Overview
The differences between Māori culture and European culture were perhaps most marked in perceptions of land ownership and boundaries. For Māori tribes, mana whenua, or the right to land, was acquired through either inheritance or conquest. Specific natural features defined territory. Alliances and wise marriages reinforced understandings about where and when tribes might come near, or onto, another tribe's land. Boundaries were precise at crucial points, but otherwise somewhat fluid and imprecise, depending on circumstances.
By the time the British decided to obtain sovereignty over New Zealand, their idea of individual title to land was well advanced. Their concept of parcels of land – “the commons" – being held in common for a community however, still remained a part of British thinking.
For two hundred years the British had been developing instruments of surveying, and the precision of their technology matched their increasingly legalistic understanding of what it was to own a piece of land. Hence the importance, in a new country, of a new professional class – the surveyor and also his inevitable partner, the draughtsman, men like Charles Heaphy.
The surveyor's traditional tools of trade have been the theodolite and chain. The theodolite, based on the telescope, is an instrument designed for the measurement of horizontal and vertical angles. It is usually mounted on a tripod. To this day it continues to be used for boundary work and the pegging of sections. Although satellite technology, particularly the GPS (global positioning system), and aerial mapping can do much of the theodolite’s work, these modern systems are generally used more for mapping larger areas.
The chain was developed in the early seventeenth century by the English mathematician Edmund Gunther, and marked out a standard measure of distance. The chain is exactly twenty-two yards, about twenty metres long, and is divided into 100 links. Each link is a solid bar. Measurement of the public land systems of the United States and Canada is based on Gunther's chain. An area of ten square chains is equal to one acre, a system that in New Zealand has been overtaken in the latter twentieth century by the metric system based on the hectare, which is equivalent to 2.2 acres.
The idea of individual ownership of land was as foreign to Māori as the idea of gifting land – even for the lifetime of the recipient only – was to European. There was therefore ample room for misunderstanding and dispute. Often it was the surveyors who, particularly from the 1860s, bore the brunt of Māori hostility and occasionally outright violence. Following the wars in the Taranaki, Waikato and Bay of Plenty regions the government moved to confiscate vast swathes of quality land. Surveyors followed the troops in. In some districts Māori retaliated by confiscating of surveyors' chains and theodolites and on some occasions the lives of surveyors were threatened.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998)