THE MAORI
"The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on. Nor all your piety or wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it."
The first colonists of New Zealand were brown men from the South Seas.
It was from Eastern Polynesia that the Maoris unquestionably came.
They are of the same race as the courteous, handsome people who
inhabit the South Sea Islands from Hawaii to Rarotonga, and who, in
Fiji, mingle their blood with the darker and inferior Melanesians
of the west. All the Polynesians speak dialects of the same musical
tongue. A glance at Tregear's Comparative Maori-Polynesian Dictionary
will satisfy any reader on that point. The Rarotongans call themselves
"Maori," and can understand the New Zealand speech; so, as a rule, can
the other South Sea tribes, even the distant Hawaiians. Language alone
is proverbially misleading as a guide to identity of race. But in
the case of the Polynesians we may add colour and features, customs,
legends, and disposition. All are well though rather heavily built,
active when they choose, and passionately fond of war and sport. The
New Zealanders are good riders and capital football players. The
Samoans are so fond of cricket that they will spend weeks in playing
gigantic matches, fifty a side. Bold as seamen and skilful as
fishermen, the Polynesians are, however, primarily cultivators of
the soil. They never rose high enough in the scale to be miners or
merchants. In the absence of mammals, wild and tame, in their islands,
they could be neither hunters nor herdsmen. Fierce and bloodthirsty in
war, and superstitious, they were good-natured and hospitable in peace
and affectionate in family life.
There is no reason to think that the New Zealanders are more akin to
the modern Malays than they are to the Australian blacks; nor have
attempts to connect them with the red men of America or the Toltecs
of Mexico succeeded. They are much more like some of the Aryans of
Northern India. But the truth is, their fortunes before their race
settled in Polynesia are a pure matter of guess-work. Some centuries
ago, driven out by feuds or shortness of food, they left their isles
of reef and palm, and found their way to Ao-tea-roa, as they called
New Zealand.
On the map their new home seems at first sight so isolated and remote
from the other groups of Oceania as to make it incredible that even
the most daring canoe-men could have deliberately made their
way thither. But this difficulty disappears upon a study of the
ascertained voyages of the Polynesians. Among the bravest and most
venturesome navigators of the ocean, the brown mariners studied and
named the stars, winds and currents. As allies they had those friends
of the sailor, the trade-winds. In cloudy weather, when the signs in
the sky were hidden, the regular roll of the waves before the steady
trade-wind was in itself a guide.[1] Their large double-canoes joined
by platforms on which deck-houses were built were no despicable
sea-boats, probably just as good as the vessels in which the
Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa. Even their single canoes were
sometimes between 100 and 150 feet long, and the crews of these,
wielding their elastic paddles, kept time in a fashion that has won
respect from the coxswain of a University eight. For their long
voyages they stored water in calabashes, carried roots and dried fish,
and had in the cocoa-nut both food and drink stored safely by nature
in the most convenient compass. In certain seasons they could be
virtually sure of replenishing their stock of water from the copious
tropical or semi-tropical rains. Expert fishermen, they would miss no
opportunity of catching fish by the way. They made halting-places of
the tiny islets which, often uninhabited and far removed from the
well-known groups, dot the immense waste of the Pacific at great
intervals. The finding of their stone axes or implements in such
desolate spots enables their courses to be traced. Canoe-men who could
voyage to solitary little Easter Island in the wide void towards
America, or to Cape York in the distant west, were not likely to find
insuperable difficulties in running before the north-east winds to New
Zealand from Rarotonga, Savaii or Tahiti. The discovery in the new
land of the jade or greenstone--far above rubies in the eyes of men of
the Stone Age--would at once give the country all the attractiveness
that a gold-field has for civilized man.
[Footnote 1: S. Percy Smith on _The Geographical Knowledge of the
Polynesians_.]
The Maori stories of their migration to New Zealand are a mixture of
myth and legend. Among them are minute details that may be accurate,
mingled with monstrous tales of the utterly impossible. For example,
we are told that one chief, on his canoe first nearing the coast,
saw the feathery, blood-red rata-flowers gleaming in the forest, and
promptly threw overboard his Polynesian coronet of red feathers,
exclaiming that he would get a new crown in the new land. Such an
incident might be true, as might also the tale of another canoe
which approached the shore at night. Its crew were warned of the
neighbourhood of land by the barking of a dog which they had with them
and which scented a whale's carcass stranded on the beach. On the
other hand we are gravely told that the hero Gliding-Tide having
dropped an axe overboard off the shore, muttered an incantation so
powerful that the bottom of the sea rose up, the waters divided, and
the axe returned to his hand. The shoal at any rate is there, and is
pointed out to this day. And what are we to say to the tale of another
leader, whose canoe was upset in the South Seas, and who swam all the
way to New Zealand?
The traditions say that the Maori Pilgrim Fathers left the island
of Hawaiki for New Zealand about the beginning of the 15th century.
Hawaiki is probably one of the "shores of old romance." Other
Polynesian races also claim to have come thence. Mr. Percy Smith gives
good reasons for the suggestion that the ancestors of the Maoris
migrated from the Society Islands and from Rarotonga, and that their
principal migration took place about five hundred years ago. It seems
likely enough, however, that previous immigrants had gone before them.
One remnant of these, the now almost extinct Moriori, colonised the
Chatham Islands, whither they were not followed by the conquering
Maori until the present century. The two most famous of the great
double canoes of the Maori settlers were the Arawa (shark), and the
Tainui (flood-tide). On board thereof, with the men, women, and
children, were brought dogs, rats, the gourd and taro root, and the
invaluable kumara or sweet potato. The karaka tree, whose glossy,
almost oily-looking leaves were in after days to be seen in every
village, was another importation. With these tradition ranks the green
parakeet and blue pukeko or swamp-hen, two birds whose rich plumage
has indeed something in it of tropical gaudiness, at any rate in
contrast with the sober hues of most New Zealand feathers. The Tainui
canoe was said to have found its last resting-place near the mouth of
the Mokau river. A stone still lies there which is treasured by the
natives as the ancient anchor of their sacred craft. Some years ago,
when a European carried this off, they brought an action against him
and obtained an order of the Court compelling him to restore it. Not
far away stands a grove of trees alleged to have sprung from the
Tainui's skids. Certainly Sir James Hector, the first scientific
authority in the Colony, finding that these trees grow spontaneously
nowhere else in New Zealand, named them _Pomaderris Tainui_. But
though, for once, at any rate, science was not indisposed to smile
on tradition and Maori faith triumphed, and the unbeliever was for
a while confounded, it unhappily seems now quite certain that the
congener of _Pomaderris Tainui_ is found only in Australia, one of the
few lands nigh the Pacific which cannot have been Hawaiki.
It will be safe to say that the Maori colonists landed at different
points and at widely different dates, and that later immigrants
sometimes drove earlier comers inland or southward. More often,
probably, each small band sought out an empty territory for itself. On
this tribes and sub-tribes grew up, dwelling apart from each other.
Each district became the land of a clan, to be held by tomahawk and
spear. Not even temporary defeat and slavery deprived a tribe of its
land: nothing did that but permanent expulsion followed by actual
seizure and occupation by the conquerors. Failing this, the right
of the beaten side lived on, and could be reasserted after years of
exile. The land was not the property of the _arikis_ or chiefs, or
even of the _rangatiras_ or gentry. Every free man, woman and child
in each clan had a vested interest therein which was acknowledged and
respected. The common folk were not supposed to have immortal souls.
That was the distinction of the well born. But they had a right to
their undivided share of the soil. Even when a woman married into
another tribe, or--in latter days--became the wife of a white, she
did not forfeit her title, though sometimes such rights would be
surrendered by arrangement, to save inconvenience. Trade never entered
into Maori life. Buying and selling were unknown. On and by the land
the Maori lived, and he clung to it closely as any Irish peasant. "The
best death a man can die is for the land," ran a proverb. "Let us die
for the land!" shouted a chieftain, haranguing his fighting men before
one of their first battles with the English. No appeal would be more
certain to strike home.
Though the tribal estate was communal property in so far that any
member could go out into the wilderness and fell trees and reclaim the
waste, the fruits of such work, the timber and plantations, at once
became personal property. The fields, houses, weapons, tools, clothes,
and food of a family could not be meddled with by outsiders. The
territory, in a word, was common, but not only products but usufructs
were property attaching to individuals, who could transfer them by
gift.
Though in time they forgot the way to "Hawaiki," and even at last the
art of building double-canoes, yet they never wanted for pluck or
seamanship in fishing and voyaging along the stormy New Zealand
coasts. Their skill and coolness in paddling across flooded rivers may
still sometimes be witnessed.
Always needing fish, they placed their villages near the sea beaches
or the rivers and lakes. In their canoes they would paddle as far as
twelve miles from land. Amongst other fish they caught sharks, killing
them before they hauled them into the crank canoes; or, joining
forces, they would sweep some estuary with drag nets, and, with much
yelling and splashing, drive the fish into a shallow corner. There
with club and spear dog-fish and smooth-hound would be done to death
amid shouts and excitement. Then would come a gorge on a grand scale,
followed by business--the cutting into strips and drying of the
shark-meat for winter food. In the forests they found birds, and,
not having the bow-and-arrow, made shift to snare and spear them
ingeniously. To add to the vegetable staples which they had brought
with them from their Polynesian home, they used the root of the
fern or bracken, and certain wild fruits and berries--none of them
specially attractive. What between fish, birds and vegetables, with
occasional delicacies in the shape of dogs and rats, they were by no
means badly provisioned, and they cooked their food carefully and
well, chiefly by steaming in ovens lined with heated stones. Without
tea, coffee, sugar, alcohol or tobacco, they had also but seldom the
stimulant given by flesh meat. Their notorious cannibalism was almost
confined to triumphal banquets on the bodies of enemies slain in
battle. Without the aid of metals or pottery, without wool, cotton,
silk or linen, without one beast of burden, almost without leather,
they yet contrived to clothe, feed and house themselves, and to make
some advance in the arts of building, carving, weaving and dyeing.
[Illustration: MAORI AND CARVED BOW OF CANOE]
The labour and patience needed to maintain some degree of rude comfort
and keep up any kind of organised society with the scanty means at
their disposal were very great indeed. The popular notion of the
lazy savage basking in the sunshine, or squatting round the fire
and loafing on the labour of his women, did not fairly apply to the
Maori--at any rate to the unspoiled Maori. As seen by the early
navigators, his life was one of regular, though varied and not
excessive toil. Every tribe, in most ways every village, was
self-contained and self-supporting. What that meant to a people
intelligent, but ignorant of almost every scientific appliance, and
as utterly isolated as though they inhabited a planet of their own,
a little reflection will suggest. The villagers had to be their own
gardeners, fowlers, fishermen and carpenters. They built their own
houses and canoes, and made every tool and weapon. All that they wore
as well as what they used had to be made on the spot. They did not
trade, though an exchange of gifts regulated by strict etiquette
amounted to a rude and limited kind of barter, under which inland
tribes could supply themselves with dried sea-fish and sea-birds
preserved in their melted fat, or northern tribes could acquire the
precious greenstone found in the west of the South Island.
Without flocks and herds or domestic fowls, theirs was the constant
toil of the cultivator. Their taro and their kumara fields had to be
dug, and dug thoroughly with wooden spades. Long-handled and pointed
at the end, these implements resembled stilts with a cross-bar about
eighteen inches from the ground on which the digger's foot rested. Two
men worked them together. The women did not dig the fields, but theirs
was the labour almost as severe of carrying on their backs the heavy
baskets of gravel to scatter over the soil of the plantations.
Almost the only staple article of Maori vegetable food which grew
wild and profusely was the fern or bracken _(pteris aquilina_ var.
_esculenta_), which indeed was found on every hill and moor and in
every glade, at any rate in the North Island. But the preparation of
the fibrous root was tedious, calling as it did for various processes
of drying and pounding.
Fishing involved not only the catching of fish, but the manufacture of
seine nets, sometimes half a mile long, of eel-weirs, lines made of
the fibre of the native flax, and of fish-hooks of bone or tough
crooked wood barbed with human bone. The human skeleton was also laid
under contribution for the material of skewers, needles and flutes.
The infinite patience and delicacy requisite in their bird-snaring and
spearing are almost beyond the conception of the civilized townsmen
untrained in wood-craft. To begin with, they had to make the slender
bird spears, thirty feet long, out of the light wood of the _tawa_
tree. A single tree could provide no more than two spears, and the
making of them--with stone tools of course--took many months. Think of
the dexterity, coolness and stealth required to manage such a weapon
in a jungle so dense and tangled that white sportsmen often find a
difficulty in handling their guns there! The silent adroitness needed
to approach and spear the wild parrot or wood-pigeon without stirring
the branch of a tree would alone require a long apprenticeship to
wood-craft.
Maori house-building showed a knowledge of architecture decidedly
above that of the builders of Kaffir kraals, to say nothing of the
lairs of the Australian blacks. The poorest huts were definitely
planned and securely built. The shape was oblong, the walls low, the
roof high pitched and disproportionately large, though not so much so
as in some of the South Sea Islands. The framework was of the durable
totara-wood, the lining of reeds, the outside of dried rushes. At the
end turned to the sunshine was a kind of verandah, on to which opened
the solitary door and window, both low and small. The floor was
usually sunk below ground, and Maori builders knew of no such thing
as a chimney. Though neither cooking nor eating was done in their
dwelling-houses, and offal of all kinds was carefully kept at a decent
distance, the atmosphere in their dim, stifling interiors was as a
rule unendurable by White noses and lungs. Even their largest tribal
or meeting halls had but the one door and window; the Maori mind
seemed as incapable of adding thereto, as of constructing more than
one room under a single roof. On the other hand, the dyed patterns
on the reed wainscoting, and the carvings on the posts, lintel and
boards, showed real beauty and a true sense of line and curve.
Still less reason is there to find fault with their canoes, the larger
of which were not only strangely picturesque, but, urged by as many as
a hundred paddles, flew through the water at a fine speed, or under
sail made long coasting voyages in seas that are pacific only in name.
To the carving on these crafts the savage artists added decoration by
red ochre, strips of dyed flax, gay feathers and mother-o'-pearl. Both
the building of the canoes and their adornment entailed long months of
labour. So did the dressing of the fibre of the flax and palm-lily,
and the weaving therefrom of "mats" or mantles, and of kirtles. Yet
the making of such ordinary clothing was simple indeed compared to the
manufacture of a chief's full dress mat of _kiwi_ feathers. The soft,
hairy-looking plumage of the _kiwi_ (apteryx) is so fine, each feather
so minute, that one mantle would occupy a first-rate artist for two
years. Many of these mantles, whether of flax, feathers or dog-skin,
were quaintly beautiful as well as warm and waterproof.
Nor did Maori skill confine itself to ornamenting the clothing of
man. The human skin supplied a fresh and peculiar field for durable
decoration. This branch of art, that of Moko or tattooing, they
carried to a grotesque perfection. Among the many legends concerning
their demi-god Maui, a certain story tells how he showed them the way
to tattoo by puncturing the muzzle of a dog, whence dogs went with
black muzzles as men see them now. For many generations the patterns
cut and pricked on the human face and body were faithful imitations
of what were believed to be Maui's designs. They were composed of
straight lines, angles, and cross-cuts. Later the hero Mataora taught
a more graceful style which dealt in curves, spirals, volutes and
scroll-work. Apart from legend it is a matter of reasonable certitude
that the Maoris brought tattooing with them from Polynesia. Their
marking instruments were virtually the same as those of their tropical
cousins; both, for instance, before the iron age of the nineteenth
century, often used the wing-bones of sea-birds to make their tiny
chisels. Both observed the law of _tapu_ under which the male
patients, while undergoing the process of puncturing, were sacred,
immensely to their own inconvenience, for they had to dwell apart, and
might not even touch food with their hands. As to the source of the
peculiar patterns used by the New Zealanders, they probably have some
relation with the admirable wood-carving before mentioned. Either
the Moko artists copied the style of the skilful carvers of panels,
door-posts, clubs, and the figure-heads on the prows of canoes, or the
wood-carvers borrowed and reproduced the lines and curves of the Moko.
The inspiration of the patterns, whether on wood or skin, may be found
in the spirals of sea-shells, the tracery on the skin of lizards and
the bark of trees, and even, it may be, in the curious fluting and
natural scroll-work on the tall cliffs of the calcareous clay called
_papa_.
But, however the Moko artist learned his designs, he was a painstaking
and conscientious craftsman in imprinting them on his subject. No
black-and-white draughtsman of our time, no wood-cutter, etcher, or
line-engraver, worked with slower deliberation. The outlines were
first drawn with charcoal or red ochre. Thus was the accuracy of curve
and scroll-work ensured. Then, inch by inch, the lines were cut or
pricked out on the quivering, but unflinching, human copper-plate.
The blood was wiped away and the _narahu_ (blue dye) infused. In the
course of weeks, months, or years, as leisure, wealth, or endurance
permitted, the work was completed. In no other society did the artist
have his patron so completely at his mercy. Not only was a Moko expert
of true ability a rarity for whose services there was always an
"effective demand," but, if not well paid for his labours, the
tattooer could make his sitter suffer in more ways than one. He could
adroitly increase the acute anguish which had, as a point of honour,
to be endured without cry or complaint; or he could coolly bungle the
execution of the design, or leave it unfinished, and betake himself to
a more generous customer. A well-known tattooing chant deals with the
subject entirely from the artist's standpoint, and emphasises the
business principles upon which he went to work. It was this song that
Alfred Domett (Robert Browning's Waring) must have had in his mind
when, in his New Zealand poem, he thus described the Moko on the face
of the chief Tangi-Moana:--
"And finer, closer spirals of dark blue
Were never seen than in his cheek's tattoo;
Fine as if engine turned those cheeks declared
No cost to fee the artist had been spared;
That many a basket of good maize had made
That craftsman careful how he tapped his blade,
And many a greenstone trinket had been given
To get his chisel-flint so deftly driven."
When, however, the slow and costly agony was over, the owner of an
unusually well-executed face became a superior person. He united in
himself the virtues and vices of a chieftain of high degree (shown by
the elaborateness of his face pattern), of a tribal dandy, of a brave
man able to endure pain, of the owner of a unique picture, and of an
acknowledged art critic. In the rigid-looking mask, moreover, which
had now taken the place of his natural face were certain lines by
which any one of his fellow-tribesmen could identify him living or
dead. In this way the heads of Maori chiefs have been recognised
even in the glass cases of museums. On some of the earlier deeds and
agreements between White and Maori, a chief would sign or make his
mark by means of a rough reproduction of his special Moko.
The Maori _pas_ or stockaded and intrenched villages, usually perched
on cliffs and jutting points overhanging river or sea, were defended
by a double palisade, the outer fence of stout stakes, the inner of
high solid trunks. Between them was a shallow ditch. Platforms as
much as forty feet high supplied coigns of vantage for the look-out.
Thence, too, darts and stones could be hurled at the besiegers. With
the help of a throwing-stick, or rather whip, wooden spears could
be thrown in the sieges more than a hundred yards. Ignorant of the
bow-and-arrow and the boomerang, the Maoris knew and used the sling.
With it red-hot stones would be hurled over the palisades, among the
rush-thatched huts of an assaulted village, a stratagem all the more
difficult to cope with as Maori _pas_ seldom contained wells or
springs of water. The courage and cunning developed in the almost
incessant tribal feuds were extraordinary. Competent observers thought
the Maoris of two generations ago the most warlike and ferocious race
on earth. Though not seldom guilty of wild cruelty to enemies, they
did not make a business of cold-blooded torture after the devilish
fashion of the North American Indians. Chivalrous on occasion, they
would sometimes send warning to the foe, naming the day of an intended
attack, and abide thereby. They would supply a starving garrison with
provisions in order that an impending conflict might be a fair trial
of strength. War was to them something more dignified than a mere
lawless struggle. It was a solemn game to be played according to rules
as rigidly laid down and often as honourably adhered to as in
the international cricket and football matches of Englishmen and
Australians.
As is so often the case with fighting races capable of cruelty, they
were strictly courteous in their intercourse with strangers. Indeed,
their code of manners to visitors was so exact and elaborate as to
leave an impression of artificiality. No party of wayfarers would
approach a _pa_ without giving formal notice. When the strangers were
received, they had the best of everything, and the hosts, who saw that
they were abundantly supplied, had too much delicacy to watch them
eat. Maori breeding went so far as to avoid in converse words or
topics likely to be disagreeable to their hearers.
Their feeling for beauty was shown not merely in their art, but in
selecting the sites of dwelling-places, and in a fondness for shady
shrubs and trees about their huts and for the forest-flowers. The
natural images and similes so common in their wild, abrupt, unrhymed
chants and songs showed how closely they watched and sympathised with
nature. The hoar-frost, which vanishes with the sunrise, stood with
them for ephemeral fame. Rank without power was "a fountain without
water." The rushing stream reminded the Maori singer, as it did the
Mantuan, of the remorseless current of life and human fate.
"But who can check life's stream?
Or turn its waters back?
'Tis past,"
cried a father mourning for his dead son. In another lament a grieving
mother is compared to the drooping fronds of the tree-fern. The maiden
keeping tryst bids the light fleecy cloudlets, which in New Zealand so
often scud across the sky before the sea-wind, to be messengers to her
laggard gallant.
"The sun grows dim and hastes away
As a woman from the scene of battle,"
says the lament for a dead chief.[1] The very names given to hills,
lakes, and rivers will be witnesses in future days of the poetic
instinct of the Maori--perhaps the last destined to remain in his
land. Such names are the expressive Wai-orongo-mai (Hear me, ye
waters!); Puké-aruhé (ferny hill); Wai-rarapa (glittering water);
Maunga-tapu (sacred mount); Ao-reré (flying cloud). Last, but not
least, there is the lordly Ao-rangi (Cloud in the heavens), over which
we have plastered the plain and practical "Mount Cook."
[Footnote 1: The Maori is deeply imbued with the poetry of the woods.
His commonest phraseology shows it. 'The month when the pohutu-kawa
flowers'; 'the season when the kowhai is in bloom'; so he punctuates
time. And the years that are gone he softly names' dead leaves!'--HAY,
_Brighter Britain_.]
Many of the Maori chiefs were, and some even now are, masterly
rhetoricians. The bent of the race was always strongly to controversy
and discussion. Their ignorance of any description of writing made
them cultivate debate. Their complacent indifference to time made
deliberative assembly a prolonged, never-wearying joy. The chiefs
met in council like Homer's heroes--the commons sitting round and
muttering guttural applause or dissent. The speeches abounded in short
sententious utterances, in proverbs, poetic allusions and metaphors
borrowed from legends. The Maori orator dealt in quotations as freely
as the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and his hearers caught
them with as much relish as that of a House of Commons of Georgian
days enjoying an apt passage from the classics. Draped in kilt and
mantle, with spear or carved staff of office in the right hand, the
speakers were manly and dignified figures. The fire and force of their
rhetoric were not only aided by graceful gesture but were set out in a
language worthy of the eloquent. If we cannot say of the Maori tongue
as Gibbon said of Greek, that it "can give a soul to the objects of
sense and a body to the abstractions of philosophy," we can at any
rate claim for it that it is a musical and vigorous speech. Full of
vowel-sounds, entirely without sibilants, but rich in guttural and
chest notes, it may be made at will to sound liquid or virile, soft or
ringing.
The seamy side of Maori life, as of all savage life, was patent to the
most unimaginative observer. The traveller found it not easy to dwell
on the dignity, poetry and bravery of a race which contemned washing,
and lived, for the most part, in noisome hovels. A chief might be an
orator and skilled captain, but, squatting on the ground, smeared with
oil, daubed with red ochre and grimly tattooed, he probably impressed
the white visitor chiefly as an example of dirt and covetousness. The
traveller might be hospitably entertained in a _pa_ the gate of which
was decorated with the smoke-dried heads of slain enemies by a host
whose dress might include a necklace of human teeth,[1] the owner of
which he had helped to eat. Though a cannibal feast was a rare orgie,
putrid food was a common dainty. Without the cringing manner of the
Oriental, the Maori had his full share of deceitfulness. Elaborate
treachery is constantly met with in the accounts of their wars. If
adultery was rare, chastity among the single women was rarer still.
The affection of parents for young children was requited by no
kindness on the part of youth for old age. Carving never rose higher
than grotesque decoration. The attempts at portraying the human face
or form resulted only in the monstrous and the obscene.
[Footnote 1: At any rate among the Ngatiporou tribe.]
[Illustration: A MAORI MAIDEN
Photo by ILES, Thames]
The Maori men are as a rule tall and bulky, long-bodied and
short-legged, and with fairly large pyramidal skulls, showing
well-developed perceptive faculties. Their colour varies from maize to
dusky olive, and their features from classic to negroid; but usually
the nose, though not flat, is wide, and the mouth, though not
blubber-lipped, is heavy and sensual. Shorter and more coarsely built
than the males, the women, even when young, are less attractive to the
European eye, despite their bright glances and black, abundant hair.
It might well be thought that this muscular, bulky race, with ample
room to spread about a fertile and exceptionally healthy country,
would have increased and multiplied till it had filled both islands.
It did not, however. It is doubtful whether it ever numbered more than
a hundred and fifty thousand. Except on the shores of Cook's Straits,
it only planted a few scattered outposts in the South Island. Yet that
is the larger island of the two. It is also the colder, and therein
lies at least one secret of the check to the Maori increase. They were
a tropical race transplanted into a temperate climate. They showed
much the same tendency to cling to the North Island as the negroes in
North America to herd in the Gulf States. Their dress, their food and
their ways were those of dwellers on shores out of reach of frost and
snow. Though of stout and robust figure, they are almost always weak
in the chest and throat. Should the Maoris die out, the medical
verdict might be summed up in the one word tuberculosis.
The first European observers noted that they suffered from "galloping"
consumption. Skin disorders, rheumatism and a severe kind of influenza
were other ailments.
In the absence equally of morality and medical knowledge among their
unmarried women, it did not take many years after the appearance of
the Whites to taint the race throughout with certain diseases. A
cold-blooded passage in Crozet's journal tells of the beginning of
this curse. Though not altogether unskilful surgeons, the Maoris knew
virtually nothing of medicine. Nor do they show much nervous power
when attacked by disease. Cheerful and sociable when in health, they
droop quickly when ill, and seem sometimes to die from sheer lack
of the will to live. Bright and imaginative almost as the Kelts of
Europe, their spirits are easily affected by superstitious dread.
Authentic cases are known of a healthy Maori giving up the ghost
through believing himself to be doomed by a wizard.
There are, however, other evil influences under which this attractive
and interesting people are fading away. Though no longer savages, they
have never become thoroughly civilized. Partial civilization has been
a blight to their national life. It has ruined the efficacy of their
tribal system without replacing it with any equal moral force and
industrial stimulus. It has deprived them of the main excitement of
their lives--their tribal wars--and given them no spur to exertion
by way of a substitute. It has fatally wounded their pride and
self-respect, and has not given them objects of ambition or preserved
their ancient habits of labour and self-restraint. A hundred years ago
the tribes were organized and disciplined communities. No family or
able-bodied unit need starve or lack shelter; the humblest could count
on the most open-handed hospitality from his fellows. The tribal
territory was the property of all. The tilling, the fishing, the
fowling were work which could not be neglected. The chief was not a
despot, but the president of a council, and in war would not be given
the command unless he was the most capable captain. Every man was a
soldier, and, under the perpetual stress of possible war, had to be a
trained, self-denying athlete. The _pas_ were, for defensive reasons,
built on the highest and therefore the healthiest positions. The
ditches, the palisades, the terraces of these forts were constructed
with great labour as well as no small skill. The fighting was hand to
hand. The wielding of their weapons--the wooden spear, the club,
the quaint _meré_[1] and the stone tomahawk--required strength and
endurance as well as a skill only to be obtained by hard practice. The
very sports and dances of the Maori were such as only the active and
vigorous could excel in. Slaves were there, but not enough to relieve
the freemen from the necessity for hard work. Strange sacred customs,
such as _tapu_ (vulgarly Anglicized as taboo) and _muru_, laughable as
they seem to us, tended to preserve public health, to ensure respect
for authority, and to prevent any undue accumulation of goods and
chattels in the hands of one man. Under the law of _muru_ a man
smitten by sudden calamity was politely plundered of all his
possessions. It was the principle under which the wounded shark is
torn to pieces by its fellows, and under which the merchant wrecked on
the Cornish coast in bye-gone days was stripped of anything the waves
had spared. Among the Maoris, however, it was at once a social duty
and a personal compliment. If a man's hut caught fire his dearest
friends clustered round like bees, rescued all they could from the
flames, and--kept it. It is on record that a party about to pay a
friendly visit to a neighbour village were upset in their canoe as
they were paddling in through the surf. The canoe was at once claimed
by the village chief--their host. Moreover they would have been
insulted if he had not claimed it. Of course, he who lost by _muru_
one week might be able to repay himself the next.
[Footnote 1: Tasman thought the meré resembled the _parang_, or heavy,
broad-bladed knife, of the Malays. Others liken it to a paddle, and
matter-of-fact colonists to a tennis-racket or a soda-water bottle
flattened.]
Certain colonial writers have exhausted their powers ridicule--no very
difficult task--upon what they inaccurately call Maori communism. But
the system, in full working order, at least developed the finest race
of savages the world has seen, and taught them barbaric virtues which
have won from their white supplanters not only respect but liking.
The average colonist regards a Mongolian with repulsion, a Negro with
contempt, and looks on an Australian black as very near to a wild
beast; but he likes the Maoris, and is sorry that they are dying out.
No doubt the remnants of the Maori tribal system are useless, and
perhaps worse than useless. The tribes still own land in common, and
much of it. They might be very wealthy landlords if they cared to
lease their estates on the best terms they could bargain for. As it
is, they receive yearly very large sums in rent. They could be rich
farmers if they cared to master the science of farming. They have
brains to learn more difficult things. They might be healthy men
and women if they would accept the teachings of sanitary science
as sincerely as they took in the religious teachings of the early
missionaries. If they could be made to realize that foul air,
insufficient dress, putrid food, alternations of feast and famine, and
long bouts of sedulous idleness are destroying them as a people and
need not do so, then their decay might be arrested and the fair hopes
of the missionary pioneers yet be justified. So long as they soak
maize in the streams until it is rotten and eat it together with dried
shark--food the merest whiff of which will make a white man sick;
so long as they will wear a suit of clothes one day and a tattered
blanket the next, and sit smoking crowded in huts, the reek of which
strikes you like a blow in the face; so long as they will cluster
round dead bodies during their _tangis_ or wakes; so long as they
will ignore drainage--just so long will they remain a blighted and
dwindling race, and observers without eyes will talk as though there
was something fateful and mysterious in their decline. One ray of hope
for them has quite lately been noted. They are caring more for the
education of their children. Some three thousand of these now go
to school, not always irregularly. Very quaint scholars are the
dark-eyed, quick-glancing, brown-skinned little people sitting tied
"to that dry drudgery at the desk's dull wood," which, if heredity
counts for anything, must be so much harder to them than to the
children of the _Pakeha_.[1] Three years ago the Government
re-organized the native schools, had the children taught sanitary
lessons with the help of magic lanterns, and gave power to committees
of native villagers to prosecute the parents of truants. The result
has been a prompt, marked and growing improvement in the attendance
and the general interest. Better still, the educated Maori youths are
awakening to the sad plight of their people. Pathetic as their regrets
are, the healthy discontent they show may lead to better things.
[Footnote 1: Foreigner.]
[Illustration]