The Missionaries: Spreading the word

Wherever Europeans settled, whether by conquest or otherwise. they took their culture with them. A mainstay of their culture or identity was religion. The Spaniards, Portuguese and French took Catholicism. The British took Protestantism more specifically Anglicanism. By the early 19th century the British were ascendant and were certain that God was on their side. In fact everything pointed to them being the most advanced civilisation that had ever developed.

They wanted to bring the wonders of the civilisation to the backward and needy natives. This would also wanted to expand the Empire, making Britain even greater… richer, more powerful… (No wonder everyone else seemed to dislike them, They probably thought Hubris was an English word).

The Missionaries who followed the explorers wanted to save the souls of the heathen. It was in their destiny to expand the empire, it was also their destiny to spread the word of God.

Samuel Marsden led the (Anglican) Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Sydney. He had a tough reputation and was known as the ‘Flogging Parson”. He lived in Parramatta and had become wealthy on the landholdings he had acquired. He developed a strong bond with many of the Maori who visited Port Jackson, especially Ruatara who spent some time recuperating in his care.Ruatara was an important chief amongst the Nga Puhi of the Bay of Islands. He hoped to encourage Marsden into bringing Missionaries to his people. However it was not just the word of God that the hoped for.

Marsden seemed to greatly admire the Maori as a people suited to accepting Christianity.Preliminary ideas of setting up a mission were put on hold by the burning of the Boyd in Whangaroa harbour. By 1814 Marsden felt more comfortable with the proposal.It was his hoped that the Missionaries could civilise the Maori. They would first show them the advantages that a civilised culture could offer them. Once this was accepted then they would readily accept the religion that was central to that culture. This explained the inclusion of King and Hall, a rope maker and carpenter. They were accompanied by their families, a sign that they wanted to establish a permanent presence. It was hoped that the families would also keep the missionaries away from the excesses and temptations of Kororareka. I guess 2 out of 3 isn’t to bad.
Civilise then convert.

It seemed simple. The first Mission station was set up on the northern side of the Bay of Islands in an area under the control of Ruatara and his hapu. The site was Rangihoua.Ruatara died soon afterwards. His place as protector was taken by Hongi Hika. Soon the Mission moved to Kerikeri and Paihia, close enough to see Kororareka, not so close it could be contaminated by the Whalers antics.

Hika wanted the Missionaries for what they could give him. He never converted to Christianity. Although Marsden came to New Zealand he never stayed. Leadership of the Mission fell to Thomas Kendall who never really fired as a leader. He lacked the ability to inspire and was unable to shake the shadow cast by Hika. Belich describes Kendall as Hika’s vassal.

Maori were disappointed by the Missionaries. They wanted traders who could provide a steady stream of material especially muskets. When Kendall followed Marsden’s direction not to trade in Muskets their mana really diminished.

From a letter to Kendall from Marsden, 1819

"I found that you had fallen into that accursed traffic with muskets and powder again, notwithstanding all the resolutions that had been passed against it when I was with you in August last. When I considered that the missionaries were furnishing the instruments of death to these poor savages by supplying them with muskets and powder, I could not but feel the greatest indignation at such a thought. The argument generally urged has been that neither timber nor pork could be bought from the natives without muskets and powder. This I do not credit."

It was not uncommon for their settlements to be ransacked by passing by Maori from other Nga Puhi hapu. Physical threats were made but rarely carried out, the Missionaries were never equals in their eyes.

Belich: Making Peoples on Missionaries

God also came to New Zealand through Australia. By 1808, missions founded in Tonga, Tahiti and the Marquesas had all collapsed. Pacific evangelism was revived by the Anglican Chaplain of New South Wales, Samuel Marsden, 'the Saint Augustine of New Zealand'. Frustrated by the Pacific failures and by his efforts among Australian convicts and Aboriginals, he turned with hope and relief to the Maori. Marsden and allies such as John Nicholas, author in 1817 of the first major book on New Zealand, tirelessly argued that Maori were the perfect prospects for conversion - despite their reputation for aggressiveness and cannibalism, and the almost total absence of converts until 1830. Confidence in Maori convertibility was not restricted to rhetoric. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) gave prospective missionaries to New Zealand two years' training, as against three for India. Trainee missionaries practised on Catholic Irish in London, only to be threatened with red-hot pokers and bricks through church windows."

Marsden set up the first mission station at Rangihoua, in the Bay of Islands in 1814, and supervised operations from his base at Parramatta, near Sydney, until his death in 1838. The CMS had established three stations at the Bay of Islands by 1823, when Henry Williams, an able and energetic ex-naval officer, if somewhat narrower in outlook than Marsden, took up the local leadership. The same year, the CMS was joined by the Wesleyan Missionary Society, whose Reverend Samuel Leigh established a station at Whangaroa. This station was abandoned in 1827, but the Wesleyans were re-established at Hokianga the following year, and between 1830 and 1836 were led by the choleric and colourful William White. The CMS and the WMS formed an uneasy cartel, with the former as senior partner, and the latter allocated the western coast. Neither mission broke out of Northland until 1833, but the number of stations exploded in the mid-1830s. In 1839, CMS missionaries and their families numbered 169; WMS 37 .By 1845, the WMS had a dozen small stations, and the CMS two dozen, some large, unevenly spread across the country. The Anglican-Methodist alliance was seldom comfortable, but both were united in their dislike of Catholics - they would rather the Maori stayed pagan than become Papist. The first Roman Catholic mission station was established in 1838, by Bishop Jean Baptiste Pompallier. Catholicism came late but fast, backed by the new Marist organisation in France and, at first, by substantial funds. By 1844, it had brought 41 French missionaries to New Zealand and established a dozen mission stations.

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 New South Wales boy named William Evans: I do not know him - if he had been bad I should have known him."' In Australia, he was known as the 'Flogging Parson', for good reason. He faced repeated accusations of corruption - of using his official position, the moral high ground of evangelism and his privileged access to the New Zealand trade to feather Parramatta. He did make a lot of money - £30,000 to be precise - and despite the indignant denials of subsequent biographers, it is tempting to see fire in the smoke. But he also spent a great deal of his own money on the New Zealand mission, as well as two years of his own time, and seven voyages at great personal cost - he was always extremely seasick. It is difficult not to admire him and his fellows. The New Zealand missionaries, men and women, spent their lives on the psychological equivalent of a fearsomely alien planet for something else's sake. They buried their children, braced their shoulders and served their God. Perhaps it was years in purgatory in this world exchanged for years off purgatory in the next, but the mean-spirited can find self-interest in every altruism.

Satan surrounded the early missionaries in the form of naked Maori bodies. Marianne Williams spent her first night in New Zealand thinking of them. 'The tall muscular forms of the New Zealanders flitted before my mind's eye, whenever I endeavoured to sleep. ` Missionary women are not known to have succumbed to temptation, but some of their menfolk did. They included William White, William Colenso, Charles Creed and Thomas Kendall, and in at least the last case sex was not the only temptation. As on other islands and beaches of the Pacific, fear of sin competed with the seductions of sinlessness, and it was not always dear which would convert which. The 'apparent sublimity' of Maori religious ideas, wrote Kendall in 1822, has 'almost completely turned me from a Christian to a Heathen'. This battle also raged in the soul of the CMS missionary William Yate. His influential book on New Zealand, published in 1835, portrayed Maori as 'neither too ignorant nor too savage to be made the subjects of the saving and sanctifying influence of the gospel', but as pretty ignorant and savage all the same. Maori mothers fed their infants pebbles to harden their hearts. thought 'it is not true that Maori mothers eat their own children. This is too horrible even for them. 'Poor Mr Yate' was subsequently sacked for alleged sexual relations with between 50 and 100 young Maori males. The Catholics maintained their chastity or their secrets, but the British missions always struggled against reverse conversion. Children and single men were considered especially vulnerable to Maoriness. Marsden reproved Kendall for leaving his eight children to visit England 'at an Age when they in a very special manner require the Eye of the Parent, to prevent them from mingling amongst the Heathens and learning their ways' As early as 1811, he wrote: 'Never upon any Account send a single man out. But some went.

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 New Zealand agriculture'. that he at least greatly hastened a Maori religious conversion, and that the British intervention that saved New Zealand from 'anarchy' was 'in large measure due to the apostolic labours of Samuel Marsden" Marsden was important, but this overstates the case. Missiology and hagiography are still too closely related.

Making Peoples

James Belich

Pp 134-137

The Third Kind of New Zealander

It should be remembered that until the 1830's the term New Zealander was attached to the indigenous people of New Zealand. The term Maori did not become popular until then. Only about then did Maori themselve use the term as a collective name for themselves although they remained tribal in their first identity. Those (mainly) Europeans who chose to live amongst and with Maori did not fit neatly into one camp or the other and thus created a new category, the third type of New Zealander.

There is a wonderful term for people who pass through a place as a temporary resident. It is Sojourner. I wish I'd known this when I lived in London, it sounds so much better than...actually I don't know what we called ourselves, we were just Kiwis on our OE. Sojourner sounds so much cooler.

This is an interesting group mainly because so little evidence was left behind by them. Known as Pakeha-Maori or Intermediaries or Go-Betweens they bridged the gap between Maori and visiting Europeans. Few were literate and so most of the records about them are written by others. Most of these records are written by Missionaries and often reflect the bias these writers held about such men (and women). Their writing is filled with references to uncouth behaviour, undesirables filled with vice and their thoroughly bad influence on Maori. There were no compliments, only complaints.

Recognising that their writing contains bias is an important historical skill. Being able to describe and explain the biased references is useful for the end of year exam. Knowing why they held these views is also important.Missionaries wanted to be the sole filters of European (British) culture and civilisation. Having someone else interpret the culture for Maori in ways that might inhibit their own activities was not something they liked. Few of the 'Intermediaries' were religious or church goers, in fact most would have had a pretty poor view of Missionaries and religion. Many of the Pakeha Maori were former convicts and possibly a number would have been Irish and Catholic. Their view of the Anglican Church would have been even lower and the (CMS) Missionary would have represented everything their disliked about the establishment.

Many would have had experience of the CMS from Sydney and few would have viewed Marsden with any great favour. They apparently often counselled Maori against the Missionaries.Possibly another reason was simply their horror at the thought of White Men 'going native' and abandoning the (superior?) european civilisation for the degenerate and permissive life amongst the natives.The Pakeha Maori themselves were a disparate group. the first of them fled their ship in 1799 and there were many different types of Pakeha Maori who followed in the next 70-80 years. The last Pakeha Maori of the traditional type was possibly Kimble Bent who fought with Titokowaru.

Some were escaped convicts, some were unhappy seamen, others were traders or adventurers. Your hand out notes (see pages 22-27) describe the many types of Pakeha Maori, and need little explanation here.What is important is to recognise that Maori only accepted Pakeha into their society on their own terms and the Pakeha had to be worth something to them, whether as a 'pet' or as a respected tohunga. If the Pakeha wasn't worth anything then they would be rejected or eaten. Several seamen who fled their ships were hunted down and returned because local Maori could not risk the loss of trading opportunities.

On the other hand a Pakeha suitably absorbed into the Hapu could be especially useful in translating with other Pakeha. Dicky Barretts help in the sale of Wellington being a poor example, as he spoke a pidgin Maori that failed to adequately explain their loss of land. There were also Pakeha Maori who lived on the periphery of their local Iwi like Tapsel or Guard.It seems in many respects that the Intermediaries impact has been downplayed. The Missionaries can be blamed for that. F EManing is one of the few Pakeha Maori who did leave a written record. But his later antipathy toward Maori may colour his vews.

Read TREVOR BENTLEYS "PAKEHA MAORI" available in the school library.