Maori tribes have a long history of fighting each other since they arrived in New Zealand around 1250AD. Each new influx of arrivals from the islands found numerous people living here, many of whom were killed so that the newcomers could take over.
In Maori society, there were many reasons to take up arms. Tribes needed to hold on to their land and food resources so had to repel attacks. Young men were trained for war and lived to establish a reputation by success on the battlefield.
There was also the culture of violent revenge for deaths and insults. Revenge could be exacted by taking action against people totally unrelated to the source of the insult.
Muskets, which were first used in these tribal conflicts in 1807, vastly escalated the carnage.
Author John Robinson, a mathematician and physicist with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gives an introduction to the movement of war parties from 1800 while bearing in mind that the full story is complicated.
He said that historian James Rutherford estimated 35,400 probable deaths in 633 battles between 1800 and 1840.
But Robinson cited Tamehana Te Rauparaha’s accounts of his father’s battles in which more were killed after the fighting than in the battles. For one group of battles, 1700 were killed in conflict while 3500 women and children were slain for the following cannibal feasts.
Society was disrupted as many were driven from their traditional lands into the bush while fertile land like Taranaki, the Auckland isthmus, and Hawke’s Bay, were all left empty.
Add to that the practice of killing baby girls to make way for boys who could grow into warriors, which reduced the breeding stock of women and young girls. This caused a further population loss that did not turn around until after 1890.
Robinson calculated that the Maori population declined from 137,500 in 1800 to 71,600 in 1840. The first census of 1857 recorded a Maori population of 56,000.
Robinson said that the mayhem caused by incessant fighting prompted some of the more thoughtful chiefs to ask whether there was a better way of resolving conflicts.
“This is what many Maori recognised when they asked the British to ‘give us the law’, to replace the anarchy of inter-tribal warfare,” Robinson wrote.
Fighting in the Musket Wars created a genocide which left a harmed and struggling population. Robinson’s account undermines the official narrative, that Maori lived in a peaceful and superior wonderland until the wicked white coloniser came along and wrecked it all.
Unrestrained slaughter – The Maori Musket Wars 1800-1840, John Robinson, Tross Publishing, 130 pages, illustrated, $30 (including postage) from www.trosspublishing.co.nz or from Paper Plus.
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