The Oven Is Gaping For You

Kimble Bent, a deserter in 1864 from the British 57th Regiment in the Taranaki who became a captive of Ngati Ruanui, found a new resolve to work harder and do as he was told whenever Maori chiefs would taunt him with: "the oven is gaping for you."

Roasting A Dead Corpse...

Analogous to beating a dead horse...

Rather than bury my response to some comments in the comments section of the post on Getting A Taste For It, I decided to post an entry in response.

Paul Moon is a critic in his book This Horrid Practice of what he sees as the political correctness of contemporary NZ historians and some in Maoridom that seek to ignore or deny Maori cannibalism. I guess Canterbury Heritage's point is that Moon didn't go far enough.

An early blog entry I wrote here assesses Dr. Moon's claim that modern NZ historians have ignored Maori cannibalism. They have not. To which I would only add further evidence to support the claim that Dr. Moon has done nothing but knock down a straw man. Trevor Bentley's Pakeha Maori, for example treats cannibalism extensively in the context of pakeha who lived as maori in the early days of contact. In the earlier post, I noted Michael King in Moriori pulls no punches in recording the brutality of the Te Ati Awa genocide against Moriori on Rekohu/the Chathams and the associated cannibalism. See too my summary here of Anne Salmond's work in The Trial of the Cannibal Dog on cultural conflict over cannibalism on Cook's voyages.

I'm at a bit of a loss in trying to understand Canterbury Heritage's comment that Dr. Moon suffers from Imposters Syndrome. Perhaps I'm too slow to pick up the joke. Dr. Moon hardly seems one troubled by insufficient self-confidence. I would simply drop the word "syndrome" from the appellation.

If anything Dr Moon seems to suffer from a persecution complex, overreacting equally to both ill-informed and learned criticisms of his scholarship or lack thereof. It is OTT, as the young people say or rather text, to equate, as Dr. Moon does in a New Zealand Herald August 2008 interview, the critical response to his work with the Nazi book burning of the 1930s. Such hyperbole I would expect more from shock-jocks who need to fuel controversy in order to do the next round of talk shows, TV appearances etc to flog a few more copies of their book. The US is replete with such examples. Perhaps the lesson has been successfully transmitted to academic-lite institutions in New Zealand, I cannot judge.

As for Dr. Moon's claim that the New Zealand academy is academic-lite, in the Herald interview he confuses academic freedom with freedom of speech in his admiration for US protection of speech, conflating the two as somehow protected absolutely by the US constitution. New Zealand, apparently, has "no such absolute security of freedom of speech". Well, there is news for Dr. Moon: the US constitution does not provide "absolute" freedom of speech, moreover, freedom of speech only applies to the relationship between the state and the individual, private actors may - and do, all the time - restrict the exercise of speech. My private employer, for example, may restrict what I say on work time. A publisher can decline to publish my work because she does not like what I have to say. Academic freedom is a loose concept applicable only somewhat in the academy and not much beyond it. Certainly it receives no constitutional protection unless in some way the state is involved in suppressing the act of academic speech.

But there are those of us who saw the Bud-lite nature of much of the New Zealand academy a few decades back and who departed for the "home of the brave, land of the free", etc. etc. to enjoy greater academic freedom and free speech. But I'm sure the research I completed and published in 1994-96 analyzing the inherent instability of the financial derivatives markets and the consequential likelihood of an global economic collapse absent an international lender of last resort would have equally fallen on (ideologically) deaf ears in the "free market of ideas" whether it was published in the US or New Zealand.

Yes, dear readers, kuaka is an imposter: no small, trans-Pacific migratory bird at all, but a mere academic. But, do not worry for me, for I do not struggle to accept my dizzying professional success - for there has not been much of it! And, mercifully, there is so much more to life than being a mere academic.

Little Billee - Thackeray on Cannibalism

Little Billee
by William Makepeace Thackeray

There were three sailors of Bristol city
Who took a boat and went to sea.
But first with beef and captain's biscuits
And pickled pork they loaded she.

There was gorging Jack and guzzling Jimmy,
And the youngest he was little Billee.
Now when they got so far as the Equator
They'd nothing left but one split pea.

Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,
"I am extremely hungaree."
To gorging Jack says guzzling Jimmy,
"We've nothing left, us must eat we."

Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,
"With one another, we shouldn't agree!
There's little Bill, he's young and tender,
We're old and tough, so let's eat he."

"Oh! Billy, we're going to kill and eat you,
So undo the button of your chemie."
When Bill received this information
He used his pocket-handkerchie.

"First let me say my catechism,
Which my poor mammy taught to me."
"Make haste, make haste," says guzzling Jimmy
While Jack pulled out his snickersnee.

So Billy went up to the main-topgallant mast,
And down he fell on his bended knee.
He scarce had come to the Twelfth Commandment
When up he jumps, "There's land I see.

"Jerusalem and Madagascar,
And North and South Amerikee:
There's the British flag a-riding at anchor,
With Admiral Napier, K.C.B."

So when they got aboard of the Admiral's
He hanged fat Jack and flogged Jimmee;
But as for little Bill, he made him
The Captain of a Seventy-three.

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.

Just Eat The Vegetables… Cannibalism in early New Zealand

Emile Rouargue’s fanciful illustration of Maori cannibalism, an illustration in a volume on French explorer Dumont D’Urville’s expedition to New Zealand. The artist is not known to have visited New Zealand. This illustration is on the cover of Moon’s This Horrid Practice – the title itself being Captain James Cook’s reference to cannibalism.

In This Horrid Practice, (Auckland: Penguin NZ, 2008), author Paul Moon argues that Maori cannibalism or kai tangata [human food] was more widespread and occurred later than many histories record. Moreover, in various radio & newspaper interviews launching his book, he charges revisionist historians have sanitized New Zealand histories in recent decades by ignoring or excluding discussion of cannibalism. This post will limit itself to the second claim and its factual accuracy.

Conceding for argument’s sake that political correctness in New Zealand has been widespread in recent decades, the charge that recent New Zealand general histories have denied or ignored the practice of cannibalism is a weak one not borne out by the facts.

Moon charges that Keith Sinclair’s A History of New Zealand (multiple editions) mentions cannibalism but once and that Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand (2003) omits any discussion of it at all.

A quick review of Sinclair’s history shows at least three separate references: quoting Maori anthropologist Terangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) as dryly commenting of the pre-European Maori that ” ’Human flesh was eaten when procurable’.” (p.18); that the inter-Maori musket wars of the 1820s “led to heavy casualties and cannibal feasts unprecedented in pre-European battles fought with stone weapons” (p. 42); and, that under the influence of the missionaries “Christian chiefs… gave up killing and cannibalism” (p. 45). It is clear from the tenor of Sinclair’s remarks that cannibalism was embedded within Maori culture and was practised on a large scale in the 1820s. A closer reading of Sinclair’s body of work would likely uncover further references to the role of cannibalism within Maori culture.

Turning to Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand, he certainly does examine the short, brutal lives of Maori, cut short often by premeditated acts of violence: “As Maori oral tradition recorded, and ancient burials have confirmed, elderly people, women and children, along with defeated male warriors, were periodic subjects for torture, killing and cannibalism.” (p. 87) King continues with an un-cited quote detailing the evidence of violence at a burial site in Palliser Bay that notes the site was hidden possibly to avoid desecration by enemies (pp. 87-89).

King also cites the Grass Cove incident of 1773 in which ten of Captain Cook’s crew were victims of Maori cannibalism to underscore the misunderstandings of first contacts between Maori and Europeans, despite Cook’s generally enlightened and moderate approach to indigenous peoples in the Pacific (p. 106).

One might be led to conclude, among other possibilities, that Moon’s consideration of these two general histories was limited to an act the first year student is cautioned against: the reading of a book’s index to a topic rather than a thoroughgoing reading of the work in question. A scholar has a higher duty yet - of familiarizing himself with the body of another’s work before making a full assessment.

Stepping back from King’s general history which of its nature means even for such a young country as New Zealand that many matters must be dealt with sketchily, in the context of his body of scholarship it is clear that King knew well and did not shy away from tackling the vexed issue of cannibalism.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in King’s Moriori (1989) in which he presents an authoritative account of the genocide, including cannibalism, of intertribal colonisation by mainland Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama Maori of the Chatham Island/Rekohu Moriori. King’s work was path-breaking in confronting a European or Pakeha myth that Moriori were an inferior, non-Maori group driven from the mainland; in challenging Maori accounts of the Moriori genocide; and, affirming Moriori as first peoples in Rekohu.

In Moriori, (for example, pp. 62-66), King quotes at length missionary Johannes Engst who collected the few surviving Moriori accounts of genocidal cannibalism: after death, “the heads were removed and thrown to the dogs, which gnawed off the best and buried the remainder for the next meal. Then the virile membrane [penis], having been cut off, was thrown to the women sitting around who ate this dainty morsel eagerly…. The heart, the most sought-after part of the whole body, was set aside for the chief guest…. When it [the flesh] had all been washed clean it was brought to the oven…. [Once cooked] they then laid the flesh compactly in small baskets, giving each person an individual portion.” (p. 65).

Did Sinclair and King ignore or deny the prevalence of cannibalism? Even their general histories suggest not.

If you don’t like the meat, just eat the vegetables…