On 22 December 1814, having convinced the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of the need for a mission to New Zealand, Samuel Marsden arrived in the Bay of Islands. Nga Puhi chief Ruatara, whom Marsden had met while serving as an assistant chaplain in the colony of New South Wales, was key to the mission’s initial success: he identified a suitable location for the mission station, constructed a pulpit for Marsden and his fellow missionaries, and translated their sermons. From the very beginning, then, the Māori were actively involved in the introduction and spread of various Christianities—Anglican, Methodist, and Marist—in New Zealand. Timothy Yates emphasises this point throughout, concluding that “the agents of conversion were the Māori themselves, to whom Christianity proved attractive for a wide variety of reasons, and who, once they had embraced it in their own way and forms, proved adept at propagating it and securing the response of a whole people” (128).

The Conversion of the Māori examines the history of early Christian mission in New Zealand in twelve relatively short chapters. Yates commences his study by describing “the basic outlines of the social context into which European missionaries entered” (2), drawing on anthropological, archaeological, and historical sources. He acknowledges that “Māori society was subject to change in the period 1200-1800”, but suggests that “[c]hanges over these six hundred years were likely to be gradual compared to those that followed European contact” (2), especially in view of the introduction of new technologies. The following nine chapters are arranged chronologically, leading the reader from Chapter 2, “Samuel Marsden and the New Zealand Mission to 1914”, to Chapter 10, “Expansion of a Mission: Māori Initiatives and the CMS”. With the exception of Chapter 9, which deals specifically with missionary involvement in the Treaty of Waitangi, the intervening chapters traverse early CMS, Methodist and Marist endeavours in various parts of New Zealand, introducing notable individuals, Māori and Pākehā, and dissecting interactions between and within groups. Chapter 11, “Indigenous Agents: Teachers, Catechists, and Martyrs”, expands on themes introduced in Chapter 10. In Chapter 12, easily the highlight of this monograph, Yates offers a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of religious change, identifying a range of contributing factors—social dislocation, power and control, economic and technical benefits, literacy, openness to change—and acknowledging that conversion “inevitably [entailed] both loss and gain” (124). A brief appendix, “Richard Quinn and A. T. Yarwood”, evaluates two contrasting assessments of Marsden’s character and achievements.

On a structural level, I found this monograph somewhat taxing to read, largely due to an almost complete absence of signposting. Yates’ preface, a mere two pages, outlines the basic contours of his study—we are told that “[t]he narrative attempts to chart the change in society and religion over nearly thirty years in detail … what begins as anthropology and continues with detailed history ultimately leads to a consideration of conversion” (xii)—but gives nothing away as far as the contents of specific chapters are concerned. Signposts within each chapter are similarly scarce, and there is little attempt to identify overarching themes outside the concluding chapter. On top of this, Yates gives the strong impression of writing for a specialist audience, introducing significant figures with little or no contextual information: I had to resort to an online search to discover that “Dandeson Coates in London” (42) was, in fact, Lay Secretary of the CMS from 1830 to 1846.

With regard to content, The Conversion of the Māori is both very European and very male. Its subject matter and methodology combine to emphasize certain stories, perspectives, and experiences at the expense of others. Having struggled to adequately address a similar combination of circumstances in my own work, I can certainly empathize. Yates is well attuned to the limitations imposed by almost exclusively European sources, noting at the outset: “The study may strike some as traditional in approach, being narrative history based on close attention to sources in archives … early Māori sources for this purpose are virtually non-existent … it is sadly inevitable therefore that the weight of substantiation has come from the European archives of missionary societies” (xi). Within these limitations, he is careful to foreground the diversity of Māori responses to Christian mission: on the one hand, deathbed conversions, evangelistic sorties, and the emergence of syncretistic cults; on the other, scorn, hostility, incomprehension and indifference.

In contrast, the gender issue is not specifically addressed. Yates certainly recognizes the significant contributions of missionaries’ wives, some of whom were acknowledged even at the time as missionaries in their own right: Marianne Coldham and Jane Nelson, who married brothers Henry and William Williams respectively, are notable examples. Māori women, however, are doubly disadvantaged in the archival record, and Yates’ tendency to identify them primarily by their relationships to men does not help matters. One of Marianne Williams’ servant girls, who converted to Christianity “after some personal struggle” (54), is key to Yates’ argument for the importance of so-called “domestic natives” in changing attitudes, but unlike her husband Poto, also a convert, she is never named. Possibly this anonymity merely reflects an omission in the primary source documents, yet the complete absence of authorial comment on this point struck me as somewhat of an oversight. I was considerably more annoyed by Yates’ insistence on referring to Turikatuku not by her name, but as “Hongi’s blind wife” or “Hongi’s blind widow” (46, 51 and 54). Marital status and physical disability hardly suffice to describe this Nga Puhi woman of mana, of whom it is recorded that her husband “never travelled or fought without taking her as his chief adviser”.Footnote ¹

These criticisms are not intended to negate the merits of Yates’ study. His careful analysis reveals early missionaries’ records as very rich sources of historical and ethnographic detail, and he is surely correct to balance the advisability of approaching missionary writing via a “hermeneutics of suspicion” against the importance of “[giving] due weight to contemporary descriptions, arising out of the immediate pressures and observations of the participants” (18). The Conversion of the Māori is a book worth persevering with; though not as accessible to non-specialist readers as I might have hoped, it makes an undeniably useful contribution to mission studies, New Zealand history, and the history of encounters.