BAUCKE, WILLIAM (1848-1931) was born at the Chatham Islands. His father, Johann Heinrich Christian Baucke, was a native of Bavaria who came to Nelson in 1843 as a member of the Moravian mission of the Evangelical Lutheran Missionary Society and shortly afterwards went to the Chathams. He was naturalised in 1853. Brought up among Maori and Moriori children, William learned to speak both languages with fluency, and in later life was the leading authority on Moriori.

Baucke wished to be a civil engineer, but his father intended him for work in the South Seas mission. At the age of 14 he was sent to Wellington, where he attended public schools for four years. Returning to the Chathams, he worked on a 50,000 acre sheep farm in which his father had an interest. Incidentally he acted as schoolmaster to pakeha and native children, and widened his education to a remarkable degree by private study. An apt linguist, he acquired a good knowledge of French, German, Italian and Greek; to the end of his life he delighted in the Greek classics. On the practical side, smith's work was especially congenial to him and he acquired a competent knowledge of carpentry and navigation. His father having given up the sheep farm, and unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament for redress, William returned to New Zealand and found employment as an interpreter in the King Country, where he spent the remainder of his life. During the war he served under von Tempsky and received a wound in the foot. From his intimate knowledge of the life and thought of the Maori he wrote a series of articles in the New Zealand Herald (which were published in book form in 1905 under the title Where the White Man Treads and reprinted later). At the request of the Bishop Museum (Honolulu) he wrote his memoirs of the Moriori, which the museum published in 1928. This is an important contribution to the ethnology of this extinct race, especially on the linguistic side. Baucke was a man of rugged exterior but exceptionally high intellectual powers, with the pride and sensitiveness of the German. He died at Otorohanga on 6 Jun 1931.

App. H.R., 1885 A1; 1870; New Zealand Herald, pass.; Baucke, op. cit.; Otorohanga Times, 10 Jun 1931.

Reference: Volume 1, page 40

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