As you read through the early books on New Zealand (read more) the narratives of missionaries, early visitors and traders, settlers and the military, the new administrators, particularly those up to about 1845, you are often confronted with that very relevant issue of the moment, judging the people and the actions of the past on the basis of modern values. It arises in national histories everywhere, with the American founding fathers and their slave-holdings, the imperial adventurers and figureheads such as Cecil Rhodes, and in recalibration of the views of admired voyagers, explores and navigators such as James Cook. It is easy to condemn the worst, Pizarro in South America, Elgin destroying the Summer Palace in Peking, the British supporting and fighting for the opium trade in China, King Leopold of the Belgians and his atrocities in the Congo, the list is long. It often seems harder, however, to come to an agreed moral perspective of history where the legacy is still alive with questions and controversy, but where there might be ambiguities. History has been taught largely from well-established perspectives, but we no longer accept that these necessarily give an equitable account of the views of all participants of the time. Were the views and actions of historical actors justified by the morality of the time? Did they not know any better? Are modern perspectives reinventing events that have a range of interpretations? And why judge the past anyway, it is the present that matters?

A recent article in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik[1], confronting the issues of slavery with respect to the founding father Samuel Adams, gives us one way of looking at the issue. He says that we are “….aware of the risks of judging the ideas of the eighteenth century by the standards of the twenty-first. In truth, the moral standards of 2022 are already different from those of 2019.  Yet universal amnesty for everyone past feels too easy: taking and holding slaves was not an innocent occupation to which only a handful of moderns have retrospectively been awakened; it was an action self-evidently brutal and unhuman, which countless people at the time said was brutal and inhuman.

The reasonable approach seems to be to survey the field of possibility – to gauge what was understood at the time, which moral doctrines were readily available and which were not.  Abolition was a powerful, articulate, and persuasive position during the American Revolution and in the years afterward. Those who rejected it weren’t just “men of their time” – they were in a real sense men out of step with their time….., having chosen to ignore the best available argument. They need not be eliminated from study or admiration – their contributions are too important, and history, anyway, is not a book of good conduct awards. But it is not wrong to censure them retrospectively.

On the other hand, criticising them for, say, not standing up for the rights of sexual minorities seems wildly unhistorical; an argument for these rights had not yet taken a coherent and widely available form…….

If all this puts us in the uncomfortable position of seeming to demand some measure of moral prescience from the past, well, is this not what we actually do, in any case?  There are many skills in life where the magic lies in anticipating what has not yet happened but shortly will – hitting a curveball is one, acting morally may be another.“

When we look at the early New Zealand literature, written through Western eyes, we see a range of views on Māori.  There was a strong preconception of the war-like savage, almost every account talks about cannibalism and slavery, and at the worst, a view of a diseased, dirty, immoral and primitive race. The fleeting visitor Benjamin Morrell provides a familiar view, crediting the missionaries with civilizing the savages: ‘Indolence and filthiness have given place to industry and personal cleanliness…’.[2]  Visitors who stayed, however, almost always altered their views, engaging with individuals, forming friendships, and partnerships in some cases such as Kendall, Maning and Colenso. As well, there was a frequently expressed general admiration for a proud, aggressive people who stood up to opposition, in contrast to other indigenous people subject to colonisation and invasion or conquest. Many of the views, spoken and written, on the first Australian people, were particularly despicable. The missionaries almost all had a warmer, respectful view, but coloured by a basic belief that this was a savage society that needed to be civilised, and this would happen through Christian conversion.

As well, amongst the more fervid proponents of colonial settlement, there were those who just didn’t want to have Māori around. ‘If there were no Natives, or they were reduced to a thorough state of submission to our laws, so that the Colonists could rest perfectly assured of their security the country might be settled from each port as a nucleus;…’[3] And: ‘The greatest, and perhaps the only drawback to settlement in the Northern Island is the great preponderance of the native population, and corresponding confidence it gives them in all dealings with the settlers.’[4] There was also those, such as Edward Shortland[5], however, who were strong supporters of Māori rights, speaking out about the injustices around land purchases, and the failure of administrations to adhere to the Treaty. William Swainson[6] and Sir William Martin, Attorney-General and Chief Justice respectively, were not slow to write on this, and their opposition to the Taranaki campaign.

Thus there was a contemporary morality, and views and information, that countered the negative views of a savage race. There was also a more formalised movement, available to all and well-publicised, that put forward strong concerns over the ways in which indigenous people were treated and perceived in the colonisation movements. The Aborigines Protection Society[7] was the most vocal, set up in 1837 and later merging with the remnants of the anti-slavery movement. The Society was committed to the preservation and protection of the rights of indigenous people, and as early as 1848, its Secretary, the activist Louis Chamerovzow, wrote on Māori: ‘The relations of Great Britain with the Islands of New Zealand, are unprecedented in the annals of Colonization, inasmuch as her acquisition of the country was peculiar and specific; and this fact renders the position of Settlers there and of Emigrants proceeding thither, both complicated and singular, they being brought into contact with an intelligent, enlightened, and ambitious native Race, who standing dispossessed of the Sovereignty of their own country, claim extensive and exclusive proprietary rights of which they are extremely jealous, and which they are in a situation to enforce; whilst, on the other hand, the local Government asserts, on behalf of the Crown, another kind of right, by virtue of which all free exercise of the Natives’ natural proprietary rights is averred to be extinguished, and the Emigrant becomes dependent, not alone upon the disposition of the Native owner to sell his land, but on that of the local Government to permit the purchase of the same by any third party, save through its medium, and contingent upon its own inclination to acquire such land so offered for sale, at a price regulated by circumstances, and virtually irrespective of native valuation.’

He writes as the mouthpiece of the Society: ‘We simply deny to any Nation the right, on the plea of discovery, to seize upon another country which, at the moment of its being discovered, is already inhabited.[8] He writes much about right of discovery, the differences between occupation of un-peopled versus peopled lands, and on the deep understanding of Māori of the Treaty and the land. He quotes Nōpera Pana-kareao[9] on the second article of the Treaty, calling this ‘the most graphic, the most poetic, and the most logical’ explanation: ‘The shadow of the land goes to Queen Victoria, but the substance remains with us. We will go to the governor, and get a payment for our land as before.’[10] And he ends: ‘the prosperity of all our Colonies is intimately associated with the welfare of the Native population, whether great or small; but which, unfortunately, it has too much neglected: and that one broad rule of justice, applicable to Natives as well as to Settlers, is not less a political necessity than it is a Christian duty.’[11]

If we go back to that question of the moral perspectives or doctrines available on the day, then there were enough to prevent us from dismissing and excusing racist and deeply patronising attitudes to indigenous people, and to the injustices around their basic rights, particularly land. At the same time, it must have been difficult to escape the views of the society that you grew up in and the people you were educated with, and worked for in the 19^th century imperial and colonisation enterprise. While we should not accept the offensiveness sometimes shown by the usually well-educated people  who wrote the early narratives, and we should continue to find them admirable, engaging and for the most part compassionate, perhaps the most important thing is to ensure that everything is exposed, laid out, not hidden or swatted away. As Gopnik says, history is not a ‘book of good conduct awards’, but then neither is it a catalogue of excuses. We will never understand the consequences of our past, and history’s modern implications, if we hide, or unduly excuse, any aspect of our history. And that is also why it is important that we read our early literature.

[1] Adam Gopnik, “Finding the Founders”. New Yorker October 31, 2022, p.67,

[2] Morrell, B. A narrative of four voyages to the South Sea, North and South Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antarctic Ocean…..  New York, J & J Harper. 1832. p. 371.

[3] Brees, S. C.  Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand.  London, John Williams and Co.,1847.

[4] Power,W.T. Sketches in New Zealand, with pen and pencil. From a journal kept in that country from July 1846, to June 1848. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. 1849.

[5] Shortland, E. The Southern Districts of New Zealand; a journal, with passing notices of the customs of the aborigines. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans. MDCCCLI (1851); Traditions and superstitions of the New Zealanders; with illustrations of their manners and customs. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. 1854

[6] Swainson, W. New Zealand and the war. London: Smith, Elder and Co. M.DCCC.LXII [1862]

[7] Aborigines was a general term for indigenous people

[8] Chamerovzow, L.A. The New Zealand question and the rights of the aborigines. London: T. C Newby. 1848. P. 25

[9] Pana-Kareao was a prominent chief of the northern Te Rawara iwi, Nōpera meaning ‘Noble’. He was a Christian convert and largely supportive of the British.

[10] Chamerovzow, L.A. pp. 152-153.

[11] Ibid. p. 416