CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL SKETCH.
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THE NEW ZEALAND HANDBOOK.
CHAPTER I.
HISTORICAL SKETCH.
DISCOVERY, RISE AND PROGRESS. --Though New Zealand was first sighted and named by Tasman, a Dutch explorer, in the year 1642, the country was first fully discovered by our illustrious circumnavigator, Captain Cook, in 1769. Cook visited the Islands four times to recruit his exploring vessels, surveyed a large portion of the coasts, held a great deal of friendly intercourse with the Natives, and introduced the Pig, the Potato, and various useful seeds and plants.
He formed a high, and a remarkably correct opinion of the capabilities of the country for European settlement; and his report of the genial climate, fertile soil, fine harbours, and evergreen forests, so captivated the practical mind of Benjamin Franklin that the American philosopher published a proposal for the colonisation of the newly-discovered Land.
Twenty or thirty years after Cook's visit--a period during which the Islands were visited by various
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European navigators, but, during which they remained steeped in barbarism to their tree-tops, shambles wherein the Natives were butchering each other in bloody tribal wars--trade and intercourse began to spring up between Sydney (New South Wales) and New Zealand. In 1814 the first Church Missionaries arrived; and, by degrees, various rude little mixed communities of sealers, sawyers, sailors, petty merchants, produce-collectors, and the like, attracted over from New South Wales, settled themselves along the coasts, trading and occasionally intermarrying with the Natives; while, year by year, New Zealand's bays and harbours became the favourite resorts and recruiting stations of the British, American, Bremen, and Colonial vessels engaged in the sperm and black whale fishery.
The reports carried home by the Whalers as to the fine harbours, and the forests of magnificent kauri spars and ship timber found in the new Islands, the glowing accounts of the fertility of the soil spread abroad by the visitors from Australia, together with the testimony of the missionaries as to the bracing salubrity of the climate, eventually revived in England that desire for the regular colonisation of the country which Cook and Franklin had excited so many years before. In 1838, an influential body of public men, including the late Lord Durham, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, various members of Parliament, the Barings, Goldsmids, and many of the leading merchants of London, formed themselves into an association, called the New Zealand Company, for the purpose of colonising the islands from the Mother Country; while, soon after, the Government, influenced partly by the desire of certain of the Native Tribes to place themselves under the protection of England, partly by the desire to prevent France from seizing on a country capable of becoming the naval mistress of the South, raised New Zealand into a British colony, and sent out its first governor in the person of Captain Hobson of the Royal Navy, who, in 1840, planted the infant
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capital of the colony at Auckland, on the shores of the noble harbour of the Waitemata.
The New Zealand Company were at first most successful in the great enterprise they had planned. Between the years 1840 and '43, they acquired by friendly purchase from the natives some fine tracts of land in Cooks' Strait, and here they planted their little settlements of Wellington and Nelson, Wanganui and Taranaki--peopling them with 6,000 pioneer emigrants of a stamp better fitted to subdue the wilderness and rough-hew the foundations of an infant State than any who had left the mother country since the days of the cavalier emigrants of Delaware, or the pilgrim fathers of Massachusetts.
Unfortunately, however, dissensions soon arose between the New Zealand Company and the Colonial Office in England, while suicidal quarrels soon followed between the Company's agents and the Government officials in the Colony. Two or three of the native tribes, encouraged by this enfeebling division between the two new Powers which had appeared in the country, assumed a hostile attitude, ventured to repudiate the sale of the various districts which the Company's agents had fairly purchased, and committed numerous acts of trespass and petty violence. The Government authorities, instead of checking these first manifestations of Maori turbulence with a firm and vigorous hand, misled by the missionaries, pursued a feeble policy of over-conciliation and non-interference, until at last the disaffected natives, thus encouraged to believe themselves the stronger power, broke out into rebellion. A small military force was brought over from Australia, and a series of smart skirmishes took place between the troops (ably supported however, by bands of, "friendly natives"), and the rebels, led by Hone Heke, Kawiti, Te Rauperaha and Rhanghiata. Life and property in certain districts now became insecure: some of the Company's pioneer Settlers in Cook's Strait, driven from lands on which they had expended their little all, now abandoned the country; others
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joined the troops and volunteered against the rebels; trade, immigration, enterprise, were temporarily checked; while, here and there, the little fields won from the wilderness and waving with corn were given up to the dock and the thistle.
At last, after a gloomy and inglorious period of some years of misgovernment, anarchy, and confusion, brighter days began to dawn. In 1845, an urgent petition from the long-suffering pioneer Colonists was laid before Parliament by the lamented late Charles Buller; it led to a three nights' debate, and was virtually supported by Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Earl Grey, and a large majority both in the Commons and the Peers. The Exeter Hall and Aborigines-protecting policy of pampering the Native to the destruction of the Colonist which had hitherto prevailed in New Zealand, was ostensibly renounced. Captain Fitzroy, who had succeeded Captain Hobson as second Governor, was superseded by Sir George Grey; additional troops were brought over; and the rebel natives, mildly chastised, far too mildly for their own good, were induced to accept a peace, and to put away their arms.
Trade and agriculture, the progress of settlement, and the arts of peace, which had drooped so low, at once began to revive. In 1846 the Scotch Settlement of Otago was planted, in 1860 the patrician Settlement of Canterbury took root; and about this time the infant Colony, having battled its way through an Iliad of disasters, began a career of quick and solid progress, which, for a whole decade, received no serious check.
In 1851 the Australian gold discoveries took place, and at once gave signal impetus to New Zealand's agricultural industry. In 1853 the new Constitution, described hereafter, came into force, and placed half 1 the government of the colony in the hands of the Colonists. In this year, too. Sir George Grey's term of
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office having expired, he proceeded home, and was eventually succeeded by Lieut.-Col. Browne, K. C. B., whose administration of affairs was unfortunately disturbed by the "Native Outbreak" at Taranaki--an event leading, by degrees, to a long New Zealand War. Among the North American Indians, among the Kaffirs in our South African possessions, among all the dark-skin aboriginal races with whom we have come in contact in our world-wide work of colonisation, while there have ever been Tribes "friendly" to the White Man and to the new order of things, the peace and security, the comfort and wealth, which, in these later days of colonisation, he has sought, everywhere, to introduce, there have also been Tribes of the same people, more blinded by superstition, more wedded to their ancient barbarisms, who have looked on the White Man with hatred or envy or fear or suspicion, and this, to some extent, has been the case in New Zealand, During Governor Grey's time, it was observed that certain of the Waikato, Ngatiawa, and Taranaki tribes, who, in common with the whole native race, had been signally benefited by the European colonisation of the country, 2 were growing insolent and disaffected; and, at last, in Governor Browne's reign, these Natives, banded with others, threw off their allegiance to Victoria the Queen, and coolly proclaimed an old Waikato chief, one Te Potatau, their King. As his Majesty's court and subjects were a long way off in the "Bush," the new sovereignty did not at first much incommode the Colonists; while the Government, hoping that the Missionaries would be able to laugh the pretentious rebels out of their ungrateful folly, suffered old Te Potatau to paint himself all the colours of the rainbow, to hoist his flag, and assume the Meri sceptre of the Maori King.
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Mischief soon spreads, however--the reptile's harmless egg hatches the reptile, replete with "high-concocted venom"--and this, at first, half-comic King Movement, unnoticed by the Government as the Natives thought through fear, attained, at last, such dimensions as emboldened certain of the Tribes who supported it to band together and form what was called the "Land League," under which, not content with a declaration that they themselves would sell no more wild land to the Government, 3 they sought to intimidate other Natives from doing so--sought to intimidate others from doing what they thought best to do with their own--a braggart, arbitrary, aggressive, proceeding which, sooner later, could not fail to bring such land-leagueing "Kingites" into collision with the Crown.
This, indeed, it did at once, for on Governor Browne attempting to take possession of certain land 4 in the province of Taranaki, which the Government had purchased from the native owners, the surveyors were resisted by armed bands of the Ngatiawa Tribe, and driven back. Expostulation, warning, menace, on the part of the Government Authorities, the best efforts of the friends of the Native Race, were all thrown away
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on the Insensates; when, as a last resource, to prevent the laws from becoming a laughing stock, and to preserve the supremacy of the Queen, troops were sent for, the provincial militia called out, and volunteer corps formed--the Ngatiawa rebels were reinforced by allies from the "King Party" in Waikato and by lawless desperadoes from other quarters, and War broke out. After many skirmishes, and grievous destruction of Settlers' property, the rebels were at last slightly discomfited; and as Governor Browne's term of office was about to expire, and as it was thought that Governor Grey's old personal influence with the Natives might now prove useful, he resumed the governorship of New Zealand, and, after an absence of five years, again landed in the Colony in the year 1861.
The hope, however, that Governor Grey's old personal popularity among the Natives would now make itself felt; the hope that by judicious management the rebels and rioters might be induced to resume their allegiance to the Queen, to welcome the introduction of law and order into their villages, and to unite with the Colonist in the goodly work of reclaiming the wilderness and making "the desert blossom like the rose," was not destined to be fulfilled. With no shadow of a substantial grievance to complain, of, 5 yet yielding to evil counsellors and false prophets among themselves, incited by that passion for fighting ever the curse of their race, well armed, too, and by the slight chastisement received for old offences undeterred from committing new, the Taranaki Tribes and their allies would listen to no word of peace; and the Taranaki Tribes being now re-inforced by the adhesion of all the Waikato and by many of the East Coast and Taupo people, the War enlarged its original limits at New Plymouth, and gradually extended itself over some of the most beautiful of the native districts of the North Island. To describe its various incidents in a little work of this compressed and humble character
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would be impossible 6 --suffice it to say that owing partly to the inefficiency of the chief commander of our forces, partly to the paralysing disputes long raging between various of the civil and military authorities, partly to the rugged character of the tangled wilderness into which the rebels had to be followed up, the Native War, which Governor Grey came to finish in 1861, lasted, with intervals of partial cessation, from that year up to 1865, while even now, here and there, its ashes may retain some heat.
Such is an outline sketch of the history of New Zealand from Cook's time to the present. Some New Zealand Macaulay writing the history of our infant Britain of the South--weighing the dreadful incubus placed on her shoulders in tenderest youth by consigning her to the statesmanship of Exeter Hall, 7 weighing her persecutions by "Red Tape," weighing her persecutions by "War"--must come to the conclusion that nothing short of some deep-seated principle of vitality, found, possibly, in her great natural gifts, saved her from utter extinction; and may well predict that a Colony which, despite long struggles for existence, and when not far out of its teens, could show 200,000 Settlers, a public revenue of a million and a half, with an export and import trade of ten millions, was the hardy Oakling, destined to grow into the goodly, deep-rooted, storm-defying, long-enduring, Oak.
