10 - New Zealand

Summary

The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals – the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy in New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children.

–Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)

A virgin countryside cannot be restocked; the vicissitudes of its pioneers cannot be re-enacted; its invasion by alien plants, animals and birds cannot be repeated; its ancient vegetation cannot be resuscitated – the words terra incognita have been expunged from the map of little New Zealand.

–H. Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, the Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station (1921)

We have discussed the American and Australian Neo- Europes topically – weeds, then animals and germs – in order to tease out evidence of the ecological factors underlying the success of European colonies there, but we have not tried to reweave the history of, say, the pampa into a narrative. The stories of all the continental Neo-Europes are too long and complicated to tell within the limitations of this book. Therefore, we turn to New Zealand, insular and comparatively small, whose history is the briefest and most fully documented among all the Neo-Europes. New Zealand is a palimpsest written on by only a few people, and only recently. It would be better for our purposes if New Zealand's indigenes had been Paleolithic or New World Neolithic when the marinheiros first came – purely non-Old World Neolithic, to be clear about it, like those of all the other Neo-Europes. They were not, but they were nearly so, because the long migrations of their Asian and Polynesian ancestors across the Pacific had stripped them of all but a few Neolithic elements, as we shall see later. They almost fit our needs perfectly, and whatever difficulties the said few elements may make for us are compensated for by the fact that the Europeans came to New Zealand so late that they made their first and most important additions to its biota while under the perceptive scrutiny of scientists and scientifically minded men of the generations of Cuvier and Darwin.

New Zealand calved off Australia 80 to 100 million years ago and has been in splendid isolation ever since.