A History of Missions to New Zealand

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[00:02:06] I'm Elise and in every episode I'll bring you a new martyr and or missionary, the called and the brave. In this episode we're exploring the history of missions in New Zealand. Before we begin I want to announce some exciting news to you guys.

[00:02:39] This is the 50th episode of Martyrs and Missionaries. We've been going for two years and are now in the top one and a half percent of all podcasts and of course that is only possible thanks to you guys, wonderful listeners. So thank you.

[00:02:53] And I also want to give a shout out to some new Patreons we have. JW and Ying Long, thank you for joining us and for supporting this show. The inspiration of this episode actually came from a YouTube short.

[00:03:05] I was listening to somebody talking about the history of London. She does walking tours in London and she happened to mention somebody who was associated with New Zealand missions and had written a book and different things like that and I thought you know what?

[00:03:18] I don't know an awful lot about New Zealand and New Zealand missions and it got me thinking so then I started doing some research and found that it's, well it's not really talked about very much at all.

[00:03:30] There's really not a whole lot on the topic but New Zealand has a really interesting history. So before the early to mid 1300s it had absolutely zero human populace. The first people to settle New Zealand were a Polynesian tribe who became known as the Maori people.

[00:03:46] The Maori name for New Zealand means the long white cloud. And for an island located parallel to the southeastern coast of Australia you would imagine that it would be pretty toasty but actually the temperature fluctuates wildly

[00:03:57] with subtropical temperatures in the north and then you get progressively colder as you go south with temperatures as low as 14 degrees Fahrenheit in the mountains. And actually the country is separated into two separate land masses with a north island

[00:04:12] and a south island and then there are 700 tiny little islands that are surrounding it. And when I think of New Zealand personally there are two things that come to mind. Lord of the Rings and sheep. However neither hobbits nor sheep are indigenous.

[00:04:27] There are only two varieties of bats and they are the only land mammals that are indigenous to New Zealand. And there used to be a large flightless bird similar to an ostrich which died out about 600 years ago seemingly. It hunted to extinction.

[00:04:42] And when the Maori arrived there wasn't a lot of edible vegetation and they tried to cultivate plants they brought with them but many of them were just ill suited to the more temperate climate.

[00:04:51] And so the only one that really took off was the sweet potato which then became a dietary staple which seems to have even influenced a high ranking deity in the Maori pantheon. Their god of agriculture has a particular association with the sweet potato. Now about the Maori themselves.

[00:05:08] The Maori religion never deviated that far from the Polynesian religious beliefs as a whole. All living things have a genealogy and a life force. They worshipped three main deities. Tongaroa, the persification of the ocean and the origin of all fish.

[00:05:23] Tain or maybe Tane, the persification of the forest and the origin of all birds. And Rongo was the personification of all peaceful activities and agriculture and was the ancestor of all cultivated plants. And there is a controversial belief about the possibility of there being a supreme

[00:05:39] being or a god but it seems that this belief didn't really develop until after the introduction of Christianity much much later. The Maori followed certain practices that relate to traditional concepts like tapu or taboo.

[00:05:53] Certain people and objects contain mana or a spiritual power or essence and in earlier times tribal members of a higher rank would not touch objects which belonged to members of a lower rank.

[00:06:03] To do so would pollute them and then persons of a lower rank could not touch the belongings of a high born person without putting themselves at risk of death. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Maori were divided into multiple tribes spread across

[00:06:17] the islands with the largest concentration being in the North Island and even today 90% of Maori people are located in the North. The Maori practiced ritualistic cannibalism. They would imbibe the mana or spiritual essence of an enemy tribes person. Infanticide was also widely practiced especially against baby girls.

[00:06:37] For over 300 years, the Maori lived in what seems to be total isolation from the outside world. Their first encounter with Europeans came in 1642 from a Dutch sailor Abel Tasman who sailed from Indonesia to Golden Bay, South Island and Anchored.

[00:06:52] A Maori tribal contingent came out to meet them and asked if they were friend or foe and of course the Dutch couldn't understand them so they loudly blew trumpets in reply and lowered a boat to greet them.

[00:07:02] So in response, the Maori killed four of the crew by ramming the boat and then Tasman decided that he didn't care enough to fix the misunderstanding so he sailed away naming the spot Murderer's Bay. The next Europeans wouldn't arrive until 1769, that's 127 years after the Tasman incidents.

[00:07:21] A famous English explorer James Cook arrived in the North Island near Poverty Bay. Cook sent a few men ashore, another misunderstanding led to some of the Maori being killed. Then the next day, Cook tried again and he brought along a Tahitian crew member who spoke

[00:07:35] a dialect that's similar to Maori and they tried to show gifts and kindness but the Maori were a little bit miffed about the day before and when one of them tried to take a musket, he was shot and killed.

[00:07:46] But Cook, unlike Abel, didn't give up so easily and on the third attempt, the two parties met on separate boats and when three Maori jumped ship, they were captured by Cook's men and then brought aboard where they were showered with more gifts and food and then

[00:07:59] eventually they were able to get across that they meant no harm. The next day, Cook's men brought them back ashore. Soon traders and whalers began arriving in Dro, a little town of Russell on the upper east coast of North Island.

[00:08:13] Today it's a beautiful seaside town but in the 1800s, it was known as the Hellhole of the Pacific. All sorts of vices would and could be had in this former capital of New Zealand.

[00:08:26] This leads us to the Church Missionary Society or rather to a man named Samuel Marsden but let's talk about the CMS first because all of the missionaries, pretty much, that we will be talking about in this episode were ordained and sent out by them.

[00:08:41] In 1787, a few men of the East Indies Company sent letters to William Wilberforce of British abolitionist movement fame who was then just a young member of parliament and then to another man named Charles Simeon, an Anglican clergyman. But it wasn't for another 13 years that anything came of it.

[00:08:59] In April of 1799, a group of conservative Anglicans including Wilberforce and Simeon came together to form the charter dubbing the organization the Society for Missions to Africa and the East. It later became known as the Church Missionary Society or CMS for short.

[00:09:17] Wilberforce was asked to serve as president but declined and served as VP instead and its first missionaries were sent out in 1804. So back to Samuel Marsden, he's born in Britain in 1765. He was recruited by an evangelical Anglican group at the age of 21 and then sent to Magdalen

[00:09:34] College and there he was commissioned to work as an assistant chaplain in the New South Wales penal colony in Australia. He was ordained, married, and sent out when he arrived in New South Wales in 1794. He took care of orphans and female convicts.

[00:09:49] He bought up to 100 acres and employed people to work the grounds, providing food and money to those he cared for. And he served as a magistrate as well as a chaplain and in 1800 he became the sole chaplain for New South Wales.

[00:10:01] And he would regularly provide food and housing to those who were visiting from surrounding islands. And eventually he became interested in the Maori people of New Zealand and he felt the call to go evangelize to them but it wasn't until 1807 when he was able to go back to

[00:10:16] Britain and try to raise a group to go. And he was tentatively heard out by the Church Missionary Society who agreed to send lay settlers to help pave the way for missionaries to come. And this group included Thomas Kindle, a schoolmaster, William Hall, a joiner which is basically

[00:10:32] a carpenter but a little bit more skilled, and John King, a rope maker, and Ruatara of Ngapuhi, the largest of the Maori tribes located on the North Island. Ruatara was found by Marsden in a sick and neglected state in England and he was offered passage home.

[00:10:49] And he returned the favor by teaching rudimentary Maori to Marsden. A little bit about Ruatara, he had chiefly roots but they were pretty distant. He left New Zealand in 1805 around the age of 18 and he worked on a British whaling ship.

[00:11:03] His goal was to meet King George but instead he spent the next four years serving on four different whaling ships. Some of them were good and some of them were bad. And when Marsden found him, he had been defrauded and beaten and although he made it to Britain,

[00:11:17] he wasn't allowed ashore. So he arrived with Marsden in Sydney and stayed with him in his home. He spent eight months there and he conceived a lot of great plans to introduce wheat production

[00:11:27] to New Zealand which would provide his people with a valuable food source and export crop because as I mentioned there aren't a lot of crops available. The only thing that really grows is the sweet potato. They also have a cabbage tree but not really a whole lot else.

[00:11:40] And he studied European agricultural techniques, carpentry, other skills and when Marsden arranged a passage for him to New Zealand in a whaling ship, he took with him tools and a quantity of seed wheat.

[00:11:51] But once again, he was defrauded and abandoned, this time on Norfolk Island and he was rescued by another whaling ship and was taken back to Port Jackson in Sydney and was not actually able to go home until 1812.

[00:12:06] In December of 1809, something happened which would become known as the Boyd Incident and it did some serious damage in international relations. A ship arrived from Sydney to collect an order of timber.

[00:12:16] One of the passengers was Te Ara, a young Maori chief and he was meant to work as a seaman to pay for his passage but he decided that this work was beneath him and he refused.

[00:12:27] So he was flogged and denied food and when he arrived home in New Zealand, he told his family about what had happened and they swore revenge. Now unaware of this, the Europeans come ashore to check on the timber shipment.

[00:12:38] They are killed and eaten and their attackers disguise themselves as the dead crew and get on the ship and they kill and eat pretty much everyone there except for the sizable number which is gased by clinging to the rigging.

[00:12:50] Now Te Pahi, a prominent chief and relative of Ruatara arrives to assuage the problem and tries to care for the Europeans but he is told to back off and is forbidden from interfering.

[00:13:00] So they killed those on the rigging and some of the only survivors included a two year old boy, a baby and her mother and the cabin boy who cared for Te Ara after his beatings

[00:13:10] but then he was later killed and eaten for his ineptitude in making bait hooks. And killed pretty much all of Ruatara's tribe including Te Pahi even though he wasn't responsible but he was caught up in a case of mistaken identity.

[00:13:24] And because of this, Maristan's permission to enter New Zealand was revoked and for some Europeans the Boyd incident put New Zealand on the avoid at all costs category and a pamphlet began circulating in Europe that warned sailors off of the cannibal islands, touch not that

[00:13:39] cursed shore lest you these cannibals pursue. When Ruatara arrived he had good fortune in a way because now he's a senior chief so everybody else had been killed in this retaliatory attack. Retaliatory? Retaliatory? Attack?

[00:13:54] And he had a tenuous grasp on power because he had these weird foreign ideas about agriculture and wheat production and he had these seeds and he's like if you take these seeds then

[00:14:04] you can grow them into plants and then we can export them and it's going to be great. But he wasn't able to prove his theories and these ideas until 1814 when Maristan purchased a ship and then sent Thomas Kindle and others to consult about setting up the church missionary

[00:14:18] society mission. So Maristan was able to send Ruatara many gifts including a hand powered flour mill and he was at last able to convince his fellow chiefs the value of wheat. Some other gifts were given by the governor of New South Wales who was anxious to make

[00:14:33] sure that this projected mission went really well. These gifts included a mare, a cow, other livestock, a military uniform, poultry, seed and seedlings of many useful plants. Samuel Maristan was finally able to arrive in December of 1814 and he landed at Ruatara's

[00:14:51] village and began preaching to a large audience. He began with Psalm 100 and ended with Luke 2 10, behold I bring you good tidings of great joy. Ruatara was translating for him. He and Maristan traveled around the Bay of Islands which is where the mission station

[00:15:05] was set up and Ruatara helped the missionaries establish good relationships with the people near to the mission and also assisted them in building houses. But Ruatara was also wary because some people in Sydney had told him that missionaries are the forerunners to settlers and soldiers.

[00:15:22] All he had to do was look at the poor aborigines of Australia. But despite these apprehensions he continued to help the missionaries but in February of 1815 he was struck severely ill with a raging fever.

[00:15:33] Maristan tried to reach him and had to threaten to raze the entire town to the ground in order to get to him because of the Maori views on what was taboo. They moved him and gave him medicine but it continued to worsen until he died on March 3rd.

[00:15:46] His wife then hanged herself and they were buried together inland in his tribal lands. With the death of Ruatara, the relationship of the missionaries with the Maori of the Bay of Islands becomes much more exploitative.

[00:16:00] They needed the goodwill of the chiefs in order to stay and so they needed to make it worth their while and the Maori were not interested in the preaching of what they considered to be an angry god declaring the damnation of all.

[00:16:11] And within the religion of the Maori, because the missionaries had no power, they had no mana and therefore their message was to be endured but not taken too seriously and they were far below the chiefs who had great mana and in order to convert a village you first

[00:16:25] had to convert the chiefs. So just that right there is a huge problem. The second problem is that the missionaries were interested in civilizing the Maori more than they were in sharing the gospel. And third, those early missionaries, Maristan aside, were not men of great moral caliber.

[00:16:45] I also want to note that this is early in modern missions and Protestant missions as a whole is just getting off of the ground. So there's a lot of things in those early days that didn't go as well because it was

[00:16:55] a system, a little bit of a trial and error. So I want to make sure that I'm gracious in this episode while at the same time pointing out some of the problems that beset the mission because of the character of the people who were interested in coming over.

[00:17:08] There were some people who came over because they legitimately wanted to evangelize to the Maori. There were some that were interested in exploring and botanizing. There were some that came over that were not qualified to be clergy in other parts of the

[00:17:22] world because they didn't speak Greek and Latin. And so these combinations together, sometimes you got fantastic guys that came over and were very passionate, loved the Lord and loved the people that they were ministering to. And then you had another group of people that not so much.

[00:17:40] There's one more thing that I want to bring up that caused some issues for these missionaries. Not all of them, but because it comes up enough, I want to point it out that a lot

[00:17:49] of these missionaries did not marry for love, but rather because it was a requirement of the organization back in those days that you just, you had to have somebody to go with you on the mission field.

[00:17:59] Now some people did marry for love or they came to love their spouse, they worked through it. But because some of these men were men of dubious character, it compounded their issues and caused some problems.

[00:18:10] And I came across some quotes regarding the temptation some of them felt, but I won't include them because they're a little awkward and we're trying to keep this PG or at least PG-13. I want to reintroduce Thomas Kendall.

[00:18:23] If you remember, he came over in 1814 with a small crew. He's a few months ahead of Marsden, but Marsden travels quite a bit. He's not around as much. And when he does come around, it's usually for disciplinary reasons.

[00:18:35] Now Kendall worked as a school teacher and he opened the mission school in 1816 to 33 students. The school closes two years later because of lack of resources and funding. But he's appointed as justice of the peace in New Zealand and then he assumed himself

[00:18:50] to be the head of the mission. He was a little grating, a little irritating, and he had an explosive unreasonable temper. So for these reasons, he was not popular at the mission station and there was a lot of interpersonal conflict that almost destroyed the mission.

[00:19:06] And in 1815, he had compiled a spelling book that was attempting to capture spoken Maori into a written language which they didn't have. And he sends it off to be published and the CMS Oriental linguist doesn't like it.

[00:19:19] So Kendall decides to leave the mission and go to England on an unauthorized visit to prove that his work was accurate. And he brings with him Chief Hongi Hika, who's another primary benefactor of the mission. He also brings along a young chief named Waikato.

[00:19:34] And if you are from New Zealand, we do have a few listeners from New Zealand. So if you're one of them and you are cringing on the inside from my horrible pronunciation, please accept my most humble of apologies.

[00:19:44] Kendall's work was approved and published and it established the foundation for written Maori. His visit to England was a smashing success. He meets the king, George IV. He has his portrait painted with the two chiefs. He amazed audiences with his tales of New Zealand.

[00:20:00] And he returns full of himself and asserting his leadership of the mission using his recent successes and his friendship with Hongi to bully the others around. So his relationship with other settlers deteriorated rapidly and so did the situation with the Maori.

[00:20:16] They had to constantly capitulate to them in everything and they were entirely at the whims of their benefactors because they had no power. And so if they wanted to get anything done, they had to do whatever was asked of them.

[00:20:28] This led to something called the musket wars, which was exacerbated by the gun trade. So what was happening is that settlers were selling guns to different Maori tribes. So then these tribes would get the guns, they'd go and wipe out their enemies, and it would

[00:20:44] go back and forth. And then eventually everybody got enough guns that then they became equal and it was no longer a problem in the same way that it had been. But Marsden was furious to learn that settlers, especially missionaries, were selling guns.

[00:20:59] So he tells them to cease and desist and they do for a little while and then they decide they were going to do it anyway. And Marsden has to dismiss two of the missionaries for their dogged determination to defy him.

[00:21:09] And Kendall is a staunch defender of the gun trade. He writes this in a letter to the CMS in 1822. So for this harshly worded letter, he was let go. But a year earlier, he was caught in adultery with a young Maori woman.

[00:21:39] She had been taught by Kendall at the school and was a servant in his household. And so once the news broke, he fled with her to a village near to the mission station, but ended the relationship with her in April of 1822.

[00:21:51] He then later tries to explain to a ship's captain that he had only lived with her in order to obtain accurate information as to their religious opinions and tenets, which he would have in no other way obtained.

[00:23:35] To Marsden's credit, once he found out about the affair, he immediately suspended Kendall. And then after Kendall's dismissal from the mission, he and his family set sail for England, but the ship wrecked and then he decided that that meant that God wanted him to stay.

[00:24:07] So they go back to the house they had built on the other side of the island away from the mission. And then a few years later, in 1825, he goes to Chile as a clergyman to the British consulate. And then he goes to New South Wales and Australia.

[00:24:20] But he always came back to the Maori and their ideas on religion. But then later on, he becomes kind of a strange spiritualist or pantheist. And at the same time, he's trying to publish a book amending some of his earlier work concerning a written language for the Maori.

[00:24:35] But Marsden blocks his publication at every turn. And then eventually in 1832, he is drowned in a shipwreck. It's a rather tragic ending to a rather tragic life. I also want to talk about Henry Williams and he is a breath of fresh air.

[00:24:51] We'll talk about him and his brother. They're both very solid guys. Henry was born in England and his family was wealthy until the death of his father. And in 1806, at the age of 14, he entered the Royal Navy as a midshipman.

[00:25:03] And he served over 10 years during the Napoleonic Wars. And if anything will prepare you for a future life in the New Zealand mission field, it would be the Napoleonic Wars. And I believe he is the first veteran of that war that we have covered on this show.

[00:25:18] He was eventually discharged as a lieutenant on half pay, which is a rather common situation. So he needed a new vocation. And he becomes a drawing master or an art teacher basically, but on a more professional level. And he marries his wife, Mary Anne in 1818.

[00:25:34] And it was shortly after that. And under the discipleship of his brother-in-law, that he decided to go into missions. And in 1819, he offered his services to the CMS and he was accepted as a lay settler. And then in 1820, as a missionary candidate.

[00:25:49] Before leaving for New Zealand, he also learned medicine, weaving, twining, basket making. And then during his trip out, he learned shipbuilding. So with Mary Anne and the three children, he arrives in the Bay of Islands, August 3rd, 1823.

[00:26:05] And when he arrives, he assumes leadership of a mission that is a complete disaster. After almost 10 years in operation, they had not had a single convert. The missionaries are still dependent on the Maori for food and supplies.

[00:26:18] And under Thomas Kendall's abrasive leadership, the entire mission is just a complete, complete wreck. So he sets about ending the gun trade and making the missionaries independent financially with the construction of a trading vessel.

[00:26:33] So this in turn, boosts the mana of the missionaries, which is crucial to their success anyway. And then he focuses on the spiritual issues. So too much emphasis had been placed on civilizing the Maori through teaching the arts and agriculture prior to sharing the gospel with them.

[00:26:50] And this obviously wasn't working when you have a mission station that has zero converts in 10 years. To be more efficient, Henry argued that the missions members needed to put more emphasis and time into learning the Maori language, and then preaching to the tribes in the surrounding

[00:27:06] areas, and also teaching in the schools on the mission stations. And so to do all these things, most of the personnel would have to be concentrated in one place. So he moves the mission station to Paihia, and the missionaries begin devoting regular

[00:27:19] amounts of time to learning Maori together. Having more missionaries at one station meant they were able to visit the surrounding villages more frequently, and then as they became more proficient in Maori, their preaching was also more effective.

[00:27:32] And then schooling for Maori children was revitalized under Henry and his wife, Mary Anne, and more students attended classes regularly. Working together more effectively fostered a very harmonious relationship among the missionaries, and then also the Maori noticed that they had a greater unity and purpose.

[00:27:51] Henry's successful leadership in the mission increased his mana in the years that followed, and so he was frequently asked to mediate between warring Maori factions. The 1830s were a decade of achievement and progress for Henry Williams and the CMS mission as a whole.

[00:28:05] By 1842, over 3,000 Maori in the Bay of Islands area had been baptized. And by the end of 1840, the mission had established stations and influence over 50 miles to the south. So 1840 represents an important turning point in the history of New Zealand, but we're

[00:28:21] not going to talk about that just yet. Before that, I want to discuss some of the other things that are going on in the background. So in 1838, the first Catholic missionaries arrive and they also set up their own mission station in the Bay of Islands.

[00:28:35] And they told the Maori that they could mix the pagan elements of their culture and Christianity together and it was no big deal. So this was confusing and it conflicted with what the Anglicans were saying. And then they compound things even further.

[00:28:48] The Catholic missionaries were French, and so the faith you chose reflected your national allegiance. So rival tribes would choose Catholicism if the other chose Anglicanism and vice versa. And then many tribes covered their bases and had some of their people convert to Anglicanism,

[00:29:03] Catholicism, and even Methodists who were in the area. They had a small, if somewhat unsuccessful mission station of their own. So Henry Williams' brother's name is William Williams and he arrives with his wife in 1826.

[00:29:19] And early on, he does a lot of work in scripture translation and other texts for the Maori mission. I want to contrast the lives of William and Henry against a couple of their fellow missionaries

[00:29:29] who were also vital to the work at the mission, but they chose not to stay the course. One of these men is named William Yate. He arrived from Britain to New Zealand a couple of years after William did. And he was instrumental in translation work.

[00:29:43] He decides to publish a history of the mission, but makes it all about his work and mentions his co-workers without their consent. He also goes to England without permission and decides to raise a lot of money for their

[00:29:54] mission station church, to expand it and make it this grand edifice. And it's going to be his baby, his project. And he tries to get the other missionaries on board and they're pretty frustrated because it's a small mission station.

[00:30:06] There's no reason to have something grand and he wanted to make this really all about himself. But on his trip back to Australia, he's caught in a scandal engaging in inappropriate relations with another man and he's dismissed.

[00:30:19] And then his life kind of goes south from there and never quite recovers. William Colenso arrived in New Zealand at the end of 1834 and he had been brought on to help run the printing press, which would then churn out all the documents that William

[00:30:33] Williams and Yate and the others were developing. So by 1840, Colenso had produced over 74,000 copies of various books and pamphlets and they weren't all religious in nature. In October of 1835, the first tract produced in English was printed by the order of the

[00:30:49] British resident James Busby, warning settlers about the imperialistic ambitions of Baron Charles de Thierry. And then over the next nine years, other official notices and publications appeared, including the first New Zealand Government Gazette.

[00:31:05] Colenso's most memorable work of this sort was the printing of the Maori text of the Treaty of Waitangi on February 17th, 1840. But it's signing his cautious representations to the Lieutenant Governor that many of the Maori were unaware of the meaning of the treaty was brushed aside.

[00:31:21] So his observations were recorded at the time and they were published as the authentic and genuine history of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1890. And it is the most reliable contemporary European account of the signing.

[00:31:34] But by 1840, he had grown tired of running the printing press and wanted to explore and evangelize. The other missionaries were skeptical of his motivations and also his extreme legalism. But he lobbied and lobbied for a deacon appointment, and he married his wife Elizabeth in 1843

[00:31:51] in order to fulfill the requirements, and then was reluctantly given the job of basically a traveling evangelist. And as the years went by, he had two children and an increasingly deteriorating marriage. He began to travel further out and stay away for longer, and he became obsessed with botany,

[00:32:07] and one could argue that his main driving factor was honestly to botanize. His harsh evangelistic methods earned him no reward from the Maori and instead turned many of them away from the gospel.

[00:32:17] And he was unyielding in his ability to sniff out sin in others and then treat them with reproach. But in 1848, he began an affair with one of the Maori girls living in his household. And then when she was married in 1850, she was already pregnant with Kolintso's son.

[00:32:33] So after the affair was found out, his wife's brother took their children to Australia, and then Kolintso's wife Elizabeth followed with the baby a year later. However, the boy was not accepted by her family, and she was forced to send him back to New Zealand.

[00:32:47] And Kolintso never saw his wife or other two children again, and he was suspended as a deacon in 1852 and then was dismissed from the mission. When we go through stories of the history of missions, it's easy to kind of brush

[00:33:01] over the people who didn't finish their race strongly, because it's sad how many people do just fall away for various reasons. But I think it both highlights the reality of missions, and then it also shows in contrast the people who were faithful to the very end.

[00:33:21] So let's get back to those guys. For his part, Samuel Morrison continued to preach and teach and explore many different places. He was a really gentle soul, and he often had the unfortunate duty of calling out nonsense,

[00:33:34] even though he really didn't have much of a heart for it. He wanted to see New Zealand grow and flourish, with European settlers and Maori living together peacefully as Christian brothers. And he made many journeys out into the far-flung areas, strengthening the believers there, and

[00:33:48] eventually in 1838, at the age of 75, he passes away in Sydney. And I found this little bit about him I want to share. Inevitably, Marsden was much misunderstood in his generation and just as often misrepresented. In essence, he was simple-minded and honest, even to a fault.

[00:34:05] He was also open-handed, almost prodigal with his time and money. He also looked with pity on the fallen and the lost, and he often befriended convicts. He was extraordinarily generous towards those who disappointed him, or even those who hated him.

[00:34:21] Two years after the death of Marsden, so in 1840, Britain was looking to annex New Zealand. The settlement at the Bay of Islands was only loosely controlled from New South Wales, and there was no formal agreement in place, and so there was a growing number of settlers in

[00:34:35] the 1830s, lots of unruly British citizens but no way of controlling them, and the French were also trying to annex New Zealand. Many of the Maori did not want to be annexed by France, and so they preferred to partner with the British.

[00:34:48] Henry and his brother William had a large role in the success of getting this document signed which became known as the Treaty of Wotangi. They were in charge of translating it into Maori and then making sure that it was read by as many chiefs as possible.

[00:35:04] Their trust within the Maori community was essential to getting it signed. Over 500 chiefs signed it on February 6th, 1840. It is the founding document of New Zealand, and here's some of the effects of the treaty.

[00:35:17] So the treaty is a broad statement of principles on which the British and Maori made a political compact to found a nation state and to build a government in New Zealand. There were two different versions, the English version and the Maori version, and they both

[00:35:30] said slightly different things, which in the end makes a big difference. So in the English version, the Maori cede the sovereignty of New Zealand to Britain. The Maori give the Crown an exclusive right to buy lands they wish to sell, and in return

[00:35:43] are guaranteed full rights of ownership of their lands, forests, fisheries, and other possessions. And the Maori are given the rights and privileges of British citizens. So the Maori are predominantly a spoken culture. They weren't used to seeing their language written because a script for it had only been

[00:36:00] created recently. This was added to the confusion as well. The Maori thought they were getting a more equal deal, and in reality, the English had the upper hand. And this led to deteriorating relationships between the Europeans and the Maori in the

[00:36:15] 1840s, and it quickly got to the point where it was beyond mediation. And so Henry Williams, and he was instrumental in getting this treaty signed, he was between a rock and a hard place, so he was accused of favoritism by both sides.

[00:36:29] And in 1845, New Zealand got a new governor, Governor Gray, and he was out to get Henry for whatever reason. Henry had purchased a large tract of land for his growing family. He had nine kids. Gray doubted the validity of Henry's title and claimed falsely the CMS missionaries'

[00:36:47] land holdings were the cause of wars up north. This was completely false. So Henry was obliged to defend his land purchases, and much more important as far as he was concerned, was his personal integrity against the governor's charges.

[00:37:00] But he was fighting a losing battle against a more powerful adversary, and even his own bishop, his superior, sided with Gray against him. And in 1849, the CMS in London, persuaded by Henry Williams' critics, decided that

[00:37:14] Henry was much too much of an embarrassment to remain a member of the organization. So he returned to his family and lived on the land that had caused so much consternation, but he continued to preach and teach even as the New Zealand wars broke out in the 1860s.

[00:37:30] Now in private letters, he was critical of the government officials and their policy, but he remained largely aloof from the public debate about the war. In 1862, he wrote to his brother-in-law,

[00:37:40] I feel our work is drawing to a close, and were it not for the Maoris, I should have relinquished all long since, but I feel bound to them. And after several years of deteriorating health, Henry Williams died on July 16th, 1867.

[00:37:55] And his passing was deeply felt by the Northern Maori, among whom he had lived for most of his life. Now as for his brother William, he continued to build and work on various mission schools until he felt that his true calling was to disciple the Maori pastorate.

[00:38:10] All through his life, he kept revising the Maori New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer, and his enduring work is a dictionary of the New Zealand language, which was first published in 1844.

[00:38:21] He only left New Zealand once in 52 years to return to England in order to defend his brother's reputation. William once described his missionary life like the unbroken course of a parish schoolmaster. A great deal of work, but most of it of the same character.

[00:38:39] William died in 1878 at the age of 78. One of the stranger things in New Zealand history was the creation of a cult called Pei Maraer, or Goodness and Peace, that was started by a former Maori Wesleyan convert who had previously worked at their mission station.

[00:38:57] His name was Tei Ue, and by the 1850s he was actively involved in Maori opposition to land sales. He fought against the government and was a strong supporter of the Maori King movement. In 1862 he has a vision in which the Archangel Gabriel instructed him to lead his people

[00:39:13] In casting off the yoke of the foreigner, the birthright of the Israelites, i.e. the Maori people, would be restored to the land of Canaan, which is New Zealand. And following a day of deliverance, the unrighteous would perish.

[00:39:26] He called his church Hauhau because Tei Hau, the spirit of God in the image of the wind, carried the news or prophecy to the faithful. Tei Ue considered his teaching to be Christianity purified of missionary error. And in 1864 he takes on the spiritual name of Wind Man.

[00:39:43] In April of 1864, the preserved heads of six British soldiers killed in an ambush were presented to Tei Ue. He accepted these as a symbol of the victory of the righteous. Governor Grey declared that all of the Hauhau practices were repugnant to all humanity and

[00:39:59] declared that it was to be suppressed by force if necessary. Hauhau disciples traveled around the North Island carrying the message from the West Coast to the East. And then civil wars broke out as factions within different tribes opposed the new religion, believing that it challenged their sovereignty.

[00:40:16] They didn't like it. They also thought it was kind of weird. And then the killing of the Anglican missionary Carl Volkner in 1865 by Hauhau followers caused an outrage in the settler population and then sparked another civil war on the East Coast that then lasts for another almost 10 years.

[00:40:35] So Carl Volkner was captured and then hung from a tree, decapitated, and one of these Hauhau leaders swallowed his eyeballs. He dubbed one Parliament and the other the Queen and British law. And even though the Hauhau cult was squashed in the 1880s, in a recent New Zealand census

[00:40:52] over 600 people still identified as adherents. New Zealand has kind of a strange relationship with Britain. There's no official Independence Day and they were actually never formally a colony of the Empire. They had a unique status and in World War I and World War II they fought enthusiastically

[00:41:12] for the British Empire. But if you wanted some point of separation, it would probably be 1947 when they became parliamentary independent of British influence. So what happened with the missionary legacy of New Zealand?

[00:41:28] So Maori steadily lost respect for the missionaries as a result of land politics and settler influence and then with the strange cult of the Hauhau, it was seen as kind of a twisting or very

[00:41:40] much more connected to Christianity in their mind and they didn't want anything to do with it so it really shut them off to any other kind of Christianity. And by 1860 almost all the mission schools were closed and many of the missions were deserted.

[00:41:55] The missionary agencies that had been in the country backed out and left the churches to their own governance. And according to a 2018 census, 48.2% of New Zealanders identify as having no religion and 36.5% identified as Christian but that spread across 20 different denominations.

[00:42:16] Today the fastest growing religion among New Zealanders is Hinduism. So it's hard not to look back and critique maybe rightfully so the methods and the people who were used to share the gospel in New Zealand because maybe if it was done a different way

[00:42:30] with a better missions organization or better people it would have been more of what we would consider to be a success. Because as we come to the end of this episode, it really isn't much of a success. It just kind of peters out.

[00:42:43] There's no great revivals throughout history and then a large number of that that were baptized end up kind of coming out of the faith and they're no longer they no longer consider themselves to be believers especially after the signing of the treaty and all the

[00:42:56] land battles that ensue. But Isaiah 55 10 and 11 says, So looking at it with that perspective that God's word doesn't return void. The gospel was preached in New Zealand. God is sovereign. People heard. Many people were saved and that created a legacy of faith in their families even if

[00:43:35] it's not on a grand scale that we would deem to be this successful movement. And we can take solace and hope in the fact that the Lord has not returned yet. So while he has not come back and while we're still living and breathing there is always

[00:43:47] the opportunity for people to hear the gospel and to come to Christ. And there's always opportunity for the gospel to spread and for revivals to happen. And so with that in mind I want to close with Samuel Mariston's own thoughts after he

[00:44:01] had preached the gospel for the very first time on Christmas Day in New Zealand. In this manner the gospel has been introduced into New Zealand and I fervently pray that the glory of it may never depart from its inhabitants until time shall be no more.

[00:44:16] As always thank you for listening to Mariston Missionaries. I'm Elise.

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