Maori Chiefs Hand Sovereignty of New Zealand to Queen Victoria [15min]

Abel Tasman sighted South Island, New Zealand in 1642 (the year the English Civil War started) and, being Dutch, he called it New Zeeland. James Cook circumnavigated the islands in 1769 and reported beautiful coasts and hostile Maoris. "This Sceptred Isle: Empire" is a narrative history of the British Empire from Ireland in the 12th century to the independence of India in the 20th, told in 90 programmes written by historian Christopher Lee and narrated by actor Juliet Stevenson. (You may listen again online to up to five most recent episodes of "Empire".)

The Maoris origins are 8th century Polynesian. They had a life expectancy of not much more than 30 and tended towards cannibalism. On one occasion at the start of the 19th century, most of the crew of the English ship, the Boyd, were eaten.

Christian teaching had little effect on the natives, who were more interested in guns than texts. Samuel Marsden, who oversaw the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand, discovered the Maoris were getting muskets from the mission station run by Thomas Kendall. They wanted them not so much for attacking or defending against settlers as each other.

The musket was such an advance on axes and spears that it did not need more than maybe ten guns to put one Maori community over another. In 1820 Chief Hongi was taken to England to see the king. On his way back he bought 300 muskets in Australia and, for the next 10 years, his tribesmen are said to have butchered and eaten their enemies.

It was this mass slaughter that prompted other Maoris to ask William IV for protection. The British preferred to leave New Zealand as an extension of New South Wales. However there was a realistic fear that the French were planning to colonise the islands, through Le Compagnie Nanto-Bordelaise. A meeting of chiefs and officials in 1835 led to a Royal Navy captain, William Hobson, being sent to formally annexe New Zealand.

Thus, in 1840 Hobson became the colony's first lieutenant-governor. The majority of Maori chiefs agreed to hand sovereignty of New Zealand to Queen Victoria. In return the British garrison and legal system were supposed to protect them from expanding British settlements, and from each other. After the name of the meeting place, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was signed.