The Paper Nobody Kept

Fifty years after the event, in an account printed by the Government Printer for the Treaty's jubilee, William Colenso set the words of the slip in type. His own 1840 manuscript, which also survives, gives the same Māori sentence in an older spelling, and section 5 sets the two side by side.

Three of those clauses are churches. The fourth, me te ritenga Maori hoki, is not. It is the one that carries the weight of the modern argument, because a promise to protect Māori custom is a promise about far more than freedom of worship. It is also the clause with the strangest history in the record, and the point of this page is to lay that record out rather than to summarise it.

Note what the object is. There is no original: the slip was passed from Henry Williams to Governor Hobson to Bishop Pompallier and back, read out, and never seen again. There is no translation either, in the ordinary sense, because the English words the Governor spoke and the Māori words the assembly heard were not produced by one person working from the other's text in a settled way. What there is, is testimony. Five people or documents record some part of that minute, and they were written down between fifteen days and fifty years after it.

Every interval below is computed from the date the record was made or published, against 6 February 1840. None of them is typed into this page. The badge on each card says whether we read the printed page itself, a digitisation of it, or somebody else's transcription of a manuscript we could not reach.

The counter below reads the five passages out of the paragraphs this page has just rendered, folds macrons and case, and matches whole words. It is counting what you are looking at. Type a word, or take one of the offered ones.

The sentence on the slip was supposed to be a rendering of something. There are two links here, not one: the ask, meaning what the interpreter was handed to put into Māori, and the sentence, meaning what the assembly is recorded as having heard. Four of the five records give the ask. Three give the sentence. Two give both.

Below, each span is quoted exactly from the passage above it, and the page checks that it is before it counts. The right-hand column is computed by looking in that span for any of ritenga, custom, practices, which are the three ways the clause about Māori custom is worded anywhere in this record.

That is a statement about where in the chain the clause enters, and the strong form of it is not the pattern across witnesses but the pattern inside two of them. Colenso prints the Governor's instruction in full and then the slip: the instruction ends “that I shall protect all creeds alike,” and the slip has the custom clause. Williams quotes the Bishop's request and then his own sentence: the request is about people who join the Roman church, and the sentence has the custom clause. Neither man is being contradicted by somebody else's memory. Each is recording, in one continuous account, an ask without the clause and an answer with it.

Both of the men who report the sentence as delivered also report how it came to be written, and each account leaves no room in it for the other. Click a marked phrase in either column.

The disagreement is not about the words. Williams's English list and Colenso's Māori sentence contain the same four items in the same order, and the fourth item is the Māori one in both. What they disagree about is agency: who caused the sentence to be written, and who put the fourth item in. Colenso says he prompted the writing and then got the fourth item inserted as a counterweight to Rome. Williams says he took the paper himself because the announcement was hard to render on the spot, and wrote the sentence himself, taking the missions in their order of establishment in the country. That order covers the three churches; he gives no reason for the fourth item, which his list, like Colenso's sentence, puts last.

Neither man corroborates the other, and neither contradicts the other on any fact except this one. It is worth being exact about what that leaves: the clause is attested by two independent witnesses as having been in the sentence, and its authorship is claimed by one of them alone.

Colenso's 1890 introduction makes an unusual promise. The narrative, he says, was written in 1840 from notes taken at the time; James Busby read the manuscript on the passage to Sydney in March 1840 and added notes in six places; and “on consideration he has decided not to alter it in any instance, so that the narration should stand as Mr. Busby read it, and with his full acquiescence in its correctness.”

The manuscript survives, at the Alexander Turnbull Library, and Judith Ward collated it against the print in a 2011 Massey MA thesis. Her transcription of this passage is the one we have used, because we could not reach the manuscript ourselves. It does not support the promise for this paragraph.

So the fact that a suggestion was made to Williams while he wrote is in the 1840 text. The identification of the suggester as Colenso in the first person, the identification of what was suggested, and the reason for it, are all 1890. Fifty years separate the two, and the author of both had spent the intervening decades in public argument with the Church Missionary Society and its people, including Henry Williams.

We are not able to say that Colenso invented the claim in 1890, and we do not think the documents can establish it. A man writing hurriedly in 1840 in an insertion squeezed down a margin may well have left out what he later put in. The honest statement of the position is narrower and firmer: the earliest surviving text records that somebody made a suggestion to Williams as he wrote, and does not say who or what; the claim that it was Colenso, and that it was this clause, is first attested fifty years later, in a book by Colenso.

The orthography in the last row is a smaller matter and cuts the other way. Colenso's postscript says the old way of writing Māori, without the wh, has been retained, and it plainly has been in the appendices, where the Māori text of the Treaty is printed throughout as wenua, wakaminenga, wakaaro. Inside the narrative the same sentence is modernised. That is a compositor's decision more likely than an author's, and we mention it only because a promise of an unaltered text should be tested where it can be.

Put article into the search above and every one of the five witnesses returns zero. None of them describes the sentence as an article of the treaty, a clause of the treaty, or a part of the treaty. The one person recorded as saying anything at the time about its relation to the treaty is the Governor, and what Williams reports him saying is that it was not in it:

Captain Hobson, with much blandness of gesture and expression observed,—“Most certainly;” and expressed his regret that he had not made known his wish earlier, as “your desire should have been embodied in the treaty.”

That is one sentence in one memoir published thirty-seven years afterwards, and it should be weighed as such. Williams follows it at once with a comment of his own, which the ellipsis in his card above cuts: “Catch the idea. This was to be a stipulation between the Queen of England and the natives of New Zealand.” Hobson's remark and Williams's comment on it bear directly on the question Parliament was asked in 2026.

In February 2026 a New Zealand parliamentary petitions committee, having received a petition initiated by the historian and theologian Alistair Reese with two Tauranga kaumātua, recommended that the government begin a formal policy process on whether to recognise the oral undertaking. The committee did not recommend legislating it. The question is live and unsettled.

The two positions, in their strongest form and in their own words:

• For recognition. Reese: “The Treaty is firstly an oral covenant before it is a written one.” Every signatory affirmed with a tohu or a signature on the strength of what they had heard, not what they had read; the negotiations happened in te reo, aloud; and tiaki is active protection rather than mere tolerance.
• Against. Paul Moon, closing his case with the words of the late Kīngi Tūheitia: “The Treaty is written. That's it.” Most signatories were not present to hear the statement, there is no evidence it was repeated at any other signing, the term “fourth article” does not appear in the record before the 1990s, and Lord Normanby's 1839 instructions had explicitly refused to protect Māori custom in general terms.

Nothing on this page settles that. Reese's argument does not depend on who held the pencil. If the operative instrument was what the assembly heard, then the assembly heard the clause, and both witnesses to the utterance say so. Moon's argument does not depend on it either. The documentary record can tell you where a clause enters a chain of custody; it cannot tell you what a promise made aloud to people who were listening is worth.

There is a deeper limit, and it should be said plainly rather than buried at the bottom. Every witness on this page is a European man writing in English, and four of the five were partisans of one mission or another. The assembly at Waitangi was mostly Māori and the exchange that mattered happened in te reo Māori. Māori accounts of that day exist in forms this instrument cannot read: whaikōrero, whakapapa, the memory carried in hapū and iwi and given in evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal. A page built out of colonial paper will systematically find colonial paper, and a reader should discount it accordingly. What we can honestly claim is narrow: this is what the written witnesses say, and this is how far apart they stand.