From Moriori: A People Rediscovered, by Michael King (Penguin, 2017), Kindle Loc. 1766ff.:
Archibald Watson Shand, who arrived at Chatham Island in July 1855 to become the first resident magistrate and collector of customs, wrote to [George] Selwyn that same year while the bishop was on the island, explaining to his lordship how things were (and describing scenes which might have been concealed from episcopal eyes):
…
The resident magistrate adds his disappointment that even Wi Tamihana, the catechist in Waitangi, kept several slaves, and he asked Selwyn to ‘prevail on him to not only set a better example in general for the future — but in practical proof of his sincerity, to begin by liberating his slaves.’
Shand took a census the same year. It revealed that the Moriori population was now down to 205: 106 men, 76 women and 23 children (the figure still, of course, excludes those on Auckland or Stewart Islands; and those who are of mixed Maori-Moriori blood, who were classified as Maori). Maori numbered 300, and ‘Europeans’ 64, including six Tahitians, four Portuguese, two Spaniards and two North American Indians (most of the latter had come off ships to join the shore whaling gangs).
This decline in Moriori population, which was to vary from seven to ten per cent per annum in the years that followed, was too steep and began too early for there to be any possibility of a major recovery a few years later when slavery was relaxed and Moriori morale rose and the Maori population as a whole began to increase. By 1860, the population of pure-blooded Moriori was headed irreversibly towards extinction.
The following eight years were nightmarish for Archibald Shand, who was a fastidious but ineffectual man. The Maori kept promising to behave — to obey the laws, to moderate their drinking, to cease plundering one another, to observe customs procedures, to stop beating their slaves, even to release their slaves — and just as promptly broke these promises. A land-loan dispute with the German missionaries led to their ignoring the resident magistrate’s authority and refusing to comply with such laws as the registration of births. Shand for his part had no authority other than a moral one. There was no one, Maori or European, on whom he could rely to enforce his authority or even to risk friendship. While everybody on the island wanted their lives and property protected, they did not want the submission to procedures that was part of the social contract with the New Zealand Government. The Chathams had already evolved a culture that was independent (and suspicious) of mainland New Zealand and its bureaucracies. Almost all Shand’s Maori appointees as tidewaiters (to collect duty from visiting ships) and constables let him down and were themselves guilty of infringements of the law.
To compound these problems, Shand was trying to raise his large family (eight children born before he reached the Chathams, four more on the island) as British ladies and gentlemen. He was horrified at the poor example they received from their fellow citizens, and despairing of their ever being able to find suitable husbands and wives among the riff-raff Europeans cast up on the island (largely seamen who had jumped ship); for his offspring, a union with a Maori was unthinkable and one with a Moriori never even considered. At times, after he had tried to discipline recalcitrants, he feared that the family’s physical well-being could be in as much danger as their virtue.
