Page 13 - Puhipi

obvious advantages of Aotearoa to be overlooked and within 23 years of Cooks first

voyage sealers were operating in the Southern Fiords.

Two years later spar’s were being felled in the bush on the shores of the Hauraki Gulf.
By 1800 whaling vessels of many nations had begun to hunt off Aotearoa shores,
putting into northern harbours to refit and to demonstrate to the Maori the doubtful

advantages of civilisations as interpreted by its most unqualified ambassadors. The Bay
of Islands became a centre for refitting, rest and recreation. On a pleasant bay on the
eastern side of the main harbour there sprang up Kororareka, as rip-roaring a seaside

shanty town as the world has ever seen.

The Maori people benefited hardly at all from this contact, either in the Bay of Islands
or in other places where whalers set up their stations. Perhaps the sealers were not so
much to blame as most of them were established in lonely parts of the South Island like

Dusky Sounds. The Maori certainly learned the rudiments of trading potatoes and pork,
both of which had been introduced in the very early days were supplied to the ships
together with their wares of a less savoury nature. From them they received articles of

iron like knives, axes and garden implements, blankets, fiery liquor, disease and guns.
He learned to take part in the degrading carousels of the seamen but needed little
tuition in how to apply the new weapons he had acquired. As the ships put to sea an
increasing number carried Maori among their crews and many of these men born in a
society that had not known that a world outside their land existed found their way to

the far corners of the earth.

One of the most nefarious of the early practices was the trading in dried heads. These

grisly relics of tribal warfare, decapitated heads of enemies smoke-cured so that they
became mummified and retained without distortion the facial tattoo pattern were
eagerly sought as curios by visiting ships. When the supply ran short, chiefs would kill
well tattooed slaves to supply the demand and even had men tattooed especially and
then killed. There seems little excuse for the Maori who took part in this inhuman

commerce, but there can be none at all for the Europeans who encouraged it.

Many Maori arrived in Sydney often destitute, where some of them came to the notice
of Samuel Marsden, the principle chaplain of the convict settlement.

Marsden was attracted to the Maori he met and hoped someday to establish a mission
for them and to bring to them the message he believed would save them from the
degradation introduced by the baser elements of European society, For across the seas

had come whispers of the wild, wicked ways of Kororareka, of European excesses and
of Maori revenge. Marsden believed that a mission should teach the arts of life as well
as the gospel, so his first missionaries included a carpenter, a shoemaker who also new
the craft of rope making and a school teacher. They were William Hall, John King and

Thomas Kendall, their mission was delayed when the crew of a ship called the Boyd on