Explorers and missionaries
Explorers
The first French arrival was Captain Jean François Marie de Surville, who brought the St Jean Baptiste on a trading expedition in 1769. His first sighting of New Zealand was of the Hokianga; from there he sailed around North Cape to Doubtless Bay, but he eventually left under a shadow of misunderstanding with Māori in the area.
Discord and departure
Captain Jean François Marie de Surville, an early French trader, initially got on well with Māori at Doubtless Bay. But the relationship turned sour when, having wrongly accused them of stealing his ship’s boat, he then burnt houses and captured a chief, Ranginui. When de Surville sailed for Peru, he took Ranginui with him. Although the chief was treated well, he died of scurvy the following year.
In March 1772 Marc Joseph Marion du Fresne sailed the Mascarin into the Bay of Islands. His party made scientific observations, and traded and socialised with Māori. A few weeks later, however, Marion du Fresne and others were murdered. There are several theories to explain what the French did to anger Māori; one suggests that they fished in sacred waters. Whatever the real reason, Māori distrust of ‘the tribe of Marion’ remained for years.
The first truly scientific expedition was led by Louis Isidore Duperrey on the Coquille, which reached the Bay of Islands in April 1824. Duperrey surveyed the bay, met the Māori chief Hongi Hika, and later published his observations.
Also on board was Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville, who led a second expedition in 1827. From the West Coast of the South Island he sailed towards Cook Strait, naming French Pass, D’Urville Island and the Croisilles Harbour. He visited for a third time in 1840. Like other French explorers, Dumont d’Urville made a major contribution to the scientific knowledge of New Zealand.
French whalers appeared in the 1830s, mostly working off Banks Peninsula until the 1840s. Some eventually settled.
Novel discoveries
The voyages of Tasman and others had inspired French writers from as early as 1681. Voltaire, Alexandre Dumas the elder and Jules Verne subsequently drew on accounts of New Zealand contact.
The explorer Dumont d’Urville wrote what is arguably New Zealand’s first novel. Les Zélandais: histoire australienne is based on his encounters with Māori in 1824. Set in Northland, it relates the fortunes of the people of Tiami and their chief. Dumont d’Urville depicts them sympathetically, their culture about to be changed dramatically by the arrival of Europeans.
Missionaries
The French had a major influence on the Catholic Church in New Zealand. The Pacific had been allocated by the Pope to French missionaries in 1829, and in 1835 the western portion including New Zealand was made a parish. Bishop Jean Baptiste François Pompallier was sent out to head the mission, and arrived in the Hokianga in 1838. The first bishop of any denomination in New Zealand, he became the leading light of the Catholic Church for the next 30 years.
Pompallier and his missionaries from the order of the Society of Mary (Marists) faced poverty, hardship, opposition from Protestant missionaries, and hostile Māori who distrusted the French. But they quickly learned English and Māori, and in 10 years 5,000 people were baptised. Mission stations were established from north Auckland to Akaroa.
For Māori, becoming Catholic was a gesture of dissatisfaction with Protestant missionaries and the British Crown. But Catholicism did not remain associated with protest for long. During the New Zealand wars in the mid-1800s, Pompallier sided with the government. He abandoned the Māori mission, and in the 1860s condemned the indigenous Pai Mārire religious movement. The new focus of the Catholic Church was to minister to the country’s Europeans.
The gold rushes of the 1860s and 1870s took the priests to Southland, to work with the mining communities. French Marists were a significant part of the clergy in Wellington and Canterbury until around 1885, and remained until the 1930s. They made a substantial contribution to Catholic education.
The missionaries, and later the Sisters of Mercy, accomplished groundbreaking welfare work with Māori and Pākehā. As well as churches and chapels, they built schools, hospitals and orphanages. The most well-known missionary was Suzanne Aubert, who arrived in 1860 and founded the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion.
Today, there are at least 11 Catholic orders which maintain their contact with France.
