“We cannot change the past – we can only try to understand it.”

 

Preparing for 2014:

 

Re-evaluating Missionary Beginnings in Aotearoa New Zealand

 

Allan K. Davidson

 

 

 

On the 25 December 1814, the Reverend Samuel Marsden preached his famous sermon on the text: “Behold! I bring you glad tidings of great joy”. The location at Oihi, under the shadow of Rangihoua Pa in the Bay of Islands, has been marked by what is called “Marsden’s Cross”. In three and a half years we will observe the bicentenary of that event. This gives rise to a number of questions:

• How do we understand Christian beginnings in this country?
• What was the nature of Maori and missionary interaction in 1814 and after?
• Should we celebrate or commemorate what began at Oihi in 1814?
• What impact did Christianity have on shaping the world that emerged as the nation we call New Zealand?
• How have we told, and how will we tell this story of Christian beginnings in Aotearoa New Zealand?

 

Our history is about us, who we are, where we have come from, why we are like we are. One of my guiding principles as an historian has been that we cannot change the past; we can only try to understand it. That role of being an interpreter of the past, promoting understanding, is fraught with ambiguities and complexities. In our postmodern age when grand narratives have collapsed, the search for meaning is easily shaped by contemporary questions and the danger of “presentism”, defining the world by what we know. It has been said that where you stand determines what you see. The spectacles we wear focus what we look at. Understanding the past requires us to be self-critical as well as aware of the foreign country we enter when we traverse the past.

 

How, for example, do we understand Samuel Marsden? Is he the “flogging parson” from Parramatta, or is he the Patriarch of the New Zealand Mission? Contrast, for example, A.H. Reed’s hagiographical biographies: Marsden of Maoriland: Pioneer and Peacemaker (1938), and Samuel Marsden: Greatheart of Maoriland (1947),[1]  with Richard Quinn’s excoriating biography, Samuel Marsden: Altar Ego. Reed gives a glowing Sunday school presentation of Marsden’s pioneering exploits in New Zealand. Quinn takes great delight in highlighting Marsden’s perceived “misdeeds” in New Zealand and his “unlovely self”.[2] The either/or characterisation of Marsden is of course far too simplistic. Yet this is the sometimes the way in which history is presented.

 

 

1. Christian Beginnings – the Missionary World

 

The beginnings of continuous Christian involvement in New Zealand are quite exceptional in the history of missionary expansion. In most primary missionary situations in the nineteenth century, missionaries just turned up and began their work without consulting the local people. The arrival of the Duff with London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries at Tongatapu, Tahiti and the Marquesas in 1797, which began Protestant missionary work in the Pacific, was unannounced. In contrast, Maori played a significant role in negotiating and facilitating missionary beginnings. There was a lead of some fifteen years as Maori such as Te Pahi and Ruatara developed connections and then friendships with Samuel Marsden in New South Wales.

 

Andrew Porter, a leading historian on the relationship between missionaries and British colonial expansion, writes of the way in which “Pacific historians, no less than other regional specialists, are liable to fragment their studies of missions by focusing on a single society or territory”. He pointed to the way in which “global awareness and international cooperation ... imparted so much dynamism to missionary enterprise”.[3] Following Porter’s lead, the appreciation of the New Zealand missionary enterprise needs to be set within its wider international context. Marsden, for example, should be understood within the wider Pacific and international Evangelical context in which he worked. An Anglican priest and colonial chaplain, Marsden acted as the agent for the LMS in the Pacific, founded the Church Missionary Society (CMS) work in New Zealand and had close associations with the Methodists in Australia and facilitated their beginnings in New Zealand. The wider Pacific view allows us to see dynamic forces resulting from missionary interaction with Maori such as people movements, the impact of literacy, the role of chiefs in conversion, the considerable role of indigenous evangelisation, and the local reaction movements as part of a much broader phenomenon.[4]

 

Understanding the early CMS work in New Zealand also necessitates seeing it within its wider historical setting. The modern British Protestant Missionary Movement had its beginnings in the 1790s. The founding of the CMS in 1799 as a voluntary society within the Church of England was part of the flowering of the Evangelical spirit of voluntarism, what Andrew Walls described as the “Fortunate Subversion of the Church”. It was the CMS’s lay leaders, including William Wilberforce, who gave the Society much of its initial influence.[5] The voluntary missionary societies proved to be as revolutionary in the spread of Christianity in the nineteenth century as the monasteries had been in Europe in the so called “Dark Ages”. The relationship between the Metropolitan missionary societies and their missionaries, seen, for example, in the developing missiology articulated by CMS secretaries such as Josiah Pratt, Dandeson Coates and Henry Venn are a part of the crucial wider picture.

 

New Zealand was a pioneering area of missionary endeavour. The first English CMS missionaries sent overseas came to this country. The Protestant missionary movement was still in its infancy in terms of developing its methodology, let alone its missiology. Samuel Marsden, like Thomas Haweis, another Anglican priest and a founding director of the LMS, was wedded to the idea of combining civilisation with Christianisation. The selection of artisans as the first missionaries: William Hall, a carpenter; John King a shoe maker and twine spinner; who were joined by Thomas Kendall, a school teacher, represented the Marsden / Haweis’ missionary approach. It was also a pragmatic response to the unwillingness of any Anglican clergy to offer themselves as missionaries at this stage. The method was based on the false premise that people needed to be civilised in a European sense both before and as they were being Christianised. Henry Williams, after his arrival in New Zealand in 1823 turned the Marsden approach on its head by emphasising evangelisation as the primary focus of mission, He noted in 1826, after a long discussion with Marsden, that Marsden’s “heart is deeply engaged in the mission but his ideas are rather wild”.[6]

 

What was the driving force that led missionaries to give up the comforts of home, place themselves and their families at considerable risk and go to the ends of the earth? R. Pierce Beaver, a leader in the study of the history of missions in the United States a generation ago, talked about the way in which secular historians had difficulty in understanding missionary motivation.[7] Sarah Dingle in a 2009 PhD thesis, “God’s Own Civilization”, highlights “the theological worldview” of CMS missionaries who came to this country and the way in which New Zealand historians have attributed their “missionary religiosity, and particularly theology ... with little significance”.[8] To understand the missionaries and their motivation you need to enter into their theological world.

 

Dingle points to Judith Binney’s appraisal of the religious world of Thomas Kendall in The Legacy of Guilt as an exception in New Zealand historical writing. She nevertheless critiques Binney for her negative reading of Kendall’s theology. In her review of other writings by Binney and the work of historians such as Keith Sinclair, John Owens, and Ranginui Walker, Dingle points to the way in which they interpreted the missionaries as having a limited world view which restricted their ability to contribute positively to Maori society. Missionaries are portrayed in much of our recent historical literature as destroyers of culture, trying to impose their narrow theological worldview of sin and redemption, heaven and hell, along with a puritanical morality on Maori. The legacy of guilt is given more prominence than the legacy of grace. And yet missionaries were seeking to introduce their theological worldview among Maori in order to save them from what they believed were its consequences.

 

Dingle in her thesis looks closely at “the religious or theological view of life” that “often underpinned the missionary cultural mores”.[9] She argues that this had a much more positive impact on Maori than secular historians have acknowledged. Understanding missionaries on their own terms means entering the world that shaped them. The missionaries were deliberate change agents, seeking in their own terms to bring about the transformation of individuals and their society. From a different viewpoint, particularly those who adopt a “Fatal Impact” perspective, missionaries were, as Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck) puts it, dislocating “the cultural centre of gravity that centuries of local adjustment had established” or part of “an organized attack on a native social system”.[10]

 

Missionaries shared in the much larger European assault on indigenous societies including in the pre-1840 period, accidental change agents such as sailors, whalers, traders, and escaped convicts who brought a range of influences to bear on Maori society. The impact of ideas and material goods from muskets, axes, the plough and flour mill, alongside the introduction of animals such as horses, cattle and sheep and new methods of farming were also at work changing the Maori world. Maori were themselves active agents in the processes of change and not merely passive bystanders. There were also things over which neither Maori nor missionaries had much control. Ann Salmond in Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans concludes that

 

New plants and animals came ashore, new people, and new and devastating illnesses. Perhaps, after all, the epidemic diseases, plants and animals were Europe’s most eloquent emissaries. Even more than the first Europeans who came ashore at this time, they changed Maori life forever.[11]

 

Evaluating the missionary impact requires examining both negative and positive contributions. Peacemaking, for example, was promoted by the missionaries in the 1820s and 1830s in ways which transformed endemic hostilities.

 

One of the thorny questions is how far missionaries were agents of empire. There is no simple generalisation to sum up missionary action. Stereotyping missionaries as flag-waving representatives of British colonialism and imperialism just produces caricatures. Missionaries were individuals, they changed over time and they responded to their different contexts in different ways. They sometimes were advocates for British intervention and authority and at others they were amongst the most strident critics of British and colonial governments, and their attitudes and policies towards indigenous peoples. The full range of missionary approaches to British identity and power were found among the New Zealand missionaries.

 

The CMS missionaries were shaped by their national background, their anti-French hostility and their deep seated anti-Catholicism. Marsden on Christmas Day 1814, seeing the British Colours flying “considered it as the signal and the dawn of civilization, liberty, and religion, in that dark benighted land” and looked to the day when “the Natives of that island enjoyed all the happiness of British Subjects”.[12] The missionary participation in helping Maori petition King William to declare a protectorate over New Zealand in 1831, and their contribution in translating and supporting the Treaty of Waitangi are two significant examples where national identity and missionary commitment came together. Missionary outrage at Earl Grey’s dispatch in 1846 suggesting that unused “waste land” should become Crown land, and Octavius Hadfield’s blistering attacks on government policy over the Waitara purchase in 1860 and 1861 are two examples where missionaries stood up against colonial and government actions. In New Zealand, as in much of the Pacific, Protestant missionaries preceded colonial influence. The missionary emphasis on the equality of all people in the sight of God found its expression in the humanitarian-evangelical campaigns of the first half of the nineteenth century. Missionaries in the field, and their societies located in the metropolitan centre, increasingly found themselves acting, “as mediators between the British and local peoples”.[13] The unfortunate experience of mediators is that they are often squeezed by those they are seeking to bring together.

 

Henry Williams, for example, has been criticised and even vilified by some historians for his role in translating and securing support for the Treaty of Waitangi. Paul Moon and Sabine Fenton, accused Henry of deliberately mistranslating the Treaty in order to gain Maori support.[14] Williams had become very close to many Maori in the period before 1840. During the 1830s he frequently accompanied taua, war-parties, sometimes for several months, seeking to act as a peace-maker. The names of Rewa, Moka, Tareha, Pumuka appear in his journal – men he knew well – and who contributed to the debate at Waitangi in 1840. Williams was well known to these people and although some of them had doubts about whether accepting Hobson and the British Crown was a good thing they nevertheless signed the Treaty. Williams’ name was also known throughout much of the North Island – his reputation went before him. Without his support it is doubtful whether the Treaty would have been signed. Williams carries unfairly the historical weight for the wrongs of the settlers and governments who through their actions betrayed the Treaty. Ironically, the redressing of Maori rights under the Waitangi Tribunal and the government settlements are dependent on the very Treaty, with its imperfections, that Williams helped secure.

 

A significant starting point for understanding missionaries and their world is reading their own writings. Once you needed to go to the missionary archives to access their voices, but typescripts, microfilms, microfiche, the internet and edited extracts now make the missionaries’ writings more accessible.  Two recent examples of missionary writings are: Caroline Fitzgerald’s extracts from Henry Williams and others, and the two volumes of John Morgan’s Letters and Journals edited by Jan Pilditch.[15] While they were writing both officially for the CMS and unofficially for family, the letters and journals reflect the close interaction between the missionaries and Maori. Morgan’s writings in particular, have many Biblical allusions and imprecations for prayer as he lived through the disruptive inter-tribal wars in the Waikato at the beginning of his missionary career in the 1830s. The journals and letters clearly indicate how he was driven by his own Evangelical worldview. Then towards the end of his ministry Morgan faced the devastating impact of the New Zealand Wars and what to him was the misguided Kingitanga movement. You can read firsthand about Morgan’s attempt to make a difference to Maori at Otawhao, Te Awamutu, through his preaching, devoted pastoral care and his commitment to education and providing training and support for Maori agriculture. Acting as a government informant on Maori and the King Movement, what was seen in Maori eyes as spying, was for Morgan an expression of his patriotic spirit and his belief that Maori were misguided.

 

In recent years increasing attention has been given to the important participation of missionary wives alongside their husbands. Cathy Ross’s work on four CMS missionary wives demonstrates how they were missionaries in their own right, keeping the mission station going when their husbands were away, contributing to schools and working among women.[16] Caroline Fitzgerald’s book about Marianne Williams allows us to hear Marianne’s own words – the pioneering struggles when faced with Maori opposition, the domestic tasks of giving hospitality to strangers and other missionary families and in the midst of this giving birth and bringing up eleven children.[17] Marianne has been subjected to a feminist critique by Kathryn Rountree[18] who sees Marianne in a “subordinate relationship” with Henry, attempting to reproduce in “her own relationship with Maori women ... submissiveness towards her (and all missionaries)”. Rountree argues that for Marianne, “Maori women’s bodies required re-making in the image of English women’s bodies in order to facilitate their souls’ salvation and to preserve the myth of British superiority”. Henry certainly saw Marianne as his equal partner in missionary work. While both patriarchy and maternalism were present in their attitudes and actions there is a question as to how a far a feminist critique gets inside Marianne Williams’ world. Ross counsels “Contemporary readers” that they “should resist imposing modern sensibilities on the perspectives and perceptions of these women”.[19] Rountree, herself acknowledges, that “Marianne was a remarkable woman who played a very significant role in the mission and the lives of many Maori with whom she came in contact”.[20] 

 

2. Christian Beginnings – the Maori World

 

The second crucial party in the dynamic interaction in terms of Christian beginnings in this country were Maori. The exceptional or unique starting point on Christmas Day 1814 was preceded by a growing sense of trust and a developing relationship between Maori and Samuel Marsden. Although Marsden had his blind spots, gained a deserved reputation for his harshness as a magistrate and had some unfortunate qualities, A.T. Yarwood concluded that: “No one matched the length and quality of his service to the cause of Polynesian (including Maori) evangelism during the last forty years of his life.”[21] Marsden had a genuine respect for Maori, and with some, notably Ruatara, the young chief from Rangihoua, he established a close friendship. During a visit to London in 1808, Marsden gained the support of the CMS for a mission to New Zealand. On the voyage back to Australia he found Ruatara, who he had already met previously in Australia, on board the ship. Ruatara had been dealt with harshly by whaling crews and was in poor health. He was nursed by Marsden on the voyage and then given hospitality at Marsden’s home at Parramatta. Ruatara showed a great interest in agricultural developments, and Marsden, a very competent farmer, was able to provide assistance.

 

Marsden’s Australian base (another subject which requires further historical investigation) became the launching pad for missionary work in New Zealand. Because of the sacking of Boyd at Whangaroa in 1809, and uncertainty over how safe it was for missionaries to come to New Zealand, Hall and King were initially employed in Australia. Marsden reported in 1811 that before returning to New Zealand Ruatara was already expressing an interest in “instituting a Sabbath day” and that he wanted “Hall and King very much to go with him to preach to his People.... He also requested that I would procure him some Schoolmasters to teach the Children.”[22] Just what was in Ruatara’s own mind in making these requests is uncertain. This points to one of the difficulties the historian faces in dealing with the Maori voice. Oral history apart, we are largely dependent on the missionary written sources, supplemented by other European writings to understand Maori actions. Marsden and missionaries constructed their letters, reports and journals as advocates for the cause in which they believed. In reading their texts we need to bring an attuned ear to listen for the Maori voice.

 

In 1814 Marsden purchased his own ship, the Active, and sent Hall and Kendall to New Zealand to investigate the readiness of Maori to welcome missionaries. Writing to Ruatara, Marsden indicated that Kendall could come permanently to “teach the boys and girls to read and write” and that the missionaries “will come to live in New Zealand if you will not hurt them, and teach you how to grow corn and wheat and make houses”. Marsden’s emphasis is very much on the material aspects of “civilisation” with no direct indication about Christian teaching and the changes it would bring.[23] On the return voyage to Australia Ruatara was accompanied by the great Ngapuhi chief, Hongi Hika, and other Maori.

 

In November 1814, Marsden, accompanied by thirty-four passengers set sail for New Zealand. Kendall, Hall and King were accompanied by their wives and five children; eight Maori including Ruatara and Hongi, two Tahitians, four sailors, Captain Thomas Hansen, his wife and son, John Nicholas, “two sawyers, one smith, and one runaway convict”.[24] The vessel was detained by bad weather for a week on the Australian coast. Nicholas recorded that the Maori chiefs, Ruatara in particular, “appeared quite dejected”.[25] Although the Maori were carrying back with them valuable material possessions, Ruatara’s concern was that “the Missionaries ... would shortly introduce a much greater number; and thus, in some time, become so powerful, as to possess themselves of the whole island, and either destroy the natives, or reduce them to slavery”.[26] Ruatara’s anxiety was identified as originating from someone in Sydney who had criticised the idea of missionaries going to New Zealand and pointed to “the miserable state” of Aborigines in New South Wales. According to Marsden, Ruatara was concerned other Maori would “be very angry with him if he should be the author of their country being taken and given to the English”. Despite attempts “to remove his fears”, according to Marsden “The poison infused into his mind was too subtle and infectious ever to be removed.”[27] Nicholas, in contrast to Marsden, writes that Ruatara was reassured and encouraged Marsden to proceed to New Zealand.[28]

 

The missionary beginnings were based very much on the goodwill and trust that existed between Ruatara and Marsden. Ruatara, it seems, had some insights into the possible negative impact the missionary settlement might have. His motivation in bringing the missionaries appears to have been driven by his desire to have access to new forms of agriculture, education and material goods – the kind of civilisation which Marsden was encouraging. But how much did Ruatara understand the implications of evangelisation?

 

On Christmas Day 1814 Ruatara acted as master of ceremonies and organised the space where the service was held as an open air church with a reading desk, pulpit, and canoes serving as pews. At the end of his sermon, Maori said that they could not understand what Marsden meant. Ruatara replied that “they were not to mind that now, for they would understand by and bye; and that he would explain my meaning as far as he could”.[29] Maori heard Marsden’s sermon through Ruatara’s translation. What they heard we do not know.

 

Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins have interpreted this foundational event in Maori and Pakeha relationships through a Maori lens. The response of Maori with a haka is seen as part of a “powhiri or waka taki” in which “the arrivals” are taken “into the hapu, to be protected and developed as allies and friends”. They speculate that Ruatara’s speech was cast in a political context and that he indicated “why he had brought these people here; what he had seen in Australia; how the new arrivals were a source of good things”. They conclude that “The ‘Pakeha’ story assumes that Maori welcome Pakeha authority”. In contrast, “the ‘Maori’ story signals that a struggle to engage with Pakeha has begun.”[30] While there is a speculative dimension to this interpretation, it does highlight an alternative perspective and the value of listening for the Maori voice.

 

The Marsden / Ruatara relationship underlines the importance of understanding the missionary / Maori dynamics of Christian beginnings in our country. It was not a one-way process of missionaries coming with their gospel and expecting Maori to accept it. Missionaries in fact found themselves in a dependent relationship with Maori in their early years – dependent on Maori for land, food, transport and protection. The death of Ruatara in March 1815 came as a tragic blow for the early mission settlement. Hongi Hika took over as the “patron” of the mission. Missionaries for Hongi were not welcomed for their message but because they gave access to European material goods. The acquisition of gun powder and muskets were much more important for Hongi’s agenda than gaining new ideas about sin and salvation. The involvement of Thomas Kendall in the musket trade represented a betrayal of the missionaries’ gospel of peace but is understandable in terms of the way in which Kendall sought to retain his relationship with Maori and traded in the major currency of the day.

 

Indigenous agency played a crucial role in the spread of Christian ideas and the conversion of Maori. The remarkable changes, and what John Owens refers to as the “Unexpected Impact”, which took place in Maori society from the 1830s, often went ahead of the European missionaries and were influenced and shaped by Maori. Henry Williams on the first missionary visit to the southern part of the North Island in 1839 encountered Maori who had learnt to read, were appealing for Bibles, knew parts of the Rawiri (Maori prayer-book), off by heart, and had built large chapels where regular worship was taking place. Maori, captured and taken as prisoners by Ngapuhi, had learnt something of Christianity, reading and writing, and throughout the 1830s had returned to their own people as evangelists for the new ideas, the new ways of communicating through reading and writing and the new ways of worship. Maori were involved in their own transformation.

 

The causes and nature of Maori transformation and what was meant by “conversion” were the subject of a major historiographical debate in the late 1960s and 1970s. Literacy, trade goods, sickness, war-weariness following the musket-wars, cultural anomie or confusion, better missionary organisation and leadership, peacemaking and indigenous evangelisation were among the reasons advanced to explain the Maori adoption of Christianity.  Were Maori truly converted, had alien ideas invaded the Maori camp, were Christian ideas diffused among Maori, had Maori incorporated Christianity within their own world – these were some of the different interpretations.[31]

 

Lyndsay Head acknowledged in 2005 that “Christianity’s power to change lives is an unfashionable subject in nineteenth century Maori history”. The reason for this is that missionaries have been identified as “figures of Western cultural authority in Maori lives” and Christianity has been located “on the inside of imperialism”.[32] In examining Wiremu Tamihana and the influence of Christianity on him in his role in the King Movement, Head argues that “Within the King Movement ... the status of Christianity was unambiguous: it provided the moral authority for armed resistance to the state.” She goes on to point out that “Historians have not dealt satisfactorily with the evidence that Maori found personal dignity, social discipline and political empowerment in the faith of the nineteenth century superpower.”[33] In the Maori religious movements we see Maori going even one step further and developing what can be called expressions of Maori Christianity.[34]

 

We cannot change the past – we can only try to understand it. In that understanding we need to bring critical sympathy or what Michael King called “compassionate truth”. Those warm, although uncertain beginnings at Oihi, expressed a form of bicultural partnership between Marsden and Ruatara that Anglicans have acknowledged in recognising Ruatara as “Te Ara mo te Rongopai, the gateway for the Gospel”.[35] The first permanent Pakeha settlement in this country was a Christian one, situated among and dependent for its existence on Maori. It was at Oihi that Kendall first began turning Maori into a written language. It was in that mission settlement that the first Pakeha child was born in New Zealand. Beginnings are only starting points. The coming of Methodist and Catholic missionaries before 1840, the arrival of settler Christianity after 1840 add other rich and complicating dimensions to the story of Christian influences on our country.

 

Ian Jack has written that “Anniversaries are our way of drilling into history’s groundwater and sending it to splash briefly on the surface of the present.” He indicates that “anniversaries can be an enlightening force as well as a patriotic indulgence. They can uncover history and revise it.”[36] Planning is underway for bicentenary events throughout 2014 and the commemoration at Oihi on Christmas Day. A history conference is planned for Waitangi in November 2012 looking at “Maori and Missionaries: Re-evaluating the Beginnings of New Zealand Society c.1800 to c.1860”. It is hoped that papers given at this conference will be published in 2014. The bicentenary in 2014 provides a significant historical opportunity to re-evaluate Maori and missionary interactions and the contributions that Christianity has made to the shaping of New Zealand society so that hopefully we can understand ourselves a little better.