Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

     “OLD NEW ZEALAND – A Tale of the Good Old Times” by “A Pakeha Maori” [F. E. Maning] (first published in 1863)

 

            In the 1960s, the publishers Wilson and Horton (then proprietors if the New Zealand Herald) printed a series of facsimiles of New Zealand books that had first been published in the 19^th century. I have seven of these facsimiles sitting on my shelves. They are very interesting at least because they show what attitudes European (British) writers had when it came to Maori. Some of these books would not be criticised now, but some display very dated or even bigoted ideas about race. One book in particular is well known, F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand – A Tale of the Good Old Times.

Fredrick Edward Maning (1812-1883) was a Protestant Irishman who was a robust man very happy to fight and brawl when it suited him. He was apparently 6 feet 3 inches tall. In 1833, Maning came over to New Zealand from Tasmania and set himself up as a trader in Hokianga, the north of New Zealand. He lived with the Ngapui iwi, married a Maori woman (the sister of a chief) and had four children by her. He also, apparently, sometimes joined Ngapui war parties fighting other iwi. Years later he became a judge of the Native Land Court, but in his early years he was known to have clashed with British laws. He opposed the Treaty of Waitangi and formal colonisation of New Zealand. In his brief Preface to Old New Zealand, Maning says he “thought it might be worthwhile to place a few sketches of old Maori life before the remembrance of them had passed away.” He adds “I first saw them as they were still unlike a civilised people of British subjects”. Remember, Maning wrote his book in the 1860s. When he referred to “ the good old times” he was referring to the 1830s, before the Treaty of Waitangi existed. The 1830s were not all that far away from the 1860s. Old New Zealand was a very popular book and was reprinted many times in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. But by the late 20^th century, it was being criticised by historians. In 1975, the historian Professor M. P. K. Sorrenson wrote an essay (ironically called “How to Civilise Savages”) in which he said that Old New Zealand had “undeservedly become a local classic”. More recently Maori writers have criticised the book.

I finally got around to reading Old New Zealand this year, and here is how I see it. [Page numbers given according to the original facsimile.] Maning does not write about events in sequence. His narrative – such as it is – jumps hither and thither. He has the maddening habit of not giving dates and not giving names of the people he meets and works with. Although he is a “trader” he never specifies what he trades in.  He often attempts to be jocular (and sometimes succeeds) but his attempts at oratory are flat. Take the gushy words with which he opens his book: “Ah! those good old times, when first I came to New Zealand, we shall never see their like again. Since then the world seems to have gone wrong somehow. A dull sort of world this, now. The very sun does not seem to me to shine as bright as it used. Pigs and potatoes have degenerated; and every thing seems ‘flat, stale, and unprofitable’. But those were the times! – ‘the good old times’ – before Governors were invented, and law, and justice, and all that. When every one did as he liked – except when his neighbours would not let him, (the more shame for them) – when there were no taxes, or duties, or public works, who public to require them…” and so on (Chapter I, pp,1-2)

In all of his narrative, such as it is, we have to remember that in the 1830s, Maori tended to welcome Pakeha, this being long before Pakeha became the majority population. Maori rangatira looked forward to getting iron ploughs, knives, axes, European clothing and, of course, firearms – muskets and tupara (double-barrelled shotguns). For this reason, many Pakeha traders were held in high esteem and were protected by rangatira.

 

Maning begins (Chapters 1, 2, and 3) with a not-particularly-hilarious account of how he first stepped foot on Hokianga. He notes Maori took goods without paying for them and were particularly interested in the tupara. The chief welcomes Maning as “his” Pakeha. Maning speaks of how one senior of the iwi is a fine fellow who revels in the fact that, when he was younger, he ate many people. Yes, cannibalism was still practiced in some parts of Aotearoa and Maning  appears to find this fact amusing. After wrestling with a Maori champion, he says: “My vis-à-vis in the operation [of bringing goods to shore] was a respectable old warrior of great experience and approved valour, whose name being turned into English meant ‘the eater of his own relations’… This was quite a different diet from ‘melons’, and he did not bear his name for nothing… I will only say that my comrade was a most bloodthirsty, ferocious, athletic savage, and his character was depicted in every line of his tattooed face.” (Chapter 3, pp,41-42) He makes it clear that there was a big trade on the selling of [Maori] heads, who have been killed and cured by Maori and sold to traders. “The skippers of many of the colonial trading schooners were always ready to deal with a man who had ‘a real good head’, and used to commission such men as my companion of the morning to ‘pick up heads’ for them. It is a positive fact that some time after this the head of a live man was sold and paid for beforehand, and afterwards honestly delivered ‘as per arrangement’ ”  (Chapter 3, p.63)

There are still “small” wars between iwi and some against British settlers. He says (Chapter 4) a renegade, and members of the team that help him ashore, made a raid against one settlement and were driven away by cannon fire. He builds a modest house for himself (Chapter 5), but of course has to pay, in axes, muskets etc., to competing people who claim his plot of land is theirs. At which point, delving into the future, he curses official Land Commissioners who, years later, make him prove that he acquired his plot legitimately. He freely admits (Chapter 6) that he has Maori “retainers” and servants whom he pays. And naturally he loves to spin sensational tales even if they are true, as in the following: “He killed several men in fair fight, and had also – as was well known – committed two most diabolical murders, one of which was on his own wife, a fine young woman, whose brains he blew out at half a second’s notice for no further provocation than this: - he was sitting on the verandah of his house, and told her to bring a light for his pipe. She, being occupied in domestic affairs, said ‘Can’t you fetch it yourself, I am going for water’. She had the calibash in her hand and their infant child on her back. He snatched up his gun and instantly shot her dead on the spot; and I have heard hm afterwards describing quite coolly the comical way in which her brains had been knocked out by the shot with which the gun was loaded. He also had, for some trifling provocation, lopped off the arms of his own brother or cousin. I forget which, and was altogether, from his tremendous bodily strength and utter insensibility to danger, about as ‘ugly a customer’ as one would care to meet.” (Chapter 6, pp. 89-90). This is very much as in the tone of his boastful tale of wrestling with a formidable Maori warrior and catching a tomahawk thrown at him by the said warrior (Chapter 6, pp. 92-93)

Often he emphasises that Maori crave for European tools because they had previously had to work with more primitive tools which made for very laborious toil thus: “As for the Maori people in general, they are neither so good or so bad as their friends and enemies have painted them, and I suspect are pretty much what almost every other people would have become, if subjected for ages to the same external circumstances. For ages they have struggles against necessity in all its shapes. This has given them a remarkable greediness for gain in every visible and immediate tangible form. It has even left its mark on their language. Without the aid of iron the most trifling tool or utensil could only be purchased by an enormously disproportionate outlay of labour in its construction, and, in consequence, became precious to a degree scarcely conceivable by people of civilised and wealthy countries. This great value attached to personal property of all kinds, increased proportionately the temptation to plunder; and where no law existed, or could exist, of  sufficient force to repress the inclination, every man, as a natural consequence, became a soldier, if it were only for the defence of his own property and that of those who were banded with him – his tribe, or family….”                             (Chapter 6, pp. 99-100)

From Chapters 7 on, he discusses what he sees as traditional Maori codes and laws that were almost universally respected. Muru (Chapter 7) is regarded by Pakeha as sheer robbery or plunder, but Maning suggests muru was really a means of dividing up goods equitably, often under the pretext of punishing somebody who owned too much. But in Maning’s time it is rarely used. Tapu (Chapter 8) however is quite different, still widely used as a means of keeping order. A tohunga really could, by his mana, stop people in their tracks by declaring a person or thing was tapu. Maning tells a tale of how he himself was chastised by a tohunga when he accidentally slept in a hill where the bones of an earlier tohunga were buried. He says he was put through a long ceremony by the tohunga in which he was divested of all his clothes and kitchen utensils. He also notes (Chapter 9) that a tohunga was in effect a soothsayer, claiming to be able the predict the future. Maning says this was very much the same technique the ancient Greeks used – giving a prediction that was ambiguous enough to mean almost anything. One tohunga (Chapter 10) was credited with raising up the dead. In what is, oddly, one of Maning’s best anecdotes, he tells the story of a botched such “resurrection” which ended in tragedy. There is still some fear of the taniwha (Chapter 11) and other cases of the use of tapu.

In Chapters 12 and 13, he speculates what Maori warfare was like, prior to the entry of firearms. He regards most of them had been real but on a small scale. He speculates on why so many earth fortifications had been abandoned by iwi and concludes that the nature of war has changed since muskets came along. Muskets massively depleted Maori numbers [he doesn’t use the term, but he is here referring to what some historians now call the Musket Wars]. Later he also suggests that another factor was the introduction of European diseases. In his own time he has seen iwi becoming fewer and fewer… He circles us back to his first chapters, reminding us that “A chief possessing a pakeha was much envied by his neighbours, who, in consequence, took every opportunity of scandalising him and blaming him for any rough plucking process he might submit the said pakeha to;… pakehas being, in those glorious times, considered to be geese who laid golden eggs, and it would beheld to be the very extreme of foolishness and bad policy to kill them, or, by too rough handling, to cause them to fly away.” (Chapter 13 p. 184) And in Chapter 14 he moves into different territory by telling us abput an old warrior, a Rangatira who lamented the days of the spear and axe and mere that had been taken over by the muskets. When the old warrior dies, two old women of his age hang themselves.

And then (Chapter 15) Maning proceeds to tell us the meaning of a number of Maori words. He intends to write a Maori lexicon. He asserts how difficult it is to explain many Maori words, and declares “It will be a tough word [a Maori word with many nuances which he has been analysing] disposed of to my hand, when I come to write my Maori dictionary, in a hundred volumes, which, if I begin soon, I hope to have finished before the Maori is a dead language.”  (Chapter 15 p. 224)

As I said at the beginning of this review, Old New Zealand jumps all over the place “hither and thither”. Maning is by no means a stylist and his book often has odd absents. Though he was a “Pakeha Maori”, he never mentions the many British he would have met in the 1830s. He overlooks such things as Maori crafts, Maori forms of marriage, and major Maori people who took important roles in iwi. Also there is that element of boastfulness (his skill as a wrestler etc.). Sometimes, too, there are statements that we could now regard as patronising. Consider this, written with regard to Maori: “for our own safety and their preservation, we must give new laws and institutions, new habits of life, new ideas, sentiments and information, - whom we must either civilise or by our mere contact exterminate.”(Chapter 6, pp. 99-102) The last word might seem shocking – though it is not suggesting genocide, but rather that contact with Pakeha is dangerous. Like it or not, distasteful though some people will now find it, much [perhaps most] of what Maning writes about Maori customs are true and provable. Not a great book, but still one worth reading as a primer.