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foreigners, apart from cases of direct provocation. On the contrary, the Maori are “not opposing
but inviting the permanent settlement of English people amongst them – not disregarding merely,
but cherishing defenceless missionaries and other strangers – even protecting helpless English
women and children from the outrages of savage Englishmen”. 12 Thus, their love of everything
European, or rather British, and peaceable demeanour, which continual interaction with the best
of British has naturally done no end of good, together with their “great improvement” as servants
for hire in the form of labourers, traders, sailors and whalers, 13 make the “strong, active, and
almost uniformly well shaped” 14 Maori the perfect race to share a country with, as
“amalgamation” is a foreseeable eventuality due to their superiority over other savages, in which
“future generations of Europeans and natives may intermarry and become one people”. 15
Thus, in order to “preserve the New Zealand race from extermination” by encouraging the
Maori “to embrace the religion, language, laws and social habits of an advanced country”, 16 what
better way than through the guidance and authority of the New Zealand Company as the official
agency for emigration to New Zealand by bringing only the best British immigrants into the
country, as the well-being of the local population is supposedly foremost on their minds.
According to the Company, the Maori are only too willing and anxious to give away all their
sovereignty and lands, which in itself was far from the truth, 17 not only in order to ‘improve’
themselves through ‘civilisation’ and ‘Christianity’, which alone already justifies the Company’s
‘noble’ actions, but also to save their own livelihood from the growing number of miscreants,
who, it was believed, could irreparably harm the supposedly poor and defenceless Maori:
They are offended that we do not colonize their country; and with good reason, for they see the
substantial benefits that would accrue to them from the establishment of our laws and the rest of
our civilization, and that it is no longer a question whether Englishmen shall come into their
country, but whether they shall do so under the sanction and control of a proper authority, acting
with strict impartiality between both parties, or whether they shall come with gunpowder, brandy,
and debauchery, to corrupt their wives and daughters, plunder their potato grounds, and set all the
neighbouring tribes at variance; whilst the unhappy natives, if impelled by the irregular impulses
12 Wakefield and Ward, British Colonization, 49.
13 Cf. Belich, Making Peoples, 284.
14 Wakefield and Ward, British Colonization, 276.
15 Ibid., 29; cf. Ward, Information Relative to New-Zealand, 60-95.
16 Wakefield and Ward, British Colonization, 42.
17 “For all the tribes of New Zealand land was essential to a healthy way of life, a need as basic as air. From the soil
and water they obtained food, clothing, shelter – all the necessaries of life; from the possession of land a chief and his
tribe derived the mana, the honour, which made life worthwhile. Land linked the people to their ancestors. It was
treated as a sacred trust, handed from one generation to the next, ever sustaining the tribe. For tribes which had not
known Europeans intimately, or for any length of time, the idea of selling land was incomprehensible” (Burns, Fatal
Success, 20).
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