Greater Britain

Religious rites and social customs outlast both physical type and language; but even were it otherwise, there is great resemblance in build and feature between the Polynesians and many of the “Red-Indian” tribes. The aboriginal people of New York State are described by the early navigators not as tall, grave, hooked-nose men, but as copper colored, pleasant looking, and with quick, shrewd eyes; and the Mexican Indian bears more likeness to the Sandwich Islander than to the Delaware or Cherokee.

In reaching South America, there were no distances to be overcome such as to present insurmountable difficulties to the Malays. Their canoes have frequently, within the years that we have had our missionary stations in the islands, made involuntary voyages of six or seven hundred miles. A Western editor has said of Columbus that he deserves no praise for discovering America, as it is so large that he could not well have missed it; but Easter Island is so small, that the chances must have been thousands to one against its being reached by canoes sailing even from the nearest land; yet it is an ascertained fact that Easter Island was peopled by the Polynesians. Whatever drove canoes to Easter Island would have driven them from the island to Chili and Peru. The Polynesian Malays would sometimes be taken out to sea by sudden storms, by war, by hunger, by love of change. In war time, whole tribes have, within historic days, been clapped into their boats, and sent to sea by a merciful conqueror who had dined: this occurs, however, only when the market is already surfeited with human joints.

In sailing from America to New Zealand, we met strong westerly winds before we had gone half way across the seas, and, south of the trade-wind region, these blow constantly to within a short distance of the American coast, where they are lost upon the edge of the Chilian current. A canoe blown off from the southern islands, and running steadily before the wind, would be cast on the Peruvian coast near Quito.

When Columbus landed in the Atlantic islands, he was, perhaps, not mistaken in his belief that it was “The Indies” that he had found – an India peopled by the Malay race, till lately the most widely-scattered of all the nations of the world, but one which the English seem destined to supplant.

The Maories, without doubt, were originally Malays, emigrants from the winterless climate of the Malay peninsula and Polynesian archipelago; and, although the northernmost portions of New Zealand suited them not ill, the cold winters of the South Island prevented the spread of the bands they planted there. At all times it has been remarked by ethnologists and acclimatizers that it is easier by far to carry men and beasts from the poles toward the tropics than from the tropics to the colder regions. The Malays, in coming to New Zealand, unknowingly broke one of Nature‘s laws, and their descendants are paying the penalty in extinction.

CHAPTER IV.

PAREWANUI PAH

“Here is Pétatoné.This is the 10th of December;The sun shines, and the birds sing;Clear is the water in rivers and streams;Bright is the sky, and the sun is high in the air.This is the 10th of December;But where is the money?Three years has this matter in many debates been discussed,And here at last is Pétatoné;But where is the money?”

A BAND of Maori women, slowly chanting in a high, strained key, stood at the gate of a pah, and met with this song a few Englishmen who were driving rapidly on to their land.

Our track lay through a swamp of the New Zealand flax. Huge swordlike leaves and giant flower-stalks all but hid from view the Maori stockades. To the left was a village of low wahrés, fenced round with a double row of lofty posts, carved with rude images of gods and men, and having posterns here and there. On the right were groves of karakas, children of Tanemahuta, the New Zealand sacred trees – under their shade, on a hill, a camp and another and larger pah. In startling contrast to the dense masses of the oily leaves, there stretched a great extent of light-green sward, where there were other camps and a tall flagstaff, from which floated the white flag and the Union Jack, emblems of British sovereignty and peace.

A thousand kilted Maories dotted the green landscape with patches of brilliant tartans and scarlet cloth. Women lounged about, whiling away the time with dance and song; and from all the corners of the glade the soft cadence of the Maori cry of welcome came floating to us on the breeze, sweet as the sound of distant bells.

As we drove quickly on, we found ourselves in the midst of a thronging crowd of square-built men, brown in color, and for the most part not much darker than Spaniards, but with here and there a woolly negro in their ranks. Glancing at them as we were hurried past, we saw that the men were robust, well limbed, and tall. They greeted us pleasantly with many a cheerful, open smile, but the faces of the older people were horribly tattooed in spiral curves. The chiefs carried battle-clubs of jade and bone; the women wore strange ornaments. At the flagstaff we pulled up, and, while the preliminaries of the council were arranged, had time to discuss with Maori and with “Pakéha” (white man) the questions that had brought us thither.

The purchase of an enormous block of land – that of the Manawatu – had long been an object wished for and worked for by the Provincial Government of Wellington. The completion of the sale it was that had brought the Superintendent, Dr. Featherston, and humbler Pakéhas to Parewanui Pah. It was not only that the land was wanted by way of room for the flood of settlers, but purchase by government was, moreover, the only means whereby war between the various native claimants of the land could be prevented. The Pakéha and Maori had agreed upon a price; the question that remained for settlement was how the money should be shared. One tribe had owned the land from the earliest times; another had conquered some miles of it; a third had had one of its chiefs cooked and eaten upon the ground. In the eye of the Maori law, the last of these titles was the best: the blood of a chief overrides all mere historic claims. The two strongest human motives concurred to make war probable, for avarice and jealousy alike prevented agreement as to the division of the spoil. Each of the three tribes claiming had half a dozen allied and related nations upon the ground; every man was there who had a claim, direct or indirect, or thought he had, to any portion of the block. Individual ownership and tribal ownership conflicted. The Ngatiapa were well armed; the Ngatiraukawa had their rifles; the Wanganuis had sent for theirs. The greatest tact on the part of Dr. Featherston was needed to prevent a fight such as would have roused New Zealand from Auckland to Port Nicholson.

On a signal from the Superintendent, the heralds went round the camps and pahs to call the tribes to council. The summons was a long-drawn minor-descending-scale: a plaintiff cadence, which at a distance blends into a bell-like chord. The words mean: “Come hither! Come hither! Come! come! Maories! Come – !” and men, women, and children soon came thronging in from every side, the chiefs bearing scepters and spears of ceremony, and their women wearing round their necks the symbol of nobility, the Heitiki, or greenstone god. These images, we were told, have pedigrees, and names like those of men.

We, with the resident magistrate of Wanganui, seated ourselves beneath the flagstaff. A chief, meeting the people as they came up, stayed them with the gesture that Homer ascribes to Hector, and bade them sit in a huge circle round the spar.

No sooner were we seated on our mat than there ran slowly into the center of the ring a plumed and kilted chief, with sparkling eyes, the perfection of a savage. Halting suddenly, he raised himself upon his toes, frowned, and stood brandishing his short feathered spear. It was Hunia té Hakéké, the young chief of the Ngatiapa.

Throwing off his plaid, he commenced to speak, springing hither and thither with leopard-like freedom of gait, and sometimes leaping high into the air to emphasize a word. Fierce as were the gestures, his speech was conciliatory, and the Maori flowed from his lips – a soft Tuscan tongue. As, with a movement full of vigorous grace, he sprang back to the ranks, to take his seat, there ran round the ring a hum and buzz of popular applause.

“Governor” Hunia was followed by a young Wanganui chief, who wore hunting breeches and high boots, and a long black mantle over his European clothes. There was something odd in the shape of the cloak; and when we came to look closely at it, we found that it was the skirt of the riding-habit of his half-caste wife. The great chiefs paid so little heed to this flippant fellow, as to stand up and harangue their tribes in the middle of his speech, which came thus to an untimely end.

A funny old graybeard, Waitéré Maru Maru, next rose, and, smothering down the jocularity of his face, turned toward us for a moment the typical head of Peter, as you see it on the windows of every modern church – for a moment only, for, as he raised his hand to wave his tribal scepter, his apostolic drapery began to slip from off his shoulders, and he had to clutch at it with the energy of a topman taking-in a reef in a whole gale. His speech was full of Nestorian proverbs and wise saws, but he wandered off into a history of the Wanganui lands, by which he soon became as wearied as we ourselves were; for he stopped short, and, with a twinkle of the eye, said: “Ah! Waitéré is no longer young: he is climbing the snow-clad mountain Ruahiné; he is becoming an old man;” and down he sat.

Karanama, a small Ngatiraukawa chief with a white moustache, who looked like an old French concierge, followed Maru Maru, and, with much use of his scepter, related a dream foretelling the happy issue of the negotiations; for the little man was one of those “dreamers of dreams” against whom Moses warned the Israelites.

Karanama‘s was not the only trance and vision of which we heard in the course of these debates. The Maories believe that in their dreams the seers hear great bands of spirits singing chants: these when they wake the prophets reveal to all the people; but it is remarked that the vision is generally to the advantage of the seer‘s tribe.

Karanama‘s speech was answered by the head chief of the Rangitané Maories, Té Peeti Té Awé Awé, who, throwing off his upper clothing as he warmed to his subject, and strutting pompously round and round the ring, challenged Karanama to immediate battle, or his tribe to general encounter; but he cooled down as he went on, and in his last sentence showed us that Maori oratory, however ornate usually, can be made extremely terse. “It is hot,” he said – “it is hot, and the very birds are loath to sing. We have talked for a week, and are therefore dry. Let us take our share – £10,000, or whatever we can get, and then we shall be dry no more.”

The Maori custom of walking about, dancing, leaping, undressing, running, and brandishing spears during the delivery of a speech is convenient for all parties: to the speaker, because it gives him time to think of what he shall say next; to the listener, because it allows him to weigh the speaker‘s words; to the European hearer, because it permits the interpreter to keep pace with the orator without an effort. On this occasion, the resident magistrate of Wanganui, Mr. Buller, a Maori scholar of eminence, and the attached friend of some of the chiefs, interpreted for Dr. Featherston; and we were allowed to lean over him in such a way as to hear every word that passed. That the able Superintendent of Wellington – the great protector of the Maories, the man to whom they look as to Queen Victoria‘s second in command, should be wholly dependent upon interpreters, however skilled, seems almost too singular to be believed; but it is possible that Dr. Featherston may find in pretended want of knowledge much advantage to the government. He is able to collect his thoughts before he replies to a difficult question; he can allow an epithet to escape his notice in the filter of translation; he can listen and speak with greater dignity.

The day was wearing on before Té Peeti‘s speech was done, and, as the Maories say, our waistbands began to slip down low; so all now went to lunch, both Maori and Pakéha, they sitting in circles, each with his bowl, or flax-blade dish, and wooden spoon, we having a table and a chair or two in the Mission-house; but we were so tempted by Hori Kingi‘s whitebait that we begged some of him as we passed. The Maories boil the little fish in milk, and flavor them with leeks. Great fish, meat, vegetables, almost all they eat, in short, save whitebait, is “steamed” in the underground native oven. A hole is dug, and filled with wood, and stones are piled upon the wood, a small opening being left for draught. While the wood is burning, the stones become red-hot, and fall through into the hole. They are then covered with damp fern, or else with wet mats of flax, plaited at the moment; the meat is put in, and covered with more mats; the whole is sprinkled with water, and then earth is heaped on till the vapor ceases to escape. The joint takes about an hour, and is delicious. Fish is wrapped in a kind of dock-leaf, and so steamed.

While the men‘s eating was thus going on, many of the women stood idly round, and we were enabled to judge of Maori beauty. A profusion of long, crisp curls, a short black pipe thrust between stained lips, a pair of black eyes gleaming from a tattooed face, denote the Maori belle, who wears for her only robe a long bedgown of dirty calico, but whose ears and neck are tricked out with greenstone ornaments, the signs of birth and wealth. Here and there you find a girl with long, smooth tresses, and almond-shaped black eyes: these charms often go along with prominent, thin features, and suggest at once the Jewess and the gipsy girl. The women smoke continually; the men, not much.

When at four o‘clock we returned to the flagstaff, we found that the temperature, which during the morning had been too hot, had become that of a fine English June – the air light, the trees and grass lit by a gleaming yellow sunshine that reminded me of the Californian haze.

During luncheon we had heard that Dr. Featherston‘s proposals as to the division of the purchase-money had been accepted by the Ngatiapa, but not by Hunia himself, whose vanity would brook no scheme not of his own conception. We were no sooner returned to the ring than he burst in upon us with a defiant speech. “Unjust,” he declared, “as was the proposition of great ‘Pétatoné’ (Featherston), he would have accepted it for the sake of peace had he been allowed to divide the tribal share; but as the Wanganuis insisted on having a third of his £15,000, and as Pétatoné seemed to support them in their claim, he should have nothing more to do with the sale.” “The Wangenuis claim as our relatives,” he said: “verily, the pumpkin-shoots spread far.”

Karanama, the seer, stood up to answer Hunia, and began his speech in a tone of ridicule. “Hunia is like the ti-tree: if you cut him down he sprouts again.” Hunia sat quietly through a good deal of this kind of wit, till at last some epithet provoked him to interrupt the speaker. “What a fine fellow you are, Karanama; you‘ll tell us soon that you‘ve two pair of legs.” “Sit down!” shrieked Karanama, and a word-war ensued, but the abuse was too full of native raciness and vigor to be fit for English ears. The chiefs kept dancing round the ring, threatening each other with their spears. “Why do you not hurl at me, Karanama?” said Hunia; “it is easier to parry spears than lies.” At last Hunia sat down.

Karanama, feinting and making at him with his spear, reproached Hunia with a serious flaw in his pedigree – a blot which is said to account for Hunia‘s hatred to the Ngatiraukawa, to whom his mother was for years a slave. Hunia, without rising from the ground, shrieked “Liar!” Karanama again spoke the obnoxious word. Springing from the ground, Hunia snatched his spear from where it stood, and ran at his enemy as though to strike him. Karanama stood stock-still. Coming up to him at a charge, Hunia suddenly stopped, raised himself on tiptoe, shaking his spear, and flung out some contemptuous epithet; then turned, and stalked slowly, with a springing gait, back to his own corner of the ring. There he stood, haranguing his people in a bitter undertone. Karanama did the like with his. The interpreters could not keep pace with what was said. We understood that the chiefs were calling each upon his tribe to support him, if need were, in war. After a few minutes of this pause they wheeled round, as though by a common impulse, and again began to pour out torrents of abuse. The applause became frequent, hums quickened into shouts, cheer followed cheer, till at last the ring was alive with men and women springing from the ground, and crying out on the opposing leader for a dastard.

We had previously been told to have no fear that resort would be had to blows. The Maories never fight upon a sudden quarrel: war is with them a solemn act, entered upon only after much deliberation. Those of us who were strangers to New Zealand were nevertheless not without our doubts, while for half an hour we lay upon the grass watching the armed champions running round the ring, challenging each other to mortal combat on the spot.

The chieftains at last became exhausted, and the Mission-bell beginning to toll for evening chapel, Hunia broke off in the middle of his abuse: “Ah! I hear the bell!” and, turning, stalked out of the ring toward his pah, leaving it to be inferred, by those who did not know him, that he was going to attend the service. The meeting broke up in confusion, and the Upper Wanganui tribes at once began their march toward the mountains, leaving behind them only a delegation of their chiefs.

As we drove down to the coast, we talked over the close resemblance of the Maori runanga to the Homeric council; it had struck us all. Here, as in the Greek camp, we had the ring of people, into which advanced the lance-bearing or scepter-bearing chiefs, they alone speaking, and the people backing them only by a hum: “The block of wood dictates not to the carver, neither the people to their chiefs,” is a Maori proverb. The boasting of ancestry, and bragging of deeds and military exploits, to which modern wind-bags would only casually allude, was also thoroughly Homeric. In Hunia we had our Achilles; the retreat of Hunia to his wahré was that of Achilles to his tent; the cause of quarrel alone was different, though in both cases it arose out of the division of spoil, in the one case the result of lucky wars, in the other of the Pakéha‘s weakness. The Argive and Maori leaders are one in fire, figure, port, and mien; alike, too, even in their sulkiness. In Waitéré and Aperahama Tipai we had two Nestors; our Thersites was Porea, the jester, a half-mad buffoon, continually mimicking the chiefs or interrupting them, and being by them or their messengers as often kicked and cuffed. In the frequency of repetition, the use of proverbs and of simile, the Maories resemble not Homer‘s Greeks so much as Homer‘s self; but the calling together of the people by the heralds, the secret conclave of the chiefs, the feast, the conduct of the assembly – all were the exact repetition of the events recorded in the first and second books of the “Iliad” as having happened on the Trojan plains. The single point of difference was not in favor of the Greeks; the Maori women took their place in council with the men.

As we drove home, a storm came on, and hung about the coast so long, that it was not till near eleven at night that we were able to take our swim in the heated waters of the Manawatu River, and frighten off every duck and heron in the district.

In the morning, we rose to alarming news. Upon the pretext of the presence in the neighborhood of the Hau-Hau chief Wi Hapi, with a war party of 200 men, the unarmed Parewanui natives had sent to Wanganui for their guns, and it was only by a conciliatory speech at the midnight runanga that Mr. Buller had succeeded in preventing a complete break-up of all the camps, if not an intertribal war. There seemed to be white men behind the scenes who were not friendly to the sale, and the debate had lasted from dark till dawn.

While we were at breakfast, a Ngatiapa officer of the native contingent brought down a letter to Dr. Featherston from Hunia and Hori Kingi, calling us to a general meeting of the tribes convened for noon, to be held in the Ngatiapa Pah. The letter was addressed, “Kia té Pétatoné té Huperinténé” – “To the Featherston, the Superintendent” – the alterations in the chief words being made to bring them within the grasp of Maori tongues, which cannot sound f‘s, th‘s, nor sibilants of any kind. The absence of harsh sounds, and the rule which makes every word end with a vowel, give a peculiar softness and charm to the Maori language. Sugar becomes huka; scissors, hikiri; sheep, hipi; and so with all English words adopted into Maori. The rendering of the Hebrew names of the Old Testament is often singular: Genesis becomes Kenehi; Exodus is altered into Ekoruhe; Leviticus is hardly recognizable in Rewitikuha; Tiuteronomi reads strangely for Deuteronomy, and Hohua for Joshua; Jacob, Isaac, Moses, become Hakopa, Ihaka, and Mohi; Egypt is softened into Ihipa, Jordan into Horámo. The list of the nations of Canaan seems to have been a stumbling-block in the missionaries’ way. The success obtained with Girgashites has not been great; it stands Kirekahi; Gaash is transmuted into Kaaha, and Eleazar into Ereatara.

When we drove on to the ground all was at a deadlock – the flagstaff bare, the chiefs sleeping in their wahrés, and the common folk whiling away the hours with haka songs. Dr. Featherston retired from the ground, declaring that till the Queen‘s flag was hoisted he would attend no debate; but he permitted us to wander in among the Maories.

We were introduced to Tamiana té Rauparaha, chief of the Ngatitoa branch of the Ngatiraukawa, and son of the great cannibal chief of the same name, who murdered Captain Wakefield. Old Rauparaha it was who hired an English ship to carry him and his nation to the South Island, where they ate several tribes, boiling the chiefs, by the captain‘s consent, in the ship‘s coppers, and salting down for future use the common people. When the captain, on return to port, claimed his price, Rauparaha told him to go about his business, or he should be salted too. The captain took the hint, but he did not escape for long, as he was finally eaten by the Sandwich Islanders in Hawaii.

In answer to our request for a dance-song, Tamiana and Horomona Torémi replied, through an interpreter, that “the hands of the singers should beat time as fast as the pinions of the wild duck;” and in a minute we were in the middle of an animated crowd of boys and women collected by Porea, the buffoon.

As soon as the singers had squatted upon the grass, the jester began to run slowly up and down between their ranks as they sat swinging backward and forward in regular time, groaning in chorus, and looking upward with distorted faces.

In a second dance, a girl standing out upon the grass chanted the air – a kind of capstan song – and then the “dancers,” who were seated in one long row, joined in chorus, breathing violently in perfect time, half forming words, but not notes, swinging from side to side like the howling dervishes, and using frightful gestures. This strange whisper-roaring went on increasing in rapidity and fierceness, till at last the singers worked themselves into a frenzy, in which they rolled their eyes, stiffened the arms and legs, clutched and clawed with the fingers, and snorted like maddened horses. Stripping off their clothes, they looked more like the Maories of thirty years ago than those who see them only at the mission-stations would believe. Other song-dances, in which the singers stood striking their heels at measured intervals upon the earth, were taken up with equal vigor by the boys and women, the grown men in their dignity keeping themselves aloof, although in his heart every Maori loves mimetic dance and song. We remarked that in the “haka” the old women seemed more in earnest than the young, who were always bursting into laughter, and forgetting words and time.

The savage love for semitones makes Maori music somewhat wearisome to the English ear; so after a time we began to walk through the pahs and sketch the Maories, to their great delight. I was drawing the grand old head of a venerable dame – Oriuhia té Aka – when she asked to see what I was about. As soon as I showed her the sketch, she began to call me names, and from her gestures I saw that the insult was in the omission of the tattooing on her chin. When I inserted the stripes and curves, her delight was such that I greatly feared she would have embraced me.