The Passing of the Moriori

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 86, 2 July 1927, Page 24

The Passing of the Moriori

Written for THE SUN by G. I. PEACOCK

T is a sad thing when a j\\Mhuman being dies and mOr his love, his hatred, his work and his play become as nothing. There may be a few who mourn, but soon he is forgotten and one wonders why he has lived at all. How much sadder, then, is the dying of a race—the w-iping out of perhaps thousands of years of custom and belief, rendering useless all its wars, and vain the lives of all the people of its generations. Surely those who belonged to the race in the days of its prosperity must look down upon the earth and weep. But to die without glory, that is the worst, to die unmourned, almost unknown, like the Moriori. ■ They are now a vanished race, these seal hunting, smoke-grimed people of the Chatham Islands, who could trace their genealogy back for thousands of years. From a study of their word-of-mouth tradition and their elaborate genealogical recitations it has been deduced that they are descendants of a race identical with the ancient Mouriuri people found in New Zealand by the Maoris. The reconstruction of the scene is not hard —the coming of the warlike Maoris, who in time outnumbered the original inhabitants, constant quarrels, and finally open warfare. It was a grim struggle between these two races, and a struggle to the death. Many of the unmixed Mouriuri folk hed to the solitudes of the interior and as far as history is concerned were lost. But some were saved. A party of these harassed people under a chief named Kahu sailed in specially constructed canoea to the moist and foggy Chatham Islands, where they might dwell in peace. There seems to have been many of these migrations, and then a long period of oblivion, while in the civilised world nations have risen and fallen, and empires have been won and lost. And all the time the history of this little race on tire Chatham Islands was shaping itself, a romantic and yet a pathetic history, the story of a race which decayed by reason of their own integrity. It would seem from tradition that there were two separate peoples oil these small islands —the Northern, who by reason of their further degeneracy seem to be the older, and the Southern, who were of later migration. And between these two there was war. until the last great battle was fought, a battle that marked a new era in Moriori history. The slaughter was terrible. TO have continued such battles within the narrow confines of the island would have meant rapid extinction. It may have been the white man’s God that saved them at this point. It was something more than the fear of extinction that filled the breast of Nunuku the reformer and gave to these people a set of social laws that had as its foundation the love of a man for his neighbour. And so under the teaching of this ancestor there was no more war or fighting to the death, and the Moriori lived his strange, narrow life down through the ages until in 1835 came the Maori. The white man’s God had withdrawn his hand, and the time of their dying was near. They had obeyed the law of the pacifist, but the law of Nature they had forgotten. On account of their isolated life, constant in-breeding must have occurred, and the love of fighting that is given to the male —to cut out the weaklings—had been condemned. It is a cruel, hard law this, of the survival of the fittest, but if it had been obeyed it would have stood the Moriori in good stead in 1835.

Dreadful days for the Moriori followed the invasion of the warlike

Maoris. We would mourn for those that died, but for those who were captured there was a worse fate. They were herded together to be used as food whenever their captors felt a longing for human flesh. It was the coming of Christianity that saved a remnant of these people, but a pitiful remnant, a people without hope and almost without life. And now they have died, another link has gone from the chain that connects the strapge races of the Sojuth Seas. To Ve who, deep down in our hearts, prefer your splendid savage who holds his head high while he brandishes his spear, the peace-loving but degenerate Moriori is repulsive. There was nothing splendid about him as he crouched on his heels over his fire, wearing naught but a loin cloth in the summer, or a cape and apron of sealskin in the winter. His body had a peculiar odour that was born of the putrid food that he ate, food that had lain in water until it was rotten. Or it may have been birds preserved in their own fat until they acquired a rancid flavour, or. meat that had been baked and buried in the ground until it was covered in mould. To aid him in the getting of these succulent morsels he invoked the aid of his gods, the elements and many of the creatures of nature. To him they were dreadful potential

influences, and his whole life was spent in placating them. Oh wasted allegiance to those that have neither ears that hear or eyes that see, but are merely soulless servants of a greater power! There are those who have lived on the islands while still a remnant of this ancient race remained who would favour a theory that the Moriori inhabited the Chathams long before the coming of the Maoris from Hawaiki. Some would even dispute their relation to the ancient Mouriuri folk of New Zealand. There are many facts that are contradictory to the generally accepted theory of their origin. The total absence of the art of tatooing is in itself a revolutionary fact. But it is a task for the ethnologist to find for this stray race a home in one of the great families of the earth. We who belong to a race that is at its zenith, and go our way in? the busy modern world, have little time to study the native and his ways, and our understanding is dim. We can but pray for the souls of the people of vanished races, and wonder if their lives were all in vain.