A Christian Missionary Was Slaughtered
In some native cultures, Europeans were able to win people over by converting them to Christianity. In 1849, an organization called The North German Missionary Society sent a Protestant missionary named Carl Sylvius Volkner to preach the gospel to the Maori, in hopes that they would listen and become more civilized. They called this new religion “Pai Marire“, which was a mixture of Christianity and the native Maori belief system. At first, it actually worked, and people preferred Pai Marire to Catholicism, which a man named Joseph Marie Garavel had already tried to teach them in the town of Opotiki. So, Garavel was kicked out, and Volkner was allowed to live with one of the tribes. He even built a church where he was able to deliver his sermons to the people.
During this time, the tribes on the East Coast of New Zealand were debating amongst themselves how they should deal with the hostility among them. The inner-tribal warfare had gotten really bad, because some of the groups were working with the English government, while others were staying loyal to their culture. To make matters, worse, the European settlers were spreading diseases like Typhoid Fever, and the natives had no way to combat the disease.
So much was going wrong, they needed someone to blame. They started to suspect that Volkner might be a spy for the English government. Joseph Marie Garavel was still angry about being kicked out of his position, so he lied and said he could confirm that Volkner was truly writing letters to the government and selling them out. The tribe in Opotiki felt betrayed. The beheaded Volkner near the altar of the church, gouged out his eyeballs, and ate them.