THE MOTIVE OF REVENGE

Te Ao Hou, November 1957, Page 17

THE MOTIVE OF REVENGE In the first group were those opportunists who took advantage of pakeha-introduced methods of extermination, especially the musket, and embarked on bigger, bitterer and more extensive campaigns of mass slaughter. Their motives were the old motives of inter tribal animosity and the personal aggrandisement of the chiefs themeslves.

In the perspective of modern ideas we tend to see these campaigns in terms of slaughtered thousands, reeking umus, and decimated tribes, but we must remember that these leaders themselves and many of their contemporaries saw them in the accepted tradition of their own custom as laudable and enterprising. The mammoth exterminations of Matakitaki, Totara Pa and Patu-one differed only in degree from the affairs which had preceded them for generations. If the question of culpability comes into it at all, it must be conceded that the pakeha traders who supplied the guns were even more guilty than the chiefs who used them. Incidentally it is, perhaps, interesting to reflect that the introduction of firearms not only brought in a new concept of warfare, but also caused a change in the whole pattern of Maori living, being the main cause of the abandonment of the old hill-pa sites, as living quarters, in favour of kaingas built on lower levels. According to Dr Thompson (one of the earliest pakeha historians), this made them susceptible to an incidence of chest and lung diseases which wiped out more thousands than all the slaughter-experts put together.