Crusoe Among the Maori: Translation and Colonial Acculturation in Victorian New Zealand

The role of print as a force for historical change is perhaps most explicit in colonial and missionary uses of printed texts to convey the social, political, and economic ideals of the dominant, literate society. Print culture played a significant role in the establishment of the vast British Empire, particularly in the settlement of Britain’s most distant territory, New Zealand. After an initial contact period during which a written alphabet was developed for the language of the indigenous Maori, printing presses were quickly established in the new colony, and works were published in both English and Maori.

Among the early European translators into Maori, pride of place goes to Henry Tacy Kemp, both because he was an exceptionally good translator and because his works formed part of an explicit government policy of Maori acculturation. ¹ Kemp’s translations fall into two categories: nonfiction (a medical treatise, language primers, an introduction to capitalism, and a spiritual biography), and fiction (Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim’s Progress). While the distinction between fact and fiction may have mattered more to the colonial Europeans than to their intended readers, the decision to move from one mode to the other reveals alterations in the European perception of Maori. The texts themselves and the historical and social contexts surrounding Kemp’s selection of his texts tell us a great deal about European and Maori attitudes toward print, and they may also suggest why government-sponsored translation was suspended after 1854.

I

Henry Tacy Kemp was born in 1821, the son of English missionaries, at Kerikeri. With William Yate in 1834 he sailed to England, where he studied for two to three years, but he returned to New Zealand, in part because of a shortage of funds. ² By 1837 he was apparently back at Kerikeri helping his father run the family store, ³ and was teaching in the mission school’s first class by June 1838. ⁴ Sometime around 1842 Kemp accepted a position as Protector of the Aborigines and then served successively as Native Secretary for the South in Wellington and Native Secretary in Auckland. Thereafter he held a few other less prestigious government positions and, due to complex governmental changes, ended his career pensionless after more than twenty-five years of service. He lived the final years of his life near his children in Onehunga, attempting through diligent correspondence to interest the government of the day in a second edition of his translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress. He died in 1901. ⁵

II

Before turning to Kemp’s translations, we should briefly review the quite distinct Pakeha and Maori responses to reading from the period of about 1830–60. ⁶ The first crucial differentiation is that, until sometime in the mid-1850s, when the number of colonists increased and Maori interest in reading declined, the literacy rate in Maori among Maori was higher than the literacy rate in English among the colonists. ⁷ Maori ability and desire to read is a constant topic of comment by itinerant missionaries; as B. Y. Ashwell noted in his journal of a visit to the Taupo area in 1841, “There is not a pa [fortified Maori village] I have passed through but some of the natives can read and only one pa in which I did not find a Testament.” ⁸ Numerous instances attest to the Maori desire for printed material. C. J. Parr, in two important articles on Maori literacy, documents the demand for books and points out that by 1860 the various missionary societies had distributed roughly one printed Bible for every adult Maori. In addition, there were about 110,000 copies of much shorter works in Maori printed locally, ranging from broadside proclamations to sermons to school primers. ⁹

Why did Maori want all these books? One obvious reason was their novelty value. Books could serve as a status symbol, as George Angas explicitly acknowledged in his 1852 portrait of Tamihana Te Rauparaha, who is shown with his arm resting beside an open book. ¹⁰ Angas also wrote in his Savage Life and Scenes...