Scotsman and Maori.

Physically Donald Maclean was well fitted for the heavy work of travel in those days of no roads, no bridges, no vehicles and few horses. Most of the travelling that fell to the officials and the missionaries was on foot; and Maclean must have walked some thousands of miles about the country in his time, carrying his swag as the Maoris carried their pikaus. The natives admired a big well-built man, and Maclean was just the type that filled their ideas of a warrior and leader—tall, burly, wide of shoulder, deep of chest.

For his part, Maclean quickly took a liking to the Maoris as a race. His love for the traditions and ways of his Highland and Isles folk predisposed him in favour of a people whose social life and methods of government so closely resembled those of his own people. The tribal pride, the intertribal jealousies and feuds, the readiness to fight at the slightest affront, the patriarchal rule of the Ariki and the rangatira, the popular passion for songs and chants and oratory, even the favourite working and fighting costume, the rapaki or kilt, all reminded the lad from Tiree of his clan and their neighbours, as they had been from time immemorial.

“Te Makarini,” as the Maoris called him, very soon came to enter into the Maori ways of thought. He became able to place himself in the position of the Maori, when occasion called, and to understand the often peculiar processes of reasoning that few pakehas could fathom. All this explains the often extraordinary hold he came to exercise over the tribes and the success that almost invariably attended his official dealings with a proud and often suspicious race.

In 1845 we find the 25-year-old Scot filling the role of official ambassador to the grand old chief Te Heuheu, of Taupo, the king-like Ariki who regarded Queen Victoria as a fellow-sovereign in no way superior to himself. Maclean reconciled rival clans, he carried the tenets of civilisation to savage places, he smoked the peace-pipe with dour old cannibals who rather despised the mild missionary, but who came to recognise in the Scot a chieftain of a fighting race like themselves.