MAORI MEMORIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 September 1938, Page 8

MAORI MEMORIES

IMAGINARY FEAR. (Recorded by J.H.S. for “Times-Age.”) In the literature of 1858 we find that there were three serious drawbacks to a more rapid influx of emigrants from Britain to this colony. First, the duration, risk, and cost of the voyage in small and comfortless sailing vessels. Epidemics in the absence of suitable food, remedies or medical men, took an unrecorded toll of human life- Second, the imaginary savagery of the Maori hosts, whose first and greatest pleasure in life was their hospitality to worthy guests. Captain Cook’s popular records of his five separate visits to New Zealand created a false impression of the practice of that much maligned sacrament called cannibalism. Writers of that time said that the Maoris, if treated in a true Christian spirit were a blessing and not a curse, and that Europeans could travel among •them more safely than in Yorkshire. Third, the fear of earthquakes. It had been known to the Maoris that these were confined to an area 140 miles south and north of Cook Strait, and there were but two fairly severe shocks since 1840. With their lightly built thatched whares, the Maoris had no fear or risk, and they considered the pakeha were very foolish to build -with brick and stone in Wellington. We remember seeing an old Maori womna shaking her fist at the first two storey brick house on Lambton Quay in 1870, and crying derisively, “Akuanei he ru” (soon comes the earthquake). In all three of these instances, the primitive folk of those days had not realised that “There is no Devil but Fear.” . ,