Don't Confuse Us With Facts, Part #3

The European Heart of Darkness

We have been addressing the myth-making revisionism about Maori that is pervasive throughout the liberal-academic complex. There has been a deliberate attempt to recast pre-European Maori as noble savage rather than degenerate primitive. Many in the liberal-academic complex have “gone along for the ride.” They have just accepted the mythology and perpetuated it when opportunity arose.

Cultures are never totally static. They are often very dynamic—none more so when people are uprooted from their ancestral homes or the “places” of their forefathers. We do not know whether the ancestors of Maori were advanced, both technically and ethically. It may well be that they were. Earlier Maori clearly had sophisticated ocean-going navigational skills. However, it is not uncommon for a culture to decline rapidly, once isolated from ancestral connections. We suspect that this indeed did occur in the case of the Maori invaders. Whether they brought practices like slavery, cannibalism, and farming humans for food to New Zealand is not clear. What is clear, however, is that these degenerate practices were pervasive throughout New Zealand by the time Europeans arrived.

What is also very clear is that many Europeans rapidly degenerated when they came into contact with Maori and lived among them. The pakeha-maori—that is, those Europeans who lived amongst Maori as maori, were predominantly male; they were also predominantly seamen and/or escaped or released convicts. They were thus isolated males, not part of family groupings. They were removed from their ancestral and their cultural traditions. In many cases rapid cultural degeneration followed.

One example is the quick adoption of polygamy by some pakeha-maori. In the decades of the 1820's and 30's, with the escalation of inter-tribal wars, Maori chiefs came to place a high value on having resident pakeha in the tribe. Such pakeha-maori were used as a conduit for European trade goods into the tribe, particularly muskets. Having a trader-pakeha under one's protection came to be regarded as a status symbol. One way to recruit pakeha-maori men was to give them a wife as soon as possible. In some cases, this soon led to multiple wives.

Trevor Bentley records:

. . . several pakeha-maori chose a life of polygamy. The tattooed pakeha-maori seen by George Angas on the Mokau River in 1834 had “at least six wives.” Jacky Marmon claimed to have had four wives at the Hokianga after 1924 and five wives from his previous residency in the Bay of Islands after 1817. . . .

Elsewhere, pakeha-maori replaced their wives as they improved their status or shifted their residence. The Spanish pakeha-maori Jose Manual had five wives at Poverty Bay during the 1830's, each of whom bore him one child. The descendants of these marriages are know today as the Paniora (Spaniards) of Ngati Porou and number several thousand. In the same district the trader-whaler Thomas Halbert, known as Tame Poto (Tommy Short) secured his commercial enterprises through successive alliances with six Maori women from three East Coast tribes. Halbert's six marriages made him famous locally and he was nicknamed Henry VII by the resident Europeans. Eleven of Halbert's children survived and founded families well known in Poverty Bay today.
Bentley, p. 199,200

For many pakeha-maori, their marriages to Maori women turned out to be little more than dalliances. Bentley again:

As the political and economic influence of the pakeha-maori declined after 1840, their Maori wives and mistresses did not fare well. At harbours, river mouths and in the interior, pakeha-maori dissolved their unions and rejoined European society. . . . Women with half-caste children accompanied their lords; childless women returned to their own race.
Bentley, p.204

Another example of rapid degeneration by many pakeha-maori was their becoming cannibals. This fact has also suffered from revisionism, this time from the European record-keepers of the day, who found great difficulty acknowledging the truth. Most pakeha cannibalism took place not in isolation, but as part of participating in intertribal battles.

Bentley writes:

Any study of the fighting pakeha-maori is limited by the reluctance of contemporary and late nineteenth century New Zealand writers to accept that civilised Europeans would deliberately choose to live as Maori and be equally savage, or more so. Regarded by missionaries and early settlers as the worst type of cultural renegade, Pakeha toa (warriors) are acknowledged reluctantly in the literature, and as we will see in at least one case, their stories were deliberately expunged from the historical record. The difficulties in researching this group have been compounded by fugitive pakeha-maori who deliberately distorted their personal histories. Others, re-entering the European world, denied combatant roles in intertribal battles where victories were invariably followed by the massacre of civilian populations and cannibal feasts.
Bentley, p.77

The reality is that many pakeha-maori participated in tribal warfare. This participation in most cases was pretty much complete: they not only engaged in the fighting, but shared in the eating of “farmed” slaves on the longer expeditions, partook in the slaughter of defeated non-combatants, the rape, and the cannibal feasting upon the vanquished—usually committed to the oven when dead, but not always so. Most became tattooed; many with the distinctive patterns indicating they were "veterans" of rape and other atrocities.

The notorious Jacky Marmon, who became both rangatira and tohunga, was first seen by Captain Herd's settlers at the Hokianga in 1826 travelling along the beach with a war party and a full kit of human flesh upon his back (ibid., p. 66). Another Hokianga settler, John Webster described how during a feast, Marmon brought in a basket of human flesh which had been cooked in a hangi and offered it around. When it was refused, Marmon told them they had no idea how good it tasted (ibid., p. 176).

New Zealand needs to take a good long honest look at its past. It is clear that Maori culture manifested extreme elements of human depravity. It is also clear that many of those Europeans who became long term, assimilated pakeha-maori adopted the same practices and performed the same evil deeds.

This is important for it underscores how depravity is not a function of race, but is a condition common to the human heart. Culture is but a corporate expression of common beliefs: where a people are separated from their culture and its intrinsic restraints, degeneracy into evil can follow quickly. Civilization is skin deep. Underneath lurks Conrad's heart of darkness.

Without the gracious restraining hand of the Living God, the veneer of civilization is quickly peeled away. What lurks beneath in the darker caverns of the human heart is a Balrog indeed, which emerges rapidly—far more quickly than our smug moderns would ever care to admit.