The Völkner Incident (1865)

After New Zealand was named a British crown colony in 1840, Christian missionaries began to disseminate their teachings among the native Maori people. In the early 1860s, a religious-military Maori cult emerged, mingling Christian beliefs with native spiritual elements and urging followers to violently oppose the European presence. In March 1865, members of this Pai Marire movement killed missionary Carl Sylvius Völkner in a gruesome manner, hanging him before supposedly doing what to his body? More...

Although warned to stay away from the town, on his next visit he was captured, put on trial and hanged from a tree, and his body was decapitated an hour later. The Hau Hau prophet, Kereopa Te Rau, re-entered the church and conducted a service with Völkner's head in the pulpit beside him. He plucked out the dead missionary's eyeballs and swallowed them. He said one eye was Parliament and the other the Queen and British law.