A ‘Wanton Piece of Business’? Lieutenant-Colonel Foveaux, Lieutenant Finucane and the Massacre of Te Pahi’s Te Puna People

Abstract

This article identifies a substantial intervention of British force into New Zealand affairs in the early nineteenth century, led by senior imperial officials. This intervention resulted in a massacre of scores of people in the Bay of Islands.[i] The two officials in question – recently in the government of New South Wales – were Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Furneaux, and Lieutenant James Finucane. In what is shown to be a conspiracy, the moral and legal responsibility for the massacre was covered up from the Imperial Centre by a range of actors up to and including the Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie.

The Australian Massacre Map project defines massacre as “the indiscriminate killing of six or more undefended people in one operation” (https://humanities.org.au/power-of-the-humanities/the-australian-wars-new-insights-from-a-digital-map/, downloaded 20/08/2024). Many recent New Zealand historians have avoided use of the word in the context of the Boyd deaths. However, it is a meaningful functional description of a certain form of group killing and it is consequently used here. The Boyd massacre was indiscriminate in that (1) numerous defenceless people were killed who bore no active responsibility for the act which apparently triggered the massacre and (2) the killings were disproportionate to the triggering event.