Travel Writing

Bathurst’s primary motivation for its discussion of New Zealand is to praise the work of the CMS. However, the author’s description of the Māori temperament, customs and piety, as well as European vice, serve a secondary purpose by implicitly justifying a missionary presence in New Zealand. This purpose, and the anthropological nature of her descriptions, echo the nineteenth-century religious travel writing genre.

Anna Johnston notes that accounts by ships’ captains that mapped the Pacific during the latter half of the Eighteenth Century “stimulated European interest and ensured that Australasia loomed large in the public imaginary” (203). These accounts had a particularly passionate affect upon evangelists who “read of sexual and social freedom [...] with a sense of outrage [and] determined to introduce the Christian message to the 'benighted heathen'” (204). Evangelical interests entered the Pacific as early as 1797 and as “missionaries were prolific writers, [...] their texts about the region soon flooded the British marketplace in an effort to gain public support and funding for their ongoing evangelical enterprises” (204). These texts, operating like Bathurstas evangelical propaganda, were also strongly associated with the travel writing genre as they were “intensely descriptive of landscape and local cultures” (204). The description in Bathurstof “the mingled beauty and grandeur” of New Zealand aligns it with even the more secular examples of the travel writing genre (16-17). The author’s illustration of the “precipitous ravines, [...] interrupted in their career by magnificent cataracts, that give additional effect to the other features of sublimity and romantic beauty by which the country is distinguished”, give the novel an exotic, romanticised edge (17-18). This exoticism is amplified by the author’s record of Māori customs, such as their “superstitious fears during the hours of darkness” or their “universal” belief in witchcraft which leads them to ascribe a chief’s illness to “the evil influence of some enemy, whom the conjuror or witch usually decides to be a member of some tribe against whom his employers wish to make war” (26). The author’s lengthy and detailed description of Māori superstition, warfare, slavery and cannibalism reflects the “European reli[ance] on (often stereotyped) images of threat or allure” to depict the foreign worlds they encountered (Boehmer 22). However, in religious travel writing, and in Bathurst, these stereotyped images not only provided exotic thrill, but were also used to highlight the need for missionary interference.

In the nineteenth century “religious literature formed the largest single category of books published in Britain” (Johnston 208). This “ensured that religious travel writing was a major mode through which nineteenth-century Britons learnt about the outside world, and particularly the new antipodean colonies” (208). Evangelical desire to “recast Australasia as a moral landscape, one about which missionaries and religious Britons had authoritative and authentic knowledge” thus shaped the construction of Australasia in the British imagination around “white, Christian superiority” (202). Much of the description of the Māori found in Bathurstreflects “the need for missionaries to represent the regions targeted for evangelical work as sites of dire immorality [so as] to justify their uninvited ventures into Pacific cultures” (209). The author claims that the Māori “undertake exterminating wars on the most frivolous pretences” and that “there can be little doubt that human flesh was a repast in which they delighted” (33). This description is not included merely to thrill the reader, but, in keeping with all other aspects of the novel, to serve a larger, religious purpose.

However, Bathurst’s depiction of the Māori is not simplistic. Although they are clearly meant to appear to need Christian guidance, the author’s illustration of Māori customs does attempt to remain objectively informative. She often praises their skillful work or intelligence and records that Māori competency, such as “the acuteness and military skill displayed by some of the chiefs, seems to have surprised the English” (166). In the majority of cases the author even favours their moral character above that of European colonists and sailors. Her criticism of fellow Europeans once more echoes the findings of first-hand missionary accounts whose “identification of white depravity in the antipodes threatened to undermine the assumptions of European superiority that substantially underpinned British imperial projects” (Johnston 209). Missionary antipathy to other European involvement certainly sprang, to some extent, from a fear that “such white men threatened to subvert missionary reforms” (211). However, in many examples of religious travel documents, and certainly in Bathurst, there appears to be a genuine empathy for indigenous peoples caught in “a vicious cycle of colonial violence” brought on by “European misconduct and fear, accompanied by the sense that their actions would have no repercussions” (214). Although it was a Māori “falsehood [which occasioned] a fearful murder of numbers of innocent persons after the massacre of the Boyd”, Bathurst’s author heavily criticises the “indiscriminate slaughter” which left a tribe “nearly exterminated” by violent whalers taking revenge (29). She argues that “even had the men of the tribe been the guilty parties, the women and children could have had no share in the crime; and to punish them for the faults of their relatives could have been neither Christian nor just” (29). Although the author’s defense of the Māori at the expense of fellow Europeans does appear altruistic, even this is used to promote the need for missionary intervention.

In Bathurst, as in much religious travel literature, “geographical isolation [...] excuse[s] Pacific ignorance” and thus prompts the need for Christian guidance (Johnston p.211). Even when discussing the notorious massacre of the Boyd, the author writes that “Europeans should be careful how they excite the passions of the savage, who, being totally unacquainted with the Christian duty of forgiveness of injuries [...] cannot be expected to take care that his vengeance shall bear any just proportion to the amount of injury received” (41). The danger of the “savage” culture is certainly promoted, but it is presented as treatable, provided the British public support missionary societies - such as the CMS - to ‘civilise’ the heathen. Mr Munro’s review of New Zealand in 1833 confirms that missionaries can succeed. He reports, amongst many examples, that at a christian service held at a church built by a Māori chief “the Liturgy of our Church had been translated [into the Māori language] and the whole congregation joined with one voice in the responses, in a way which English worshippers would do well to imitate” (54). In contrast, nearby crews of European whalers “were rioting in a disgraceful state of intoxication, whilst those whom they probably despised as barbarians, were honouring the command of Him whose servants they professed to be” (55). It is highly unlikely that Bathurst’s author ever visited New Zealand, as Mr Munro presents his information as second-hand. However, her choice to present well-researched information on the Māori in the style of a travel document is understandable given how persuasive an argument it could make for the missionary, and thus the CMS’s, cause.

Valentine Cunningham notes that “as a body of fiction [...] the Victorian Novel urges upon us all the more the importance of its contingency and of the particularity of its characters” as it is “closer to social actualities” than novels of most periods (5). Given that “‘originals’ are what the novel, especially the Victorian novel, is all about”, Bathurst’s defense and promotion of the CMS gives us a remarkable insight into some of the real religious and political concerns of Victorian society, especially those concerned with the colonisation of New Zealand (5). The author’s amalgamation of Christian conduct manual, evangelical propaganda and religious travel writing is often conflicting, disjointed, abrupt and didactic. Yet, as an example of various Victorian concerns and literary styles, and of an unusually positive attitude towards women and indigenous peoples, it is an enlightening text.