Thomas Kendall

Thomas Kendall (13 December 1778 – 6 August 1832) was a New Zealand missionary, recorder of the Māori language, schoolmaster, arms dealer, and Pākehā Māori.

A younger son of farmer Edward Kendall and Susanna Surflit, Thomas Kendall was born in 1778. He grew up in North Thoresby, Lincolnshire, England, where he was influenced by his local minister Reverend William Myers and the evangelical revival within the Anglican Church. Dates of his early careers are disputed. While a teenager he moved with Myers to North Somercotes, where he was assistant schoolmaster and also helped run Myers's 15-acre (6.1 ha) farm. Kendall also tutored a gentleman's children in Immingham, where he met Jane Quickfall. On 21 November 1803, he married her and set up business as a draper and grocer. The business did not prosper.

In 1805, while attempting to sell a cargo of hops in London, Kendall visited Bentinck Chapel, Marylebone. Preaching of Basil Woodd and William Mann changed his outlook. He sold his business and moved his family to live in London, joining the congregation of that church and taking a job as a schoolmaster. In 1808, he decided to become a missionary.

The Anglican Church Missionary Society was, at the time, a powerful organisation with a number of political connections, including the Colonial Secretary. It had recently adopted an experimental policy of sending lay preachers with practical skills to new missions, with the idea of bringing native peoples the benefits of English culture and religion – and the hope that men who could make their living from a trade might be welcomed by indigenous people where theologians were not.

More than 150 years previously, Dutch sailor Abel Tasman and his crew had become the first Europeans to sight New Zealand, and 40 years previously the coast had been mapped by Captain James Cook. However, extensive European contact with the Māori people had only begun in the previous decade. This was mostly by whalers operating out of shore bases; however, a few traders had formed a small settlement at Kororareka in the natural harbour of the Bay of Islands. This had gained a reputation for drunken lawlessness and corruption, with the sailors accused of encouraging prostitution and alcoholism among the Māori as well as kidnapping or press-ganging them. While there was some truth to this the sailors were in a poor position to present a threat to Maori, and lived largely by grace of these martial people. Nevertheless, as far as the Church Missionary Society was concerned, they were heathen souls to be converted.

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