The Welcome of Strangers

When last night's dinner guest becomes this morning's breakfast...

Frederick Maning, Pakeha Maori, trader, judge, and increasingly reactionary in his advancing years, recalls in Old New Zealand how two runaway sailors, one of whom was most likely Jacky Marmon, another Pakeha Maori, were hosted by a Maori chief in the Hokianga in 1824:

[They] were hospitably entertained one night by a chief, a very particular friend of mine, who, to pay himself for his trouble and outlay, ate one of them the next morning. Remember my good reader, I don't deal in fiction. My friend ate the pakeha, sure enough, and killed him before he ate him, for it was not always done. But then, certainly, the pakeha was a tutua - a nobody, a fellow not worth a spike nail. No one knew him. He had no relations, no goods, no expectations, no anything: what could be made of him? Of what use on earth was he except to eat? And, indeed not much good even for that - they say he was not good meat." Maning, p. 19.

As good as last night's kai paraurehe or junk food...