Rangihoua Pā and Oihi Mission Station

Rangihoua Pā and Oihi Mission Station (1814)

Christianity’s detention camp

Picturesque on a sunny day, bleak at any other time, south-facing Oihi provides an object lesson in the importance of geography and topography. Getting there is a breeze by water, but by land, even with modern roads, it is wearying - boats have always worked better than cars in the Bay of Islands. Trek down the farm road, though, and you immediately understand. In 1814 several hundred Ngāi Tawake crowded the now deserted stronghold of Rangihoua, a coastal ridge that looked commandingly south out over the Bay, then bustling with whaling ships and Māori traders. To the north, Rangihoua also looked down on Christianity’s beleaguered first beachhead in New Zealand.

Chief Ruatara was an adventurous young cross-cultural traveller. He had visited New South Wales and, willing to chance his arm, invited ‘the flogging Parson’, Samuel Marsden, to establish a mission in New Zealand. The porcine parson waddled ashore from the ship Active in December 1814 to celebrate New Zealand’s first Christian service. It has been honoured by stamps and by penny-­dreadful historiography ever since, but fewer have dwelled on the fact that Marsden’s missionary mechanics had to wait almost two decades to make a single convert. Māori wanted European trade goods, not their superstitions.

If you look hard enough beyond the hefty Celtic ‘Marsden Cross’ in the grass you will see the archaeological platforms of the cottages erected on Oihi’s slopes by the Church Missionary Society’s disputatious guinea pigs. Here Thomas Kendall, William Hall and John King bickered and schemed against each other and sold guns while their Maori overlords looked down on them, literally and metaphorically. ‘Touched by God but otherwise not all that strange’, conservator Fergus Clunie notes, ‘the missionaries wanted to forsake this barren, claustrophobic cove.’ You cannot blame them, especially if you visit on a wet, windy day. Marsden, as usual, thought he knew better and kept them cooped up here until 1832. During that entire time the CMS toilers made no converts, though the same could not be said of Māori.

In 2012/13 the University of Otago and the Department of Conservation conducted the first archaeological survey of the Oihi site in the lead-up to the bicentennial celebrations.

Further information

This site is item number 9 on the History of New Zealand in 100 Places list.

On the ground

At the time of writing (2013) a visitor centre is planned to be ready in time for the site’s bicentennial celebrations in 2014.

Websites

• Heritage New Zealand Register
• Rangihoua Heritage Park
• Department of Conservation info
• Hohi - Marsden Cross Facebook group
• Flickr page of Oihi mission station archaeology
• Samuel Marsden biography - Te Ara
• Ruatara biography - Te Ara
• Thomas Kendall biography - Te Ara
• Church Missionary Society - NZ History
• Missionaries and muskets - Roadside Stories (video)

Book

• Judith Binney, The legacy of guilt, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2005