feet long and a house thirty feet long filled with chips and its 

 side posts elaborately carved. The ship's artist added. 



The men [at Tolaga] have a particular taste for carving 

 their boats, paddles, boards to put on their houses, tops 

 of walking sticks, and even their boats valens, are carved 

 in a variety of flourishes, turnings and windings, that are 

 unbroken; but their favorite figure seems to be a volute, 

 or spiral, which they vary many ways, single, double, 

 and triple, and with as much truth as if done from 

 mathematical draughts; yet the only instruments we 

 have seen are a chizzel, and an axe made from stone.* 



Tolaga was a treasure trove of taonga whakairo, and it is no 

 coincidence that this is the place where Te Rawheoro, the 

 school of learning and carving skills, was founded by 

 Hingangaroa. 



The settlements on the East Coast were undefended and 

 peaceful, but as the Endeavour cruised along into the Bay of 

 Plenty those on board saw the cliffs bristling with huge fortified 

 sites, fleets of canoes drawn up on the beach, and large gardens 

 on shore. This was evidently a densely populated and wealthy 

 area, where warfare was commonplace. The Endeavour was 

 chased and overtaken in this area by a carved double sailing 

 canoe, whose crew threw stones and smashed her windows. 



Several days later at anchor in Mercury Bay on the Coro- 

 mandel Peninsula, they could observe at first hand the ravages 

 of war. In Mercury Bay every small rock out at sea had a 

 fortification perched on top, and the local people seemed mis- 

 erable and impoverished. The canoes that came alongside 

 were simple dugouts, without any decoration, and the people 

 on board were "almost naked and blacker than any we had 

 seen . . . yet these few despicable gentry sang their song of 

 defiance and promised us as heartily as the most respectable of 

 their country men that they would kill us all." 10 Haka (war 

 dances) were a standard way of greeting strangers and not 

 necessarily hostile, but the Europeans knew nothing of the 

 proper etiquette and when provoked replied with smallshot or 

 musketballs. There was one good-sized fortification in the Bay 

 which Cook visited and described; it was defended on the land 

 side of its promontory by a double ditch and bank, two pali- 

 sades and a fighting stage, and inside the ground was laid out 

 in twenty palisaded divisions of one-to-two to twelve-to- 

 fourteen houses each. Dried fish and fern root were piled up 

 inside in heaps, and bundles of darts and heaps of stones were 

 ready on the fighting stage. The local people confided to the 

 Europeans (through the Tahitian interpreter, Tupaea) that they 

 were frequently raided from the north by warriors who cap- 

 tured their wives and children and destroyed all their pos- 

 sessions. Cook summed up the situation in Mercury Bay by 

 saying: 



Its inhabitants . . . altho pretty numerous are poor to the 

 highest degree when compair'd to others we have seen; 

 they have no plantations but live wholly on fern roots 

 and fish, their canoes are mean and without ornament, 

 and so are their houses or hutts and in general every- 

 thing they have about them." 

 Their taonga had been utterly ransacked. 



In the Bay of Islands, several hundred miles to the north, 

 however, there was plenty of visible wealth and this area could 

 well have been the home of the raiders who were making life 

 miserable for the people in Mercury Bay. Certainly Ngapuhi 

 were raiding Thames and much farther south in the very early 



historic period in their fleets of sailing canoes. As the Endeavour 

 ran toward Cape Brett, two large canoes came out to meet her: 



The strangers were numerous and appeared rich: their 

 Canoes were well carvd and ornamented and they had 

 with them many weapons ofpatoo patoos [patu] of stone 

 and whale bones which they value much; they had also 

 ribbs of whales [hoeroa] of which we had often seen 

 imitations in wood carved and ornamented with tufts of 

 Dogs hair. 1 -' 



Clearly, we are back in taonga territory. The chiefs had dogskin 

 cloaks and prolific tattoos, and on shore there were large gar- 

 dens and fortified towns in every direction. The major local 

 industry appeared to be fishing, and Banks spoke with some 

 awe of nets four to five hundred fathoms (2,400 to 3,000 feet) 

 long, adding that the locals laughed a little at their own net, a 

 common king's seine. 



Archaeological work in this area suggests that the main 

 cultivations were some way inland, and the coastal sites were 

 mainly dedicated to collecting sea resources. This area was, 

 like Anaura, able to support a range of cultigens, including a 

 few prized plants of aute (barkcloth). Agnes Sullivan's 

 postulates about settlement patterns would seem to be well 

 supported by the eyewitness accounts of the Bay of Islands. 

 There is also a very curious story collected by Banks just north 

 of the Bay which suggests that two-way voyaging may have 

 persisted well into the settlement period. Tupaea, the Tahitian 

 on board, talked to people who came out to the ship in canoes 

 and asked them 



if they knew of any Countries besides this or ever went to 

 any. They said no but that their ancestors had told them 

 to the NW by N or NNW was a large countrey to which 

 some people had sailed in a very large canoe, which pas- 

 sage took them up a month: from this expedition a part 

 only returned who told their countreymen that they had 

 seen a countrey where the people eat hogs, for which 

 animal they usd the same name (Booah) [puuaa] as is 

 usd in the Islands. And have you no hogs among you? 

 said Tupia. — No. — And did your ancestors bring one 

 back with them? — No. — You must be a parcel of Liars 

 then, said he, and your story a great lye for your ances- 

 tors would never been such fools as to come back with- 

 out them." 



Unfortunately Tupaea, who was also much given to lecturing 

 the Maori about the evils of cannibalism, was a thoroughgoing 

 Polynesian chauvinist. 



The final place visited on this voyage was Queen Charlotte 

 Sound to the south of Cook Strait, where bands of hunters and 

 gatherers retreated to their pa (fortified settlement) on 

 Motuara Island where the Endeavour arrived but soon dis- 

 persed to open-air camps along the shoreline in groups of fif- 

 teen to twenty. These people had no cultivations but lived off 

 fern root and the local supplies of fish, and enthusiastically 

 hunted down their enemies. Cannibalism is mentioned for 

 most other places visited by Cook in 1769-70, but here it was 

 everyday practice. It is difficult to know who was more horri- 

 fied by the evidence of cannibalistic custom in New Zealand, 

 the Europeans or Tupaea. When they came across some 

 chewed human bones in a provision basket by a shore camp, 

 they asked the local people, "what bones are these? they 

 answered. The bones of a man. . . . Why did not you eat the 

 woman who we saw today in the water? — She was our rela- 

 tion. — Who then is it that you eat? — Those who are killed in 15 



