This is the third book in which Seed applies the discipline he gained earning a Bachelor of Engineering in electronics to New Zealand history.
In Hoani’s Last Stand (2022), he proves without doubt that no women and children were herded into a church at Rangiaowhia (near Te Awamutu) on February 21, 1864, and burnt to death by colonial troops, as has been frequently claimed.
Taonga and Contra Proferentem (2023) analyses two “very wobbly” legal constructs that the Waitangi Tribunal has used in decisions over 40 years.
The New Zealand wars have been investigated for 162 years and have generated successive compensation payments, the latest of which totals $4.6-billion.
The perception of these conflicts has changed radically over the years.
Described as “tribal rebellions” in legislation in 1863, and carved in stone as “the New Zealand wars” in 1929 at the Auckland Museum, I grew up in the 1950s referring to them as the “Maori wars” (my great grandfather fought in them).
They were recast as “land wars” by the Waitangi Tribunal and others from 1985 when a law change enabled the re-investigation of grievances back to 1840.
The spark for the 1860s wars was the offer to sell 600 acres in Waitara, Taranaki, in 1859, by a chief of the Te Ati Awa tribe, and the vehement opposition to the sale by another Te Ati Awa chief.
That escalated to sporadic armed conflict for 10 years in which 2899 people were killed and nearly a million hectares were confiscated (The total land area of New Zealand is 26.8-million hectares.)
A narrative that British colonisers tricked noble savages into letting them settle here and started stealing their land and when some chiefs stood up for their rights, they were killed and their land confiscated grew around the Waitangi Tribunal’s investigations.
However, Seed shows that the sequence of falling dominoes started in 1820, when chiefs starting using guns to embark on industrial-scale slaughter from which numerous tribes fled leaving vast areas without people.
Taranaki was such an area.
By 1840, when large numbers of British were on their way to New Zealand and when the British government offered peace and protection in return for the right to control New Zealand, large numbers of Maori were on board with the chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi, keen to leave behind permanent war, slavery, and the likelihood of being killed and eaten.
Yet, after 1840, successive British governors were both unable (insufficient resources) and reluctant (Maori kicked up a fuss) to deliver on the protection promise of the treaty by extending control, leaving Maori to look after their own affairs.
Having said that, the settler presence made dangerous and deserted areas (like Taranaki) safe for Maori, freed slaves returned. Peace and prosperity returned.
But old tribal grudges and aspirations remained, tribal controls had broken down, and anarchy spread, especially in areas without a settler presence.
That was the context in which Te Ati Awa chief Te Teira Manuka offered Governor Gore Browne his 600 acres in Waitara and another Te Ati Awa chief named Wiremu Kingi not only objected, but challenged the governor to fight, expecting him not to, and was most surprised that he did.
Seed presents “a 40-year chain of dominoes that relentlessly led to what we will find is a largely predictable conclusion” which was armed conflict to decide who was the boss – the British Queen or the Maori King.
Written in plain language, requiring no prior knowledge of anything, and asking nothing other the reader other than the ability to read, Seed says “it was written to make sense to me, an ordinary New Zealander, in the hope that it will do the same for other ordinary New Zealanders”.
The book does not play favourites. Everyone is judged by the same set of rules. Seed is not trying to prove anything. He is not pushing a narrative. There are no 21st century moral judgements imposed on 19th century words and deeds. He wrote:
Forty of the 77 sources listed in Seed’s selected bibliography were published in the 19th century sources, along with many more early newspaper articles.
Add to that, quotes from newspapers that recorded key events between 1820 and 1860, as well as settler eye-witness books, Seed provides a level of detail and humanity that does not appear in more recent broad-brush agenda-driven histories.
Only 17 of his sources were published after 1980, when history graduates found work with the Waitangi Tribunal to write a grievance history of the British settlement of New Zealand.
The key actors in this drama are:
Kingi says the war is about the existence of the Maori king and not Teira’s 600 acres (according to Wiremu Tamihana on p330 of Seed’s book).
Seed writes that “Teira’s offer is, in effect, a side show. What follows will not be a land-related contest between Teira and Kingi but a sovereignty related contest between Kingi and Browne.
Armed conflict spread to Waikato, the Bay of Plenty, to the East Coast and Hawkes Bay, morphing into fighting with different entities including Hauhaus and Te Kooti, and lasted for more than 10 years.
Large numbers of Maori fought for the government, motivated both by support for the new way that the governor brought as well as hatred from the Kingites and for what those tribes and others did to them in the 1820s.
The over-achieving first governor William Hobson and his success in gathering the signatures of 512 chiefs all over New Zealand on the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 is discussed somewhat in passing.
However, that treaty is covered in detail in exchanges between the fourth governor, Thomas Gore Browne, and Kingi.
The treaty that Gore Browne invokes and Kingi ignored was the original treaty in which chiefs ceded sovereignty (Article 1) in return for the status of British subjects (Article 3) whose property rights were confirmed (Article 2).
Of course, Gore Brown and Kingi were unaware of the other treaty, created by the Waitangi Tribunal 127 years later, in which chiefs allegedly merely allowed the governor to govern British settlers (Article 1) while chiefs could carry on exercising their “chiefly authority” or “rangatiratanga” (Article 2).
After the war, Kingi lived in seclusion, appearing in public in New Plymouth while he travelled to Parihaka where he finally settled, as the Wellington Independent reported on February 26, 1872.
Kingi rejected the Maori king yet benefited from Waikato support when under attack. He mostly profited from a close association with the settler government until he misread the wrong governor.
Seed produces evidence that Kingi was not a superior chief to Te Teira Manuka. In fact, all chains of authority in Te Ati Awa had broken down at that time, as had authority of other iwi in the area, and including those in Waikato. It was anarchy.
Current claims that sovereignty was not ceded in 1840, that Maori MPs are not subject to parliamentary rules, and that tribal businesses are tax exempt, all show that this battle over who is the boss of New Zealand continues to this day.
While offering no comment on New Zealand’s culture wars, Seed’s book totally undermines the current orthodoxy on history and the treaty.
The Spark, the Logs, and the Gasoline, Piers Seed, Probitis Publishing, 446 pages, illustrated, $65 is available from https://aotearoabooks.co.nz/the-sparks-the-logs-and-the-gasoline-the-long-road-to-the-new-zealand-wars/.
They were recast as “land wars” by the Waitangi Tribunal and others from 1985 when a law change enabled the re-investigation of grievances back to 1840.
The spark for the 1860s wars was the offer to sell 600 acres in Waitara, Taranaki, in 1859, by a chief of the Te Ati Awa tribe, and the vehement opposition to the sale by another Te Ati Awa chief.
That escalated to sporadic armed conflict for 10 years in which 2899 people were killed and nearly a million hectares were confiscated (The total land area of New Zealand is 26.8-million hectares.)
A narrative that British colonisers tricked noble savages into letting them settle here and started stealing their land and when some chiefs stood up for their rights, they were killed and their land confiscated grew around the Waitangi Tribunal’s investigations.
However, Seed shows that the sequence of falling dominoes started in 1820, when chiefs starting using guns to embark on industrial-scale slaughter from which numerous tribes fled leaving vast areas without people.
Taranaki was such an area.
By 1840, when large numbers of British were on their way to New Zealand and when the British government offered peace and protection in return for the right to control New Zealand, large numbers of Maori were on board with the chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi, keen to leave behind permanent war, slavery, and the likelihood of being killed and eaten.
Yet, after 1840, successive British governors were both unable (insufficient resources) and reluctant (Maori kicked up a fuss) to deliver on the protection promise of the treaty by extending control, leaving Maori to look after their own affairs.
Having said that, the settler presence made dangerous and deserted areas (like Taranaki) safe for Maori, freed slaves returned. Peace and prosperity returned.
But old tribal grudges and aspirations remained, tribal controls had broken down, and anarchy spread, especially in areas without a settler presence.
That was the context in which Te Ati Awa chief Te Teira Manuka offered Governor Gore Browne his 600 acres in Waitara and another Te Ati Awa chief named Wiremu Kingi not only objected, but challenged the governor to fight, expecting him not to, and was most surprised that he did.
Seed presents “a 40-year chain of dominoes that relentlessly led to what we will find is a largely predictable conclusion” which was armed conflict to decide who was the boss – the British Queen or the Maori King.
Written in plain language, requiring no prior knowledge of anything, and asking nothing other the reader other than the ability to read, Seed says “it was written to make sense to me, an ordinary New Zealander, in the hope that it will do the same for other ordinary New Zealanders”.
The book does not play favourites. Everyone is judged by the same set of rules. Seed is not trying to prove anything. He is not pushing a narrative. There are no 21st century moral judgements imposed on 19th century words and deeds. He wrote:
We will be entering the world of, and thinking like, the people of the time. Maori will be thinking with the mindsets and customs of the day, intelligently weighing up the pros and cons of European culture, picking out all the good bits while trying to maintain their control and their identity. Europeans will be thinking with the mindset of someone raised in Regency England, at the height of the technical triumphs and human misery of the Industrial Revolution, the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the peak of evangelistic humanitarianism, the massive unemployment, desperation, and famine that forced literally millions of Europeans to seek their fortunes in distant countries.To guide us into that 19th century world, Seed goes to what the actors in this drama said and contemporary reports of what they did.
Forty of the 77 sources listed in Seed’s selected bibliography were published in the 19th century sources, along with many more early newspaper articles.
Add to that, quotes from newspapers that recorded key events between 1820 and 1860, as well as settler eye-witness books, Seed provides a level of detail and humanity that does not appear in more recent broad-brush agenda-driven histories.
Only 17 of his sources were published after 1980, when history graduates found work with the Waitangi Tribunal to write a grievance history of the British settlement of New Zealand.
The key actors in this drama are:
• Ngati Toa chief Te Rauparaha (who built a substantial empire during the 1820s wars),Wiremu Kingi was a player in all events recorded in Seed’s history. His life exemplifies widespread chiefly opportunism enabled by Musket War raids, the post-raid terror and desolation, the settler readiness to pay good money for land, and the government’s willingness to pay off chiefs to keep the peace.
• Governors Fitzroy, Grey, and Gore Browne,
• Te Teira Manuka, Wiremu Kingi,
• Wiremu Tamihana (the Ngati Haua chief who set up a Maori king),
• Rewi Maniapoto, the firebrand central North Island chief who was the gasoline for the 1860s conflagration.
• Originally named Te Rangitake, he left Taranaki with his father in the early 1820s to get away from the risk of being killed in a Waikato tribe raid, settling in Waikanae.Government troops attacked the pa Kingi built on the 600 acres on March 17, 1860. Kingi asks for Kingite help by May 1860. The first Taranaki war, which Seed said should be called the first Waikato war, was fought in sporadic clashes for one year.
• With Te Rauparaha, he helped raid other tribes in both the North and South islands,
• He sold land in Taranaki, Wellington, and in the northern South Island to the New Zealand Company in 1839-1840,
• Signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840,
• Complained to the Spain land sale commission in 1844 that the payments for land were not enough,
• Prospered in Waikanae,
• Returned to Waitara in 1848, when settlers made Taranaki safe, against Governor Grey’s wishes,
• Prospered in Waitara,
• Involved himself in and helped escalate a feud between members of the Puketapu hapu that started in 1854 over a land sale,
• Opposed Te Teira Manuka’s offer of 600 acres, on March 8, 1859, on the grounds that if that sold, others would sell,
• Objects, in December, 1859, to the presence of a Maori king flag,
• Disrupted a survey of the 600 acres on February 20, 1860,
• Built pas where he shouldn’t have around March 5, 1860,
• Ignores Gore Browne’s warning, on March 6, 1860, to cease and desist,
• Another Kingi pa is found on the 600 acres on March 16, 1860.
Kingi says the war is about the existence of the Maori king and not Teira’s 600 acres (according to Wiremu Tamihana on p330 of Seed’s book).
Seed writes that “Teira’s offer is, in effect, a side show. What follows will not be a land-related contest between Teira and Kingi but a sovereignty related contest between Kingi and Browne.
Armed conflict spread to Waikato, the Bay of Plenty, to the East Coast and Hawkes Bay, morphing into fighting with different entities including Hauhaus and Te Kooti, and lasted for more than 10 years.
Large numbers of Maori fought for the government, motivated both by support for the new way that the governor brought as well as hatred from the Kingites and for what those tribes and others did to them in the 1820s.
The over-achieving first governor William Hobson and his success in gathering the signatures of 512 chiefs all over New Zealand on the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 is discussed somewhat in passing.
However, that treaty is covered in detail in exchanges between the fourth governor, Thomas Gore Browne, and Kingi.
The treaty that Gore Browne invokes and Kingi ignored was the original treaty in which chiefs ceded sovereignty (Article 1) in return for the status of British subjects (Article 3) whose property rights were confirmed (Article 2).
Of course, Gore Brown and Kingi were unaware of the other treaty, created by the Waitangi Tribunal 127 years later, in which chiefs allegedly merely allowed the governor to govern British settlers (Article 1) while chiefs could carry on exercising their “chiefly authority” or “rangatiratanga” (Article 2).
After the war, Kingi lived in seclusion, appearing in public in New Plymouth while he travelled to Parihaka where he finally settled, as the Wellington Independent reported on February 26, 1872.
The old chief seemed to enjoy the levee, for as each batch of children came in, he laughed with delight as he took their tiny little hands in his and kindly shook them.Kingi, like many Maori leaders of the time, adapted to the circumstances he found himself in. He raided with the raiders, sold land when buyers appeared, and opposed land sales when opposition appeared.
Kingi rejected the Maori king yet benefited from Waikato support when under attack. He mostly profited from a close association with the settler government until he misread the wrong governor.
Seed produces evidence that Kingi was not a superior chief to Te Teira Manuka. In fact, all chains of authority in Te Ati Awa had broken down at that time, as had authority of other iwi in the area, and including those in Waikato. It was anarchy.
Current claims that sovereignty was not ceded in 1840, that Maori MPs are not subject to parliamentary rules, and that tribal businesses are tax exempt, all show that this battle over who is the boss of New Zealand continues to this day.
While offering no comment on New Zealand’s culture wars, Seed’s book totally undermines the current orthodoxy on history and the treaty.
The Spark, the Logs, and the Gasoline, Piers Seed, Probitis Publishing, 446 pages, illustrated, $65 is available from https://aotearoabooks.co.nz/the-sparks-the-logs-and-the-gasoline-the-long-road-to-the-new-zealand-wars/.
11 comments:
I will not buy the book - likely get it from the library. But at 82, born in Hawera, family arrived 1841 as first settlers in New Plymouth, you can understand I grew up with all of this recounted from family, and went to primary school with Maori - and they were good at pinching my lunch, pencils etc. And the b### continues from Maori today... especially her running TPI...
Seems to me the first to breach the Treaty of Waitangi were the chiefs who signed it and ceded sovereignty to the Crown, and then rose in armed rebellion against the Crown. Kingi is the immediate example of that, but every chief involved was culpable. And never forget it was Maori that lobbied to abolish the Crown's right of preemption in the second article, thereby opening up the entirely predictable predation by land speculators of all hues. And that was not the fault of colonialism. Human greed transcends culture, particularly when the tribal occupiers of the land stole it in he first place and were then able to flick it on for a quick buck (or musket). The "chiefly opportunism" continues to this day through the medium of Treaty Settlements.
Maybe someone will buy it for Luxon, maybe for Christmas tho' he really needs it now!??
Glan011, Write it all down for your children/grandchildren, in fact I would encourage everyone with such knowledge/experience to record it somehow.
After reading Seed’s book on Rangiaowhia, I’ll read this book too.
Colonial Governors paid off Maori chiefs to avert conflict. Today we call that a full and final settlement. History might not repeat exactly, but it definitely rhymes.
Dave Lenny
The Maori history is oral of course and like Chinese whispers has deteriorated over the years from truth to more grievances, as there is money for jam in that .i hope this is untrue ,but I heard that JA in her tenure ordered the destruction of Maori history from our National Library ,and if so ,a sin beyond belief, but makes this book more precious in the search for truth..
Vance
"The Spark, the Logs, and the Gasoline", by Piers Seed - one copy for research at Auckland Library, and I've got it coming soon.... ....O N E copy available!!!!!
There would be many copies of all manner of Maori propaganda!
Good little Communist our JA, pervert the course of history as recorded to suit a Marxist agenda. That person could not even state what was in the articles of the Treaty when asked but I guess she never did the righting, reeding or rithmatic stuff in skool.
Seems a somewhat inappropriate title. Gasoline not a colonial expression. Sounds far too objective for any shools to adopt so the author wont get rich..
Doubt skools will wont it. Reading too hard. An enyway its not wot they teech.
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