MISSIONARIES AND THE
PROMOTION OF WHEAT GROWING
AMONG THE NEW ZEALAND MAORI
Hazel Petrie
At the beginning of the world, says the book of Genesis, God told man to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,” adding that He had given “every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is every fruit of a tree yielding seed” to be “meat” for humankind.1 But, for Christians, one seed, not known in all parts of the earth, would assume much greater importance than others. That seed was wheat, and its introduction into New Zealand’s indigenous Maori society—largely for secular reasons—would be accompanied by many of its spiritual symbolisms. As bread, however, it did not merely retain its significance for Christian ritual but supplanted an indigenous food staple in certain ceremonies.
When the British navigator Captain James Cook first landed on New Zealand shores in 1769, the Maori inhabitants had no seed crops. Their staple food, the kumara or sweet potato, raised from seeds in their more tropical ancestral homelands in Polynesia, could only be grown from tubers in New Zealand’s temperate climate. But, from the time of Cook, European voyagers left behind a number of previously unknown crops—just as they had done elsewhere in the Pacific. They did so in hopes that familiar foodstuffs would be available to them and other Western mariners when they passed that way again. While those early explorers and the occasional whaler were merely fleeting visitors, members of two early French expeditions to New Zealand, those of Jean-François Marie de Surville and Marion du Fresne, reported that the Maori they encountered took an immediate liking to bread and ship’s biscuit. As well as white potatoes and other vegetables, British and French explorers left wheat seed behind, but apparently with little instruction as to how to grow or use it. Although the French did attempt the introduction of wheat cultivation into New Zealand, their reports of Maori responses are ambiguous.2 De Surville felt they had “cast their seed on barren ground,” and du Fresne’s lieutenant, Julien Marie Crozet, thought Maori “had no more mind for [grain cultivation] than brutes.” Yet, Crozet’s shipmate, Jean Roux, reported that they were pleased with the French wheat plantings and promised to take great care of them.3
Whatever the initial response to wheat at that time, potatoes were a more immediate success. Maori were able to cultivate this root crop using techniques similar to those used to grow the kumara and were soon aware of the economic advantages of growing a product much in demand by visiting European and American ships that called at their ports to reprovision. Potatoes had other advantages as well. Yields were much higher than kumara, which were also vulnerable to frost, prone to rot, and had a limited storage life. Another important factor, however, was the lack of embedded spiritual restraints associated with new cultivars like the potato. The word taboo, used in English to mean something forbidden, derives from the Polynesian and Melanesian languages. The New Zealand Maori version is tapu, indicating spiritual restriction.
Maori applied a variety of spiritual sanctions to food production and consumption, but especially to the cultivation of kumara, their prized carbohydrate. The men who prepared the ground for planting kumara ornamented their hair and their spades with feathers before planting the tubers in perfectly straight lines on hillocks in holes facing east toward the rising sun. The workers moved along in rows chanting songs to propitiate Rongo, the god of cultivated food. Having finished their work for the day, they washed their hands and then held them over a protective fire before taking their first meal of the day. Carved wooden images, painted with red ochre to signify the state of tapu, were stuck into the ground to warn passers-by not to enter or interfere with the growing plants. No women or slaves were permitted to enter, and only men could take part in the harvesting, which was also attended with important rituals and could not begin before the sun was well up. The introduced white potato, on the other hand, was free of such restrictions.
There are many oral traditions concerning the kumara, but one recounts a fierce argument between two sons of Rangi and Papa (Heaven and Earth, the primeval parents) over a kumara plantation. The upshot was a battle in which Rongomaraeroa (who represented the kumara) was killed, cooked, and eaten by Tumatauenga (who represented man and warfare).4 Consequently, because food holds the noa element, the ability to remove or abrogate tapu, cooked food is an important medium in whakanoa (tapu lifting) ceremonies. For example, newly completed meeting houses or other buildings could be rendered safe for use through various rituals including the tohunga, or spiritual expert, and an older woman of rank carrying a cooked kumara into the building.
In Maori society, leadership is underpinned by mana, a psychic force giving power and prestige, and tapu is the source of that mana. The more prestigious the person, the greater their tapu. Despite their status, chiefs still worked alongside their people—making fishing nets, fishing, felling trees, building canoes, planting, and harvesting—but they could not engage in food preparation. Cooked food being so destructive of tapu and chiefs far more vulnerable to those forces, they could not go near ovens or places where it was being prepared or cooked.
However, as the most important crops of both Maori and Europeans were employed in their religious rituals, so, too, were the connections between peace and agriculture common to both cultures. Because kumara was usually eaten on festive occasions and required a state of peace for its cultivation, it was symbolically associated with peace, whereas fern root, a wild plant, was more often connected with warfare. As will be seen, these spiritual aspects of the staple carbohydrate and its associations with peace would eventually allow wheat to take on some of the same connotations in Maori society as it had in the Western world.
In the meantime, however, the early explorers were followed by trading and whaling ships, which began to call at the Bay of Islands in northern New Zealand from about the late 1790s or early 1800s. Although limited, this interaction increased the familiarization of Maori in that area with flour-based products such as ships’ biscuit, of which they became very fond. These ship visits aroused Maori curiosity about the wider world, too, and a number of young men took passage to foreign parts. Many signed on as crew on whaling ships, visiting Australia, Europe, and the Americas long before any Europeans had taken up residence in their country. Because it was the most often visited port, a large proportion of those leaving New Zealand shores were from the Bay of Islands area.
One of those who signed on to a whaling ship in 1805 was a young man of chiefly rank called Ruatara. His plan was to reach England and meet with King George III. Although he reached his destination, he was prohibited from disembarking his ship and failed to meet the king. Perhaps worse than that, he was seriously maltreated and abandoned by ships’ masters on several occasions. In 1809 he was rescued by Samuel Marsden, the chaplain of New South Wales, who was returning from a visit to England aboard a convict ship called the Ann. Finding Ruatara ill and vomiting blood as a consequence of beatings by previous shipmates, Marsden arranged for him to be taken care of and invited him to his home in Sydney. The chief spent eight months there, during which time he realized that introducing wheat cultivation to New Zealand would not only provide his people with a valuable new food source but also an export opportunity. Despite being the staple food of the British population, little wheat was grown in Australia at that time. Once again, Ruatara’s first attempt to return to New Zealand—some twelve hundred miles across the treacherous Tasman Sea—was stymied when he was defrauded and abandoned yet again; this time on Norfolk Island. However, around 1812, he did reach his home again—armed with a supply of seed wheat.
Ruatara quickly began distributing the seeds to members of his tribal group, but, because Maori had not previously known any grain crops, his people were incredulous of his claims that it could be used to produce the bread and biscuits they were already familiar with. Their ridicule only increased when, without a mill, he was unable to grind the first wheat that he harvested in 1813. However, things began to change when, in 1814, Marsden sent an advance guard of missionaries to New Zealand to consult with Ruatara about the possibility of establishing a Church Missionary Society (CMS) mission station under his patronage and protection. Marsden had taken this opportunity to send a number of gifts, including a hand-operated flour mill. That mill allowed Ruatara to demonstrate the process of turning wheat into flour, which he is said to have cooked into a cake in a frying pan. This was the breakthrough that allowed him to convince his fellow northern chiefs that his claims were not mere fancy, and he began distributing fresh seed wheat, which Marsden had sent along with the mill, among other chiefs of high rank.
So it was that Maori began growing wheat before the first missionaries set up residence in New Zealand, but Ruatara was still keen to enhance his knowledge and accompanied the missionary delegation when it returned to Sydney. There he spent some five months more studying European agricultural techniques and other skills. Moreover, because the governor of New South Wales and others were keen to establish friendly relations with Maori and ensure that the planned mission was securely founded, they gave him additional gifts including a mare, a cow, and other livestock. These were supplemented by poultry and other useful plants which were brought by the missionaries Thomas Kendall, William Hall, and John King, who arrived with their families in December 1814 to establish the first mission at Ruatara’s settlement of Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands.
Sadly, Ruatara died prematurely the following year. Although his successor, Hongi Hika, also grew wheat, he put more effort into extending his production of potatoes, which were in great demand by visiting whalers and trading ships. Mission stations were a very real economic and political asset for the local tribe as their presence encouraged shipping to call most often at those locations. Hongi’s control of the missions and the key northern ports allowed him to monopolize trade and accumulate an extensive arsenal of muskets, which gave him significant advantages over his rivals within and well beyond the Northland region. Indeed, his military and political power was such that Hongi was able to contain the early mission stations within the areas under his authority.
Very much under the Maori thumb, the early missionaries could not avoid involvement in trade but did not lose sight of their evangelical purpose. Seeking not only to convert the indigenous population to Christianity but also to “civilize” them, their approaches to these always intertwined tasks drew on the theological, political, scientific, and philosophical understandings of their society and their time. Biblical injunctions, contemporary “scientific” and philosophical ideas, and entirely pragmatic motivations underlay missionary eagerness to convert Maori to Western ways of living, dressing, and eating. The introduction of wheat, as a crop and a dietary staple, was an important consideration in these contexts. Bread, particularly wheaten bread, was a staple food of the Bible. As the very “staff of life,” it has featured prominently in religious rituals, especially the Eucharist in which Christ’s body is transubstantiated into or represented by bread.
Four years after establishing a New Zealand mission, Samuel Marsden wrote that he “should feel a joy inexpressible to see the New Zealander [Maori] returning home from his cultivated field with his sheaf with him.” He anticipated “the day when he will plough with his yoke of oxen like the ancient prophets and rejoice with the joy of harvest when his crops are gathered in.”5 Maori had long celebrated the “joy” of their own harvests with hakari, or feasts that were often referred to by Europeans as a “harvest-home,” but the desire for them to emulate the crops and agricultural methods of the Holy Land was always evident. Indeed, when the Wesleyans, who arrived in 1823, brought in their first wheat harvest at Whangaroa, they were so pleased to see Maori chiefs approaching their home, carrying sheaves, their “delightful anticipations” were awakened “of that period when the prophetic vision of Micah shall be realized by these noble tribes of barbarians: ‘They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.’”6
However, Hongi’s military dominance had given him such a stranglehold that it was not until the mid 1830s, some six or seven years after his death and in the wake of a resulting power vacuum, that Christian teachings could expand south of the Bay of Islands. And, as missionaries and Maori catechists or lay teachers moved south, so did their exhortations for Maori to grow wheat. They needed local food supplies and encouraged settled habitations to allow for regular Christian instruction, but they were still heavily influenced by biblical injunctions and ingrained ideas of morality and civilization.
Biblical metaphors such as those equating certain societies with “fertile soil,” which “sifted the wheat from the chaff,” or “harvested” souls, pepper the writings of early nineteenth-century missionaries in New Zealand. The Reverend John Butler, who was glad to be able to feed his Maori workers with a “good wheaten loaf” in March 1822, wrote a year later that the “sixteen natives” then under the care of his mission were “regularly fed with the bread of this life and, as far as we are able to communicate it to them, with the bread ‘which cometh down from heaven and giveth life unto the world.’”7 Maori were encouraged not only to eat the bread of this life but also to produce it, and early converts, referred to as “leaven” among their people, worked similarly to propagate the “bread from heaven.” Metaphors of conversion, such as John Morgan’s report from the Waikato that “the missionary already looks forward to the glorious harvest he hopes to reap and rejoices in the prospect of entering the heavenly garner with his arms filled with the golden sheaves,” appear to have had real substance in their minds.8
As the missionaries were able to venture beyond the far northern part of the country, so did foreign ships begin to call at other ports too. A number of accounts are recorded of the first experiences of diverse tribal groups with a triad of new products: flour, sugar, and soap. One account refers to a northern chief believing that biscuit was pumice stone.9 Another tells of some Taranaki people who helped themselves to stores aboard a wrecked ship in 1834 but threw the flour away thinking it was a type of sand.10 Yet another story from an island in the far south of New Zealand referred to a group of Maori who did the same when they raided the stores of some sealers, thinking it was ashes.11 Whatever the initial reaction, the introduction of flour-based products was remembered, a liking for them quickly cultivated. Such a preference was reflected in the term utu pihikete, or “paid for in biscuits,” one of several derogatory terms for half-caste Maori children. Among the many services Maori offered at the ports favored by foreign shipping was that of sexual favors in exchange for material goods: the phrase implies they were the product of a commercial transaction with visiting sailors.12
Like Ruatara, tribal leaders in other areas were only too happy to adopt items of Western diet, but, as with other aspects of Christian teachings, they did so for their own reasons and tended to incorporate them into their existing systems and worldview. In this process the inherent symbolisms became closely associated not only with their spiritual connotations but also with the Maori-British alliance, which strengthened with the arrival of the first British government official in 1833.
James Busby was appointed British resident in response to pleas from both Maori leaders and the small community of British traders now established in Northland who were concerned about matters of law and order—concerns that were exacerbated by the different legal and value systems held by Maori and Europeans. Even though Busby had limited powers and no military support, his arrival signaled the beginning of “on the ground” support for missionary endeavors.
On landing at the Bay of Islands, Busby addressed an assembly of tribal leaders, explaining that he was a representative of King William charged with investigating any complaints they might have concerning His Majesty’s subjects. He told them how Britain had once been an uncivilized country, but that, after God had sent his son into the world, its people learned to cultivate their land so that they “had abundance of bread.” Now, he said, God had sent his servants, the missionaries, to dwell amongst them so that their land, too, would flourish: “Instead of the roots of the fern, you shall eat bread, because the land shall be tilled without fear, and its fruits shall be eaten in peace. When there is abundance of bread, men shall labour to preserve flax, and timber, and provisions for the ships which come to trade, shall bring clothing, and all other things which you desire. Thus shall you become rich.”13 Timber and prepared flax were big income earners for many northern communities during the 1830s, but his message was that bread was the key to both peace and wealth.
In February 1840, after much consideration by the British government and negotiation with a number of Maori leaders—mostly from the northern regions where the missionaries lived and had greatest influence—New Zealand was annexed to Britain under the Treaty of Waitangi. Protestant missionaries played a prominent part in fostering support for the agreement, and, from this point on, the missions, which now included Anglicans, Wesleyans, and Roman Catholics, gained considerable political and economic backing as well as support for their evangelical mission.
The emphasis on the desirability of wheat cultivation and bread consumption served the overlapping aims of complying with Christian imperatives to make the land fruitful, improving the moral and spiritual good of Maori, civilizing them, and assisting the process of colonization. Among the more pragmatic reasons was the ever present need for missions to be self-sufficient and to feed the students who attended their schools. Moreover, given the widespread acceptance of philosopher John Locke’s theory that those who used the land most productively had the greatest moral right to its ownership, it was sometimes evident that missionary encouragement was intended to head off settler attempts to deprive Maori of their land on the basis that they were not meeting this requirement.
The seemingly insatiable settler demand for freehold land heightened tensions between Maori and the government, but the relationship between the government and the Church Missionary Society in particular was one of mutual support. Government officials expected that converting the indigenous population to more intensive farming methods would free up more land for settler occupation, while missionaries wanted a settled congregation to preach to. The Reverend John Morgan, based at Otawhao in the Upper Waikato from 1841 to 1863, was an especially zealous promoter of wheat farming, flour milling, and bread baking. He explained his rationale to his superiors in London by saying, “Prone to wander and scatter themselves they will by the growing of wheat and building of mills be drawn together to certain favourable localities within 25 miles round the mission station, by which the visiting of each tribe will become more regular and easy.”14
As the practical, spiritual, and “scientific” motivations behind missionary endeavors to convert Maori to wheat growing and a flour-based diet were always intertwined, so, too, were those driving government policies aimed at the same ends. However, the connections between Christianity, wheat growing, and “improvement” were often evident, as in November 1842 when the assistant protector of Aborigines, Edward Shortland, was pleased to report an increase in the number of Christians among the people living at Te Tapiri, near Matamata. A “remarkably elegant chapel” had been built there by the local chief Wiremu Tamihana, he said. “Improvements seem[ed] to be going on with spirit, & [he] was much pleased to observe several acres of flourishing wheat” in the neighborhood as well.
During his first governorship of New Zealand, from 1845 to 1853, George Grey supported missionary efforts to promote wheat cultivation with gifts of seed, farming implements, loans to purchase handoperated or water-powered flour mills, and he sometimes supplied agricultural instructors at government expense. Put in place immediately following a rebellion by a number of tribal groups in Northland, this policy saw an enormous growth in Maori wheat and flour production. Popularly called his “flour and sugar” policy, the strategy was intended to reduce the chance of further rebellion as well as make the new colony self-supporting.
John Morgan was particularly adept at drawing government support for his mission. His correspondence with Grey was businesslike, hitting all the political and financial buttons the governor would have been looking for, while biblical metaphors were restricted to his journal and letters to fellow missionaries. One such letter, written to the secretary of the CMS in London, exemplifies the direct connections between Christianity, civilization, and a Western diet that were frequently evident. It asked whether “so many of the rising generation” should be allowed to die for want of improper food, or whether efforts should be made “to save the race by the blessings of christianity and civilization”?15
An article in a government-sponsored newspaper contained all the common messages including the religious significance of wheat. It began by reminding Maori readers that Providence had placed among them “a civilized, energetic, and industrious race—the English,” that former forests and swamps (where they had long caught birds and eels) were now “corn fields and meadows,” and that their duty was to progress, not retrograde for to retrograde was to perish. The writer, who called himself “a friend in Auckland,” told them not to merely grow potatoes for their own consumption but to “become agriculturists in the true sense of the word,—GROW WHEAT.” Wheat, it continued, had been the “staff of life” from the earliest ages, the “most distinguished nations of the earth” had always cultivated wheat as their principal article of food, and Christians regarded it “as a blessing only second to Revelation.” Potatoes, he continued, had a much more recent provenance, the market was a small one, and “experience” had taught “that from its exclusive use as food an infinite variety of social evils will always spring.” So, even the potatoes beloved by mariners as a convenient, storable food that warded off scurvy, were not fit for civilized people.
This article went on to explain that wheat cultivation would force a number of the arts of civilization upon their attention with opportunities for acquiring knowledge and rising in humanity. Wheat was “gold” and, having been blessed by Nature, “ever proved the fruitful source of prosperity” and a means to preserve the Maori race.16 This advice was published in 1851 when the Irish potato famine of the 1840s would still have been fresh in the minds of the settlers. But the idea that wheat was superior to potatoes was in place well before that. The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1836, for example, proclaimed that “the potato, useful as it is, will always be pauper-food; while wheat is the staff of independent life.”17 Thomas Chapman reflected these ideas when he expressed the hope that the building of flour mills would induce Maori to increase their wheat cultivation so that “the blessing of God [would] introduce a better system than their present one of potatoes only.”18
Potatoes may have been denigrated before the Irish famine highlighted the dangers of relying totally on that crop, but the sacred nature of bread was very clear in an article entitled “The Arabs’ Respect for Bread” that appeared in a later Maori-language newspaper. Indicative of the writer’s perception as much as the lessons it sought to impart, the item explained that when an Arab drops a crumb of bread he takes it in his right hand, kisses it, and presses it to his forehead before placing it on a fence or branch for a bird to eat. Everyone, it claimed, whether Arab or Christian, has respect for bread.19
The establishment of the British government had seen a number of officials add their support to missionary concerns about Maori diet. For example, in 1844, John Fitzgerald, medical officer to the Maori of Wellington, gave advice concerning the care of mothers and newborns in the government-sponsored newspaper Ko te Karere o Nui Tireni. He not only recommended a diet of fresh pork, poultry, fish, and flour mixed with sugar as the most suitable for babies but also stressed the importance of mothers abstaining from fermented foods in order to improve the quality of breast milk and avoid the many illnesses said to result from a bad maternal diet.20
The settler government even sought to legislate against the consumption of fermented or, as they preferred to call it, “rotten” food. In 1860, the country’s first chief justice, Sir William Martin, proposed to outlaw “eating rotton [sic] food, rotton corn [maize] or potatoes &c.; causing another person to eat such food; making, pits for sleeping [perhaps “steeping?”] and preparing such food.” The penalties for involvement in such activities were to be stiff: “not less than five shillings, or more than twenty shillings. And upon conviction of the offence the Kai-whakawa [Magistrate] shall certify to the runanga [Maori district council], and the runanga shall cause such food or the pits for making the same to be destroyed.”21
The missionary brethren had an equally strong aversion to the various fermented foods that Maori enjoyed. A particular favorite was kanga pirau, or fermented maize, which many early European visitors referred to as “putrid maize,” “rotten corn,” or “stinking corn.” Although bread, wine, and cheese depend on fermentation processes for their production, these were clearly recognized as “civilized” food. Fermented maize, cooked and eaten as a sort of porridge, was condemned explicitly but also implicitly by classifying it as putrid, rotten, stinking, or decayed.
The connection between fermented maize and a lack of both civilization and Christian sensitivity was evident when Reverend Benjamin Ashwell expressed his disappointment in a young Maori man who had been “brought up in the best society,” educated by an officer of the East India Company, and taken to Calcutta, Sydney, and elsewhere but who was, by 1851, living with the Ngati Pou tribe. Ashwell clearly considered the young man to have retrograded. He told the Church Missionary Society in London that this man had returned to New Zealand in his late teens and been tattooed (a sign that he had rejected Christianity and “civilization”). Now “a complete Native, wearing a Blanket and eating decayed corn,” Ashwell attributed “his ingratitude and return to Barbarism” to “a want of Christian principle.”22
Although, on the one hand, missionaries condemned the eating of fermented foods, on the other, they and other Europeans often complained of a lack of variety in their diet. Thomas Chapman was deeply grateful when a Maori teacher from the East Coast gave him some flour as a gift because, he said, his health soon suffered if he ate “more than a very small quantity of vegetable food.”23
Flour and bread, frequently recommended as the ideal infant foods, were also closely connected with the concept of wholesomeness, which embodied ideas of both physical and spiritual health. During 1851, Jane Woon, wife of the Wesleyan William Woon, advised a Maori woman whose child persisted in eating fermented maize to take him inland where there was a flour mill in order to “get him some wholesome bread.”24 Government newspapers agreed with her prescription, advising that flour was the “first thing necessary for children,”25 although it was sometimes mentioned that baked flour was actually better for infants than bread: “There are only two kinds of food really necessary for children, flour, baked, or made into bread, and milk. Arrowroot, rice, sago, are all good, specially for babies, who like change of food, but most children thrive on bread and milk. Flour baked in a pot till dry is better for babies than bread.”26
Government and Christian-sponsored newspapers in the Maori language extolled the virtues and wholesomeness of wheat farming and a flour-based diet, and instances of Maori growing wheat, milling flour, and eating bread (of which there were many) were applauded.
Neither fermented food nor potatoes were considered “wholesome,” but bread was especially so, as the Reverend Alfred Brown noted in January 1849 when Maori in his area had begun to bake in the European style. His journal recorded a twenty-five-mile walk after morning service when,“instead of being laden as usual with potatoes as food for our journey,” the Maori who accompanied him “had a large supply of wholesome home-baked bread, for they have become of late on a very extensive scale, practical farmers, millers and bakers.” “The Natives have named their pa [fort] Samaria,” he added.27
Charles Hursthouse appealed to potential immigrants’ desire for wholesomeness when he told how the “cultivation of a new country materially improves its climate” and how land once “fertile only in miasma” was converted into “wholesome plains of fruit and grass and grain” by the plow.28 A sense of purity and wholesomeness was even perceived in the machinery used to process wheat. Thomas Chapman recorded a visit to a Maori village in the Bay of Plenty where, having turned a corner, he found “a new patent Flour Mill, just purchased, having a pack of dirty, very common playing cards, lying carelessly on its top.”29 His reaction invokes a sense that the purity and virtue of the mill had been violated by unwholesome playing cards.
High Maori mortality rates in the early decades of European contact related in large part to their lack of immunity to newly introduced diseases, but medical science had not yet recognized this. Instead, Western ways of living, together with a Western diet—both considered more wholesome—were recommended to counter poor health statistics.
Because poor health and high death rates among Maori children were frequently associated with a lack of flour in the diet, the government’s Maori newspaper explained that “the greatest wealth a man can have is his children, ‘a gift and heritage which cometh from the Lord.’” The article exhorted Maori leaders to stop the evil. “In areas near the East Cape, the people have cows, and milk them, and the women make large loaves of bread,” it said. “They bake them in iron pots [and] in those parts the children have began to multiply again.” At Otawhao, it reported: “the children in Mr. Morgan’s [mission] school have milk and bread all the year and only one dies in a year for 84 who live. In the Maori villages, where the children eat potatoes only and rotten corn, one dies every year out of 34.”30 In order to encourage English-style baking and cooking and increase consumption of flour-based foods, instructions for making leaven, bread, and plum pudding often appeared in Maori newspapers from the late 1840s on.31
The ownership of a flour mill would surely bolster production and consumption. At Otamarora in the Bay of Plenty region, both Christian and non-Christian groups wanted a water-powered flour mill, but the latter lacked the wherewithal to complete such a project on their own. So, after some negotiation, the “heathens” agreed to help the Christians build a new chapel before a jointly owned and operated mill was constructed.32
Practical support in acquiring flour mills was often dependent on sponsorship from an influential missionary. For some missionaries, it was also the key to gaining converts albeit, perhaps, on a superficial level, but the ability to influence government in granting loans or other assistance could be a two-edged sword. The Anglican Reverend Taylor must have felt this when he was locked into a “souls for flourmills” battle with the Catholic Father Lampila along the Whanganui River.
Lampila had a material advantage in the form of a lay brother who was also a millwright. This vexed Taylor, who feared that his previous and potential converts were being tempted by the “Papists’” offers of subsidized flour mills. He protested that these were “a snare of Satan to entrap their souls.”33 Having learned that two of his Maori teachers had allowed the Catholics to construct mills for their people, he expressed disappointment that they connected mill building with religion.34
Because subscribing to Christian tenets was so often the key to gaining support, Maori did perceive close connections between religion and flour mills and sought to better their chances of receiving this material support by emphasizing their piety. So, when a group of chiefs from Manawatu wrote to Governor Grey asking for a plow and “small hand mill,” they explained that these would assist them to grow and grind wheat while they were “engaged in greater pursuits.”35 Europeans certainly interpreted the appearance of flour mills, churches, Western implements, and farm animals as confirmation of their success in converting and civilizing their charges.
John Morgan had introduced wheat to Otawhao, and his relationship with Grey had allowed him to introduce agricultural machinery and water-powered flour mills to the area as well. As a result, Otawhao and the nearby settlement of Rangiaowhia came to be considered “model villages,” providing the young capital of Auckland with essential food supplies.36 But Morgan’s zeal was not appreciated by his superiors, who accused him of neglecting his religious duties. Thomas Chapman was one who chastised him for overemphasizing civilization through agriculture: “we must never forget that civilization itself cannot illuminate the darkness of the heart … and that large barns and stacks of corn, cannot give your people, the peace of God which passes all understanding.”37
Morgan responded that his congregation’s “wandering habits prevented their advancement in civilization and Christianity” and that his agricultural instruction kept “each little party continually under the sound of the Gospel,” as well as providing them with better food and other benefits. “Civilisation,” he added, was necessary for Maori to build churches and to support their ministers and mission schools.38
The plow and plowing, which the Bible refers to as representing virtuous labor and peaceful productivity rather than idleness, were as symbolically important in the New Zealand context as they were elsewhere. From around 1840, when Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton published The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy, biblical metaphors relating to the plow acquired “scientific” substance. The idea that the introduction of the plow into a society represented the advent of civilization was promoted and accepted even into the latter half of the twentieth century.
Maori may not have understood the Western concept of “civilization,” but metaphorical links between agriculture and peace were crosscultural and, in this context, wheat growing became the supreme example. An English language newspaper found it “positively delightful … to hear how the tea and fern scrubs are giving place to the wheat and barley closes; how the wilderness is becoming rich with the fruits of agriculture,—how lone, and but recently savage streams are being dotted with busy mills, and how, in reality and practical truth, the plough is superseding the musket.”39 So, through European eyes, “savage” streams could be pacified by “busy” flour mills, but Maori were also adamant that agriculture and the adoption of Western farming practices signified their peaceful intent.
In 1857, one month before hostilities broke out over who had the right to sell lands in the Hawke’s Bay for European settlement, a group of local chiefs wrote to the regional newspaper. They confirmed that they welcomed settlers in their area and that they intended to follow “those pursuits that will tend to advance and improve our condition; such as the erection of flour-mills, the production of food, the breeding of sheep, and so forth.”40 Six years later, when their new flour mill was commissioned, they publicly welcomed other tribes as well as European settlers to the opening celebrations. The event conformed to the customary practice of holding a feast to strengthen bonds of friendship and good relations between communities. The mill owners sought to reassure the settlers of their safety while battles were now raging elsewhere.41
In 1860, when war had broken out in Taranaki, the government was anxious to shore up support from tribes not then involved, and their attestations of loyalty often made explicit reference to wheat and flour production. Hakopa Te Waharoa, for example, referred to Romans 6:23 when he deplored murder and confirmed his people’s commitment to “ploughing the land for wheat, potatoes and corn for us to sell.”42
At a subsequent conference between government representatives and noncombatant leaders, William Nero Te Awaitaia gave his understanding of the missionary message and the material benefits they claimed would accompany Christian belief: “There is a fountain above in Heaven and from this fountain the Earth is supplied. The Missionaries came bringing what they had received from Heaven for the salvation of the soul, and they made their errand clear.”43
Peace is closely associated with loyalty, and both require reciprocity. So when the wheat and flour market collapsed in the mid-1850s, and Maori were effectively disenfranchised by the establishment of a settler government at much the same time, John Morgan was very disappointed by the consequences. In 1858, the Waikato tribes among whom he had been working with so much apparent success established their own king. Te Wherowhero was to be a protector for Maori interests in partnership with Queen Victoria, but the settler government interpreted his appointment as a threat to British sovereignty, and, after the outbreak of war, the king’s followers did eventually join the “rebel” side. Maori were divided politically into pro- and antigovernment factions, with the psychological and ideological associations, in this milieu, between the British queen and flour often evident. The inherent symbolisms had become closely associated with the Maori-British alliance, and, consequently, those who remained loyal to the government were associated with the foods they had introduced. Richard Taylor recorded one example of this, a derisory chant which linked “sugar, flour, biscuit, and tea consumers” with worthless people who should be banished to Europe.44 On the other hand, those tribal groups that chose not to fight with the “rebels” understood that by engaging in activities associated with peace they were also demonstrating their loyalty.
Further to the east, on the Mahia Peninsula, is the site of an old pa named Kaiuku (clay eating). The name derives from an incident that occurred around 1830 when the people were besieged by other tribes from the Waikato region. After two months their food supplies ran out and they were forced to survive on a diet of blue clay, found in the cliffs, which they mixed with water and boiled in much the same way as missionaries prepared flour. That incident was recalled some thirty years later when wars again raged in the area—this time between the British and their supporters, on one hand, and “rebel” tribes known as “Hauhau,” on the other. The Hauhau were supporters of a millennial religious movement which combined Jewish and Christian elements with Maori beliefs. During this period, those loyal to the British are said to have remarked, “The Waikatos gave them clay, but the Queen gave them flour.”45 This was a direct allusion to the metaphorical connections between flour and the alliance with the British.
Still later, in 1878, a Maori newspaper reported that a Taranaki leader named Te Kahui was encouraging his people to plant wheat at Te Waimate because planting crops was preferable to fighting.46 This was significant because Taranaki was where war had broken out in 1860, and Te Kahui had more recently worked with the prophets Te Whiti o Rongomai III and Tohu Kakahi who adopted strategies of peaceful resistance. A modern township had developed under their leadership at a place called Parihaka, which their people refused to vacate after the government confiscated it as retribution for alleged rebellion. Tensions were mounting, but, rather than offer armed resistance, the people of Parihaka responded by disrupting the work of surveyors and asserting their ownership rights by plowing land that was being occupied by European settlers. Despite the symbolisms, this considered policy of peaceful protest was not appreciated by the government, which sent more than fifteen hundred soldiers to Parihaka to remove the community by force.
As they approached the village on November 5, 1881, the troops were met in a traditional Taranaki way by women who bade them welcome with poi (balls attached to a cord and used to accentuate a dance). After them came a line of two hundred small boys and then about sixty girls with skipping ropes. The children offered the soldiers some of the five hundred loaves of freshly baked bread that had been prepared to share with the “visitors.” But their intimations of peace were ignored, and, as the people huddled together, the troops closed in, destroying their gardens, demolishing their houses, raping the women, and arresting the men who were held without trial for several years.
As this incident indicates, semiotic connections between agriculture and peace readily crossed cultural boundaries. The Maori word rongo and the god of the same name embrace both meanings. So the symbolisms that linked agriculture, and especially wheat growing, with peace were not difficult for Maori to understand, and they often made this understanding explicit, especially when addressing missionaries or government officials or soliciting assistance: “Europeans and Maori will work together in peaceful activities like this [flour] mill”47 and “I will only fight with a mill. My head shall be down and my heels up in working at a mill. Give a mill, a mill.”48
The association between wheat growing and peace appears to have been adopted readily, but the fear engendered by the destructive effects of food on tapu took much longer to overcome. For example, some young chiefs who accompanied missionary Richard Davis on a journey in 1833 had been “very particular as to what burden they carried”49 They could not carry bags containing flour. This was because, after the head, the back is the most tapu part of the body, so contact between food and a chief’s back could have deadly consequences. As this and other similar reports reveal, the rules of tapu applied equally to “foreign” food as to items of customary diet—although there was sometimes confusion as Maori began to respond to Christian teachings. One man asked Richard Taylor whether he could still eat his produce because someone had “dropped down dead in his cultivation,” which, in Maori terms, would previously have rendered it tapu and therefore unsafe.50
Samuel Marsden was distressed when Ruatara, the chief who first introduced wheat cultivation into New Zealand, became ill soon after the first mission was established and was forbidden by his tohunga to eat or drink for five days for reasons of tapu. He wrote that his friend had been accustomed to eating bread, rice, and sugar and to drinking tea and wine, and he feared that this prohibition had made his death inevitable.51 Nine years later, when the Reverend Samuel Leigh sought to administer medicine to another Northland chief, he had to wait while protective rituals were undertaken by a tohunga with a prepared basket of kumara. Some two weeks later they called on another man who was laid up with a bad leg. After dressing the leg, Leigh took a piece of bread from his pocket and gave it to the man in the hope of inducing him to violate the tapu, which, he hoped, would help to lessen its force and open the way for Christian conversion. Initially agitated, the man eventually overcame his fear and took the bread, placing it by his side. The missionary felt that his anxiety was heightened by the presence of an aged chief, but the patient turned to the old man explaining that the Europeans claim “our tapu is of the devil.” Another chief who was present responded by permitting the missionary to dress his brother’s leg, but prohibiting him from visiting any other sick people.52 Interactions such as this gradually chipped away at long-held beliefs, but Maori were also using bread in their own ways, too.
One of the key reasons for Maori agreeing to sign the Treaty of Waitangi was to protect their lands, which had often been subject to unscrupulous claims of purchase by Britons and other foreigners. So, when the New Zealand Company laid claim to land that the local Ngati Toa people denied having sold and dispatched surveyors to those lands in early 1843, the Ngati Toa chiefs evicted the surveyors and burned the temporary shelters they had erected. Police magistrate Henry Thompson and company representative Captain Arthur Wakefield responded by arming some of the settlers and attempting to arrest the chiefs for arson. The ensuing hostilities resulted in the death of twenty-two Europeans, including Wakefield, and at least four Maori. Giving evidence subsequently, Reverend Samuel Ironside recounted that when Wakefield’s body was found a piece of bread or damper had been placed under his head. Asked whether he was “aware of any native custom which would account for this being done,” he replied: “The head of a chief is held sacred, and nothing common should come near it; and therefore bread, being common, and being placed there, it was intended as an insult.”53
In the days before Christian influence, when a person died inside a house, it was burned down to remove the spiritual potency of the deceased person, but, because modern homes are a more permanent and expensive asset, the practice has been replaced by a ritual called takahi whare. This ceremonial walking through the deceased person’s home after burial is accompanied by a prayer or incantation to lift the tapu and render it safe for the living to reoccupy. For some Northland Maori, this involves touching the walls of the house with bread, a practice that seems to follow the earlier pattern in which a cooked kumara might be used to lift the tapu from a newly built meeting house.54 Also in Northland, at Te Karetu, Ngati Manu mourners are cleansed of tapu following a funeral by the application of water and the sprinkling of small pieces of bread over the body.55 It involves the sprinkling of water in other communities, too, but among the Tuhoe people it may also require the tohunga to consume the bread used in the ritual. This is so the evil influences may be absorbed into the bread and removed through the digestive process.56
So Maori did not merely grow and eat the new crop but absorbed bread into their own spiritual practices. By turning to Christianity, they had adopted many of the understandings, rituals, and festivals associated with the faith, too. For example, the Reverend Thomas Samuel Grace was very pleased when, in March 1852, he was invited to an English-style “Harvest Home” put on by East Coast Maori who had been entertained in the same way at the mission school a short time before. Roast pork, potatoes, and apple pudding were followed “by a plentiful supply of wellsweetened tea, and good bread and butter.”57 In the twenty-first century, bread and steamed pudding still feature strongly on the menu at Maori communal gatherings.
As missionaries and government had multiple motives for promoting wheat production and flour consumption among Maori, Maori, too, had multiple motives for growing it and producing flour. In practical terms, it offered a more reliable food supply than their previous crops and was a profitable trade item. On another level, though, the implications of loyalty and peaceful intent served to bolster good relationships with the Crown, which, in turn, brought material advantages such as schools, employment contracts, loans to purchase trading ships, flour mills, and other benefits. However, these innovations were also infused with their own spiritual restraints. So, for reasons of tapu, laundry and swimming were prohibited in waterways that powered flour mills and thus produced food. In fact, during the mid nineteenth century, the name of one stream on the Whanganui River was renamed Kaukore, meaning “no swimming” as an ever present reminder.
In 1861 one chief expressed the opinion, unthinkable today, that his language ought to die with his generation: “as the taste of the fern-root and the mamaku will be lost with the old men who are now passing away. Let the tongues which have tasted of English food only utter the language of the great nation.” Clearly, this man had adopted the missionaries’ linking of “English” food with other aspects of the “Christianity-civilization” package, as had others apparently, because the magistrate who reported his speech claimed that his view was “warmly supported.”58
In the twentieth century, when giving evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal in support of a claim asserting that the Maori language was a taonga, or treasure, that the government was obliged to protect under the treaty, the prominent Maori leader Sir James Henare recalled a visit by a school inspector during his childhood. The inspector told him and his fellow pupils that “English is the bread-and-butter language, and if you want to earn your bread and butter you must speak English.”59 Given the religious connotations of bread instilled by Christian missionaries, its application as a metaphor for something mundane or commonplace is somewhat ironic. Those missionaries of a hundred years earlier could not have known that, in the Christian Maori era, the significance of bread did not diminish but instead expanded to fulfill additional spiritual functions.
Notes
1. Genesis 1:28–30.
2. Salmond, Two Worlds, 356; and Crozet, Crozet’s Voyage to Tasmania, 27, 75.
3. Crozet, Crozet’s Voyage to Tasmania, 27, 75; and Salmond, Two Worlds, 406.
4. Colenso, “Contributions Towards a Better Knowledge,” 35. Some tribal groups consider Rongo to be a son of Tane, god of the forest, and grandson of Rangi and Papa.
5. The Revd. Samuel Marsden to Messrs. Kendall, Hall, King, Carlisle, and Gordon, February 24, 1819, in Elder, The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden, 233.
6. Strachan, The Life of the Rev. Samuel Leigh, 155.
7. John Butler, Earliest New Zealand, 217 and 263.
8. Morgan, “Letters and Journals,” September 1, 1846, MS 213.
9. White, The Ancient History of the Maori, 10:125, http://www.nzetc.org.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-WhiAnci.html (June 10, 2009).
10. “History and Traditions of the Taranaki Coast: The Wreck of the ‘Harriett’ 1834,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 19, no. 13 (1910): 109.
11. Beattie, “Traditions and Legends,” 129.
12. Meredith, “A Half-Caste on the Half-Caste.”
13. James Busby to the chiefs and people of New Zealand, May 17, 1833, cited in Marshall, Personal Narrative of Two Visits to New Zealand, 337.
14. John Morgan, Report of the Otawhao Station for the year 1852, transcript, Morgan, “Letters and Journals,” vol. 3, MS 213.
15. Morgan to Venn, July 1, 1852, Morgan, “Letters and Journals,” vol. 3, MS 213.
16. Maori Messenger: Ko te Karere Maori, August 14, 1851, 2.
17. Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1836, 390.
18. Chapman, “Journal,” February 12, 1855, typescript, MS 56.
19. Te Korimako, February 22, 1887, 5.
20. Te Karere o Nui Tireni, August 1, 1844, 40.
21. Maori Messenger: Ko te Karere Maori, July 31, 1860, 5.
22. Ashwell to CMS, July 28, 1851, Letters and Journals.
23. Andrews, No Fear of Rusting, 198.
24. Woon, “Extract from His Journal,” June 30, 1851.
25. Maori Messenger: Ko te Karere Maori, November 15, 1859, 3.
26. Ibid.
27. Brown, “Journal, 1835–1859,” January 15, 1849, MSS and Archives A-179. Spelled Hamaria in Maori, this settlement was on the shore of Lake Taupo. The place is now called Hallett’s Bay.
28. Hursthouse, New Zealand, 110–111.
29. Chapman, “Journal,” June 21, 1848, vol. 1, MS 56.
30. Maori Messenger: Ko te Karere Maori, August 15, 1859, 4.
31. For example, Maori Messenger: Ko Te Karere Maori, November 22, 1849; Ko Aotearoa, January 1, 1862, 30; and Manuhiri Tuarangi, May 15, 1861, 16.
32. Chapman, “Journal,” July 28, 1856, MS 56.
33. Taylor, “Journal,” October 29, 1852, typescript, MS 302.
34. Ibid., October 31, 1853.
35. Hori Takerei, Maka Te Papa, Ngawena Tamarua, and Ngawaka to Grey, July 20, 1853, Letter 411, GNZMA.
36. Howe, “Morgan.”
37. Chapman to Morgan, January 1852, Morgan, “Letters and Journals,” vol. 3, MS 213.
38. Morgan to Chapman, March 4, 1852, Morgan, “Letters and Journals,” vol. 3, MS 213.
39. Daily Southern Cross, February 25, 1851, 2.
40. Hawkes Bay Herald, October 10, 1857, 3; Supplement to the New Zealander, November 4, 1857, 2.
41. Te Waka Maori o Ahuriri, July 11, 1863, 3, July 25, 1863, 1–2.
42. Maori Messenger: Te Karere Maori, May 31, 1860, 11.
43. Maori Messenger: Ko Te Karere Maori, June 30, 1860, 2–13.
44. Taylor, The Past and Present of New Zealand, 133–134 (translation mine, but based on Taylor’s).
45. White, The Ancient History of the Maori, 21:166.
46. Te Wananga, March 23, 1878, 127.
47. Te Waka Maori o Ahuriri, August 8, 1863, 2 (my translation).
48. Enclosure 1 in Wynyard to Grey, February 22, 1855, British Parliamentary Papers, 10:86–90.
49. Church Missionary Society, Missionary Register, December 1835, 555.
50. Taylor, “Journal,” June 22, 1850, vol. 7, typescript, MS 302.
51. Elder, The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden, 212.
52. Strachan, The Life of the Rev. Samuel Leigh, 187.
53. Wakefield, Adventure in New Zealand, 395.
54. Sadler, “A Clash of Cultures.”
55. Munn, “Ngati Manu,” 86.
56. McNeill, “Te Hau Ora,” 179.
57. Brittan et al., Pioneer Missionary, 31–32.
58. William B. Baker, resident magistrate to the native secretary, January 3, 1862, no. 2, E no. 9, sec. v, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 5.
59. Report of the Te Reo Maori Claim, 3.2.6, http://www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz/…/2580F91B-5D6F-46F4-ADE0-BC27CA535C01.pdf (September 13, 2009). The Waitangi Tribunal was established to consider claims by Maori against the Crown regarding breaches of principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.