Bruce Moon: The so-called ”Littlewood treaty” is vitally important!

“An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it”.

William Bernbach.

 

William Hobson was not a free agent.  He was appointed by Lord Normanby, Colonial Secretary, on behalf of the British Crown to negotiate with the Maori chiefs with the prospect of a British colony being established in New Zealand.   A 4200 word brief was issued to him before his departure from England.

 

A successful negotiation would require a document composed in the language of the chiefs and duly signed by them, or at least the great preponderance of them, setting out the basis on which a British colony might be established.   Cession of sovereignty over the entire country was a prime prospect. 

Hobson was not a speaker of any form of the Maori language.[i]  Thus it is beyond any possibility of doubt that there must have been a document written in English from which the Williams, father and son, produced the version in the Ngapuhi dialect of Maori which, with one word changed on review in the morning, became known as the “Treaty of Waitangi”.  That document in English can only have been written on 4th February 1840.

 

Hobson, having made little progress in preceding days in drafting a document in English with his snobbish secretary, Freeman, sought an alternative.  On the evening of 2nd February he sent George Cooper of his staff to Busby with the rough and inadequate earlier draft material, with a request that he draft something more suitable.[ii]  Busby after all had some experience of such activities, the initial draft in English of the fatuous “Declaration of Independence” being mostly his work.

 

Busby set to work with a will next day (3rd) and by that evening had produced something useful for Hobson to work on.  He had also arranged with James Clendon, trader, British subject and American consul for Hobson’s final drafting session next day (4th) to be held at the spacious home of Clendon who also provided materials from his own private stock.  This included paper watermarked “W Tucker 1833” which he used for his consular despatches, quite distinct from that used in the preceding efforts of Hobson, Freeman and Busby[iii] and for other official purposes.

 

Thus equipped and with Busby as scribe, Hobson proceeded to produce the final version in English of his prospective treaty.  By mid-afternoon on 4th February this had been achieved,  Busby finishing off the document with “Done at Waitangi on the 4^th Feb 1840.”  What could have been more accurate and normal than that?

 

Hobson then took this document “across the water” to the Paihia mission station where he requested Henry Williams to produce an appropriate translation by morning.  This the Williams succeeded in doing, with one sole addition: the inclusion of the word “maori”[iv] in Article third, since it was not intended to convey the privileges of British citizenship to foreigners and existing British subjects had them already.

 

That the Williams added “maori” subsequent to the composition of Hobson’s text is yet another proof, if further proof be needed, that Hobson’s English text, the so-called “Littlewood treaty”, was written prior to the drafting of the Maori language text![v]  It was correctly dated 4th February, Busby fully aware that he had invited chiefs to a major meeting the next day.[vi]  No other date is possible.

 

That the Williams’ text was a first class translation is a not a matter for doubt,   Edward Williams who had arrived in New Zealand at the age of four being in the words of his future brother-in-law Hugh Carlton, a scholar of the Ngapuhi dialect “facile princeps” ‒ “easily best”.  Of course in some instances the Williams had to choose existing Maori words which were at best approximations to the English concepts expressed in Hobson’s English version of 4th February.  Thus in Article second for “possession”, an ill-defined concept to traditional Maori thinking[vii]with no obvious word for it in their language, the Williams chose “tino rangatiratanga”.  Moreover, and this is a point conspicuously overlooked or ignored by most latter-day commentators, it was assured to “tangata katoa o Nu Tirani”  This unequivocally means “all the people of New Zealand” and “all” means “all’’  Any claim that Article second guaranteed sovereignty to any Maori is nothing but pork-barrel politicking.

 

Since both the Williams’ text in Maori and Hobson’s final English text of 4th February[viii] were read out[ix] to the 5th February meeting and no objections raised, we may take it that this translation was fully acceptable at the time.

 

Moreover, when senior Ngapuhi elder Graham Rankin was shown both in 2000, he said that their meanings were the same.  Got that, New Zealanders?  Does this not suggest that the so-called “Littlewood Treaty”, though not actually a treaty in itself, is a quite important foundation document of our nation, informal though it may be asserted to be?

 

But, oh! No! Not to the experts, Claudia Orange for one.  Writing three years after it was found: “it looked very like a translation of the Maori version ... It may date from the 1850s.  The  watermark of 1833 may simply indicate it was paper that was hanging around the solicitor’s office.”[x]  As we have noted some time ago, this is speculation, not scholarship.

 

Of Orange’s book,  originally published in 1987, entitled  “The Treaty of Waitangi” based on her thesis for a doctoral degree accepted by the University of Auckland, a second edition appeared in 2011 entitled “The Story of a Treaty”.  Readers may judge for themselves whether the time to read it would be well spent!

 

A similarly fatuous excuse was offered by Margaret Wilson, then Associate Minister of Justice,

in responding on 27 September 2004 to a correspondent’s ‘Official Information request’.[xi]  “A written treaty ... has no validity unless signed by both parties.  The ‘Littlewood Treaty’ was not signed.”  If Wilson cannot comprehend the difference between an important draft and a (so-called) treaty as executed,  then one might seriously question her fitness for the office which she held.

  

In further dismissing the so-called “Littlewood treaty”, Wilson goes on to refer to Schedule One of the profoundly flawed Treaty of Waitangi Act, 1975.   There it is legislated that “the Treaty in English” is a Freeman fake “treaty in English”, used at Waikato Heads by Maunsell in an emergency for chiefs’ signatures when the only available Treaty text, a printed copy, had run out of room. 

 

This is no trivial matter because on this wholly spurious basis, many millions of dollars’ worth of fisheries and forest assets have been transferred by successive supine governments to increasingly rich tribal corporations.

 

FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE “LITTLEWOOD TREATY”

 

Clendon, as US Consul, had not been idle as befitted his responsibilities.  Thus he had his own notes of the Treaty text in English which he made during the drafting session of 4th February. Hence he was able to compose a text which he sent on 20th February 1840 to John Forsyth, U.S. Secretary of State.  It was in fact a very faithful copy of the “Littlewood treaty”, with of course the date of sixth February and correcting Busby’s error “sovreignty” where it occurred.[xii]

 

A significant arrival at the Bay of Islands on 29th March 1840 was Charles Wilkes,   Commodore of the American Antarctic Expeditionary squadron.  As Wilkes likewise reported to the U.S. Secretary of State: “I lost no time to inquire into the actual state of these islands.” Accordingly and via U,S. Consul Clendon, the actual “Littlewood” document. i.e. the final draft written by Busby, was provided to Wilkes by Lieutenant Shortland, administrator owing to Hobson’s illness,, since the copy made by Wilkes (or his writer) contains the actual spelling mistakes in that document as well as a few of his own!  This was sent by Wilkes to the U.S. authorities on 5th April as recorded in the letter book of Wilkes’ ship, “U.S.S. Vincennes”. While the originals of Wilkes’ papers are held in U.S.A., microfilm copies made in 1953 are held in the University of Auckland Library in Microfilm 1262.[xiii]  Any professional historian worthy of his or her salt should have found such records long ere now!!

 

The original “Littlewood” document was duly returned by Wilkes to Clendon but there it stopped until held in Clendon’s private papers by Henry Littlewood, Clendon’s solicitor.  And so Hobson’s critical final English text of the Treaty remained in Littlewood hands until discovered by Beryl Needham in 1989 amongst the personal effects of her recently deceased mother, Ethel Littlewood, grand-daughter of Henry.  Given its undoubted legitimacy, no translation of the Maori text of the actual treaty is needed by anyone![xiv]

 

This discovery should surely have been welcomed with delight. But oh! No!  Our second-rate “scholars” prefer to wallow in their own prejudices and dismiss a key document clearly expressing the concepts which are our true legacy from the earliest days of our existence as a nation.  The remedy lies in our own hands.

 

Bruce Moon

Nelson

Bruce Moon is a retired computer pioneer who wrote "Real Treaty; False Treaty - The True Waitangi Story".

 

POSTSCRIPT

So we “googled” and found that: “’tino rangatiratanga’ can mean ‘self-determination, sovereignty, independence, autonomy’. The term itself is rooted in a Māori worldview, and there is no one English term which fully encapsulates its meaning.”

 

Well, whoever wrote that was certainly carried way by his or her own rhetoric -  a really large bucketful and curious too, since in the pre-European “Maori worldview”, such concepts were so little comprehended or even imagined that there were no words for them in many cases  while cannibalism and slavery were ever-present horrors for the less fortunate members of Maori society

 

And in the second article of the ToW, remember, “tino rangatiratanga” is no more than the Williams’ translation of “possession” or, shall we say, s imply “ownership” of ordinary property, guaranteed to all of us and no Maori on that fateful day, 5th February 1840, said that was wrong.

 

So that is it!  But today it even has its own flag!  It has come a long way since it was concocted by earnest early British pioneers striving to create neo-Maori words for concepts which did not exist in their primitive language.  And one more thing: in comprehending the ToW, written in 1840, only the 1840 meaning counts!

 

---

[i]                       Notably Hobson took pains to learn one sentence “Hei iwi tahi tatou” - “We are one people now” - in                     anticipation of success.  (Note that recent commentators dispute the precise translation – that doesn’t                        matter.)

[ii]                      Exhaustively studied by such people as Ned Fletcher in recent times

[iii]                     For details, see M Doutré, “”The Littlewood Treaty ... Found”, ISBN 0-473-10140-8, 2005,p..9 et al.

[iv]                     As rendered in the version produced by mission printer, Colenso, to Hobson’s order.

[v]                      This important point first made by Doutré (personal communication)

[vi]                     M.Doutré, op.cit, p.77 (and also recorded by Buick)

[vii]                    As recounted by Maning: “Old New Zealand”,1 863

[viii]                   The “Littlewood Treaty” to latter-day pseudo-scholars!

[ix]                     By Henry Williams and Hobson respectively, as minuted by Colenso and checked by Busby

[x]                      C.Orange, “NZ Herald”, 11 September 1992, p.2

[xi]                     M.Doutré,op.cit., p.127

[xii]                    ibid, pp78-81

[xiii]                   ibid, p.99

[xiv]                    Note that recent cabinets, by contrast, have used Kawharu’s deeply flawed translation as authoritative.                    We note particularly, his use of the modern meaning of “taonga” instead of the very different 1840                  meaning, unforgivable in a knighted professor!