Timothy Yates, The Conversion of the Ma¯ori: the Years of Religious and

book reviews

TIMOTHY YATES, The Conversion of the Ma¯ori: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 Ma¯ori 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 Ma¯ori 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 Ma¯ori 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 Ma¯ori, and even that Ma¯ori 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

he came up to Magdalene in 1790 aged 25, Marsden had been a Yorkshire apprentice blacksmith, and despite his late-acquired Magdalene veneer, he remained a tough and uncompromising character, something of an ecclesiastical thug. Yates is good at presenting a fair-minded assessment of him, concluding that for all his many obvious faults and failings he was rightly appreciated for his great merits, courage and generosity, and his immense achievements. He was ‘treated with something approaching veneration by the Ma¯ori’, even if he suffered from his reputation in Australia as ‘a flogging magistrate’. Marsden’s steadfast belief in the potential of the Ma¯ori as ‘a noble race’ was matched by his vision of New Zealand as a future land of ‘fine sheep walks’, the ‘finest country in the world for wine’.

Yates’s study may be commended as an attractively manageable and highly readable account of a fascinating transformation in a human society, one in which a great Magdalene man played a key part. R H

The Revd Samuel Marsden

JOHN MOLE, Treatment(Shoestring Press, 2013, 9 pp).

There are circumstances in which to keep your wits about you, never mind your wit, is a tough challenge. ‘Do you have a line?’ asks the nurse, clutching a bag of liquid chemicals: ‘No, but I’ll think of one’ is the Groucho-like response in this self-aware and affecting poem. To say that John Mole’s course of chemotherapy in 2013 inspired his wry and reflective work Treatmentis both obviously true and clearly inadequate. The body and the mind play against each other in this lyric, vying as to which will offer the more coherent sense of the immediacy and the quiddity of a human existence. Not surprisingly, then, the naming of selves is important in the sequence. Crucial though they are, the personnel who inhabit the hospital wards are never quite promoted beyond the level of the pronoun – the ‘she’ who conducts a fatuous survey of levels of fatigue or the ‘we’ who glance supportively at each other along the rows of drips. But the names of those who populate the mind are properly nouns: Arthur [Sale] is there – the poet’s former supervisor at Magdalene and a lifelong friend who died in 2000; and Mark Twain is there, as is Chaucer and the actor Richard Goolden. Harold Pinter makes a cameo appearance. And ‘John Mole 12.10.41’ is there, confirming movingly that he is ‘who I am/ And was and hope to be’.

Two-thirds of the way through the poem, another group of names is given startling presence: Retuximab,/Prednisolone, Cyclophosphamide,/ Doxorubican, Vincristine,/Filgrastin. The compounds are difficult in both a medical and a lexical sense, the intriguing and unfamiliar nature of the phonemes representing the love-hate relationship of the patient to his painful therapy. Poets love weird words, of course, and the challenge presented by their abnormal metric patterns (‘I remember Adelstrop – the name’, writes Edward Thomas in a famous early twentieth-century poem). But in the case of Treatment, we are reminded in this expert poetry that the cancer patient emerges from therapy coerced by fate into becoming an expert in a terminology which is far from obviously poetic.

We can forgive the patient a touch of impatience: the well-meaning but vapid remark from a disembodied voice (italicised among a list of other hopelessly inadequate words of encouragement) ‘Honestly. That beanie/Suits you’ seems to get short shrift: the poet reminds us, when the italics end, that he is hooked to a pump for three hours. Finding words is difficult, for the well-meaning enquirer as for the poet; but Mole in the end seems to think it is worth trying – ‘hope’, he says, ‘punching its weight in sound’. M E J H