James Belich - Agents of Contact

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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