By 1833 concerns about the relations between Briton and Maori, generated largely by the CMS missionaries, had resulted in the appointment of James Busby as an official British Resident in New Zealand. Busby reported that the British whalers, traders, and early settlers were provoking increased warfare and insisted that the ‘miserable condition of the Maori had some claim of justice upon the protection of the British government’. He pressed Buxton to agitate for more, not less, formal British intervention. The Aborigines Committee commented that ‘it will be hard... to find compensation... for the murders, the misery, the contamination which we have brought upon [the Maori]. Our runaway convicts [and sailors, whalers, and traders]... too frequently act in the most reckless and immoral manner when at a distance from the restraints of justice.’ ‘In proof’, the Report continued, ‘we need only refer to the evidence of the missionaries.’ It was correspondence from Henry Williams of the CMS and his society’s Director, Dandeson Coates, that was cited most often. Coates told the Committee of an incident in 1830 when Captain Stewart of the ship Elizabeth and some British Xax traders conspired with their Maori trading partners to lure a rival Maori chief and his followers into an ambush where many were massacred, as part of a trade deal. The Committee cited such actions, unregulated by proper authorities, as the worst form of British overseas activity.
Fearing, on advice from Williams and a former Colonial Secretary, Lord Goderich, that the Maori teetered on the verge of extinction, the Committee recommended using ‘every possible method to rescue the natives of those extensive islands from the further evils which impend over them, and to deliver our own country from the disgrace and crime of having either occasioned or tolerated such enormities’. As with South Africa, Glenelg was convinced by the Committee’s findings of ‘the necessity of some interposition by the British Government for the protection, both of the British settlers and of the natives’ in New Zealand.
However, even as Glenelg wrote, Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New Zealand Company was sending out its first parties of ‘systematic colonizers’. Something more effective than a British Resident would be needed to regulate this much more extensive settlement. The Treaty of Waitangi, procured by the new Consul, William Hobson, followed from the Committee’s prescriptions in 1840. It established Maori title, reserved large areas for exclusive Maori occupation, and required the Company to use state-registered channels to purchase land for settlers. Though it was an annexation rather than a retrocession of land, the Treaty seemed a humanitarian triumph comparable to the quashing of Queen Adelaide Province, and ‘an experiment akin to emancipation’. It was certainly upheld as a model for future settler- Aborigine relations by Australian humanitarians.
However, the missionaries Henry Williams and his son Edward laid the basis for unending controversy because their English translation of the Treaty differed from the Maori version printed by the Paihia mission press. The Maori text seemed to promise the full authority of chiefs over their lands and the cession only of a more general governorship of the country. The British missionaries had played a crucial part in persuading the Maori signatories to accept the treaty by offering reassurance on this issue. Settlers viewed the Treaty in yet a different light, seeing its supporters and the missionaries as placing the needs of Maori ‘savages’ above those of fellow Britons. In the settler imagination, neither the persistent Maori claim to sovereignty nor Maori possession of the land was safeguarded by the Treaty. According to the company-financed and settler-edited Nelson Examiner, the Treaty did not safeguard Maori land but merely ensured that the Maori would benefit from its alienation to a more civilized race.
Consul Hobson further endeavoured to pursue the Aborigines Committee’s findings by supporting the CMS missionaries and appointing a Protector of Aborigines on the model already established in Australia. Through this Protectorate, ‘missionary influence impinged directly on the government’ in New Zealand. Reluctantly, the CMS missionary George Clarke took on the role of Chief Protector in 1840, and soon found himself under pressure from the colonial government to act on its behalf in land sale negotiations with the Maori. If he did not necessarily please government officials in this role, he certainly angered settlers. From the beginning, the majority of settlers opposed the Protectorate because ‘they wanted free access to the land unhindered by consideration of the native title’. Indeed, many settlers charged that the ‘missionaries and ‘‘missionary-ridden’’ government were . . . villainously studying the ruin of the colony and the colonists’. Instead of protection, they demanded ‘amalgamation’, a term deployed by the New Zealand Company to mean the transfer of nine-tenths of the land to the settlers and the reduction of the bulk of Maori to a landless proletariat.
Clarke further fuelled settler animosity by siding with the Maori over the Wairau ‘Affray’ in 1843, sparked by the Company’s sale to British immigrants of land it had not acquired through the channels required by the Treaty of Waitangi. When the Maori chiefs Te Rauparaha and Te Ranghaeata sacked a colonial surveyor’s property, a British magistrate accompanied by armed settlers set out to arrest them for looting. When they provoked a fight, in which twenty-one of them died (including one of Wakefield’s brothers), British authorities put the blame plainly on the settlers for ‘needlessly violating the law’. Governor Fitzroy held a meeting with the chiefs in 1844 to announce that the British authorities would not be seeking revenge. The settlers of Nelson, however, were more inclined to blame the missionaries— especially Clarke, who had published an address in Maori stating that both the settlers and the Maori had been ‘wrong according to the laws both of God and man’. Alfred Domett, writing in the Nelson Examiner, argued that Clarke and the missionaries stood to gain by inciting the Maori to violence, because they were engaged in the private accumulation of land and capital, ventures that would be threatened by the increasing oversight of local settler authorities. Furthermore, missionaries feared that settlers would deflect Maori attention from themselves as the sole representatives and purveyors of a superior culture. If Company-appointed bishops arrived, their own status among the Maori would inevitably diminish. A subsequent settler petition to Queen Victoria complained that ‘the annual expense of the Protectorship of the Aborigines is about £3,000 a year, while not one penny is expended in protecting the settlers against the natives’.
Like their counterparts in the Cape and New South Wales, New Zealand settlers also used the colonial press to appeal to a more popular metropolitan readership. The Nelson Examiner applauded the Times’s coverage of the ‘massacre’, which was itself based on articles in the Nelson Examiner. In a comment that feminized humanitarianism, in the same way that indigenous peoples were often feminized within colonial discourses, the metropolitan and the settler papers concurred that the ‘work of colonizing New Zealand’ properly ‘must be accomplished by the statesmanship and the management of men of common-sense—not by the old woman policies of Protectors’.