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expense of Maori, whose loss of land he viewed with sadness. These views would soon be tested
by Hochstetter after the onset of the Taranaki Wars.
An important difference between Krull’s perception of the Maori in his original letters and
what would appear in a more scholarly work is that the former’s views evolve more according to
his experiences, beliefs and the conclusions formed in those moments than on inflexible quasiscientific
preconceived notions derived from a wealth of ethnographic literature. When observing
the Maori he often assumes a merchant’s viewpoint through placing greater attention on themes
which would prove beneficial in future business transactions, such as gender roles, social status,
personal hygiene, and monetary and economic pursuits. Despite his non-scientific background,
Krull’s preconceptions and biases are consistent with those of Forster and Dieffenbach through
using similar forms of Romanticism and idealisation. The most noticeable change in perception
occurs within the female-male dichotomy. At first glance, he separates the Maori into the
beautiful and symmetrical male and the dirty, ugly and seemingly lazy female. Further contact
teaches him to agree with the Fosterian notion that it is traditional Maori custom for the women to
do all the manual work, with the exception of chiefly daughters, while the man is immune from
such chores. However, he finds the reverse to be the case the further he progresses through
Europeanised settlements. The outcome of this belief is that a chief’s daughter exhibits all the
European qualities of beauty and grace, while the appearance of those forced to live their lives as
slaves to their husbands reflect the unattractive and detrimental conditions they work in.
Following on from Dieffenbach, Krull also views the Maori as an intelligent and friendly selfsufficient
people, albeit also materialistic and sometimes greedy traders, who are better educated
than his fellow Germans and live more civilised and prosperous lives particularly around the Hot
Lake district, leading to his not fully endorsing theories of ‘fatal impact’, other than recognising
disappearing traditional traits and relaying information from predominantly British sources,
including colonists. In this way, he continues the underlying sympathies for the Maori that
Dieffenbach prescribed to, such as their general welfare and present state of conversion, and
combines them with original insights into the more peaceable and productive yet subjugated and
materialistic state of the Maori. In doing so, Krull makes a unique contribution to the depiction of
colonial life in New Zealand through offering a comparable perception to that expressed in the
more well-known writings of his contemporaries, Hochstetter and Haast.
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