Maori Prisoners and Slaves in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In a discussion of Maori warfare written in 1823, the missionary, Samuel Marsden, stated: Prisoners of war are seldom killed but are kept as slaves. . . Yet in 1772, just 51 years before Marsden made this observation and just three years after the first landing of Europeans in New Zealand, M. le St. Jean Roux, a French voyager sojourning with the Maoris at New Zealand's Bay of Islands, had said: to the way in which they treat their prisoners, they gave me a very clear explanation. As soon as the prisoners are in their power they are killed. 2 Captain James Cook, another of the very early European visitors to New Zealand, also had come to the conclusion that to give quarter was no part of Maori military practice; Maori warriors, in Cook's opinion, killed everyone indiscriminately-whether man, woman, or child-and they took no prisoners at all. 3 The statements by Roux and Cook, based on somewhat limited opportunities for observation, probably are not tenable as blanket generalizations, but they do support the view that the enslavement of prisoners, perhaps especially the male ones, was no more than an occasional episode of pre-European Maori warfare. If we adopt this view, a likely explanation of the disparity between Marsden's statement and those of the earlier voyagers is that enslaving prisoners rather than killing them became more