Carronade

A carronade is a short-barrelled cannon, lighter and easier to handle than a long cannon, used on British ships in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (1) This one, purchased for the Dominion Museum collection in 1933, is said to be a relic from the Boyd, a sailing ship that was attacked by Māori in Whangaroa Harbour in December 1809. This incident has been recorded by Pākehā as the most violent clash between Māori and Europeans in New Zealand in the early nineteenth century, and it had a heavy impact on trade and settlement.

The Boyd left London in March 1809 carrying convicts bound for Australia. (2) Equipped for war with France, it carried 14 carronades that could fire heavy balls at short range. (3) The Boyd docked at Sydney in August, collected hardwood, coal, furs and other supplies, and then departed for the return voyage via Cape Horn in November. (4) The captain planned to make a short stop in New Zealand to collect kauri spars, and on board were a number of Māori including Te Āra, the son of Ngāti Uru rangatira Pipikoitareke, who was returning home. (5)

The Boyd put in at Whangaroa Harbour and the captain and crew went ashore to inspect a stand of kauri. They were attacked by their Māori guides, who then returned to the Boyd and killed those on board. Only four survived – as many as 70 crew members and passengers lost their lives. (6) The next day the ship was looted, and during the pillaging the gunpowder stores were accidentally ignited, causing a huge explosion. Approximately 15 Māori were killed, including Te Āra’s father, Pipikoitareke. (7)

The ship was burnt to the waterline and the carronades lay with the wreckage. (8) Some were salvaged by local Māori; in 1824 British naval officer Richard Cruise noted that at Kāeo, the principal settlement of Ngāti Uru, three of the carronades of the Boyd were planted at the summit of the pā, while three others lay on the banks of the river below. (9) Others were later raised by Pākehā settlers. (10)

In the decades after the attack the story of the Boyd was told and retold many times, gaining new ‘layers, contexts and complications’ with each retelling. (11) Initially the attack was seen by Europeans as senseless and barbaric. Blame was entirely placed on Māori and regarded as evidence of their inability to embrace ‘civilisation’. (12) As new sources of information and alternative perspectives were introduced, the story gained more nuance. The ‘initial tabloid headline’, to quote literary historian Lydia Wevers, gradually broadened out into a narrative of ‘barbaric yet understandable reprisal’, taking into account factors such as internal tribal politics, commercial interests and cultural imperatives. (13) 

On the journey across the Tasman Te Āra had been tied up and flogged, probably because he was ill and unable to work his passage. (14) When the Boyd arrived in Whangaroa Harbour Te Āra reported his mistreatment to his iwi, and they vowed to obtain utu. The arrival of European ships was already a source of suspicion and fear, as Ngāti Uru believed a curse had been placed on them by the captain of the Commerce a year earlier. The captain – Ceroni – had been showing off his pocket watch when he dropped it into Whangaroa Harbour, and according to one source Ngāti Uru felt he had done them ‘an irreparable injury by leaving his Etua [atua or god] behind as a demon of destruction’. (15) Shortly thereafter an outbreak of disease killed a number of local Māori, and this earlier tragedy likely factored into the events on the Boyd. (16)

Katie Cooper

This essay originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024).

1. What was a carronade?’, Royal Museums Greenwich (rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/what-was-carronade, accessed 21 August 2023); Paul D’Arcy, ‘Maori and muskets from a pan-Polynesian perspective’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 34, no. 1 (2000), p. 126.
2. Charles William Ingram, Owen Wheatley, Lynton Diggle, Edith Diggle and Keith Gordon, New Zealand Shipwrecks: Over 200 years of disasters at sea, 8th ed., revised and updated by Lynton Diggle, Edith Diggle and Keith Gordon (Hodder Moa, Auckland, 2007), p. 12.
3. ‘Ship buster’, Te Papa Collections Online (collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/3125, accessed 21 August 2023).
4. Ingram et al., New Zealand Shipwrecks, p. 12.
5. Waitangi Tribunal, He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti The Declaration and the Treaty: The report on stage 1 of the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Inquiry (Legislation Direct, Lower Hutt, 2014), p. 80.
6. Vincent O’Malley, The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā encounters, 1642–1840 (Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2012), p. 61; ‘A frontier of chaos? The Boyd incident’, New Zealand History (nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/maori-european-contact-before-1840/the-boyd-incident, accessed 31 July 2023).
7. ‘A frontier of chaos?’; Waitangi Tribunal, He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti, p. 81.
8. Judith Sidney Hornabrook, ‘“Boyd”, Massacre of’, in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. AH McLintock [1966], Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand (teara.govt.nz/en/1966/boyd-massacre-of, accessed 21 August 2023).
9. Richard A Cruise, Journal of a Ten Months’ Residence in New Zealand [1824], 2nd ed. (Capper Press, Christchurch, 1974), p. 159 (enzb.auckland.ac.nz/document/?wid=85&page=1&action=null, accessed 21 August 2023).
10. ‘Ancient relics’, New Zealand Herald, 18 August 1877, p. 1 (Supplement); ‘An interesting relic’, Thames Advertiser, 4 November 1892, p. 3; ‘Cannon’, 1965.78, Auckland Museum Collections Online (aucklandmuseum.com/collections-research/collections/record/am_humanhistory-object-649890?k=boyd&c=ecrm%3AE22_Man-Made_Object&ordinal=16, accessed 3 August 2023).
11. Lydia Wevers, Country of Writing: Travel writing and New Zealand 1809–1900 (Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2002), p. 24.
12. O’Malley, The Meeting Place, p. 63.
13. Wevers, Country of Writing, p. 24.
14. O’Malley, The Meeting Place, p. 62.
15. Alexander Berry, ‘Particulars of the destruction of a British vessel on the coast of New Zealand, with anecdotes of some New Zealand chiefs’, in Constable’s Miscellany, Adventures of British seamen in the Southern Ocean displaying the striking contrasts which the human character exhibits in an uncivilised state, p. 331, quoted in Wevers, Country of Writing, p. 23.
16. ‘A frontier of chaos?’; O’Malley, The Meeting Place, p. 63.