Notes on Early Life in New Zealand

George Clarke

First published by J. Walch and Sons in 1903

Digitised and made available online by the University of Auckland Libraries and Learning Services.

Epub © 2013 Early New Zealand Books Collection

ISBN 978-1-927289-49-5

[FRONTISPIECE]

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Rev. George Clarke
Chancellor of the University of Tasmania.

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NOTES
ON
Early Life in New Zealand.
BY
GEORGE CLARKE.
HOBART:
J. WALCH & SONS, WELLINGTON BRIDGE.
1903.

[TITLE VERSO]

Hobart:

J. WALCH AND SONS, PRINTERS, 42 MACQUARIE STREET.

1903.

[PREFACE]

PREFACE.

THIS little book is personal and provisional. These Notes on an early chapter of my life were written ten years ago for the information of family friends, and were not intended for publication. They had to be egoistic to serve their purpose, but I thought they were too much so for general circulation. They are, however, charged with the historical element, from one who was not only behind those early scenes, but who took some effective part in them. They are at any rate the testimony of a witness at first hand, and it seems a pity to throw them into the waste basket of general oblivion. They may be of some little value in the coming years, just as they stand, if the readers only know that they are a family record. I leave my children to dispose of them as they please.

GEORGE CLARKE.
31st March, 1903.

PUBLISHERS' NOTICE.

MR. CLARKE'S little book, "Notes on Early Life in New Zealand," was printed for private circulation, but as others besides his more intimate friends might like to obtain a copy, he has given us permission to dispose of a limited number as if they were published. He writes us: – "At eighty, I suppose I am about the only old man left who can tell of those early days of Maoriland from direct and personal knowledge."

J. WALCH & SONS.

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CHAPTER I.

Early Life in New Zealand.

CHAPTER I.

BY the time a man has lived in this world for seventy years, I think he ought to have become interesting to some one. And if such a life should nearly all have been passed in these Southern lands, he ought to have a story that is worth the telling. And if he happens to be a minister who has been long in the same place, you need not suspect him of inordinate vanity, if he supposes that he himself, more than the public interests with which he had to do, may be rather interesting to his friends. It is with such a combination of claims that I venture to give you a very personal address to-night. In truth, I shrink, as much as most men, from talking about myself in public, but I am here under a sort of pressure. The story I am urged to tell cannot be told at all, in a way to hold your attention, without making myself the centre of the narration. I extract it from a selection of notes that were prepared to please my own family, and they allow me discretion to take from them what I think is within the limits of propriety.

Many friends tell me that one who has been at the beginning of such things as I have seen, may be allowed to say what in other circumstances might well be kept to the knowledge of one's more intimate circle, and, therefore, in deference to their wishes, I have consented to give you an account of what I had to do with the early history of New Zealand. I do it humbly, and with no disposition to show myself other than I actually was, but I know that, for good or evil, I had very much to do with the making of New Zealand history, and with bringing Maori and Pakeha to terms of mutual understanding.

The New Zealand of to-day is one of the fairest and most flourishing colonies of the British Empire, and I can simply say

that all we see there now, has grown up within my personal recollection. I have long been detached from New Zealand affairs, but in various ways am still bound to the early scene of my interests by ties, only less strong than those which bind me to Tasmania. I seem to myself to have lived three lives – one in New Zealand, one in Tasmania, and one (of shorter duration) in England. Their associations are altogether separate, and though I am conscious of personal identity running through all, it is difficult for my friends in one place to link on to their knowledge the associations of the other. Being in for it, I think I may as well begin at the beginning. You may, if you like, take the notices of my childhood, as an old fellow's prattle about things that were once very interesting to him, and which he is apt to fancy may be nearly as interesting to the second and third generation of them that follow after him. But still I can hardly leave them out for whatever they may be worth.

About the year 1800, English whalers and sealers began to frequent the coast of New Zealand. The Maoris were anxious to procure firearms, and many of them, fond of adventure, shipped as sailors, for the chance of getting them. These men visited Sydney, and, in most cases, were tolerably treated, in some with great violence and injustice. There was a Bay of Islands Chief, named Ruatara, who, in the course of his wanderings, visited England under promise that he should be presented to the King. On arriving, however, in London, he was shamefully treated, and thrust ashore without wages, to shift for himself, and he nearly died from neglect and illness. By some means passage to Sydney was obtained for him in the convict transport, the "Ann," and with nothing but a few rags on his back, he went on board, and sailed to the far South – that was in the year 1810.

Among the passengers on board the "Ann," was the Rev. Samuel Marsden, the Chaplain of the settlement at Botany Bay. Marsden was greatly taken with Ruatara, pitied his misfortunes, admired his intelligence, was attracted by his disposition, and showed him great kindness. On landing in Sydney Mr. Marsden

took him for some time to his own house, a kindness which Ruatara never forgot, and which stood us in good stead for the years that were to come. The interest Marsden took in his Maori friend on that voyage, was in fact the grain of mustard seed that grew into the New Zealand Mission, and that prepared the way more than anything else for the peaceful colonization of the country thirty years afterwards. You never know what will come out of personal kindness and consideration. It is the most fruitful of all seeds that we can sow in the world, and you never know whereunto the thing will grow. Before Marsden's arrival in Sydney, apart from the whaling and sealing expeditions that frequented the coast of New Zealand, there had grown up the Kauri trade. Kauri was in very high request at that time as the best known timber for the masts and spars of ships, and it was preferred before all other kind of timber, for the use of the British navy. Kauri was only found in the Northern part of the island, and it was most plentiful in the district between the Bay of Islands and the North Cape. Among other vessels in this trade, was one with a large crew, named the "Boyd." In 1810 she made a voyage to Wangaroa, a fine harbour to the North of the Bay of Islands, to procure a cargo of the New Zealand pine. The "Boyd" had engaged some Maoris in Sydney to help in procuring a cargo of Kauri timber, and on the voyage the captain had tied a chief of high rank, named Tara (the sailors called him George), to the gangway, and flogged him twice on the bare back, with a cat-o'-nine-tails, because he was too lazy or too ill to keep on working the ship. To a Maori Chief the disgrace was worse than death. The man vowed vengeance for the insult, and when the vessel arrived at Wangaroa, the whole crew were murdered, except a woman and three children, and the ship was plundered and burnt. Tara's joy over his glut of vengeance did not last long. Amongst the cargo brought on shore, were a good many casks of gunpowder, and while Tara was smoking near the haul it exploded, and he and many around him were forthwith blown into infinite space.

Five English whalers, shortly after the "Boyd" massacre, visited the Bay of Islands, and under the mistaken impression that a Chief named Te Paki was concerned with the massacre (he had really tried to stop it) they armed all their boats and attacked Te Paki's village, killed all the inhabitants, burnt the houses and food stores, and smashed up their canoes. Te Paki, himself, fled severely wounded, and was killed by the Wangaroa natives because he did not take part in the massacre. Not long after, a neighbouring tribe, in sheer exasperation at the slaughter of Te Paki's people, attacked a whale boat, and killed and cooked several of the sailors. The Bay of Islands now became a very dangerous place to visit, and only now and then would an English vessel venture to anchor in the port at all, but they surprised villages, lured the canoes to come alongside, and then sunk them, carried off the women, and did such things as have been reported of the most lawless of traders in the labour traffic of our day, and which have led to so many murders in the islands of the Pacific. Among these whalers were not a few escaped ruffians from the penal settlement of Port Jackson, and you may be sure that they would not be likely to pay too much regard to the laws of justice and humanity, in their dealings with the Maoris. The competition between the ruthless savage, and the civilized villain ran high, and it was hard to say which had the best or the worst of it.

The intercourse of the whalers and the natives for the next four years was very troubled; there was much treachery and bloodshed on both sides, and Governor Macquarie tried by proclamation and by exacting heavy bonds from all ships going from Sydney to New Zealand, to stay the horrors that were done. Mr. Marsden, the Colonial Chaplain, and the founder of the New Zealand mission, represented strongly to the C. M. Society the growing evils of the traffic, and commended the intelligence of the natives and the possibility of teaching them Christian and civilized ways. In answer to his importunity, two laymen, Messrs. Hall and King, were at length sent out, and

became the first missionaries who found a resting place at Rangihou, in the Bay of Islands. That was the first Missionary Station, which they founded in the year 1815.

In September, 1822, my father and mother arrived at Hobart, in the "Heroine," as missionaries, on their way to Sydney, and from thence to New Zealand. Hopkins, Mather, G. C. Clarke (well remembered by some of us but no relation of the family). Walker, Worthy, Barrett, and other well-known Tasmanian colonists were fellow passengers. My father went on to Sydney and was detained at Paramatta for over a year, no opportunity offering of getting to the Bay of Islands. During this time he had charge of the establishment of Aborigines at Black Town, and it was during his sojourn there, that the speaker made his first appearance in this troubled world, at Parramatta, 29th June, 1823. There is one dear old friend among us who I know from hearsay, though I daresay she has forgotten it, used to go with her mother to see my mother, and, as a very little girl, found pleasure in occasionally nursing the baby. I refer to Mrs. Sprent, daughter of Mrs. Oakes, the first-born of Australian children.

Some time in 1824 my father embarked on board a French corvette, "La Coquine," under the command of Captain (afterwards Admiral) D'Urville, the celebrated circumnavigator. Many years afterwards I met the first Lieutenant Barrard (I think then Commodore) at the French settlement at Akaroa, who told me that I was such a nuisance with my squalling, that more than once the officers were on the point of pitching me overboard. He was glad now that they had not done it.

On arrival at the Bay of Islands, the parents and the baby went up an arm on the western side of the bay, some fifteen miles long to the Keri Keri, the new station that had just been formed by Messrs. Buller & Kemp.

At that time there was a population of many thousands of Maoris on either side of the inlet, where all is silent and deserted now.

The Keri Keri was the headquarters of the Chief, Hongi, or, according to his full name, Hongi Ika ("Smell Fish"). There is a fair summary of this man's character, "ferocious to enemies and faithful to friends," and of his stormy and bloodthirsty career in Rusden (Vol. I.) He swept through the island like a consuming fire. I have a dream-like recollection of being carried by my nurse into his pah, and of his taking me in his arms. The Keri Keri was my baby world. It is a circle of low, bare hills, surrounding a beautiful little basin of water, in which a river, some forty yards wide, pours over a ledge of rock in a fall of eight or nine feet into the tidal water. The house stood by the waterside, a few yards from the fall, and stands there still. I have a photo of it as the oldest European house in New Zealand. It is built of heart of Kauri, and preserved itself well. My earliest child years were spent there. It now belongs to the Kemps. None of the hills are more than half a mile off from the centre of the enclosure, and they framed in nearly all that I knew from observation of the habitable globe. I could now throw a stone a quarter of the way across the basin, but it once seemed to me as great a spread of water as the widest part of the Derwent between Hobart and the Iron Pot.

I have visited it several times since, and the contrast between my earliest and latest impressions is like looking at a landscape, first through one end of a telescope, and then through the other.

I have never heard such music as the sound of the waterfall near which our house was built. The entrance to this basin from the sea is by a channel like the three sides of the letter Z, and you see nothing of the enclosure until you turn the corner and find yourself in it. Just at the entrance, on the side of the basin opposite to our house, was Hongi's famous pah Kororipo, surrounded on three sides by water, and guarded on the land side by long stretches of mangrove swamp that no enemy could cross. It was also defended by a deep fosse, and a strong stockade. There was a perfect network of pits and palisade ways inside. It is all gone now, except the remains of the

trenches, which I examined as a stronghold, and greatly admired last time I visited the place, four or five years ago. As I knew it when a child, it was full of houses, and was impregnable to any assault of Maori warfare in those days.

Let me try and give you some idea of this Maori fortress, as I knew it in its strength. It was a double stockade of upright posts from fifteen to eighteen feet high, with a chain of pits between the two fences, and another chain of pits inside the second of them. The posts at the angles, and at certain intermediate distances, were, in fact, logs about two feet in diameter, the intervals being split logs, and they were surmounted by grotesque and carved hideous human figures, mostly head, with goggle eyes and protruding tongues, all looking outward as if in defiance of any hostile approach. So far as the faces are concerned, I have seen something like them in old English buildings. They have their counterpart in the gargoyles or projecting waterspouts which the old monks delighted to carve into contorted and agonised griffins, and dwarfs, and devils, squeezed down by the roof and struggling out of the super-incumbent weight that seemed to crush them. In the centre of the stockade was the ware puni, the Chief's state house. It was a wonderful specimen of Maori art. The beams and rafters inside were stained red, and were elaborately carved throughout after the general pattern of the moko or tatoo on a chieftain's face. The wooden posts which supported the ridgepole were human figures after the manner of the osiride pillars in an Egyptian temple, or the caryatides round the temple of Poseidon, at Athens, though of course they were in wood, and far ruder in execution than the works of even the remotest Egyptian antiquity. I have seen many such chiefs' houses since, but none at all approaching the ware puni of Hongi for its elaborate decorations and carvings. Such specimens of Maori architecture have long since disappeared, and the fragments of carving that one sometimes meets with in museums give but a very poor notion of what was common enough in my early days. I could not have been more than five years old

when all the artistic glory of Hongi's house passed away. I remember standing in our verandah and watching the conflagration which consumed it all, and I remember the comparatively paltry style in which the pah was rebuilt.

I hope you will be tolerant, but my childish recollections of the Keri Keri must necessarily take the form of prattle, and yet they are the recollections of such things as go to the making of every man's particular life. It was a time when fishing for sprats and eels seemed the noblest occupation of humanity. I had to do most of my fishing with bent pins which, in those days were so precious a commodity, that if the stock ran out you had to send to Sydney for more, and were very lucky if you could renew your supply within three months of the order.

I had no difficulty at all in believing that "it was a sin to steal a pin." A real fish-hook was a rare treasure, and it made me as happy as a king. No prohibition would keep me from the water. I have a lively recollection of squatting on a stone (it has been maliciously suggested that it was a Sunday) in the act of hauling in a small eel, when I was hitched by the slack of my lower garments behind and pitched head over heels into the river by a newly arrived priggish old missionary puritan, whom to this day I have never forgiven, but my dear mother thought it a shame, and told my tormentor so, and she gave me more indulgence in consequence of my ducking.

I have a faint recollection of the death of Hongi. Some time in 1827 he made an expedition to Wangaroa to settle a quarrel in which he was involved with a closely related tribe, and was shot through the lungs in a skirmish. Immediately afterwards the Wesleyan station at Wangaroa was plundered and burnt, and the fugitives, among whom were the late Nathaniel Turner and his wife, came twenty roadless miles, utterly destitute, to the Keri Keri settlement. Many of you will have a kindly memory of these good people. They deserved the reverence that they received among the fathers and pastors of the Wesleyan Communion in these Southern lands, and it was they who laid the

foundations of much that has now grown into superstructure in all these colonies.

I was about five years old, but I can remember joining the rest of our people, carried on my nurse's back, and crossing the river to meet the jaded and fugitive travellers, and bring them to our house. What struck me most was Mrs. Turner – it could have been no one else – with bare and bleeding feet, and but poorly and shiveringly clad. I am not sure, but I think Anne Turner, afterwards Mrs. Harcourt, was the baby in her arms.

The years 1827-8 were times of great peril to the missionaries. Hongi died. My father and Mr. Kemp determined to hold on to their post, but made an arrangement secretly to send off the wives and children to the Bay of Islands. For some days before my little head had been puzzling over mysterious hiding and burying of things, and I fancied that if I only had leave to hunt, I might find all sorts of treasures in secret places. Indeed the notion clung to me for many years afterwards, and even last time I was in New Zealand (a pretty oldish man), as I wandered over the old house, I noted what I long ago used to consider the most likely places for a treasure quest – under the stairs, down the cellar, under the hearthstone, in the lining of the walls, and so on. It is hard to reproduce those old sensations.

I was not much over four years old, but I remember a time between midnight and morning, being lifted out of my cot and told to be very still. In the dim light of a lantern I saw my poor mother enveloped in a cloak, and quietly sobbing, then father wrapping me in a thick blanket, and taking me in his arms, they crept stealthily out of the house and made their way in the starlight to a boat, with muffled oars, under the rock, Mother, and I and baby Sam, were deposited in the stern sheets, and we glided silently to the entrance, and passed the sleeping pah, beyond which I can say nothing of my own knowledge, though I have been told that we went on to Paihia, in the Bay. Hongi died commending the missionaries to the care of his people, and his last words were: "Be brave! Be brave!" The

crisis was over in a few days, and we came back, and the disinterring of hidden treasures in the following weeks kept me in a condition of strained expectation that was altogether a great delight. I remember it with feeling if no one else does.

I think I began to learn to read very early, and I can still remember the lesson books I conned when three or four years old. One was a great favourite, which I learnt by heart, for I was a child of one book, as most of us were in those times. It had a fine, clear print, and my favourite lesson began, "Hark! it is the huntsman's horn," &c. The other, a more advanced book, would hardly pass with the Board of Education. One sentence ran: "It is wicked to look at the sun, and to point at it with the finger," and my conscience was greatly exercised to find out wherein the wickedness lay. I began learning Lindley Murray's grammar, and though I hated it, soon learnt it all by heart.

It must have been soon after our flight, on the eve of Hongi's death (1828), that the Rev. W. Yate joined the Mission and became for a long time an inmate of our house. I will tell, hereafter, how, after losing sight or report of the gentleman for many years, I met him again like a man from the dead, or who had dropped from the clouds, in the streets of Dover. Shortly after his arrival at Keri Keri, a sister was born into the family, who died in three months from whooping cough. An incident, associated with her death, made a lasting impression upon me. It always comes back to me with the sight and smell of cabbage roses, and is a sort of faint musk to my memory. My father had a short time before got a box of plants from Sydney, among them some precious cabbage roses, the first I suppose that were grown in New Zealand. Cabbage roses are best of all roses. I have heard of a thousand diggers in Colorado coming to look at an English daisy. My father carefully planted and tended them until the buds began to form. I remember his taking me by the hand, nipping off a half open bud, and then our walking into the study and his putting the flower in the dead baby's hand. I

cannot be sure, but I should think that was the first of our sweet English roses that ever bloomed in New Zealand. Then, too, by way of improving the occasion, I had to learn a hymn beginning –

"Tell me, Mamma, and must I die

"One day, as little baby did?"

that, I don't think I have seen for over sixty years, but I have not quite forgotten it yet.

In the end of 1828 the first missionary "Huihuinga," or gathering of their adherents, was held at Paihia. The missionaries of all the stations, their families, and their Maori followers, all came together and had examinations and services, and kept high festival. I remember, because the Rev. Henry Williams – who had fought gallantly at Copenhagen, and on board the "Endymion" when she took the "President" – an old navy salt, had planted four carronades on the hill at the back of the station for show, not for defence, and I was frightened out of all my little wits by the banging of their guns over my head in honour of the meeting. The noise ended in grief, for a young Englishman in his eagerness to keep the guns going, loaded before the remains of the old cartridge were cleared out, and he, with his ramrod, was blown down the hill, losing some of his fingers, burning his face, temporarily blinding his eyes, and suffering other bodily delapidation.

Our parents did the best they could to keep us out of the sights and sounds of Maori savagery, and though the knocking of unfortunate slaves and prisoners of war on the head, and then putting them in the oven, was an every day occurrence around us, especially at the pah opposite, and on the return of a war expedition, I never, as a child, saw an actual murder, but I have watched the war canoes on their return from fighting expeditions with loads of baked humanity and crowds of unfortunate prisoners, who were just as likely as not to be massacred on landing by any of the fierce men or fiercer women who had lost father or son, brother or husband, in the battle. One evening when a fleet of war canoes returned with a score of

prisoners in each of them, I was looking across the water at a scuffle on the landing. Fortunately it was getting too dark to see plainly, but I did see the poor creatures jump out of the canoe with their thick mats thrown over their heads – which was always what a Maori did when he expected a blow from a "mere" or a tomahawk – and then there was a crowd and a rush, and yells, and the scream of a single fury rising high above all. I was sent to bed and kept out of Maori company all the next day, but managed to find out that the wife of some chief who had been killed in battle, rushed with a tomahawk upon the wretched captives and managed to kill eight or ten of them before she was stopped. She then deliberately strangled herself in a paroxysm of rage, grief, and despair, and more prisoners were sacrificed and drowned that night as "utu," or revenge. I once saw a procession of over twenty women from the canoes pass through the settlement, each with a heavy basket on her back containing human flesh.

The murderous expeditions, begun by Hongi, kept up the supply, and the Maoris had not yet learned to be in the least ashamed of it. Even in times of peace it was not possible to escape the sight.

Many of the missionaries' servants were, in fact, war slaves, and it was often anxious work to keep them out of their owners' hands.

Fortunately, from the very beginning of their intercourse with the Maoris, the missionaries managed to keep the interior of their houses sacred from all intruders. Wild Maoris might cluster like bees at the windows, and flatten their noses on the glass in trying to see what was going on within, but they never entered a room without invitation. I fancy that there was some superstitious fear of the consequences of intrusion almost equivalent to a violation of their own tapu; at any rate, it often served us in good stead. Many a time when some cannibal friend was known to be prowling about the village, my mother has locked a poor slave girl in her room, or put a man

into a cupboard, till the prowler was known to have gone. We children had to learn to keep secrets at such times from the Maoris. I remember, however, in one case at Paihia, where a slave was locked into a room and put under the bed for twelve hours, when a murderous old fellow named Marupo was after him, yet though he knew he was there, he did not venture to break in. One of my most soft spoken, but most gluttonous friends, was Tareha, the hugest man I ever saw, and whose usual residence was some miles down the Keri Keri river. Whenever he paid us a visit there was a scramble to put every slave in the place out of his way. Fortunately he was so fat and inactive a man, that he could not run his victims down. He used to try all sorts of wiles, grim enough, but very amusing, to get some unsuspecting wretch within the reach of his tremendous arm, for he knew that he could not pursue him. I once asked old Rauparaha how he made his way from the banks of the Thames to the neighbourhood of Otago, and he simply said: "Why, of course, I ate my way through," which was almost literally true. In some unaccountable way, two or three of my Hobart friends have got the impression that it was I who said this, and not Rauparaha. I do not in the least believe the theory, as far as the New Zealanders are concerned, that cannibalism had its origin in their craving for animal food. The Maoris had an abundance of fish, captured vast numbers of birds and kiores (indigenous rats), and reared dogs, like the Chinese, for food. It was simply their half religious notion that it would appease their ancestors by a complete revenge, and that it was the most contemptuous settlement of the whole score of wrong, that a man, or a man's father might have received from another man, or from his fathers. No doubt in some cases it did develope into a real unsophisticated appetite for human flesh, but I think that such cases were altogether rare and exceptional.

At this time (1828) Maoris of the highest rank did not disdain to enter into a qualified service of the missionaries, prompted by the desire of learning our ways. Harriet, the daughter of

Hongi, who was by descent on both sides one of the highest ladies in the land, and her cousin and future husband, John Heke, were in the family of the Williams and the Kemps, the one as a housemaid at the sewing class or wash tub, and the other as a general sort of upper servant. They were very docile, though they never forgot their high birth. I have often, as a boy, played with Heke, who attached himself to me up to the end of the war, and with the full knowledge that I was on the other side. The rank of these people made it necessary to be polite. In giving our orders, they were always in the form of invitations, and if they did wrong we could go no farther than express our disgust and call them to their senses by appealing to their honour as gentlemen and ladies, or to the dictates of the universal conscience.

My mother used to tell of her first batch of bread at the Keri Keri. After it was made, she put it into a portable oven and set a very great young lady to watch it. In due time she told the girl to take it out and bring it into the pantry. She brought something like an ill-cooked batter pudding, steaming with an intolerable odour which made my mother's heart sink. The explanation was that the girl had a fine fish, half dried and very odorous, and she thought that "Mother Karaka" would not mind her putting it on top of this queer stuff, bread, where it would cook so nicely. What was the use of getting out of temper about such things? The missionaries took it merely as all in their bargain, though they often had to grin over its humour and inconvenience.

In 1830, Mr. Yate had to go to Sydney, about carrying some translations through the press, and kindly took me with him.

At that time hundreds of blackfellows could be seen in the streets of Sydney, and one could see at a glance that they were a lower race than the Maoris by many degrees.

I was a little over six, and stayed with Mr. Marsden and Mr. Hassall for six months, having a very good time of it, and then returned home. There is somewhere an effigy of me at this age with a blue jacket, to which the nether garments were buttoned

outside, and a frill round the neck. The precocity of collars in small boys was an outrage on propriety that had not yet come into fashion, and the frill made me thought rather fast for assuming such frippery.

It was in the same year, 1830, that the Waimate station was formed. Hitherto, the mission stations had been by the seaside. This was the first advance inland. My father and Mr. Hamlin cut a road – ten miles – for drays, and built several bridges, and with the steady work of the Maoris, in parties under their direction, they finished it in three months. They then built three small cottages, and when all was ready, two families emigrated from the Keri Keri, and another from Paihia, and settled down in the new station. I remember the flitting well. My mother rode a famous little white pony known as "Lion," the most vicious and long-lived of all ponies I have known. My younger brothers and sisters were carried, and I walked part of the way and rode pick-a-back on a stalwart Maori's shoulder for the rest.

In 1832 Mr. Yate again took me to Sydney, and after a short stay there I was sent on to Hobart Town by a wretched little schooner called the "Admiral Gifford." It was a long and tedious passage. We were half-starved, and when I landed, on a Sunday in January, 1833, I came to the house in Patrick-street now occupied by Mr. Charles Walch, miserably weak and ill after the voyage.

Just a word of explanation as to how this came about. My dear mother, and my wife's dear mother, were closer friends than most sisters are. Mrs. Hopkins could not bear the notion of her friend's child being brought up through all his boyhood with no better surroundings than those of early missionary life in New Zealand, and she affectionately pressed upon my mother the duty of sending me away. She promised, and most sacredly she kept her promise, that she would be a mother to me if I could only come for three or four years and be educated with her own children, and thus, through her importunity, I got my first introduction to Tasmania.

On that first Sunday I went to church with the other children. It was the Scotch Kirk that is now the school attached to St. Andrew's. I was very ill, and had as hard a time of it to get over my trouble as in emergencies most stray young boys know. I remember the old faces – the Walkers, Youngs, Gunns, Facys, Turnbulls, and the rest. They have all long since passed away, but their descendants to the second and third generation are among us still, and for the sake of the old past they are all very interesting to my feeling. In the beginning of July I went to school at New Town, at "Summerhome," which has been for so many years our family nest, and made my first acquaintance with the forebears of my friend, Mr. Justice Giblin; but I need not take note of my early Tasmanian life, as Tasmania is not New Zealand.

On August 4th, 1836, I left Hobart Town to meet Mr. Yate at Sydney, and to return with him to New Zealand. On arrival, however, at Sydney, things were in great confusion. Charges of irregularity were brought against Mr. Yate, affecting his clerical character, which were so serious as to prevent his return to New Zealand, and he resigned his connection with the C. M. Society. He returned to England, and from that time to 1848 (twelve years) I never heard a word about him, except a vague rumour that he was preaching at some obscure village in Wales. I may as well finish at once what I have to say about this gentleman, whose faults, whatever they have been, could not quench my personal love and loyalty. Happily, I knew next to nothing of the gross charges or of their merits that had been brought against him. When I went to England, in the "Wellington," in 1848, we were becalmed in the Straits of Dover, and Mr. Charles Seal, a fellow passenger, suggested that we had better land and take the train for London next day. We did so, left our traps at the hotel, and spent our time till evening in strolling over the Castle and seeing the lions of the place. On our return, when within twenty yards of the hotel, I heard Mr. Seal muttering over and over again, as was his wont when anything was on his mind.

"Rev. W. Yate." "What do you mean?" I asked. "There," he said, pointing with his finger to a brass plate on the next door, "Rev. W. Yate." While we were getting our dinner I asked the waiter about the clergyman next door, and he told me he had only been in Dover a year; that he was the clergyman of the Mariners' Church; and that he was exceedingly popular, especially among sailors; had a very large congregation; and then added: "He often comes in, Sir, of an evening, and most likely he will drop in for a few minutes to-night." I asked where he had come from; the waiter did not know, but thought he had been some time in "furrin parts." And so in the evening Mr. Yate came in. It was indeed a strange meeting. I recognised him in a moment, called him aside, and said: "Mr. Yate, do you know me?" "No, Sir, I cannot say I do." "I am George Clarke, the little boy you took to Sydney sixteen years ago." I thought the poor man would have fallen to the ground, but after some talk he asked me to go home with him to supper. We spent some hours in recalling old scenes and old faces. Next morning I went to breakfast with him, and his sister took me aside and told me that he had done nothing but pace up and down his room all night long. After I was settled at college, I came two or three times to see him. He died about thirteen years ago, greatly respected by the people of Dover for his consistent and benevolent character. He was a clergyman who had laid himself out especially for the help of sailors, and who had been on several occasions very active in looking after shipwrecked people.

But now to return to the end of 1836, or rather the beginning of 1837, when I got back to Waimate (age over 14).

I went to school again, and began to take to the Greek and Latin classics – alas! I have nearly forgotten them – with so much interest, that my tutor, Mr. Williams (afterwards Bishop of Waiapu), pressed me to go on. I developed a greed for reading of all kinds, except novels, which were not allowed by our mentors, though we managed to read them surreptitiously, and got started in a direction from which I have never wholly swerved to this day.

Two years after – 1838 – Bishop Broughton visited New Zealand, and among other things, confirmed all the children of the missionaries above twelve years old. It was at this time that my old friend and tutor, Mr. Hadfield, late Bishop of Wellington, was received into priests orders at Waihia, the finest missionary in some respects that has ever been sent to New Zealand.

Towards the end of the next year Mr. Williams left Waimate to form a new station at Turanga (Poverty Bay), and persuaded me to go with him and to have a year's reading. When our vessel reached Poverty Bay the natives came off in crowds and landed us at the mouth of the river. After we got on shore the captain was uneasy about the position of the vessel, and was taking up anchor to shift to the other side of the roadstead, when somehow the Maoris got the notion that he wanted to make off with their missionary's goods. They at once overpowered the crew, cleared every bit of cargo out of the vessel, and took the whole on shore in their war canoes. The consequence was that the ship's copper was some feet out of water, and they had to make to the north shore for ballast to keep her steady. Fortunately the weather was fine. We really had nothing to do with it, but there was a great row, and the charter for the voyage expired in a storm of abusive slang, that might have unnerved Mark Twain himself. I spent a very happy year and a half at Turanga. The natives had built Mr. Williams a large house, nicely thatched, and with the walls inside beautifully lined with upright, pencil-like-reeds. The position was half a mile from a very large Pah, and about eight miles inland from the beach. We had little peace for the first week. Hundreds of natives surrounded the house and all night long kept shouting in unison h-a ha, h-e he, hi, h-o ho, h-u hu, and so on through half the primer spelling book. I think they fancied that it was part of the missionary's "karakia" or worship. We had brought down with us a small primer in sheets, and had given away half a dozen copies, and this was the result.

It will be readily understood that the elder members of the missionary families had to take their share in teaching the natives

to read, write, and cypher, as well as to conduct Bible classes on the Sunday. I have often taught a class in which two generations sat together. The language of the Maoris, like the other dialects of Western Polynesia, has sprung from the Malay. Its alphabet contains only fourteen letters, and every syllable ends with a vowel sound. It is to Dr. Lee, Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, in the early twenties, that we owe the inestimable boon of Maori orthography. If you know the sound you can learn the whole art of correct spelling in an hour. The Maoris never make mistakes in spelling their language, incredible as it may seem to us, who have to learn our own orthography with so much labour and patience. The young people, perhaps, would like to hear the sound and swing of the language. Well, I will give you a very ancient "haka," or war-song of the Ngatitoa tribe, as it will not take two minutes to recite. You must take it, however, as said and not as sung. It is difficult to show the measure of the rhythm, but you must imagine that it should be so delivered as to mark the step and swing of the tribal war dance.

Ka tito au
Ka tito au
Ka tito au ki
A Kupe
Te tangata
Nana-i tope tope
Te wenua.
Tu Ke, Kaputi
Tu Ke, Mana
Tau Ke Aropaoa
Ko nga To hu-Tena
O taku tupuna
O Kupe
Na na-i wakatomene
Titapu-a
Ka toro ke i au
Te wenua nei.

The subject of the song is Kupe, the heroic and mythical ancestor of the tribe, who, according to the legend, separated the North Island from the South by what we call Cook Strait, and planted the adjacent islets in the ocean.

The words may be thus roughly Englished: –

"I chant a song, I chant a song,
I chant a song of Kupe;
He was the man
Who sliced the lands,
Apart stands Kaputi,
Apart stands Mana,
Beyond lies Aropaoa,
These are the wonders
Of my forefather
Kupe,
He who engulfed
The place of Titapu,
And hither I come,
To fire this land."

The I of course is not the individual but the collective tribe.

Here, too, is an ancient love song that shows the sentimental side of the Maori character. I will give you the song first in Maori, and then render it into English as closely as I can. It is more than fifty years since I learnt it, and I have not heard it since, but I think it must then have been at least 50 years old. It is old and genuine Maori, untouched by Christian ideas, or by the after-thought of following generations, or the corruption of changing fashions of speech: –

"E to e te Ra! rehu-rehu ki te Rua,
Ringi-ringi a wai te roimata i aku kamo,
He mea mahue au i te hikoinga wae,
Nou e Tarati e wakangaro atu ana.
Nga Kurae koe, Wai-ohipa ra,
Waka-ahu ahi ana te taraki Mitiwai.
Kei raro taku Atua, e aroha nei au;
Kati te wairua te mahi te haramai,
Kia mutu ai ranei te rangikanehetanga."

SONG OF THE SETTING SUN.

Go down, O sun, sink away to the Rua,
Thou pourest like water the tears from my eyes,
Belated thing am I in the stepping on of the feet
Of thine, O Tarati, fading from sight.
At the cliffs art thou, on to Wai-ohipa there,
All glowing like fire is the ridge of Mitiwai.
Gone Below is my divine one, whom still I am loving,
Let thy spirit cease from constantly coming,
So perchance may end this passion of longing.

"The Rua" is the under-world tunnel, into which, like the ancient Egyptians, the Maoris thought the setting sun entered at dusk, and travelled along through the night, to emerge again at the Eastern portal in the morning. The play between the setting sun and the setting love is too delicate to be easily translated into our language, but I have tried to give a hint of it in the rendering, which is as literal as even a slavish expert could demand. We think of the diversity of human nature and not enough of its sameness. Human nature is, at the heart of it, the same in all nations, and in all ages. Even a savage song like this may remind us that "He hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation."

My fidus Achates at this time was Henry Williams, nephew of my old friend, the Bishop, and now a member of the New Zealand Parliament. I am afraid that we boys sometimes presumed on the deference, not to say, awe, of our savage admirers. The Pah near by swarmed with lean and hungry curs, who prowled about at nightfall in search of food, and if they could not find a bone, did not mind walking off with our boots; and then we had a few poultry that we had brought with us, and that we could not afford to lose. We put the case before the chiefs and got their reluctant consent to kill any offender we could catch on the premises after nightfall. So we constructed a box-trap, and often disposed of three or four of the marauders in the course of the night. One chief quietly encouraged us, as he wanted the skins of our prey to make a fashionable Maori robe for himself, and he often came to discharge with very good will the office of executioner. One night he came in great glee and said: "there is a fine fellow in the trap as black as night; I don't think there is a white hair about him, let me knock him on the head." We said "yes." There was a blow, the dragging out of the victim, and then the bitter cry: "Why this is my dog." He was too ashamed to reproach us. However, that made him reckless, and the creatures

began to disappear at such a rate that we were obliged in prudence to hold our hand. Turanga was famous at that time for its innumerable ducks and water fowl, and we often, after an hour's sport, brought home a dozen at a time. I bought a small canoe for duck shooting, and, thinking it as easy to sail as to paddle, rigged up a mast, and set a sail not much larger than a pocket handkerchief. The canoe was very crank, and the sail not very manageable, and though I could swim a little I was once nearly drowned, and was twice or three times upset.

About four miles from our house, there was a great preserve of wood pigeons, that was made as tapu as the native chiefs could devise. At a certain season, the pigeons came in vast flocks to feed on the white berries of the Ti tree (bracoena) and got so heavy with fat that they could hardly fly from one tree to another. No gun was allowed in the place. The Maoris, with a long slender rod and a slip noose at the end, squatted under the leaves and noiselessly slipped the noose over the necks of the stupid pigeons as they were feeding. We wanted to have a shot, and argued for permission, on the ground that we were proof against all harm from the most dreadful tapu that the "tohunga" could weave. They did not see it, but they did not positively forbid us. It was a risky thing to do, but we went. We gave two or three hours to the sport, and then desisted, because our friends were getting annoyed. However, we brought away two such bags of birds as we fairly staggered under. We did not venture to repeat the experiment upon the temper of the tribe and were rather ashamed of the rashness and folly of our adventure.

In the early intercourse of the Pakehas and Maoris, many, if not most, of their quarrels rose from sheer ignorance of each other's ways.

One very frequent cause was the inadvertent or careless violation of the laws of tapu. The "burial places," or rather "sacred groves," in which the bones of the dead were deposited, were carefully guarded against violation. It was death for a Maori to go into them at any time, except when the funeral rites were being

performed, and though the rule was relaxed as far as we (the missionary families) were concerned, it was easy to give offence by straying into these grounds, and still more by carrying into them any particle of food. We had to be very careful about the approach to these places. To hold a picnic under the delicious shade would have been as deadly a sin as if we had committed a murder. Sometimes a chief was under the tapu vow for weeks or months together; during that time he dare not touch any food or food-vessel with his hand, and whatever he ate or drank was put by an attendant into his mouth. To touch his person with any kind of cooked provisions was a mortal insult. To spill a calabash of water upon him was nearly as bad. Especially the head of the chief was tapu. To say even in joke: "I will break your head," was one of the forms of "kanga," or cursing. Nay, the word for the head of a beast, and the word for the head of a man, were different, and to substitute one for the other was a great offence. To burn the hair of a chief when his head was cropped, would be awful sacrilege. The possessive pronouns as applied to his limbs or to his property are different. One of the earliest tragedies of our intercourse with the natives, the massacre of Captain Furneaux's men, in 1773, arose from an unintentional violation of the tapu. I heard the story from a very old man when I was once on a visit to Blind Bay. He said that when the "Adventure's" boat landed in the cove, the men sat down to their meal, and one of them refused either to return or to pay for the stone hatchet of one of the Maoris; and that the latter snatched up a piece of bread and ran off. The white man ran after him with some kind of tin can in his hand, and coming back to a group of the natives sitting round the boat, he, sailorlike, put the tin, as if it were a hat, on the head of a chief. It had contained food, and it was to Maori feeling a very gross insult, and that, he said, was the direct cause of the massacre that followed. Of course, from our having grown up among this people, we became acquainted with their superstitions and prejudices, and we took care not to offend them, if we could help

it, by carelessly disregarding them. This was one thing that established us in their confidence. We became at last recognized peacemakers, in their inter-tribal quarrels. Even if fighting was going on, our persons were sacred, and we were allowed to pass to and fro, between the contending parties, they sometimes deliberately suspending their fire, that we might pass unharmed.

While I was at Turanga, Mr. Williams projected a tramp to the East Cape, and on to nearly as far as Opotiki, and asked me to join him. No missionaries had as yet got a footing along this coast, but a number of slaves had been released in the North, and had found their way back to their own tribes. Some of them were partially instructed in Christian doctrine, and, acting as teachers, persuaded their people to build places of worship, and conducted Christian services as well as they could every Sunday.

After several days march we came to Waiapu, a pah near the East Cape, with a population at that time of two or three thousand. Mr. Williams was more than a persona grata to these people who, in fact, almost worshipped him. The reason, I think, was this: in 1833 a whaler lay becalmed off the East Cape with twelve of the Waiapu people on board, who had sent their canoe ashore. In the night the wind suddenly rose, and the ship was driven northward by a violent gale. The Captain did not know what to do with his unwilling passengers, but at last landed them at Kororareka, in other words, into the very jaws of their enemies. The Northern Maoris instantly seized them, and distributed them among four chiefs as slaves. The Missionaries appealed to the Ngapuhi chivalry – and as we shall see by and by they were as chivalrous a tribe as ever lived – showing how unworthy it was of them, as gentlemen, to take advantage of an accident that was equivalent to a shipwreck, and which put these men in their power. The chiefs proudly admitted the force of the appeal, and gave up the captives, and Mr. Williams took them back – four years before this visit of ours to Waiapu – with a score of other released slaves who were received as those alive from the dead, and whom no one expected to see again, anymore than we expect

to see those to whom we have bidden our last farewell. So it was no wonder that we should now be received with enthusiastic welcome.

We got to Waiapu on a Saturday afternoon, and pitched our tent a hundred yards from the pah, on the edge of a deep ravine, and were hardly able to do it for the throng that pressed upon us. There were nearly as many dogs as men, and the human part of the assembly was as noisy and as wild and savage in appearance, as any crowd I ever saw. As the sun was setting, Mr. Williams settled that I was to stop in the tent and make arrangements for our morrow's dinner, while he went to have a short evening service in the spacious new church that had been built within the pah. He was very particular in his directions; we were sick of pancakes made without eggs, which were our normal substitute for bread. My chief care was to make a bolster pudding, to mix the dough, roll it out with a bottle, spread over it the contents of our one jar of jam, then roll it over into a bolster and properly tie and boil it. We were to have it cold for our Sunday dinner; and I remember it all from the intense disgust with which my friend regarded the performance when the piece de resistance came to be discovered the next day. It was beautiful and correct in form, that I know, but it was rather black in colour, and of the consistence of soaked leather. My friend got out of temper, but could not blame me for the absence of what we had not got. I learnt the lesson then that you cannot make a proper bolster pudding without suet.

To go back, however, Saturday evening was closing in when we were rather startled by the sound of a most melodious bell. It was simply a musket barrel, hung from the branch of a tree, and struck with a stone, but the effect was more musical than the ringing of many a bell I have since heard. One of its most astonishing effects, however, was that on its first stroke all the dogs around made for the bush, howling and yelping as if they were possessed. The explanation was, that the Maoris knew that the church was no place for dogs, and that the ringing of

the bell was the signal for every man thrashing his cur out of all desire to follow him; thus, the association of the sound and the thrashing became a fixed idea in the canine mind.

You can readily imagine that in these rough tramps we had not much opportunity for the use of blacking. It was our practice every night to grease our boots with as much as they would absorb, and so we kept the leather supple and our feet dry. It was also our practice to keep a good stout stick at our bedside for any emergency that might arise. On this particular night there were some dozen Maoris sleeping round a fire some twenty yards or so from us, with their thick, thatch-like mats drawn over their heads. Towards the small hours of the morning we were disturbed by a shuffle in the tent. It turned out to be a dog walking off with my friends boots. Mr. Williams sat up, rubbed his eyes, gathered all his forces together, and with one fell swoop his stick came down on the head of the unlucky intruder. The wretch was only half killed, and we were in great fear lest his moans should awaken the sleepers outside, and let us in for a row. I advised a second rap, and then we sat up in our beds, and considered what we should do. I suggested that in the circumstances we were not bound to wait and explain, and that our volatile friends need not know that there was anything to be explained. So at last I took up the limp, nasty beast, and stepping stealthily, out of the tent door, I carried him gently away from the sleepers, and at the edge of the ravine hurled him into the depths below. It awakened no one, and to our great relief I got to the tent and turned in again, without any of our savage friends being a whit the wiser for what had occurred. It was very amusing, but still we knew that we were among savages, and that with all their expressions of joy at our visit, a breach of their laws of hospitality might give us a good deal of trouble. As it was the wretched dog did not seem to be missed, and we were relieved from all suspicion of unkindness.

Next day, I saw, perhaps, as wonderful a congregation as ever assembled for Christian worship. But first a word about the Church.

It was a very fine specimen of Maori architecture, capable of holding more than a thousand people, unseated, and with few props or pillars to break the whole view of the interior. All the beams and rafters, which divided roof and sides into so many panels, were painted with Kokowai (red ochre) and pricked out with a pattern of white, the run of the lines being after the fashion of the tattoo on a Maori's face. A kind of framed pathway extended from the door to the opposite end, the space on one side being given up to the men, and on the other to the women and children. At the extreme end was the pulpit, or reading desk, resting upon a sort of dais, some two feet above the general ground floor. The pulpit was in fact the remains of a large oil barrel, the front left entire, but the back part sawn half away, the seat resting on the lower half. Like all the other wood in the place, it was plastered with red Kokowai relieved by the white Moko pattern. The spaces of the panels through the whole building were beautifully filled up with reeds, that looked like thousands of long, white cedar-pencils. An hour before the Sunday service one could see that great preparations for the ceremony were going on. Red ochre for the face, and shark oil for the hair were much in requisition. The least tag of European costume was utilized. Whether a jacket was worn as trousers or trousers as jacket, was altogether a matter of taste, and no one's fashion disturbed in the least the gravity of his neighbours. Many of them thought it highly proper that they should be armed with books. It might be an old ship's almanac, or a cast-away novel, or even a few stitched leaves of old newspapers. What did it matter? A book was a book, and every one knew that to hold a book was part of the ceremony in the new Karakia. Still there were a score or two who could read, and one of the most touching things was to see their books. Leaves of cartridge paper folded and stitched like a pamphlet, but written all through with the prayers of the Liturgy, or a chapter or two from the New Testament. That was the equipment of many an earnest helper of his country in those days.

It was generally done with some mixture of lamp-black, or powdered charcoal, for ink, and I was often glad to exchange a printed book for some of these early relics of Christian labour. Many of them are lodged among the archives of the Church Missionary Society in England. Presently a bell began to ring and the dogs to howl, and on all sides there was a grave and quiet movement towards the house of assembly. We gave them time to dispose of themselves before we entered the church. Our first surprise was to see two grizzly old savages, nearly naked, plastered with red ochre and reeking with shark-oil from head to heel, on each side of the door, each brandishing a murderous club, and as far as looks went, threatening to brain any disturber of the ceremonies – be it man, woman or child. They were the door keepers of the Sanctuary, and their main office was to brain any dog who dared to put his nose inside the door, to frighten into fits the boys who were disposed to larking, and otherwise to keep order in the course of the proceedings. I have seen the guardians of the Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem, and they were truculent enough, but they were mere babes in ferocity compared with these Maori custodians. On entering, we found the place densely packed, more than a thousand people reeking with shark oil, and dressed, as far as they were dressed at all, in such a grotesque and fantastic variety of costume as no rag fair ever presented. The men were on the right side, the women on the left, and we passed along with all eyes following us, to the dais at the end, where the native "Teacher" awaited us.

Mr. Williams went into the pulpit, and after a few minutes gave out the Maori version of "With one consent let all the earth." It was then a common custom for the "leader" to sing the first line by himself, and then the people joined in with a roar; Mr. Williams struck up the "Old Hundredth," but when he got to the second line not a soul fell into the tune, and on all that sea of upturned faces there was a look of blank surprise and unmistakable disgust. The "Teacher," however, rose to the occasion, and stepping up to the pulpit, said, "They don't

know that tune, sir, let me start one they can sing." So he made his start, and every face began to lighten. With a sound like the bursting of thunder, they took the second line out of the leader's mouth, and, as it were, carried off in a roar, like the noise of many waters, all the rest of the singing. It was terrible. They felt that now or never was the time to show their friends what good Christians they meant to be. Man, woman, and child were on the strain, holding their sides, stooping to the effort, gasping for more breath, and working till the perspiration made long brown seams, where it rolled down their red smeared faces. I saw our two old club friends gesticulating wildly in the distance (it was getting misty with the steam), and close by me there was a hoary old sinner, whom I could just hear gasping out "Kia Kaha, Kia Kaha" (sing louder, sing louder). Poor things they meant well, and were surely hearty enough, but it was hard to reconcile it with our notions of the Apostolic precept – "Let all things be done decently and in order." The rest was comparatively calm, and Mr. Williams gave them a quiet, sensible sermon, to which they listened in rapt attention. This was the place, and these were the people that gave name to the diocese, and Mr. Williams liked nothing better than to be known in after years as Bishop of Waiapu. I afterwards took another tramp with my friend over what was, in a missionary sense, virgin ground, and we went South as far as Ahuriri, which was one day to be known as the district of Napier. Before the country was ceded to the Queen I had thus gone from one camp to another, and, as a rule, even the hostile natives who accompanied me were unmolested, provided that they did not carry arms. Of course things changed very much afterwards, but down to the time of the British occupation of New Zealand as a Colony, this impunity had, as far as we were concerned, the force of law. It was by this sort of training that I got such qualification as I had to deal with the natives in cases of dispute and difficulty when I afterwards entered the Civil Service, and it was by this knowledge of their ways that I succeeded in averting many a quarrel

that might have sprung from inadvertence, and yet have been as disastrous in effect as though it had arisen from some act of conscious and wilful injustice.

I was still at Turanga when Captain Hobson arrived in the Bay of Islands and ' concluded with the Northern Chiefs the celebrated Treaty of Waitangi, 6th February, 1840, in which the natives ceded the sovereignty of the country to the Queen on certain conditions. The signatures of nearly all the recognized chiefs in the country were afterwards appended, and Captain Hobson became the first Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony, under the general administration of Sir George Gipps, Governor of New South Wales.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER II.

IN the last chapter I brought down my notes to the time when I was about seventeen years old. I was then at Turanga, with the Rev. W. Williams (afterwards Bishop of Waiapu), reading Latin and Greek, and travelling with him among tribes that had been seldom visited, and whose knowledge of the Pakeha was derived from what they had seen of a few scare-crow, vagabond specimens of the English people. They were savages, pure and simple, only knowing the white man in his roughest character, and, in fact, were rather appalled at our exceptional decency. It gave me a rare opportunity of studying Maori character and customs, and proved a good discipline for the unknown duties and difficulties that were before me. Of course the mere information one gained about tribal history, personal acquaintance with the chiefs, and insight into Maori ways, was something, but the best lesson I learnt was the ability to put myself mentally in the Maori's position, and to look at questions through his eyes, as well as through those of the white man. That helped me much in after years to mediate between the two races, and to stave off many a quarrel when we were quite unprepared to support our contention if it came to a trial of strength, and which, but for careful handling, would have precipitated us into serious peril and disaster, ending, perhaps, in our weak condition, by simply wiping us out altogether. I could estimate our perils better than many of my elders, and could guard against them more carefully than would have been possible without this experience.

It was in the year 1840 that Captain Hobson arrived in the Bay of Islands and concluded with the Northern Chiefs the Treaty of Waitangi. It is the Magna Charta of the Maoris. By this Treaty, we on our part agreed to recognize all Maori rights to property and land, to mete out equal justice to Maori and Pakeha, and to give the natives the full status of British subjects, while they on their part agreed to cede the supreme government of the country to Her Majesty the Queen. The Treaty was executed on the 6th February, 1840, and within a few months the signatures of nearly all the recognized Chiefs in the country were appended to the document. So New Zealand became a British colony, and Captain Hobson was installed as its first Governor,, subordinate for a time to the general administration of Sir George Gipps, the Governor of New South Wales. 1

It was with great reluctance that the British Government assumed the responsibility of taking formal possession of New Zealand, but it is quite certain that they would soon, in any circumstances, have had to annex the country, not only to save the natives from anarchy, but for the protection of our own interests, and to prevent the Islands from being occupied by a rival power. Two things, however, compelled them to decide at once what they would do: the secret preparations of the French to forestall us, and the pretensions of the New Zealand Company to found an independent State. We know now that while we were hesitating, Louis Philippe was officially assuring the Foreign Office that he had no designs on New Zealand, and yet all the while was secretly pushing on a scheme of French colonization. There was a French Company of adventurers, the Nantes-Bordelaise, with a scheme to acquire land in New Zealand by purchase, and they obtained authorization from the King, who appointed Admiral Duperre Minister of Marine, to make terms with them, and he promised the Company that he would sustain their action, by the presence of one or two ships of war. That was in 1839, and no doubt the Foreign Office

had some knowledge or suspicion of the move by which Louis Philippe meant to steal a march upon us. The French Company was formed, and their settlers were conveyed by a French man of war, but it was too late, and when the war ship reached the Bay of Islands, it was to see the British flag flying at Kororareka, and afterwards at the principal harbours in the Southern Island.

The other thing that precipitated the action of our Government was the formation of the New Zealand Company, and the pretensions of their scheme, which they kept secret till they had started their first vessel, to found an independent State of their own in any district that they might get the Maoris to cede to them. This Company was really the project of the Wakefield family. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the elder brother, was a man of great ability, and, one may add, of great audacity. He and Sir Charles Buller had gone with Lord Durham to quell the insurrection in Canada, and as Justin McCarthy truly says: "Lord Durham saved Canada but wrecked his own career." On their return to England, Edward Gibbon started this New Zealand Company in 1839, making Lord Durham its Governor, and Mr. Somes the great ship-owner, its Deputy-Governor. Buller, Molesworth, Stuart Mill and others of the Left-Liberal wing supported the scheme. Wakefield himself, for personal reasons, kept his name in the back-ground, but it was well known that he wrote the very able letters which Somes signed, and which were far and high above anything that Somes himself could have done. A capital of £100,000 was raised, and 100,000 acres were sold in London before a single acre had been purchased in New Zealand, or even the site of the settlement had been determined. The Ship "Tory" was chartered and put to sea before the Government could stop her, and a brother, William Wakefield, went on board in charge of the first expedition.

Among these adventurers were several gentlemen who had been more or less implicated in the Canadian rebellion, and who

had a strong feeling of resentment against the Imperial Government. They formed a very distinct element in the earliest batch of the Company's emigrants, and gave tone and spirit to the young community. There were also several retired officers of the Spanish Legion. In September the "Tory" arrived at Port Nicholson, and the series of loose purchases began, on the strength of which the Company claimed a fourth of the Northern Island, and say, one fifth of the Southern Island. William Wakefield, the principal resident agent, had been a Colonel in the Spanish Legion. Another brother Captain Wakefield was afterwards the agent at Nelson, and young Edward, a son of Gibbon, came out with his uncle in the "Tory." They are all gone now and I would not speak otherwise than very gently of the dead, but this much I may say: William would have been a master of diplomacy if he had only had art enough to conceal his art, but he always, in any negotiation, betrayed his subtlety in scheming, and put the other side on their guard lest they should concede more than they meant to do. Captain Wakefield, at Nelson, was a brave straight-forward sailor, to whose nature the craft of diplomacy was altogether distasteful, and who was always disposed to take the shortest cut to the end he desired. Young Edward was very eccentric, and there was a certain strain of rowdyism in his composition that did more harm to himself, poor fellow, than to those against whom it was directed. He could hardly open his lips without uttering some bitter sarcasm against those he disliked, and he was not at all particular in whose presence he did so.

The new settlers, on landing, organized themselves into a government, and claimed to exercise all rights of sovereignty on the ground that, with the land, the Maoris had also transferred to them their functions of chieftainship within the alienated district. So they elected magistrates, tried cases, and inflicted fines, conducting themselves in all respects as an autonomous State. A man named Pearson was arrested on a charge of breach of contract with someone in Hobart Town, and when he refused

to recognize the court and was rescued by his friends, the magistrates, as they called themselves, issued an escape warrant, while their new paper – conducted by a Canadian refugee – declared in grandiloquent fashion: "We are well pleased that the first person subjected to an assertion of law is of sufficient standing and intelligence to raise the question of our right to act under the sovereign power of the district; Captain Pearson will find that the constituted authorities of Port Nicholson have power to compel obedience." What with the intrigues of the French and the eccentricities of the Company, to say nothing of the growing complication of our relations with the Maoris, it was time for the British Government to determine how it should deal with a country that lay too near to her Australian Colonies to be safely disregarded.

In September, 1840, six months after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, the assembled missionaries, at Captain Hobson's earnest request, released my father from his duties to the Church Missionary Society, that he might take the post of Chief Protector of the Aborigines.

It soon became apparent that the Bay of Islands was in no way suited for the seat of (government, and my father was instructed to proceed to the Thames and to treat with the natives, if possible, for the purchase of a better location. The issue was that in the end of September he bought a block of forty thousand acres at Auckland, and afterwards a still larger tract, and there the British flag was hoisted on a hill on the Southern shore of Waitemata harbour within the site of what is now the city of Auckland.

All this had happened while I was still at Turanga. It was in the last days of 1840 that I returned to the Bay of Islands, and in January, 1841, I took my stool as probation clerk in the native department of the Civil Service of New Zealand, age nearly eighteen. The government establishments were then being removed to Auckland, and when I got there, the city was represented by three or four rough shanties and a few hundred tents.

From a little after seventeen I began to form the ambition of getting qualified to become some day a Minister of Christ's Holy Gospel. The tumult of my political life for the next few years never changed my purpose. My duties were thrust upon me by no will of my own. I could not escape them, but in my heart I always regarded them as an episode. I can see now that they were a full preparation for the work that was to come on at last. My old grind in classics, now so much forgotten, was not altogether labour in vain. Bishop Williams drilled me severely in language and logic by the analysis of Greek and Latin sentences, after the strict and literal fashion of the old Oxford School. The exercise has served me well through life, and not the least in the old complications of Maori affairs, where accuracy was often of vital importance, and looseness of expression might so easily lead to misunderstanding. With such a training and knowing Maori and the Maoris more than most men, I was not morally free, and could not resist the call to public service at a crisis when such qualifications were sorely needed in the interests of both races, though I had little notion of the cares it would entail. It seemed to spoil my scheme of life but it did one no harm in the end. My way was hedged in, and I had to face the pressing and often perilous duties of the passing hour, which someone must have discharged, at a time of experimental, abrupt and almost violent transition. It was too exhausting a process to allow one, while it lasted, the luxury of dreaming disappointed dreams. Yet through all I never let go the hope that in quieter times I might have the chance of carrying out the purpose of my earlier youth. The opportunity was in the end made for me, and I did not make it for myself. That all should issue in such a quiet course of ministry as mine has been in Tasmania, never entered into my imagination or forecast in those harassing times, though I often prayed the old Hebrew aspiration: "Oh, that I had wings like a dove! for then I would fly away and be at rest .... I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest."

Whether I deserved it or not, I soon got the credit of being a clear and careful interpreter, and for so young a fellow I was thought to have unusual discretion in all dealings with the Maoris. The time was near to test whatever might be in me.

In November, 1841, news came of an atrocious murder committed by a young Chief in one of the islets off Kororareka, in the Bay of Islands. The name of the murderer was Maketu and his victims were a Mrs. Robertson, her two children, and a little half-caste in the house. The plea which Maketu made in excuse of his atrocity was always that the woman cheated him, swore at him, and exasperated him with threats and insults. Even so, it was a barbarous and terrible revenge. There was madness in Maketu's family of a homicidal character. His brother and sister were both deranged, his aunt strangled herself in a paroxysm of rage, and his father Ruhe was subject to fits of frenzy, that made it dangerous for his best friends to go near him. Ruhe, for instance, had always a great reverence for my mother, and, in ordinary circumstances, would do almost anything she told him. But one day he burst into the room where she was with a loaded pistol, and with an impulse he could not repress, he determined to shoot her, but, with the pistol at full cock and pointed across the table to her breast, my brave little mother did not flinch (I don't think she ever screamed in her life), but with a few low and quiet words she said; "Ruhe, put down that ugly thing. I am only a woman (he wahine au). (God is looking at you, and you must put it away." Twice he presented the weapon, and dropped it at her calm and steadfast look, and then he withdrew. When the fit of madness was over, he was full of remorse. He was the Chief of a village about three miles from our house, and ever after, when my mother passed his place, he was eager to ask her to his house, and to show her every kind of attention and respect that he could think of; putting all he had at her disposal, and at a hint he was delighted to be at any trouble to serve her. No doubt there was the same mad strain in Ruhe's son, though I do not mean to represent it as bad enough to make Maketu irrespon-

sible for the dreadful crime he committed. Maketu made no secret of the murder when it was done, and the question of arresting him was a very serious matter to a Government hardly yet established and that had no soldiers to support its authority or enforce its laws. It was Maketu's own father who came forward and gave him up. A meeting of Chiefs was called at Paihia, and Waka Nene, Heke, Tawai, Patuone and Pomare, all leading Chiefs of the Ngapuhi tribe, discussed the situation. Heke was furious at the surrender; he would not in the least have minded the Maoris shooting the murderer, but to pass over the whole adjudication to the British Government, was, he thought, to give up his independence. But the others insisted that the young man should be tried according to the law that by treaty they had accepted, and sent a letter to Hobson, expressing their loyalty to the Queen and their confidence in British justice.

The trial was fixed for February, 1842, and it was the first Criminal Sitting of the Supreme Court in New Zealand under Chief Justice Martin, who had recently arrived from England. I do not know why, but out of some dozen capable men at hand, the Government chose me, though the youngest of them all, to act as Interpreter, on this most critical occasion. It was for the Government itself a question of life and death. The greatest care was necessary to make everything clear to the Maoris, and it was an anxious task to make them understand the meaning of our antique forms of law. There were many natives in court, who, of course, had never seen our way of procedure: they listened with intense interest, as in the presence of Maori scholars who could have corrected any mistake I might make – though they had never once occasion to do so – I explained the principle that the law assumed a man to be innocent until he was proved to be guilty; I told them, under the Judge's direction, the functions of the Jury and of the counsel on either side, and made them understand what was meant by the technical plea of "not guilty," and such forms of oath as "you shall truly try," or "the evidence you shall give, shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but

the truth." The contrast was so great between the dehberation of the trial and the passionate way in which the Maoris were accustomed to settle such matters among themselves, that they were struck with admiration and awe at the formality and patience of the whole proceeding, and, anxious as the crisis was, it was as a new revelation of our ways, and went far to inspire them with confidence in the desire, at least, of the Supreme Court to be scrupulously just in its administration of the law. They were much astonished at the grave process of proving a crime that was already confessed, and greatly impressed with the personal demeanour of the Judge and the solemnity which I tried to put into my rendering of his words. Maketu was hanged and his body buried within the precincts of the goal. It would never have done to give it to his friends just then, though a year or two afterwards the remains were handed over. When Justice Martin afterwards visited the Bay of Islands, the father received him sadly, of course, but without resentment, and with every mark of deference and respect. So far as I was concerned, I think poor old Ruhe liked me better than otherwise for my part in the business. It was the first trial in the Supreme Court that launched me into public life. Sir William Martin took kindly to me ever after, and poor Hobson who was now breaking down with care and sickness, was greatly relieved, and gave me warm approval and encouragement, and promised to do his best for my advancement. Sir William grew in the estimation of the Maoris, and all over the country they greatly revered him for his upright and benevolent character. His associations with Bishop Selwyn deepened their confidence and respect beyond anything that they felt for all other officials of the Government. Years after I had settled my Tasmanian relations, he pressed me pathetically to throw them up for what he considered the higher duty of coming to their help in the strait and confusion that had overtaken the country, but I was much too entangled in home interests to make the sacrifice. He retired in a few years from the Bench on account of illness, and returned

to England at about the close of Colonel Gore Browne's administration in New Zealand. He died at Torquay not long after his friend the Bishop of Lichfield had passed to his rest. We are now in 1842. Mr. Spain, a solicitor who had been much engaged in the electioneering Liberal interest at home, had recently arrived from England, having been appointed by Lord John Russell to be Chief Commissioner to adjudicate upon claims to land through purchase from the Maoris, and he was now preparing to go to the South to look into the titles of the New Zealand Company. To my great surprise I was again selected to be the medium of communication between the Maoris and the Court, first as Interpreter and soon after simply as Maori advocate. I was made protector of the natives through all the territory claimed by the Company. My father had nothing to do with the appointment and feared that the post would be too difficult, but I believe that the Governor offered it to me on recommendation of the Chief Justice and the Attorney General, and at the request of others, and not merely of his own good will. I roughly reckoned my clients at some fourteen thousand souls, and knew well that a task of great difficulty and unpleasantness was before me. It was not at all my duty to make out a claim for the natives, or to try by any means, fair or foul, to upset the Company's claims, and nothing could be farther from my disposition; but I had to find out the facts of the purchase, to prove them in open court, and to see as well as I could, that the Maoris were not defrauded of such lands as they had never sold. I had also to try and effect a compromise in any case where disputed ground had been occupied by settlers who had bought their allotments on the faith of the Company at home. That was almost the hardest task in all my duty, gave me anxious days and sleepless nights, and inured me to the perils of a peace-maker when both sides were too ready to settle everything by a fight.

Before I take you into this part of my work, I should like to try and explain in as few words as possible, the essential difficulties of our position. Setting aside for the present the con-

tingent and accidental occasions of dispute, there were standing causes of complication that were normal and fundamental. No mistake could be greater than the notion that the Maoris were without law in their relations with one another, or that there was any looseness in their notions of the tenure of land. On the contrary, they had very stringent laws that were not at all unsuited to their condition and the stage of social development that they had reached; they were far more conservative in observing them than we are in our modern changes of fashion or conviction; and so they were the source of great trouble to us when we tried to supersede them by our own advanced civilisation. There was, first, the (I) Law of the Blood Bond, which we see everywhere at a certain stage in the progress of nations. It is not at all the unreasonable thing that has sometimes been thought. The idea of separate and individual responsibility, or of separate possession of every kind of property, is a late product of civilisation that has no place in the earlier condition of society. What the Blood Bond was with our remote ancestors, is well explained in the opening chapter of "Green's English People," and the explanation will do just as well for the modern Maoris as for the ancient Britons.

Green says: "Order and law were made to rest in each little group of English people upon the Blood Bond, which knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by all who were linked to the doer of it; every crime to have been committed against all who were linked by blood to the sufferer from it. From this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the wrong doer by forces which the tribe, as a whole, did not as yet possess, sprang the first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, and to suffer with and pay for him if wrong were done. So fully was this principle recognized, that even if any man was charged before his fellow tribesmen with crime, his kinsfolk still remained in fact his sole judges, for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or his

guilt that he had to stand or fall." No words could more exactly describe the Maori law of Blood Bond, and you can see how full of difficulty it was likely to be to us in our dealings with the race, and as it came into collision with our principle, that every man must be held accountable for his own actions alone, and not for the actions of his kinsmen as well.

A second fundamental Maori law was the law of (2) Tribal Possession. The private, separate, and exclusive ownership of land was not recognized among them, though I have seen this denied. There might be gradation in personal claims, but the consent of the tribe as a whole, or of some subdivision or group of its families, was necessary for the alienation of any part of the tribal territory. No Chief, however high his rank, could dispose of a single acre without the concurrence of his tribe. Without such a law, no tribe could be sure of its integrity, and any number of wedges might be driven into its territory. Throughout the Northern Island, and through the greater part of the Southern, the divisions of land were accurately known, and on no subject was there greater jealousy than on the invasion of each other's boundaries. It was fatal to the tribe to allow the individual, on his own mere motion, to admit a stranger to get foothold on its land. Long before the white man showed his face in New Zealand, there was a proverb among the Maoris: "He wahine he wenua, e ngaro ai te tangata," which may be rendered in English: "For land or wife, man stakes his life," meaning that a man, who is a man, will fight with all his life rather than be forced to surrender either land or woman. The depth of this feeling about their land, to say nothing about the wife, was greatly underrated by Europeans, and their disregard of it was, and has continued to be, the source of most of the trouble that we have had with the Maoris.

The third and last Maori law that I will notice, was the law of (3) Possession by Conquest. Most of the land held by the tribes was held by right of inheritance – but not a little was claimed to have been wrested from its original owners by force

of conquest. To establish this force into a right, it was never enough to invade and overrun a given district, and even to drive out for a time the inhabitants if the invading force were then to retire from the raid. Permanent occupancy was the condition of permanent possession, and it was expressed by building pahs, making tracts of actual cultivation, or exacting a yearly tribute of the produce from the remnant of the original holders. Obviously claims of this character might be very indeterminate, and they, in fact, raised the most complicated questions with which we had to deal.

Now, anyone who carries these three laws in his mind – the law of the Blood Bond, the law of Tribal Possession, and the law of Possession by Conquest – will have the key to all our great troubles with the Maoris, from the Treaty of Waitangi to the present hour.

Our only hope of keeping peace between the races, was by gradually modifying their system until it should be merged into our principles of possession, and I am very strongly of opinion, that nearly all our contention with the Maoris has arisen from our disregard of these fundamental considerations, or from the attempt to abolish them too suddenly, and with too high a hand.

Mr. Commissioner Spain was a man of solid intelligence, but with a good deal of legal pedantry about him. He was somewhat slow in thinking, very wooden in his apprehension of ways of dealing with new emergencies, steady and rather plodding in his ways, thoroughly honest in intention, and utterly immovable to threats, though he might have been softened by flattery.

The agents of the company could have got more out of such a man if they had not begun by shaking their fists in his face, grimacing to their utmost power of contortion, and defying his authority in a very larrikin sort of manifestoing.

We were not very welcome to the community of Wellington. No Government officials were at that time. Many of the settlers were sore at the course that things had taken. The

leaven of the old Canadian rebellion was still working in some of their leading men. They had founded the settlement before the British Government had annexed the country, and to some extent in defiance of the Foreign Office. They were very jealous of Auckland, they laughed at the Treaty of Waitangi, at its engagement to respect Maori rights in property and land, and at its concession to the natives of the status of British subjects. They were vexed that the little self-governing state they hoped to found, had, as such, been brushed away by the Queen's authority, and that what they called the "sovereignty of the district" was not only hailed with inextinguishable laughter, but had been taken out of their hands, and they resented with fear, as well as anger, the appointment of a Commissioner to examine into their purchases, and possibly, to question their titles. So there was a great deal of inner trembling, and of outward bluster and protest at the opening of the Court, objections to its jurisdiction, to its constitution, and to its forms of procedure; above all, to its demand of evidence and its summoning of Maori witnesses. That was what no one could abide, and those who insisted upon it were put down at once as faddish enemies to British rights and liberties. Spain bitterly offended Colonel Wakefield at the outset, by requiring proof that the signers of the Company's deeds had the right to convey the lands that were claimed to have been purchased. It was considered as altogether superfluous, and young Edward, his nephew, made himself rudely conspicuous by interrupting the proceedings with outbursts of wrath, and with open sneers at the preposterous and ridiculous character of the demand.

One of the first witnesses called was Dickey Barrett, the Interpreter, through whom Colonel Wakefield had negotiated his purchases. Barrett was a shore whaler who had married a native woman; he was a decent fellow enough among men of his class, but he was very ignorant, and I soon made him show in the course of his evidence that he did not even understand the English meaning of the deeds he

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HONE HEKE. (From a Photo by Angas.)

professed to interpret. He admitted, too, that instead of telling the natives, as the deed set forth, that one-tenth of the surveyed lots should be reserved for their use, he had simply put it that one lot of the alienated land should be kept for the Maoris, and one for the Pakehas, and so on through the whole – that is, that half the land should be kept for their use. He admitted, further, that he had taken no account of many natives who were unwilling to sell. It soon became clear that Barrett's qualification to interpret, was that he spoke whaler Maori, a jargon that bears much the same relation to the real language of the Maoris as the pigeon English of the Chinese does to our mother tongue. The whole transaction had been of a very hasty and hugger-mugger character. Of course my exposure of all this greatly exasperated the agents of the Company, and made even the settlers who had bought allotments on the faith of the Company, look at me as if I was trying to oust them from their possessions. I was really most anxious to get them, in any case, out of their difficulties, but I suppose they could not see it. It was rather hard to bear, but it was my duty to see all the facts of these transactions thoroughly sifted, and I knew that the occupying settlers could never have peace until the Maori rights were fairly extinguished.

Young Wakefield now attacked me in the local paper, asserting broadly that I knew nothing of Maori; that I was always prowling about the pahs; that I was helping the natives to concoct false evidence; and finally, by way of climax, he suggested that I was deliberately perjuring myself as Interpreter to the Court. That last hit was going too far. I insisted at once that the charge be disposed of, and the court refused to move another inch until it was settled. To bring the matter to an issue, I then threatened the paper with a prosecution unless they retracted and apologised, and they came out with both in the next number, but not without giving me a parting kick for my youthful presumption. The fact was that there could be no mistake about what I did in Court, for every question and answer was

painfully written down by me both in English and Maori. My head aches now at the thought of the reams of paper I wrote to fulfil this requirement. The attack now became puerile and personal. I was a "raw-boned boy," "a nigger youth," "an uneducated stripling," "half civilized," and the "son of a gunsmith," which, if true, was surely of the smallest account, but I suppose it sounded like "son of a gun." Any stone is good enough to hurl against a man you do not like, and this particular missile would do to express contempt. Such a fashion of dealing with me only stiffened my resolution. So far as the Court, or the Government, or I, myself, was concerned, It was all like pouring water on a duck's back, and really did me more good than harm, though it was unpleasant enough at the moment. No doubt it made me very reserved and wary in my talk, and I suppose some people set it down to "sulkiness," which I am sure it was not, but it was my only safety, in ordinary conversation, to measure my words. It is awful to live on perpetual guard and distrust. There was in the town of Wellington, at this time, a collection of three native pahs, from which the Maoris refused to budge. One of them, Te Aro, was in the most valuable part of the town, and it was of course very desirable that it should come into the Company's possession. In fact it had all been sold in London, but the Company could not give possession to the buyers. It was notorious that the people of this pah had refused from the very first to have anything to do with Colonel Wakefield's negotiations, and the Colonel had settled the matter to his own satisfaction by proclaiming that this particular pah really never had any land rights to dispose of, and that it was in fact a mere collection of fugitives, vagabonds, and slaves. When, before I came, Captain Hobson and my father visited the place, the Te Aro natives at once stated their case, and Colonel Wakefield was greatly annoyed that the Governor should have given them audience, and that my father interpreted their complaints.

Some time after my work was done in the South, when things were going on badly with the Company in England, as well as in the Colony, Colonel Wakefield sent his nephew home, and on arrival in London young Edward set himself to write a book in defence of his uncle and of the Company, and professing to recount the proceedings of the Government after they assumed the sovereignty of the country. It was a very clever and a very savage book, but its sarcasm was so unrelieved, and its animus so apparent, that it did no one much harm. Some of his facts are hard to recognize, and it may be said, generally, that they take shape and colour from the spectacles through which he looked at them. Everyone who in any way had checked the Company's agents was presented in unredeemed lamp-black, and everyone who supported them was made beautiful as an angel of light. The young man spared no one on the other side from the lash of his scorn. The successive Governors, the Chief Justice, the Commissioners, the Police Magistrates, the Bishop, the Missionaries, with the single exception of Mr. Hadfield, the protesting Maoris, and even the captains of the English ships of war, were all included in his satire. But George Clarke, junior, the Maori advocate and protector, was very specially his bete noir, and he never missed a chance of giving me a cut as he passed me in his narration. Now and then he drew finely on his imagination, as when he told that I was on one occasion "pale and frightened" because I would not head an unruly mob who wanted to force on a row in the pah. However, I am not afraid that any of you would take young Edward's picture for a portrait.

As the examinations of the Company's titles proceeded, Mr. Spain found himself in a position of very serious difficulty. He could soon have given his decision, and as far as the Company was concerned, it could only have been that none of their purchases was completed, and that the original negotiations had been of the loosest description, but then there were the unfortunate settlers who had purchased in good faith from the English Company in London.

A precipitate decision might have raised Maori expectations and demands to the point of danger. I had to repress the Maoris as well as to keep back the Pakehas. In fact I had to stand as a buffer in madly contending interests. It was not possible to turn the settlers out of their allotments. It would have been cruel to punish them for the sins or the blunders of the Company. Mr. Spain, therefore, determined to spin out the proceedings, so as to give time for some workable compromise that would at least leave the settlers in secure and legal occupation of their lands. He simply indicated in which direction compensation was due.

The native side of the business was left in my hands, and Colonel Wakefield was to act for the Company. If we could not agree on terms of compensation, we were to refer the matter to Mr. Spain as umpire, and his decision was to be final. A long and troublesome correspondence passed between the Colonel and myself. I could not bring him to terms. The preliminary condition I laid down, that the Maoris should not be ousted from their pahs, burial places, and cultivations, he would never frankly accept, and, for the most part, our negotiations about compensation fell through. He refused to refer our differences to the umpire, and it was not till the arrival of Captain Fitzroy, the new Governor, that he was compelled to give compensation in some of the cases that were most pressing, and that could not be left open any longer without peril to the community.

Besides my duties in the Land Court, I had to watch, with the greatest care, the general course of Maori affairs throughout the Southern district, and that involved many tedious journeys along the West Coast, as far north as Wanganui and Taranake. There were personal dangers enough everywhere, but I was never very anxious, except in Wellington itself Things were in such an inflammable condition in that town, that it would have taken very little to bring on serious disturbances at any moment between the settlers and the Maoris. There were foolish, hot headed people enough who were bent upon forcing on a conflict between the races. They thought that the natives could be intimidated

by demonstrations, or cowed by bullying, and that a magistrate with a posse of special constables could over-awe any collection of "niggers" who might be disposed to give trouble. It was also a fixed notion with them that a company of British soldiers might march from Port Nicholson to the North Cape against any combination of Maoris to oppose them. There was never a more ignorant, extravagant, and dangerous exhibition of the folly of despising your enemy. The native Chiefs on their side dreaded a collision, not from personal fear of an encounter, but because they knew that it would be like the letting out of water from a dam, and that there was no measure of the destructive consequences, if once the flood were let loose. I saw clearly that our people were living in a fool's paradise, and that with the first serious appeal to force, the eyes of both parties would be opened to our relative strength, and it would be harder than ever to stave off disaster. Many a row have I nipped in the bud, with small thanks for the risk and trouble, and, indeed, to do our people justice, with little knowledge on their part of the crisis that was averted. I went from one side to the other with my life in my hand. I went daily about the town with the feeling that I was a sort of portable fire engine, ready at any moment for the cry of fire, and for a rush to put it out before it made any way. It was a pretty lively experience for a young man's nerves. Our military force in Wellington was represented at one time by less than a company of soldiers, and I remember that on one occasion the alarm was raised that there was a row at Pipitea, the pah on the North West side of the town. It afterwards turned out to have been a squabble between a white man and a Maori, in which the Pakeha struck the first blow, when the Maori turned upon him and gave him a good thrashing with his fists. The man ran into the town, yelling that the Maoris had set upon and nearly killed him; a mob was collected and the soldiers were called out, and I hastened to the spot. The soldiers drew up, with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, on the edge of a bank, which half surrounded the pah, and from

whence they could look down into the yards and houses at their feet. I rushed into the place, and to my intense disgust found that the noisiest of the Maoris who was capering about, musket in hand, and calling on the rest to follow and show fight, was my own scallywag of a boy, whom I at once knocked down, wresting the musket from his hands and kicking him into the nearest house. While this little scuffle was going on, the soldiers made ready to fire, but luckily held their hand. Some of them told me afterwards that, thinking I had something to do with stirring up the row, they meant to pot me first. I persuaded the Maori to appear at the Police Court next day. The case was dismissed in a few minutes, on clear proof that the other man had begun the assault, and, after a few words of caution to the Maoris from me, the natives retired well pleased, and the Pakehas as intensely disgusted. That was the sort of work I had to do, and you can easily understand that it was not pleasant or popular work at all.

There were other land claims of the Company that we had to investigate, at Porirua, at Manawatu, at Wanganui, at Taranake, and on the southern side of the Strait. It was difficult to get the Colonel now to attend the court, and Mr. Spain was often kept waiting, and had to threaten that if he did not attend, the examination must go on without him. The Colonel was always privately very kind and friendly to me however fiercely we might be opposed in our political contention. He went with us to Wanganui, where the Commissioner decided (I quote his words) that "the Company's claims to that district were defective to the extent of millions of acres. They only established a claim to land on one side of the river," and even for this, they had still to compensate owners who had never been paid.

I come now to one of the saddest tragedies connected with these miserable land squabbles that made an old man of me when I was just turning twenty one. There were districts in the Southern Island that were as much disputed between the Company and the Maoris as any in the North. Some seventy miles from

Nelson there was a fine tract of country, known as the Wairau, and which the agents were anxious to appropriate. When we were to hold the Court at Porirua, Colonel Wakefield excused himself from attending, and sent his nephew in his place. There we met Rauparaha and Rangihaeata, who had cultivations at Wairau, and who stoutly denied that they had ever sold or dreamt of selling a foot of the ground. Mr. Spain afterwards reported: "no evidence of the purchase has been adduced by the Company's agent; there is no proof in any way that the district was ever alienated to the Company by the parties from whom that body asserts, through its agent, that it has been purchased, and I entertain no apprehension that a candid and impartial perusal of the evidence will ever lead to any other conclusion." That was before the Wairau massacre. In March, 1843, Captain Wakefield, the agent at Nelson, had offered payment to Rauparaha and Rangihaeata for the "Wairau" lands, and in spite of their refusal to part with them, sent a party of surveyors to cut the district into blocks. The Chiefs said plainly to Captain Wakefield, and afterwards to Mr. Spain and Edward Wakefield, at Porirua, that if the company wanted to take the land, they must first take their lives, or handcuff them and reduce them to slavery. The Colonel's brother. Captain Wakefield, at Nelson, however persisted. The natives pulled up the Surveyor's ranging rods, and at last, after first removing their personal goods to the boats, they burnt down the temporary hut which Mr. Cotterell, the Surveyor, had built. The goods they said belonged to the Pakeha, and they would not touch them, but the material of the hut was their own and they did not choose that the surveyor should have it. Mr. Cotterell went back to Nelson, and laid an information at the Police Court, against Rauparaha and Rangihaeata for arson. It was the maddest of mad things that people dealing with Maoris could have done. The Company's friends seized upon the chance. Captain Wakefield, Thompson the Police Magistrate, Cotterell the surveyor, and Richardson the Editor of the local paper, with a party of about fifty started together, equipped with

an assortment of handcuffs to execute the warrant, which even people in England would have considered of the most technical character. Thirty five of these poor people were armed. It is a dismal story of ignorance, rashness, hide-bound formality, and foolhardy contempt of Maori rights and Maori powers of resistance. The end was, that the natives resisted the arrest, then our people opened fire, and the issue was that nineteen of those unfortunate special constables, including Wakefield, Thompson, Cotterell and Richardson were killed. Some fell in the fight, others were captured, and when it was found out that Ronga, Rauparaha's niece, had been shot with three other Maoris in the fray, the prisoners also were killed. When the firing began and death seemed inevitable the old Chief shouted out, "Hei kona e te ra, hei kona e te ao marama – haere mai e te po haere mai e te mate." "Farewell, O Sun, farewell thou world of light; – Come on O night, come on O death." That was a cry of utmost stress, and no Maori loyal to his Chief could resist the appeal even to the very death. The day was the 17th June, 1843. Mr. Tuckett, one of the surveyors, escaped as soon as the firing began, and crossing the Strait on the second day after the fight to Wellington, told us as much as he had seen. The massacre of the captives was not then known. A large party of us, some seventy, immediately armed for the rescue, and went on board the Government brig, "Victoria." Mr. Spain and I were among the number. Fortunately for us it came on to blow a heavy gale that evening before we came out of the port, and we had to anchor inside the Heads. It was a terrible night with the rain and wind and heavy sea, and the brig pitching bows under with both her anchors down and a long stretch of cable out, and I have since wondered that we weathered the gale that night at all.

In the course of the next day the gale abated, and we sailed across the Strait to Cloudy Bay. There we fell in with the Rev. Samuel Ironside, the Wesleyan Minister whom many of you know. He told us all. He had met Rauparaha crossing

back on his way to Kaputi, and, with the Chiefs consent, Mr. Ironside had hastened off to Wairau, and had collected and buried the dead. We went on to Wairau, buried another body or two, and then returned to Wellington.

Things were getting very dangerous now for all of us. The Maoris were exasperated at what they considered our treachery, and our own people were thirsting for revenge. Happily there was a gentleman living at Waikanae, who had great influence with the Maoris allied to Rauparaha, and was equally respected by both races, the Rev. Octavius Hadfield, now the revered Bishop of Wellington. At the risk of his own life and after a severe struggle with the Chiefs, who were almost mad at the sight of the handcuffs which Rauparaha brought with him, Mr. Hadfield managed to stop the old man's projects of immediately marching upon Wellington. I got away from Wellington as soon and as quietly as I could, and had an interview with the angry Chief, pledging all that I could to assure him that the Government would not attack him without first hearing his side of the question, and begging him to try and keep the natives quiet, until the case was investigated. Then Mr. Spain went to see him, as one who was known to be a high official, and who was deputed by the leading magistrates to give the same assurance in a more public and formal way. In September, 1843, that is, three months after the fray, Sir Everard Home came to Wellington in the "North Star," and I went with him and Major Richmond, the Superintendent of the South, to a conference with the natives, the first of many cruises that I made with Sir Everard. We held the meeting at Waikanae. Rauparaha then said that he was doing his best to allay irritation, but the natives were kept disturbed by threatening rumours of what the Wellington people, or the Government, were going to do, and Sir Everard told him not to believe in idle reports of our intended movements against him, but always to apply to Mr. Hadfield, Major Richmond, or myself, and he might be sure that we would tell him the truth.

In January, 1844, Sir Everard Home again came to Wellington in the "North Star," bringing with him this time the new Governor, Captain Fitzroy. By arrangement. Major Richmond and I again went to Waikanae, and summoned the natives to meet the Governor. On landing from the "North Star" several hundreds of the Maoris were there to receive him, and the conference began. A chair was provided for the Governor, and Rauparaha sat down at his side. I interpreted the Governor's speech of enquiry for their version of the Wairau affray, but the natives remained silent. The Governor told me to ask Rauparaha if he had nothing to say. The old man then rose, and minutely related the whole of his story. When he had finished the Governor told them all to be quiet, while he thought over the decision that he would announce. For nearly an hour no one moved or spoke, but all eyes were intently fixed on us. Fitzroy wrote out in pencil what he had to say, read it, and then handed me the paper to interpret. It was to the effect that he thought the English in the wrong for having provoked the conflict by trying to take forcible possession of disputed land, while the case was actually under debate in the Commissioners Land Court; that they were to blame in sending an armed party to arrest the Chiefs on such a pretext as burning down a temporary surveyor's hut; and because at the last moment they had been the first to fire. He, the Governor, was deeply grieved, especially at the slaughter of the English prisoners when Ronga was killed, but looking at all the circumstances he felt that it would not be just to use the British power merely to avenge the death of those who had fallen.

After this business, I accompanied Mr. Spain to Wanganui, and then to Taranake, and the Commissioner made his award. To the surprise of Colonel Wakefield himself, and to the consternation of all who knew anything about the Maoris, Mr. Spain declared that this was the fairest of all the Company's purchases, and that they were entitled to 60,000 acres of land. The Chief, William King, at once rose, and protested that the

decision was against all Maori law, and that he and his people would never submit to it. They would rather die first. Fortunately the Governor was not obliged to give effect to the Commissioner's award, and mainly at my urgent remonstrance. Captain Fitzroy set it aside. Mr. Spain was, of course, greatly mortified, and, rather ungenerously, he tried to shift the blame of his decision on me, because, he said, I had called only one witness in support of the absentees, who declared that they had never lost their rights or sold them, and, still in a very illogical way as regards his excuse, Mr. Spain to the last protested that to recognize these claims was to establish a most dangerous doctrine. Many of the witnesses, whom I did not call for the purpose, stated in their examination that the rights of the absentees could not be extinguished by the act of their brethren who still held to the pah at Ngamotu; and, besides, Mr. Spain knew well my opinion and that of Mr. Forsaith, the Interpreter, as to the Maori law on the subject, and, what was of greater authority than ours, he knew the opinion of Mr. Hadfield. We had told him often enough, but he would not accept our judgement as binding upon him. I did call one witness expressly on this point, but Mr. Spain snubbed him, saying he did not believe his testimony, and adding that he could not recognize the rights of men who had been driven out of the district by war, and who did not come back to resume possession until after the actual residents on the land had sold the district to the Company. No doubt it was altogether a difficult and complicated case to adjudicate upon. It came under the Maori law of possession by conquest, and the real question was: whether or not the Waikato tribes who laid waste the country also took possession of it. They returned home after their campaign, building no pahs and cultivating no lands in the desolated country. The only remnant of the Taranake tribes who held their ground were the handful of people of the stronghold of Ngamotu, who sold to the Company. But the fugitives flocked back to the district as soon as the Waikato invaders retired, and they protested that

the Ngamotu remnant had no right to dispose of the lands of their brethren, because they were not at that moment occupying them. Mr. Spain would not allow the protest, and I warned the Government that it would take an army to enforce his decision, and that it foreboded nothing but strife and bloodshed in the coming time. My argument prevailed for the time, but, a few years after, it was the attempt to force the natives to surrender a portion of this very land that brought on the Taranake War, in which the Waikato tribes joined their former enemies against us, and this again led on to the "King" movement which has not been put down to this day, though we employed 12,000 British soldiers besides the Colonial forces to suppress it. Rusden has given a fair account of my action in getting the award set aside, in the first volume of his History of New Zealand.

In June, 1844, I received instructions to go to Otago, and to assist in the purchase of a large block of land for the Scotch settlement that was then being projected. Colonel Wakefield was to act for the Company, and I for the natives, while Mr. John G. Symonds, the Police Magistrate of Wellington, was to superintend and endorse the whole transaction on the part of the Government. We took Mr. Spain with us part of the way, and dropped him at the French settlement of Akaroa, in Banks Peninsula. This settlement had been projected by a French company in 1839, after secret negotiations with Louis Phillipe, and promises of his support, while he was formally assuring the British Government that he had no designs on New Zealand. When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, the French frigate "L'Aube" called at the Bay of Islands, and Captain Hobson entertained her officers with cordiality.

Somehow the secret leaked out that she was on a voyage to support a company of French colonists on their way to Akaroa. H.M.S. "Britomart" was in the harbour, and Captain Stanley, a brother of the late Dean of Westminster, was sent off in the night with instructions to sail for Akaroa with the utmost

despatch, and to hoist the British flag. Stanley at once did so, and when four days after his arrival at Akaroa, Captain Lawand, in the "L'Aube," put in an appearance, he found the British flag flying and a Court of Magistrates sitting, though they had no case before them. Thus you see how narrow our escape was from having a French colony in the Southern Island. The French immigrants, under one Langlois, the captain of a whaler, arrived the next day in the "Comte de Paris." The settlers planted gardens under the guns of the block house, but made no homes. Most of them were soon removed to the French Marquesas. We found a French ship of war in the harbour. The poor remnant of the people looked very listless and unenterprising. The Nantes-Bordelaise Company sold their interests (a grant of 30,000 acres) to the New Zealand Company about the time of our visit, and before long the French colony had passed away.

When we got to Otago we anchored a mile or two inside the heads, off a native village on the eastern side of the harbour. The natives appeared to be in a miserable condition. More than in any other part of the country they had suffered by their intercourse with the very roughest of whalers and sealers, and altogether they were in a more pitiable state than any of the tribes in the Northern Island.

In numbers, in physique, and in morals, they had greatly gone down. The very jargon they spoke in their common talk with Europeans was a strange medley of bad French, bad English and low Maori. We found them ready to sell, but a good deal out of temper. The irrepressible Tuckett, known familiarly in our expedition as "Bill Sykes," who had learnt nothing by his escape from the Wairau massacre, would insist upon cutting his survey lines over anything that came in his way, and took not the least notice of the remonstrance of the Maoris. The Government and Colonel Wakefield together had to make him stop, and until he did so, Mr. Symonds refused to begin any negotiations. So the gentleman was not in very good humour when we arrived.

With Symonds's consent, as well as Colonel Wakefield's, I started with the understanding that the whole negotiation with the Maoris should pass through my hands, and I told the natives that I should be answerable for no conditions or promises whatever, except what I myself should tell them. We pulled up in a boat to what is now Port Chalmers. It was then a little forest of Kahikatea trees, and we pitched our tents on the edge of it. The wood swarmed with pigeons, and I shot as many as we could eat, from the tent door. It is all a nest of warehouses now. The first hitch in the business was the question of native reserves. The Maoris knew too much about the Company's purchases in the North, and did not believe in making over the whole block and then leaving it to us to say what portions should be assigned to them, nor would they hear of parting with their village cultivations and burial grounds. I had a hard fight with Tuckett and Wakefield to make the reserves and put them into the deed. These proposed reserves lay almost wholly in the Peninsula on the eastern side of the bay, while, naturally enough, Colonel Wakefield was as anxious to buy the Peninsula as the Maoris were to retain it. I believe that in after years they did part with most of it. There were at this time some two or three hundred men on the ground, most of them were from different parts of the coast; there were also a few miserable looking women and hardly any children. The principal Chiefs were Tuhawaiki and Taiaroa. Contact with the whalers and sealers had taken much of the dignity out of them, and their bearing was nothing like that of their Northerly countrymen. There were some twenty heads of septs a little lower in rank. One day we crossed over with them to look at the ground which they wished to retain, and, walking to the top of a hill, Tuhawaiki asked the Colonel, Mr. Symonds and myself to sit down. Stretching out his arm and pointing with his finger, "Look here, Karaka," he said, "here, and there, and there and yonder; those are all burial places, not ancestral burial places, but those of this generation. Our parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters,

children, they lie thick around us. We are but a poor remnant now, and the Pakeha will soon see us all die out, but even in my time, we Ngailaki were a large and powerful tribe, stretching from Cook Strait to Akaroa, and the Ngatimoe to the south of us were slaves. The wave which brought Rauparaha and his allies to the Strait, washed him over to the Southern Island. He went through us, fighting and burning and slaying. At Kaikoura, at Kaiapoi, and at other of our strongholds, hundreds and hundreds of our people fell, hundreds more were carried off as slaves, and hundreds died of cold and starvation in their flight. We are now dotted in families, few and far between, where we formerly lived as tribes. Our children are few, and we cannot rear them. But we had a worse enemy than even Rauparaha, and that was the visit of the Pakeha with his drink and his disease. You think us very corrupted, but the very scum of Port Jackson shipped as whalers or landed as sealers on this coast. They brought us new plagues, unknown to our fathers, till our people melted away. This was one of our largest settlements, and it was beyond even the reach of Rauparaha. We lived secure, and feared no enemy; but one year, when I was a youth, a ship came from Sydney, and she brought the measles among us. It was winter, as it is now. In a few months most of the inhabitants sickened and died. Whole families on this spot disappeared and left no one to represent them. My people lie all around us, and now you can tell Wide-awake (Wakefield) why we cannot part with this portion of our land, and why we were angry with Tuckett for cutting his lines about here."

The next question we had to settle was the exact boundary of the block of land that the natives were willing to sell. Except the Maori occupants of the Eastern Peninsula, and one or two small stations on the coast, there were no inhabitants in the whole district. The nearest white settlement was a decayed whaling station, about thirty or forty miles away. What is now the city of Dunedin and its surrounding farmsteads, was only a run for wild pigs. On the Eastern side of the block there was,

of course, the ocean; on the Western there were the distant ridges and peaks pointed out to us and named, and beyond which it was practically no man's land. On the North the line was well known and sharply defined, but the Southern line was vague, and might easily be the occasion of dispute hereafter. I refused to take this line on the mere description of the tribe or the word of the surveyor, and, to the disgust of all but my friend Mr. Symonds, insisted upon seeing it with my own eyes, and having it carefully pointed out by a selection of the Maoris formally deputed to do so. It was midwinter, and very cold, and the prospect of more than a fortnight's tramp through the snow, carrying all our provisions with us, was not at all inviting. However, we agreed at last to make up a party comprising Symonds, Wakefield and myself, with a number of delegated Maoris, and started to mark the Southern limit. We pulled from Port Chalmers to what was then a bare and silent waste, but which is now, Dunedin.

Then we pushed on, striking first across country, and coming down to the coast.

The ground was undulating, covered with snow, and almost bare of trees, except that some miles before us we could see a small island of forest. A curious spiky plant stood out above the snow in tussocks, with points as sharp as needles, that made it wary walking for the shivering Maoris, and clumps of aniseed grew thick upon the downs. The whirr of innumerable quails, almost kicked up by our feet, would have been tempting to sportsmen, but we had to push on for shelter, and we felt too cold to shoot them. We reached the island of forest late in the afternoon, and pitched our tents on its edge. The forest was infested with wild pigs, that made it unsafe to wander alone, and the trees were alive with wood-pigeons, which we shot in sufficient quantity to supply all our party for two days. Next day we emerged on the beach; it was backed by a sweep of flat table land, which broke off like a low wall, and where the water trickled over the edge there hung great icicles, sometimes as

[Inserted unpaginated illustration]

TAMATI WAKA NENE. (From a Picture by Angas.)

thick as a man's body. At length we reached the mouth of the Taieri river, where we found the remains of an old whaling station, and a couple of houses, in one of which was a Maori woman and a half-caste child. Her husband was away, but we got from her a supply of potatoes, and the loan of a large boat, in which we pulled to the head of the Taieri Lake. We had a strange craving for meat in the intense cold, and the want of it made everybody savage.

Just after we entered the lake the word passed that a quarter of a mile ahead there was a vast flock of wild ducks that were evidently not accustomed to be disturbed. Silence was ordered and I was sent with my gun to the bow. The crew paddled gently, and when near enough I gave the signal to stop, and we glided gently to within two boat lengths of them.

I fired both barrels, and to our great satisfaction brought down nearly a dozen. We at once pulled on shore, lighted fires, half picked and half roasted our game. It all disappeared in less than an hour after the ducks were alive; we were well supplied so long as our boating lasted. Leaving the head of the lake, after hauling the boat ashore, we struck towards the south-west, dragging wearily over long rolling downs, with here and there a small clump of stunted trees, often miles apart. We always pitched our tent near one of these clumps, for the sake of shelter and firewood. Sometimes it would rain in the night and then freeze, so that the packing of the tent next morning was like folding a sheet of tin, and made it rather an unpleasant back-load for the unfortunate Maori who had to carry it.

So we went on until we reached the boundary, and then returned by the same track, luckily killing three or four wild pigs on the journey. They were in fair condition, but with very thick skins, and had to be flayed before we could eat them. Back to Otago, I prepared the Maori deed. The block we acquired must have been, I think, a good deal over 400,000 acres. The original deed is in Maori in my hand writing,

signed by Symonds, Tuckett and myself. I wrote and certified the English translation, and no dispute has ever come out of it. The document was signed by Symonds, Tuckett and myself, and by twenty-five of the leading Chiefs. The consideration was under £3,000, and the date of execution the 31st July, 1844. There have been complaints among the Maoris about subsequent arrangements, but so far as this negotiation was concerned, I have never heard from that day to this, of a single Maori putting in a claim to be compensated for rights that I had not fairly extinguished. My father purchased the site of Auckland, and several hundred thousand acres around, and the Maori deeds of transfer are in his handwriting, and in no case has any dissatisfied Maori impugned the validity and completeness of the bargain, and, considering how easy it is to muddle such transactions, I am not in the least ashamed of the part I took in negotiating for a district which was then a silent waste, but which is now the head and centre of the fair, flourishing and populous province of Otago. 2

Things were now quieting in the South. Some of the worst and most dangerous questions in dispute between us and the Maoris were settled, or in the way of settlement. Some questions still remained, formidable enough, but insoluble for the present, and such as only time and patience could set right.

The last two years of incessant care and heavy responsibility had taken a good deal out of me. I was very weary, and told Governor Fitzroy that I thought myself now due for a rest, little dreaming of the fresh troubles that were waiting for me in the North.

The Governor was very kind. In a few weeks he summoned me to Auckland, and sent down a gentleman to take my place in the South.

1 See Treaty of Waitangi. APPENDIX I.

2 Translation of Deed of Sale. APPENDIX II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER III.

IN the last chapter I gave you a sketch of my official life down to the time when I negotiated the purchase of Otago from the natives.

That was at the end of July, 1844. Things were now quieting in the South. The titles of the New Zealand Company had been carefully sifted. Some of the most pressing difficulties had been arranged by compensation, and though there were still dangerous questions awaiting solution, nothing could be done with them for the present, and it would be a work of time and patience to dispose of them. For more than two years, all my powers of endurance had been strained to the utmost. It had been a time of incessant care and heavy responsibility, and I was getting very weary. I told the Governor that I thought myself due for a rest, and he very kindly recalled me to Auckland, and sent a gentleman to take my place. A rest was what I asked for, and little dreamed of the new troubles in which I was soon to be entangled.

There had been very little difficulty about the land question in the North, nor indeed was there serious disaffection on this subject anywhere except such as grew out of the loose purchases of the New Zealand Company. The rising of Heke and his followers was not at the beginning a question of Land Titles at all, but simply a revolt against the British Government, as such, for its assumption of power over the natives, which Heke declared to go far beyond what was contemplated in the Treaty of Waitangi. The land question did, however, come in before the final breach, in a way that no one had anticipated, and was, in fact, the last consideration that determined Heke to commit himself to war.

Heke was a young and highborn Chief of the Ngapuhi Tribe, in the Bay of Islands, a little over thirty years of age; and his wife and cousin Harriet was the daughter of Hongi, and, perhaps, the greatest Maori lady in the land. They were both in their way as proud of their descent as any blue-blooded grandee of Spain. Before Captain Hobson's arrival, Heke had been much in the company of American visitors and residents. From them he learned the story of the American struggle for independence, and became a great admirer of Washington, and there slowly grew up in his mind a feeling of habitual distrust of the British power, and a dread of all our masterful ways.

It was with some hesitation that he was induced to sign the Treaty of Waitangi. He was enraged at the surrender of the murderer Maketu, and thought that to hand him over for trial by an English jury and not by his own people, was simply to efface the standing law of the Maori Blood Bond, which makes a man's own tribesmen the judges of his crime, and the executioners of his sentence. The quarrel with us was altogether impersonal. The object of his hostility was the British Government as an institution, and he expressed his resentment by cutting down the visible symbol of our sovereignty in his district, the Custom house flag-staff at Kororareka. In July 1844, while I was in the far South effecting the purchase of the Otago block, Heke, with a party of one hundred young men, cut it down by way of protest and defiance.

The Bay of Islands was at the time of the cession of New Zealand, the great resort of whaling ships, French, English and especially American. There were often as many as twenty whalers anchored at Kororareka at the same time, and of course there was a large trade between them and the natives.

The proclamation of British sovereignty changed it all. The immediate result of imposing Customs regulations, was to destroy this local commerce, and the Ngapuhi tribe, from being the richest and most prosperous in the country, sunk rapidly into poverty, The port was deserted, and the flag-staff and what it

meant was the visible cause of the evil. To add to the commercial depression of the tribe the seat of Government was removed to Auckland, the centre of their Waikato enemies, and nearly all the resident traders of the Bay of Islands, who could get away, very naturally migrated to the capital. Heke's notion was first to free his own district from the control of Government officials, and when he had restored the independence of his tribe, to march upon Auckland. Then he hoped to effect a general rising of the Maoris throughout the country, and finally he had some dream of securing his victory by entering into an alliance with the Government of the United States. When the flag-staff of the Customs was cut down, Fitzroy at once sent to Sir George Gipps for soldiers, and a detachment of, I think, the 99th Regiment was sent to Auckland. H.M.S. "Hazard" was at hand, and she proceeded with the troops to Kororareka. Waka Nene, the great Hokianga Chief, who had been the leading spirit in effecting the Treaty of Waitangi, now interposed, urging the Governor to avoid a conflict and to keep the troops at Auckland, while he, Nene, pledged himself to guard the new flag-staff. The guns and tomahawks that the Governor demanded from the tribe in token of apology and submission, were given back, and at Nene's earnest entreaty the Bay of Islands was at once proclaimed a free port. It was too late. Though Fitzroy wrote to Gipps "the disturbance was caused by the false assertions of bad and designing men, mostly English, and by the land question, and above all by the Customs' regulations, which have almost destroyed the traffic of the Bay, without producing any considerable amount of revenue. By removing the Customhouse officers from this port, the root of the mischief will be, I think, extracted."

In this statement I think the Governor was mistaken in attributing any weight as yet to the land question, which, as I have said, was the source of disturbance only among the Southern tribes. Things seemed to be smoothed down; but now there came tidings of the report of a select Committee of the House

of Commons on the Maori tenure of land that worked irreparable mischief, and filled the minds of the native Chiefs throughout the country with the suspicion that we did not mean to keep faith in our engagements with them. The majority of this Committee impeached the Treaty of Waitangi, impugned the rights of the Maoris to what they called "wild lands," and recommended that "lands not actually occupied by the natives" should be vested in the Crown. The report was passed by a majority of the House, but Lord Stanley refused to act upon it, or to annul a solemn Treaty that had been made in the name of the Queen of England, and on the faith of which we had been allowed to assume the peaceful sovereignty of the country. The news of all this came in the end of September, 1844, just before my return to Auckland, and greatly agitated the native Chiefs. It gave Heke his chance, and it sealed the disaffection of the Maoris. What mischief such a Committee ignorant and inflamed with party passions can do! On the 10th of January, 1845, without a word of warning to any one outside his special following, Heke made a rush with a few of his men upon the flag-staff, and cut it down the second time, but without disturbing the residents of Kororareka. Two hundred soldiers of the 58th were now sent on from Sydney, and Nene came on to the Bay with 300 men to sustain the English Government. Heke again declared that if we persisted in erecting the offending flag-staff he would at all hazards cut it down.

The staff was again set up, and to guard against surprise, it was sheathed this time with iron for several feet from the ground, a block-house was put up at its foot, trenches cut round the hill, and two or three guns mounted. A guard was put into the block-house every night, and a military camp formed in the town below. The "Hazard" was anchored close off the town, and the residents were drilled in arms.

In the beginning of February, after I had been in Auckland a week or ten days, the Governor, who was in great trouble, and in some doubt about what was really going on in the Maori mind,

asked me to go to the Bay of Islands, and quietly find out how the Chiefs in the North would be likely to range themselves if, as he feared, conflict with Heke was inevitable.

So I visited the Bay, and spent a week in sounding the principal Chiefs, and listening to the common talk of their people, and having satisfied myself as to the course things were likely to take, I returned to the Governor and reported.

My impression was that Heke, Kawiti, and half a dozen other Chiefs were determined this time to fight, and, if possible, destroy the flag-staff, against any opposition of the garrison; that Nene, Patuone, Taewai, Repa and all the Hokianga branch of the tribe would support us; and that Pomare, Tareha, and Mauparaoa, the resident Chiefs in the Bay itself, and Ruhe, at Waimate, would be doubtful, sympathising indeed with Heke, but afraid to commit themselves openly to his cause. These men all round were close blood relations. They meant to watch events and take the winning side. On the 11th of March the crisis came. It was known that Heke might attack at any time that week, and on the day before his band was collected at a pah a few miles off. Heke divided his force on the night before his attack into three parties, two of them were to enter the Township at different points and engage the soldiers of the Garrison, the third he meant to lead himself against the block-house. During the night the assailants took up their positions without disturbing any of our sentries, and before daylight, Heke with his detachment had crept to within a hundred yards of the flag-staff. It was full daylight when they rose from their ambush and rushed for the block-house. The guard was taken by surprise, and after a short struggle was driven down the hill, and in less than half an hour the staff came down with a crash to the ground.

Meanwhile the two other detachments of the enemy sprang from their lair and made for the town, the largest one under Kawiti. They were met at the entrance and gallantly repulsed by the marines and sailors of the "Hazard," who were stationed

on shore. It was for the most part a hand-to-hand fight, cutlass against tomahawk.

A good many Maoris were killed, the rest were driven back, and Captain Robertson, who was in command, and who engaged Kawiti hand-to-hand, fell covered with wounds, from which, I am glad to say, he afterwards recovered.

Desultory firing went on till noon, when the Maoris at the block-house hoisted a flag of truce, and brought down a woman and our wounded men into our lines; among them, the signalman of the block-house, who stuck to his guns when the rest retreated, and was badly wounded before he would surrender.

A few minutes after, our powder magazines on shore blew up, and then it was determined to evacuate the town. It was awful blundering throughout.

Under somewhat wild, but heavy firing from the "Hazard," the English men, women and children were brought off, without any interference from the natives.

The American corvette, the "St. Louis," could not, of course, take part in the fight, but she manned all her boats, took off the families, and received a great crowd of fugitives on board. Next morning all the vessels left for Auckland, and the Maoris plundered and burnt the deserted town.

Much to the annoyance of Heke, not only the wives and children, but most of the men of the old missionary families, joined the fugitives in their panic. He thought that they ought to have known him better.

Mr. and Mrs. Williams remained at Paihia, Mr. Burrowes at Waimate, and Mr. Kemp at Keri Keri. Some of the young men also had not gone away; but H., who was the Maori Protector of the district and the official agent of the Government in all dealings with the natives, joined the flight in great trepidation. He had known Heke intimately all his life, but had taken fright and gone with the rest. He was an intelligent, well meaning man, and one of the best Maori scholars in the country, but he listened too much to alarmist reports, and could not keep his head in a time of any calamity or danger.

I had told the Governor before, that I thought in any case Heke had no disposition to meddle with any of the missionaries' families if they conducted themselves with common prudence.

Fitzroy was annoyed at this gentleman, H., having come away in such haste, though he would not blame him. He sent for me, and bewailed the absence of any Government agent, who might at least rally our Maori allies and keep up communication with head quarters. Not a solitary representative of the Government had dared to stick to his post. He was afraid, as every one was, that Heke's next move would be to march on Auckland, unless we could get our Maori friends to hold him to the North. I at once told him that I did not think Heke would touch me, and at any rate I was ready to go, if there were any way of sending me, and I would do what I could to hold Heke back from any advance towards Auckland.

Fitzroy was pleased, and said he would not order me into so much risk, but if I volunteered, the United States corvette was going to look in at the Bay, and he had no doubt that Captain McClellan would oblige him by giving me a passage and landing me.

So it was arranged, and the next day I sailed in the "St. Louis."

My instructions were to make my way if possible to Waka Nene's camp, and to do all in my power to block the threatened advance of Heke upon Auckland by keeping him employed in his own district. My duty was to watch and strengthen what was at first the very shaky alliance of our Maori supporters; to report the movements of the Northern Tribes; to keep the Government in touch with the friendly natives; and to be the organ of communication between them and the authorities of Auckland.

They put me on shore at Paihia, and after ascertaining from Archdeacon Williams that Waka Nene was at Waimate, and Heke at Waitangi, I started by myself for the inland tramp of fifteen miles. At the landing place near the Waitangi falls of Haruru, I came upon a group of Heke's people, Heke himself being among them.

He was rather surprised to see me, as he thought I was still in the far South, looking after Maori rights at Wellington. He knew well how hard I had fought, almost single handed, to get justice for the Maoris, and so he was prepossessed in my favour. I told him that I had left because I was tired almost to death, and when I had no idea of the trouble in the North; that I had come up in the "St. Louis" by the kindness of the American Commander; and that I wanted to get on to Waimate. "Oh," he said, "I suppose you want to see Waka Nene and the Hokianga people. I do not know what they are going to do, but you can go on if you like. I am disgusted with H. for going away. You know that he and you and I were old playmates together, and unless you came upon me, sword in hand, I should not hurt either of you. Though you are a Government officer, you are an officer for the Maoris also according to your lights. You are not a stranger, and so long as you do not turn soldier, or policeman, or collector of customs, I do not mind if you are the only representative here of the Government in Auckland, but you must give up any letters you have on your person."

I told him I had none. He then asked the news from Auckland, what the Governor was going to do, and enquired how the fugitives were disposed of. He said that the Pakehas who were not in arms need not have fled from Kororareka, and that he would not have molested the women, or plundered and burnt the town, if they had remained to look after their property. He enquired especially about Captain Robertson; said they admired his pluck; that in the encounter with Kawiti, he cut through the handle of the chief's tomahawk and nearly cut him down; and that he was the only very brave officer in the fight. Then he complained that the "Hazard" had not treated him well, but that after his people had ceased firing, she kept discharging her guns at the church, which was rather sacrilegious, and behind which the wounded were lying, though, as it happened, none of the people about the building were killed or even hurt.

I told him I was quite sure that they knew nothing of the wounded there, or they would not have made the church their mark.

So we parted for the present, and I went on my solitary road.

Within a few miles of Waimate, I came upon Waka Nene's scouts, and soon reached his camp. Nene was very glad to see me, but as several Chiefs were present of whom he was evidently doubtful, he whispered to me that I had better reserve my confidences till they were gone. So I sat down and talked gossip, and purposely made very idiotic comments now and then about the state of political affairs. I hung about the place, laughed at the display of the war-dance, and chaffed the young men about their brave talk, reminding them of Ahab's proverb, "Let not him that girdeth on his harness, boast himself as he that putteth it off." In the evening when Nene was alone, I dropped in "promiscuous like," for a smoke and a chat.

Here I may explain that Waka Nene and his followers belonged to the Western branch of the Ngapuhi tribe, who had their seat in the district of Hokianga. Hokianga was necessarily the base of Nene's operations, while the region about Waimate was the centre of the Eastern branch of the tribe which was closely allied to Heke. Nene told me that of the five hundred people I saw around him, there were only two hundred of his own men that he could trust, and that, therefore, he had secretly sent to Hokianga for a contingent of two hundred more, who would arrive next day.

The people about Waimate were wavering, and, apart altogether from the cause of quarrel, they were drawn to Heke by blood relationship.

I found that though Heke and Nene were watching one another, no shot had as yet been fired on either side, and I was anxious that our friends should commit themselves. So I persuaded Nene to send off a troop of skirmishers next day, to the river Waiaruhe, half way to Heke's camp, to make a show of opposing the passage of the river. He did so, there was a

desultory skirmish in which a few were wounded on both sides, but it was all I wanted to commit our friends to an act of war.

Heke and Nene now came to an understanding as to the way in which the contest should be carried on.

The two divisions of the tribe were so entangled by marriage-relations, that they could not afford to carry on war in the old, savage, and indiscriminating way. The actual fighting was to be kept as much as possible to the ground between and about the opposing camps. Women, children, stragglers, and unarmed whites were not to be meddled with when they were off the fighting ground.

They were not to intercept each others supplies, or to make raids on distant and defenceless villages, and they were to treat with humanity and kindness any of each others wounded who might fall into their hands.

And here I may anticipate, that when our troops came upon the scene, Heke had many a chance of capturing our convoys of food and ammunition and of cutting off detached parties in the rear, but he never attempted it. He even allowed one or two resident contractors to supply our soldiers with fresh meat, and let them go within his lines to drive up the cattle we needed for our support. There was no glory, he said, in fighting half starved men, who after all were serving their government, and between whom and himself there was no personal resentment.

There was hard fighting in this war; but Heke always said, "if fight we must, let us fight like gentlemen," and, from beginning to end, I never heard of a single act of treachery on either side, and only of one reported, but doubtful, act of wanton cruelty. This was after our repulse at Ohaeawae, when we left our dead and dying at the foot of the stockade we had vainly tried to storm; the cries of some poor wounded fellow were heard in the camp, and the soldiers got the impression that he was being tortured, but the enemy afterwards denied it, though they confessed that some of the dead had been hacked and mutilated

after they had fallen. I was never in the least afraid of going for a moderate distance within Heke's lines, though not into his pahs, so long as I was unarmed and had no troops behind me; and, though everyone knew that I was the channel of communication between Nene and the Auckland Government, I was fairly safe until I took actual part in the fray.

Nene soon found his position at Waimate very uncomfortable. He was really in the heart of Heke's country. Even the best disposed of the Waimate people gave him a grudging and half-hearted support, and the great majority sympathised with the enemy.

There was nothing now to keep Nene so near the Bay of Islands. Kororareka had fallen, the Bay was deserted, and there was no settlement to protect.

Nene was twenty miles from Hokianga, which was the proper base of his supplies. So he determined to give up his Waimate camp, and to build his pah some eight miles nearer to his own district. He would be out of the range of doubtful adherents, there would be nothing then in his rear, and it would not be difficult to feed his force.

The road from Waimate to Hokianga is about twenty miles long, and runs in a north westerly direction. About three miles from Waimate it skirts a remarkable volcanic hill, from the top of which there is a wide view of the surrounding district. Beyond Puke Nui, or "the great hill" as it is called, there is a deep lake six miles long and a mile or two across, caused by the subsidence of the land in some not very remote eruption.

Just under the hill, at the point where the road touches the edge of this lake, and with a network of impassable swamps on flank and rear, Heke built his stronghold of Okaihau.

Four miles farther on the road was Nene's pah. A stream crossed the centre of the intervening space and divided the hostile lines.

On Heke's passing through the Waimate to build his pah, I met him and had a few words of talk.

He was rather sulky at the opposition of Nene, which held him to the district, when he would fain have been marching on Auckland, but though he would not say much, he was not at all uncivil.

I knew I had nothing to fear from the bulk of his followers, and that the safest place was always where they were congregated in the greatest number, but on this occasion he had a contingent of wild Maoris from the interior, to whom I was not so well known. I was quietly looking on at a war dance near the road, when a file of these wild rascals finished there capering by levelling their muskets at me at some ten paces off, I suppose to frighten me. To move would have been to invite a volley, so I stood still, when a man in the ranks, who had been an old servant of ours, rushed forward and beat their guns aside.

When the two pahs were finished, there used to be a skirmish every two or three days, and the passing of a challenge from one to another to let the young men "play," as the old fellows called it, in the open.

The house I was living in was three miles to the rear of Heke, and his force lay across the direct road to Nene's pah, which I could only otherwise reach by taking a circuit of some ten miles.

There were wild larrikin lads about Waimate, as nearly related by blood to one side as to the other, and who of course did not care a rush for the cause of battle, but they looked upon a scrimmage much as we do at a game of football.

I generally knew a day or two beforehand, when anything important was coming on, and I was often amused to see a group of four young scamps sitting round their evening fire, and making up their minds which side they would severally take in the skirmish of the morrow. Sometimes they would even borrow cartridges from one another, and before daylight half would go to Heke and half to Nene.

Next day, perhaps, they would change about. The fight over, the friends would find their way back before midnight, and spend

the time till morning in bragging about their respective exploits. Now and then one or two of them came home with a wound, but no worse than to disable him perhaps far a week or ten days.

I remember one particular day when there had been a sharper brush than usual, some had been killed and there were a good many badly wounded on both sides. The news came to me that they were torturing the poor wretches by laying rags soaked in rum upon their wounds, which they had been told by some quack Pakeha was the best thing to do for speedy healing and recovery, and I thought, for mere humanity's sake, I ought to try and stop it. So I rode to the outside of Heke's pah, and persuaded them to use no other treatment but washing with cold water, and then laying a green leaf upon the orifice. They were doing the same barbarous thing at Nene's pah, and so Heke allowed me to go through and stop it.

I had a quiet talk with Nene about the position of affairs, and he told me that if they continued to burn powder at the rate they had been doing in these skirmishes, he was a little afraid that their ammunition would run short. His object was not to fight a decisive battle at a heavy cost of life, which, even if he won, would not politically be of much service to our Government.

It was necessary that Heke should be crushed by a force of British soldiers, and not by people of his own race.

His own duty, he (Nene) thought, was to hold Heke back from the least advance towards Auckland until we had gathered a force, and the best service he could render us was just to keep harassing the enemy by frequent skirmishes, until we were ready to encounter him ourselves.

I told him that I would give his message to the Governor, and ask him to arrange time and place for delivering the ammunition. I thought we could only land it at the head of the Keri Keri, and Nene would have to send an escort to bring it on to the camp.

On my return, towards evening, I came upon Harriet (Heke's wife) and a group of attendants outside Heke's pah. We talked about the wounded, and I told what I had seen of them, though they did not need the information, and at last Harriet said with an air of innocence, "How many letters did Nene give you for the Governor?" I said, "I am not a postman, and you don't suppose I should be such a fool as to carry despatches through your lines! No, the only letters I have brought are in my head." She laughed and said, "I know you don't tell lies, but let me feel," and so she passed her hand lightly on the outside of my pockets and said, "That will do, good night." The letters came to hand in the evening.

In due time the supplies of ammunition came to the Keri Keri, in charge of my brother, and he came on with the escort to Nene's camp, and gave the messages with which he had been charged by the Governor.

Early in May, 1845, that is two months after the fall of Kororareka, the Governor sent a force under Colonel Hulme to Nene's aid. It consisted of detachments of the 58th and 96th, and some sailors and marines from the "Hazard" and the "North Star," a little over four hundred in all.

They landed near the mouth of the Keri Keri and marched some fourteen miles to the old missionary station at the falls.

Two days after they tramped, with an escort of friendly natives, some sixteen miles to Nene's pah.

After a day's rest Colonel Hulme determined to attack, much against Nene's advice. I went with a few others to the top of Puke Nui to watch the day's events.

The ground lay before us like a map. Heke's pah, some hundred yards from the edge of the lake, was close at our feet. Four or five miles before us was the slope up to Nene's stockade, and we could see the troops in the distance, with two or three score of Maoris, slowly approaching. We could see also the preparations that Heke had made to receive them.

[Inserted unpaginated illustration]

TE RANGIHAEATA. (From a Drawing by K. L. Sutherland.)

As the troops came on and neared the pah, there was on their right flank a considerable force of the enemy under Kawiti, ready to attack if the soldiers should try to storm the pah. We could see them plainly enough, though they were hidden from the approaching troops by a rise in the ground.

We thought it looked dangerous, when suddenly we noticed a force of sailors and marines and a score or two of Maoris detach themselves from the main body, and making a sweep to the right they came round on Kawiti's flank, and, after a volley, charged with the bayonet. There was a struggle for a quarter of an hour or so, and then we saw Kawiti's people scattering in every direction.

They were badly beaten, a good many fell, and among them were two of Kawiti's own sons.

The troops before the pah fired a rocket or two into the enclosure, and, rushing forward with fixed bayonets, they drove in the stragglers, and then lay on the ground close in to the palisades. Colonel Hulme saw at once that the place was much too strong to be stormed by the bravest men without artillery, and he withdrew his men without the Maori garrison attempting to molest their retreat.

We had lost fourteen killed and over forty wounded in the fight with Kawiti; a large number out of four hundred men.

Nene's men covered the rear till all were back in the friendly camp.

Our dead were hurriedly buried, and a day or two after, Heke ordered the graves to be deepened, and the poor fellows to be more decently laid to their rest, and then he himself read over them the Maori version of the burial service.

Colonel Hulme returned with his force to Keri Keri, and re-embarked for Auckland. He expressed himself grateful for the care and tenderness with which Nene's men carried the wounded over that thirteen miles of bush road, and praised the loyalty of our allies.

Heke now found that apart from the British troops, Waka Nene alone was too much for him, and that if he could not manage to crush him before we mustered for the next attack, his cause would be lost.

He would not wait for another expedition at Okaihau; it was getting more difficult to draw his supplies; and he had to be in a position from which, if worsted, he could retreat to where our soldiers could not follow him. He removed his pah to the other side of the Mawe Lake.

A day came when Heke knew by his spies that Nene's pah was nearly empty. Two thirds of his men were absent, getting supplies from Hokianga, and now, Heke thought, he had got Nene at last. He attacked him with a force of about five to one. This roused the old warrior at last. He not only held his own, but watching some movement of hesitation or confusion in the enemy, he fiercely charged them, and drove them headlong before him. Many were killed, Heke himself was badly wounded, and very nearly captured. Heke was now thrown entirely on the defensive. He never ventured to attack Nene again. He now built a new pah at Ohaeawae, some five miles to the west of Waimate.

There was a model either of this pah or of Ruapekapeka in our Hobart museum, and I suppose it exists still. The pah was very strongly built, with a double row of palisades, the posts of which were thick enough for our round shot to stick in them, and they were so ingeniously fastened by traverse rafters, that it was very difficult to bring them down, even when they were cut through. For some eight feet from the ground there was a thick thatched screen of green flax, and there were two or three embrasures with the muzzles of some ancient six-pounders peeping through. The interior was a net work of palisades and pits and covered ways. A fosse surrounded the whole work, and it was held by a garrison of about three hundred men.

In the month of June, that is nearly four months after the fall of Kororareka, Captain Fitzroy received fresh reinforcements, and

a new expedition of six hundred men was organized under the command of Colonel Despard of the 99th, and went on to the Bay. He had but four field guns, a rocket-tube, and about eight old mortars. With much toil one of the "Hazards" thirty-two pounders was afterwards dragged by the sailors to the camp. The first camp was pitched at Waimate, and a good deal of time was spent in bringing up stores and ammunition. When all was ready, the troops marched five miles more to Ohaeawae, and the camp was pitched under the shelter of a low bank about three hundred yards from the front of the pah.

Nene, with two hundred and fifty men, accompanied the troops and pitched his camp on our right, a little to the rear. On our right front there was a low hill, backed by scrub, which commanded the inside of the stockade, and there we established a battery, and fired in a desultory way on the palisades.

I left the camp before the work was finished. My brother Henry was on the Colonel's staff as interpreter. On the 30th of June I happened to be on board the "Hazard" for a day at the mouth of the Keri Keri river, and a little after daylight the next morning I started alone on a tramp to Ohaeawae. I first walked 10 miles to the Keri Keri station, then 10 miles to the Waimate, and then five more miles to the camp. Two miles before I reached my destination I met a friendly Maori with the unpleasant news, "O Hori Karaka your brother Henry has fallen this morning, shot through the head." Presently I met another, whose version was that he was shot through the lungs, but was still alive, and I might see him if I hurried on. A third said, "he is badly but not fatally wounded, and you will find him all right." When I got to the camp, I learnt that during the night a party of the enemy had worked round to the rear of the battery, which commanded the works inside the pah, and watching their opportunity had carried the battery with a rush in the early morning, driven out the guard and spiked the guns with wood, and they in their turn had been driven out by a bayonet charge of the 99th. At the moment when the enemy made their rush

my brother Henry was standing at the parapet, looking down on the pah. There was a shout that it was the Colonel, and as my brother turned to face them, a volley was fired and he rolled from the top of the hill to the bottom. He had only one serious wound however, through the upper part of the thigh, but happily the femoral artery was not cut, and the bone not broken. I found him in the Hospital tent, and then sought out Lieutenant Phillpotts (son of the Bishop of Exeter) for whom I had a message, and found him and others ready to storm.

Before Kororareka was taken it was Phillpotts who drilled the civilians, and, on Captain Robertson being wounded, he had taken command of the "Hazard." It was afterwards said that he had been too precipitate in his surrender of the place. It galled him terribly, and the poor fellow took it as a reflection on his courage, and was very sore about it. It made him reckless, and he joined the camp with the foreboding that he should never return. There were three of us brothers who were free and open guests to the company of officers on board the "Hazard," and, as it happened, two of the officers bore the same distinguished name of Clarke. One day we were all five at dinner, and as you can imagine our several personalities got rather mixed. The two Lieutenants were distinguished by their familiars, one as "Polly" and the other as "Jemima" Clarke, and at Phillpotts suggestion we were nicked off, I, as "Prophecy," Henry as "Litany," and William as "Gospel." Prophecy, Litany and Gospel were our current designations in the fleet to the end of the war. Gospel was a special chum. One day Phillpotts said, "Gospel, I am writing my will, what shall I leave you?" Of course William thought it a joke, and said, "Oh, leave me your Manton," and a month after, to his great surprise and sorrow, the gun was handed over to him, and I believe he has it to this day. A day or two before the flag-staff was cut down, Phillpotts took a walk by way of reconnoitring the enemy, and had been captured by Heke, disarmed, and escorted back to our lines when he gave him back his sword.

The Maoris knew him everywhere as Toby Phillpotts, and liked him for his good humour. Once at Ohaeawae, a little after dusk, Phillpotts crept up to the palisade, and began slashing with his cutlass at the flax screen, when, of course, nothing could have been easier than to strike him down, but instead of that an awful voice came from the ground at his feet, not five yards off: "Go away Toby, go away Toby," and he went away.

The battery had been firing all day, and Colonel Despard fancied that there must be a practicable breach, and gave the order, "prepare to storm." Nene told him that there was no breach, and that the bravest soldiers in the world could not find a passage for two abreast, and the Senior Officer of Engineers supported him. But Despard was not to be moved. Late in the afternoon the bugle sounded the assault. The storming party consisted of two hundred men, under the command of Major Macpherson and Lieutenant Phillpotts. Phillpotts was in flannel and carrying a seaman's cutlass instead of the regulation sword. It was not a rush of more than one hundred yards.

The poor fellows went on bravely, and might as well have run their heads against a stone wall. There was not a breach wide enough for a single man to enter. Phillpotts tried to do it; two officers and ninety six men out of the two hundred were struck down before they gave up the hopeless task.

We found out afterwards that with all our bombardment, the second, or inner palisade of the stronghold was hardly scratched, and many of our round shot were sticking in the posts of the outer palisade.

Two days afterwards a flag of truce was flown from the pah, and we were invited to bury our dead. We laid thirty four together in a single pit. Captain Grant of the 58th, and Lieutenant Phillpotts were among the killed.

We afterwards laid these officers in the quiet little churchyard at Waimate. 3

But to go back to the assault: just as it was at its height, and they were dragging the wounded in, I made my way through a

nasty fire to the hospital tent. There my brother was lying, while all around were the sights and sounds of the surgeon's work, and I felt that at any risk I must get him out. I ran round through a cross fire to our right flank, and got hold of two Maoris to help me, and so we carried him on his blanket through the hurtle and sputter of bullets till we got him to a place of comparative safety. At one point one of the two bearers dropped him, but we managed to drag him somehow over a low plantation wall and let him lie; then I made off in pursuit, and by forcible words and other persuasions I brought the fugitive Maori back to his duty. Then we rigged up a sort of litter, and, as night came on, we started with our burden for a five mile tramp to Waimate. It was very dark and rain came down in torrents. Part of our way lay through a thick forest, and the only passage through it had been cut and churned into a slough of glue mud, nearly up to our knees. The soil was a most tenacious clay, and in struggling through it I got one foot into a hole, and had to leave my boot there, for by no effort could I get it out; it was enough to get one's foot out. So I stumped on with one boot till I got to the house. I lit a fire, made the patient a basin of slops, and laid him on a mattress upon the floor.

After midnight a dray load of weary, drenched, and groaning men came into the settlement, among them Major Macpherson, who had led the storming party.

The rain and the jolting had been bad enough for the poor fellows, but in the dark the bullocks had managed to take a stump and upset the dray.

I took the old Major in charge, and made him a bed on the floor by the side of my brother, to his very great content. The Major was very stout; he had been struck down by a bullet which flattened on a snuff box in his breast, and while in the act of falling another shot had gone through the thickest flesh it could find in his body.

I was desperately tired, but my patients were feverish and restless, and I was perfectly stupid with sleepiness. They

wanted water, or that I should pull the toes of the one, or help the other to turn over. At last I gave them each a stick and told them to stir me up when they wanted me. I fell into a dead sleep, and suppose I got up often, but do not know, only at different points over my ribs I felt uncommonly sore the next day from the poking of my friends.

After the repulse, Colonel Despard was naturally depressed, and began to talk about withdrawing the force. Again Nene remonstrated, telling him that it would be ruinous to the public interest, and would make the last error worse than the first. At last he said, "Well, Colonel, if you go, I mean to stay."

It came on now to rain heavily for several days, and the trenches inside Heke's pah became so full of water that they were no longer tenable.

On the night of the 10th of July the enemy silently evacuated the place, and no one knew it till next day, when they were already in the forest. We blew up the guns and burnt what we could of the place, and a few days after returned to Waimate. There the troops entrenched themselves, and remained in that position till the arrival of Captain Grey to assume the Government.

Heke had retreated far inland, and it was impossible for us to follow him.

Nene remained near Waimate, and for some time there was practically a suspension of hostilities. Heke and Kawiti parted early in September, and Kawiti built his new stronghold at Ruapekapeka, far away from what had hitherto been our fighting ground. The new pah was some ten miles inland from the head of the Kawa Kawa, on the south eastern side of the Bay of Islands.

Active operations, as I have said, were suspended, and towards the end of October I went back to Auckland. I had been eight months in the very focus of the rebellion, and for most of the time I was the only representative of the Government in the district. I came, knowing that our only chance of

avoiding serious disaster was to hold Heke to the Bay of Islands, and give him no chance of marching on Auckland. Waka Nene was not strong enough to crush him, but he could make it impossible for him to go out of the district.

I could watch the course of affairs and do something to rally our Maori friends, and could be the channel of communication between them and the Government of Auckland. I found that my safety, until I joined the troops, was in being somewhat ostentatiously defenceless and unarmed. I never even tried to get out of Heke's way, if he had chosen to hurt me. He always said, frankly enough, that I might do anything except fight in battle. I never saw the interior of Heke's defences as long as he occupied them, and it was understood, as a point of honour between us, that I should not try to do so.

I never carried arms until the attack on Ohaeawae, and afterwards when before the stronghold of Ruapekapeka. But it had been an anxious time and I was glad of a short respite. When I was in Auckland Governor Grey arrived, and he assumed the administration on the i8th November, 1845, and at once attached me to his personal staff. He was anxious to have done with the war; he had 1,100 available men on shore at his disposal; and there were four ships of war at anchor in the bay. Grey directed Despard to move with all his force to the head of the Kawa Kawa, which was within ten miles of Kawiti's stronghold at Ruapekapeka, and which Kawiti held with a garrison of a little over two hundred men.

The Governor and I joined the expedition, and took our passage in the frigate "Castor," which had just come from the China Station, commanded by Captain Graham, brother of Sir James Graham.

In a conference with the friendly Chiefs, I wrote instructions at the Governor's dictation as to the plan of proceedings.

Mokoare was to be detached from the main body of Nene's people on special service. He was to make his way into the difficult country behind Kawiti, and to do his best to prevent a

junction between him and Heke. The two pahs of Heke and Kawiti were now twenty miles apart. Makoare was to cut their line of communication, not to risk a serious battle, but avoiding anything beyond skirmishing, he was to block the way, and if Heke got past him, to hang on his rear and embarrass him as much as possible.

Our friend did his work well, and Heke was not able to send any considerable aid to his beleaguered ally. We had to cut a road from the Kawa Kawa to the front of Ruapekapeka.

Nene and his people pushed on in advance, and kept the work of road making clear of interruption.

Soon after Christmas Day we pitched our camp in sight of the stronghold and half a mile from it; we were separated from Kawiti by a deep wooded ravine. It was the strongest place we had as yet encountered, though it had a smaller garrison to defend it than that which occupied Ohaeawae.

On our right front, a narrow ridge swept round the head of the ravine to the pah, and we were able to place a formidable battery of heavy guns within a hundred and fifty yards of the palisades, while we had another battery in the front of our camp. Nene's men were in high spirits at having the Governor at hand, and they built their stockade at the left rear of the advanced battery. Once only were we thrown into a few minutes confusion by a sally from the pah. There was a difficult way by which a bold enemy might sneak through the forest to our left front, and it had been left by us too slightly guarded. Suddenly our sentries on that side were driven in, and the alarm was sounded. Things looked likely to get mixed, and there was danger lest we should fire by mistake upon our own natives. Nene saw it in a moment; he was at the time with the Governor, the Colonel, and myself in the Governor's tent.

He at once begged the Colonel to order his men on no account to fire, and he (Nene) would soon account for the assailants. Calling to his men, he rushed at their head into the forest. There was a sharp skirmish, several on the other side

were killed, and Nene returned in an hour and laid their arms at the Governor's feet. Fighting went on. We were very much struck with the tenacity with which, under the heaviest fire of our great guns, the garrison kept to their posts. Once we shot down their flag-staff, and there was a general cheer in the camp; it was answered back by a cheer in the pah, and the flag-staff was up again, and the flag flying in defiance before sunset. I remember standing at our battery with the Governor, and seeing him much moved. We were throwing shot and shell into the place, and could see the splinters flying from the stockade every time it was struck, but through it all we saw a young girl, apparently about twenty, and a man silting quietly on the roof of a bomb-proof house, calmly watching us and quite undisturbed by the bursting shells and crashing timber around them.

We, with our great guns, mortars, and rockets, including our allies, numbered about two thousand men in arms.

The garrison of the pah never reached three hundred. On Saturday, the 25th of January, we opened fire from all our guns at daylight, every shot being directed to the same part of the stockade, so as to make a breach, and we continued the bombardment till evening.

Colonel Despard seemed to have learnt nothing from our repulse at Ohaeawae, and was actually preparing to storm a stronger place.

Mohi Tawai vehemently remonstrated against the madness of the attempt, and at length the Colonel gave way.

All through the coming night a gun was fired into the breach every half hour or so to prevent its being repaired, till at length daylight broke and there was a lull.

That Sunday morning the Governor and I were at breakfast in our tent when Nene came in. He said things were very quiet in the pah, and he was going to send one of his young men to find out what it meant. He asked that with as little noise as possible a few men should be got to the advanced

battery, where he had posted some friendlies, to be ready to act at a moment's notice. A hundred men were immediately sent, and the Governor and I went with them. On arrival at the battery perfect silence was ordered, and we watched the proceedings. Stripping themselves of nearly all their clothes, and with gun in hand, two young fellows made their way from stump to stump, crawled to the breach, and disappeared inside. Presently one of them showed out again, waved his musket over his head as a signal, and with one wild rush we poured in. The defenders were all on the outside farthest from us, sitting under the shelter of the palisades, never expecting such a move on our part. For a long time they held their ground, and fired in upon us through the spaces of the stockade from the fosse outside, but at last they were driven off. They retreated through the wood in splendid style, and a fine body of young men checked the pursuit whenever a stand was possible. The fight lasted for four hours; we had twelve killed and thirty wounded. What the loss of the enemy was we never heard. They carried off all their wounded but one, and some of their dead. I went over the ground when the firing ceased, and came here and there upon the dead. Behind one log crossing the road of retreat, where we had been kept at bay for more than half an hour, I found nine stalwart young men lying side by side.

In his officiai report to the Governor, Colonel Despard said: "Your Excellency has been an eye witness to all our operations, and, I may say, actually engaged in the assault;" which was so far true that we were in with the first party who rushed into the breach, and had to stand the fire of the enemy from outside.

Despard had good reason to rejoice that he had not repeated the blunder of Ohaeawae.

The pah turned out to be much stronger and far less injured than we thought. We had made a practicable breach through the outer palisade, but the inner works were not seriously broken. The inside was a network of covered ways, and the houses were all bomb-proof.

The Maoris afterwards said that on account of its being Sunday morning, they thought they were safe from an assault, and so they were taken by surprise. It took us many years to learn how to attack a Maori stockade, and in after wars we suffered terribly from our rashness and ignorance.

The capture of Ruapekapeka virtually closed the Northern war.

There were negotiations by letter between the Governor on one side and Heke and Kawiti on the other, that passed through my hands. At last peace was declared. Very wisely, in the circumstances, the Governor did not put Heke to open shame by insisting upon the re-erection of the flag-staff at Kororareka. It remained where it had fallen till both Heke and Kawiti were dead. The natives themselves who had been fighting against us set it up again in 1858.

Heke never got over the hardship of the war. He broke down in health and died in 1850, about forty, from pulmonary disease.

His widow Harriet was re-married to Arama Karaka, one of the leading Chiefs of Nene's tribe, who had fought against her former husband in the war. She, too, died only a few years ago. While Heke was ill, Grey sent him many presents, which he gratefully acknowledged. A lingering remembrance of past suspicions haunted him, and, taking a sovereign from a number, he turned it over and said with a grim smile: "As it comes from Governor Grey I am looking whether there is any hook in it." He wrote to Grey: "I am very ill, but do not grieve about that. This body is not our everlasting habitation." He died professing the Christian faith, and kindly attended by his wife, the daughter of Hongi.

Heke's war stands quite alone in the history of our struggles with the Maori race; alone in its magnanimity, its chivalry, its courtesy, and, I dare to say, its control by Christian sentiment.

I did my best, with a good conscience, to frustrate Heke's plans, and to thwart his ambitious aims, for his success would

have ruined the country. Heke knew I was there to do it, but he never shewed the least sign of personal resentment; nor did he treat me with such harshness as he might have done with very good excuse.

Personally we were always on terms of kindness, and I should be the last man to grudge him his meed of honest praise.

We had other wars afterwards that were bitter with all the elements of personal resentment; on the native side wars in which, I fear, there has been almost always more or less of excuse that we had provoked them to do their worst.

In the years to come we were to fight a people who for the most part had given up Christianity, and relapsed into their ancient ways, and who thought murder, treachery, cruelty, and, indeed, anything short of actual cannibalism, only fair reprisals in such a conflict of races.

There were many noble exceptions, but even with the best of them, they did not approach the chivalry of our first antagonists.

On our side, too, I am afraid that oui hands, since that first war, were not always clean, and the feelings of our later wars took on a character of exasperation, that had no place in the conduct of the first.

I may here, too, say all that is necessary about our friend Nene and our relations with him, and the part he played among his countrymen. At the time when New Zealand was ceded to the Queen, I roughly calculated the Maori population at about 60,000. Since the beginning of the century perhaps as many more had been carried off by war and disease, and everything portended that they were among the vanishing peoples that could not stand for long against the forces of what we call civilization.

It had been a race amongst the tribes which should be the first to arm themselves with the European rifle, and Hongi began that series of exterminating wars before which thousands and thousands disappeared.

We brought them epidemics against which we have been partially fortified by the innoculation of many generations, but

which found in the Maoris fresh and virgin soil, in which the seeds of destruction grew with rapid and fatal luxuriance. This, I think, and not the oppression of white men at all, is the main cause of their fast diminution.

For a short time there was a rage among them for intoxicating liquors, which was a kind of defiance to the legal prohibition of their sale to the Maoris. That madness, however, has very much passed away, though intemperance is far too common a vice among them, as among ourselves.

The four greatest Chiefs of the country in my time were Waka Nene of the Ngapuhi, Whero-Whero of Waikato, Heu-Heu of Taupo, and Rauparaha of the Ngatitoa. They were all great warriors, but they were also men of exceptional ability in the diplomatic management of what we should call civil and intertribal affairs. Waka Nene was strong all through, in mind as in body. He had a singularly open, honest, and benevolent expression of face, and though, if needs were, he could be stern enough, there was little of cruelty or vindictiveness in his composition, as there could possibly have been in one whose youth was spent in such surroundings. He was the bravest among the brave; a splendid Maori general; averse to fighting until every way of conciliation was exhausted; and, though he never heard of Polonius, with him, too, it was a maxim: "Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear't that the opposed may beware of thee." He was impressed with the abiding feeling that the only chance for his Race was to keep peace with the Pakeha; to accept loyally the supremacy of the Queen; and to bear themselves patiently through the slow and difficult transition from Maori custom to British law. His bare word was trusted through all the country as the most binding writing would be trusted among ourselves, and he had the power of attaching followers to his person with a devotion which made them ready to stand by him in life or in death.

If I remember right, he was the first to sign the Treaty of Waitangi; at anyrate his influence was paramount, and but for

him the Maoris would never have signed the Treaty at all. His proper home was the banks of the Hokianga River, on the western side of the country, opposite to the Bay of Islands.

He had for many years been a convert of the Wesleyan Mission, and received at his baptism the prefix "Thomas Walker," to his old Maori name of Nene. From beginning to end he never swerved from his pledge of loyalty to the Queen. When he died he was buried in the little churchyard of Kororareka, having solemnly adjured his friends not to allow the Maori custom of disposing of his bones, but to let him lie at peace in a Christian grave; and over his grave the Government raised a stone monument with an inscription in both languages, expressive of their gratitude, and purporting that that was the resting place of one who was alike steadfast in his friendship for the English, and in his labours to secure the best interests of his countrymen – a chief of men, as wise in counsel as he was brave in war.

For once in a way, this was an epitaph of severe and simple truth, and there was not a word of flattery in its praise of the dead. He had been one of Hongi's lieutenants, and had traversed with his war parties the whole of the Northern Island to the neighbourhood of Cook Strait. But it was for his wisdom as a councellor, and his influence as a peace-maker, that he was specially famous. No one could set down his conciliation to weakness or fear. In his ordinary bearing he was as gentle as a child. In conversation his voice was soft as a woman's, but in the shout of battle it was said to be terrible, and it could be heard above all the clash of arms and the din of the conflict. He was hardly ever defeated, and it was his way before he fought, to look beyond the victory, and to determine the move by which it should be followed. He was half a life older than Heke, and, indeed, he regarded the action of that Chief very much as the escapade of a petulant boy. In their case, too, the struggle had none of the bitterness of personal resentment, and, when Heke made his somewhat sulky submission,

Nene advised the Government to treat him with kindness and consideration, and, the war being ended, not to add to his disappointment anything that would hurt his sense of personal dignity. We owe Nene's memory, more than to any other of the Maori race, a real debt of gratitude and respect, for at many a crisis he threw himself into the breach, and averted dangers that might have been fatal to us in those early days. As a father he was a man of tender feeling. He had but one son, eighteen years old, whom my mother nursed in his illness, and after the boy's death, when Nene came to our house, he could not speak of his loss without tears, or thank her too much for the kindness that seemed to him to have been all in vain.

I saw him last during Colonel Gore Browne's administration, when I paid a visit to New Zealand.

The Taranake war was then at its height, and the old man told me mournfully, that his heart was darker than it had ever been, when he thought of the issue of the struggle, whether to ourselves or to the people of his own Maori race. Of this I am sure, that throughout that first Maori war we were opponents who thoroughly respected each other, not only as the brave respect the brave, but as they admire the honour, the courtesy, and the humanity that may redeem even a war of races from sinking into a mere brutal struggle for existence, or a base and greedy struggle for our ruder neighbour's goods. I need not carry you farther.

After the war was over I accompanied Governor Grey to the Southern settlements, and we secured a good deal of the disputed land at Wellington, Nelson, and elsewhere, by compensating the unsatisfied Maori owners.

In the upper valley of the Hutt new disturbances broke out in which the natives were aggressive, and, I think, almost wholly in the wrong. There was a splutter of hostilities for a few months, with considerable loss on our side, but the aggressive natives were driven back to the mountains, and their principal leader died.

[Inserted unpaginated illustration]

TE RAUPARAHA. (From a Drawing by K. L. Sutherland.)

Things continued outwardly quiet for some years, though all the while the storm I had distinctly foretold was brewing, till it broke out in the Taranake war, and the series of struggles that followed in its train.

Before this, however, the time had come when I was wanted elsewhere, and much against the advice of the Governor, and many friends, I tendered my resignation and closed the Maori chapter of my early life.

A fit of prostration had brought me very low, and I knew that neither body nor mind could bear the strain much longer. It was a sort of living martyrdom to one not over robust in health and constitution, and to be always in the storm was not at all suited to my temper. I longed for a quieter scheme of living, and it did not trouble me to give up the splendid prospects which the Governor held before me, if I could only fulfil what had been all through my peaceful ambition – to be a plain and simple preacher of Christ's Holy Gospel. It was not the mere peril and care and worry of the life which made me give it up, but the change was hastened on because I was vexed by some things which the Governor had lately done in the South, and I thought they were not as straightforward as in our dealings with the Maoris we should have been. I was very unwilling to be an agent in a policy against which my private conscience revolted, or to be entangled in a business that I could not stomach in the way of morality. So I cut the knot, and definitely withdrew from active service, much against the wishes of the Governor with whom all along I had been on the most pleasant terms of intercourse. In fact the Governor would not accept my resignation when I tendered it, and I left with the arrangement that I should have six months leave of absence, and that if at the end of that time I still persisted in resigning, my service should be closed. Nothing could have been kinder than the way in which the Governor treated me, though I am afraid he thought me rather a fool for my decision. My brother Henry suceeded to my post and became a much trusted judge of the Land Court, who was often

called by the Government to decide upon difficult cases after his retirement from official service, and who died only a few months ago.

It was not easy at first to break with such a past as is described in these notes, and, "forgetting those things which are behind," to subdue oneself to the yoke of a simple college student, but I did it and have never regretted it. The issue has been the long, happy, and, I hope, not quite useless life of a Congregational minister in this fair land.

The story I have tried to tell you is a story of the beginning of things. My recollections go back to a time before the formation of a single town in New Zealand, and the point to which I have brought you is still as far back as fifty years ago. You know what those fifty years have done. The New Zealand Company with all its good and evil passed away. Nearly all the territory that it claimed, and large tracts of land besides, have been acquired by purchase from the natives. Many a wilderness and solitary place has been made glad, and the desert has blossomed as the rose.

We have had many a disastrous conflict between the races; and at great expense of blood and treasure, and still more of labour and thought, the dangers and difficulties of the earlier times have been overcome. Not only in numbers, but in all other ways, the British colonists are in the ascendant.

It seems that slowly but surely the Maori race is passing away, or at least hanging in the balance, as their own native birds, the Kiwi, the Weka, the Tui, and the Korimako, are vanishing before the pheasant, the partridge, the sparrow and the linnet.

It seems as if in God's providence, our English speaking race were destined to gain a supremacy in the world's affairs of which there is no example in the history of the past. But it is sad to think how much goes down before us. Let us hope that we may put something better in its place. Forty years hence those who look back at our time will think of it as the day of small things. It is in all these colonies the day of beginnings;

and we have this advantage, that every true man among us can leave his mark upon the coming future as the man equally true cannot hope to do in long established communities.

For the rest – my Tasmanian friends know for themselves the manner of life I have had among them for fifty years. The foregoing story may, perhaps, help to account for it.

June 1895.

3 See APPENDIX III.

APPENDICES.

APPENDIX I.

THE TREATY OF WAITANGI,

6TH FEBRUARY, 1840.

"Her Majesty, Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, regarding with her Royal favour the native Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand, and anxious to protect their just rights and property, and to secure to them the enjoyment of peace and good order, has deemed it necessary (in consequence of the great number of Her Majesty's subjects who have already settled in New Zealand, and the rapid extension of emigration both from Europe and Australia which is still in progress) to constitute and appoint a functionary properly authorized to treat with the aborigines of New Zealand for the recognition of Her Majesty's sovereign authority over the whole or any part of those islands. Her Majesty therefore being desirous to establish a settled form of civil government, with a view to avert the evil consequences which must result from the absence of the necessary laws and institutions, alike to the native population and to her subjects, has been graciously pleased to empower and to authorize me, William Hobson, a Captain in Her Majesty's Navy, Consul and Lieutenant-Governor over such parts of New Zealand as may be, or hereafter shall be, ceded to Her Majesty, to invite the confederated and independent Chiefs of New Zealand to concur in the following articles and conditions: –

"1. The Chiefs of the Confederation of the united Tribes of New Zealand, and the separate and independent Chiefs who have not become members of the Confederation, cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England, absolutely and without reservation, all the rights and powers of sovereignly which the said Confederation or independent Chiefs respectively exercise or possess, or may be supposed to exercise or possess, over their respective territories, as the sole sovereigns thereof."

"2. Her Majesty the Queen of England confirms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand, and to the respective families and individuals thereof, the full, exclusive, and undisturbed possession of their lands and estates, forests, fisheries, and other properties which they may Collectively or individually possess, so long as it is their wish and desire to

retain the same in their possession: But the Chiefs of the united Tribes and the individual Chiefs yield to Her Majesty the exclusive right of pre-emption over such lands as the proprietors thereof may be disposed to alienate, at such prices as may be agreed upon between the respective proprietors and persons appointed by Her Majesty to treat with them in that behalf."

"3. In consideration thereof, Her Majesty the Queen of England extends to the natives of New Zealand her Royal protection, and imparts to them all the rights and privileges of British subjects."

This short treaty was duly signed by Captain Hobson, and by the assembled Chiefs, and attested as "Done at Waitangi, this 6th day of February, in the year of our Lord, 1840;" with the following addition: – "Now, therefore, we, the Chiefs of the Confederation of the united Tribes of New Zealand, being assembled in congress at Victoria in Waitangi, and we, the separate and independent Chiefs of New Zealand, claiming authority over the Tribes and territories which are specified after our respective names, having been made fully to understand the provisions of the foregoing treaty, accept and enter into the same in the full spirit and meaning thereof, in witness of which we have attached our signatures or marks at the places and the dates respectively specified."

Of the forty-six who signed the treaty at first, twenty-six had signed the Declaration of Independence in 1835. In both cases they had been stirred by desire to keep the French from their land, and to obtain English protection. In both they had the sympathy of their English resident friends.

APPENDIX II.

TRANSLATION OF DEED OF SALE.

Know all men by this Document, We, the Chiefs and Men of the Ngaitahu Tribe in New Zealand, whose names are undersigned, consent on this Thirty-first day of July, in the year of our Lord 1844, to give up, sell, and abandon altogether to William Wakefield, Principal Agent to the New Zealand Company of London, on behalf of the Directors of the said Company, all our claims and title to the lands comprised within the undermentioned boundaries; the names of the said lands are Otakou, Kaikarae, Taieri, Mataau, and Te Karoro; these are the boundaries, the northern boundary line commences at Purehurehu, runs along the sea shore, crossing the entrance of Otakou (Harbour), to Otupa, thence along the coast to Poatiri; the eastern boundary is the ocean from Poatiri to Tokata; thence the southern boundary runs along the summit of the Kaihiku Range, and

crosses the Mataau River, thence along the summit of Wakari to Mihiwaka and Otuwararoa, then descends to Purehurehu on the coast. We also give up all the Islands, Kamautaurua, Rakiriri, Okaiha, Moturata, Paparoa, Matoketoke, Hakinikini, and Aonui; excepting the following places, which we have reserved for ourselves and our children, that is to say, a certain portion of land on the eastern side of Otakou, called Omate, the boundary line commences at Moepuku, crosses over to Poatiri, and thence along the coast to Waiwakaneke, then crosses to Pukekura, and runs along the side of the harbour to Moepuku. Also a certain portion of land at Pukekura, the boundaries of which are marked by posts, containing one acre more or less; also, a portion of land at Taieri, the boundary of which commences at Onumia, and runs across in a straight line to Maitapapa, the Taieri River forms the other boundary; also a portion of land at the Karoro, bounded on the south by the Karoro River, on the east by the ocean; the northern boundary includes the Kainga of that place, and extends inland about one mile; which said Reserved Places we agree neither to sell or let to any parly whatsoever, without the sanction of His Excellency the Governor of New Zealand. We have received as payment for the above first-mentioned lands the sum of two thousand four hundred pounds in money, on this day.

John Tuhawaiki, Kahuti,
Karetai, Kurukuru,
Taiaroa, Mokomoko,
Pokene, Te Ao,
Koroko, Koroko Karetai,
Kaikoarare, Tutewaiao,
Takamaitu, Papakawa,
Te Raki, Te Kaki,
John Tuhawaiki on behalf of Topi, Rakiwakana,
Kihau, Te Raki (the second),
Solomon Pohio, Potiki,
Pohau Pohata.
Taiaroa for Pokihi,

In the presence of these Witnesses:

John Jermyn Symonds, P.M.
Frederick Tuckett.
George Clarke, junior. Protector of Aborigines.
David Scott.

A true translation of the original Deed,

GEORGE CLARKE, junior, Protector of Aborigines.

I, William Wakefield, the Principal Agent of the New Zealand Company, do undertake to select one hundred and fifty thousand acres, to which the Crown's right of pre-emption has been waived in favour of the said Company, from the block of land specified in the Deed to which this is annexed, as soon as such land shall have been surveyed, leaving the unappropriated residue to to be dealt with in such manner as His Excellency the Governor shall deem fit.

APPENDIX III.

THE REV. H. WILLIAMS AT OHAEAWAE.

The memory of Archdeacon Henry Williams has suffered much from wild reports and ignorant or malicious slanders. The worst thing said against him, an old naval officer, is that he was the instigator of the mad assault on Heke's pah at Ohaeawae. How the report could have sprung up I do not know, but he had detractors who would believe anything. The following letter from his son to the Curator of our Museum, effectually disposes of the imputation, but it is a pity that for want of knowing better, we should have appended to our model of Heke's pah a note that the assault was on the Archdeacon's advice. I knew better, and ought to have corrected it, but it did not come under my serious notice. Henry Williams had more influence over the Maori Chiefs than any man in the country, and was thoroughly trusted. His nine years in the navy were not thrown away. But for his earnest recommendation and assurance, the Treaty of Waitangi would never have been signed, but he put his whole heart into the business, and we of both races owe him the tribute of our respect and veneration, and ought not to let his name be spattered by the guessing of malignant gossip, when in fact, he was as simple and robust a Christian, and as loyal and brave an Englishmen, as ever pioneered our way in dealing with a race that he wanted to lift up to our own civilization. Such a man can make enemies as well as friends.

PAKARAKA, KAWAKAWA,
BAY OF ISLANDS,
AUCKLAND, N.Z.
October 28th, 1902.

ALEX. MORTON, ESQ.,
Curator and Secretary Museum,
HOBART, TASMANIA.

Re MODEL OF THE OHAEAWAE PAH.

SIR, – I thank you for your letter of the 1st October last, in which you say you will be glad to get a clear account of what I have, relating to the taking of the Pah, to lay before the Trustees.

I will quote from an impartial witness – a military officer – who was present on the occasion. The following is an extract from "The Story of New Zealand, Past and Present, Savage and Civilized," by Arthur S. Thomson, Surgeon-Major 58th Regiment (vol. 2, page 115): –

"One day the enemy made a sortie from the Pah and attacked Walker Nene's (our Maori ally) position. So sudden and unexpected was this sally, that a British flag was taken, and Colonel Despard and some senior officers only escaped by a ridiculous flight. This token of success was hoisted inside the fortification under Heke's flag. After twenty-six shots had been fired from the thirty-two pounder, Colonel Despard thought the palisades sufficiently broken in two places for an assault, but Captain Marlow, the Senior Engineer Officer, did not consider either breach practicable. In defiance of this professional opinion. Colonel Despard ordered a storming party of l60 soldiers, under Majors Macpherson and Bridge, and 40 seamen and volunteers under Lieutenant Phillpotts, R.N., with hatchets and ropes and ladders, to be ready at 3 p.m. on 1st July. All the troops told off for this awful service paraded at the hour named, save one man of the 99th Regiment, who was taken prisoner in the morning. . . . When the advance was sounded, the stormers rushed on the breach at 80 yards, and for ten minutes tried to enter the Pah by pulling down the palisades, but the inner fence being unbroken, and two officers and half the men having gone down, the party fell back baflled from an impregnable stockade. The whole force then withdrew to a position 400 yards from the Pah."

On page 118 – "Colonel Despard was justly blamed by soldiers and civilians for sacrificing men's lives in attacking a half breached Pah, and it was whispered in military circles in London, that the Duke of Wellington on reading the dispatch, stated, that distance alone prevented him bringing Colonel Despard to a Court-Martial."

Moss' Book "School History of New Zealand," page 90, says: – On the 1st July, in spite of the adverse opinion of the officer in command of the

Engineers, and of the very emphatic and explicit warnings of Waka Nene, and other Maories, Colonel Despard ordered an assault. . . . Waka Nene, denouncing the assault as foolery, and sending the men to certain death, refused to let his Maories have anything to do with it."

In "The Life of Henry Williams," by Hugh Carleton (vol. 2, page 110), is the following: – "When the troops returned this time, under Colonel Despard of the 99th, they were directed against Ohaeawae. According to preconcerted arrangements the rebel forces concentrated, throwing themselves into Pene Taui's Pah. The attempt to breach, maintained for a week, was ineffectual. On the 1st July a sally was made from the Pah, which resulted in the temporary occupation of the Knoll on which Waka had encamped, and the capture of Waka's colours – the Union Jack. The position was gallantly recovered by a party of the 58th Regiment under Major Bridge, but the Union Jack was carried into the Pah. There it was hoisted, upside down, and half mast high, below the Maori flag. This was the cause of the disaster which ensued. The sight was too much for Colonel Despard's temper, and he ordered an assault upon the Pah. The point selected for attack was the only angle double flanked. The hopelessness of success was perfectly well known to the storming party; they were marching to certain destruction. They did their duty to the utmost, some of them even firing into the Pah through its own loop-holes; but within five minutes one third of their number lay stretched upon the earth. The men returned to the bugle call, but not till then. One officer only, Captain Westropp, escaped unhurt."

On page 113, the following extracts from letters and journals supply details. From Archdeacon Henry Williams's Journal: – "July 1st, 1845. Mr. Burrows (Rev. R. Burrows) and I rode out to Ohaeawae. On our arrival observed much firing, and soon learnt that the natives had made an attack on Waka's people on a hill overlooking the camp. The hill retaken by the soldiers under Major Bridge in noble style. Henry Clarke (interpreter to the forces) was wounded in the thigh. At 4 o'clock the troops marched to storm the Pah, and in a short time a heavy firing was opened. It was a fearful moment. I moved on to the camp and found numbers of wounded brought in. The troops were repulsed with serious loss. Captain Grant and Lieutenant Phillpotts killed, with 22 seamen and soldiers, and upwards of 70 wounded – some mortally, many seriously. I assisted in dressing the wounded. Towards sunset, at the request of the Colonel, I attempted to go to the Pah to recover the bodies of the slain, but as soon as I came in sight, was ordered back by the people of the Pah."

"July 3rd – Returned to the camp to endeavour to recover the bodies. On my arrival, learned that a flag of truce had been hoisted at the Pah, and

that enquiry had been made for myself and Mr. Burrows that our boys might fetch away the bodies. I proceeded to the Pah on my arrival, but the Natives would not give up the body of Captain Grant. Found the people disposed to be insolent. Returned to the camp. Attended the funeral of the soldiers, 30, including the seamen – a mournful sight. The troops were all present."

Sec also "Plain Facts relative to the late war in the Northern District of New Zealand," printed by Philip Kunst, of Auckland, 1847, pages 21 and 22.

Archdeacon Williams, for he is the Mr. Williams referred to, had for more than twenty years been a Minister of the Gospel of Peace amongst the Maoris, and is it at all probable that he would have interfered in military matters and advised an assault on the Pah, or that a military commander would order an assault on the advice of a civilian?

Archdeacon Williams had served for nine years in his youth as an Officer in His Majesty's Navy, and was too good a disciplinarian to interfere in matters outside his own calling.

It will be seen from the above extracts from Archdeacon Williams's Journal that he did not see Colonel Despard until after the assault, having only arrived at Ohaeawae whilst the assault was being made.

I trust that your Board of Trustees, after verifying the above quotations, will be satisfied that it would be only just and proper to remove the statement which is attached to the Model.

I remain, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
H. WILLIAMS.

J. WALCH & SONS, PRINTERS, 42 MACQUAURIE STREET, HOBART.

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