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was not perfect: Grey Savage societies could simply die of old age, with or without European
contact. Fatal impact was carried by bacilli who were themselves immune to it – European agents
of contact, especially ruthless ones. Fatal impact was thought to work through the corrosive effect
of European things and thoughts, through moral degradation and loss of confidence in the face of
mighty Europe’s vices and virtues, through the greater destructiveness European weapons gave to
warfare, and through European disease. But it was usually seen as more than the sum of its parts, a
product of ‘more mysterious causes’ – immutable laws of Nature and Providence. Fatal impact led
to empire by ploughing the field for it, sweeping away previous inhabitants to clear the field for
Europe. In pure versions, it left no natives to rule. In moderate versions, which might be called
‘crippling impact’, it weakened them and either left them vulnerable to evil empire or obliged
agents of virtue to step in and save them from the agents of vice by imposing benign empire. As
early as the 1820s, well before it was reinforced, from 1859, by Social Darwinism, fatal impact
pervaded the thinking of many European visitors to New Zealand. They were predisposed to see
an empty Maori village as evidence of it, rather than of the inhabitants having gone to the beach
for the summer. Sometimes they were right. 15
In this way, the most fatal characteristic of ‘extinction discourse’ was its emphasis on the
certainty of this disappearance:
The sense of doom has often been rendered all the more powerful by the combination of three
elements: belief in the progress of at least some (chosen) peoples from savagery to civilization; the
faith that progress is either providential or natural – God’s or Nature’s wise plan; and the idea that
the white and dark races of the world are separated from each other by biological essences that,
translated into Darwinian terms, equal “fitness” versus “unfitness” to survive. 16 In all these ways,
extinction discourse forms a powerful nexus of ideas that has been hegemonic for countless
European explorers, colonists, writers, artists, officials, missionaries, humanitarians, and
anthropologists. 17
Thus, the inescapability and presumed consequences of European contact were readily believed
without a second thought thanks largely to their belief in the “fundamental moral and biological
weaknesses of islanders”, 18 which saw these small and isolated populations as naturally weak,
flawed, degenerate and helpless, 19 often resulting in gross exaggerations as to the extent to which
these supposedly dying races were diminishing, whilst their superior European brethren remained
immune.
At the forefront of this belief were also the reports of early British missionaries, who “did
much to spread the belief that the native peoples of the Pacific in their natural state were depraved
15
Belich, Making Peoples, 126.
16
The oft-cited phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was actually coined by the Scottish philosopher Herbert Spencer in
1864 before eventually being adopted by Charles Darwin in the 1869 edition of his Origin of Species as a substitute
for ‘natural selection’.
17
Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930. Ithaca, New
York: Cornell University Press, 2003, 190.
18
Howe, Nature, Culture, and History, 43.
19
See ibid., 43-46, 64-68.
14