The Development of the Art of War in New
Zealand Proves a Large Pre-Polynesian Population

(6) But there are first some a priori arguments for a greater antiquity for New Zealand man than the fourteenth page 233century that should alone be sufficient to shake the faith of those select few still loyal to the six canoes as the human genesis of the country. One of these has been already indicated in the chapter on the military art; it is the extraordinary development of the science and art of war, and especially of military engineering, the art of fortification and siege. The few hundreds that came in the six canoes left Polynesia in order to escape feuds and their results and were evidently bent on peace; for they brought the products of their islands to acclimatise in their new land, and clearly intended to devote themselves to agriculture. When they arrived they found unlimited space compared with the islets they had left, and tradition tells how they spread far and wide, so that they had plenty of elbow-room for centuries. Is it likely that they began at once in such wide and empty spaces a regular Donnybrook Fair? Yet this is what must have occurred, if we are to explain the Maori passion for war and development of the art of war. They did not fortify their villages so strongly for nothing, after having done nothing of the sort in the scantier spaces of their tropical islets. To have developed this new art in their new and wider land against no enemy but their own scanty numbers does not seem explicable on the ordinary principles of human nature. Reason tells us that such an evolution of self-defence implies a formidable and unscrupulous foe. The genius of a whole people, especially in primitive times, is not bent in one direction unless there is sheer necessity forcing it. And every tissue and thought of the Maori was turned to war. Nor is there any evidence that it was want of room during the four centuries before Europeans arrived; for there was no remigration, nor was there any movement towards monarchy, such as there was in Hawaii and other islands, till European weapons and ideals put it into the heads of men like Hongi and Rauparaha.