The Taranaki Bible-Burying Incident—A Footnote

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 29, 1 January 1996, Page 85

Peter Oettli

The Taranaki Bible-Burying Incident —A Footnote

In his final paper on the question of the ‘Taranaki anti-land-selling league’, Keith Sinclair discusses the question of the alleged burial of a copy of the Bible as a confirmation of the establishment of such a league. 1 He cites the dispatch of Donald McLean to the Colonial Secretary of 20 February 1854, in which McLean writes that the Ngati Awa, Taranaki, and Ngati Ruanui tribes had entered into a league and that ‘by way of rendering it as binding as possible on the parties, a copy of the Scripture was buried in the earth with many ceremonies, thereby, as it were, calling the Deity to witness the inviolability of their compact’. 2

Sinclair rightly disassociates the bible-burying incident from the meeting at Manawapou in April 1854 but wrongly attributes it to ‘local gossip’. 3 He confesses that he had not been able to find any further evidence about the episode. 4 There is, however, further evidence about the incident, and Sinclair even obliquely points to it. Earlier in his paper he states that, apart from the journals etc. of the Wesleyan missionary W. Woon, there is little documentary evidence ofNgati Ruanui attitudes to land selling. He then comments: ‘Journals or letters of [Woon’s] son-in-law, J C [sic] Riemenschneider, who sometimes visited him, would be useful’. 5

While the German missionary Johann Friedrich Riemenschneider (1817-66), who lived among the Taranaki people at Warea, makes some isolated comments about the

Ngati Ruanui, particularly after Woon’s departure from their territory in 1853, he is also the missionary who was most closely associated with the bible-burying incident. His description of the incident and its aftermath is by far the fullest and, in the absence of others, the most reliable account. In a report to the Administration Committee ( Verwaltungsausschufi ) of his North German Mission Society, dated 12 December 1853, he writes:

If the old heathen tapu is no longer effective and permissible, the Ngamahanga (Taranaki [people] between Warea and New Plymouth) had last winter thought of a certain new kind of tapu (ban) in conjunction with an uncertain Christian concept. They used it as a substitute for the earlier tapu to protect their land against the intrusion of the Europeans. They held a great meeting in August in the episcopal village 6 of Puketaua (about nine English miles to the north of Warea) concerning their land at which they considered all kinds of plans how to secure it. Landmarks and agreements were already in existence, however both seemed to be too feeble to achieve their purpose. So they had the unfortunate idea of burying a New Testament in the ground in order to place for all of Taranaki and for ever a sacred oath and divine tapu (ban) against all complete or partial sale to and settlement by Europeans!

The native teachers and congregations of the Ngamahanga on the episcopal side declared their support for the matter and a baptised episcopal native from the village of Kaihihi (14 English miles from Warea), undertook the burying of the Holy Scripture! A few days later I was in the vicinity of Kaihihi. Here I was stopped by some episcopal natives who saw me on the road. They informed me in detail about the episode I have just described and they asked me about my opinion of it. 7

Riemenschneider now reports to his superiors in Bremen verbatim an impromptu sermon, held at the roadside, in which he condemns the action. The two main ideas in the sermon, which takes up almost four single-spaced A 4 pages in the typed transcript, are contained in the following two extracts. After describing the blessing God has lavished on the Maori by sending them His missionaries, Riemenschneider continues:

But He, who loves your souls so much that He has redeemed them with the blood of His son and himself has bought him for his kingdom, he also thinks of your external, physical welfare. He has long since given you proof of this by returning you as free people from slavery into your homeland. But He wants to give you more and give you a share of both

all inner, spiritual and also all outer, physical blessings, equal with that of all the Christian, civilised Europeans. But who, then, can achieve this? You will never do so of your own strength, and we missionaries have not been given the office, vocation or means. We have to look after your souls and their wealth and, as far as secular things are concerned, we have to teach you to recognise God’s guidance and to use it wisely. All other things God wishes to direct to you and share with you through those to whom He has given worldly goods and vocations, and 10, these are the European colonists here. Do you think that they have arrived here completely without God’s guidance? By no means! Admittedly they have no teaching vocation like we have, and there are many godless and contrary practices among them. Yet God knows how to use them and their property as tools in order to bless you externally and to make you great and happy. We faithfully warn you against all that is wrong with them. You are to accept only the good and desirable that they bring you and readily make available to you and thank God who makes it available to you.

As far as the actual bible-burying incident is concerned, Riemenschneider has this to say: You have buried a book which had been given to you for free, gratis by the Christian church, so that you should learn from it and follow God’s laws, justice and His way which he had marked out for you for your temporal and eternal salvation. Such a book you have destroyed for unholy and profane purposes. Thus you have committed a shameful robbery! How can you bury the holy books which we have given to you? But by far the worst aspect of the matter is the fact that you have buried God’s book, precisely because it contains the word of God. In this way you have misused and violated His holy word by attributing to it a dark, heathen magic power, commensurate with your profane thinking and intention, and by trying to turn it into a damnable magic device to make your plans and your land untouchable.

After the description of the sermon, Riemenschneider continues his account of subsequent events: This discussion took place on the roadside and at first I only had two or three natives in front of me who had first stopped me in order to ask me for my opinion. Gradually, however, other groups, who were on their way to New Plymouth, joined us, eager to hear, of course, with all the

native nosiness. So I soon had a fairly sizeable group gathered around me. Originally I had intended to give only a brief decision regarding the main issue which was at stake. However, with the intense attention of my listeners, whose number was continually increasing, and with the repeated call from their midst, ‘korero, korero ’ (‘speak, speak’) I had dismounted from my horse and had proceeded to give a detailed discussion of the wider context of the conditions which had taken over so powerfully here. The natives not only listened intently, but the earnestness of the Lord, particularly in the matter of the misuse of His word, seemed to be felt by them and seemed to make a deep impression on them. They

confessed that a great sin had been committed and asked whether the book had to be dug up again. I replied that this would certainly have to be done in order to remove the offence, but that this in itself was by no means sufficient in the eyes of God, as long as sincere penance and a change of heart was not added to it. My audience consisted largely of episcopal natives of the Ngamahanga sub division of this T aranaki tribe, with whom I seldom have an opportunity to speak otherwise. Unfortunately none of their native teachers, who had favoured these excesses, was present. ‘You have your own missionary’, I said, ‘and just like you have turned to me you must also acquaint him with the matter. If you belonged to my tamariki I would exclude all who had taken part in the incident from holy communion until I could see in them proof of sincere penance’. At this point I asked whether my tamariki at Kaihihi or anywhere else had taken part in the matter. The answer to that question was that none of our natives had had anything to do with the incident but rather that our teachers at Kaihihi, old Hohepa (Joseph) and Porikapa (Polycarp) had from the beginning declared their opposition and that they had stated that the matter did not seem right to them, and that they and their flock could not agree to it until they had heard my thoughts about it.

Within a few days all Taranaki knew what I had said, and this seemed to have caused everywhere a certain fearful excitement of minds. They felt that a sin had been perpetrated and they feared the consequences. I have already said that among my audience none of the native episcopal teachers had been present, and because the latter still, as in the beginning, seek to maintain the strictest separation between them and our congregation, and because in addition my words contained much that was unpalatable for them, they had attempted to pass the matter over lightly.

In the meantime the teachers of our part of the Ngamahanga came to me with the question whether they, our people that is, should intervene and dig up the holy Scripture. This I forbade because from the beginning they had had nothing to do with the incident and in addition their intended intervention would have not only brought no benefit to the guilty party, but might also have raised a spirit of opposition and hardening of hearts among them and thus produced more harm than good. In the meantime the unrest of mind had continued until the participants in the incident had dug up the book again. When the episcopal clergyman next visited Taranaki, his teachers among the Ngamahanga had also told him about the matter and at the same time they had reported what I had said about it. The answer which

he had given them had been: ‘Well, things are exactly like Rimene 8 has said, and that is how they must remain’. On the very day on which missionary Govett had announced his decision, one of his strict teachers, Hoani, the member of Ngamahanga who had heard it, told me of it himself. He was moved to do this probably not so much by the desire to let me know that missionary Govett and I were of one mind, but rather by wanting to show me that he had not neglected to tell the tale to his preacher, particularly since I had previously made the point that the episcopal natives had to bring the matter before their pastor as well.

Riemenschneider’s account makes it clear that the Bible-burying incident was certainly more than mere gossip. Unlike the account of McLean, Buddie, and others, however, and as Sinclair rightly concluded, it was not the solemn confirmation of a treaty between a number of iwi. It was a further attempt by a hapu of Taranaki to stop the encroachment of Europeans on their land. The assurances of their missionary, the setting up of boundary poles, or the concluding of agreements had obviously not been sufficient to allay the fears of further European expansion. The attempt to mobilise the powers of the new God was also doomed to fail and to bring missionary rebuke and disgrace on those who had tried. It was probably because of the embarrassment among the Maori brought about by Riemenschneider’s and Govett’s strong reaction, that news of the incident was not widely propagated, so that in the subsequent writings of McLean, Cooper, Buddie, and others, who may not have been aware of the details and also had their own agendas, it could be associated as a dramatic embellishment with the second- and third-hand accounts of the alleged foundation of an anti-land-selling league.

Turnbull Library Record 29 (1996), 85-90

References 1. Keith Sinclair, ‘Te Tikanga Pakeke. The Maori Anti-Land-Selling Movement in Taranaki 1849 59’, in The Feel of Truth. Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History, Presented to F. L. W. Wood and J. C. Beaglehole on the Occasion of Their Retirement , edited by Peter Munz (Wellington, 1969), pp. 79-92. 2. Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives [.AJHR ], 1861, C-l, p. 197. 3. Sinclair, p. 84. 4. Sinclair, p. 85, note 34. 5. Sinclair, p. 81, note 14. 6. Riemenschneider classifies the Taranaki kainga according to whether their inhabitants are adherents of his (North German Mission) church or Anglicans. 7. The text of Riemenschneider’s report is, of course, in German. The translation preserves the original underlinings but divides the text into paragraphs which are not in the original. 8. The Maori name for Riemenschneider.