All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

The Musket Wars and the Invasion of the Chatham Islands

c. 1806–1863 · Oceania

Displacement Territory Seized Mass Killing

Displaced

30,000

Around 30,000 people are estimated to have been enslaved or forced to migrate during the wars, out of a Maori population of perhaps 100,000-150,000; the figure comes from historians' reconstruction, chiefly R. D. Crosby's synthesis of iwi oral tradition, missionary accounts and Native Land Court testimony, and is an estimate rather than a count. Whole iwi abandoned their territories: Ngati Toa migrated from Kawhia to Kapiti, Te Ati Awa and Ngati Mutunga from Taranaki to the Wellington region and then to the Chathams. In 1835 about 900 Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama seized the brig Lord Rodney and landed on Rekohu, where the Moriori population of roughly 1,600 fell to 101 by 1862, recorded in colonial censuses.

Share of the population affected

30%

of the Maori population of New Zealand at the start of the musket wars, together with the Moriori of the Chatham Islands, 1815

Killed

20,000–40,000

conflict deaths incl. combatants

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

From about 1806 the spread of muskets through the Bay of Islands trade set off four decades of intertribal warfare across New Zealand, in which as many as 3,000 battles and raids were fought, an estimated 20,000-40,000 people died and around 30,000 were enslaved or driven from their lands. Whole iwi relocated hundreds of kilometres, permanently altering the map of customary territory before British annexation in 1840. In November 1835 about 900 Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama, themselves displaced from Taranaki, seized a European vessel to reach Rekohu, the Chatham Islands, where they killed a proportion of the Moriori — whose tradition of non-violence, Nunuku's law, led them to submit rather than fight — and enslaved the remainder, prohibiting marriage and taking their land. The Moriori population fell from roughly 1,600 to 101 by 1862. In 2001 the Waitangi Tribunal's Rekohu report found on both Moriori and Ngati Mutunga claims and recorded the killings and enslavement; the New Zealand Crown apologised to Moriori in a 2020 settlement. The atlas covered the New Zealand Wars and the raupatu but not the preceding intertribal upheaval.

Parties

Maori iwi armed with muskets acquired through European trade conquered and displaced rival iwi across New Zealand; Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama invaded the Chatham Islands and subjugated the Moriori

Disputed

Whether the Chatham Islands invasion is properly termed a genocide, a description used by some Moriori representatives and historians and resisted by others as anachronistic; and the reliability of casualty estimates for the Musket Wars, which rest largely on oral tradition recorded decades later.

The denominator

Estimates of the Maori population around 1800 range from 85,000 to 110,000, back-projected from the first colonial counts of the 1850s; by 1857-58 the count was about 56,000. The Moriori numbered roughly 1,600-2,000 when Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama landed on Rekohu in 1835, and fewer than 200 by 1862.

Deaths and displacement in this period are inseparable from the epidemic mortality that accompanied European contact over the same decades, so the ratio attributes to warfare losses with mixed causes.

Where the baseline comes from

Musket Warsopen-edited
Morioriopen-edited

On the death toll

The range given by historians of the Musket Wars, principally R. D. Crosby, built from iwi tradition, missionary observation and later Native Land Court evidence; it covers killings in battle and raids and does not separate deaths from the epidemics and food shortages that accompanied mass migration. On the Chathams, roughly 10 per cent of about 1,600 Moriori were killed in the initial invasion, with most of the subsequent decline caused by enslavement, disease and prohibition of marriage.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingForced LabourDestruction of Property

The Waitangi Tribunal's Rekohu report and the 1862 Moriori petition to the Crown document the killings and the enslavement of the Moriori survivors.

Formal findings

Waitangi Tribunal (New Zealand) (2001) — Rekohu: A Report on Moriori and Ngati Mutunga Claims in the Chatham Islands (2001), which recorded the 1835 invasion, killings and enslavement of Moriori and addressed both peoples' claims against the Crown — source

Movements mapped

Ngati Toa migration from Kawhia to Kapiti and the Cook Strait
Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama invasion of the Chatham Islands, 1835900

Countries touched, on present-day borders

New Zealand

Sources

Musket Wars — Wikipediaopen-edited
Moriori — Wikipediaopen-edited
Moriori genocide — Wikipediaopen-edited
Wharekauri / Rekohu / Chathams inquiry and the Rekohu report — Waitangi Tribunalofficial