Thomas Kendall
Kendall was born in Lincolnshire, England where he came into contact with the evangelical revival of the Anglican Church. He married Jane Quickfall in 1803 and set up business as a draper and grocer, but the business did not prosper. In 1808 he decided to become a missionary. A mission to New Zealand was being promoted by Samuel Marsden, a Church Missionary Society agent in New South Wales. In 1809 Kendall was chosen to head a mission to New Zealand accompanied by William Hall and John King.
In March 1814 they arrived in the Bay of Islands. They founded a mission under the patronage of Ruatara and Hongi Hika at Rangihoua on the northern edge of the Bay of Island, just outside the Kerikeri Inlet. The isolation of Kendall, Hall, King, and their families, made life difficult, and the differences between the three men led to conflict. Kendall had been made a Justice of the Peace, but was prone to fits of temper and was more emotional than the other two, more pragmatic men. The appointment of the Reverend John Gare Butler as superintendent of the mission in Kerikeri in 1819 did not relieve the tension.
Kendal started the first school at Rangihoua in 1816 but it closed in 1818 due to the lack of trade at the settlement. He had the first book written in Maori published in 1815 in Sydney and continued with the study of the language. There was some criticism of a manuscript that he sent to the Church Missionary Society back in the UK and Kendall made an unorthorised trip back to defend his work. He took Hongi Hika and the younger chief Waikato of Rangihoua with him. The three went to Cambridge where he worked with Professor Lee, an oriental language specialist, and together they published A grammar and vocabulary of the language of New Zealand. The visitors were entertained widely and Waikato and Hongi were introduced to George IV. Kendall was ordained a priest (only of NZ due to the lack of a classical language) on 12 November 1820 by the bishop of Ely.
Hongi was given many gifts and most of these were traded for muskets in Sydney on the return voyage. In the following years, the guns helped him conquer a significant northern portion of the North Island in the Musket Wars and made him a man of considerable importance.
Kendall returned to NZ in 1821 where he supported and profited from the trade in muskets. On 27 September 1821 all the missionaries signed a letter written by Kendall defending the gun trade, saying they could not dictate what was sold to Maori: “They dictate to us! It is evident that ambition and self interest are amongst the principal causes of our security amongst them.”
Around this time Kendall had begun an affair with Tungaroa, one of his school pupils who worked as a servant in his household. She was the daughter of a Rakau, a prominent Māori tohunga or priest and wise man. When the affair was discovered the pair eloped, living among nearby Maori. However, the relationship had ended by April 1822. Jane took Kendall back, although he was unapologetic. One sailor wrote Kendall’s rationalisation of the relationship with a Māori woman was “in order to obtain accurate information as to their religious opinions and tenets, which he would in no other way have obtained”. Kendall indeed began a serious flirtation with Māori religious beliefs, an exploration he set out in a series of seven letters between 1822 and 1824. In 1822 he wrote that the “sublimity” of Māori spirituality saw him “almost completely turned from a Christian to a Heathen”.
This resulted in the Church Missionary Society dismissing Kendall in 1822 and telling him to leave NZ. When his ship the Brampton ran aground while leaving, Kendall claimed this was divine intervention and decided to stay. The Kendall family remained living in the Bay of Islands until 1825, when he accepted a position as clergyman at the British consulate at Valparaiso, Chile. This job did not last, and his family settled in New South Wales where he was granted land. He died in the sinking of the ship Brisbane off Sydney Harbour in 1832.
