Tuai : A Traveller in Two Worlds

April 2025 reprint

In early 1817 Tuai, a young Ngare Raumati chief from the Bay of Islands, set off for England. He was one of a number of Maori who, after encountering European explorers, traders and missionaries in New Zealand, seized opportunities to travel beyond their familiar shores to Australia, England and Europe in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-centuries. They sought new knowledge, useful goods and technologies, and a mutually benefi cial relationship with the people they knew as Pakeha.

On his epic journey Tuai would visit exotic foreign ports, mix with teeming crowds in the huge metropolis of London, and witness the marvels of industrialisation at the Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire. With his lively travelling companion Titere, he would attend fashionable gatherings and sit for his portrait. He shared his deep understanding of Maori language and culture. And his missionary friends did their best to convert him to Christianity. But on returning to his Maori world in 1819, Tuai found there were difficult choices to be made. His plan to integrate new European knowledge and relationships into his Ngare Raumati community was to be challenged by the rapidly shifting politics of the Bay of Islands.

With sympathy and insight, Alison Jones and Kuni Kaa Jenkins uncover the remarkable story of one of the first Maori travellers to Europe.