Few episodes in Pacific history attract more heat than the claim that early encounters between Europeans and Māori involved cannibalism. The truth is more complicated, more human, and more revealing than a lurid headline. It is a story of culture clash, ritual, revenge, and the long shadow of misunderstanding.
Sorting fact from myth matters, because those first meetings shaped how each side saw the other for generations. Here is what the record actually shows.
First contact: Tasman, Golden Bay, and a long silence
The first known meeting between Europeans and Māori occurred on 14 December 1642, when Abel Tasman’s two Dutch East India Company ships sighted the South Island. They anchored days later in what Tasman named Moordenaersbaai, Murderers’ Bay, now Golden Bay. Tense exchanges followed across the water. On 19 December, a Māori waka rammed a Dutch boat ferrying men back to the Heemskerck. Four sailors were killed. The Dutch fired cannon and withdrew.
New Zealand’s Ministry for Culture and Heritage summarizes the encounter plainly: it did not go well. Crucially, there is no contemporary evidence that cannibalism occurred in this first contact. What did happen was violent, brief, and bewildering for both sides. Tasman left and did not land. Europeans would not return for another 127 years, until James Cook arrived in 1769.
Marion du Fresne, 1772: friendship soured by tapu
In 1772, French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne sailed into the Bay of Islands. Initial relations with Ngāpuhi were friendly. Over weeks, the French cut timber and fished, activities that likely breached local tapu and depleted resources at key sites. Tensions rose. On or about 12 June, Marion du Fresne and a party of his men were killed ashore. Across several days, roughly two dozen Frenchmen died in separate incidents. Survivors reported that some bodies were cooked and eaten.
For Māori, cannibalism was a ritual act tied to warfare, utu, and mana. It was not an everyday food practice. Anthropologists classify this as exocannibalism, the consumption of enemies for reasons of vengeance or humiliation rather than sustenance. For the French, the killings were an outrage. Retaliation was devastating. French parties destroyed canoes, gardens, and villages, and killed many Māori before departing.
The tragedy is a study in cultural misreadings. What the French saw as benign provisioning, Ngāpuhi may have viewed as transgressions against sacred places and authority. Once blood was spilled, custom demanded redress. In an age of sail, the delay between offense and reprisal amplified the cycle.
The Boyd, 1809: flogging, utu, and a global scandal
Thirty-seven years later, the merchant ship Boyd anchored in Whangaroa Harbour. During the voyage, its captain had flogged a young rangatira named Te Ara (also known as George) for refusing to work. On his return home, Te Ara related the insult. A large war party boarded the Boyd under pretense, killed the crew and many passengers, and burned the ship, which exploded when the flames reached gunpowder. Accounts vary, but around 66 people died. Contemporary reports and later testimony recorded that parts of some victims were eaten.
The event reverberated across the world’s shipping lanes. Missionaries and whalers spread the tale. Crucially, blame for subsequent reprisals fell at first on the wrong people. Ngāpuhi chief Te Pahi, who had tried to save survivors, was mistakenly targeted by a punitive expedition that killed many of his people. The tangle of error and revenge illustrates how quickly misinformation hardened into violence.
Putting cannibalism in cultural context
To modern readers, any act of cannibalism feels shocking. In late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Aotearoa, it had specific meanings. As historian and anthropological research have long noted, Māori cannibalism in warfare was about utu, restoring balance after grievous insult or loss, and asserting mana over defeated enemies. It was not a dietary choice, nor was it applied to kin. Practices diminished through the nineteenth century with changing warfare, the spread of Christianity, and colonial law.
Context also tempers easy comparisons. Early modern Europe had its own accepted forms of consuming human material. As documented by scholars and reported by Smithsonian magazine, European apothecaries sold preparations made from skull, blood, or preserved “mummy” well into the seventeenth century. That history does not erase Māori practices, but it does remind us taboos have shifted across cultures and time.
Why myths linger, and why precision matters
The stickiest myths are simple. The history is not. The first meeting in 1642 involved killing, not confirmed cannibalism. The 1772 Marion du Fresne killings did involve ritual cannibalism according to multiple accounts, but they grew out of tapu infringements and a spiral of retaliation. The 1809 Boyd attack was a targeted act of utu for a brutal humiliation at sea, later exaggerated and misassigned in its aftermath.
It is tempting to bundle these episodes into a single narrative about savagery or civilization. Doing so flattens people into caricatures and obscures the causes. The record shows two maritime worlds learning each other the hard way. A ship captain’s flogging of a chief could ignite a war party. A French crew felling the wrong trees could desecrate sacred ground. A gun broadside answered a stone club. Each side read the other’s actions through its own law and custom, often with catastrophic results.
Precision also means acknowledging what we do not know. European journals, missionary letters, and Māori oral histories provide overlapping, sometimes contradictory, evidence. Numbers of dead vary by source. Details of who ordered what and why are contested. Responsible history sits with that uncertainty, weighing sources rather than cherry-picking shock value.
Beyond the gruesome: the legacy of first meetings
The legacy of these encounters reaches far beyond macabre details. Tasman’s bloody brush-off discouraged Dutch return for more than a century. Cook’s later voyages opened sustained engagement and exchange, for better and worse. The Marion du Fresne affair became a cautionary tale carried in French naval lore. The Boyd massacre hardened prejudices among whalers and traders, while the wrongful assault on Te Pahi’s people deepened inter-iwi and Māori–Pākehā grievances.
Out of this violent crucible came a century of accelerating contact that culminated in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi, in 1840. Understanding how rocky the first steps were helps explain the hopes and frailties embedded in the treaty and the disputes that continue to this day.
Reading the record with care
If you want to go deeper, start with sources that separate what happened from what was imagined. New Zealand’s Ministry for Culture and Heritage provides clear, accessible summaries of the 1642 first contact and later flashpoints. Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand offers detailed entries on Marion du Fresne and the Boyd. For cultural framing, anthropological work on exocannibalism explains why warriors might consume an enemy in victory.
When we strip away sensationalism and stick to the evidence, the story that remains is stark enough. It is the story of strangers meeting under sail, of law and custom colliding, of insults avenged and errors multiplied. It is also a story of learning, adaptation, and the fragile agreements that eventually followed.