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Oceania. Hawaii upper-right.
(NASA photography)
William Bligh, Captain
of the HMAV Bounty
Captain Cook remembered in Greenwich, London, Engand
French warships in Tahiti, unassailable offshore
weapons because of the range of their cannon.
In 1767 a British ship commanded by Samuel Wallis anchored at the island of Tahiti. Tahitians in a massive number of canoes greeted the ship. The British traded beads and other items for a new supply of food, and the Tahitians were interested in the cloth and things of iron that the British had. The Tahitians understood well enough what private property was but they began taking what they could. In time, the British resorted to gunfire to protect themselves from thievery. The British were secure on their ship and the Tahitians were secure on land, with Tahiti's chiefs wary of British firepower. To pacify the British and renew trade, the chiefs recruited women of low birth (lower at least than nobility) to offer themselves to the British crewmen. Prostitution had not been a part of life in Tahiti, but sexual hospitality had. A lively trade resumed, and the seaworthiness of the HMS Dolphin was threatened as the crew pulled nails from the ship to trade for sexual favors - nails with which the Tahitians made fishing hooks.
Wallis claimed Tahiti for King George III. But the following year the French explorer Louis Bougainville arrived and claimed Tahiti for France. Then in 1774 the British returned - an expedition led by Captain James Cook. And Cook arrived again in 1777. Cook estimated the population of Tahiti to be around 200,000. He found islanders at war with each other, with a flotilla of 200 war canoes and 10,000 warriors from Tahiti setting out for the island of Eimeo (Moorea), fifteen miles to the west. In a recent war, an ambitious chief on the island of Raiatea (100 miles northwest of Tahiti) had been promoting a god named Oro, a god with an appetite for human sacrifice greater than the appetite of its rivals in the other islands. And, by the time of Captain Cook's arrival, a mellowed Oro worship dominated Tahiti.
Eleven years after Cook's last visit, another British ship, the Bounty, arrived in Tahiti, captained by a thirty-three-year-old former sailing master for Cook - William Bligh. His mission was to collect saplings of breadfruit trees for transport to the West Indies, where British plantation owners were in need of a source of food for plantation workers. The Bounty stayed in Tahiti for five months. Three crewmen who had deserted were recaptured by Bligh and were flogged. On April 28, 1789, sailing away from Tahiti, the crew mutinied, led by one of Bligh's officers, Fletcher Christian. They put Bligh and eighteen others in a small boat called a launch, and the mutineers sailed the Bounty back to Tahiti. They were not allowed to stay, and with a few women the mutineers sailed away. They looked for a place out of reach from British authorities, and on January 15, 1790 - the second year into the French Revolution - they landed at Pitcairn Island.
The Tahitian chieftain most friendly with the British was Pomare. The additional British captains arriving at Tahiti accepted his claim to hegemony. They gave him guns in trade and helped him in his battles. British missionaries arrived, sent by a non-denominational Protestant group called the London Missionary Society. Pomare befriended the missionaries, and the missionaries favored both peace and Pomare, but, with the British unwilling to apply force to create order among the islands, the missionaries were unable to stop the warring.
By now, islanders were passing to each other diseases that had arrived with the Europeans - diseases for which they had undeveloped immunities. Many islanders were dying. And, in 1803, Pomare died. His son, Otu, became head of the family, with the title Pomare II. The missionaries remained allied with the Pomare family. Despite their pacifism, they wanted to see Pomare II successful in uniting the islanders under his rule. Other chieftains on Tahiti became fed up with what they saw as Pomare's pretensions of power, and in 1808 they drove him from Tahiti to the nearby island of Eimeo (Moorea). These other chieftains were not so friendly toward the missionaries, and the missionaries left Tahiti for other islands.
Pomare II believed that his fall was a sign of having lost favor with the god Oro, and, aided by the missionary Henry Nott, he began paying more attention to the god of the Christians. Pomare II organized military support from his kinsmen on the islands of Raiatea, Bora Bora and Huahine. Warring resumed, with Pomare winning the decisive Battle of Feii, on November 12, 1815. His victory was a victory also for the Christians. And, in victory Pomare surprised the Tahitians. He pardoned all who laid down their weapons. When defeated warriors returned from the hills, they found their homes had not been set afire and that their wives and children had not be slaughtered. The warfare culture of the islanders had been changed by the influence that the missionaries had on Pomare II.
Centralized authority among chiefs was not traditional in Tahiti, but the missionaries welcomed Pomare's new power. Distress from disease, civil war and death won for them serious attention to their teachings. They launched a campaign to teach the islanders to read, so they could read scripture. There were mass conversions in hope of the supernatural protections that Christianity offered. The missionaries told the islanders how to dress. The climate was suitable to exposing the skin to the greater cool of open air, but for the missionaries cool was no consideration. Little clothing for them was indecent exposure.
Another lifestyle promoted by the missionaries was manufacturing, the missionaries setting up a sugar refinery and a textile factory. In 1817, Tahiti acquired it first printing press, and, in 1819, cotton, sugar and coffee crops were planted.
Pomare II asked the missionaries for advice on laws, and the missionaries, being monarchists and wanting Pomare to be a proper monarch, advised him that the laws would have to be his, not theirs. They did make suggestions, however, and in September, 1819, Pomare produced Tahiti's first written law. There was protection of life and property, observance of the Sabbath, a sanctification of marriage and a judiciary to maintain the laws.
Pomare II died in 1824 at the age of forty-two, leaving behind an eight-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. The son, Pomare III, ruled in name while being educated by the missionaries. He died in 1827 of an unknown disease, and the daughter, then eleven, became Queen Pomare IV.
By 1829, of those who had arrived at Pitcairn on the Bounty only seven remained, but with their offspring they numbered 86. The ages old problem of population had developed. Given the level of their talent and technology, the island's resources were not enough to sustain them. The supply of timber on Pitcairn was decreasing, and the availability of water was erratic.
Since the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Pitcairn islanders had been discovered by and had friendly contact with the British Navy and British authorities. In 1830, Tahiti's Queen Pomare IV invited the Pitcairners to return to Tahiti, and in March, 1831, a British ship transported them there. The Tahitians welcomed the Pitcairners and offered them land. But having been isolated and not having developed any immunity to the diseases now on Tahiti, the Pitcairners suffered from disease in alarming number. Fourteen of them died. The Tahitians took up a collection for the surviving Pitcairners, and for $500 a whaling captain took them back to Pitcairn.
In 1778, Captain Cook and his two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, were sailing from Tahiti toward the American northwest, and they came upon the Hawaiian Islands, during an islander religious festival. The islanders associated Cook with the festival diety. Cook and his men traded with the islanders for fresh meat and filled their water casks. Cook named the islands after the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, and, two weeks after arriving, Cook departed, with religious offerings: gifts of food, firewood and sacred objects. Cook sailed toward what was not yet called Vancouver Island.
Cook was looking for a passage to the Atlantic Ocean, but in the Artic Ocean he was blocked by ice. He began a journey back to England by way of the Indian Ocean, and he stopped again at the Hawaiian Islands, hoping to do repairs there. This was during November, 1788. He stayed into February, and at the biggest of the islands, Hawaii, one of his small boats was stolen. A crewman shot one of the islanders, inflaming passions. Cook went ashore with some men to get the boat back, and islanders killed Cook and four Marines and dragged their bodies away - perhaps for a ritual meal.
Cook's ships returned to England, and word went out that the people of the Sandwich Islands were cruel and fierce savages. No ships appeared in the Hawaiian islands for seven years. Then, in 1786, ships began stopping off in the Hawaiian Islands at a rate of about one per year, to trade for provisions and to take on fresh water.
European beachcombers had begun to appear on various islands in the Pacific, including the Hawaiian Islands. Some were the victims of shipwrecks, or they were men who had escaped from a ship's captain or for some reason wished to change ships. Two Englishmen who had washed up on shore in the Hawaiian Islands, Isaac Davis and John Young, learned the Hawaiian language well enough to serve as translators for a chieftain named Kamehameha, who had inherited power in the northern part of the "big Island" - Hawaii. Kamehameha was warring in an effort to expand his rule. With Davis and Young at his side, he used weapons acquired from the Europeans and tried European battle tactics. And Kamehameha's winning ways won for him a reputation for having the favor of the god of war, Ku.
Meanwhile, a British sea captain, George Vancouver, brought horned cattle from California to the Hawaiian Islands, and he brought goats, geese, grapevines, orange and almost trees and various kinds of garden seeds.
In 1791, Kamehameha gained control over the entire island of Hawaii. He won control over Lanai and Molokai. With a huge fleet of Hawaiian boats, in 1795 he invaded Oahu. There he fought his way across the plain that is now Honolulu, and he drove the opposing army up the Nu'uana valley. Both armies were using guns as well as traditional weapons, and both sides had a few Europeans in their ranks. Kamehameha's army had tight formations and troops with long lances, and it drove the opposing army over the thousand-foot cliff of Pali.
The struggle for supreme power in the Hawaiian Islands continued, while a scourge greater than war appeared. In 1804 around 150,000 Hawaiians - nearly half of the population - are said to have died from what was called the Great Sickness, which may have been bubonic plague or cholera.
It was 1804 that Russians first visited the Hawaiian Islands - on the way to their outpost at Fort Ross in California. A couple of years later the Russians returned and traded the skins of sea otters for salt, sweet potatoes, pork, and other food. In 1809 the Russians built a fort at Honolulu and tried to establish themselves on the island of Kauai. But the Russians offended the Hawaiians by ignoring islander customs. The Hawaiians did not need the Russians for trade, and they drove them out.
In 1810, the ruler of Kauai ceded his island to Kamehameha. Kamehameha was now ruler of all of the Hawaiian Islands, and he ruled in accordance with Hawaiian tradition. Hawaii's chieftains were considered divine. Commoners prostrated themselves before their chieftain, and in theory the land belonged to the chieftain, who could dispose of his land as he saw fit. Chieftains parceled their land to sub-chiefs - supporters that he best try to please - and these sub-chiefs parceled their holdings to people below them, down to the commoners who worked the land.
In Hawaii's hierarchical society, common people did not own land, and they were forbidden use of words thought to have extraordinary power - for example, the words life and death.
With hierarchy in mind, Kamehameha sent a letter to the lord of the ships that often arrived from England: King George III. And in that letter, with courtesy, Kamehameha described himself as George's subject.
When Kamehameha was facing death in 1819 he commanded that his priests follow all customs but one: human sacrifice. He was succeeded by his son, Liholiho, who acquired the title Kamehameha II. These were times of cultural revolution. Tahitians had been arriving in the islands aboard British ships and bringing with them their Christianity, which they passed along to a few Hawaiians and described to the royal court.
In 1820, missionaries arrived, not from Britain but from the United States, led by the Reverend Hiram Bingham. American whaling ships were calling on Hawaiian ports to gather provisions, and their trade was bringing wealth to island sub-chiefs. Whaling crews were coming ashore in search of a good time, and islanders were wondering why ugly foreigners could break rules and they could not. The missionaries gained respect among the islanders by denouncing the behavior of the whalers. The missionaries befriended island aristocrats and introduced Western social mores. The missionaries also denounced the old gods, and, with all of the disease and war that the islanders had endured, they were receptive to the teachings of a new god to replace the gods that had let them down.
As elsewhere in Polynesia, cooking had been men's work, and the men ate together, excluding women, believing they were taking communion with ancestral gods. Women had separate eating houses, and women were forbidden from entering temples. Men of high rank were permitted to eat pork, coconut, shark, sea turtle, whale and most varieties of banana. Women were obliged to eat fish and taro but had been eating forbidden foods when they could do so unseen by men - at the risk of having an eye destroyed or being put to death, if they were commoners. A woman of high rank who had been caught eating forbidden food might be obliged to sacrifice one of her servants to the gods.
The mother of Kamehameha II was among some high-ranking women strong enough to rebel against the eating prohibitions. King Kamehameha II declared an end to the old moral (kapu) system, and in a dramatic ceremony he ate and drank with women. Then temples were destroyed and images of the old gods were burned.
In 1822, notices were posted prohibiting boisterous conduct by visiting sailors - Hawaii's first written laws. Sailors responded by rioting and were set upon by island police. In 1824, written law was extended by a list of injunctions drawn from the Ten Commandments. The missionaries managed to have the hula outlawed, and they introduced the new fashion in dress: the mumu.
Islanders remained vulnerable to European diseases, and, in 1824, Kamehameha II and his wife died of measles. In 1825 their son, Kauikeaouli, age eleven, became Kamehameha III.
Meanwhile, Honolulu had become a busy port of trade. While on their way elsewhere, U.S., French and British warships stopped at the islands for supplies, sometimes staying across the winter months. Ships traded between Mexico's coastline, including California, and the Hawaiian Islands. New England traders brought kitchen utensils, pins, and scissors to the islands - and a billiard table.
The elite among the islanders were the main consumers of imported goods, and to acquire the means for trade the common people were taxed in various forms, including the sandalwood that grew in Kauai's Waianae mountains. Sandalwood was selling in China for about $10 per 133 pounds, and by 1829 sandalwood in the Islands was all but gone.
A British agriculturalist and former planter in the West Indies, John Wilkinson, arrived in Honolulu and started seven-acres of sugar cane, but he had difficulty acquiring islanders willing to work for him. A coffee plantation was also begun. In 1830, Mexican cowboys (paniolos) arrived from California for involvement in the cattle business on the island of Hawaii. Whites in the Hawaiian Islands now numbered around 1,000. The population of the islands in 1830 has been estimated at 130,000, down from 142,000 seven years before - a loss of around 1,700 per year. [note]
In 1770, Captain James Cook sailed to New Zealand and charted its coastline. He claimed the area for King George III, and he missed the French explorer, Jean-François-Marie de Surville, who was anchored at Doubtless Bay. Cook sailed to the eastern coast of Australia, called New Holland by the English rather than Australia - the eastern coast of which had been missed by the Dutch explorers in the 1600s. Captain Cook sailed up that coast and landed at Botany Bay. He sailed north and landed at Possession Island and named his discoveries New South Wales. Then he touched the nearby southern coast of New Guinea and headed back home to England. And for the next eighteen years, the British were distracted by a revolt in their American colonies and ignored New South Wales.
Britain's prisons were overcrowded, and losing what became the United States and no longer able to send its convicts there, Britain began sending some of its convicts to New South Wales. It put 732 of its more unruly prisoners abroad eleven ships, and on January 26, 1788, these ships unloaded 1,372 people, including the convicts, at a place named after Lord Sydney, secretary of state for Britain's colonies. January 26 was to be celebrated every year in Australia as "Australia Day" - a commemoration of this landing.
Hopes that convict labor would be able to grow sufficient food for the little colony were not realized. A second fleet of ships with convicts arrived in 1790, bringing much needed food and supplies - and disease. This was known as the Death Fleet, 267 convicts and eleven others having died along the way. Three years later a few more settlers arrived, and, to encourage agriculture, land grants were given to military officers, who were allowed to employ convict labor. In 1794 another settlement was established forty kilometers north of Sidney, alongside the Hawkesbury River. In 1796 a naval dockyard was built at Sydney, and Sydney provided the Royal Navy a good port. Whaling ships, mostly from Britain, had been visiting Sydney, and a robust trade developed. In New South Wales, the quality of goods and the production of food improved. In 1797, grapes were planted. There was the planting of grains and fruit trees along with the raising of chickens, cattle and sheep. In 1797 coal was found 120 kilometers up the coast from Sydney, on the banks of Hunter River.
In general the Aborigines wanted nothing to do with the white settlers. As early as 1788, Aborigines had killed two British men who had been laboring in a field, and this had hardened the attitude of some settlers toward the Aborigines. Most Aborigines ran from any attempt of friendliness by the British, and the British were disgusted by Aborigine rejection and by what they saw as Aborigine uncleanliness and laziness. They expected of the Aborigines the same energy that agriculture and then modern industry had forced upon Europeans.
The British were appalled too by more killings. In 1796, Aborigines lured an Aboriginal girl working as a maidservant away from her workplace and hacked her to death. In 1799, in the Hawkesbury region (40 kilometers north of Sydney), and around Parramatta (20 kilometers west of Sydney), Aborigines burned settler houses, which began what became known as the "Black War." Conflict between the British and Aborigines erupted on the colony's Van Dieman's Island (Tasmania), where another penal colony had been founded and where from 2,000 and 4,000 Aborigines lived. By 1806, settlers here and in New South Wales were driving Aborigines away from any area where Aborigine "outrages" had occurred. Some settlers had begun viewing Aborigines as pests and shooting them with little fear of Aborigine military capability.
The European population in "New Holland" in 1800 was counted at 5,995. They were improving their economy. Convicts were sent to work at the coal mines 120 miles up the coast, at a settlement called Newcastle. In the Hawkesbury area, linen manufacturing had begun, and in 1805 the first whaling ship built in New South Wales was launched. A government brewery was established, breaking the monopoly that military officers had held in the trading of rum. The production of beef and mutton developed to an extent that the government began purchasing these from the colony's farmers rather than buying imports. The land was different from what colonists in North America had found, and the typical Australian was raising sheep rather than becoming a farmer. And the wool produced had a greater value by weight than did the wheat that was being grown.
The governors of the colony had been naval officers, the last of whom was William Bligh of mutiny on the Bounty fame. He was followed in 1810 by an army lieutenant-colonel, Lachlan Macquarie, who brought with him his own regiment - the 73rd. He ended a rebellion among officers interested in the rum trade. Macquarie urged the colony's elite to conduct themselves with propriety and rectitude and urged the lower elements to remain sober. He urged convicts and former convicts (the latter called emancipists) to practice good manners. He urged everyone to attend church services and called on magistrates to prevent all forms of vice and immorality, including what had become the widespread practice of men and women living together without the legal sanction or holy matrimony - the same go at Christian virtue that British missionaries were attempting among the Polynesians.
Governor Macquarie actively opposed mistreatment of Aborigines. He launched a program to teach the Aborigines English values. A school was opened for Aborigines that never had more than twenty students and soon failed. Aborigines in the towns remained a source of amusement and ridicule for some school-age boys and adults. In the town of Parramatta, men enjoyed getting Aborigine men drunk and setting them against one another.
Macquarie replaced barter in New South Wales with coinage, and he established the colony's first bank in 1817 - the year that the British changed the name of the continent of New Holland to Australia. And Macquarie encouraged exploration to expand the colony's pastoral lands, and he launched numerous public works projects, including roads and a public hospital.
By 1821, Australia's wool industry was attracting the attention of British investors. New South Wales had a population of around 30,000 - a fourth of whom had served time as a convict. Officially it was still a penal colony, and Britain's legislators considered the colony not yet ready for representative government. But in 1823 they passed the New South Wales Act. This established Van Diemen's Island as a colony separate from New South Wales. The Act authorized both Van Diemen's Island and New South Wales, their own Supreme Court. And the Act authorized for New South Wales a Legislative Council to advise the colony's governor on the passage of laws and taxation.
Seventy-five percent of the whites in the colony could read. The women ex-convicts had been marrying and becoming mothers and productive workers, helping in what was the colony's chronic labor shortage. Immigration was not keeping up the demand for labor. Migration to Australia was more difficult than it was to Canada. Sailing from Britain to Canada took about twelve weeks and cost about five British pounds. The trip to New South Wales took between four and five months and cost four times as much.
In 1829 the first soccer (football) game was played in Australia. And in 1829 the Swan River colony was begun on the continent's southwest shore, where the city of Perth would rise. In the 1830s sheep raising was spreading south, west and north into unsettled areas of the continent, the expanding wool industry benefiting from the demand for wool by Britain's textile industry.
Settlers spread to South Australia, and ships began making regular stops at Port Adelaide, and in 1834 South Australia became a separate colony. By the late thirties at Brisbane (700 kilometers north of Sydney), where coal and limestone were being mined, settlers were arriving, and the penal colony there was closed and most of its convicts returned to Sidney.
By 1836, on the south coast opposite Van Diemen's Island, Melbourne had a population of 142 males and 35 females. By 1840, the whites in Australian numbered around 140,000. The booming economy crashed that year. There had been too much speculation in land, sheep and cattle. Prices had inflated and bad lending had occurred. The crisis accompanied economic depression elsewhere, including the United States. The depth of the downturn came in 1843. Wool and meat were not selling. A few made the old accusations that God was punishing people for their sins, but a new secular view of economic dynamics had spread among intellectuals and was taken more seriously.
Australia's first economic downturn had worked itself out by 1847. Gold was discovered at Bathurst, in the mountains 160 kilometers west of Sydney, and held secret until 1851 - two years after the gold rush to California. Gold was discovered also to the south, across the Murray River and halfway to the coast, at Ballarat and Bendigo. Between 10,000 and 20,000 people per month passed through Melbourne on their way to Ballarat and Bendigo. In 1852 the population of Melbourne was counted as 168,231. And with the prospectors in this area were many Chinese some of whom were to stay and add to the cultural diversity in that part of southern Australia.
Tent cities with populations as large as 40,000, arose near the gold fields of New South Wales. Prospectors arrived from California, and with them came four-wheeled carriages, which proved able across Australia's rough terrain. Violence was not uncommon, but after a couple of years not enough gold was available to make the work worthwhile. Finding alternative work for the new migrants was difficult, and unemployment became widespread.
The gold rush had provided food growers with a greater market for their produce. A mechanical harvester, called Ridley's stripper, had been invented in South Australia and was cutting the cost of labor during harvests to one-tenth, and Australia was exporting more food than it was minerals.
In the years before the Crimean War, colonists in New South Wales shared with the homeland the dislike of Russia, and they feared a Russian attack on New South Wales. Instead, the attack that came was in the form of rabbits. A landowner, Thomas Austin, imported two dozen rabbits in the hope they would breed and supply New South Wales with meat and skins. Lacking enemy predators, the rabbits began to multiply without restriction.
The colonists had gained some control, however, in politics. In 1851, people south of Murray River were freed from control from Sydney. The area was made a colony separate from New South Wales - Victoria. And Britain's parliament allowed each of the Australian colonies its own Legislative Council - a body that was given jurisdiction over all but crown lands and was free to pass any legislation that did not conflict with English law. This included the colony at Van Diemen's Island, whose name in 1853 was changed to Tasmania. In 1856, New South Wales drafted its own constitution, and the secret ballot was introduced - a first. The parliament of New South Wales was to have an upper house elected by professionals who met property qualifications, and a lower house elected by universal manhood suffrage.
In 1859, the area around Brisbane was separated from New South Wales, creating Queensland. Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia were self-governing, like New South Wales. Western Australia remained a penal colony.
In the 1860s railways were being built with government help, so that wool and wheat could be transported cheaply to ports. By 1870 Australia had 1,000 miles of railway track. But a government program to expand farming failed.
In 1868, the shipping of convict to Australia had ended. By 1870 the population of white Australia was a little more than 2 million, and forty-six percent female. Australian now had a substantial number of Germans and Catholic Irish, who worshiped freely. The Irish were suspicious of authority, but they found Australia to be without the oppressions they had known in Ireland.
The Aborigine population had dwindled to perhaps 150,000, considered to be about half their number in 1800. The Aborigines in Tasmania had dwindled from their original number of from 2,000 to 4,000 around 1800 to 44 by 1847, and by 1876 these were gone, the victims of disease or drink.
Around 1000 CE, give or take a century or so, Polynesians today called the Maori arrived, perhaps from the area of Taiwan, in long twin-hulled canoes, each said to carry several hundred warriors. The Maori settled in the Bay of Islands area, and soon they were moving to new locations in the land they called Aoterroa (the land of the long white cloud), and the more peaceful people who had been in Aoterroa before them disappeared as an identifiable people. The Maori hunted the ostrich-sized moa bird into extinction, and also the greatest of eagles, the Harpagornis Moorei. And, from their excessive harvesting, the large shell fish that the Maori found also disappeared, the Maori having to resort to the eating of smaller shell fish.
Maori is a Polynesian word meaning common or normal, used by the Maori to distinguish themselves from foreigners. In the 1700s, Europeans came in their sailing ships, and the Maori traded with European whalers and those who were taking seals from Aoterroa's coasts. The Maori traded fish and sweet potatoes for cloth, glass bottles, beads and nails. The Europeans and Maori usually got along well enough for trade, but in 1810, the captain and some crew members of a British ship, The Boyd, who had gone ashore at Whangoroa Harbor, were killed and eaten by Maori who were retaliating for cruelty to one of their number.
The Maori acquired a reputation among Europeans as dangerous savages, which delayed the arrival of an Anglican mission from New South Wales until 1814. The missionary, Samuel Marsden, sent two missionaries ahead of him and arrived shortly afterward with six Maori chieftains who had been staying with him in New South Wales. In the Bay of Islands area, on land that was received in trade for axes, the mission built a church and a mission school. The mission made little progress, but with its agricultural tools, farming developed around the settlement, and the local Maori chief, Hongi Hika, was friendly.
The Maori were living in tribal groupings. Sometimes these tribes feasted together, and often they fought each other. Hongi Hika suggested to other chiefs that rather than war with each other, it was best to unite politically. But he found other chiefs unwilling to follow his suggestion. The Maori, like others since the ancient Egyptians, were more likely to find unity through conquest.
In 1820, Hongi Hika visited England and met with King George IV. King George gave him gifts in recognition of Hongi's help in introducing Christianity to the Maori people. On returning to New Zealand, Hongi Hika stopped at Sydney, and there he exchanged King George's gifts for muskets and ammunition. He used his muskets in a war with a neighboring chief: Te Morenga. Hongi Hika won with the greater range provided by muskets and bullets over the traditional weapons of bone and hardened wood. Across New Zealand an arms race developed, and what were called the Musket Wars continued among the Maori. The British government was not yet in control of New Zealand's coast and was unable to stop the trade in muskets. The British were, however, able to diminish the trading of heads from New Zealand to Australia.
Hongi Hika's warriors killed more than 5,000 and enslaved many more of his fellow Maori before his death in 1828. Meanwhile, in 1825, more Church of England missionaries had arrived - their number having reached 60, including wives and children. The Maori associated the healing power of the European medicines that they received from the Christians with spirituality, and taking aspects of Christianity that suited them and blending them with Maori ideas, Christianity was spreading among them. Also, the Maori were growing weary of the slaughter of the Musket Wars, and by 1835 the Musket Wars were ended.
On Chatham Island (pronounced CHAT-ham), 800 kilometers east of New Zealand, lived the Moriori, who were related to the Maori. They were hunters and gatherers, sparse in population and, perhaps because they were few in number and isolated they were unpracticed at warfare. In late 1835 about 900 Maori from New Zealand landed on Chatham Island. The Maori had a history of warfare, and they were armed with guns, clubs and axes. They invaded Moriori settlements and announced that the Moriori were their slaves. Moriori chiefs conferred with each other and drew from their religious heritager. They chose to befriend the Maori and offered the Maori a share of the island's resources. The attempt at appeasement failed. The Maori began killing the Moriori, including women and children. The Maori put people in pens and feasted on the tender meat of Moriori children. A Maori conqueror described it:
We took possession …in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped. Some ran away from us. These we killed, and others we killed - but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom.
In 1839 it was feared in Britain that France was planning to colonize New Zealand's South Island. The British wanted to keep the French away from what some of them believed God had willed to the British. In Britain, a private company, the New Zealand Company, formed in 1839 and, in January 1840, the company transported settlers to New Zealand. And Queen Victoria's government claimed New Zealand on the ground of Captain Cook's discovery.
The British preferred a peaceful arrangement to taking control of New Zealand by force, and the queen's government offered the Maori chiefs its support and all privileges as the queen's subjects. This was the Treaty of Waitangi, signed by 46 Maori chiefs on February 6, 1840. The treaty guaranteed the Maori possession of their "lands and estates, forests, fisheries and other properties" in exchange for their accepting the Queen of England as their sovereign. One of the Maori chiefs, Tamti Waska Nene, under the influence of the Wesleyan missionaries, argued with his fellow chiefs that accepting the treaty would put an end to warring between tribes for the benefit of all. On February 6, forty-six Maori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi. The British then went elsewhere in New Zealand to collect signatures, including sparsely populated South Island. Some chiefs refused. But by May 21 the British had more than a hundred signatures.
Some Maori were learning English and converting to Christianity, and a few among them were Christian evangelists. The French settlers who had arrived on South Island were to become British subjects. Conflict arose between the British government and the New Zealand Company. Britain's government compromised with the company, and the company founded a second settlement. In 1841, Britain's government made New Zealand a colony separate from New South Wales, and the British built a capital for its colony and called it Auckland.
Thousands more from Europe poured into New Zealand. Some Maori sold them land while some others Maori were offended by the incursions of foreigners into their territory. In the Wairau Valley, Maori torched a surveyor's hut. Armed settlers tried to arrest the Maori responsible. Violence erupted and twenty settlers were killed.
A rebellion among the Maori followed in 1844. Hone Heke (a nephew of Hongi Heke), who had lapsed from Christianity, was angry at the high price of tobacco and blankets and the duties that the British had imposed on imported goods. He cut down a flagpole with its symbol of British authority. The governor of New Zealand, Captain Robert FitzRoy arrived in December and was sympathetic with the Maori and ready to take their side in disputes. He re-erected the flag pole, abolished customs duties and imposed a property tax on settlers but not on the Maori. He also gave into Maori demands for the right to sell their land to European settlers. Hone Heke was not mollified. He cut down the flagpole again. The governor ordered his arrest. War resulted - called the First New Zealand War. Some Maori tribes sided with Heke, and some sided with the British.
In 1845 a new governor arrived at Auckland, George Grey, who intended to restore peace and rescue the colony from bankruptcy. He was the first governor to New Zealand who knew the Maori language. He studied their traditions and was noted for his scholarship on Maori culture. He tried to develop close ties with the Maori chiefs, and he distributed gifts among them. He had Maori hired for road building, and he paid them almost as much as the European settlers were receiving in their towns. He encouraged missionary education among the Maori, and he established four hospitals in which the Maori and settlers were treated on equal terms. Grey also pursued military action against the Maori rebellion, and the First New Zealand War dwindled and was largely over by 1847.
The settler economy grew. By 1850 there were 70,000 sheep in the Nelson settlement (in the north of South Island) and 42,000 sheep across the channel at Wellington. By 1852 Wellington had around 6,000 settlers, and more than 8,000 settlers were on South Island - mainly in at Nelson, Christchurch and Duniden. Auckland was populated by almost 10,000 Europeans, and around Auckland almost 100,000 sheep were being raised.
In 1852, Britain's parliament passed the New Zealand Constitution Act, which allowed for the setting up of a General Assembly and representative government in New Zealand. And by 1856, New Zealand had control over its internal affairs, while Britain's governor maintained control over defense and relations with the Maori.
The Maori were developing agriculturally, selling food to the European settlers and exporting food to California. But Maori unrest continued. Maori chiefs met in the Taranaki area in hope of halting further sales of land to settlers. Gray left New Zealand and his position as governor, and settlers more hostile toward the Maori became prominent in New Zealand politics. The Maori felt more threatened. Their sale of food to settlers was declining as settlers were growing more of their own.
In 1859, New Zealand's government attempted to force a land sale in the Waitara area, and the Second New Zealand War erupted. Grey returned as governor in 1861, and again he pursued both war and better relations with thee Maori. Many Maori chiefs remained allied with the British. Some of the Maori combatants belonged to the Hau Hau, who were anti-Christian and believed that their spirituality gave them a power greater that the white man's bullets. Another movement among the Maori, the Pai Marire, advocated the preservation of Maori identity and self-rule. Rebel Maori fought 5,000 British regulars, settler forces and Maori loyalists. The rebel Maori combatants suffered, and in 1866 the British withdrew their regulars. The war, meanwhile, was damaging New Zealand's economy. Industry was depressed. The cost of the war encouraged the settlers to a greater conciliation toward the rebels, and the war ended in 1872. The rebel dead since 1845 was counted at more than 2,000. The British lost 560 killed and loyal Maori (Kupapa) forces suffered 250 dead.[note]
In 1865, the capital of New Zealand was moved to Wellington - a more central location.. By now gold had been discovered, at Otago. The influx of miners to South Island doubled the population there. Gold and wool became New Zealand's leading exports. The economic boom that began in 1871 was followed by bust in 1879, with the usual banking crisis.
According to a 1881 census the total population of New Zealand was 534,030. Of the whites in New Zealand, 40 percent were British - most from laboring and lower middleclass backgrounds. The rest were Scandinavians, Germans and a few who came from Australia and the United States for gold prospecting in the 1860s. According to the 1891 census the total population had risen to 668,632, and the Europeans outnumbered the Maori by 14 to 1 - another instance of the boom in agriculture and population in Europe centuries before making possible migration by Europeans to a less densely populated area.
In the 1820s, France was eager to catch up with the British and Americans in the Pacific, and the Catholic Church was eager to compete with Protestants there for souls. Catholic missionaries, supported by France's government and navy, carried a message into the Pacific about the glories of France mixed with the Gospel. They landed in Hawaii in 1827, and there they encountered hostility from New England missionaries, and the Catholic missionaries were expelled from the islands.
In 1834, the French navy landed Catholic missionaries in the Gambier Islands, 14 small mountainous islands, more than 1600 kilometers (1000 miles) southeast of Tahiti, in the extreme southeast corner of Tuamotu archipelago. On the main island there, Mangaréva, Father Honoré Laval converted the king , Maputeoa, and, within four years, the islanders in general were considered Christian.
Father Laval established stringent rules, called the Mangarévan Code. He ruled the Gambier Islands as a despot and started a huge building program, forcing people to build more than 116 coral stone churches, convents, mills and other buildings. One of the buildings was the highly decorated Cathedral of St Michael, built to accommodate 2000.
The population of the Gambiers is estimated to have been between 5,000 and 6,000 when Father Laval arrived. By 1886 there were only 463.
In 1836, two Catholic missionaries from the Gambier Islands arrived in Tahiti. British missionaries were advisers to Tahiti's Queen Pomare IV, and the two Catholic missionaries were arrested and deported. France was displeased and demanded reparations, while six years passed. Then the French were confident enough to intervene militarily. The British were busy in India and Afghanistan and were satisfied with control of the area around New Zealand and Australia,. A French warship arrived at Tahiti to arrest and deport the English missionary, Rev. W.T. Pritchard, whom they held responsible for the deportation of their missionaries. Resistance to the French erupted on several islands. Queen Pomare IV fled to Raiatea. The British missionaries complained. The French gave assurances to Britain that Protestants would be allowed to do their work where the French were dominant, and Tahiti and surrounding islands (the Society Islands) became a French "protectorate." The French were poised for taking control of the Marquesas Islands (closer to the equator, 1400 kilometers northeast of Tahiti), an island with a population now of around 5,000 people - a small fraction what it had been. Whalers and other whites in the main port of the Marquesas were defying the local chief, who was allied with the French. The chief asked the French to intervene. The French obliged, and in late 1842 the Marquesas Islands became another French protectorate.
The French were less successful in the islands of New Caledonia (in Melanesia, between Australia and the Fiji Islands) where Catholic missionaries arrived in 1843 and father Pierre Chanel was killed and eaten, and because of his martyrdom he became Oceania's first saint. In 1853, France annexed the main island among the islands of New Caledonia, and there they established a penal colony and occasionally were the targets of violence from hostile local inhabitants.
Trouble then returned for the French in Tahiti and the Society Islands. Only a minority there supported French domination, and between 1844 and 1847 bloody battles were fought for freedom from French rule. The freedom fighters requested help from the British, which was not forthcoming. With their superior firepower the French crushed the rebellion. And Queen Pomare IV returned to Tahiti and ruled under French domination.
In Tahiti during the U.S. Civil War, cotton plantations were attempted, and labor was imported from southern China. The plantations were soon abandoned, but the Chinese remained, some becoming traders or growers of crops, and some of them eventually blended with the Polynesians.
King Kamehameha III was interested in trade with the Americans, and Americans were interested in Kamehameha maintaining the kind of stable government that was conducive to commerce. Kamehameha responded with a Bill of Rights in 1839. In 1840 a constitution was created that provided for the king sharing power with a legislature. And on December 19, 1842, the United States recognized the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
French moves in the Pacific frightened Kamehameha into believing that they were on their way to Hawaii, and in February, 1843, a British warship arrived and threatened an attack on Pearl Harbor concerning a dispute over the treatment of Britain's resident agent in the islands. Nominally for protection against the French, Kamehameha III ceded his kingdom to Britain. Soon thereafter the British restored sovereignty to Kamehameha in exchange for an agreement that British subjects in the islands would have parity of treatment with other foreigners. And in November, Britain and France, in a joint declaration, announced their recognition of the Hawaii Islands as an independent state, declaring that this was justified on the basis of the islands being "capable of providing for the regularity of its relations with foreign nations."
These were the years that Herman Melville was a sailor on whaling ships in the Pacific. Whaling in the Pacific was at its peak. Hawaii's trade with foreigners was booming, predominately with Americans. In Melanesia, Americans were trading in Fiji and sharing trade with merchants from Australia.
In 1848 the ownership of Hawaiian lands was individualized, seen by Hawaiian leaders as advantageous for Hawaiians as well as enabling foreigners to buy land. It was called the "Great Mahele" (land division). The old feudal relationship of land possession from the king to his subordinate chiefs to commoner was at an end. Traditional communal rights to land were abolished. Now the common Hawaiian might claim ownership of a piece of land and sell it if he wished.
Plantations were still few and small, but they were developing. Some Hawaiian men were eagerly going to sea as sailors - viewed as good sailors by ship commanders - but Hawaiians were not willing to labor on plantations. Slavery was not to be in Hawaii, as it still was in the U.S, and in 1850 Hawaii's legislature approved the recruitment of foreigners. The plantations were to be worked by Asians seeking to avoid starvation.
By 1850 the number of whites in the Hawaiian Islands had increased to around 2,000. The Hawaiians had dwindled from about 142,000 in 1823, and 100,000 in 1839, to about 84,000. An epidemic in 1848, said to be of flu, measles and whooping cough, took the lives of around 10,000. There was concern among the missionaries about Hawaiians "backsliding" from Christianity. A medical missionary, James William Smith, complained of "Balls and dinner parties, wine drinking and card playing [being] tolerated in what is called the fashionable circle."
In February 1853, smallpox arrived at Honolulu from the Pacific Coast. Ships were quarantined. Vaccination and food centers were established by Protestant ministers, and many people clamored for vaccination. June 15 was declared a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer. Catholic priests tended to the dying, and Mormon elders tried expelling the disease by the laying on of hands and anointment. For some of the Hawaiians the vaccinations did not take. Many others refused modern medicine and went instead to a traditional (kahuna) doctor. The rural areas were hit hard by the disease. In the cities the dead were carted away in wagons. The disease ran its course and began dying out. At the end of January, 1854, no new cases were recorded. A total of 6,405 cases had been reported and 2,485 deaths. The man in charge of the census, Richard Armstrong, believed that many cases had gone unreported and that the figures should have been two or three times that amount. [note]
In 1856, the U.S. Congress authorized annexation of any small island in the Pacific that was not claimed by another government. This was followed in 1857 by the annexation of Jarvis Island, 40 kilometers south of the equator and south of Hawaii, Baker Island about 1,900 kilometers to the west, a little east of the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati) and on the equator, and, in 1858, Howland Island, about 70 kilometers north of Baker Island. On June 19, 1858, Johnston Atoll, about 1,900 kilometers west and a little south of the island of Hawaii, was claimed by the Kingdom of Hawaii, but on June 27, the U.S. annexed the atoll. In 1867, the same year that the U.S. acquired Alaska from the Russians, the U.S. annexed the Midway Islands, about 1,600 kilometers northwest of Hawaii.
Meanwhile, in December, 1854, King Kamehameha III had died - at the age of 41. Alexander Liholiho, the grandson of Kamehameha I, became Kamehameha IV. He bitterly opposed any talk of United States annexing the islands. He and his brother Lot had had unpleasant experiences in the United States, and Britain had impressed them more than the United States by its having outlawed slavery. Kamehameha IV supported the established religion of Great Britain, the Episcopal Church, and had little time for Americans. He subscribed to the London Times, read other journals from Britain and avoided U.S. journals.
Kamehameha IV established a hospital in Honolulu for sick and destitute Hawaiians. Depressed by the death of his own son at the age of four, he drank more, ate less and suffered increasingly from asthma, until he could hardly breath, and he died in 1863 as the age of 29, and his bother Lot became Kamehameha V.
Kamehameha V defeated a proposal to repeal the law against selling strong liquor to Hawaiians, saying: "I will never sign the death warrant of my people." He was offended by islanders congregating during the day around hula dancers, and to prevent idleness he restricted hula dancing. He urged the replacement of the Constitution of 1852, rewrote the constitution, signed it into law a 1864 and took an oath to maintain it. The new constitution strengthened the king's powers and limited the right to cast votes in elections of legislators. Those who could vote had to be male; if born since 1840 they had to be able to read and write; and they had to own real estate worth at least $150 or have an annual income of at least $70.
In the mid-1860s, the first plantation workers arrived from abroad. Eighty-five percent of them were from China - 470 males and 52 females. In 1866, 148 Japanese laborers arrived. Two thousand, men, women and children, were to arrive by 1872.[note] The disease of leprosy provided a new scare in the islands - a disease that was said to have arrived from China. In the islands it was called the Chinese disease. Moves were made, supported by Kamehameha V, to isolate the afflicted, and there was resistance.
During the U.S. Civil War, sugar exports to California soared, and by 1870 Hawaii's sugar exports were 9,400 short tons, up from 700 short tons in 1860.
Steamships provided faster transport and communications between Honolulu and San Francisco. There was a monthly mail service. And steamship service from Australia and New Zealand to San Francisco, stopped in Honolulu. A small number of tourists began arriving in the islands. Honolulu had but one hotel, but people stayed with families in the outlying areas and could get around on rough pathways by horseback. At Hilo they could see the world's only surf boarding.
Relations between the United States and Kamehameha V remained cool but cordial. Fears of U.S. power remained, while Kamehameha grew in weight until he had difficulty moving about or riding a horse. He abandoned physical activity and soon was confined to his bed. He grew steadily weaker and died on December 11, 1872 at the age of 42.
Figures for 1866 had the number of native Hawaiians at 57,000 - to hit its low at 39,656 in 1900.
Additional Online Reading
Recommended Books
A History of the Pacific Islands, by I.C. Campbell, University of California Press, 1989.
Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian islands, by Gavan Daws, MacMillan Company, 1968.
The Oxford History of New Zealand, Geoffrey W Rice ed. , Oxford University Press, 1992.
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, by Caroline Alexander, 2003
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Britain Overseas and in Ireland, 1865-1885
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