Maori Origins and Migrations

M. P. K. Sorrenson

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781775581192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Australie et de l'Océanie

Since Europeans first set foot in New Zealand they have speculated about where the Māori people came from, how they made their way to New Zealand and how they lived when they arrived here. Theories have abounded: some of them have hardened into accepted truth. The result has been an accumulation of Pakeha myths about Māori origins. The process of this mythmaking is the subject of Sorrenson's book: 'It is not an attempt to find an original or even a Pacific homeland for the Māori. I leave that task to the many others who are happily engaged on it.' But as a study of the development of ideas, this book is both fascinating and salutary.

1 The Whence of the Maori

Europeans have searched for the original homeland of the Maoris since first discovering them. But the search was not a uniquely New Zealand exercise; it was part of the wider quest for the original homeland of all Polynesians. Until recently they were assumed to have migrated as a distinctive race into the Pacific from the Asian mainland and indeed, on the assumption that mankind had diffused from one centre, from a cradleland in the Middle East, or the Caucasus.

Until the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 Christian theology, and more particularly the Book of Genesis, provided the orthodox explanation of the origin of man and his dispersal throughout the world. The races of man were said to have descended from the sons of Noah, from Shem, Japheth, and Ham. When new races were discovered in the New World, they were fitted into this classification. The blackest and apparently most primitive of them, like the African negroes and Australian aborigines, were classed as the sons of Ham. But others of lighter hue and more advanced culture, including the American Indians and the Polynesians, were considered to be the sons of Shem. Elaborate theories were constructed to plot their migration by land and sea from the Middle East.

Early speculation about the origin of the Polynesians did not go beyond the bounds of orthodoxy. Jacob Roggeveen, the Dutch navigator, said that the Polynesians were descended from Adam though ‘human understanding [was] powerless to comprehend by what means they could have been transported [to the Pacific]’.1 Such doubts were also to afflict James Cook and his men.

Though the Spaniards had traversed the Pacific for more than two centuries it was not until the late eighteenth century, and notably with Cook’s voyages, that the wide spread of Polynesian occupation of the Pacific was revealed. Cook first came to New Zealand from Tahiti and brought with him a Tahitian, Tupaia, who was able to speak with Maoris. Cook and his naturalist, Joseph Banks, noted the similarity in customs and material culture between the Maoris and other inhabitants of the South Seas and saw this, as Hawkesworth’s official account put it, as ‘a very strong proof that the inhabitants have the same origin.… They have both a tradition that their ancestors, at a very remote … time, came from … HEAWIJE; but the similitude of language seems to put the matter altogether out of doubt.’2 To emphasize the point a vocabulary of more than forty words in Maori and Tahitian was added. Thus Cook and Banks had initiated three methods of inquiry that were to be used with increasing confidence in later years: a comparison of customs and culture, comparative philology, and the examination of oral tradition. However, they retained a salutary caution that was not to be observed by many later writers: ‘But supposing these islands and those of the South Seas, to be peopled originally from the same country, it will perhaps for ever remain in doubt what that country is.’3 It was not likely to be America, let alone the supposed southern continent, but somewhere in the west.

Cook’s subsequent voyages added further speculation which pointed more firmly in the direction of a Malaysian origin for the Polynesians. On the second voyage, Banks was replaced as naturalist by J. R. Forster. It was Forster who anticipated the division of the peoples of the South Pacific into Melanesians and Polynesians; the former a dark-skinned, small-framed people inhabiting the western isles; the latter a handsome, lighter-coloured, large-limbed people in the eastern Pacific. Forster suggested that the Polynesians had come into the Pacific by island-hopping from Malaya. Some had even got as far as New Zealand where they had absorbed an aboriginal people.4 The idea of a Malay origin for the Polynesians was soon to gain the support of one of the pioneers of European anthropology, J. F. Blumenbach. In his original edition of the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1775), Blumenbach divided mankind into four races: Caucasian, Asiatic, American, and Ethiopian. Banks persuaded Blumenbach to modify this classification after Cook’s second voyage by adding a fifth race, the Malays (who included the Polynesians), to the second edition of the book in 1781.5 In a third edition of 1795, dedicated to Banks, Blumenbach graded as well as classified the races. He allotted ‘first place’ to the ‘primeval race’, the Caucasians, last place to the Ethiopians, and an intermediate place between the two to the Malays and the Pacific Islanders. Like Forster, Blumenbach saw the Pacific Islanders as varying between the ‘tawny Otahetians and the tawny-black New Hebrideans’.6 So too did Lieutenant Julien Crozet, who accompanied Marion du Fresne to the Bay of Islands in 1772, though he argued that the Maoris were composed of three races: ‘true aborigines’ with a yellowish-white skin, tall stature and straight black hair; a swarthy shorter variety with curled hair; and ‘true negroes’, short and broad in physique, with woolly hair.7 The notion that the Maoris were composed of two, if not three, races was to persist. When H. Ling Roth published an English translation of Crozet’s journal in 1891 he said that there were two races in the make-up of the Maoris, a black or Papuan and a yellow or Malayo-Polynesian group.8 By the late nineteenth century this was accepted dogma.

With the coming of the evangelicals to the South Pacific in the early nineteenth century firmer ideas were advanced as to the ethnic origin and ultimate homeland of the Polynesians. At the centre of the evangelical creed was the assumption that the Polynesians, like other heathens, had degenerated from an original state of civilization. Christian theologians worked within a short chronology: in 1644 Dr Lightfoot, Chancellor of Cambridge University, claimed that mankind was created at 9 a.m. on 12 September 3928 B.C. Six years later Archbishop Ussher gave the date as 23 October 4004 B.C.9 In less than six thousand years some races had reached a high state of civilization; others had become isolated and degenerated to primitive savagery. But the missionaries were confident that they could be quickly converted and civilized.

Like the Jews, Marsden wrote, the Maori had a ‘great natural turn for traffic’. John Williams’s version of ‘Jewish’-featured Maoris bargaining with a Jewish trader at the Bay of Islands in the 1840s.

Alexander Turnbull Library

The Reverend Samuel Marsden and other evangelicals had tried but failed to convert the intractable Australian Aborigines.10 They were relegated to the hapless sons of Ham and regarded as uncivilizable.11 And Marsden turned with renewed enthusiasm to the New Zealand Maori. He had met some of their chiefs in Sydney and was impressed with their proud demeanour, their intelligence, and their enterprise. He concluded that they were of Semitic origin, and had ‘sprung from some dispersed Jews’.12 Thereby Marsden was to lay the scent for one of the false trails in the nineteenth-century hunt for the homeland of the Maori. Marsden’s case for the Semitic Maori was based mainly on biblical precedents. He was able to find numerous comparisons between Maori customs, especially those relating to warfare, and those of the Jews in the Old Testament. Maori cannibalism, displayed in the drinking of the blood and eating the flesh of vanquished chiefs, could in Marsden’s view have been ‘derived from Divine revelation. Our Saviour told the Jews: “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him.” ‘13 It was a dangerous precedent to let loose on the lively intelligence of the Maori; one day it would boomerang on the missionaries. But Marsden was not content to rest his case on biblical precedents. Not lacking in the commercial instinct himself, Marsden soon noted it in the Maori. Like the Jews, Marsden wrote, the Maori had a ‘great natural turn for traffic; they will buy and sell anything they have got’.14 And Marsden was not alone in his discovery of the Semitic Maori. J. L. Nicholas, who accompanied Marsden on his first voyage to New Zealand, thought the Maoris had descended from a people familiar with the Mosaic account of creation who, having spent a period in India, had degenerated from civilization to barbarism. He too found biblical precedents for various Maori customs and beliefs—for instance their belief that the first woman was formed from the ribs of man, and their custom of sprinkling children with water before naming them.15

In the next twenty years or so many who published books on the Maori were to assert the Semitic connexion. Craik, Marshall, FitzRoy, Polack, Dieffenbach, and Mundy are notable examples.16 But the most persuasive advocate of all was the Anglican missionary, Richard Taylor, author of Te Ika a Maui (1855). A critic of evolutionary theory or, as he called it, ‘progressive development doctrine’, Taylor saw in the history and traditions of the Maori proof of the alternative theory of degeneration, reflected in their language, material culture, and religion. The ‘beautiful parable’ of the prodigal son, he said, had its

literal fulfilment in the history of the New Zealand race; in it may we not behold one of the lost tribes of Israel, which, with its fellows, having abandoned the service of the true God, and cast aside his Word, fell step by step in the scale of civilization; deprived of a fixed home, became nomadic wanderers over the steppes of Asia … and gradually retreated until … they reached the sea, and thence … from island to island driven by wind currents, and various causes, they finally reached New Zealand, and there fallen to their lowest stage of degradation, given up to the fiercest passions, consumed, and being consumed, they are enabled to reflect, repent … and go to their Father.17

Taylor was to repeat this point in a second edition of the book in 1870 but by then the assumption of a Jewish ancestry for the Maori was coming under criticism. Now, scholars who took up the comparative study of language, material culture, and religion were more likely to give the Maori an Aryan than a Semitic origin. Ironically, the Semitic Maori was living on in the Maori prophet movements of Te Ua Haumene, Te Kooti, and Te Whiti. If the Maori prophets were declaring themselves Tius, fleeing from captivity in Egypt, they were merely taking the missionaries’ message literally, and applying it to their situation in war-torn New Zealand. Moreover, the Semitic Maori lived on in the preaching of Mormon missionaries who began to proselytize among the Maoris in the late nineteenth century. According to the Book of Mormon the Polynesians were descended from American Indian Semites who first landed in Hawaii in 58 B.C.18

Before discussing the making of the Aryan Maori it is useful to note the developments in anthropology and related social sciences that flowed from the great discoveries in natural science of Darwin and Lyell.19 The new scientific theories were quickly disseminated in New Zealand by educated colonists through local philosophical societies, and just as quickly applied to such local problems as the whence of the Maori. Darwin’s theory provided a new basis for monogenesis by demonstrating scientifically that mankind was one species and reinforcing the assumption that the races of man had diffused from a central cradleland. But the theory of evolution, backed up by contemporary discoveries in the fledgling sciences of geology, palaeontology, and archaeology, greatly lengthened the time scale for human evolution and dispersal. At the same time, however, Darwinism provided a new basis for racism: in the lengthy period of human evolution, some races—and were there not some notable contemporary examples?—had remained almost static, while others had reached a high standard of civilization. All around there was evidence of the ‘survival of the fittest races’, a Spencerian phrase which Darwin happily adopted. And in his Descent of Man, published in 1872, Darwin became the prophet of social Darwinism. He found in Maori depopulation an illustration of the dogma that the ‘inferior’ races were destined to be extinguished by the ‘superior’ Anglo-Saxons.20 Nevertheless it was not so much social Darwinism as newly invigorated comparative anthropology that offered most to New Zealand scholars who searched for the homeland of the Maoris in the later nineteenth century. The two most influential figures were E. B. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock. They believed that the study of contemporary savages could, as Lubbock put it, ‘throw light on … the condition of early races which i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Illustrations
• 1. The Whence of the Maori
• 2. The Coming of the Maori
• 3. The Making of the Maori
• 4. Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Back Cover