258
15 Dating the First Settlement of New Zealand
for the total North Island population of 0.7091–0.7526% per annum we propose
between 1445 and 1801. This rate dropped to 1.4% p.a. in the period 1858–1874,
falling to 0.605% in the period 1874–1896. These figures are based on three censuses carried out in 1858, 1874 and 1896. We calculate that the overall loss of Maori
population from AD 1770 to AD 1896 (when the census estimate for the Maori population was 42,000) was over 73–76%. But this actually represented the loss of over
70% of the 8% of the 1445 population that had survived till 1801, a total population
loss from 1445 to 1896 of around 98%.
The highest decline rates during the period 1801–1858 reflect circumstances in
New Zealand when, especially after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, European
migrants flooded into New Zealand and moved away from the coastal ports, where
earlier migrants had been focussed, exposing Maori in the interior to the diseases
they carried. Maori deaths had increased markedly still earlier after 1819 when musket sales became more frequent, magnifying the consequences of tribal warfare. The
halving of the population decline in the 22-year period between the 1874 and 1896
censuses suggests that five generations after Cook, there was growing immunity by
Maori to European diseases and an improvement in nutrition and thus in fertility.
Improvement in nutrition came from such sources as whale meat, available from
trying stations, and the introduction of the less cold-sensitive, more easily grown,
white potato.
James Belich [12] denies that the population losses suffered by the Maori from
European contact had any significant cultural impact:
Although Maori-Pakeha conflict was also a factor, these figures seem to support the notion
of a Pandemic phase of high mortality in the 1850s–70s, with somewhat lower rates of
decline before and after. The decline was unevenly spread across space and time, and it may
have ‘crippled’ particular Maori communities in particular periods. But overall it was not
crippling impact, still less fatal impact. . .The overall connection between population decline
and social and cultural disintegration is almost as suspect as high population estimates.
Maori suffered nothing comparable to the decline by one-third within a decade experienced
by England in the mid-fourteenth century, Ireland in the mid-nineteenth, and Russia in the
mid-twentieth. Why should Maori be thought to have undergone socio-cultural collapse, to
have been a dying or crippled race, when European peoples who suffered even more traumatic disasters were not? The enduring myth of fatal impact is my answer to this question.
The myth was strong enough not only to overshoot the evidence on Maori depopulation and
to have an enduring effect on historical interpretations.
England, Ireland and Russia may have lost a third of their populations in a decade
through the Black Death, the potato famine and the mania of Stalin but none of them
suffered the loss of over 73% of their population following a foreign invasion that
catapulted them from the Neolithic into the modern world. Maori did not trade for
pretty beads. They traded for muskets and used them to annihilate their traditional
enemies. The opportunism, the readiness to seize new opportunities as they arose –
a major survival strategy for Maori throughout their Neolithic history – opened a
Pandora’s box of destructive possibilities. The escalation from Neolithic hand-tohand combat to “modern” warfare catapulted a warrior society into a see-saw of
attacks and retributions, of killing and being killed, on a scale outside traditional
experience and, once initiated, outside their scope to contain. The catapulting of a
15 Dating the First Settlement of New Zealand
for the total North Island population of 0.7091–0.7526% per annum we propose
between 1445 and 1801. This rate dropped to 1.4% p.a. in the period 1858–1874,
falling to 0.605% in the period 1874–1896. These figures are based on three censuses carried out in 1858, 1874 and 1896. We calculate that the overall loss of Maori
population from AD 1770 to AD 1896 (when the census estimate for the Maori population was 42,000) was over 73–76%. But this actually represented the loss of over
70% of the 8% of the 1445 population that had survived till 1801, a total population
loss from 1445 to 1896 of around 98%.
The highest decline rates during the period 1801–1858 reflect circumstances in
New Zealand when, especially after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, European
migrants flooded into New Zealand and moved away from the coastal ports, where
earlier migrants had been focussed, exposing Maori in the interior to the diseases
they carried. Maori deaths had increased markedly still earlier after 1819 when musket sales became more frequent, magnifying the consequences of tribal warfare. The
halving of the population decline in the 22-year period between the 1874 and 1896
censuses suggests that five generations after Cook, there was growing immunity by
Maori to European diseases and an improvement in nutrition and thus in fertility.
Improvement in nutrition came from such sources as whale meat, available from
trying stations, and the introduction of the less cold-sensitive, more easily grown,
white potato.
James Belich [12] denies that the population losses suffered by the Maori from
European contact had any significant cultural impact:
Although Maori-Pakeha conflict was also a factor, these figures seem to support the notion
of a Pandemic phase of high mortality in the 1850s–70s, with somewhat lower rates of
decline before and after. The decline was unevenly spread across space and time, and it may
have ‘crippled’ particular Maori communities in particular periods. But overall it was not
crippling impact, still less fatal impact. . .The overall connection between population decline
and social and cultural disintegration is almost as suspect as high population estimates.
Maori suffered nothing comparable to the decline by one-third within a decade experienced
by England in the mid-fourteenth century, Ireland in the mid-nineteenth, and Russia in the
mid-twentieth. Why should Maori be thought to have undergone socio-cultural collapse, to
have been a dying or crippled race, when European peoples who suffered even more traumatic disasters were not? The enduring myth of fatal impact is my answer to this question.
The myth was strong enough not only to overshoot the evidence on Maori depopulation and
to have an enduring effect on historical interpretations.
England, Ireland and Russia may have lost a third of their populations in a decade
through the Black Death, the potato famine and the mania of Stalin but none of them
suffered the loss of over 73% of their population following a foreign invasion that
catapulted them from the Neolithic into the modern world. Maori did not trade for
pretty beads. They traded for muskets and used them to annihilate their traditional
enemies. The opportunism, the readiness to seize new opportunities as they arose –
a major survival strategy for Maori throughout their Neolithic history – opened a
Pandora’s box of destructive possibilities. The escalation from Neolithic hand-tohand combat to “modern” warfare catapulted a warrior society into a see-saw of
attacks and retributions, of killing and being killed, on a scale outside traditional
experience and, once initiated, outside their scope to contain. The catapulting of a