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However, the main issue and stereotype Dieffenbach tackles is that of the so-called
‘Dying Maori’, namely the introduction of diseases and the notion of ‘fatal impact’. 124 Although
early explorers describe the Maori on first contact as being “possessed of that energy of frame
and exuberance of health and animal spirits which we may always expect to find where a people
are untainted by the evils which seem to be the necessary companions of civilization” (II:13), he
is certain that inflammatory and epidemic diseases did exist. Yet the picture seventy years after
Cook’s first voyage to New Zealand sees the Maori being more riddled with diseases than ever
before, leaving them in a “weakened and corrupted” state through being more prone to disease,
specifically European, which is either fatal or else results in chronic disorders from which they
never fully recover. 125 The end result is that the “number of the aborigines in New Zealand
rapidly decreases – a strange and melancholy, but undeniable, fact!” (II:14). As Forster was
concerned with the effects of moral corruption on the Maori, so too is Dieffenbach concerned
with the seemingly fatal culmination of immorality, corruption, disease, ill-fitting modes of living
and their improper treatment by European settlers and officials, in which “[n]ot only […] the
bodily frame of the savage lose[s] its health and manly beauty, his mind its instinctive acuteness
and primitive resources, but, either by the more violent means of wholesale murder, or gradually,
as if acted upon by a slow poison, the races diminish in numerical strength, until they cease to
exist as nations or tribes” (II:135).
Although he notes how animals have been affected by man’s introduction of foreign
species, Dieffenbach argues that mankind cannot be classed in the same way:
All our researches into his history lead us to conclude that the races are not different in their
origin, and forbid the idea of inferiority, and of the necessity of one race being superseded by
another. I am of opinion that man, in his desires, passions, and intellectual faculties, is the same,
whatever be the colour of his skin; that mankind forms a great whole, in which the different races
are the radii from a common centre; and that the differences which we observe are due to peculiar
circumstances which have developed certain qualities of body and mind. Man, even in the state of
barbarism in which the Polynesian nations remain, is superior in many respects to a large
proportion of the population of Europe. That he gives way before the European, and is gradually
exterminated, whilst it shows our superiority in some points, shows also our deficiency in the arts
of civilization and moral government, which disables us from uniting his savage simplicity and his
virtues to what our state of society might offer to improve his condition, and which causes him
merely to taste what is bitter in civilized life. But this by no means shows his inferiority: the lion
that tears the deer into pieces is not therefore made of nobler material. We, who with “ firewater,”
with the musket, and disease, war against the unoffending tribes of coloured men, have no right to
124 See also Polack, Manners and Customs, 184-88.
125 Cf. Belich, Making Peoples, 173-78; Pool, Te Iwi Maori, 78-87; Maori Population, 90-97, 106-44.
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