Dom Felice Vaggioli: History of New Zealand and Its Inhabitants

Translated by John Crockett

(Otago University Press)

$49.95

Review: Angela Middleton*

John Crockett's translation of Vaggioli's 1896 work History of New Zealand and its Inhabitants reminds us that there has been a long line of critical, moral voices scrutinising the process of European settlement and colonisation in New Zealand which have been ignored.

These include some of Vaggioli's sources, and others such as Rusden's Aureretanga: Groans of the Maoris, published in 1888, and Sir William Martin's criticisms of Government land policy (1861).

Dom Felice Vaggioli was a Benedictine monk who spent eight years in New Zealand, from 1879 to 1887. On his return to Europe, Vaggioli's superiors asked him to write about New Zealand and its inhabitants.

Two volumes of his work were published in his native Italian language: the first in 1891, on natural history, the second in 1897, History of New Zealand and its Inhabitants.

It is this second volume which appears here in English for the first time, translator John Crockett having spent six years on this task. On its first publication, the British Government requested the Italian Government to destroy copies of it, because of its outspoken criticisms of British colonial policy in New Zealand. This suppression adds to the interest of the history.

The appeal of Vaggioli's work today lies in its airing of issues and grievances current in political and social debate for the past several decades.

In particular, Vaggioli is vociferous in his condemnation of the land-grabbing activities of Protestant missionaries, the New Zealand Company and the British Government following annexation in 1840. Vaggioli includes the Treaty of Waitangi in his polemics against the actions of Protestants and the Anglo-Saxon race.

However, before seeing this work as an anti-myth challenging Pakeha notions of cosy colonisation, as Tom Brooking of Otago suggests in his foreword, I would suggest a careful analysis of Vaggioli's sources and his main argument - a very old argument, about the relative merits and demerits of the Catholic and Protestant faiths. Vaggioli the Benedictine is concerned to demonstrate the moral fibre of the Catholic religion and the greater merits of its works in the Pacific and New Zealand.

Vaggioli uses two main sources in his work: John Dunmore Lang's Four Letters to the Right Honourable Earl Durham, published in 1839, and Arthur S. Thomson's The Story of New Zealand, first published in 1859. These are both useful to him for their criticisms of the land-grabbing activities and moral lapses of both Anglican and Wesleyan missionaries. Lang in particular is vociferous in this respect, but uses this to argue for British annexation as a means to control these activities. Thomson also gives an analysis of the missionaries' land purchases, and describes Maori in a sympathetic light, arguing their case against the rashness of civilised men, a feature which Vaggioli's work has also been praised for.

Vaggioli uses this material in a selective way, and generalises and makes assumptions in order to develop his central argument for Catholicism. He sees all Protestant missionaries (apart from Selwyn) as bad, and all Catholic missionaries as good. This tendency often leads to inaccuracies in his material.

He confuses and mixes events, simplifies complexities and gives incorrect dates. For example, he places the death of Pomare I, of the Bay of Islands, at the battle on the Waipa River in the Waikato after Te Whero Whero's campaign to the Thames in 1830. In fact, Pomare's death in this battle occurred in 1826.

He states that Kororareka, or Russell, was the country's capital in 1833. This is wrong on two counts. Hobson purchased Clendon's Okiato property in 1840 as the capital and renamed it Russell. When the seat of government was moved to Auckland, the name Russell was transferred to nearby Kororareka. For this reason, Vaggioli's History should not be relied upon as an accurate account of such events.

A similar but more mystifying error occurs with his, or perhaps the publisher's or translator's, confusion between Hongi Hika and Hone Heke. If read in Italian, in an Italian context, these errors would have had little impact on Vaggioli's main argument; read in a New Zealand historical context, they are misleading. Annotation of such errors would provide a more useful framework. Otherwise, Crockett's references to Vaggioli's sources are very useful.

Vaggioli, while sympathetic towards Maori interests, still uses the language typical of 19th-century social Darwinism, depicting Maori as foolish children; they are savages who need to be civilised, but he considers the British Protestant too immoral for the task.

In his introduction, Crockett points out that historian Hazel Riseborough had previously found this work derivative, and a re-run of the well-known Catholic-Protestant controversy. Brooking, in his foreword, suggests that it is the perfect antidote to what James Belich calls the historical amnesia of New Zealanders. However, I agree with Riseborough, and I suggest that this Pakeha amnesia exists despite works that Vaggioli has called upon, such as those by Lang and Thomson. It may well be time for these works, and others of a similar genre forgotten in our own libraries, to be brought to light again.

* Angela Middleton is studying historical archaeology in the Bay of Islands for her PhD at the University of Auckland.