A MISSIONARY EXPLORER

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25769, 2 April 1949, Page 3

A MISSIONARY EXPLORER

William Colenso. By A. G. Bagnall and G. C. Petersen. A. H. and A. W. Reed. 494 pp. [Reviewed by JOHN PASCOE]

Here is a satisfying biographical study of a New Zealand pioneer whose life and travels are expertly set in relief against the events of his period. The authors of this life of an outstanding figure in Hawke’s Bay have given their subject an exhaustive historical treatment. They have outflanked the narrow scope of the professional historian and have given rich detail of the many sides of Colenso’s life without letting the narrative fall te the irrelevant or the inessential. Few New Zealanders have been so objectively treated. Their choice, too, was fortunate. Colenso had been neglected by biographers, and the interest of his activities is such that he deserved this close study, which goes far to explain, a man whose actions were sometimes riddles and whose versatility grew with misfortune and the turns of fate.

For William Colenso surely lived. He was born in Cornwall in 1811 and was apprenticed to a printer. His trade led him to London and the Church Missionary Society. In 1834 he took up an appointment as missionaryprinter in the Bay of Islands. The following 10 years were eventful ones for the earnest young man whose printing work was good despite the lack of full equipment or trained assistants, and whose increasing fluency in Maori made his duties as lay preacher onerous. His religious fervour was linked with the curiosity of the born explorer; and the enthusiasm he acquired for botanical discoveries was to stay with him for the rest of his life. Events such as the expansion of the missionary field and the signature of the Treaty of Waitangi led Colenso to a wide appreciation of Maori problems. Ordained as a deacon, and married. Colenso took up his new station at toe Ahuriri mission in 1844. From this base and with Maori assistance he made many important journeys across the Ruahine Range—important because they increased topographical and botanical knowledge. The physical hardships of this work were many; as exhausting was his championship of the Maoris against what he regarded as encroachment on their rights by pakeha settlers. But he made enemies and his adultery with a Maori woman strengthened their power. In 1853 he was expelled from his mission. It is to his credit that he took these consequences bravely. Thence his career lay in politics both in the provincial and the national arenas. From the sixties his work concentrated on a monumental Maori dictionary that never reached complete publication, and on his special science, botany. He died before the close of the centbry.

To document this life the authors have accomplished prodigies of labour. Between them they travelled on foot over the ramifying trails of Colenso’s journeys. They studied primary source material over many years and have documented important material in well-ordered footnotes. It is easy to find fault with Mr Petersen’s writing; his style has the conveyancer’s tendency to circumlocution. But his collaborator is a scholar well grounded in psychology and in New Zealand history. The assistance of their patient work by a State grant was well-de-served. The production of the book is marred only by maps on so reduced a scale as to make place names illegible and by excessive margins to the illustrations. All in all, the study is fair, objective, and sympathetic without being uncritical, an important contribution to histoi ical research and writing, and definitive in the widest sense.