Waitangi: An Alternative View
If you want to understand the Treaty of Waitangi, the first thing you have to do is to invent it.
If you don’t know how history is written that probably sounds a bit weird, so let me explain it to you. History writing exists at two levels. There is a straightforward narrative of facts and events in a time sequence the purpose of which is to help people understand what happened in the past. This is what most non-historians mean when they use the word ‘history’. But beyond that there is always a meta narrative which frames the first narrative by setting criteria for the selection of the facts relevant to the understanding of the past and to establish their meaning.
Meta narratives have been identified under a number of names. The social philosopher Thomas Kuhn calls them paradigms. The cultural Marxist Antonio Gramsci calls them egemonia which roughly translates as hegemonies. There are other names too, but we’re all referring to the same thing. They’re the usually unarticulated premises on which any history you are reading is predicated and they usually reflect the perspective of the dominant groups within the society. If you are aware of them then you know to read history with a critical eye and can ask yourself: whose history is it that I‘m reading?
As far as the Treaty is concerned the traditional framework under which it is understood is that of a benevolent government in London, assisted by the Christian missions in New Zealand also based in London and similarly benevolent in their intentions, which arranged for it to be prepared and signed to protect Maori and their possessions, including their land, from unscrupulous Europeans by establishing British sovereignty over New Zealand. In other words it derives its meaning from the place it occupies in the general history of the British Empire. That traditional paradigm doesn’t allow any agency to Maori other than to listen and to sign. For decades this apparent lack was explained by saying that Maori understood what was going on and that apart from a few malcontents down the years they’ve always known it was for their own good. They knew that because the missionaries told them so.
As an overall paradigm it arose from the underlying ideology which justified the British Empire to its creators and protagonists. When I went to school in the nineteen fifties we were taught that the British Empire was a positive and benevolent force in the world which had brought civilization, culture, and God to savages everywhere. The imperial authorities in London were doing this because it was their destiny to do so. Why them rather than the French, say? The answer was: because the British race and its civilization was superior to all others. You can laugh at this but it was believed in by many otherwise intelligent and serious people over several centuries. To prove it, all classrooms were issued with a map of the world with the British bits coloured red. The Treaty of Waitangi was considered to be a step in this process of civilising the savages.
But as that Empire began to vanish until it no longer exists, people began to question the paradigm upon which it was based, because it looked sillier and sillier when there was no empire, and over the last thirty years or so voices have increasingly been raised calling that paradigm into question. Notwithstanding, it lingers on and this still drives much of our thinking on the Treaty although that’s rarely spelled out. This evening I’d like to suggest an alternative to it.
Let’s go to London in early 1839. Two men are having a meeting in the Colonial Office.
Who are they? The first is a man called Constantine Phipps who is better known to us as the Marquis of Normanby. He’s the Colonial Secretary and a member of the governing Cabinet of the day. The man he is talking to is a naval captain called William Hobson. Normanby has asked to see him because he has a job for him. Captain is a fairly high rank in the Royal Navy and Hobson had got there by his abilities. He was very experienced and was known to be a safe pair of hands. If he was given a job he did it. His previous posting from which he had just returned was to what was known as ‘the China Station’ which included not only the Asia-Pacific coast but New South Wales where Hobson had been posted for the last few years. In the course of that he had visited New Zealand (then an independent country) and written a report on its affairs for the Governor of New South Wales, George Gipps, who was so impressed by it that he forwarded it to London. So when Normanby wanted someone to do a little job affecting New Zealand Hobson, who by now was back in London, was the ideal man.
Normanby wanted Hobson to go to New Zealand and negotiate a Treaty with the indigenous inhabitants under which they agreed to cede sovereignty over New Zealand to the British Crown. Hobson said he’d think about it so the following day Normanby, to help convince him to do it wrote him a letter (which we have) setting out the terms of his task, and after a bit of to and fro to clarify certain aspects of it Hobson accepted the job and set off, calling first at Sydney for a few weeks for discussions with Governor Gipps and then on to New Zealand, arriving at the Bay of Islands in January 1840.
How genuine was Normanby in seeking the consent of the Maori people as a basis for sovereignty? The traditional interpretation says that he was entirely motivated by goodwill towards them. But when you look into the facts surrounding the lead up to the Treaty signing however that isn’t quite so straightforward and in fact becomes a bit questionable.
The British government seems to have taken it for granted by its actions that it was going to be a done deal before Hobson even left England whether the Maori agreed or not and named him Consul and prospective Lieutenant Governor over New Zealand in August 1839 on that assumption. When he does get here there’s an argument with Captain Nias commanding his ship as to whether he ought to get a salute in that capacity or not. And his first action is to post a proclamation setting up a meeting with the local Maori at the house of the British Resident James Busby for a week later which he signs as if he has some form of authority to do so. But he has no text of any treaty that he is to ask the chiefs to sign, and so he spends the intervening week drawing up a text with the assistance of the Rev Henry Williams who heads up the Church of England mission, and of James Busby who for nearly a decade has been living in the Bay of Islands. What were these two people doing there?
Busby had been set up there as official British Resident some years previously to send reports of affairs in New Zealand to the Colonial Office in London because of the growing bad reputation of New Zealand as a rough and lawless place in which quite a number of British citizens had taken up their abode, or were visiting regularly for trade purposes and were misbehaving. This culminated in a nasty incident in which the brig Elizabeth trading out of Sydney had been used by the Ngatitoa chief Te Rauparaha to exact utu by way of a surprise attack on his enemies Ngai Tahu, the latter having been massacred and their upoko ariki tortured to death in captivity. The then Colonial Secretary Lord Goderich when he heard of it tried to have Captain Stewart commanding the Elizabeth and his first mate prosecuted for murder because the law was clear that any crime under English law committed by British subjects, was still a crime even one committed outside English jurisdiction, and this was clearly accessory to murder. But for tangled reasons of New South Wales politics Goderich could get no sense out of anybody in Sydney and the two perpetrators ‘disappeared’ in mysterious circumstances before the prosecutions could go ahead.
Thoroughly exasperated Goderich arranged for the appointment of Busby to report regularly to the Colonial Office on New Zealand affairs. He was a bad choice. The authorities in Sydney didn’t want him there and so he had no soldiers available to him to enforce law and order. He also had a very short fuse and would resort to bluster when no-one took him seriously. The Maori derisively named “the man of war without guns” and laughed at his pretensions. To be fair he did do some useful things such as setting up a ruling Council of Bay of Islands chiefs as the putative ruling body of an independent country called New Zealand, and establishing a ship Registry for the trading vessels now being built in New Zealand. He also got the local chiefs to approve a mercantile flag as part of that process which is still flown by some Maori at political events here and which is known as the flag of the United Tribes. He’s also credited with planting our first vineyard. But mostly he was politically impotent.
The Rev Henry Williams was a different character all together. In the eighteenth century membership of the official Church of England declined steeply between 1720 and 1800 while parallel membership in Dissenting churches rose at quite a steep rate. To counter this a reforming movement within the Church called Methodism led by John Wesley developed and grew rapidly. Both Dissenters and Methodists were zealous evangelicals who stressed the more radical messages of Christian justice. Both also expressed a fervent desire to bring the message of Christ to the heathen. The resultant missions in New Zealand had been established under the auspices of the Rev Samuel Marsden in 1814 but by the beginning of the 1830s they were in a sorry state, rent by internal dissension and backbiting. This was not helped by the fact that all of their efforts had by 1830 yielded about fifty adherents and only nine baptisms.
And then quite suddenly Maori began to seek conversion literally in droves. The missionaries thought this was a miracle from God, although we now know it actually meant that something much more interesting was happening. Maori had their own sophisticated cosmology and quite openly laughed at a religion which strung its own principal god up on a cross, so why did they suddenly start converting to Christianity? That was not in fact what they were doing. Their culture was a highly flexible and pragmatic one which quickly fitted European technologies into their world. As soon as they saw whaleboats for instance they stopped making traditional canoes for everyday work and adopted this new version which was easier to build and navigate. The same with European agricultural techniques, and more particularly firearms. But although they could adapt their cosmology to these innovations up to a point it eventually proved incapable of making sense of many European activities and ideas they wanted to incorporate into their own understanding of the world. And so almost en masse they adopted the European cosmology instead and adapted it to their ends.
There’s nothing strange about this. It has happened all over the Pacific for the same reason – in Melanesia and Micronesia as well as in Polynesia creating what are now known to anthropologists as “cargo cults”. And then equally abruptly about 1838 the Maori converts began walking away from it, similarly in large numbers although they claimed still to be Christians. The missionaries were distraught. They couldn’t understand what was happening. They didn’t have the advantage of anthropological insight which would have predicted this outcome after the adaption had been made. So they blamed it on the presence and example of numerous pakeha already living here who were generally regarded in official and missionary circles as ruffians, scoundrels and an all round bad lot. Who were these people?
Let’s return to Normanby’s letter to Hobson in which he refers to:
“a body of persons not less than two thousand of British subjects had become permanent inhabitants of New Zealand; that amongst them persons of bad and doubtful character – convicts who had fled from our penal settlements, seamen who had deserted their ships – and these people, unrestrained by any law, and amenable to no tribunals, were alternatively the authors and victims of every species of crime and outrage.”
Shocking! But was it true? The answer to that as so often in history is yes, and no. There’s no doubt that quite a lot of people with no wish to renew their acquaintance with the law had ended up in New Zealand. Some were ex-convicts who had done a runner, or ship’s deserters. In both cases, given the conditions under which they had previously worked and lived it’s hard to blame them. But others had been recruited legally by contractors to work on New Zealand shore whaling stations where the work was similarly hard and often brutal. There’s at least one case which ended up in front of the Sydney magistrates of a teenage boy being beaten to death by his employer for losing a whaleboat (the employer walked free by the way). It’s no surprise either to learn that things could get a bit boisterous when the whaling fleet was in and men starved of alcohol and female company enjoyed their first liberty ashore for as much as a year or even more.
But not all of them behaved in this way. A number of the written accounts we have also record that some men on shore leave spent their Sundays attending church. Nor did all of those who had found themselves living in New Zealand fit Normanby’s pattern. The developing lively and thriving trade between Sydney and the Bay of Islands meant that there was also a mixed population of timber workers, ship’s carpenters, grog shop and accommodation keepers, and ships’ suppliers of provisions and equipment and so forth living ashore. These people made up the bulk of the people Normanby was referring to. Mostly they were respectable working folk who minded their own business and didn’t want any trouble. They included many Maori and were the same sort of people as the later New Zealand immigrant working class. They were there for the opportunities you always found in a new settlement.
This was a maritime frontier no different to many others which had long dotted the shores of South America, the West Indies and Madagascar to name only the most significant areas. Such settlements governed themselves, owed nothing to the laws of the nations where they were located, and in some cases had been there for over a century. New Zealand was one of the more recent of these. And they were by no means lawless. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, nephew of the more famous Edward Gibbon Wakefield, records a visit to a shore whaling station run as a sort of co-operative by the men themselves, which from his description sounds rather cosy and well set up. Others integrated themselves into the local iwi in one way or another, usually with local partners both business and personal. It was often a much better life than their compatriots were being subjected to in Britain’s burgeoning industrial cities. But the missionaries were scandalised by it, said they were debauching their converts, and demanded action from the home government. The demand for stricter law and order among the lower orders was not invented by the National Party last year; it has a long history.
The interesting question is how this missionary view came to prevail and found its way into Normanby’s instructions to Hobson? This was simply because they had the ear of powerful and influential friends in London, and one in particular. Normanby didn’t write Hobson’s instructions himself; officers of the Colonial Office did and they were under the authority of its head, James Stephen. Stephen was not an evangelical (he was in fact a Unitarian) but he was very influential, a friend of William Wilberforce for example, with whom he had worked on the abolition of slavery. He was also well acquainted with Dandeson Coates the head of the Church Missionary Society who ran the larger part of the missions in New Zealand, so it was the missionary version of events which drove official policy. Stephen privately expressed some skepticism about the wilder missionary claims, such as to the numbers killed in the so-called ‘musket wars’, but he saw no reason to cause problems for himself by contradicting the missionaries; particularly so as there had been a major Parliamentary inquiry into the treatment of the indigenous peoples of the British Empire just a few years previously and this had led to the setting up of the Aboriginals Protection Society, also under church influence.
So Hobson was sent on his way to establish sovereignty over New Zealand by way of a treaty. But as I said he had almost no text. Instead he was invited to confer with Governor Gipps when he got to New South Wales, and when he got to the Bay of Islands he was to seek the assistance of the missionaries – which, of course they were very glad to provide although for their own reasons in some cases as we will see. The only thing his instructions specified that he must include in the Treaty was a provision that once sovereignty was established Maori could only dispose of their land to the Crown at a price decided by the Crown. I’ll talk about why that was there and why it alone was mentioned as a top priority shortly. But before I can do so I have to introduce a new player in this little drama – a private commercial venture called the New Zealand Company.
Quite a lot of people had taken a commercial interest in New Zealand’s possibilities over the previous several decades. A New Zealand Company had been set up in London in 1825 for example and had tried unsuccessfully to get a Royal Charter granting it a monopoly on colonization of this country. At the same time the general view was that Britain was overpopulated and a number of schemes had been proposed for dealing with this. But they all proved to be impossibly expensive. Then a man popped out of the woodwork with what seemed a plausible proposal under which emigration of surplus population not only cost nothing – it actually made money. His name was Edward Gibbon Wakefield.
Wakefield has always been a controversial figure in our history. Some people regard him reverently as the Father of His Country. Others, such as myself, think he was a bit of a wide boy and main chancer who preferred abducting heiresses to working for a living, although he ended up in Newgate Prison because of it. He had snake oil to peddle in the form of this rather dodgy theory of immigration. Either way it interested quite a lot of people with money to invest. His idea went something like this:
It was well known that in official new settlements the value of town land (usually sold as acre lots) appreciated rapidly in value. Wakefield said that if you could get in at the outset and purchase the land in new colonies first from the indigenous owners at a cheap price, you could then sell it to incoming investors at a significantly higher price. You needed also however to import labour to do the work of development which added the value, and set the land price sufficiently high to ensure that it was the investors and not the labourers who bought it. That required control under English law. And that in its turn required the establishment of British sovereignty. The costs of this system and the profits to both the promoters and the investors would come from the difference in cost between the land acquired by the promoters and the cost they charged the investors.
It all looked very elegant on paper but when it was tried in Western Australia at the Swan River settlement it didn’t work. If you want to know the details of that you should have a look at Karl Marx’s analysis of why in the first volume of Capital. But the main flaw in the scheme was that the imported labourers could see no advantage to them in sweating it out in the sun to profit other people. So they stopped doing it and took ship to New South Wales where the government gave them fifty acres of land free. Any subsequent scheme had to avoid that pitfall.
So when it came to New Zealand the Company had to have a land monopoly, especially as some of the wealthier inhabitants of New South Wales, and in particular a man called William Charles Wentworth, were busy buying up the available land from Maori. Let’s look again at the Crown pre-emption of purchase that Hobson was told to put in any treaty he negotiated. That would safeguard the Company interest against the likes of Charles Wentworth, particularly as Normanby also announced that there was going to be a land claims commission to deal with pre-Treaty claims of purchase. One upshot of that was that the Company urgently dispatched a survey ship to New Zealand to buy up as much land from Maori as possible so they’d have a case to argue before this body which is known to history as the Old Land Claims Commission. I’ll come back to that, but just note that the New Zealand Company claimed subsequently to have made large purchases of land, around Cook Strait in particular but also in other places such as Nelson and the Taranaki. Unfortunately they were a bit careless about who they thought they were buying it from and an ancestor of mine had his life cut abruptly short as a result but that’s another story. They also sent out their first batch of settlers to Wellington before they knew if they even owned any of the land they had promised them. Normanby was well aware that this was going on because he referred to these settlers in his instructions to Hobson, adding weight to the suggestion that it was all cut and dried before Hobson left England.
So let’s go back a step and look at what happened in the event. Who wrote the Treaty? Hobson had a secretary with him and he largely did the scrivening – the copying out of the final text – but the actual text was composed by Busby, the Resident, and the Rev Henry Williams both of whom were fluent in the Maori language. The latter was something of a tough customer an ex naval officer who brought the habits and manners of the quarterdeck to his charge as head of the mission and who had sorted out the muddle into which the mission had descended. Both were experienced and knowledgeable in matters to do with the Maori.
Their efforts created two principal texts, one in English and the other in Maori, but they don’t say quite the same thing. The Maori text doesn’t for example invite the chiefs to sign over their sovereignty in terms of their mana which would have been the obvious appropriate word, because I’m sure Williams, who did the translation, was well aware that the chiefs would never agree to sign up to that. Instead he told them they were signing over their kawanatanga which was a much more vague concept, and he also told them they would retain their tino rangatiratanga (that’s to say control of their own affairs and property) which seemed reassuring. The Maori version also contains the pre-emption clause but the wording used was te hokonga o era wahi whenua e pai ai te tangata non ate whenua which I’m advised (because I don’t read or speak te reo) doesn’t mean that the Crown would have sole right of purchase but only first dibs. If the Crown didn’t want to buy then the right of disposal of license to reside on land reverted to the Maori owners as the latter understood it. I say “reside” because in Maori culture there was no concept of land alienation. You couldn’t sell the land because it didn’t belong to this generation to dispose of. It was a trust inherited from the tupuna and held on the same basis for successor generations.
We have two contemporary unofficial accounts of events that happened on the day at Waitangi that we know about. One is by William Colenso, the Mission Printer, who wrote down notes at the time and got Busby to countersign them as an accurate account, although he didn’t publish them until some decades later. The second is very interesting because it is hardly ever mentioned if at all and also comes from a quite unexpected direction. During this period an American flotilla under a Lieutenant Wilkes was sailing around the Pacific region collecting natural history material (which subsequently formed the foundation of the Smithsonian Institution) and looking into American trade interests. This flotilla happened to be in the Bay of Islands in February 1840, and although Wilkes was not present at Waitangi some of his other ships officers may have been. They certainly reported to him what had happened, and when the major chief Kawhiti came by on his return home Wilkes accosted him and got his version of events as well. I’ll come back to Wilkes in due course.
Meanwhile at Waitangi, when the chiefs heard what was proposed a few supported it but most said “no thanks”. What did they need a Governor for? They were perfectly happy running their own affairs, and furthermore they had grievances of their own. At that point there was a bit of a commotion from the local pakeha inhabitants who had gathered to see the fun, one of whom said that Williams was not translating what was said properly, particularly in relation to the land. It was suggested that a local named Johnson should take over but he declined and Williams continued as before with most chiefs telling the prospective governor to go back to England. And on that note the first day ended with a distribution of tobacco and blankets. Nothing was supposed to happen the next day but then Hobson got a report that some of the chiefs were going home complaining they hadn’t got their blankets and tobacco so he hurried ashore and reconvened the gathering for the actual signing.
At that point Colenso says he intervened. He said these people don’t understand what they are being asked to sign. Hobson got quite annoyed and said that he’d done his best to explain it and couldn’t see what more was needed and Colenso stepped back. But still nobody came forward until Williams called on the young chief Hone Heke to come forward and ordered him to sign, and others then followed suit. There were subsequent signings at other locations over the following months, mostly convened by the missionaries, although when it came to the South Island Hobson, who may have got sick of the process dragging on, declared New Zealand annexed by proclamation.
Back to Lt Wilkes, who also, from his interview with Kawhiti, arrived at the same conclusion as Colenso; the signatories had no idea what they had done and they would regret it. But he then went on to say something else which is very interesting. He said: “The New Zealand Land Company has been the secret spring of this transaction” and that it had been because of the influence of what he called “the high names” at the head of the Company that the British government had been induced to go along with this proceeding. Why would he (and he says many others generally) think that?
To find the answer you have to go back to London and the relationship between the Company and the British government of the day. I said earlier that an attempt to set up a chartered New Zealand Company in 1825 had failed. However in 1838 a revived New Zealand Association came into existence to be followed by a new New Zealand Company in 1839 (which was revised later the same year). These ventures got a much more positive political response because following an election in 1830 and passage of the significant Reform Act of 1832, the Tories had been displaced from power after fifty years and replaced by a Whig government much more amenable to colonial and commercial ventures beyond Britain. There was a very strong presence of this new political group among the promoters of the New Zealand ventures.
Central to this was John Lambton (known to his friends as ‘Radical Jack’) whose control of a small group in the House of Commons ensured the government a majority. He had been raised to the peerage in 1828 as Lord Durham, and headed all four of the New Zealand oriented bodies. Three of the original directors of the 1825 company were directors of both of the 1839 companies. A further four were also directors of both the two companies of 1839 and the Association, while nine more were directors of both companies. Most of this core group of people shared interests in shipping and maritime trade and insurance, and had previously invested in whaling and its related activities in the South Seas. There is nothing particularly remarkable about any of that. What is remarkable is the close association between them and successive governments in the 1830s. Twenty of them had been Whig MPs at some point and a number had held senior Cabinet rank. One of their number, Sir William Molesworth was the Company point man in the Commons and was to become Colonial Secretary some years later.
In the light of this the comments of Wilkes about the New Zealand Company being behind the Treaty make considerable sense. If you then look into the activities of the Old Land Claims Commission more evidence of this connection comes to light.
The main chair of this body was a man called William Spain, a protégé of the Whig leadership and known to be a safe pair of political hands. He and his fellow Commissioners gave short shrift to most small pre Treaty claimants to land, and even saw Wentworth off with a small compensatory grant of two hundred pounds while disallowing his claims. But when it came to the Company claims they took a different tack. Some of the claims they found valid but even when they cast doubt on them instead of returning the land to the previous Maori owners they awarded it to the Company claimants anyway, and paid the Maori owners compensation instead, whether they wanted it or not, and at a knockdown rate. Most of these lands were then disposed of at a much higher price to individual colonists.
How could this be justified? Because the orthodox view of the day was that anyone who held land ownership collectively i.e. tribally by way of an inter-generational inheritance in trust – which is how not only Maori but the majority of indigenous peoples around the world perceived their occupation of territories –by continuing to do so were standing in the way of their advance to a state of civilization. This was best achieved by the commodification of land ownership and its vesting in legal individuals. The missionaries, people with a strongly protested interest of the Maori people at heart, largely endorsed this view and mostly in good faith saw divestment from Maori of their land as a step in the right direction – that’s to say their salvation and achievement of civilisation. Thus their almost universal subsequent advice to Maori to sign the Treaty. The exception was the Roman Catholic Mission led by Bishop Pompallier who cautioned Maori who sought his advice that they should not sign because they might regret doing so.
Establishing sovereignty and with it the advantages of civilization may not have been the only missionary motive. Cynics among you might like to note that when the dust had settled the Rev Henry Williams had come into personal possession of 12,000 acres of land under legal title and that he quickly gave up being a clergyman in favour of being a wealthy landowner although he remained in holy orders. In so doing he later built the basis in the Hawkes Bay and Canterbury of a family which today owns through 800 direct descendants more land than any other family in New Zealand. His actions at the time were regarded as sufficiently scandalous that in 1848 he was prosecuted in the courts by the then Governor Sir George Grey, and his own Bishop, George Selwyn, for land grabbing. I’m sorry to say that the case was unsuccessful.
So what is the result of what I have been saying? You may remember that we set out to invent the Treaty. I hope you have noted that the one I have invented for you is not quite the same as the one you are usually taught about. You can draw your own conclusions about that, but when in 1843, Lord Stanley, the incoming Colonial Secretary in a new Tory government encountered the Treaty and asked what it was about, he was referred not to the Colonial Office officials as you might expect, but to Sir Joseph Somes, now Chairman of the New Zealand Company following the death of Lord Durham. And Somes replied that the Treaty of Waitangi was “nothing but a praiseworthy device for amusing and pacifying savages for the moment”. It’s hard to disagree with him because from the point of view of himself and his commercial and political friends that’s exactly what it was. But more importantly than that it signals the beginning of a continuous and continuing period of international capitalist exploitation of our resources and people – more immediately the land and its raw materials – and more recently our capacity to produce food efficiently for the world.
Does that mean that we should not honor the Treaty because its proponents were acting in bad faith? Not in the least although that’s a separate but related matter for debate, which is coincidently happening right now. But I will say this. Since its signing the Treaty has overseen every sort of political skullduggery and legal chicanery used to relieve the Maori people of their landed estate. If the intention of the Treaty was, as loudly proclaimed in the official meta narrative both at the time and since to protect Maori and their possession of their land then it has been a miserable failure.
Given that over the last thirty or so years that there has been a continuing attempt made to redress the grievous injustices entailed it seems to me that honoring its promises is a very suitable, even ironic, basis upon which to go on doing that.
Tony Simpson
March 2024