Land, page 30
There are 66 million acres of New Zealand, from the tropical tip of Cape Reinga in the north to the cold and blustery southern cliffs of Stewart Island, a place of tussock grass and marsh so bleak you know it is just a short hop from there to the bitter gales of the Roaring Forties. These millions of acres, in the main lushly emerald pastureland and spectacular (but alarmingly seismic) mountain country, constitute a land that was seized, wholesale, by those British outsiders who first found it for themselves and then, after Captain Cook’s first claim to the place in 1769, eventually came and settled there. Much of this land now needs, in the eyes of many in New Zealand, to be handed back.
To the extent that talk about such a possibility is occurring at all, and to the extent that the need for a restoration of Maori right is now part of the country’s national will, the reforms that are under endless and definitely not warp-speed consideration surely bode well for the moral compass of the nation. Many locally will suggest that in terms of social justice New Zealand is an impressively successful place, on myriad levels. And to those who think so, the country’s programs that deal with native land are seen as central to such success and reputation as the nation currently enjoys.
The key event in the history of New Zealand, most especially her complicated relationship with her 66 million acres, was the signing on February 6, 1840, of the Treaty of Waitangi. This remains the central icon of the country’s national origins myth. And given what has happened since, it seems very much more important today than it ever was back in the nineteenth century.
The physical treaty itself still exists, as much revered as elsewhere are Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. Unlike these two very much more venerable documents, the treaty is now a decayed, ragged, and rather careworn thing. Nonetheless, it is sedulously preserved and guarded, its fragments on view in glass cases in a darkened room in the National Library in Wellington, a hallowed and hushed place.
The events leading up to the treaty’s making and signing took place at the zenith of Britain’s imperial adventuring—in the times when, as previously noted of the locals, “we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.” The trope that has long since defined British missionary behavior in Africa was much replicated in the Antipodes: James Cook—bent on a mission of a different kind, but a mission nonetheless—stumbled across island after island in the Pacific, and he took them, annexed them, claimed them (the language varies) for Great Britain. He came to New Zealand in 1769, then sailed on to what would be New South Wales in 1770, and notwithstanding the presence of Maori people in the former and aboriginal Australians around Botany Bay in the latter, he declared all now to be under the sovereignty and benign invigilation of Britain. He then sailed away, discovering and claiming as he went, to tell his faraway sponsors of their new austral possessions, and leaving the locals, to the extent they understood what had happened to them, mightily dazed and confused.
Migration to Australia—initially, and infamously, of convicted and impoverished petty criminals who were sentenced back in Britain to transportation to this new-formed penal colony—began in earnest in October 1788. New Zealand, however, was initially discounted as a destination—it was thought neither suitable for prisoners, nor tempting enough for voluntary pastoralists, and so it was retained in a loose association with New South Wales, administered informally, more or less forgotten about.
The Treaty of Waitangi, first signed in February 1840 between British officials and Maori chiefs, formally established British sovereignty over the island. Interpretations of its various translations have led to much controversy.
A handful of Europeans settled, equally informally. Some few were convicts who managed to escape from the relatively nearby British prisons in Tasmania and on Norfolk Island. And then once the Chinese trading houses in Canton said they would accept sealskins in exchange for tea,* a ragtag huddle of British sealers set themselves up in the South Island, in the vain hope—augmented by some onshore whaling, once the great beasts had been spotted cruising outside the west coast fjords—of making great riches. Many of these sealer-settlers lived with Maori women—with no objections from the Maori menfolk, who were generally kindly and accepting. A scattering of missionaries then arrived and, after an initial sturdy reluctance, by the 1820s some Maori did agree to take baptism. And then not a few Maori—whose customs and practices the British found intriguing and admirable, most especially relevant here being their view that all land is owned communally, and not by any individuals—were invited across to Australia, to be properly “civilized,” there to acquire a working familiarity with the English language, just in case Britons ever decided to come to New Zealand en masse. But they did not come, at first, and in the first few decades of the nineteenth century New Zealand was still almost wholly Maori and was generally omitted from the colonial gazetteers. As if to rub the point home, New Zealand was particularly mentioned in an 1817 law, the Murders Abroad Act, which held that murders committed in places not then under British rule—the United States, Tahiti, Honduras, and New Zealand among them—would be treated as if carried out on the high seas.* It was not a colony in law—although by 1830 it started to be accepted by London that such a growing number of Britons were now beginning to live there, dotted around the country, that its status should be reconsidered from time to time.
Time to time happened soon thereafter. Matters started to change in 1833, when the British decided to act. They first, and somewhat incautiously, sent down an ill-suited emissary, a professional wine grower named James Busby, who was charged in his new-made post of British Resident with managing the island outpost on London’s behalf. He landed in the Bay of Islands, and being generously welcomed by the local Maori chiefs set up his headquarters in the estuary village that would later become so famous, Waitangi.
His appointment turned out to be no great success. Rather than sticking to his formal remit, Busby apparently became enamored with the idea that the Maoris might create for themselves some form of properly organized government—ignoring the fact that since so many of the various Maori tribes were at odds with one another, the establishment of some kind of central government was unlikely. Nonetheless, this was the Busby plan, and he further supposed that, once self-governing, the country’s leaders might form themselves into a wholly independent nation. His optimism was such that he even had their leaders choose a flag for themselves.
London, on hearing of these developments, and also hearing talk of violence breaking out among various gatherings of British settlers in South Island, dismissed their Resident’s ideas as plain silliness and tomfoolery. Generously, though, they assumed publicly that by making such grandiloquent plans Busby was merely trying to see off the rival French, whose imperial tentacles were starting to curl down from Tahiti toward New Zealand’s North Island.
As Busby’s dispatches became ever more irritating, and as the trickle of inbound Britons continued to grow—two private settlement companies had been formed back in London for the express purpose of encouraging migration to New Zealand—London decided to act: all dithering would henceforth be ended, Britain would formally annex the islands once and for all, and create a new colony. A naval officer named William Hobson was given orders to head off south to Waitangi and formally to annex the islands for the newly enthroned Queen Victoria.
Hobson was already familiar with the region: he had served as commander of the HMS Rattlesnake, employed during the founding of the settlement of Melbourne; and he had been summoned across the Tasman Sea in 1837 by the vexed James Busby to put down a small Maori rebellion and a simultaneous outbreak of lawlessness among some of the settlers. Both had fizzled by the time Hobson reached the territory, and so instead he wrote a report on the situation to give to the Admiralty once he was back in London. But then he was told, essentially, that he needed to change his clothes and head back down south again, this time on imperial business. His sailing orders were initially simple, though to the confusion of many they changed while he was en route. In consequence, by the time he arrived in the village of Waitangi (whose name means, appositely, “the waters of lamentation”) he had written a treaty document that would lead to a raft of problems—and, to be fair, a raft of possibilities as well—that are still very much in existence today, two centuries later.
His original instructions—written by a group of senior Colonial Office bureaucrats, evangelical Christians who had led earlier movements to abolish slavery in other British possessions, and who were broadly sympathetic to the Maori people—were straightforward enough. Hobson would apologize for disregarding the earlier Busby self-government plan, but would instead declare that Queen Victoria was now formally claiming sovereignty over New Zealand and her native people; and that Maori land would be purchased, at fair prices, by the colonial government. The land would then be resold to would-be British settlers, with the revenue from the sales being used to finance the colonial government’s operations.
But as he got under way, the Colonial Office amended the arrangement. It had come under immediate pressure from the two private settler bodies that had been created to encourage migration, which had different views. Rather than Hobson heading south to create a system whereby British settlers would be accommodated in a country that was still broadly Maori, he should make instead “a settler New Zealand” in which “a place had to be kept for the Maori.” And so the treaty he was to write—and Hobson was given no official help to compose what would in effect be the new country’s foundation papers—should reflect this changed priority: settlers first, Maoris next in line.
Considering the profound eventual importance of the document, it remains remarkable that Hobson, together with the already in place James Busby, was able to hammer out the document in just four days, all in the comparative comfort of Busby’s seaside cottage. It had then to be translated into Maori, a language with which few were familiar—the local specialist being Henry Williams, an Anglican cleric. Williams achieved that task overnight, but it is his extraordinarily rushed rendering that lies today at the heart of the many problems the treaty has since thrown up.
On the midsummer Wednesday morning of February 5, 1840, the local chiefs and hundreds of ordinary Maori were summoned by runners to attend a formal reading of the treaty. A giant marquee had been erected on Busby’s front lawn, and standing on a hastily made dais Hobson read the English text aloud. He did so for posterity of course, but also for the benefit of the scores of settlers who had turned up, though they were told firmly to remain silent during the proceedings, since this was an event exclusively concerning relations between the Maori people and the British Crown. Some French had arrived as well, eager to torpedo any arrangement involving the British, trying to persuade the Maori to convert to Catholicism and extolling the virtues of being ruled from Paris rather than London. Few paid them heed.
Over a gathering din, the Reverend Williams then calmly read out his translation,* paragraph by paragraph, to the Maori crowd—men who, according to the other visitors, seemed initially quite unimpressed by what they were hearing, though whether it was the content or the grammar that most concerned them is not known.
The Treaty of Waitangi, after a formal preamble telling the chiefs of Victoria’s pledge to protect the Maoris’ rights and property, had just three articles—with which the chiefs were “invited to concur,” by signing. The first required “the Chiefs of the Confederation of the United Tribes of New Zealand” to cede to the Queen of the United Kingdom “absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of sovereignty . . . over their respective Territories.” A simple enough imperial demand as things go, making the Queen, Queen of New Zealand.
The third article, just as unambiguously simple, gave all New Zealand native peoples the full rights of privilege and protection as any other British subjects. That might in due course suffer some limitations and restrictions, but on the face of it, for now it seemed plain enough.
It was the second article, dealing with land, that would eventually cause all the trouble and consternation. It stated that “the Queen guarantees to the chiefs and tribes and their families the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests, Fisheries and other properties . . . so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession.” The chiefs would also give exclusive right to the sale of their land to the Crown or the Crown’s official representatives.
One of the many failings of the British empire, when making such attempts as this to bring a native people gently to heel—rather than the more traditional means of colonial expansion via conquest and annexation by force of arms—was the often bovine inability of Britons to even try to understand the subtleties and nuances of another and unfamiliar people. The Maori chiefs assembled here, studying the translated text that was presented to them, could have had no notion whatsoever of sovereignty, nor could they fathom what the rights of British subjects might be, since they had no certain idea of what or where Britain was. And as for phrases like “the full exclusive and undisturbed possession” of lands—to a Maori the concept of individual land possession simply did not compute.
One Maori word used in the treaty continues to cause trouble. The British first granted to the chiefs what in the translated text was called rangatiratanga—from the word rangatira, meaning “chief”—and which was taken by all to signify “chieftainship.” But the colonists also went on to ask the chiefs to cede to their new rulers kawanatanga—and this was an invented word, a neologism, and it was intended by the British intended to mean “governance.” The chiefs agreed to both terms—a concurrence which historians suggest means that the Maori kept something that meant a great deal to them, but at the same time ceded to the newcomers something that meant very little, or of which they had no real understanding.
The kinds of questions the assembled chiefs put to the white men displayed their perplexity: “What do we want of a governor?” asked a leader named Rewa. “We are not whites nor foreigners. We are the governor. We are the chiefs of this land. Return!” The very concept of empire that was embodied in Hobson’s visit—let alone its implications for the solid surface on which all the locals lived, on the forests and the fields and the seashore and the mountain ranges—eluded all the Maori that day. The settlers got it, of course, as did the French, whose Gallic disdain for the British was all too evident. But the Maori, presented with this document, must have wondered why on earth they were being so bothered, why shaken so rudely out of their long arcadian slumber.
Nonetheless, after a day and night during which the various Maori groups argued among themselves—with Henry Williams doing his level best as intermediary—the colonists’ coercion, so silkily applied, finally achieved its goal. On February 6, the assembled chiefs informed Hobson’s men they were ready to sign. Hobson himself had retired to the ship that had transported him from Britain, HMS Herald, and had not expected an agreement so quickly. Stories still circulate suggesting that he arrived at Busby’s house in a state of undress, and signed the British side of the agreement while in his dressing gown. (Paintings of the event naturally show him in full naval uniform.)
The first Maori to sign was one of Henry Williams’s converts, a Bay of Islands chieftain named Hone Heke Pokai, who was able to sign his name. Twenty-five others followed him—such that by the end of a day observed as a holiday every February 6 in today’s New Zealand—it could fairly be said that over half of the senior chiefs who were present that day had agreed, with their signatures or their marks, to London’s imperial demands.
Even so, Hobson thought it prudent to take the proposed treaty around the country to win the approval of other Maori leaders. So he had eight further copies run up, each of them handwritten and covered with official stamps and seals, and all translated with more or less the same text. By the time this exercise was complete, more than five hundred chiefs had added their various notations of concurrence, and by the time the austral spring was bringing the daffodils back to Otago—one of several South Island regions that never got to participate, since the weather was too foul for the treaty carriers to visit—the deal was done. William Hobson then formally detached the country from the superintendency of New South Wales, declared himself governor of the Crown Colony of New Zealand, and swore in three fellow Britons to perform the territory’s senior management. With a budget of four thousand pounds, a bureaucracy of thirty-nine junior civil servants, and a gathering of eleven policemen* brought over from Sydney, the new governor proceeded to run the colony as best he could.
One of Hobson’s first appointments was of a Land Claims Commissioner, an English lawyer named William Spain. However important matters of sovereignty and protection might seem in principle, the most significant practical business of the Treaty of Waitangi concerned the disposition of the country’s 66 million acres of hitherto communally owned land. That would produce the very raft of problems that are being dealt with in New Zealand to this day—and which other nations with substantial indigenous populations are watching closely.
First of all, though, argument over the interpretations of the treaty triggered a series of vicious land wars between Britons and Maori, conflicts that would last for thirty wretched years. These confrontations became so serious that they would eventually involve the summoning over from Australia of eighteen thousand British soldiers, complete with artillery pieces and cavalry regiments. Those troops would put down rebellions of a ferocity quite unimagined by those who had so congenially signed the paperwork back beside the seaside in Waitangi. The passionate intensity that underpinned the Maori attitude toward their land—it could not be for sale because it was not owned by anyone—was all part of the subtleties of another culture that seemingly so often eluded the Britons’ understanding. Nearly three thousand people, by far the majority of them Maoris, died as a result of the fighting.
