Critical Years At Kerikeri

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28774, 20 December 1958, Page 3

Critical Years At Kerikeri

(Reviewed by A.R.} Crisis at Kerikeri. By Andrew Sharp. A. H. and A. W. Reed 116 pp. In his introduction to his latest book, Andrew Sharp says: “My aim has been to present the colourful personalities and events of New Zealand’s vital years from 1814 to 1828 for the entertainment oF the general reader. The book makes no pretence of being academic or systematic history, although those who may be entertained may also be edified.” The author has certainly succeeded in writing a thoroughly attractive popular account of an exciting period when missionaries passed through many crises, had disputes with one another, fought the Devil without as well as the Devil within, and occasionally found themselves witnesses of. if not participants in, battles or post-battle scenes in which the Maoris who had been most closely associated with them were the victors as a result of their possession of the all-conquering musket. Actually, there was not one crisis, but a whole series of crises at Kerikeri in the period between 1819 and 1823. The principal character, the Rev. John Butler, ran into more than one—sometimes it was with Samuel Marsden, a difficult taskmaster if ever there was one, sometimes it was his colleagues, and sometimes with the Maoris. A simple, naive, rather emotional type of man, who might have lived a happy useful life in London where he had been a clerk-accountant-foreman before he was ordained for the mission field, Butler was more than a little out of his depth in the Kerikeri of the early 1820’s. After several serious disagreements with Marsden, Butler was suspended from the mission. From Butler’s account, Butler emerges as a more attractive human being than the self-righteous censorious Marsden. After explaining certain incidents in Butler’s career as well as describing his tendency to weep, the sort of thing which may have led others to conclude unfairly that he was drunk, Mr Sharp says:

John Butler deserves a bettter reputation than that of an ineffectual sot who alienated his Maori and European associates. Butler was not only New Zealand’s first resident clergyman. He was also its first systematic farmer. . . . He was a man of nervous temperament and quick choler, and no less able to brook opposition or criticism than Marsden himself. His tragedy, like that of Kendall, was to be translated from suburbia to an environment where men of sterner stuff might well have failed.

Thomas Kendall had his own particular form of crisis. Although he and his wife, Jane, are de-

scribed as "an ordinarily respectable couple in their thirties, who loved one another,” and who had five children. Kendall is also reported as sleeping regularly with a Maori girl while “Jane Kendall found solace in the arms of their assigned servant, Richard Stockwell.” Some missionaries drank too much; some dabbled in the trade in muskets and powder, and thus provided the Maoris with the means of defeating the tribes to the south. On the other hand. Kendall did more than any other early European resident to learn and set down all he could about Maori culture, customs and language. But his enthusiasm for knowledge of an ethnological character did not impress Marsden, who once wrote, “His mind has been greatly polluted by studying the abominations of the heathens, and his ideas are very heathenish.”

Andrew Sharp holds the Bay of Islands to be "one of the loveliest places on earth.” Nevertheless, with whalers and traders supplying the trade-goods most sought after by the Maoris, it was the centre from which there quickly spread rapid changes in the Maori way of life. The introduction of the musket spelt “crisis” in capital letters for Maori tribes a long way to the south of Kerikeri, where Hongl Hika and others were building up the strength in armaments which would give them certain victory. Once rum and muskets had become the principal medium of exchange, the old order was threatened with extinction.

Andrew Sharp has picked on some of the more dramatic incidents wherewith to entertain the “general reader.” He may offend professional historians and serious students by including “direct conversations which are merely imagined reconstructions” but, for the most part, they do not offend against either the spirit of the times or the established facts. Indeed, they supplement the various extracts from the missionary and other Journals, which provide the really reliable core of the book, in a convincing manner. It is a pity that the author did not document his quotations from the primary sources he has used. Such a service to his readers would have greatly enhanced the value of his book. As it is. he has written an entertaining book which should be widely read. It may serve to direct the attention of some of its readers to the wealth of published material on the same period and place of which the most notable items are “The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden" and “Marsden’s Lieutenants,” both edited by Professor J. R. Elder.