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Updated: June 12, 2025
Ruatara had many troubles and dangers to meet, through many months, before he was at last settled among his own people. Meantime, the new Governor of Sydney refused to allow the missionaries to go to New Zealand. The massacre of the sixty-six people of the Boyd had roused a feeling of horror, and it seemed a wicked waste of life to try to live among savages so fierce.
The Active took back spars and dressed flax to the value of £450. The flax was sold at £110 a ton. Kauri timber brought half a crown a foot, and the duty charged on it at the Sydney customs house was a shilling a foot. The day of Free Trade there was not yet. One cloud was hanging over the mission when Marsden sailed. Ruatara lay dying.
They had swords by their sides, and switches in their hands. We entered the enclosure, and were placed on the seats on each side of the pulpit. Korokoro marched his men and placed them on my right hand, in the rear of the Europeans; and Ruatara placed his men on the left. The inhabitants of the town, with the women and children and a number of other chiefs, formed a circle round the whole.
But the sulky captain broke his promise and sailed past the Bay. Why trouble to land a Maori? Ruatara had to choose between landing at Norfolk Island or another voyage to England. Cheated of his earnings and half-drowned in the surf, he struggled ashore on the convict island, whence he made his way to Sydney and to Marsden's kindly roof. The whaling captain went on towards England.
When Marsden, along with these two courageous men, started back to Sydney in the Ann convict ship, in 1809, there was on board, strangely enough, a Maori chief called Ruatara. This young fellow was a nephew of Hongi, the powerful head chief of the Ngapuhi tribe. Four years before, being anxious to see something of the wonders of civilised life, he had shipped as a sailor on board a whaler.
But for the determined support which Ruatara as a high chief was able to afford, Marsden could never have gained a footing in the land; and without the sustained labour of the civilised European, the work of the Maori innovator, too much in advance of its time, would have withered like Jonah's gourd, and have come to an end with the premature decease of Ruatara."
The Active was a brig of 110 tons, and claims the honour of being the first missionary craft of modern times. Hall and Kendall were the men chosen for the preliminary visit. They were instructed to open up communication with Ruatara, and, if possible, to bring him back with them to Sydney.
After reading the service, during which the natives stood up and sat down at the signals given by Korokoro's switch, which was regulated by the movements of the Europeans, it being Christmas Day, I preached from the second chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, and tenth verse, 'Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy, etc. The natives told Ruatara that they could not understand what I meant.
Ruatara caused about half an acre of land by the Oihi beach to be fenced in; within this area he improvised some rough seats with planks and an upturned boat; in a convenient spot he erected a reading desk and pulpit which he draped with black native cloth, and with white duck which he had brought from Sydney; on the top of the hill he reared a flagstaff; and thus prepared his church for the coming festival.
This meeting was momentous in its results. "Mr. Marsden and Ruatara," as Carleton says, "were each necessary to the other; each furnished means without which the labour of his associate must have been thrown away.
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