From Moriori: A People Rediscovered, by Michael King (Penguin, 2017), Kindle Loc. 1196ff.:
At least Moriori who were killed fell into merciful oblivion. Those who survived the first killings were separated, moved around, and forced into slavery of the most onerous kind. As the 1862 Moriori plea to George Grey records, ‘men were separated from the women, parents from children, older children from younger children, and the strings of their heart quivered’. They also faced continuous near-starvation, frequent beatings, sexual abuse by their captors if the slaves were young women, a prohibition on marriage or sexual contact with their own people, permanent removal from the territories where their tribes had lived for centuries, and enforced breaking of the ancient tapus that had formerly protected them. They faced a life in which those they had loved were not only absent, but whose remains could still be seen intermittently, defiled by Maori and dogs alike. Perhaps worst of all, they faced a world in which everything in which they had believed spiritually and culturally was shown to be leached of fertility and value: their gods did not protect them from these horrors; their gods were dead.
…
It is little wonder that, in the circumstances, Moriori continued to die: some for angering their owners by their listlessness; some from reduced immunity to disease (there were further influenza epidemics in 1839 and 1840 that killed a large number of Maori and Moriori — one authority says as many as half of the surviving Moriori); and some from ‘kongenge’ — dispiritedness and despair.
…
Others who clung to life, but stunned and stunted by their experience, were among those reviled by Maori and Pakeha as being degenerate, of low intelligence, and deficient in energy and initiative. For that was how many of them seemed. And when in later years some attempted to anaesthetise their suffering in cheap alcohol, that only added weight to the accusations that the Paraiwhara, these ‘black fellas’, were low in the scale of God’s creation.
Some few Moriori continued to resist slavery and its overbearing physical and psychological weight. One such was Koche. He was the only one of his people able to leave a direct account of his experience, thanks to his contact with the American lawyer Ewing, who wrote it down about 1850. Koche told his story as the whaling vessel on which he crewed crossed the Pacific, and he spoke chiefly at night, when his duties were at an end.
