Trade Ahead of the Flag

BEFORE whaling dwindled, trade — a new thing to the Maori—began in earnest. At some of the ‘stations’ flax was cultivated; it had already appeared, with timber, in seal-skin cargoes that fell short of expectations. The double innovation encouraged white settlement: Tasman’s failure to persuade the brown man to do business afloat was completely avenged ashore.

Soon enterprising merchants at Port Jackson found it advisable to send paid agents to selected spots on the coast of the North Island, there to engage in barter, chiefly for shiploads of flax. This sort of settler, often tediously lonely at his com­mercial outpost, although in the midst of a welcoming tribe, lived dangerously. Inter-tribal quarrels and greedy raids on his store of trade-goods provided sometimes too much adventure. Two agents of Montefiore and Co.—Barnet Burns at Mahia (1829) and Thomas Ralph at Mokau (1832), on opposite sides of the island—risked death in efforts to escape. For men so employed, durance easily became vile.

Happier, as a rule, was the lot of those other individual settlers, of the strange genus Pakeha-Maori, a sort of ‘white agent-general’ of a tribe, as Pember Reeves sympathetically says. With the grace of tact, such a ‘foreigner Maorified’ could get along tolerably well. His diplomatic value could be enormous.

George Bruce and James Caddel (the ‘Ruther­ford’ of a narrative partly true) seem to have fitted the position with success; Jacky Marmon too successfully; but the life of Frederick Manning showed how fine a type of settler the Pakeha-Maori could become. His kind deserves a grateful place in memory.