Samuel Leigh and The Maori Heads.

The story of the “Hahi Weterce” (“Church of Wesley”) in New Zealand begins with the coming of young Samuel Leigh, who arrived at Sydney in 1815, as the first apostle of his church to the Southern world. He worked as a minister in New South Wales, preaching and founding churches, and in the course of his duties he became very friendly with the great English Chaplain of the Colony, Samuel Marsden. In 1818, through the kindness of Mr. Marsden, who had established the first mission in New Zealand, he made a cruise for the sake of his health to the Bay of Islands in the C.M.S. brig Active. One of the first things he saw when he reached the Bay of Islands was a row of smoke-dried Maori heads, for sale; the wonderfully tattooed mokamokai was an item of commerce with the Sydney traders. Leigh was offered the heads, and when he refused to buy them he was told that the owners of the “dry goods” could easily sell them on board other Sydney vessels.

This callous traffic so affected the young clergyman that he went to England and appealed for help towards a Wesleyan Mission in New Zealand, and by February, 1822, he was back in these waters and landed at the Bay of Islands. It is recorded that he preached his first sermon in New Zealand in February, 1822, and it is characteristic of the narrow vision of many of these good men that, as he had found his congregation in the fields planting potatoes on Sunday “he expounded to them the obligations of the Fourth Commandment.” It must have puzzled the aboriginal brain to comprehend such “obligations” so foreign to its thought. However, when Maoridom did at last adopt the Mosaic sabbath it did so very thoroughly, often even to the discomfort and annoyance of pakeha travellers.