book reviews TIMOTHY YATES, The Conversion of the Māori:the Years of Religious and Social Change, 1814–1842 (Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Co, Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK, 2013, 150 pp). The dedication is to three ‘historians and inspirers of historians in grateful memory’, one of whom is Ralph Bennett, ‘director of studies at Samuel Marsden’s alma mater of Magdalene College, Cambridge’. It is worth recalling that for Ralph, ‘excellence in historical writing consists of simple and solid virtues’, such as clarity and careful precision, undertaken with enjoyment. He would therefore have approved of this relatively short latest book by Canon Yates (1955), not only for its subject, the establishment of Christian missions in New Zealand from 1814, but for the admirable way it is written. It covers ground which has attracted a lot of anthropological insights and historical controversies, and Yates summarises these succinctly with learned and judicious common sense. He is particularly concerned of course with the nature of religious conversion. He finds that despite a traditional society notoriously given to cannibalism, infanticide, and human sacrifice, the Māori were‘a spiritual people in whose pre-[European] contact life religion entered at every point’. Their response to missionaries was therefore far from passive, but adept at naturalising the alien religion. He concludes that ‘the agents of conversion were the Māori themselves, to whom Christianity proved attractive for a wide variety of reasons’. The results of early mission work, Anglican, Wesleyan Methodist, and Catholic, were remarkable. By 1842, when G A Selwyn became the first Anglican bishop of new Zealand, the Māori were substantially Christian: it was estimated that 64,000 were adherents out of a population of 110,000 – about 60%. It was also claimed that New Testaments in translation had been made available for one in every two Māori, and even that Māori Christianity had become‘better Christianity than that of European settlers’. The conversion process was initiated by Magdalene’s Samuel Marsden, ‘the Apostle of New Zealand’ according to the Church Missionary Society. He first preached the Gospel there on Christmas Day 1814, a bicentenary shortly to be celebrated, and he made six subsequent voyages from his chaplaincy-base in New South Wales. Marsden died only in 1838, providing the strategic and spiritual direction of the New Zealand Anglican mission for a quarter of a century. Before
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