The Long White Cloud eBook

William Pember Reeves
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 371 pages of information about The Long White Cloud.

The Long White Cloud eBook

William Pember Reeves
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 371 pages of information about The Long White Cloud.

The Maori men are as a rule tall and bulky, long-bodied and short-legged, and with fairly large pyramidal skulls, showing well-developed perceptive faculties.  Their colour varies from maize to dusky olive, and their features from classic to negroid; but usually the nose, though not flat, is wide, and the mouth, though not blubber-lipped, is heavy and sensual.  Shorter and more coarsely built than the males, the women, even when young, are less attractive to the European eye, despite their bright glances and black, abundant hair.  It might well be thought that this muscular, bulky race, with ample room to spread about a fertile and exceptionally healthy country, would have increased and multiplied till it had filled both islands.  It did not, however.  It is doubtful whether it ever numbered more than a hundred and fifty thousand.  Except on the shores of Cook’s Straits, it only planted a few scattered outposts in the South Island.  Yet that is the larger island of the two.  It is also the colder, and therein lies at least one secret of the check to the Maori increase.  They were a tropical race transplanted into a temperate climate.  They showed much the same tendency to cling to the North Island as the negroes in North America to herd in the Gulf States.  Their dress, their food and their ways were those of dwellers on shores out of reach of frost and snow.  Though of stout and robust figure, they are almost always weak in the chest and throat.  Should the Maoris die out, the medical verdict might be summed up in the one word tuberculosis.

The first European observers noted that they suffered from “galloping” consumption.  Skin disorders, rheumatism and a severe kind of influenza were other ailments.

In the absence equally of morality and medical knowledge among their unmarried women, it did not take many years after the appearance of the Whites to taint the race throughout with certain diseases.  A cold-blooded passage in Crozet’s journal tells of the beginning of this curse.  Though not altogether unskilful surgeons, the Maoris knew virtually nothing of medicine.  Nor do they show much nervous power when attacked by disease.  Cheerful and sociable when in health, they droop quickly when ill, and seem sometimes to die from sheer lack of the will to live.  Bright and imaginative almost as the Kelts of Europe, their spirits are easily affected by superstitious dread.  Authentic cases are known of a healthy Maori giving up the ghost through believing himself to be doomed by a wizard.

There are, however, other evil influences under which this attractive and interesting people are fading away.  Though no longer savages, they have never become thoroughly civilized.  Partial civilization has been a blight to their national life.  It has ruined the efficacy of their tribal system without replacing it with any equal moral force and industrial stimulus.  It has deprived them of the main excitement of their lives—­their tribal wars—­and

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The Long White Cloud from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.