Missionary Settlers

WHILE this task of home-making was going on, in connection with whaling and trading and farming, by groups large and small and by individ­uals using their separate resources, the missionary settlements were doing their share. They were meant to do this. From the first they were planned to continue to do it, for the missionaries were expected to stay, and all but a very few did so. The women as well as the men were busy at the task, according to a definite purpose. Thus the missionaries were, in a full sense, real settlers, and their serving of the beneficent purpose of their coming helped others to settle.

That purpose was, supremely, to persuade the Maori to accept the Gospel of Peace. As far as they achieved this they made the home-making of others secure, and their manifest concern for moral and spiritual progress was both a check to base treatment of the Maori and a stimulus to worthy immigration. It is now known that to missionary counsel was decisively due the acquir­ing of British sovereignty in 1840. Twenty-five years of patient toil had given the missionaries an acknowledged right to be heard by the British Government and nearly all the leading Maori chiefs.

Their toil had been beset by peril sufficient to make them think of abandoning the task. In earliest times violent attacks upon them often endangered their lives. Long after those critical days two of them, Volkner and Whiteley, were killed by war parties. But this missionary home-making, the distinction of which, in contrast to sealing and whaling, trading and farming, was to give rather than to get, created conditions essential to success in every form of New Zealand’s white settlement.