Getting A Taste For It: The Maori Gourmet's Approach to Cannibalism

It is well known that Maori practised cannibalism in both the pre-colonial and early colonial periods and that this was not just confined to Maori eating Maori. In the late 1890s, the historian R. A. A.Sherrin estimated that some one hundred pakeha (Europeans) were devoured between 1774 and 1804 with the number doubling between 1809 and 1840 with the greater availability of the food on offer.

Generally, the imported product turned out to be less appealing to the cultivated Maori palate than the local, tangata whenua version.

This was no doubt informed in part by the better physiological condition of the domestic variety. Captain James Cook had remarked in his journal that Maori were generally in better health and condition than their pakeha counterparts: they were taller, had better muscle tone, and were much less afflicted by diseases that had ravaged European populations such as smallpox and measles - that was yet to come.

Diet and healthy exercise would have contributed to this superior condition: fresh or well-preserved kai moana (sea food), kumara, greens, and the bounty of the forest in the form of birds, bats, and rats, with a touch of kauru to sweeten things up, rounded out the Maori diet. In comparison, Cook's pakeha sailors and the sealers, whalers, and runaway convicts that followed were fed a diet of salted pork and worm-infested ship's biscuit that was hardly the stuff on which pedigree stock are raised. It can have given no pleasure to the Maori gourmand to see his scurvy-ridden, vitamin C deficient, meal on-the-hoof. It was hardly sufficient to whet the appetite.

As to taste, Maori gourmands informed early visitors to New Zealand that they did not care for the saltiness of European flesh. That of "Negroes" tasted too much of tobacco. Perhaps too, overall conditioning was lacking in the pakeha product, reflecting their generally poor physical state which would have affected overall tenderness of the meat.

Given the generally disappointing condition of the imported product, many a pakeha who came into Maori hands dodged the knife and fork - or being picked up in the fingers.

Nevertheless, Edward Markham of Hokianga counseled as late as 1834 that:

"They say the Meat of a Mans leg and Thighs well boned, washed, and rolled is very delicious but Sailors the Gourmands pronounce to be too tough and Salt, and not so good as Mouries but still are eatable with a good appetite as Sauce and well done Potatoes."

Fortunately for the Maori gourmand, an abundant domestic supply of human flesh came onto the market in the early 1820s. Primed by a vigourous trade in muskets with pakehas paid for in potatoes, pork, and preserved moko mai - tattooed heads - an enterprising Maori entrepreneurial spirit tapped into a value-added, premium export market based on other people's meat. Inter-tribal war on a previously unheard of mass disassembly scale, in addition to settling old political scores, provided a steady supply of taurekareka - captives or slaves - to feed the booming export sector. Some taurekareka were eaten by their Maori captors while others of a higher export grade, in a selfless act of delayed gratification by their enslavers, were held for facial tattooing before beheading for the moko mai trade, yielding meat as a valuable protein by-product for local consumption.

Citation for Markham quote and numbers of pakeha devoured:

Trevor Bentley, Pakeha Maori, (Penguin Books NZ, 2 ed, 2007), p. 59.

Legal notice: As of 2009, and to the best of our knowledge, cannibalism is illegal in most jurisdictions and persons should not engage in the practice under almost any circumstances (unless stranded for months at sea or by plane crash in the Andes). A healthy historical interest in cannibalism is permissible in some jurisdictions where freedom of inquiry and speech are still protected.

Meat on the Table - Maori Cannibalism Revisited

Anne Salmond's three books - Two Worlds, Between Worlds, and The Trial of the Cannibal Dog - are sophisticated, nuanced accounts of first contacts between Maoris and Pakeha (Europeans).

Kahura, Maori Chief at Grass Cove, 1773,

Self-confessed cannibal

In The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (2003), Salmond explores how Captain Cook's sailors, outraged at his lack of reprisal for the cannibalism of fellow sailors at Grass Cove on a previous voyage, put a kuri or Maori dog owned by a shipmate on trial (the dog kept nipping shipmates) - then ate it - and had the shipmate owner of the dog unwittingly eat a meal of it.

Salmond looks at this mock trial from the cultural perspective of both the English/European and Maori worlds. In 18th century European eyes, dogs and cats were familiars of witches and even if the owner was not a witch, the animals were seen as representatives of their owners. Thus, to eat a dog was akin to cannibalism.

Each side trying to come to terms with a foreign culture may subconsciously begin to absorb and adopt elements of the other's culture. The English seamen, who spend more time in Polynesia than England in the years of their voyages, end up adopting the Maori cultural practice of utu (revenge) in order to restore their mana (prestige) but combine this act with a mock English trial for the crime of cannibalism.

Cook's "enlightened", tolerant approach to conflict with Maori and other Polynesians was to forbid the use of deadly force by his men unless they were in imminent danger. This led to much conflict and resentment from a number of Cook’s officers and crew. From a Maori perspective, Cook's failure to take revenge meant to Maori that he and his men were taurekareka - people without mana or spiritual power, no better than slaves, and this exposed them to further aggressive acts. Salmond argues that this incident sowed the seeds of discord between Cook and his crew as well as with Polynesians on this, Cook's final and fatal voyage in the Pacific.

So, I reiterate from an earlier recent post that recent historical work has indeed dealt with the issue of Maori cannibalism. Sure, there are those hacks in Maoridom and the Pakeha world that may ignore or exclude cannibalism in their work & romanticize pre-European Maori, but there continues to be serious scholarly work that explores the violence and cannibalism of Maori. And Maori did not have a monopoly on violence, Europeans proved rather more adept at it on a larger scale. Sadly, it's the dark side of the human condition not confined to any particular ethnic group.

In other words, there’s more than enough blame to go around on all sides.