Overview - Musket Wars

Hongi Hika returns from a raid

Between 1818 and the early 1830s an estimated 20,000 Maori were killed in what have been called the Musket Wars. On a per capita basis this is equivalent to around 200,000 deaths in the First World War instead of the 18,000 New Zealand lives actually lost. Thousands more were enslaved or became refugees.

Unlike the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s the Musket Wars were New Zealand-wide. Initiated by the rivalries between the northern iwi Ngapuhi and Ngati Whatua, all of the tribes were soon trading to obtain muskets. Some of the heaviest fighting took place in the South Island involving Ngati Toa and Ngai Tahu. Sometimes the fighting was even 'closer to home'. The kai huanga (eat relations) dispute on Banks Peninsula of 1826-27 is a prime example. Only the common threat of Te Rauparaha and the Ngati Toa attacks on the region ended this bitter internal feud. In 1835 Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama took the fighting offshore when they devastated pacifist Moriori during their invasion of Rekohu, the Chatham Islands.

These wars have been described as a prime example of fatal impact theory in practice. Maori, in the wake of contact with Europeans, are said to have grabbed as many guns as they could and killed as many of each other as they could. The assumption was that it was the introduction of European technology alone that was responsible for these wars.

Maori had always fought rival kin groups. As McLean observes men fought for 'land, for resources, for women and for the sheer hell of it.’ Warfare was ‘an integral part of the Maori political system’ and a ‘legitimate cultural response to offences or crimes of any kind’. Conflict increased as the Maori population increased. Resources were depleted and insults demanding a response multiplied. Wars were fought in autumn - after food for winter had been stored - using hand-to-hand weapons such as mere and patu. They were often ritualised affairs that caused relatively few deaths. The victors gained land and booty and increased their mana (status). The losers sometimes had to migrate to a less desirable, unpopulated area.

The cost of muskets

The first muskets peddled by European traders were unreliable and slow to reload. Trained warriors armed with taiaha and patu (long and short clubs) were more effective that those armed with muskets. When Ngapuhi used muskets in battle for the first time, around 1807, they were overwhelmed by conventionally armed Ngati Whatua. Tom Brooking suggests that the musket was of greater value as a mechanism for utu when executing prisoners.

Ngapuhi sought to buy as many of these costly weapons as they could. From 1815 Ngapuhi taua (war parties) armed with muskets wreaked havoc across the North Island. Their victims faced exile, death or slavery. Fighting escalated in 1821 when the Ngapuhi leader Hongi Hika acquired 300 muskets. Over the next few years he led huge musket armies against iwi (tribes) from Tamaki (Auckland) to Rotorua. Ngapuhi suffered heavy casualties, but their opponents were crushed despite retreating into fortress pa.

Once all tribes had muskets there were no more easy victories. Pa that had been adapted to withstand musket fire were harder to capture. By the 1830s the strain of maintaining campaigns and the impact of European diseases were taking their toll. Warfare gave way to economic rivalry.