We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“PEWHAIRANGI – Bay of Islands Missions and
Maori, 1814 to 1845” by Angela Middleton (Otago University Press, $NZ50)
My
first cursory glance at the publishers’ description of this book led me to
wonder if the author could possibly have anything new to say about the subject.
Pewhairangi concerns, as
its subtitle indicates, the interaction of Maori with Anglican CMS (Church
Missionary Society) missionaries in the Bay of Islands from the very first
permanent English settlers in 1814 to the winding-down of the Anglican mission
in that area in the so-called “Northern War” of the 1840s. (“Pewhairangi” is
the Maori transliteration of the English phrase “Bay of Islands” and not the
original name that Maori gave to that area.)
But hasn’t this
subject already been covered in numerous history books – not just popular
general histories, but also more recent scholarly studies? Was there really
anything of significance that readers would not already know from other
published sources?
As it happens,
my misgivings were quite unfounded. Pewhairangi
has much that is new to reveal to us, because Angela Middleton is primarily an
archaeologist rather than an historian. Her book appears on the second
centenary of the first permanent European settlement in New Zealand. It was, as
she told a Radio New Zealand interviewer, over a decade in the making, as many
of its key findings are based on a series of archaeological digs at the sites
of old mission stations. Consequently Pewhairangi
gives us not only the general history of the missions in those years, but also
the intimate details of how people lived at the mission stations as revealed in
the material artefacts uncovered by the archaeologists’ spades.
Middleton
includes three general chapters on the development of the Anglican missions.
“Into the Maori World” concerns the ways in which missionaries did or (more
often) did not adjust to the Maori worldview and customs. “Maori Gardens and
European Arms” considers how the missionaries inevitably became involved in
trade with their hosts the Ngapuhi, and how this led, via the growing musket
trade, to Hongi Hika’s first “musket wars” and his slaughter of the Ngati
Whatua at Tamaki-makau-rau (Auckland). “The Escalation of War, 1845” outlines
the period in which, with the influx of European settlers after the Treaty of
Waitangi, the Anglican church in New Zealand was becoming more a settler church
than a mission church, Auckland became the country’s capital, and the Ngapuhi
took up arms as they saw the promises made in the Treaty not being kept. There
is also a brief final chapter, “What Hath God Wrought?”, giving the author’s
(mainly negative) view of what the missions achieved.
These chapters
are, however, necessary mainly to give the book narrative and chronological
coherence.
The originality
of Pewhairangi lies in the other five
substantial chapters in which Middleton examines each of five mission stations,
one by one. Her method is to give the full history of each station in turn,
from its first settlement to its decline and closure, with an account of its
inhabitants and their success or failure in the missionary field, buttressed by
detailed comments on the geographical site of the mission station and its archaeological
remains. The stations are Hohi (founded in 1814), near Rangihoua Pa on the
northern side of the bay; Kerikeri (founded 1819) up the river; Paihia (founded
1823); Te Waimate (founded 1830) far inland; and Te Puna (founded 1832).
Every so often,
there are words that could be interpreted as expressing the archaeologist’s frustration
at what is no longer accessible, such as this opening to the chapter concerning
Paihia:
“Visitors to Paihia today have to search for
clues to any trace of the mission and its lost structures. Little
archaeological investigation has been carried out, as development has taken
place over the years with scant regard to this heritage.” (p.134)
There are indeed
passages in which Angela Middleton assumes an audience not acquainted with any
of this early New Zealand history, as when her introductory remarks discuss the
mutual misapprehension of two cultures:
“Evangelical missionary doctrine described a
binary world, divided into good and evil. Thus, Maori cultural practices and
beliefs were seen as the work of Satan or the Devil, often personified as the ‘Prince
of Darkness’ in the reports and daily journals of the New Zealand missionaries
sent back to the CMS in London. Missionaries saw themselves as fighting a holy
battle against Maori practices related to mana and tapu. These concepts
affected the missionaries’ everyday lives as Maori inflicted punishments for
infringement of tapu by ransacking mission houses, taking goods or even
physically attacking people. The Europeans did not understand that these were
actually lesser forms of punishment, that they were being exempted from normal
practices, such as the infliction of death, for similar infringements by Maori.
When the missionaries responded to Maori transgressions by exacting European
‘justice’ or revenge, Maori were similarly confounded.” (Chapter One,
pp.19-20)
Later, when she
makes much the same point, she tends to cultural equivalence:
“The work of the mission, seen as a battle
between good and evil, personified through the Christian God and the devil,
Satan, was further exemplified by the missionaries at Paihia through the
repudiation of tapu and the unforeseen consequences of offences against Maori
cultural practices. This view was reciprocal, since some Maori considered
European practices in a similar way, seeing the preaching of the Gospel as witchcraft.”
(Chapter Five, p.144)
This, in turn,
paves the way for her closing suggestion that the Bay of Islands missions
achieved little in the way of real conversion to Christianity.
Some elements of
the general story are familiar, as when Middleton explains the original CMS
strategy, authorised by Samuel Marsden, to “civilise, then Christianise” Maori:
“None of the first missionaries were ordained
ministers. They were artisans chosen according to Marsden’s belief that nothing
could ‘pave the way for the introduction of the Gospel but civilization’,
through the ‘civilized arts’. The missionaries and their wives were to teach
Maori to read and write, how to grow wheat and other European crops, and such
skills as shoemaking, carpentry, ropemaking, needlework and housekeeping.”
(Chapter Three, p.69)
This was the
fate of the Hall, King and Kendall families. Naturally, we are told of the
choleric and bullying nature of Thomas Kendall as he became more attuned to the
Maori world than his fellow lay catechists and shifted into trading. Equally
familiar is the story of how the arrival of Henry Williams, an ordained
Anglican minister, in 1823 changed the nature of the mission and changed the
whole strategy for making converts. Williams insisted on “direct conversion through
preaching”. However, Williams’ arrival also accentuated class divisions between
the ordained clergy and the lay catechists who had preceded them. Says
Middleton:
“As
an ordained minister, Henry Williams held a superior position, as did his
brother, William. With his shift to ‘direct conversion through preaching’,
rather than teaching practical skills and literacy, divisions between the old
catechists and ordained ministers grew, along with parochial interests.” She
instances the treatment by Henry Williams of James Kemp, and says such
divisions hardened once Bishop Selwyn arrived, noting that “the (few extant) letters and journals of
missionary women” present “a world
where some of the mission families, in particular the lay catechists and
mission labourers, were considered less desirable social companions.” (Chapter
4, p.108)
Even
more tensions within the mission came with the arrival of Bishop Selwyn, who
had “high church” inclinations quite different from the more evangelical
Anglicanism of earlier Anglican missionaries. By the time Selwyn arrived,
however, the church’s focus was shifting away from the Bay of Islands:
“The significance of Selwyn’s occupation of
Waimate was that it was synchronous with the arrival of settlers after the
signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, British annexation and the development of the
‘colonial church’. With the departure of St John’s College, the bishop joined
the list of those Pakeha, including government officials and settlers, who
abandoned Ngapuhi and Pewhairangi for Tamaki-makau-rau, the seat of the old
Ngapuhi enemy, Ngati Whatua.” (Chapter 6, p.205)
If I found
myself greeting some stories told in this book as familiar from other books
(the sins of William Yate, for example), I was nevertheless beguiled by the
unfamiliarity of others. I would instance the detailed history Middleton gives
of the stone store at Kerikeri and its various uses and modifications. Or the
sad rearguard action of James Kemp in trying to maintain an active mission in
Kerikeri in the 1840s when the church was letting the mission there run down.
Or Selwyn’s pretentious (and brief) attempt to turn the Waimate station into a
seminary before he moved St John’s College to Auckland. Or the frankly
hilarious account (pp.216-219) of the urbane German visitor Karl von Huegel
attempting to visit and socialise with sour-faced and unsympathetic
missionaries.
If I regret
anything in this book, it is the lack of detail about how the Anglican
missionaries reacted to missionaries of other Christian denominations in the
area at this time. There are only a few fleeting references to the
contemporaneous Wesleyan (Methodist) missionaries in Ngapuhi territory, and
even fewer to the Catholic missionaries who arrived in 1838 and who (in
history) provoked outraged reactions from Anglican and Methodist alike.
However, Middleton’s avowed purpose is to deal systematically with the Anglican
mission stations and this she does handsomely. And I find it hard to resist a
book which is so well documented and so thoroughly illustrated with appropriate
images of places and sites.
No comments:
Post a Comment