At the beginning of the 19th century, the tribes of New Zealand were embroiled in a set of deadly conflicts that spread to every part of the country. Up to one-fifth of Māori may have died in them, a number comparable to the death toll in Germany during the 30 Years War. What were the Musket Wars? Why were they so violent?
Europeans began arriving in New Zealand from the 1790s. They brought new methods of construction, new kinds of clothes, new crops and agricultural techniques, pigs, farming implements, metal tools—and guns. In the early days of contact, these products were status symbols among Māori. Chiefs hastened to obtain them, often taking Pākehā under their patronage and protection, anxious to acquire the “new currency of mana.”
The pre-colonial Māori economy was based around hunting, gathering, and subsistence agriculture. The chief crop was kūmara. Its cultivation was labour-intensive—Māori had no draft animals—and its yield relatively small (kūmara back then was much smaller than what we buy in the shop now, thin and finger-like, almost the shape and size of a red yam). Life was based upon the necessity of obtaining and negotiating access to resources. The principal units of society were “shifting communities that could trace complex kin ties to each other… often with competing interests defined by available [seasonal] resources.” (34) There was no currency. Economic value was closely linked to personal labour and social obligation. Goods flowed on the basis of gifting and (implied) reciprocity. Where reciprocity had not been met, the wronged party would seek utu, a restoration of balance or harmony.
The word “utu” has a much broader meaning than is popularly imagined. It is still used today, for example to ask about the price of something. Back then, there were a range of mechanisms for obtaining utu, ranging from discussion and negotiation (perhaps through the intervention or mediation of a third party) to the use of force. Again, there were a variety of options. a haka might preface attempts to negotiate; a fierce wero might be issued as a challenge to guests entering marae grounds; or a taua (raiding party) might seize property (muru) as a form of recompense
These ritualised acts could resolve conflict—or they could escalate it. If fighting broke out, the killing of a family member might obligate a wave of reprisals. Cycles of violence might sweep up entire tribes for generations, with the ultimate revenge being cannibalism. But the scale and intensity of the Musket Wars was something new: “warfare pursued to a decisive end was a western idea and not a feature of most subsistence societies, because the cost of warfare to such a society was very high.” (76) Because warriors in the pre-colonial period were also farmers, hunters, and gatherers, the death of any single one was a setback for feeding the collective. This reality tended to limit the extent of any fighting.
The introduction of pigs and more reliable crops such as carrots, potatoes, and corn gave Māori a better way to feed themselves. Indeed, James Belich went so far as to suggest that we re-name the Musket Wars the Potato Wars. He argued that the potato caused an economic and logistical revolution, enabling taua to feed themselves on longer, more distant raids. But Wright diminishes this idea. Long-range taua existed in the pre-colonial period, too. And such raids were difficult: even with the potatoes, fighters were often driven to starvation and desperation, and sometimes had to resort to eating captured slaves.
Wright argues instead that the influx of European crops and goods gave rise to a new economic mode, what he calls “the contact economy.” For several reasons, the acquisition of European goods became the most important objective for Māori chiefs. Such goods were of symbolic importance—indicating a chief’s prestige—but they also conferred military advantages. Māori pragmatically and selectively integrated European goods into their societies, “taking what they saw and reframing it within familiar values.” (24) That included guns. To obtain them, tribes had to invest time and energy into growing and developing what Europeans wanted: mostly pigs, potatoes, wood, and flax (he omits two of the other major goods in this period: shrunken heads and prostitutes).
Yet the customs of warfare did not change overnight. Certain tribes only began to acquire muskets in significant numbers from the 1820s onwards, and even then, their use was at first enmeshed in the existing rituals and prohibitions surrounding warfare. A story illustrates this. In 1821, when Te Wherowhero was cornered by his pursuers along the Urenui river, his rival, Te Rauparaha, forbade his men from shooting him dead on the spot: custom dictated that commoners were not to strike down chiefs. The legend goes that Te Wherowhero, armed only with a kō (a sharpened stick for gardening), defeated 50 men in one-on-one combat, and thereby won his freedom.
The first chief to really exploit muskets was Hongi Hika. His tribe had been on the end of several losing battles. The worst of them became known as Te Kai-a-te-karoro, “the feast of the seagulls”, where 150 of his kinsmen had been slaughtered on a beach, where their dead bodies were picked at by the birds. Hongi Hika vowed revenge. Over a decade later he made his way to London - a five month journey - where he was received by King George IV, who gave him a suit of chain armour, a tūpara (transliterated: “two-barrel”, a double-barelled flintlock shotgun), and several agricultural tools. On the way back, Hika stopped in at Sydney, where he traded his tools for 300 muskets. He also ran into rival chiefs and candidly informed them of his plans. Later, when they visited him in the Bay of Islands, he laid out his guns before them and spoke the names of each: “Te Waiwhariki”, “Waikohu”, “Mahurangi”. They were the names of past defeats.
From his base in the Bay of Islands, Hongi Hika launched raids as far afield as the Waikato, the Bay of Plenty, and Hawkes Bay, bringing back thousands of slaves each time. He campaigned at a frenetic pace, eager to exploit his advantage in muskets while he had it. He was brave and often personally led his men into combat, which was sometimes necessary to convince them to go along with the new tactics of gunpowder weapons. These were often adapted from British tactics. For example, Hika used a “volley system” in which a warrior would shoot his musket and then run to the back of the line behind him to reload. The next warrior in turn would shoot, run to the back of the line, and so on and so forth, producing a constant stream of fire.
The spread of muskets was not equal. Hika’s enemies did not have muskets—or only had them in small numbers—and were unfamiliar with their use on the battlefield. With his edge in technology and tactics, he eliminated his enemies in numbers never seen before. This placed an obligation on the survivors to avenge their fallen. To do that, they would have to get guns of their own—which required them to make certain products to trade with the Europeans, thus spreading the contact economy:
The asymmetric battles that followed fed the cycle of warfare in other ways, creating wildly unbalanced reciprocity which became one of the drivers of warfare into the 1820s. That in turn fuelled the arms race, and traditional limiting systems were pushed to the edge, even broken, as fighting spiralled to ever-increasing heights due to pre-existing systems driven to breaking point by the lethality of the gun. (110)
These raids also had a knock-on effect. If one tribe left their rohe to avoid extermination, they might have to fight their way into the lands of another tribe, pushing them out of their rohe, extending and prolonging the conflict far beyond its original cause.
Wright is careful not to overstate the impact of the musket. Many of these raids took place without significant numbers of muskets: when Te Rauparaha went on a great raid south with his Ngāpuhi allies in 1820, they had only half a dozen muskets between them. When Māori did get significant numbers of muskets, it is important to note that they lacked professional training in how to use them. Gunpowder was rare and expensive, so opportunities to shoot were minimal. Maintenance of guns also required specialist tools and techniques that Māori didn’t have. They often pressured their European contacts to do this work for them. The guns themselves were usually low quality, often cast-offs or defects. Most could not take a full shot of military-grade black powder without exploding! Māori typically used a slow-burning mix of lower-grade gunpowder, which propelled the ball at a velocity just slow enough that Hongi Hika’s chain armour apparently saved his life multiple times.
But in other respects, Māori showed an excellent grasp of how these new weapons worked. They would increase the size of the hole where gunpowder was fed into, saving them time on priming the gun and allowing them to shoot twice as fast. When bullets were scarce, they would shoot stones or peach-pits. Because long-range marksmanship was difficult and impractical, they tended towards using the tūpara, which allowed them to fire twice without reloading, and complemented traditional close-quarters combat.
Māori also adapted siege techniques from the British. In 1831, Te Rauparaha had crossed the Cook Strait to avenge his uncle, whose bones had been turned into fish-hooks. Vastly outnumbered, facing a pā (fortification) at Kaiapoi that was too large to take by conventional means, Te Rauparaha utilised sapper tactics, the sort taught in British military academies. His men dug trenches towards the pā in a zig-zag formation, under the cover of gabions and roofs. Once in range, they lit the walls of the pā on fire using bundles of dried wood. They rushed through the breach in the walls and slaughtered the defenders. It was a crushing victory, the sort that would have been impossible even 10 years prior.
Some chiefs also tried to introduce cannons onto the battlefield. This usually meant smaller 12-pound carronades. Swivel-guns were also popular: they fired light anti-personnel grapeshot, but could take any sort of debris. They were often used in Europe as a form of crowd control, as when Napoleon dispersed a mob of Royalists in Paris. Whatever the cannon was, they were prohibitively expensive. A pair of carronades would cost up to 65 tonnes of potatoes and 15 tonnes of pork!
Cannons never took off because they were expensive and cumbersome, but also because Māori were already incorporating trenches and underground anti-artillery bunkers into their pā. A well-made pā could withstand several days of bombardment.
Writing in the 1980s, James Belich claimed that Māori were the first to invent anti-artillery bunkers. Wright shows this is nonsense: Europeans were already well aware of how to do this from the 1600s onwards. At the same time, fighting the British on the other side of the world, the Burmese had also figured out how to make anti-artillery bunkers. None of this is to diminish the ingenuity of Māori: “[They] understood what they learned about British military principles at a fundamental level. That made it possible to intelligently adapt and use the ideas they had picked up, running with them and turning them into forms suited to the New Zealand environment.” (165)
It is hard to say exactly why the musket wars ended—or even when. Many historians believe the wars petered out when everyone obtained muskets and the balance of power was re-established. Others claim that Christianity brought it to an end, usually crediting missionaries with the simultaneous end of cannibalism. While Christianity did spread across the land, and missionaries themselves were important peace-brokers, Māori were not converts in any meaningful sense. Christian ideas took their place alongside other European imports, but were adapted to fit into the existing patterns of life and belief.
If you had to characterise Wright’s explanations, you would call them economic. Pre-colonial economic activity was intrinsically linked to personal obligation and social life. When the influx of European goods distorted that, the mechanisms for negotiating peace collapsed. I wasn’t always convinced by the argument here. This was not helped by the confusing structure of Guns and Utu. A chapter may seem to be about one thing (cannons and earthworks) before pivoting suddenly to something else (Te Rauparaha’s South Island campaign). Other important links are suggested, but never developed. Why did prohibitions on commoners killing chiefs end? How did tapu govern the cultivation of kūmara? How did potatoes, standing outside of this, offer “as yet undefined potential? Why did cannibalism end?
It’s a tricky business gathering up the Musket Wars into any kind of coherent “contact thesis.” It is made more difficult by the overall scarcity of written records from this period. Besides, if something happened in one part of the country, does it make sense to assume that it happened that way in the rest of the country? There was probably no single cause to the end of the wars. They were multi-polar conflicts, a series of unrelated personal grudges prosecuted with new weapons. If there was an overall pattern, it may have been exhaustion: an entire generation had come of age never knowing a sustained peace, and with the arrival of settlers in the 1830s and the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, Māori were soon to be thrust into an even more turbulent and uncontrollable world.