Trevor Bentley: Captured by Maori

Reviewed by SUSAN JACOBS

Trevor Bentley - Captured by Maori: White Female Captives, Sex And Racism On The Nineteenth Century New Zealand Frontier

Readers today are as intrigued by frontier tales of white women taken captive by indigenous peoples as were their 18th and 19th-century counterparts. In those days the sensationalised image of fragile flowers of womanhood helpless in the hands of savages both outraged and titillated the imagination and fuelled the aggressive colonial expansion already under way.

Drawing on many sources and carefully separating fabricated accounts from real, Trevor Bentley examines the cases of nine women captured by Maori in pre-colonial New Zealand. Not surprisingly, he explodes a few myths.

Of the women whose stories are described here, most were illiterate, some were ex-convicts and two were children. Their periods of captivity ranged from days to months and two women, one captured as a child, chose not to return to European society and remained with Maori until their deaths.

This was not unusual, even among Maori captives, as they were relatively well-treated if they survived the initial frightening rituals enacted as part of utu or revenge.

However, Bentley does not romanticise the terror the women must have initially felt. Elizabeth Guard watched 11 crew members of the shipwrecked Harriet, among them her brother, being slaughtered, then cooked and eaten, while the child Betsy Broughton saw a similar fate befall her mother.

Two women about to be killed owed their lives to Maori women of mana who threw their mats over them, thus making them tapu. Without their protection or that of a chieftain who took them as lovers, these women would not have survived. Some women who returned to their European husbands were rumoured to have borne children to their captors, which raises the thorny and transgressive question of how far they were assimilated into Maori culture.

Bentley stresses the fact that most of these stories come to us second-hand through the words of literate men. The women thus remain voiceless, shadowy figures.

Yet he has put together a portrait of resilience and courage that challenges stereotypes of female powerlessness and resists seeing these women primarily as victims. Having survived poverty, prostitution, imprisonment and hardship in their own societies, they possessed the physical and psychological skills to adapt to any situation, no matter how alien. It is even possible they experienced more respect among the Maori.

This is a timely, meticulously researched work, an impressive addition to our knowledge of the cross-cultural encounters informing New Zealand history.

Penguin Books $34.95

* Susan Jacobs is the author of Fighting With the Enemy: New Zealand POWs and the Italian Resistance.