Overview - a frontier of chaos?

Setting the scene

The explorers Abel Tasman, James Cook and Marion du Fresne had all encountered violence while in New Zealand. This convinced many Europeans that New Zealand was a dangerous place. From the 1790s, though, the arrival of sealing and whaling gangs forged a new set of largely ad hoc, commercial interactions with Maori.

On several occasions visiting Europeans were attacked by Maori. These were not random acts of violence. In 1808 the crew of the Parramatta were killed after they were shipwrecked near Cape Brett, Northland. Their fate can be attributed to the fact that they had earlier wounded three Maori and had also attempted to leave without paying their bill, namely for the cargo they had acquired.

Maori perspectives were rarely explored when events like this occurred. When a mutinous crew of convicts aboard the Venus marauded along the Northland coast in 1806-07, there was little comment about European pirates and their depredations against local Maori. Similarly, when the sealer Thomas Chaseland stormed a kainga in Fiordland, 'slaughtering everyone he found' in retaliation for an attack on a sealing party, he was acknowledged as someone who understood the language and concept of utu. European motives for violence were somehow transparent; Maori were considered duplicitous and unpredictable.

The exception rather than the rule

Traditional histories refer to the 'Boyd Massacre', implying that it was a heinous act of murder and an example of Maori barbarism and unpredictability. Little, if any, mention was made of the Maori casualties from European reprisals or the civil war that followed.

The historian James Belich stresses the need to keep these incidents in perspective. Most Maori were willing participants in trade and realised that harming Europeans would be counter-productive. Certain events were 'exaggerated and misinterpreted'. Attacks on property were more common and contributed to a sense of lawlessness, but overall, the level of Maori-European violence was dwarfed by the sum total of contact. As evidence of this he cites the fact that when the ruthless armies of the Musket Wars ranged the land, very few European stations were plundered, and virtually no Europeans were killed. Ultimately, Belich suggests that the issue is not why there was so much Maori-European violence but why there was so little.