Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.
Unfortunate Allocation
Unfortunate Allocation.
In the same preface Grey confesses that, in depositing at Capetown a large collection of volumes and MSS. relating to the Polynesian languages, mythology, and traditions, he "must seem to have acted injudiciously." The defence he makes is that at the time he made the donation he was residing at the Cape and that he hoped, in conjunction with Dr. Bleek, the librarian, who had come to the Cape on a philological mission, to work on the philological and mythological portions of the collection, especially those relating to New Zealand. He had apparently quite forgotten that he had ceased to reside at the Cape and was then residing in New Zealand. Not till some months after he had entered on a second term as Governor of New Zealand did he offer to present the collection to the Cape Library. The books were, moreover, no longer in Capetown, but in England. The whole narrative makes his action appear worse than injudicious. It was an act of folly to send that fine collection of Polynesian literature to Capetown, where it could only rot on the shelves, and deprive of it New Zealand, where alone it could be studied by experts. It looked like a vindictive act. It was an ominous beginning to a term of administration that was to be brought to an end by a virtual recall.
We can forgive him for depositing at Capetown the 415 publications and MSS. in or relating to 78 African languages; but the 40 books in or on West Australian dialects should have been deposited, if not in London or Oxford, Paris or Berlin, then at (Australian) Perth. The 42 works in or on the various Fijian dialects, the four on or in the dialect of Rotuma Island, the many more on other Polynesian tongues, and above all, as already said, the Kohinoor of the collection, the 524 volumes and MSS., containing poems, legends, translations, letters, grammars, and vocabularies in or from the Maori language should have been placed in Wellington or Auckland. It is impossible to exaggerate the injury thus done to Philology. All the great Maori scholars of New Zealand—Colenso, Maunsell, White, Grey himself—have passed away without having an opportunity of using the treasures he had gathered. The chance of finding men to edit them who had themselves spoken with the old chiefs and tohungas from whose lips they had been taken down has passed away with them and can never recur. It was an irreparable blunder.