CENTENNIAL SURVEYS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 26, 22 December 1939, Page 23

CENTENNIAL SURVEYS

MISSIONARIES AND SETTLERS. By the Rev. A. B. Chappell. THE VOYAGE OUT. By D.O. W. Hall. Editing: E. H. McCormick; illustrations and design: J. D. Pascoe. These are numbers 5 and 6 of the official centennial pictorial surveys. To give them more praise than the first four would be difficult: to give them less would be unjust and, fortunately, unwarranted. Mr. Chappell» has not written a history. He has sketched the background of the first settlements, giving certainly not too much historical detail and scarcely too little. His cloth might have excused him had he waxed too enthusiastic about the missionaries, but he has stated quite simply, and with the restraint of such a reference in a good sermon, what they set out to do, how difficult it was, and something of what: they did. "To seek the good of the whole man, not only to snatch the soul as a brand from the burning, was their deliberate aim," he says, and adds: " Looking back on all that was achieved we appreciate their wisdom." He has ignored, as Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole ignored in "The Maori," the plain fact that these men of such " sagacious tact," these settlers who were "bigger and stouter in those days,’ were either too few in numbers or not great enough in wisdom to give the Maori immunity from the social diseases of civilisation once they had started him "late upon the road of civilised life." But possibly these are controversial matters. The collection of illustrations is as wide as ever, arranged and printed as well as ever, though a healthy appetite for steel engravings is sometimes needed, even with the finest offset printing. In "The Voyage Out," many of the old paintings and pictures. reproduced have the attraction of the unknown, and the letterpress without them would be only half as interesting. Although they are not themselves perfectly accurate, as the historians must often point out, the pictures are an admirable background for texts which correct controversy. when they can and avoid it

when they can’t. Hall does not hesitate to be brusque when he is discussing the Company’s financiel treatment of the Maoris, but he leaves his comment safely in the last century. He is quite frank, too, about the social conditions which made emigration seem necessary. But he has his picture of the voyage complete to the last detail of where people slept, how they cooked, and what they ate.