be Lord Jim among the savages. They were generally disappointed, but looked for opportunities to make their personal myths of empire true. They were not wholly pragmatic. The capitalist push behind empire pursued dreams of profit as much as profit itself. For a hundred years after 1783, Europeans dreamed of spinning New Zealand flax into gold, and risked their money and even lives on various projects for doing so. 'The subject of New Zealand flax could generate great excitement ... Hard-headed men like Simeon Lord found themselves plunging into schemes surrounded by dangers and pitfalls and spending money wildly; the language of their documents, their business agreements, and their memorials becoming more exotic as they became less realistic. There was a certain romanticism, dreams of an oily EI Dorado, about investment in whaling too - most shore-whaling stations failed to turn long-term profits. 'People,' wrote George Weller in 1837, 'are Black Whaling mad. Even sealing was viewed as a potential 'mine of wealth. George Bass, the Australian explorer, proposed in 1803 to make his fortune from a 2 1 -year monopoly of the export of South Island fish to Australia .87 Such hopes helped generate large-scale contact, which in turn generated expectations of fatal impact and empire. The pre- 1840 settlers and sojourners were significant in actual history too, bringing the things, thoughts and genes of Europe to Maori in considerable bulk. Non-Europeans, missionaries, Tasmen, Australian governors and entrepreneurs, British, American and French ocean whalemen - all were important agents of contact. But none was the most important.
Making Peoples
James Belich
Pp 137-39