F. E. Maning, 1811–1883

Alex Calder

Of all the beachcombers, traders, missionaries and explorers who wrote accounts of life in early New Zealand, and whose writings document the unfolding encounter between the indigenous Māori and European in the years preceding and immediately following the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), one writer has centre stage: Frederick Edward Maning. His significance is partly a matter of reputation and influence: his two semi-autobiographical studies of early New Zealand, the History of the War in the North Against the Chief Heke (1862) and Old New Zealand (1863), are lively and engaging books that have remained in print and been widely read; he is the anonymous authority behind Freud, Frazer, Margaret Mead and others on Māori customs like tapu and muru; aspects of his account of the first Anglo-Māori war are still cited as gospel in recent history books, television documentaries, and ethnohistorical reconstructions. But even more remarkably, the nature and salience of Maning’s views on contact and settlement in New Zealand have been, and probably always will be, a matter for debate. Is he an historian or a novelist? Is he an accurate observer of Māori life and customs or is he their satirist? Is he a Māori sympathiser or an apologist for British colonialism? Or does his laughter make him a relativist – perhaps even a nihilist?

Any one-sided answer to these questions is likely to be wrong. Maning is not the kind of fair-minded and accurate reporter who just gives us the facts as he sees them. He is biased, he embellishes, he is a writer who sacrifices accuracy for sensation and impact. Yet, as a writer, he has a fine sense not only of the ridiculous, but of the complexity of intrinsically dramatic situations and of the multiplicity of perspectives. At that level, beyond mere bias, his writings present a richer view of New Zealand’s cross cultural frontier than even their author may have intended. Yet for all the idiosyncrasies of the writing, in his life and unpublished opinions Maning is one of nineteenth century New Zealand’s most representative men. He began as a ‘Pākehā Māori’, an easy-going white man living among Māori on Māori terms, with a Māori wife, four children, good friends, and wealth that could not be measured in monetary terms; later in life, following the century’s commercial and racist turn, he became a successful businessman, a judge of the Native Land Court, and a frankly bigoted disparager of a dying race. The trajectory of that career, as well as the place of the writings in it, make Maning a key figure for New Zealand studies.

He was born in Dublin in 1811, the eldest son of the recently married Frederick Maning and Mary Susanna Barrett (the family bible, and some other sources, move the date of birth forward a year, to 1812). Frederick senior was the younger son of an ordinary respectable middle-class protestant family; Mary was the grand-daughter of the Reverend John Barrett, a Professor of Oriental Languages and Vice-Provost of Trinity College. After the birth of two more boys, the family emigrated to Tasmania to try their hand at farming.

They left on the Ardent in 1823, reaching Hobart in May 1824. But when Maning’s father drove out to inspect the family’s allotted block of land, he was appalled to find that a convict labourer had that very day shot an Aborigine with as little compunction as one might shoot a snake; the murderer thought it a great entertainment to make the fingers of the corpse move by tugging at the sinews of the arm. Apalled, Maning’s father revoked the land grant, abandoned all schemes for farming in the Tasmanian style, and opted for the security of a position as a customs officer in Hobart town. In 1830, as able bodied men of the colony, the Maning brothers were likely to have been involved in the infamous ‘Black Line’ of several thousand settlers who attempted to drive the Aborigines out of the bush. The Tasmanian context should always be borne in mind when considering Maning’s views about the likely fate of Māori once they had been swamped by British ‘civilization’. His brothers became merchants in Hobart but Maning seems to have had little patience for a settled life. After a short period managing a remote Tasmanian farm, Maning left home in 1833 for the still more remote banks of the Hokianga harbour.

The Hokianga, a large harbour or estuary fed by multiple rivers and protected by a dangerous bar, is in the northwest of New Zealand’s North Island. The hills were timbered with kauri, flax was abundant, and these commodities, together with food grown for export, found a ready market in Australia. In return, local Māori imported iron tools and guns. The trade depended on enterprising middle men with local knowledge and chiefly contacts who could organize Māori and deliver goods on time, and who could also, from a Māori perspective, guarantee fair treatment and optimum prices from ships calling for cargo. These men were not Māori, nor were they, like most Pākehā, white strangers (like the missionaries) who kept to their own ways. Because they married into Māori families, spoke the language and adjusted to Māori ways – because they were ‘in-between’ worlds – these men became known as Pākehā Māori. This was the world that Maning occupied.

The homelands of Ngapuhi – then, as now, the largest iwi (tribe) in New Zealand – extend from the Hokianga across to the Bay of Islands on the east coast of the North Island. They were the first of the tribes to have sustained contact with European and American shipping; their great chief, Hongi Hika, had travelled to London and met King George, returning with a gift of fine armour and many muskets. From about 1818 onwards, the so-called musket wars rippled down the country as first Ngapuhi, then tribes to the south, gained access to the new technology and invaded the lands of their traditional enemies, or, themselves dispossessed, sought to dispossess others further south. When there was an imbalance of power, traditional expressions of victory and defeat occurred on an unprecedented scale. Many of the defeated were enslaved; chiefs and warriors could expect to be eaten. Outside observers looked at the carnage and saw the ingrained violence characteristic of a savage people. But this period of internecine civil war was exceptional; it had obvious causes and was largely over by the time Maning arrived in the Hokianga. Parties of Ngapuhi raiders still ventured south from time to time, but from the 1830s through to ‘The War in the North’ in the mid-1840s, conflict was more likely to be local and small scale, involving tensions between competing hapu (sub-tribes) rather than iwi.

This was the case in an incident that leaves its traces on the opening chapters of Old New Zealand. A few months before the twenty-one year old Maning disembarked at Pakanae from the Mary and Elizabeth in July 1833, another trading vessel, the Fortitude, had run aground further up river. As a consequence of this misfortune, Māori custom allowed that the vessel and its cargo were open to plunder. By doing so, the plunderers came into conflict with Moetara, chief of the Ngāti Korokoro village at Pakanae, the first port of call for visiting ships and the most prosperous village in the Hokianga. Moetara saw himself as the protector of Pākehā and vowed to punish those up-river groups who had ransacked the Fortitude. In a bloody skirmish at Motukauri, both sides lost a dozen or so warriors; three Pākehā sawyers in the vicinity were plundered to make good the losses of that battle and had to decamp for Pakanae. Not long after Maning arrived, a war party, which included warriors related to those slain by Ngāti Korokoro at the recent battle, passed through the village, but tensions were defused and they moved on without incident.

Traces of these persons, places and events survive in the early chapters of Old New Zealand – an indispensable, but highly problematic, source for Maning’s early biography. Although we can’t quite say that Moetara is not the chief who welcomes Maning ashore, or that the displaced sawyers are not among the welcoming party, or that the ‘Eater of Melons’ who inadvertently gives the Pākehā Māori a dunking while carrying him ashore, is not one and the same as Peter, a noted wrestler from the village of Pakanae, we can’t quite say that they are these persons either. Fact and fiction are cross-contaminating categories in Maning’s writings. Of course, this is a challenge to anyone who believes history (or literary biography) is simply ‘the facts’ – an account of who did what, when and why, which we could more or less agree on simply by looking things up. It is also a challenge to anyone who believes that early New Zealand writing is a blinkered expression of colonial ideology out of touch with anything actual. A closer look at two incidents from these early chapters of Old New Zealand should explain why.

Old New Zealand is narrated by someone who expects to be able to tell the unvarnished truth, who insists that he is doing so, and who gets into all sorts of tangles because of it. Take the business of arriving in New Zealand: it ought to be possible to say, ‘I rowed ashore’, but the narrator finds that any clear and straightforward statement of fact is liable not only to be divisible into smaller and smaller particles – for instance, ‘I grasped the oar’, or ‘sitting myself down I grasped the oar’ – but is also subject to endless diversionary interference in the present. It takes the narrator several pages to arrive at this point of exasperation:

I positively vow and protest to you, gentle and patient reader, that if ever I get safe on shore, I will do my best to give you satisfaction; let me get once on shore, and I am all right: but unless I get my feet on terra firma, how can I ever begin my tale of the good old times? As long as I am on board ship I am cramped and crippled, and a mere slave to Greenwich time, and can’t get on. Some people, I am aware, would make a dash at it, and manage the thing without the aid of boat, canoe, or life preserver; but such people are, for the most part, dealers in fiction, which I am not: my story is a true story, not ‘founded on fact’, but fact itself, and so I cannot manage to get on shore a moment sooner than circumstances will permit. It may be that I ought to have landed before this; but I must confess I don’t know any more about the right way to tell a story, than a native minister knows how to ‘come’ a war dance. I declare the mention of a war dance calls up a host of reminiscences, pleasurable and painful, exhilarating and depressing, in such a way as no one but a few, a very few, pakeha Maori, can understand. Thunder! – but no . . . . On shore I will get this time, I am determined, in spite of fate – so now for it (96).

It is not until the end of chapter two that the narrator finally makes it to shore.

This tomfoolery has several consequences for the narrative. It establishes a distinction between the author and the hapless narrator (to revert to terms already used: Maning is not the narrating Pākehā Māori, and not not him either), and, by playing on the distinction between the present time of narration and the time spoken about, between a new New Zealand subject to Greenwich time, and an old New Zealand where time is ‘of no account’ and Māori storytellers omit nothing, the author makes the relation between old and new a peculiar problem of the book. It also means that the ‘right way to tell a story’ is not something the historian can take for granted – though many, of course, ‘have made a dash at it’. Whether it is possible to bring present and past, new and old, modern and traditional into some kind of narrative order is not only an historiographical question, it is also a political one, for the very possibility of accommodation between the ‘old’ world of the Māori and the ‘new’ world of the colonizers is at stake.

Self-consciousness about narrative is one major factor that unsettles the distinction between fact and fiction in Old New Zealand. The following sketch of a woman mourning over the preserved head of her dead son suggests another:

A number of women were standing in a row before [the head], screaming, wailing, and quivering their hands about in a most extraordinary manner, and cutting themselves dreadfully with sharp flints and shells. One old woman, in the centre of the group, was one clot of blood from head to feet, and large clots of coagulated blood lay on the ground where she stood. The sight was absolutely horrible, I thought at the time. She was singing or howling a dirge-like wail. In her right hand she held a piece of tuhua, or volcanic glass, as sharp as a razor: this she placed deliberately to her left wrist, drawing it slowly upwards to her left shoulder, the spouting blood following as it went; then from the left shoulder downwards, across the breast to the short ribs on the right side; then the rude but keen knife was shifted from the right hand to the left, placed to the right wrist, drawn upwards to the right shoulder, and so down across the breast to the left side, thus making a bloody cross on the breast; and so the operation went on all the time I was there, the old creature all the time howling in time and measure, and keeping time also with the knife, which at every cut was shifted from one hand to the other, as I have described. She had scored her forehead and cheeks before I came; her face and body was a mere clot of blood, and a little stream was dropping from every finger – a more hideous object could scarcely be conceived (120-121).

In responding to a passage like this, it may help to keep in mind a distinction the historian Greg Dening makes between ‘what actually happened’ and ‘what really happened’ (Performances, 60). What actually happened is what can be known of a past event: not the past as it was, but a past knowable through its traces, on the balance of evidence, in its singularity and in its similarity with like events, and in its multiplicity of meanings. What ‘really happened’ is something else again: it is ‘what happened as it is reductively known’, it is history in the form of a lesson, of a cliché, of common sense. Did the scene as Maning describes it actually happen? Other Europeans witnessed and were disturbed by similar incidents of extravagant self-mutilation among mourners. They often wondered at the sincerity of the participants, as Maning does, when he goes on to note that ‘the younger women, though they screamed as loud, did not cut near so deep as the old woman, especially about the face’(121). It is a ritual that might well have accompanied the return of a successful war party, and Maning remembers the story of how the son died, as well as the fact that the old woman was not from Pakanae, but had arrived from elsewhere to meet the returning war party. In short, there is enough detail, corroboration, and contextual information to indicate that Maning is writing about an event that actually happened, or is perhaps making a composite picture from several such occasions. But he is also telling us what really happened. The anecdote has a lesson, it is meant to be illustrative, it dwells on everything in the scene that is shocking and sensational in order to persuade the reader of the brutality and horror of life beyond the pale of civilization. This is not a secret of the text; it wears its tendentiousness openly. ‘Now if there is one thing I hate more than another,’ adds the narrator, ‘it is the raw-head-and-bloody-bones style of writing, and in these random reminiscences I shall avoid all particular mention of battles, massacres, and onslaughts, except there be something particularly characteristic of my friend the Maori in them’ (122, my emphasis). The satirical qualification is a characteristic note of Maning’s, but so too is the relativist re-qualification of the next sentence: ‘As for mere hacking and hewing, there has been enough of that to be had in Europe, Asia, and America of late, and very well described too, by numerous “our correspondents”’ (122). There are two persistent challenges in coming to terms with Maning: the first is not to lose sight of what ‘actually’ happened in the author’s reductive presentation of what ‘really’ happened; the second is to remember that reductive versions of what ‘really’ happened in the colonization of New Zealand will be brought to the text by its readers, and are not solely a property of it.

After this first visit, Maning returned briefly to Hobart and came back to New Zealand in October 1833 with a view to staying. He was accompanied by a servant, an ex-convict named William Waters, and, in partnership with another Tasmanian named Thomas Kelly, entered into an arrangement with Te Wharepapa and other chiefs of the Te Ihutai hapu to settle at Kohukohu, on the northern side of the Hokianaga, where they were granted land and a small house. Other Europeans had had an eye on Kohukohu, and one of them, the English adventurer Edward Markham, left several unflattering but revealing references to Maning in his journal, New Zealand or Recollections Of It – one of the few cross references for this early period. Maning, he thought, was devious and untrustworthy, and rather too concerned with keeping the good opinion of Māori. From his base in Kohukohu, Maning traded in timber, pork and potatoes for the Australian market, fathered a child to a woman named Harakoi, and, in 1835, was involved in the capture of the mutinous crew of the Industry. In 1837, he sold up, visited Hobart briefly, and returned to settle across the river at Onoke, where he again purchased a block of land and built a house.

Buying land could mean different things to different people. It is likely that the Kohukohu property was set aside for Maning’s use as part of a mutually beneficial arrangement that would terminate on his leaving the district, for Te Wharepapa disputed Maning’s right to sell the land in 1837. The Onoke purchase was carefully entered into and was binding in more ways than one, for Maning was soon living with a Te Hikutu woman named Moengaroa, the mother of his children, Maria (born 1842), Mary (born 1845), Hauraki (born 1846) and Susan (born 1847). Maning later had problems not with the Te Hikutu chiefs who had sold the land, but in having his title confirmed by the new government. These different understandings of land and land sales are the subject of chapters 5 and 13 of Old New Zealand. At first, the narrator writes from an emphatically European perspective. The Māori are presented as sly rascals out to hoodwink the Pākehā by magnifying their ties to land they do not in fact use. Throughout this section of the story, Maning takes every opportunity to belittle customary ties to land – ‘one claimed because his grandfather had been murdered on the land, . . . another because his grandfather committed the murder’ (127) – and uses a surprising amount of legal terminology in doing so. A ‘fencing proviso’, for example, establishes where an ancient burial ground is ‘situated, being, and lying’ – and so gives ‘a stronger look of reality to the sacred spot’ (128). But this obviously one-sided view of land transactions is then turned on its head. The Pākehā Māori has to defend his title before the land commission. He would rather things were done the ‘Maori’ way – ‘if I had no one but the commissioners and two or three hundred men of their tribe to deal with I should have put my pa in fighting order and told them to come on’ (129) – but as a loyal servant of the Queen he feels obliged to make a reluctant appearance in court. After making a speech of four and a half hours duration – ‘a good specimen of English rhetoric’ – he is flabbergasted to be handed a bill in which he is charged by the word, for every word spoken, at the rate of one farthing and one twentieth per word:

Oh, Cicero! Oh, Demosthenes! Oh, Pitt, Fox, Burke, Sheridan! Oh, Daniel O’Connell! what would have become of you, if such a stopper had been clapt on your jawing tackle? . . . For my part I have never recovered the shock. I have since that time become taciturn, and have adopted a Spartan brevity when forced to speak, and I fear I shall never again have the full swing of my mother tongue (129).

The point of this comic reversal in perspective is to demonstrate that Māori and Pākehā have fundamentally different attitudes to land, or, as we would now say, fundamentally different cultures. The incommensurability between those cultures, the hard boundaries supposedly ring-fencing them, is something Maning might still persuade many readers about today, but what ‘actually happens’ in Old New Zealand suggests another perspective as well. When, after a long digression made up of digressions on the nature and power of tapu (taboo), the saga of the land sale is picked up again in chapter 13, it turns out that the Pākehā Māori is himself specified as part of the payment for the land. Maning describes a set of understandings between the Pākehā Māori who has purchased the land and the chief who has obtained him in a manner that is at once satirical and true to the thoroughgoing interrelationship of Māori and Pākehā in this period. In other words, this is not a face-off between incommensurable cultures, but people interacting across the soft boundaries of contact and exchange.

Maning next appears in the archival record as an opponent of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) which sought to guarantee Māori rights and position while placing the colony under English law. Maning thought a Treaty offered little real protection for Māori and advised his relatives Hauraki and Kaitoke not to sign; although he was not, as Hobson charged, an Irish Catholic agitator with French sympathies, his stand counted against him, for in 1841 he was denied a Government post for which he was well qualified. Later in life, he sought to suppress the nature of his dissenting contribution to the Hokianga Treaty meeting. Debate over the meaning and significance of New Zealand’s founding document has continued ever since it was signed: in the 1870s it was regarded as a nullity which had no force in law; since the 1970s, it has been an omnipresent factor in the law and politics of New Zealand; established in 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal has sought to redress injustices under the Treaty, a process that has exasperated some and fostered the hopes of others in a manner that makes Old New Zealand’s anecdote about land exchange into a parable of the various intractabilities involved in reconciling Māori and English versions of Treaty.

Maning’s fullest account of the Treaty and its difficulties may be found in the opening sections of his first book History of the War in the North Against the Chief, Heke (1862). It is narrated by an elderly Māori chief and much of the comedy lies in the author’s manipulation of the rangatira’s cultural misperceptions, eye for the main chance, and lack of sympathy with European priorities. For example, the chief is horrified that English soldiers carry their own stretchers into battle – they have no understanding of omens whatsoever. On the other hand, the news that Governor Hobson travels all round the country with a very large piece of paper (the Treaty) is met with broad-minded puzzlement: clearly, the Governor’s ‘chief delight is to get plenty of marks and names on his paper’ (23) – but to what end?

Some of us thought the Governor wanted to bewitch all the chiefs, but our pakeha friends laughed at this, and told us that the people of Europe did not know how to bewitch people. Some said the Governor only wanted our consent to remain, to be a chief over the pakeha people; others said he wanted to be chief over both Pakeha and Maori. We did not know what to think, but we were all anxious that he might come to us soon, for we were afraid that all his blankets and tobacco, and other things, would be gone before he came to our part of the country, and that he would have nothing left to pay us for making our marks on his paper (20).

In the end, miffed at receiving only two blankets, the chief returns the ‘payment’ and asks for his name to be cut out from the paper. He expects ‘something bad to come of this business’; it did the Governor no good, for he died, ‘and the paper with all its names was either buried with him, or else his relations may have kept it to lament over’ (23); whatever its fate, the chief warns it should not be kept near cooked food – ‘it is a very sacred piece of paper; it is very good if it has been buried with the Governor’ (23). Maning’s tongue is in his cheek, of course, but behind the satirical picture he paints, of venal Māori signing a document they don’t understand, is a more complex view: it made a great difference then, and makes a great difference now, whether Māori ceded their rights as chiefs in signing the Treaty. In Maning’s History, different understandings of the Treaty and its failure to deliver what had been promised are seen as the primary cause of the war, and it is clear that Māori who fought against the so-called rebel chiefs did so as allies of the Crown rather than as subjects.

Much of Maning’s History is pro-Māori in emphasis and sentiment, but there are other tones as well. The book is a double narrative: Maning tells the story in the chief’s own words and interpolates a running series of explanatory notes and anecdotes by a Pākehā ‘editor’. The balance between these voices varies as the tale advances, until the garrulous chief intrudes into the narrative frame with demands for rum and accommodation and is at last unceremoniously evicted from the house and the narrative. Internal evidence indicates that this unpleasant closing frame was written shortly before publication, but we also know from letters to family in Tasmania that Maning began writing the book in 1845, shortly after one of the battles he so vividly describes. The compositional history is uncertain, but it seems likely that it began as a personal memoir – Maning was a participant in many but not all of the major incidents of the war – and subsequently became closer to history in the conventional sense of the word as Ngapuhi contacts were interviewed and their anecdotes collected. One of Maning’s aims was to correct the official record: as he wrote to his brother: ‘any one to read Despard’s despatches would think we had thrashed the natives soundly whereas they really have had the best of it on several occasions. I really begin to think it is all a mistake about our beating the French at Waterloo’ (212). Another important aim was to memorialise his great friend and brother in law, Hauraki, who was killed at the battle of Waikare, and whose death takes up a large portion of the middle of the story, along with a waiata tangi, composed by Moengaroa. At some point, Maning hit on the idea of telling the story in a Māori way, through the voice and eyes of a representative chief, a literary device that moves the War in the North closer to historical fiction in the conventional sense of the term. In 1862, when war once more seemed likely, it was published in pamphlet form as Maning’s pointedly satirical contribution to debate over the conduct of native policy, and as a warning to settlers who complacently underestimated Māori capacity to wage war. The book was published anonymously, but the author’s identity was no secret; Maning complained in a letter, ‘It is hard no one can do anything clever but it is immediately said to be me’ (214).

The History of the War in the North earned Maning the friendship and patronage of former native secretary Donald McLean, who encouraged Maning to continue writing. In a revealing letter of 25 October 1862, Maning introduced his next book, Old New Zealand, in these terms: ‘ … I believe it to be far better i.e. that is more valuable than ‘the war’ it is ironical, satirical semipolitical with lots of fun, and many serious and striking scenes from old native life and habits, and in a word shews indirectly without ostencibly pretending to do so what sort of a creature this Maori is who we have to deal with’ (213-214). His choice of phrase indicates his distance from the Māori world he had once been part of. After Moengaroa died in 1847, he sent his eldest daughter Maria to live with her grandparents in Tasmania; his remaining children spent a great deal of time with their Te Hikutu relatives and, as young adults, became increasingly estranged from their father. In the 1850s, Maning no longer worked alongside Māori but employed them in his business activities. His particular friends were old Hokianga settlers like John Webster and Spencer Von Sturmer, along with the Auckland businessman John Logan Campbell, and a number of writers and politicians associated with the Southern Cross newspaper. It was probably for a group of these like-minded people that Maning wrote an undated and unpublished paper on ‘the Native Question’ sometime in the late 1850s. Here he strikes a number of notes that he would repeat for the rest of his life: ‘When Cannibals and barbarians become our rulers which they soon will even if we invite them to dream of political rights, it will be time for every man who has the self-respect of a Briton to leave these shores, where degenerate Englishmen succumb to the savage’ (219). Māori-as-he-knew-them, though great mimics of British ways, were fundamentally lawless and uncivilized: only by a crushing military defeat could they ever be brought round to acknowledge and respect the rule of law. Views such as these are well documented in the later letters; they offer one essential key to the political and satirical intentions of his published writings, but it should be remembered that the published works are not reducible to the letters: it is the opinions on race and politics that are reductive. The writings are multi-dimensional.

Old New Zealand and the History of the War in the North established Maning’s reputation as a man who was knowledgeable in Māori customs, and who could be expected to deal with inter-tribal disputes over land fairly and astutely – albeit from a pro-settler view. In 1865, he was invited to become a judge in the Native Land Court. Among his most important cases were Rangitikei-Manawatu (1869) and Te Aroha (1871). These judgements are published in Fenton’s Important Judgments Delivered in the Compensation and Native Land Court (1879); Maning’s account of the Te Aroha case, in particular, is of considerable literary as well as historical and legal interest. He resigned from the court in 1876 and retired to Onoke.

A biographer of Maning has two difficulties: the years up to the publication of Old New Zealand, in which we are naturally most interested, have left few independent traces in the archival record; the remaining years, of only minor literary interest, are very copiously documented indeed. From the mid 1860s onwards, he wrote several letters most days of his life. These have never been published. En masse, they present a formidable body of often repetitive writing which becomes bitter and racist in the later years, and tinged with depression and paranoia. A good proportion, however, have all the vividness, humour and interest of his published works. A posthumous work, Maori Traditions by Judge Maning, is a slight collection of well known tales. He is rumoured to have destroyed another major work, entitled ‘Young New Zealand’, but Maning was by turns diffident and grandiose about his writing: any masterpiece in his drawer was likely to have been a bunch of miscellaneous stories and anecdotes that had yet to find the coherent shape of Old New Zealand and the History of the War in the North.

As an old man, Maning’s relationship with his children deteriorated to the point where he suspected they were poisoning him; in the course of what seems a period of mental breakdown, he moved to a Princes Street boarding house in Auckland in 1880. Letters to his Hokianga friends from Auckland are sunnier on the whole: he enjoyed the more stimulating environment of the city and appears to have been lionised (or pestered) by a small circle of acquaintances who enjoyed his conversation and his tales of his Pākehā Māori years. In 1882 he developed cancer of the jaw and went to London for treatment. It was unsuccessful. After a protracted and agonising illness, he died on 25 July 1883; in accordance with his own wishes, his body was returned to New Zealand for burial.