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talk of their inferiority, but should rather perceive a deficiency in our own state of civilization.
(II:137f.)
Thus, it is not simply a case of native peoples being overwhelmed by the might and supremacy of
European knowledge and means, but rather a result of the ambivalence between bloodshed and
peaceful ‘amalgamation’ through the overzealous implementation of colonisation, whose “ruling
spirit […] is that of absolute individuality”, as it is “unwilling in its contact with foreign nations
to acknowledge any other system than its own, and labours to enforce on all who are under its
control its own particular principles” (II:172).
He then proceeds to examine the possible causes for this reduction in numbers, albeit
relying on unreliable estimates of pre-contact Maori. To begin with, he isolates the pre-existing
conditions that prevented reasonable population growth:
The families of the natives are not large; - early sexual intercourse prevents the natural fruitfulness
of the women; - infanticide exists to a certain degree; - the custom of the inhabitants not to
cultivate more produce than is necessary to satisfy their common wants, and their being deprived
in very rainy seasons even of those scanty means; - their suffering from want during the time of
war, since they are usually besieged in their fortifications, which are at a distance from their
cultivated fields; - war itself, which, although mere skirmishes, carries off a large number of their
strongest men, and has often proved so destructive to a tribe, that it has been broken up entirely,
and has disappeared; - the belief in witchcraft (makuta), to which many have fallen victims, both
of the bewitched, from the mere force of imagination, and also of the supposed perpetrators of the
crime, who have been murdered in revenge by the relations; - the practice of slavery, which in no
form, even the mildest, contributes to increase the population […]. (II:16f.)
However, war, which in itself has redistributed whole districts of Maori, driven others to not
cultivate their land out of fear of neighbouring tribes and led to the initial unequal distribution of
firearms, or even erroneous customs and habits cannot account for this decline, as wars are now
less frequent, and therefore more security exists, especially whilst there is less attention to
superstitions, bar in the interior of the country.
For Dieffenbach, the one key ingredient in this decline is the altered lifestyle of the Maori
through European means, whether deliberate or otherwise. His evidence for this argument is
clearly seen in the tribes in the interior, who live away from European contact in a relatively
isolated state and according to their own customs, where “sickness is far less common” (II:22).
He puts this down to a number of factors. The first is the introduction of the potato, which is
“produced in great quantities with little labour” (II:18), so much so that it became a favourite diet
to replace previous healthier food, which took more effort to procure, as slaves and women could
simply do these tasks while the men remained idle. The second factor is the replacing of Maori
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