HENRY WILLIAMS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 497, 31 December 1948, Page 13

HENRY WILLIAMS

THE LIFE OF HENRY WILLIAMS. By Hugh Carleton. Edited by Sir James Elliott. A. H. and A. eed.

T was in no impartial mood that Hugh Carleton approached the task of writing the life of his father-in-law, Henry Williams, "a man who was looked up to by his own family with a feeling akin to veneration." With the highly commendable aim of defending an unjustly. slandered reputation he protests his case in terms which would carry greater conviction if they were less vehement. Henry Williams is spotlessly white; his enemies are blacker than night. Not many students of New Zealand history to-day would deny to Williams a high and honourable place among the world’s great Christian missionaries, but the phrases in which Carleton maintains his immaculacy require some qualification if they are to be accepted as applying to a mortal. As a biography. .pure and simple Carleton’s book ‘has all the faults of an age which demanded heroes: of superhuman perfection, but for the period of 1823-67 it is certainly one of this country’s most. important historical documents, not only for its account of the mission’s growth under a remarkable leader, and inevitable clash with other less desirable elements of European immigration, but also for the light it sheds on Maori polity, Maori. custom, and the endless wars by which that race was distracted. A large portion of its two volumes, which have neither chapters nor page headings, consists of extracts from the journals of Henry Williams, of letters written by himself and his wife. A considerable amount of its wealth of historical material is dispersed among voluminous footnotes. But whatever its merits or demerits, the life of Henry Williams has long been out of print, and Sir James Elliott is certainly to be congratulated on making it available to the ordinary reader in condensed and simplified form. Very wisely he has not touched upon the Willims’s land claims-an over-emphasised controversy that may well be regarded as closed-but I regret that he has not seen fit to include the early part of Volume II, dealing with the sack of Kororareka and Heke’s war, in my opinion the most interesting part of the whole book. As an editor he is regrettably unobtrusive in that he makes no attempt at judicial appraisement of the statements of an exuberant partisan. In consequerice one is left with a slightly unreal impression of Henry Williams, who was not a long-suffering, much persecuted man, at the mercy of ruthless slanders, but a spirit at once combative (continued on next page) Y

BOOK REVIEWS (Cont'd)

and formidable, with a son-in-law capable of writing two strenuously polemical pamphlets in his defence. Often enough he risked life and limb in the cause of peace by standing between opposing Maori armies. He fought without reserve. or hesitation against men or movements of which he disapproved. Tactless and outspoken he had neither the will nor the ability to compromise. As a result he was often the subject of bitter if unmerited reproach. For instance, he was shamefully maligned by agents of the New Zealand Company; yet the founders of Wellington could scarcely have been expected to manifest unqualified approval on discovering that their chief enemy had contrived to forestall them by ‘buying up most of the Thorn-

don fiat.

R. M.

Burdon