CHAPTER 2

THE FIRST ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIP, PRE c.1860:
A RETROSPECTIVE OVERVIEW

Webster of Waiau: A Case Study

It is now a historical commonplace that Maori, at an early stage of culture contact, adapted their traditional economy with ingenious selectivity in order to produce goods that they could exchange for those of the West. Well before New Zealand became a Crown colony in 1840, Hauraki Maori, just as had Ngapuhi in the Bay of Islands and in the Hokianga, had already established a firm economic relationship with Europeans. Logan Campbell, so-called 'Father of Auckland', whose first New Zealand lodgings were at Herekino on Whanganui island close to Coromandel, recalled in later life that once there he quickly became aware of how the steady inflow of immigrants into New South Wales during 1838-39 had set up a 'brisk trade' in 'supplies from the Maori people who were in a flourishing condition therefrom'.8 Early in 1840 Campbell had lodged with the American trader William Webster. He observed that although Webster was the Pakeha-Maori of the Ngati Whanaunga chief, Te Taniwha (whose daughter Webster had married), that American had many irons in the fire, acting as trading agent for Ngati Tamatera as well, and generally playing a full part in exploiting the anxiety of Hauraki tribes to sell timber, flax, maize and other foods in order to buy European goods.9

At that time, spar contracts were the most important transaction of all. On 28 April 1840, Campbell saw at first-hand how large-scale these operations could be when, on a visit to Man-o-War Bay at the eastern end of Waiheke Island, he observed over one hundred Maori timber workers, probably Ngati Tamatera, employed by Webster to drag out kauri logs for the Delhi, 'a barque of some 500 tons which he was loading for the Australian market'.10 But the 'fine trade' Webster 'had worked himself into . . . preparing cargoes of timber', was not confined to such activities. Local Maori provided him with pigs, potatoes and maize to ship to Australia. Webster also had Pakeha boat-builders at work for him constructing vessels at Herekino (Whanganui island) and Waiomu.11

One guards against inflating what Webster did simply because through archival serendipity that portion of his life which Webster passed as (in Campbell's phrase)

8   J.L. Campbell, 'The Story of One Tree Hill', n.d. (1902?), p.1, Folder 243, Campbell Papers.

9   See W.H. Oliver (ed.), Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Vol. 1, Wellington, 1990, pp. 578-79, pp. 427-28.

10 J.L. Campbell, Poenamo: Sketches of the Early Days in New Zealand, London, 1881, p.73; R.C.J. Stone, Young Logan Campbell, Auckland, 1982, pp. 47.48

11 R.G. Jameson, New Zealand, South Australia and New South Wales, London, 1842, p. 294; Campbell, Poenamo, p. 146.

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