I also vote for Maori as well, if you are still exercising your right to put a vote to the Consultative Assembly
Lands of Red and Gold
- Thread starter Jared
- Start date
- Status
Well, I guess, the Yadji, the Atjuntja (and the Watjubaga before them), as well as many other Bronze Age/Early Iron Age empires somehow solved this problem. So, the Kiyungu's inability to unite (except as a loose league) points to absence of bureaucracy and/or regular army in their states.
And a nitpick:
"Inward-looking", I presume
A nice update Jared.
Enjoyed Thande's cameo.
And that the Kiyungi deities have a taboo on their names - I wonder what the Rabbis would say about that.
Looks like whoever starts trading with the Kiyungi for spices should be quite happy - both parties will think they got a great deal
Interesting that they have a "Greek" mentoring style. I can see certain classicalists singling them out for their philosophies.
Enjoyed Thande's cameo
.And that the Kiyungi deities have a taboo on their names - I wonder what the Rabbis would say about that.
Looks like whoever starts trading with the Kiyungi for spices should be quite happy - both parties will think they got a great deal
Interesting that they have a "Greek" mentoring style. I can see certain classicalists singling them out for their philosophies.
The Maori have definitely been overlooked, mostly because they're largely separate for longer. But yes, I think that the next two posts will be on the Maori and on Europe, in that order. Either as part of the European post, or a separate post, I'll also show some of the first consequences of effects of Aururian crops.
On a related note, what I've shown of Aururia so far has been mostly a couple of sequences about particular cultures (the Atjuntja and the Yadji) which have been relatively constrained in time. What I'll be showing from here is the longer-term consequences as Europeans interact with Aururia, but also how this leads to greater interactions amongst the Aururians themselves.
This will mean that it covers a greater time period, too - things won't be quite as detailed in a year to year sense.
What I've written hasn't actually been that planned (unlike, say, DoD). I have some broad consequences in mind - largely the result of Aururian crops - but the rest has just been worked out as I go.
It also means that I'm interested in what readers want to know about. Without readers, there wouldn't be much point in writing it. The final decision is, of course, mine, but it's still useful to know what people are interested in.
Maori and Europe, leaning more towards Maori and the hints about Japanese Mercenaries was also looking cool
All sorts of things could be going on with Japan, but I suspect that the biggest will actually be direct or indirect Aururian contact with Japan.
I have been known to come up with the odd bad pun or three myself.
More will be heard of him, too. He's one of the long-term Aururian culture heroes, and while his later reputation does somewhat grow in the telling, there's still a pretty formidable basis for it.
Are Werringi and Baffin in the right timeframe to meet?
Very much so. As was hinted in post #35, Werringi's ships are returning from their first visit to Batavia when they meet Baffin's ships coming north at Torimi (*Port Stephens, where Baffin has just discovered about lemon tea).
Think of the great Aururian deity Tjandee (Blame Be Unto Him).
Officially no, not once they're married. In practice it probably happens occasionally, but it's not common practice.
I appreciate the mythological cameo
Glad you like it. You're not the first AH.commer who's had a cameo here, but the first which people have picked up on. Which could mean either that I was too subtle with the others, or you're more well-known; take your pick.
It's a decorative thing, mostly; it doesn't have any real practical uses. The most valued corals are the highly colourful ones, ie those which produce colours which can't be found in natural stone.
He Who Must Be Blamed is you isn't it?
That's impossible to say, since no-one remembers His name anymore.
There is a consultative assembly of sorts, although I retain the casting vote. In this case, I do think I'll work on the Maori next, unless I get a flash of inspiration for something which I just want to put into a post.
It's mostly a function of population density. The Kiyungu agriculture is less productive than further south, until relatively recently, and even with the new crops enough people are migrating that the population density hasn't increased all that much.
Lower population density means less of a bureaucratic/administrative class, and also makes it harder to build up the kind of army big enough to hold onto a second city while still fending off attacks from half a dozen either rivals. Basically, if a city-state conquers and holds a neighbour, it instantly becomes a threat to all of its other neighbours, who both work against it and encourage the conquered city-state to declare independence. With a higher population density, then the better conquerors could probably deal with that, but so far, it's usually worked out that city-states can't hold onto other conquests for more than a few decades at most.
And a nitpick:
"Inward-looking", I presume
Oops! Now fixed.
A nice update Jared.
Enjoyed Thande's cameo
That was fun to work in.
The tradition of not naming deities isn't unique to Judaism, but yes, they will probably find it interesting. Amongst the Kiyungu, it's actually an outgrowth of what's an OTL belief amongst Aboriginal peoples not to name the dead. The Kiyungu have morphed that into not naming deities, in their case because they believe it's disrespectful.
Looks like whoever starts trading with the Kiyungi for spices should be quite happy - both parties will think they got a great deal
Why, yes. There are definitely a few commercial opportunities around.
Again, it's not a practice unique to the Greeks in OTL, although the Greek version is the most well-known, and will certainly be the ones which classicists will focus on when finding out more about the Kiyungu.
Good question. I doubt that there will be just one outlook; it will depend on the particular culture's view of homosexuality. Probably the general attitude will be one of distaste or worse, given how Europe in general operated at this time, but there may be exceptions.
Of course, given that there are things in Aururia which Europeans find much more disturbing (say hi to the Atjuntja, not to mention Daluming), this may not rate as much notice.
I can't say from firsthand experience whether this is how marriage works in OTL, but I've heard stories...
I was thinking of the old sitcom cliche of a couple's sex life declining once the woman has the man exactly where she wants him
Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
Well, honestly, my bet is not that any one will outshine the other. Rather I suspect Europeans will just lump everything that appalls them together and act as if its practiced across the whole continent. Of course I refer to European culture, the actual folks on the ground will be much more discerning.
I was thinking of the old sitcom cliche of a couple's sex life declining once the woman has the man exactly where she wants him
Oh, I knew what you meant, I was just making a backhanded reference to the fact that I hope that's not what happens to me soon.
Would be an interesting subject to cover, although doing that properly requires going rather long-term (albeit earlier than in Europe). It would also mean covering which European (and other) traders come out on top in East Asia and India.
This is something I'm wondering about, actually. The Aururian cultures are rather more literate and easily distinguished from each other than a lot of, say, American or African cultures. That doesn't matter so much if Europeans aren't paying attention at all, but at least some of the travellers to Aururia will note the difference, and tell as much in their accounts of Aururia which are published back in Europe. (And maybe even translated works by native Aururian authors, or European translations of some older Aururian cultural works.)
Does that mean that Europeans will distinguish between the various cultures? Perhaps, perhaps not. (After all, they all look the same, right?) I think that the best analogy might be to what European cultures thought of the various East Asian cultures in OTL. Did they make a meaningful distinction between China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam? Of course, the Aururian cultures are geographically less distinct from each other than those in East Asia, but it seems to be about the best comparison.
Very much so. Particularly those who have to deal with the Islanders versus Atjuntja, say, or Yadji versus Gunnagal.
Lands of Red and Gold #46: Children of a Failed Continent
Lands of Red and Gold #46: Children of a Failed Continent
“Te amorangi ki mua, te hapai o ki muri.” (The leader at the front and the workers behind the scenes.)
- Maori proverb
* * *
Seven continents provide the large majority of the land surface of the globe. Or six continents, or five, or four, or even eight, depending on who provides the definitions. Regardless of their number, all of the continents have one thing in common: they are composed of masses of ancient rock which are light enough to float above the rest of the earth’s crust and provide land above the waves.
One continent, though, is a failure. It is heavy enough and unstable enough that most of its surface does not provide a continental land mass above the ocean, but has sunk into the depths below it.
A few fragments of that failed continent still project above the surface of the ocean blue. The two largest of these fragments form islands that preserve relicts of ancient times, carrying on their soil plants and animals whose relatives have vanished from most of the rest of the globe.
For this failed continent was, like the other continents of the southern hemisphere, once part of the supercontinent of Gondwana, and some of that ancient landmass’s survivors found a new home within these more limited confines. The forests that cover these islands have relatives that persist in other southerly landmasses. The animals that live on these islands are likewise distinctive. None more so than the tuatara, an innocuous three-eyed creature that appears to be a kind of lizard but is in truth the last survivor of an ancient lineage.
The two islands are dominated by mountains that have been raised up recently in geological time, as forces beneath the crust move in new patterns, thrusting up a range of high peaks. Erosion has done much to wear down these new mountains, creating some fertile plains, but much of the geography of these two islands is still marked by these high peaks or other rugged, hilly terrain.
Distant from any neighbouring landmasses, these two main islands and myriad smaller offshore islands were inaccessible for most of human history and prehistory. Reaching them required mastery of shipbuilding and oceanic navigation, to say nothing of determination.
The first visitors to these islands were the Polynesians, a people who sailed from island to island and explored a third of globe using nothing but stone and wood, their wits, and a lot of coconut fibre. To this people of explorers, the smallest of islands was worth fighting over and settling, even tiny outcrops of limestone and coral sand which could not hold permanent fresh water. History does not record, but imagination can supply, their delight at finding the two massive, forest-clad, well-watered main islands of Aotearoa which appeared to be more wealth than should be contained anywhere in the world.
Such a wealth of land must certainly have drawn quick Polynesian settlement, once they were aware of it. The first Polynesians to come here called themselves by various names, but in time they would come to think of themselves as the Maori.
The first settlers built villages which clung to the coast. Their own tropical-suited crops barely grew in these temperate lands, but the early Maori still found food in abundance. Amidst the dark, ancient forests of the interior dwelt the moa, massive flightless birds which provided an abundance of meat for any hunters who sought them. When not hunting moas inland, the early Maori hunted seals – another valued meat resource – and gathered food from the sea, as their forefathers had done since time immemorial.
Acclimatising to this new land of Aotearoa still presented some challenges to the early Maori. The sea voyages to their old islands were long indeed, enough that most domesticated animals could not survive the trip. Their Polynesian forefathers had raised pigs, chickens and dogs, but only the dogs survived the journey to Aotearoa. The kiore [Polynesian rat] came with the first voyagers, too, and quickly established itself on the main islands of Aotearoa, but that provided only a nuisance to the Maori. With only dogs for animals, the Maori were dependent on the moa and seafood for their protein, which would present problems if the moa were ever hunted out.
In their cultivation of fibre crops, the early Maori were more fortunate. Their traditional fibre crops were coconuts and pandanus, used for ropes and sails among much else, but neither of these plants grew in cooler Aotearoa. This new land offered a more than adequate replacement, however. The plants which they called harakeke and wharariki [New Zealand flax] could be harvested wild, and their leaves yielded a fibre which was superior to anything that the Maori had seen before [1].
With the vast expanse of their new islands, the early Maori did not truly need to keep exploring for new lands; Aotearoa held more wealth than any other land the Maori or their ancestors had found for millennia. Such a tradition of exploration, however, would not fade so quickly. A few Maori kept voyaging back and forth to their ancient islands, while more explored in other directions. Their early explorations were largely unsuccessful, finding only other small islands which were of little use to a people who knew the land of Aotearoa [2].
In 1310, the first Maori explorers sailed far enough west to find a land which made Aotearoa seem small, albeit also a land rather dry and fire-prone. Its inhabitants called this land by many names, but the Maori who learned of its seemingly endless expanse called it Toka Moana [3].
In Toka Moana, the early Maori came into contact with people who possessed many arts which their ancestors had lost over the long migrations which brought them to Aotearoa, and had other things which no peoples outside of that island continent had even seen. The Maori kept sailing back and forth between Aotearoa and Toka Moana, gradually exploring more of the country and learning of its peoples, and beginning a process of cultural exchanges which would transform the lives of peoples on both sides of the Gray Sea [Tasman Sea].
To their western neighbours, the early Maori gave some of their own crops, most notably kumara [sweet potato] and taro. They shared, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, some of their knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation. From their western neighbours, Maori explorers and traders acquired crops which were much more suited to their temperate lands, most notably red yams, wattles, murnong, scrub nettles, purslane, and fruits such as muntries and apple berries. They acquired domesticated birds – ducks, emus and geese – to provide a protein source to replace the dwindling moa. In time, they acquired many new skills from the westerners, such as knowledge of pottery, bronze working and, in time writing.
After this, the Maori would never be the same again.
* * *
1618: the eve of the first tentative Dutch contact with the western extremities of Toka Moana. On the eastern coast, the Maori of Aotearoa have been visiting Aururia for centuries. The voyage across the Gray Sea is a long one, but shorter than the journeys which brought their ancestors to Aotearoa from distant Hawaiki. What can be found in Toka Moana is certainly worth the travel.
From early in their contact with Toka Moana, the Maori explored much of the eastern coast. They still visit parts of that occasionally, but their main sustained contact has been with the Cider Isle [Tasmania] in the south. Here, they can find the commodity which they prize above all: tin ore. Their own islands lack any meaningful native source of tin, and the arts of iron working have not yet spread far enough east for the Maori to learn to work that metal. Bronze is the metal they know and treasure most; while they have native copper sources, they must import all of their tin from the Cider Isle, or sometimes trade for bronze in its finished form.
To the Cider Isle, then, the Maori come to trade for tin ore, and sometimes for duranj [gum cider] and gold, too. In exchange they provide jade, textiles of harakeke and wharariki, and sometimes other goods such as kauri gum or finished crafts. When the Maori visit north, they mainly trade for spices such as myrtles or peppers, or occasionally for finished bronze goods.
In Aotearoa itself, the demand for all of these goods is high. For there are a great many Maori now; numbers which their ancestors could barely have imagined when they landed their first canoes on Te Ika a Maui [North Island, New Zealand]. Food is abundant, thanks to the crops from Toka Moana. Red yams grow well in Aotearoa, except in the uttermost south, and even then wattles and murnong can be cultivated. The new crops have flourished so well, in fact, that the Maori have abandoned their original crops from Polynesia. What need to grow a kumara through laborious construction of north-facing gardens and end up with a tiny tuber the size of a man’s thumb, when a handful of buried red yam seeds will yield tubers the size of a man’s forearm?
Likewise, domesticated birds from Toka Moana have become an integral part of Maori life. Emus, ducks and geese graze their fields, supplying fertiliser and providing a welcome source of meat and eggs. Domesticated quolls were originally brought across to control the pesky kiore [Polynesian rat]. While good at that task, they are also excellent at surviving on their own; quolls have turned feral and destroyed much of the native bird life. Nor are quolls the only species from Toka Moana to cause an ecological catastrophe. Domesticated wattles have spread wild, too; the rapidly growing trees crowd out much of the native flora and transform the landscape into one where many of the native birds can find nothing to eat.
Perhaps the greatest ecological catastrophe came from the Maori themselves, though. Human hunting ravaged many of the native birds, particularly the giant moa. Slow-growing, lacking any familiarity with mammalian predators, the moa made easy targets; the process had been well advanced even before the first Maori visited Toka Moana. At least ten species of the flightless birds dwelt on Aotearoa before human arrival; barely a century later, they had all been hunted to extinction.
In Aotearoa, at least.
For while the Maori exterminated the moa in its native country, they were not the only people to glimpse these massive birds before they vanished from the fragments of the failed continent. In the early days of contact with Toka Moana, some of the westerners took passage on Maori ships and came to visit Aotearoa. Among those visitors was Burrinjuck, the High Chief of the Jerrewa people [who live around Bateman’s Bay, NSW].
Like most of those visitors, Burrinjuck found the giant moa to be hugely impressive. Also like many of the people of Toka Moana, Burrinjuck had a great passion for hunting; his people preserved large rangelands around their home country which were open for kangaroos to graze and, in turn, be hunted. In common with most visitors, Burrinjuck thought that moa would be excellent for hunting back in Toka Moana.
Unlike most of those visitors, though, Burrinjuck had the authority to do something about his desires. He asked to have stocks of the largest moa [Dinornis novaezealandiae] established in his home country, where they might be preserved for hunting. His hosts were willing to accommodate this fancy, in exchange for certain understandings of a bronzed nature, and arranged to capture some young moa chicks and ship them back to Toka Moana.
There, in the Jerrewa lands, Burrinjuck established the moa in his private hunting preserve. A very special preserve, where only the High Chief’s kin were permitted to enter, and only the highest class of chiefs were permitted to hunt. Protecting the moa has taken vigorous effort over the generations, but the chiefs of the Jerrewa like their privileges, and enforce the death penalty on any commoner who kills a moa within their hunting grounds. Any moa who wander further away from these lands will usually be killed, but within these lands they are well-protected. So a few moa still survive in 1618, one last fragment of Aotearoa preserved across the sea.
* * *
Unlike the true continent which forms its western neighbour, the failed continent of Aotearoa is a well-watered, fertile land. Toka Moana is geologically ancient, with poor, eroded soils and no high peaks; Aotearoa is rugged and often mountainous, and the mountains thrust up by tectonic forces are being continually weathered and their rocks washed down to the plains to enrich the soil. Toka Moana sits firmly in the desert latitude and is the driest inhabited continent; Aotearoa lies in temperate latitudes with regular chilling winds that bring abundant moisture with them.
The relative benefits of climate and geology can best be summed up this: in 1618, Aotearoa sustains nearly half the population of Toka Moana in a land surface barely 3.5% of its size. The population density is higher on Aotearoa than virtually anywhere on Toka Moana, except the heartland of the Yadji realm.
Crowded into such a relatively confined land, the Maori have developed what are in many ways more elaborate and more organised social systems than most of the Tauiwi, their counterparts on Toka Moana [4]. With higher population density has come more intense competition for resources; when combined with their ancient traditions inherited from Polynesia, the Maori are in most respects more warlike and hostile to foreigners and each other than the peoples across the Gray Sea. It also allows them to support some social institutions to a much greater degree; among other things, the Maori make much more use of slavery than the Tauiwi [5].
The heart of Maori social organisation has developed around three levels of relationships which define all Maori’s interaction with each other. These are ancient classifications which dated back to the earliest days of settlement in Aotearoa, and which were originally methods of tracing kinship, but which have become more general forms of social structure.
All Maori are first of all members of their local whanau, which originally meant extended family, but now generally refers to all of the people who were born or married into a particular locality. Members of the same whanau still consider themselves as relatives of a kind, and intermarriage amongst people of the same whanau is considered to be incest. All of the warriors who defend a particular region and serve its leader are drawn from the local whanau, or sometimes adopted into it.
Every whanau is part of a hapu, a word which can be variously translated as clan or subtribe. Like the whanau, a hapu was originally a genealogical term, in this case indicating a more distant but still significant relationship amongst the various whanau that it included.
Time and social construction has changed the nature of a hapu, though. Now it simply serves as a term for the fundamental political unit of Maori society. All hapu are ruled by a prominent leader, usually an accomplished warleader (or sometimes a priest) with his own sworn warriors, and who acts as a protector of all the whanau who have sworn to him.
Usually the member whanau of a hapu are close together geographically, since the main function of the hapu is to provide mutual defence and cooperation against enemies. They are not always contiguous, however. This is particularly important since individual whanau can choose to change their allegiance to the leader of a rival hapu within the same iwi [tribe or kingdom].
The process of changing hapu is part of the broader political and military struggles within Maori society. If the leader of a different hapu is deemed to have greater mana [standing, reputation, charisma, psychic power], or is a more accomplished warleader, then other whanau may choose to transfer their allegiance to his service, and thus gain his protection and hopefully some of the benefit of his mana. With raids a common part of Maori life, a warleader who can offer protection is something to be treasured.
The largest political unit in Maori society is the iwi. The word can be variously translated as clan or people, but in practice it refers to what amount to Maori kingdoms. An iwi is comprised of multiple hapu who reside in a given region, and who are a people who can trace their descent to named ancestors who reached Aotearoa on one of the ancient canoes. All members of the same iwi are thus theoretically related, although in effect they are citizens of the same kingdom. An iwi controls a recognised territory, although given the more or less continual warfare of Maori society, the borders of an iwi often shift in line with the tides of war.
Leadership at all three levels of Maori society is in theory elective, based on the mana of the leader and the acclamation of the people in the next rank. Ariki (leaders) are normally chosen for life, although particularly egregious deeds or failure in warfare (those often being synonymous) may see a leader abandoned by his followers; his name cast out and forgotten. A son may succeed a father, but in most kingdoms, this is not guaranteed.
The basic customs and traditions which surround Maori leaders do not vary significantly at each rank. The same word, ariki, is used for all leaders, distinguished only by the name of the particular social unit they lead. An ariki whanau leads an extended family, an ariki hapu leads his group of whanau, and an ariki iwi is more or less the king. All ariki are expected to conduct themselves according to the same social mores and to maintain and build their mana.
Each ariki draws their power from the same symbolic source, their marae or meeting hall, the ritual centre of their leadership. The Maori use the same word to refer to the dwellings of all three ranks of leaders, although naturally the form of the marae depends on a leader’s power. An ariki whanau may simply have a hall at the centre of his pa [stockade, fortification], while the ariki iwi may have a marae which is a palace or a virtual town unto itself.
Regardless of its outward form, each marae has one room which always serves the same function: the room which contains the heart stone, the toka atua [literally, god stone]. The toka atua is the most sacred symbol of a leader’s mana and power. Traditionally carved from granite or some other hard stone, it will be inscribed with a symbol chosen by the leader’s ancestors, and passed down through the generations. All warriors who swear service to a leader do so to this stone, ritually binding themselves to the leader’s mana and to that of all of his ancestors.
The toka atua must be defended above all else; to lose it to an open raid is the greatest possible blow to a leader’s mana, and one from which few can recover. To have the stone stolen by stealth is shameful, but not an irreparable blow to a leader’s prestige, and it may be recovered in kind.
Besides their marae, all leaders also maintain one or more pa [fortifications]. These defensive structures are essential given the warlike nature of Maori society. All leaders maintain a warband of sworn warriors, and most adult Maori males can use weapons at need, if only a staff, or sometimes a taiaha [6]. Lesser leaders will call out their warriors if a greater leader calls, or often go raiding of their own accord. Raids are commonplace, sometimes even within the same iwi, although it is rare for leaders of the same hapu to raid each other.
Indeed, warfare is an integral part of Maori life, and it is intertwined with their conception of mana. That word has many nuances in Maori life: authority, reputation, conduct, prestige, influence, honour, charisma, psychic force. All warriors, and to a lesser degree all Maori males and higher-class females, seek to gain mana, and to avoid activities which would weaken their mana.
For warriors, demonstration of their mana includes a formal list of the deeds which they have accomplished. All sworn Maori warriors have an account of their deeds which is recited on formal occasions during their lives, and ultimately at their funerals. Their mana is also represented in the moko which all warriors have carved onto their faces [7]. These designs mark a warrior’s mana, and particularly accomplished warriors will often have additional moko marked on their faces or bodies. Among men, only sworn warriors are permitted to wear moko, although some higher-status women are also permitted to use it.
Whether a warrior or not, all Maori acknowledge the central role of utu, of reciprocation and balance, in maintaining mana. All actions, whether friendly or unfriendly, demand an appropriate response. A kind deed should be repaid, in one way or another, and revenge should be sought for hostile actions. This principle brings both benefits and problems for Maori society; kindness is encouraged, but it also brings about a near-endless cycle of revenge between some groups.
In such an often hostile society, various rituals and customs have developed to help maintain some order. Leaders have an essential role to play in maintaining these customs, particularly those involving hospitality rituals. People who first visit the marae of a particular leader will usually be invited to go through one of a variety of forms of hospitality rituals, involving exchanges of gifts and stylised challenges from warriors. After going through such a ritual, the participants will be under the protection of the local ariki. This means that they cannot be killed without cause, although in some cases the definition of just cause can be very broad.
The hospitality rituals are usually mandatory for the first visit to a new region, but the protection usually holds for further visits, unless the leader explicitly revokes the protection. For leaders of whanau and some of the less influential hapu, the challenges and other rituals are generally carried out in person by the local ariki. For leaders of iwi and more prominent hapu, the ceremonies will usually be carried out by a relative on behalf of the ariki, except for particularly high-status guests.
Of course, no amount of rituals can prevent all forms of hostility, not with warfare a fundamental component of Maori life. The nature of war varies immensely, from minor raids for mana or revenge, to larger campaigns to secure prisoners, to major wars to capture resources or territory. Early Maori warfare often involved cannibalism of the fallen, both as a source of protein and to gain some of the mana of the defeated enemy. While the practice is much rarer in modern Maori society, ritual cannibalism is still sometimes part of contemporary warfare, traditionally involving consumption of the heart and arms of defeated warriors.
* * *
In 1618, while centuries of warfare have led to some political consolidation, the Maori are still divided into a number of competing iwi. They are often hostile to strangers even within their own iwi, and extremely wary of visitors from other iwi. Their default attitude to foreign visitors is similarly hostile. The only people who visit them with any regularity are the Islanders, some of whom have succeeded in gaining protection. The Maori still have a few sporadic visitors from Polynesia, and the occasional very lost ship from westerners who had been meaning to sail up or down their own east coast.
The Maori themselves still keep up their own trading contacts with the Cider Isle, and some Islanders have occasionally found it profitable to bring tin, bronze or kunduri to Aotearoa [8]. Bronze is by far the good most in demand in this trade, since the Maori supply of the metal is ultimately dependent on imported sources.
Fortunately for the Maori, bronze is an alloy which can be almost endlessly recycled and reforged for new purposes. The Maori are assiduous in their pursuit of collecting abandoned or damaged bronze objects for reforging; the metal is too valuable to be allowed to go to waste. One of the privileges of controlling a battlefield in victory is to scavenge for abandoned or damaged arrowheads, spearheads, shields or armour and reclaim it. So while the Maori do not import much tin in any given year – the sea lanes are long, after all – they have accumulated a significant amount of bronze over the centuries.
So determined are they in their recycling, in fact, that future archaeologists will find precious little evidence of bronzeworking amongst the Maori, finding mostly abandoned tools of copper or stone. This will lead to vigorous scholarly debate about how extensive the Maori use of bronze was during the precontact period.
The same Islanders who occasionally export bronze to Aotearoa have also sometimes tried to export their Plirite faith to the Maori. This has met with only modest success. Only two of the western iwi, the Te Arawa [in Westland, South Island] and Ngati Apa [in Taranaki, North Island] [9] have significant numbers of Plirite converts, and even then not a majority. No Maori ariki iwi [king] has yet accepted the faith, although a few ariki hapu have done so.
The Maori’s own religion is derived from that of their eastern Polynesian ancestors, centring around their belief in the interrelatedness and common descent (whakapapa) of all life, and its links to the gods and heroes of legend. This link to the past is part of what gives a Maori his or her mana, and any Maori of status can recite their genealogy back to one or more ancestors who sailed from Hawaiki [10], or from other great figures. Some of these figures include: Tangaroa, who personifies the seas and is the origin of all fish; Tane, who embodies the forest and is the origin of all birds; Kupe, who in some traditions first explored Aotearoa; and Kawiti, who in most traditions was the discoverer of Toka Moana [11]. With this link to the past an essential part of their mana, relatively few high-status Maori have been willing to adopt the new Plirite faith, for fear of angering their ancestors and breaking the sacred connection.
For all their hostility to outsiders and ambivalent views of foreign religion, the Maori in 1618 did not know that they would soon be exposed both to more outsiders and another religion. In 1627, the Dutch explorer François Thijssen sailed up the west coast of Aotearoa, becoming the first European to visit the Land of the Long White Cloud. At the first kingdom he visited, the ariki iwi of the Te Arawa gave him a very cool reception and ordered him to depart. Thijssen left as commanded, but Europeans would not be dissuaded from again visiting Aotearoa’s shores...
* * *
[1] Harakeke (Phormium tenax) and wharariki (P. cookianum), usually known in English as New Zealand flax, provide some of the best natural fibres in the world. The fibres from their leaves can be readily worked into a wide variety of textiles, ropes, sails, and other products, and were a major part of the traditional Maori economy. After European contact, the plants would also find willing international customers; the Royal Navy, for instance, traded muskets and other products for ropes of New Zealand flax since it was stronger by weight than their other customary fibres such as hemp.
[2] It is not known how long the Maori historically kept up their tradition of exploration and long-range navigation, but it’s likely to have been until at least 1500 AD, when the Chatham Islands were first settled. The Maori also likely discovered and settled other island groups such as Norfolk Island and the Kermadecs, although those settlements eventually failed.
[3] Originally, toka moana meant a rock which stood firm in the wildest seas, but its meaning evolved to mean a rock so big (ie land) that it took longer to cross than the ocean. To later Maori, the name will usually if somewhat inaccurately be translated as the Land Ocean.
[4] Tauiwi, originally tau iwi (roughly translated, strangers), is the generic Maori name for the people of Toka Moana. It can be used either as a catch-all for all of the westerners, or simply in cases when the Maori don’t know the names of the individual peoples across the Gray Sea. The Maori are quite familiar with the distinction between the three peoples of the Cider Isle, know the Islanders, and are broadly familiar with a lot of the peoples on the eastern coast of Toka Moana, but do not know a lot of the rest.
[5] Slavery does exist in Toka Moana, but it is not a major component of their social systems. Most Tauiwi peoples rely on corvees or other forms of drafted labour for part of the year. Permanent slavery on Toka Moana is generally confined to household domestics and for unpleasant tasks such as mining. Amongst the Maori, who are much more warlike (and thus obtain prisoners) and have a much higher population density (and thus uses for forced labour), slavery is much more common. One of its principal uses is in the harvesting of fibre crops and weaving of textiles, which is a labour-intensive but vital task.
[6] A taiaha is a traditional Maori weapon shaped from hard wood, usually with one end decorated, and the other with a flat, smooth blade. Sometimes this blade will be made from wood, although better-equipped Maori will often use a bronze blade instead. Although visually it is similar to a spear, a taiaha is a close-quarters weapon designed to be held with two hands and using short, calculated blocks, thrusts and strikes.
[7] Moko is a traditional Maori form of tattooing, where grooves are cut into the skin with chisels and then marked with pigments, rather than the punctures of standard tattooing.
[8] Islander visits are uncommon both because of the distance, and because the Nangu trading network is centred on the Island itself. Most of their goods are brought back to the Island to be exchanged there, except for short-distance trips such as between the Cider Isle and the Yadji realm.
[9] The names of the various iwi listed here are historical, being peoples who still existed at the time of historical European contact. The changed patterns of warfare and migration, though, mean that they inhabit different areas than they did historically.
[10] Although whether these genealogies are accurate is far from certain. Even where there have been no creative interpolations, literacy did not spread immediately to the Maori. While modern Maori have written records of their genealogy, in written form these usually do not go back much over a century.
[11] Whether Kupe and Kawiti are genuine historical figures will be the source of much scholarly argument. The Maori lacked writing when settling Aotearoa, and neither the Maori nor the Raduru (the people they first contacted in Toka Moana) had writing at the time of contact. Regardless of their historicity or non-historicity, Kupe and Kawiti remain important cultural figures among the Maori.
* * *
Thoughts?
P.S. I haven’t listed the breakdown of the Maori iwi (kingdoms) or their geographical regions in this post, since it’s rather hard to describe in words. If someone’s interested in drawing up a map of Aotearoa and the main kingdoms, though, please let me know.
“Te amorangi ki mua, te hapai o ki muri.” (The leader at the front and the workers behind the scenes.)
- Maori proverb
* * *
Seven continents provide the large majority of the land surface of the globe. Or six continents, or five, or four, or even eight, depending on who provides the definitions. Regardless of their number, all of the continents have one thing in common: they are composed of masses of ancient rock which are light enough to float above the rest of the earth’s crust and provide land above the waves.
One continent, though, is a failure. It is heavy enough and unstable enough that most of its surface does not provide a continental land mass above the ocean, but has sunk into the depths below it.
A few fragments of that failed continent still project above the surface of the ocean blue. The two largest of these fragments form islands that preserve relicts of ancient times, carrying on their soil plants and animals whose relatives have vanished from most of the rest of the globe.
For this failed continent was, like the other continents of the southern hemisphere, once part of the supercontinent of Gondwana, and some of that ancient landmass’s survivors found a new home within these more limited confines. The forests that cover these islands have relatives that persist in other southerly landmasses. The animals that live on these islands are likewise distinctive. None more so than the tuatara, an innocuous three-eyed creature that appears to be a kind of lizard but is in truth the last survivor of an ancient lineage.
The two islands are dominated by mountains that have been raised up recently in geological time, as forces beneath the crust move in new patterns, thrusting up a range of high peaks. Erosion has done much to wear down these new mountains, creating some fertile plains, but much of the geography of these two islands is still marked by these high peaks or other rugged, hilly terrain.
Distant from any neighbouring landmasses, these two main islands and myriad smaller offshore islands were inaccessible for most of human history and prehistory. Reaching them required mastery of shipbuilding and oceanic navigation, to say nothing of determination.
The first visitors to these islands were the Polynesians, a people who sailed from island to island and explored a third of globe using nothing but stone and wood, their wits, and a lot of coconut fibre. To this people of explorers, the smallest of islands was worth fighting over and settling, even tiny outcrops of limestone and coral sand which could not hold permanent fresh water. History does not record, but imagination can supply, their delight at finding the two massive, forest-clad, well-watered main islands of Aotearoa which appeared to be more wealth than should be contained anywhere in the world.
Such a wealth of land must certainly have drawn quick Polynesian settlement, once they were aware of it. The first Polynesians to come here called themselves by various names, but in time they would come to think of themselves as the Maori.
The first settlers built villages which clung to the coast. Their own tropical-suited crops barely grew in these temperate lands, but the early Maori still found food in abundance. Amidst the dark, ancient forests of the interior dwelt the moa, massive flightless birds which provided an abundance of meat for any hunters who sought them. When not hunting moas inland, the early Maori hunted seals – another valued meat resource – and gathered food from the sea, as their forefathers had done since time immemorial.
Acclimatising to this new land of Aotearoa still presented some challenges to the early Maori. The sea voyages to their old islands were long indeed, enough that most domesticated animals could not survive the trip. Their Polynesian forefathers had raised pigs, chickens and dogs, but only the dogs survived the journey to Aotearoa. The kiore [Polynesian rat] came with the first voyagers, too, and quickly established itself on the main islands of Aotearoa, but that provided only a nuisance to the Maori. With only dogs for animals, the Maori were dependent on the moa and seafood for their protein, which would present problems if the moa were ever hunted out.
In their cultivation of fibre crops, the early Maori were more fortunate. Their traditional fibre crops were coconuts and pandanus, used for ropes and sails among much else, but neither of these plants grew in cooler Aotearoa. This new land offered a more than adequate replacement, however. The plants which they called harakeke and wharariki [New Zealand flax] could be harvested wild, and their leaves yielded a fibre which was superior to anything that the Maori had seen before [1].
With the vast expanse of their new islands, the early Maori did not truly need to keep exploring for new lands; Aotearoa held more wealth than any other land the Maori or their ancestors had found for millennia. Such a tradition of exploration, however, would not fade so quickly. A few Maori kept voyaging back and forth to their ancient islands, while more explored in other directions. Their early explorations were largely unsuccessful, finding only other small islands which were of little use to a people who knew the land of Aotearoa [2].
In 1310, the first Maori explorers sailed far enough west to find a land which made Aotearoa seem small, albeit also a land rather dry and fire-prone. Its inhabitants called this land by many names, but the Maori who learned of its seemingly endless expanse called it Toka Moana [3].
In Toka Moana, the early Maori came into contact with people who possessed many arts which their ancestors had lost over the long migrations which brought them to Aotearoa, and had other things which no peoples outside of that island continent had even seen. The Maori kept sailing back and forth between Aotearoa and Toka Moana, gradually exploring more of the country and learning of its peoples, and beginning a process of cultural exchanges which would transform the lives of peoples on both sides of the Gray Sea [Tasman Sea].
To their western neighbours, the early Maori gave some of their own crops, most notably kumara [sweet potato] and taro. They shared, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, some of their knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation. From their western neighbours, Maori explorers and traders acquired crops which were much more suited to their temperate lands, most notably red yams, wattles, murnong, scrub nettles, purslane, and fruits such as muntries and apple berries. They acquired domesticated birds – ducks, emus and geese – to provide a protein source to replace the dwindling moa. In time, they acquired many new skills from the westerners, such as knowledge of pottery, bronze working and, in time writing.
After this, the Maori would never be the same again.
* * *
1618: the eve of the first tentative Dutch contact with the western extremities of Toka Moana. On the eastern coast, the Maori of Aotearoa have been visiting Aururia for centuries. The voyage across the Gray Sea is a long one, but shorter than the journeys which brought their ancestors to Aotearoa from distant Hawaiki. What can be found in Toka Moana is certainly worth the travel.
From early in their contact with Toka Moana, the Maori explored much of the eastern coast. They still visit parts of that occasionally, but their main sustained contact has been with the Cider Isle [Tasmania] in the south. Here, they can find the commodity which they prize above all: tin ore. Their own islands lack any meaningful native source of tin, and the arts of iron working have not yet spread far enough east for the Maori to learn to work that metal. Bronze is the metal they know and treasure most; while they have native copper sources, they must import all of their tin from the Cider Isle, or sometimes trade for bronze in its finished form.
To the Cider Isle, then, the Maori come to trade for tin ore, and sometimes for duranj [gum cider] and gold, too. In exchange they provide jade, textiles of harakeke and wharariki, and sometimes other goods such as kauri gum or finished crafts. When the Maori visit north, they mainly trade for spices such as myrtles or peppers, or occasionally for finished bronze goods.
In Aotearoa itself, the demand for all of these goods is high. For there are a great many Maori now; numbers which their ancestors could barely have imagined when they landed their first canoes on Te Ika a Maui [North Island, New Zealand]. Food is abundant, thanks to the crops from Toka Moana. Red yams grow well in Aotearoa, except in the uttermost south, and even then wattles and murnong can be cultivated. The new crops have flourished so well, in fact, that the Maori have abandoned their original crops from Polynesia. What need to grow a kumara through laborious construction of north-facing gardens and end up with a tiny tuber the size of a man’s thumb, when a handful of buried red yam seeds will yield tubers the size of a man’s forearm?
Likewise, domesticated birds from Toka Moana have become an integral part of Maori life. Emus, ducks and geese graze their fields, supplying fertiliser and providing a welcome source of meat and eggs. Domesticated quolls were originally brought across to control the pesky kiore [Polynesian rat]. While good at that task, they are also excellent at surviving on their own; quolls have turned feral and destroyed much of the native bird life. Nor are quolls the only species from Toka Moana to cause an ecological catastrophe. Domesticated wattles have spread wild, too; the rapidly growing trees crowd out much of the native flora and transform the landscape into one where many of the native birds can find nothing to eat.
Perhaps the greatest ecological catastrophe came from the Maori themselves, though. Human hunting ravaged many of the native birds, particularly the giant moa. Slow-growing, lacking any familiarity with mammalian predators, the moa made easy targets; the process had been well advanced even before the first Maori visited Toka Moana. At least ten species of the flightless birds dwelt on Aotearoa before human arrival; barely a century later, they had all been hunted to extinction.
In Aotearoa, at least.
For while the Maori exterminated the moa in its native country, they were not the only people to glimpse these massive birds before they vanished from the fragments of the failed continent. In the early days of contact with Toka Moana, some of the westerners took passage on Maori ships and came to visit Aotearoa. Among those visitors was Burrinjuck, the High Chief of the Jerrewa people [who live around Bateman’s Bay, NSW].
Like most of those visitors, Burrinjuck found the giant moa to be hugely impressive. Also like many of the people of Toka Moana, Burrinjuck had a great passion for hunting; his people preserved large rangelands around their home country which were open for kangaroos to graze and, in turn, be hunted. In common with most visitors, Burrinjuck thought that moa would be excellent for hunting back in Toka Moana.
Unlike most of those visitors, though, Burrinjuck had the authority to do something about his desires. He asked to have stocks of the largest moa [Dinornis novaezealandiae] established in his home country, where they might be preserved for hunting. His hosts were willing to accommodate this fancy, in exchange for certain understandings of a bronzed nature, and arranged to capture some young moa chicks and ship them back to Toka Moana.
There, in the Jerrewa lands, Burrinjuck established the moa in his private hunting preserve. A very special preserve, where only the High Chief’s kin were permitted to enter, and only the highest class of chiefs were permitted to hunt. Protecting the moa has taken vigorous effort over the generations, but the chiefs of the Jerrewa like their privileges, and enforce the death penalty on any commoner who kills a moa within their hunting grounds. Any moa who wander further away from these lands will usually be killed, but within these lands they are well-protected. So a few moa still survive in 1618, one last fragment of Aotearoa preserved across the sea.
* * *
Unlike the true continent which forms its western neighbour, the failed continent of Aotearoa is a well-watered, fertile land. Toka Moana is geologically ancient, with poor, eroded soils and no high peaks; Aotearoa is rugged and often mountainous, and the mountains thrust up by tectonic forces are being continually weathered and their rocks washed down to the plains to enrich the soil. Toka Moana sits firmly in the desert latitude and is the driest inhabited continent; Aotearoa lies in temperate latitudes with regular chilling winds that bring abundant moisture with them.
The relative benefits of climate and geology can best be summed up this: in 1618, Aotearoa sustains nearly half the population of Toka Moana in a land surface barely 3.5% of its size. The population density is higher on Aotearoa than virtually anywhere on Toka Moana, except the heartland of the Yadji realm.
Crowded into such a relatively confined land, the Maori have developed what are in many ways more elaborate and more organised social systems than most of the Tauiwi, their counterparts on Toka Moana [4]. With higher population density has come more intense competition for resources; when combined with their ancient traditions inherited from Polynesia, the Maori are in most respects more warlike and hostile to foreigners and each other than the peoples across the Gray Sea. It also allows them to support some social institutions to a much greater degree; among other things, the Maori make much more use of slavery than the Tauiwi [5].
The heart of Maori social organisation has developed around three levels of relationships which define all Maori’s interaction with each other. These are ancient classifications which dated back to the earliest days of settlement in Aotearoa, and which were originally methods of tracing kinship, but which have become more general forms of social structure.
All Maori are first of all members of their local whanau, which originally meant extended family, but now generally refers to all of the people who were born or married into a particular locality. Members of the same whanau still consider themselves as relatives of a kind, and intermarriage amongst people of the same whanau is considered to be incest. All of the warriors who defend a particular region and serve its leader are drawn from the local whanau, or sometimes adopted into it.
Every whanau is part of a hapu, a word which can be variously translated as clan or subtribe. Like the whanau, a hapu was originally a genealogical term, in this case indicating a more distant but still significant relationship amongst the various whanau that it included.
Time and social construction has changed the nature of a hapu, though. Now it simply serves as a term for the fundamental political unit of Maori society. All hapu are ruled by a prominent leader, usually an accomplished warleader (or sometimes a priest) with his own sworn warriors, and who acts as a protector of all the whanau who have sworn to him.
Usually the member whanau of a hapu are close together geographically, since the main function of the hapu is to provide mutual defence and cooperation against enemies. They are not always contiguous, however. This is particularly important since individual whanau can choose to change their allegiance to the leader of a rival hapu within the same iwi [tribe or kingdom].
The process of changing hapu is part of the broader political and military struggles within Maori society. If the leader of a different hapu is deemed to have greater mana [standing, reputation, charisma, psychic power], or is a more accomplished warleader, then other whanau may choose to transfer their allegiance to his service, and thus gain his protection and hopefully some of the benefit of his mana. With raids a common part of Maori life, a warleader who can offer protection is something to be treasured.
The largest political unit in Maori society is the iwi. The word can be variously translated as clan or people, but in practice it refers to what amount to Maori kingdoms. An iwi is comprised of multiple hapu who reside in a given region, and who are a people who can trace their descent to named ancestors who reached Aotearoa on one of the ancient canoes. All members of the same iwi are thus theoretically related, although in effect they are citizens of the same kingdom. An iwi controls a recognised territory, although given the more or less continual warfare of Maori society, the borders of an iwi often shift in line with the tides of war.
Leadership at all three levels of Maori society is in theory elective, based on the mana of the leader and the acclamation of the people in the next rank. Ariki (leaders) are normally chosen for life, although particularly egregious deeds or failure in warfare (those often being synonymous) may see a leader abandoned by his followers; his name cast out and forgotten. A son may succeed a father, but in most kingdoms, this is not guaranteed.
The basic customs and traditions which surround Maori leaders do not vary significantly at each rank. The same word, ariki, is used for all leaders, distinguished only by the name of the particular social unit they lead. An ariki whanau leads an extended family, an ariki hapu leads his group of whanau, and an ariki iwi is more or less the king. All ariki are expected to conduct themselves according to the same social mores and to maintain and build their mana.
Each ariki draws their power from the same symbolic source, their marae or meeting hall, the ritual centre of their leadership. The Maori use the same word to refer to the dwellings of all three ranks of leaders, although naturally the form of the marae depends on a leader’s power. An ariki whanau may simply have a hall at the centre of his pa [stockade, fortification], while the ariki iwi may have a marae which is a palace or a virtual town unto itself.
Regardless of its outward form, each marae has one room which always serves the same function: the room which contains the heart stone, the toka atua [literally, god stone]. The toka atua is the most sacred symbol of a leader’s mana and power. Traditionally carved from granite or some other hard stone, it will be inscribed with a symbol chosen by the leader’s ancestors, and passed down through the generations. All warriors who swear service to a leader do so to this stone, ritually binding themselves to the leader’s mana and to that of all of his ancestors.
The toka atua must be defended above all else; to lose it to an open raid is the greatest possible blow to a leader’s mana, and one from which few can recover. To have the stone stolen by stealth is shameful, but not an irreparable blow to a leader’s prestige, and it may be recovered in kind.
Besides their marae, all leaders also maintain one or more pa [fortifications]. These defensive structures are essential given the warlike nature of Maori society. All leaders maintain a warband of sworn warriors, and most adult Maori males can use weapons at need, if only a staff, or sometimes a taiaha [6]. Lesser leaders will call out their warriors if a greater leader calls, or often go raiding of their own accord. Raids are commonplace, sometimes even within the same iwi, although it is rare for leaders of the same hapu to raid each other.
Indeed, warfare is an integral part of Maori life, and it is intertwined with their conception of mana. That word has many nuances in Maori life: authority, reputation, conduct, prestige, influence, honour, charisma, psychic force. All warriors, and to a lesser degree all Maori males and higher-class females, seek to gain mana, and to avoid activities which would weaken their mana.
For warriors, demonstration of their mana includes a formal list of the deeds which they have accomplished. All sworn Maori warriors have an account of their deeds which is recited on formal occasions during their lives, and ultimately at their funerals. Their mana is also represented in the moko which all warriors have carved onto their faces [7]. These designs mark a warrior’s mana, and particularly accomplished warriors will often have additional moko marked on their faces or bodies. Among men, only sworn warriors are permitted to wear moko, although some higher-status women are also permitted to use it.
Whether a warrior or not, all Maori acknowledge the central role of utu, of reciprocation and balance, in maintaining mana. All actions, whether friendly or unfriendly, demand an appropriate response. A kind deed should be repaid, in one way or another, and revenge should be sought for hostile actions. This principle brings both benefits and problems for Maori society; kindness is encouraged, but it also brings about a near-endless cycle of revenge between some groups.
In such an often hostile society, various rituals and customs have developed to help maintain some order. Leaders have an essential role to play in maintaining these customs, particularly those involving hospitality rituals. People who first visit the marae of a particular leader will usually be invited to go through one of a variety of forms of hospitality rituals, involving exchanges of gifts and stylised challenges from warriors. After going through such a ritual, the participants will be under the protection of the local ariki. This means that they cannot be killed without cause, although in some cases the definition of just cause can be very broad.
The hospitality rituals are usually mandatory for the first visit to a new region, but the protection usually holds for further visits, unless the leader explicitly revokes the protection. For leaders of whanau and some of the less influential hapu, the challenges and other rituals are generally carried out in person by the local ariki. For leaders of iwi and more prominent hapu, the ceremonies will usually be carried out by a relative on behalf of the ariki, except for particularly high-status guests.
Of course, no amount of rituals can prevent all forms of hostility, not with warfare a fundamental component of Maori life. The nature of war varies immensely, from minor raids for mana or revenge, to larger campaigns to secure prisoners, to major wars to capture resources or territory. Early Maori warfare often involved cannibalism of the fallen, both as a source of protein and to gain some of the mana of the defeated enemy. While the practice is much rarer in modern Maori society, ritual cannibalism is still sometimes part of contemporary warfare, traditionally involving consumption of the heart and arms of defeated warriors.
* * *
In 1618, while centuries of warfare have led to some political consolidation, the Maori are still divided into a number of competing iwi. They are often hostile to strangers even within their own iwi, and extremely wary of visitors from other iwi. Their default attitude to foreign visitors is similarly hostile. The only people who visit them with any regularity are the Islanders, some of whom have succeeded in gaining protection. The Maori still have a few sporadic visitors from Polynesia, and the occasional very lost ship from westerners who had been meaning to sail up or down their own east coast.
The Maori themselves still keep up their own trading contacts with the Cider Isle, and some Islanders have occasionally found it profitable to bring tin, bronze or kunduri to Aotearoa [8]. Bronze is by far the good most in demand in this trade, since the Maori supply of the metal is ultimately dependent on imported sources.
Fortunately for the Maori, bronze is an alloy which can be almost endlessly recycled and reforged for new purposes. The Maori are assiduous in their pursuit of collecting abandoned or damaged bronze objects for reforging; the metal is too valuable to be allowed to go to waste. One of the privileges of controlling a battlefield in victory is to scavenge for abandoned or damaged arrowheads, spearheads, shields or armour and reclaim it. So while the Maori do not import much tin in any given year – the sea lanes are long, after all – they have accumulated a significant amount of bronze over the centuries.
So determined are they in their recycling, in fact, that future archaeologists will find precious little evidence of bronzeworking amongst the Maori, finding mostly abandoned tools of copper or stone. This will lead to vigorous scholarly debate about how extensive the Maori use of bronze was during the precontact period.
The same Islanders who occasionally export bronze to Aotearoa have also sometimes tried to export their Plirite faith to the Maori. This has met with only modest success. Only two of the western iwi, the Te Arawa [in Westland, South Island] and Ngati Apa [in Taranaki, North Island] [9] have significant numbers of Plirite converts, and even then not a majority. No Maori ariki iwi [king] has yet accepted the faith, although a few ariki hapu have done so.
The Maori’s own religion is derived from that of their eastern Polynesian ancestors, centring around their belief in the interrelatedness and common descent (whakapapa) of all life, and its links to the gods and heroes of legend. This link to the past is part of what gives a Maori his or her mana, and any Maori of status can recite their genealogy back to one or more ancestors who sailed from Hawaiki [10], or from other great figures. Some of these figures include: Tangaroa, who personifies the seas and is the origin of all fish; Tane, who embodies the forest and is the origin of all birds; Kupe, who in some traditions first explored Aotearoa; and Kawiti, who in most traditions was the discoverer of Toka Moana [11]. With this link to the past an essential part of their mana, relatively few high-status Maori have been willing to adopt the new Plirite faith, for fear of angering their ancestors and breaking the sacred connection.
For all their hostility to outsiders and ambivalent views of foreign religion, the Maori in 1618 did not know that they would soon be exposed both to more outsiders and another religion. In 1627, the Dutch explorer François Thijssen sailed up the west coast of Aotearoa, becoming the first European to visit the Land of the Long White Cloud. At the first kingdom he visited, the ariki iwi of the Te Arawa gave him a very cool reception and ordered him to depart. Thijssen left as commanded, but Europeans would not be dissuaded from again visiting Aotearoa’s shores...
* * *
[1] Harakeke (Phormium tenax) and wharariki (P. cookianum), usually known in English as New Zealand flax, provide some of the best natural fibres in the world. The fibres from their leaves can be readily worked into a wide variety of textiles, ropes, sails, and other products, and were a major part of the traditional Maori economy. After European contact, the plants would also find willing international customers; the Royal Navy, for instance, traded muskets and other products for ropes of New Zealand flax since it was stronger by weight than their other customary fibres such as hemp.
[2] It is not known how long the Maori historically kept up their tradition of exploration and long-range navigation, but it’s likely to have been until at least 1500 AD, when the Chatham Islands were first settled. The Maori also likely discovered and settled other island groups such as Norfolk Island and the Kermadecs, although those settlements eventually failed.
[3] Originally, toka moana meant a rock which stood firm in the wildest seas, but its meaning evolved to mean a rock so big (ie land) that it took longer to cross than the ocean. To later Maori, the name will usually if somewhat inaccurately be translated as the Land Ocean.
[4] Tauiwi, originally tau iwi (roughly translated, strangers), is the generic Maori name for the people of Toka Moana. It can be used either as a catch-all for all of the westerners, or simply in cases when the Maori don’t know the names of the individual peoples across the Gray Sea. The Maori are quite familiar with the distinction between the three peoples of the Cider Isle, know the Islanders, and are broadly familiar with a lot of the peoples on the eastern coast of Toka Moana, but do not know a lot of the rest.
[5] Slavery does exist in Toka Moana, but it is not a major component of their social systems. Most Tauiwi peoples rely on corvees or other forms of drafted labour for part of the year. Permanent slavery on Toka Moana is generally confined to household domestics and for unpleasant tasks such as mining. Amongst the Maori, who are much more warlike (and thus obtain prisoners) and have a much higher population density (and thus uses for forced labour), slavery is much more common. One of its principal uses is in the harvesting of fibre crops and weaving of textiles, which is a labour-intensive but vital task.
[6] A taiaha is a traditional Maori weapon shaped from hard wood, usually with one end decorated, and the other with a flat, smooth blade. Sometimes this blade will be made from wood, although better-equipped Maori will often use a bronze blade instead. Although visually it is similar to a spear, a taiaha is a close-quarters weapon designed to be held with two hands and using short, calculated blocks, thrusts and strikes.
[7] Moko is a traditional Maori form of tattooing, where grooves are cut into the skin with chisels and then marked with pigments, rather than the punctures of standard tattooing.
[8] Islander visits are uncommon both because of the distance, and because the Nangu trading network is centred on the Island itself. Most of their goods are brought back to the Island to be exchanged there, except for short-distance trips such as between the Cider Isle and the Yadji realm.
[9] The names of the various iwi listed here are historical, being peoples who still existed at the time of historical European contact. The changed patterns of warfare and migration, though, mean that they inhabit different areas than they did historically.
[10] Although whether these genealogies are accurate is far from certain. Even where there have been no creative interpolations, literacy did not spread immediately to the Maori. While modern Maori have written records of their genealogy, in written form these usually do not go back much over a century.
[11] Whether Kupe and Kawiti are genuine historical figures will be the source of much scholarly argument. The Maori lacked writing when settling Aotearoa, and neither the Maori nor the Raduru (the people they first contacted in Toka Moana) had writing at the time of contact. Regardless of their historicity or non-historicity, Kupe and Kawiti remain important cultural figures among the Maori.
* * *
Thoughts?
P.S. I haven’t listed the breakdown of the Maori iwi (kingdoms) or their geographical regions in this post, since it’s rather hard to describe in words. If someone’s interested in drawing up a map of Aotearoa and the main kingdoms, though, please let me know.
I have a feeling the moa will come to the same end, eventually, that a number of other "preserved for hunting" species did; instability or war, king can't or won't maintain such tight control over his hunting grounds, they get eaten. Or inbreeding destroys them. Pity, that.
Hendryk
Banned
We'd been looking forward to a description of allohistorical Maori culture, and this chapter doesn't disappoint.
As far as contact with Europeans is concerned, the downside of a clan-based, proto-feudal society is its political division; but the upside is that its members are used to warfare and adaptive. It looks like TTL's Maori, with their high population, advanced bronzeworking techniques and fairly complex social organization, will prove tough adversaries for would-be conquerors.
As far as contact with Europeans is concerned, the downside of a clan-based, proto-feudal society is its political division; but the upside is that its members are used to warfare and adaptive. It looks like TTL's Maori, with their high population, advanced bronzeworking techniques and fairly complex social organization, will prove tough adversaries for would-be conquerors.
Not to mention they will be better able to resist European diseases because of contact with Auruaria's native diseases and the use of domesticates ducks, emus, and geese. While their possible immunity may not be as good as those peoples inhabiting Auruaria, it will be better against European diseases than in OTL.
BTW, how much the Maori were affected by Aururian diseases due to their contacts?
The Sandman
Banned
The Maori also have one other big advantage: as best as I can tell, they don't actually have much of anything that the Europeans would want. About the only Aotearoan products I see much of a demand for are flax and mercenaries, neither of which is lucrative enough to make conquest (whether open or by subversion) preferable to trade.
According to my (tentative) calculations based on your earlier installments, Aururia supported at least 7 million people in 1618. Thus, Aotearoa was home to at least 3 million, or as many as OTL New Zealand in 1980 or so. Even allowing for the effects of European plagues, analogues of OTL 'musket wars', etc., we surely get at least half a million of the Maori at the lowest point of post-contact demographic crisis. Quite possible, the lowest figure would be even higher, at almost one million or so.
All in all, the Whites would never get a chance to replace the Maori anywhere but in mining settlements (during gold rushes) or (less probably) in the largest cities of the colonized Aotearoa (if colonization ever succeeds, that is).
Consequently, the Maori language would never become a minority one, quite the contrary - it would be the most spoken language of entire Aururian-Maorian cultural region (any one Aururian language would be less widespread than the Maori, because all Aururian 'nations' have their own languages (sometimes more than just one), and none of them has more than 2 million inhabitants in 1618).
To be honest, it'd be a very strange situation - cultural periphery of the region supports the language with largest number of native speakers. I can't find any exact analogies from OTL (well, England was periphery of sorts during the Middle Ages, and now her language is greatest one in the West, if not worldwide - does it count?)
P.S.
And thanks for saving of moa! I hope they would survive European invasions, too.
mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
What a great update
Why has it become more rare? Because of the Australian Livestock?
Also, have emu gone feral in New Zealand? Would wild populations occupy the same niche as moas?
I can see the Australians being impressed enough by the moas to import them, but would they prove challenging game to hunt? I thought that was why they went extinct in our TL, they couldn't cope with human hunters.
I remember earlier you mentioned that some wild animals from Australia may have been imported to New Zealand as game or as curiosities. Which ones have made the trip and established breeding populations? (Wallabies? Wombats? ) and what impact have they had on the ecology?
Why has it become more rare? Because of the Australian Livestock?
Also, have emu gone feral in New Zealand? Would wild populations occupy the same niche as moas?
I can see the Australians being impressed enough by the moas to import them, but would they prove challenging game to hunt? I thought that was why they went extinct in our TL, they couldn't cope with human hunters.
I remember earlier you mentioned that some wild animals from Australia may have been imported to New Zealand as game or as curiosities. Which ones have made the trip and established breeding populations? (Wallabies? Wombats? ) and what impact have they had on the ecology?
I think that mercenaries would be widely available, so except for certain particular circumstances, I don't know that it would make a huge difference.
On the other hand, flax would be a definitely lucrative, but not too lucrative crop. Enough to trade for certainly, and to produce a thriving trade. But not enough to justify a major investment in conquering the place. And given the political layout of ferociously warring xenophobic states.... conquest is going to be uphill and ugly. New Zealand's remoteness and geography is going to make it difficult.
On the other hand, the fractured polity means that there's room for entry for a number of European powers. I could see the British, French, Dutch and Spanish all making alliances with local kingdoms or local states for access to flax, and trading firearms for it.
Basically, I'm anticipating a much more ferocious version of the Musket Wars, and the consolidation of New Zealand into anywhere from one to a half dozen major Maori polities.
The most ambitious outcome would be a centralized Maori empire that extends over parts of Aurauria, Melanesia and Polynesia. Of course, this would require the Maori to consolidate into a single state which pulls a Meiji before Meiji. Verging on ASB.
More likely, a small number of Maori states, or a single Maori state devolving into protectorate status to a European power.
- Status