Moriori Hospitality

From Moriori: A People Rediscovered, by Michael King (Penguin, 2017), Kindle Loc. 867ff.:

Whatever provocations the Moriori might have endured, there is no record of their ever again breaking the law of Nunuku (or, at least, not by killing Europeans. There is a story of one Chatham Islander who killed a relative in the early 1800s after a disagreement over a woman. He was subsequently ostracised by his people — social and spiritual death for a tribal person — and committed suicide by jumping down the blowhole at Mairangi. All of which serves to illustrate how highly the law of non-violence was valued). The Chathams preserved its reputation as a safe place to visit and provision. Danger from other than natural causes was more likely to come from renegade Europeans than from Moriori.

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New Zealand Maori, too, had visited the islands during the sealing period, having joined vessels as crew in the Bay of Islands, Cook Strait, Port Nicholson, and from the South Island. Some of these became residents. There were mixed Maori-European settlements at Whangaroa and Ocean Bay prior to 1835, and several Maori (including Paki Wara of Ngati Tama and Ropata of Ngati Toa) lived at Wharekauri. It is likely that it was these latter Maori who named the small kainga on the northern coast, allegedly after a house there built from salvaged kauri timber. Subsequently Maori used this name to refer to the whole of Chatham Island, because, as Alexander Shand wrote, ‘they could pronounce [it] more easily than the Moriori one of Rekohu’.

Maori residents and visitors liked what they found at the Chathams around the mid-1830s: a small population (about 1,600) of contented and unassertive Moriori tangata whenua a handful of Europeans who were relaxed about living in association with Moriori and Maori; much unoccupied and uncultivated land; the presence of the kopi tree with its edible berries; a prolificacy of eels and waterfowl around Te Whanga lagoon and Lake Huro; ample fish and shellfish in the sea and edible birds on the outlying islands; and the growing whaling industry that was beginning to use the islands as a provisioning base. In all, it was a situation that appealed to entrepreneurial people who, for a variety of reasons, were not content in their current circumstances; and it was to lead to the most traumatic chapter in the history of the Chathams and of the Moriori.