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Updated: June 22, 2025
The two teachers were not to settle on shore, nor even to sleep there, but they were to visit Duaterra, reconnoitre the ground, and see whether it would be possible to settle there as they had at first proposed. To their delight, Duaterra came eagerly to meet them, very anxious for their assistance with his corn.
Duaterra, his uncle Hunghi, a very powerful chief, and five more, accepted an invitation to come and confer with Mr. Marsden, and the Active brought them back to New South Wales. They were very anxious for the benefits which they hoped to derive from intercourse with the whites, and readily undertook to secure Hall and King from all danger.
Marsden knew that if he came as the friend of Duaterra and his tribe alone, party spirit would entirely alienate the rest of the islanders, and he therefore determined at once to prove that he came not as the ally of one party, but as the friend of both.
"The chiefs ridiculed Duaterra much about the wheat, and told him, because he had been a great traveller, he thought he could easily impose upon their credulity by fine stories; and all he urged could not convince them that wheat would make bread.
Marsden's farm, Duaterra had sailed for his home, but only again to suffer from the perfidy of the master of the ship.
Nicholas has given us, on the authority of his friend Duaterra, the most particular account that has appeared of the inferior deities of New Zealand. Their number, according to him, is very great, and each of them has his distinct powers and functions; one being placed over the elements, another over the fowls and fishes, and so of the rest.
Duaterra was a man of much intelligence, and even under these most unfavourable circumstances had been greatly impressed with the civilization of England, and was so desirous of improvement that, on arriving at Port Jackson, Mr. Marsden took him to his farm, where he applied eagerly to the learning of husbandry. Duaterra was not the only Maori ill-treated by British sailors.
His own and Shungie's crops in time came to perfection, and were reaped and threshed; and though the natives were much astonished to find that the grain was produced at the top, and not at the bottom of the stem, yet they could not be persuaded that bread could be made of it." Marsden afterwards sent Duaterra a steel mill to grind his wheat, which he received with no little joy.
He was a young chief named Duaterra, who had, in a spirit of adventure, embarked on board a whaler named the Argo, and worked as a sailor for six months, till the captain, having no further occasion for his services, put him ashore at Port Jackson, without payment or friends.
Duaterra, meantime, of his own accord, was making preparations for the first Sunday service held in New Zealand. It was likewise the Christmas Day of 1815, and Mr. Marsden felt it a most appropriate moment for his first proclamation of the good tidings of great joy among this most distant of the nations.
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