1857 - Hursthouse, C. New Zealand, or Zealandia, the Britain of the South [Vol.I.] - CHAPTER II. HISTORICAL SKETCH.

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CHAPTER II.

HISTORICAL SKETCH.

BETWEEN 1520 and 1610 the Spaniards made several voyages from their South American possessions in search of a Great South Land, the Terra Australis Incognita, "an exceeding rich gold countrie and fair land of diamonds and precious stones," which the old explorers and ancient mariners of those times fondly hoped to light on some day in the South Pacific.

In 1605, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros and Luis Vaez de Torres started on one of these voyages and discovered the islands now known as the New Hebrides. Here, in a storm, they parted company. Torres sailed north-east, and coasting New Guinea, discovered and passed through those dreaded straits which still bear his name. Might not Quiros, holding on south in continued search of the gold land (the realised "Diggings" of two centuries later), have been the real discoverer of New Zealand? At least, it is something more than conjectural that New Zealand was first discovered by some early Spanish navigator, inasmuch as there

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exists a remarkably correct Spanish chart of Dusky Bay, of very early date; and Dusky Bay was not a place which Tasman the recognised discoverer of New Zealand forty years later appears to have visited. Those who would here exalt the Spaniard and dethrone the Dutchman, may further urge, that some New Zealanders assert that the dog was not brought to the country by their ancestors; but was introduced by some strange ship which once visited their shores; and that as Perro is the Spanish, and Pero the New Zealand word for dog, there is some evidence that this strange ship was a Spanish ship. 1

Whoever though may have been the European navigator who first stumbled on New Zealand, the honour of the true authentic discovery is due to

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the Dutch commander, Abel Jansz Tasman. Whilst the Spaniards were searching the South Seas for the great gold land, the Dutch were prosecuting voyages of discovery in the same quarter, and partly with the same views. In August, 1642, Antonio Van Dieman, governor of the Dutch East India Company, dispatched Tasman from Batavia with the yacht Hemskerk and the fly boat Zeechaan, on a voyage to the south.

This quaint little squadron, steered by dogged Dutch courage and, probably, well found in breeches pipes and Schiedam, achieved great things with small means. Some three months after its departure it leisurely discovered Van Dieman's Land; and then, steering due east, on the 13th of November again discovered land, which proved to be the south-west coast of the middle island of New Zealand. Tasman coasted northwards and on the 18th anchored in a small bay which he named Massacre Bay (Nelson), from an affray which he had there with the natives. He then proceeded along the northern coast until he arrived at the low promontory forming the north-western extremity of New Zealand, which he named Cape Maria Van Dieman, in honour of his patron's daughter the fair Vrow Maria Van Dieman, whose substantial charms seem to have touched the stout commander's heart. He then set sail for Batavia, quitting the new land without, as he says, having set foot on its shores, and naming it Nova Zealandia, after the Dutch province of Zealand.

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In 1768, George the Third, at the instance of the Royal Society, dispatched Lieutenant Cook to Tahiti, for the purpose of observing the transit of Venus. From this service Cook proceeded on a voyage of exploration through the South Pacific; and on the 6th of October, 1769, descried land which proved to be the east coast, 38 deg. south, of the north island of that "Nova Zealandia" discovered by Abel Jansz Tasman more than a hundred years before. During this and three subsequent visits, Cook circumnavigated the islands, took possession of them in the name of the king, repeatedly anchored in Queen Charlotte's Sound, named many of the principal mountains bays and capes, and held a great deal of friendly intercourse with the natives.

Our illustrious circumnavigator was a signal benefactor to New Zealand. He introduced some of our domestic animals, the potato and various other vegetables and useful seeds. Up to his time New Zealand was but a semi-fabulous terra incognita; his excellent survey of the coasts and full description of the country gave it a local habitation and a name, fixed its place on the map, and paved the way for the merchant and the missionary. He formed a high and remarkably correct opinion of the capabilities of the country for European settlement. His reports of the genial climate, fertile soil, fine harbours and evergreen forests excited considerable interest in England; and so captivated the practical mind of Benjamin Franklin, that the Ame-

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rican philosopher published a proposal for the colonisation of New Zealand.

Shortly after Cook first arrived in New Zealand, coasting northwards, he one day passed a bay which he named Doubtless Bay. Singular to relate, a few hours afterwards, Captain de Surville, of the French exploring ship St. Jean Baptiste, ignorant of Cook's presence in these seas, anchored in this very bay, and named it Lauriston Bay. De Surville had been dispatched from the French possessions in India, in search of that rich gold land before alluded to; and which, as rumoured in India, the English explorers had at last discovered somewhere in the Great Pacific. De Surville was hospitably received by the natives; but, suspecting them of having stolen a skiff, he landed a force, burnt down the village, and carried the chief off to sea, where the poor prisoner pined away, and soon died. About three years after this, a similar French expedition, commanded by Marion du Fresne, touched at New Zealand and anchored in the Bay of Islands, hard by the scene of De Surville's violence. The natives received their visiters with apparent delight; but when, after some weeks' intercourse, Marion, four of his officers, and twelve men, had gone ashore on a fishing excursion, the natives fell on them, and murdered all but one man, who escaped to the ship. The French naturally avenged their comrades, landed in force, destroyed several of the inhabitants, burnt their villages, and departed. De Surville's painful mode of revenge, and the severe chastisement which

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this retaliatory murder of Marion brought on the natives, rendered the Weewees (oui oui), or people of the tribe of Marion, hateful to the New Zealanders for the next half-century. Indeed, the semi-civilised descendants of the actors in these bloody scenes even now regard the French with aversion; and it is probably owing to this cause that the French Catholic missionaries are less successful among the New Zealanders than their Church of England and Wesleyan brethren.

Cook's fourth and last visit to New Zealand occurred in 1777. In the course of his explorations in these new Australian seas he had discovered a spot of the Australian continent, which he named Botany Bay; and it appears to have been partly through his official report of this locality that the government of the day were induced to commence the system of transportation. In 1788 it was debated in Parliament whether Cook's New Zealand or Cook's Botany Bay should be the site of our first experimental penal colony. New Zealand escaped the perilous distinction; possibly on account of fears entertained that the existence of her ferocious cannibal population might prove incompatible with the safe keeping and probationary discipline of the prisoners; and that in some fatal outburst of the cannibal passion, convict, governor, and guard might undergo the common lot, prematurely, in the native oven.

Though, however, New South Wales, and not New Zealand, was chosen for the penal colony, the fact of the discovery or re-discovery of the two

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countries and the taking possession of them by the same great explorer about the same time, the circumstance of their thus becoming known to the European world almost simultaneously, their position and proximity in the same seas, seem to have established a certain connection and intercourse between them, even from the earliest days. New South Wales was founded in 1788, and in 1800 we find the second governor, Captain King, visiting New Zealand for the purpose of procuring two or three natives to teach the convicts in Norfolk Island the mode of preparing the New Zealand flax which flourished there, and distributing presents of pigs, seed-maize, and potatoes, in return. Indeed, New Zealand, by virtue of Cook's discovery, surveys, and ceremony of taking possession, was long regarded as a quasi-possession of the Crown, a dependency of New South Wales; and was formally named as such in the commissions of the governors of that colony.

This geographical and official connection was soon cemented by commercial intercourse. It seems very early to have been discovered by the pioneer settlers of the convict colony that New Zealand was a much finer agricultural country than New South Wales. The domestic animals, the grain and vegetable seeds introduced by Cook and succeeding visitors had wonderfully thriven: it seemed probable that the meat, and maize, and potatoes of New Zealand might ere long relieve the penal colony from a recurrence of those partial famines

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which had already been experienced. Spars and flax, "preserved human heads," and other native curiosities, were also to be procured in New Zealand. The cooler, moister, breezy climate was particularly grateful to the English settler, scorched up by sun and drought on the arid rocks of Sydney. A six weeks' trip to New Zealand and back was a twelve months' restorative, a welcome escape from the monotony of convict life and the clank of the chain-gang. The dusky daughters of the land were worthy of the Cytherian Isle; and forty years ago the bold Trading Adventurer (pioneer founder of that magnificent commercial emporium and queen city of the Pacific, which Sydney has become,) would set sail from Port Jackson, and square away for New Zealand, with high hopes of profit and of pleasure--of bartering his bale of blankets, case of trinkets, dozen muskets, or keg of tobacco, for twenty times its value in native produce; and of finding chiefs' daughters, slave girls, and all the beauty of the island, ready to compete, like those on Ida's piney top, for the "golden apple," in the shape of scarlet blanket, blue round-about, bead necklace, or bright shawl.

There was one drawback to this early intercourse between the two young countries: the trader who carried his wares to the New Zealand market might be eaten there. The Hesperides of the Pacific was guarded by no mythical monster--a real cannibal dragon, with good teeth and great swallow, kept watch and ward there. Cook, though he had pro-

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nounced the natives a fine race, had proclaimed them cannibals. Evidences of their ferocity and brutal appetite for human flesh had been terribly manifested. Captain Furneaux, Cook's consort, had rendezvoused in Queen Charlotte's Sound, had sent a boat ashore one morning as usual among the natives; some trifling quarrel had arisen, every man of the crew had been killed and eaten. Marion's provoked fate was known in Sydney. In 1807 a vessel had been taken by the east coast natives; the entire crew, with one exception, had been killed and eaten. In 1809 had occurred the "Boyd Massacre," when, in revenge for the flogging of a native sailor, some fifty Europeans, crew and passengers, had been murdered at Wangaroa. Indeed, the day the races met the Anglo-Saxon saw he had found a dark-skinned "Man"--no slave Negro, clumsy Kafir, pig-headed Hottentot, emasculate Hindoo, or soft Paphian islander nourished on bread-fruit pap; but a black Scandinavian of the south, a very clever and ferocious six-feet savage, who ate the dog and shark, drank blood, scoffed at death, and who any day in the year would fight his enemy to the death for the prize of the corpse to feast on: a fierce but shrewd pagan, wont to procure his food and enforce his rights by the "argumentum baculinum," the meri and the war-club. 2

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Trading to New Zealand, therefore, in these early days, however profitable, was somewhat perilous; and was chiefly confined to those bold or amorous spirits of the young Australian community who would lead the "forlorn hope" of commerce, and beard the dragon in his den for the booty or the beauty which lay beyond.

By degrees, however, many of the perils which loomed round the New Zealand shores disappeared.

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Familiarity with the Maori proved him to be less black than he had been painted. Cannibal savage as he was, it soon appeared that he had much in common with a nation of shopkeepers; that he was a keen trader, having a most lively appreciation of the advantages of commerce, and shrewd enough to see that the practice of eating his merchant would restrict trade, limit imports, and be a most witless killing of the goose for the golden egg.

Sydney's Knight-Pedlars, therefore, soon found that they were safe enough in New Zealand. Shielded by blankets and tobacco, they bore a charmed life. A few of them took up their residence in the country, embraced chiefs' daughters, gained a smattering of the language, stuck up rude trading huts, collected flax, maize, and native produce, for some partner or employer in Sydney; and became the pioneer bush merchants of the wilderness--each a herald of civilisation, each a small oasis in the desert of barbarism.

Ere long it appeared, too, that New Zealand was in the very centre of the finest sperm whale ground. As early as the year 1800 sperm whalers had begun to fish off the coasts, and enter the dock-like harbours for wood and water. In the course of a few years, shore-whaling parties were planted on various parts of the coasts by Sydney houses; and a considerable trade was created in supplying these stations with stores, and in shipping back the produce of the fisheries. In 1814 the Church Missionary

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appeared, and strengthened the feeling of security which had grown up through trade.

Thus, the terrors of New Zealand cannibalism, fears of wrecking, robbery, and murder, gradually died out. The natives were still ferocious cannibals, but they now practised only on each other, the trader was too valuable for the oven; and by 1820 little groups of white men (traders, whalers, sailors, sawyers, missionaries, and missionary retainers) had squatted down among the natives in the northern extremity of the North Island, and exhibited the first development of that irregular colonisation of the country which in a few years was to fester to a point at Kororareka.

The year 1820 is chiefly remarkable in the early annals of New Zealand history as being the year of the first visit of any distinguished New Zealand native to Great Britain. And to show what manner of men the fathers of our present natives really were, to show any fair Emigrante who may be longing for New Zealand in 1857 that she has no cause to regret that such manner of men, types of "old New Zealand," exist no longer, I shall venture to delay the reader a moment with a little episodical sketch of this first visit, and of the man who made it--the cannibal herald of that New Zealand traveller of Macaulay's, who is "to stand on the broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's."

In 1820, Hongi, chief of the Ngapuhi tribe, New

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Zealand's cannibal Napoleon, accompanied Mr. Missionary Kendal to England. The purpose of his journey was thus written down at his dictation by Mr. Kendal:--"I wish to see King George, the multitude of his people, what they are doing, and the goodness of the land. My desire is to stay one month in England, and then to come back. I wish for 100 people to return with me. I want a party to dig for iron, a number of blacksmiths, a number of carpenters, and a number of preachers who will try to speak in the New Zealand tongue, so that I way understand them. I want twenty soldiers to protect the settlers, and three officers to keep the soldiers in order. The settlers are to take cattle over with them. There is plenty of spare land in New Zealand, which will be readily granted to the settlers. These are the words of Hongi."

This was Hongi's missionary expressed wish --it seems to have been somewhat a cloak to his real wish. This converted sheep, which brother Kendal was leading about in missionary strings, was slightly the wolf in sheep's clothing.

On arrival, Hongi became a lion. His fine port, tatooed face, and conversion, created a sensation in a hundred drawing-rooms. George the Fourth gave him a suit of armour, and various admirers presented him with guns and other gifts. The soldiers, the royal coat of mail, and a certain great elephant seem to have pleased him most. He resided some time at Cambridge to assist Professor Lee in drawing up a New Zealand grammar. He ever

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preserved his dignity as a great chief of the highest "moko," but was always courteous and affable to the Howards and the Veres who entertained him. Like Caesar, Antony, Alexander, and other regal "dogs of war," he seems to have been rather a ladies' man: and was so sensitive of female criticism, that at a party once, when some fair critics were making merry at his tatoo, he threw himself across three chairs, buried his head, and remained shut up, till the company had departed.

On leaving England, Government provided him with a passage to Sydney on his way home. The men to dig iron, the smiths and carpenters, all the pleasant words which Mr. Kendal had put down, seem to have been forgotten when the ship sailed; but the powder and the double guns were carefully packed up and carried off. On reaching Sydney he took up his residence with his friend, Mr. Marsden, the venerable founder of the New Zealand mission; and here he met Hinaki, a neighbour chief, ou a visit to Sydney. It seems that whilst Hongi was in England, one of his Ngapuhi had been knocked on the head by some connections of Hinaki's tribe. Welcome "casus belli!"---here was a chance of finding food for the new powder, of testing the virtues of the double guns and the royal suit of armour. Poor Hinaki sued for peace; but he was the lamb in the fable, the wolf meant to eat him. Hongi wanted war, and how great Hongi now went to war, and how he sped in war, shall be told in the words of the Rev. Mr. Taylor. For

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this gentleman's account of a distinguished missionary savage is substantially correct, and it affords unwitting evidence of a fact, which Exeter Hall and missionary societies have long refused to see-- namely, that our vaunted conversion of the heathen is often a conversion of the flesh, rather than of the spirit; an awakening to the merits of blankets and tobacco, rather than to the merits of Timothy and St. Paul.

Hongi was always a warm friend to the missionaries: missionaries brought him to England, missionaries welcomed him on his return from England; we may imagine with what pride missionaries exhibited him in their circles, how he would draw at subscription sermons. He knew that missionaries brought trade to his country; no man dare molest missionaries while he lived--yet how little he was a converted heathen; how little, or, as some would say, how much he was a true missionary Christian, may be gathered from the following portrait of him, painted at page 312 of "Te Ika a Maui." 3

"In vain did Hinaki try to persuade him to make peace; they sat at the same table, slept under the same roof, and sailed in the same ship, and

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no one would have supposed they were enemies. Hinaki, finding that Hongi was in earnest, and that there was no prospect of his making peace, hastened home, and assembled all his forces to resist the invader; who, having given his enemy time to prepare, soon made his appearance at the head of three thousand men, determined to turn the deadly gifts he had received to account, without loss of time. Although the tribe he went to attack was related to his own, still the pleasure of trying the efficacy of his military stores prevailed over every other feeling. The battle, however, was for a long time doubtful. Hinaki was a man of noble form, and determined courage, and, though fighting on unequal terms, he still maintained the combat, until Hongi, arranging his men in the form of a cuneus, or wedge, and placing himself at the apex, directed his men to wheel round to the right or left according to circumstances: at last he shot Hinaki, who did not fall until he had received four balls. His savage conqueror rushed forward, and with his English clasp-knife he scooped out the eye of his expiring enemy, and instantly swallowed it. He then stabbed him in the neck, and drank his warm blood, as it gushed forth from the wound.

"Hinaki had two brothers, who were likewise killed, one being nearly as noble a looking person as himself; the other a youth of about twenty. Their bodies were eaten, and their heads embalmed as trophies of victory. About one thousand men were slain, and three hundred more were cooked

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and eaten on the battle-field. So complete was the victory, that the place has never since been inhabited. It now belongs to the Bishop's college, being part of its endowment. Hongi returned to the Bay. Each canoe was filled with his captives, and had several heads of his enemies placed at their stems and sterns by way of ornament. Hongi had twenty prisoners on board his canoe, whom he intended to retain as slaves. But his daughter, who had lost her husband in the fight, with dishevelled locks rushed down to the water's edge as the canoe touched the shore, and seizing the sword presented to her father by the King's own hand, jumped on board, and smote off sixteen heads of the poor captives, who, without a murmur, placed their necks over the side-board of the canoe. 4 Twenty more were also killed and eaten; yet the frantic woman, not thinking that the shade of her husband was sufficiently appeased with this sacrifice, went into the bush with a loaded musket, and there shot herself. The ball, however, only passing through her arm instead of her head, she was still alive when found; but determined to accompany her husband to the Reinga, she afterwards strangled herself.

"Hongi had no sooner finished one expedition than he prepared for another. He quickly assembled a thousand men, and proceeded with them to Mercury Bay, to make war upon the tribes of that district; ordering another army of two thou-

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sand more to be raised, and to follow him. Success again attended his arms; and, flushed with victory, be next attacked Kaipara, where he made a great slaughter. In 1822, he again visited the Thames and the Waikato, and ascended the Waipa, where he took several large pas; thence he nearly penetrated as far as the Wanganui--in this expedition he slew fifteen hundred of his enemies.

"In 1823, he attacked Rotorua, conveying his canoes by water, as far as possible, and then dragging them by a road be had cut through the forest, to the lake. Here again he was victorious, and slew many. He continued every year his hostile raids, first to one part and then to another, always with success. His name spread terror wherever he went. In fact, he became the Napoleon of New Zealand, and declared when remonstrated with by the missionaries, that he should not desist until he had subjected the entire island to his control; that as England had but one King, so likewise there should only be one in New Zealand. But as there is a bound to all human glory, 'Hither shalt thou go and no further,' so it was with Hongi. He fulfilled the Scripture: 'He that taketh the sword, shall perish by the sword.'

"In 1827, he declared war against Tara, and the tribe which massacred the crew of the Boyd; making that an excuse for his ambitious designs. In the beginning of 1827 his men plundered and burned the Wesleyan Missionary Station, which had been commenced at Wangaroa a year or two

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before. They told the missionaries, 'Your chiefs have fled; all the people have left the place, and you will be stripped of all your property before noon; therefore, instantly begone!'

"It appears, however, as if this was to be the termination of his success. His only redeeming act had been the preservation of those who came to raise his countrymen;--immediately he put forth his hand to injure them, he fell! He killed or dispersed 'the man-eating tribes,' as he termed those who cut off the Boyd, although the epithet was, perhaps, far more applicable to himself; for he appears to have surpassed all who had gone before him in the number of victims he and his followers had consumed. Twenty only of these man-eaters escaped;--they glutted themselves with the slain, sparing neither woman, nor even suckling child. The remnant of his enemies fled to Hunahuna, a village near the Maungamuka, where they made a stand. Hongi, who had ensconced himself behind a tree, stepped forward to take aim, when a ball struck him: it broke his collar-bone, passed in an oblique direction through his right breast, and came out a little below his shoulder-blade, close to the spine. This terminated his fearful career; for though he lingered a full year, the wound never healed. When he breathed, the air escaped through the orifice with a hissing sound, which he made a subject of merriment.

"He received his wound in January, 1827. On the 6th of March, 1828, the life of this remarkable

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savage terminated. In his last hours, so far from attending to the words of the missionaries, he urged his followers to prosecute the war, and exterminate his enemies. When Patuone visited him, a day or two before his death, and told him he was dying, he said, 'No, I am not dying: my heart is quite light. I am not dying.' The next day he fainted, and was supposed to be dead. When he revived, he said, he should die, but not until the morrow. He ordered his powder to be brought to him, and when he saw it, he said to his children, Ka ora koutou,--you will be safe; intimating the powder would be their protection. He then summoned his sons, and gave the coat of mail he had received from the King of England to one of them; and then divided his battle-axes and fire-arms amongst them--sternly demanding, 'Who will dare to attack my followers after I am gone?'

"Early next morning, though evidently sinking fast, he continued to rally his friends, and said, 'No matter from what quarter your enemies come, let their numbers be ever so great, should they come here hungry for you, kia toa, kia toa, be brave, be brave! Thus will you revenge my death, and thus only do I wish to be revenged.' He continued repeating these words until he expired.

"Patuone, as soon as he heard that Hongi was dead, bid his followers sit still, whilst he and a few of his friends went to see the corpse; lest Hongi's people should be alarmed, as they had blockaded all the entrances to the pa. At first he was refused

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permission to enter, until Hunaroa interfered; he found one of his sons binding him up, his head still reclining on his breast. When the body was fully dressed, and the head richly ornamented with feathers, all the obsequies due to so great a chief were performed. His family, fearing an attack, wished to bury him at once, but Patuone said, 'Why all this haste? You will be the first to bury your father alive: let him smell before you bury him: what if he does smell?' Yielding to this advice, he laid in state for two more days, which were spent in repeating the piki, or funeral ode, in cutting themselves, in crying, and firing off guns. In the meantime, Hongi's friends arrived from the Bay of Islands, who, with the Hokianga natives, formed a large procession, when this savage warrior's remains were carried to the wahi tapu-- sacred place--amidst the mingled din of the maemae, or funeral dance, the dismal tangi, or wail for the dead, and peals of musketry; an apt termination for the life of one whose supreme delight was war, and to whose ear the dying groans of his enemies were the sweetest music." 5

During the ten years in which Hongi and his northern raids were thus the chief features of the History of New Zealand, trade and intercourse with New South Wales materially increased. The Church missionaries extended their establishments, the Wesleyans commenced operations at Hokianga,

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shore whaling stations were planted in Foveaux Straits, sealers sought their spoil in Dusky Bay and along the rugged coasts of the south-west, the sperm whale fishery had become a vast trade employing hundreds of ships cruising in New Zealand waters; and the visits of American British French Bremen and colonial whalers to New Zealand harbours for the purposes of recruiting and refreshing had become so considerable a business that as many as fifty sail have been counted at one time in the Bay of Islands--busy bartering oil tobacco spirits arms and powder with traders and natives, for spars wood water pigs onions and potatoes.

The reports carried home by many of these whaling visitors as to the fine harbours and forests of magnificent kauri spars and ship timber, the glowing accounts of the fertility of the soil spread about by the trading squatters and passing visitors from Australia, the uniform testimony of the missionaries as to the bracing salubrity of the climate, seem now to have revived in England that desire for the regular settlement of the country which Cook and Franklin had excited half a century before. In 1825, a company, including among its members the late Lord Durham, was formed in London for colonising portions of New Zealand; and tracts of land for this purpose were partially purchased at Hokianga and the river Thames. This company, however, seems to have been a company in little more than name; some difficulties were anticipated, no real

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emigrants were sent out, and the scheme fell to the ground.

Though, however, the regular settlement of New Zealand by emigration from the mother country was still to be deferred for a season, that irregular colonisation alluded to as having commenced about 1820, had attained such dimensions and displayed such repulsive features by 1831, that some governmental measures were deemed necessary for its repression.

Kororareka a fine harbour in the Bay of Islands in the midst of a large native population and the missionary stations, the favourite rendezvous of the whalers and Sydney traders, had from the first been the chief seat of this irregular colonisation; and a more lawless little Pandemonium than this village port of Kororareka had grown up to be by 1831, neither old nor new world had probably ever seen. The most reputable of its denizens were trading adventurers from a convict colony; the bulk consisted of runaway sailors "Lags" petty swindlers gaol birds, scoundrels of every mark and brand from Sydney and Van Dieman's Land. The numerous visitors, the floating population, was worthy of the resident:--nautical chips of the convict block, ticket-of-leave mates and skippers of Sydney traders, rude embruted crews of whalers --all rushing ashore for a spree and running ferociously festive "mucks" until they fell. Ragged grog-shops flourished; the population might have been divided into those who sold rum and those

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who drank it. Sterne's Uncle Toby says our army swore terribly in Flanders. But the common conversation of Kororareka displayed a substantial permanency of swearing, a boldness and originality of figure drawn from the whaler's forecastle and the chain-gang, a malicious heartiness of ribald damning, infinitely beyond the powers of our army in Flanders. Convict training and antecedents, blasphemy and the debauchery of drunkenness, were all intensified by debauchery in women. Dark Helens, aboriginal Messelinas, swarmed in Kororareka. Every resident kept a mistress, every visitor came for one. Native women were as common an article of barter between chiefs and whalers as native pigs; and to the daily fights and quarrels which arose in such a community through rum and whiskey were to be added those which arose through the passion of jealousy and the disputed possession of the slave girl. There was neither magistrate 6 nor policemen at Kororareka, neither law nor order nor gospel; every ruffian, and there were many, did what seemed good to him; and in 1831, this New Zealand village port was the veritable "Alsatia" of the Pacific, dashed with a "Convict Wapping." 7

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The Missionaries utterly powerless to turn or stem this flood of vice and violence which had flowed into Kororareka and which bade fair to spread and desolate the entire country, induced, in 1832, various chiefs of the neighbourhood to petition the British Government for some protection and repressive aid.

Bearing in mind that New Zealand for a quarter of a century had been a recognised dependency of the Crown where the Crown had exercised acts of sovereignty; that a large amount of British property was at stake, the whale fishery increasing, and ships of various nations constantly visiting the ports; that the Government professed vast sympathy for the natives and must have seen that if Kororareka were not reduced to order fifty Kororarekas would grow up, exterminate the natives with powder fire-water and disease and convert New Zealand into the semi-piratical pest of the Pacific; bearing all this in mind, the answer which the Colonial Office made to this appeal, affords an amusing instance of that ludicrous stupidity which this department of State had ever been remarkable for exhibiting.

All that New Zealand wanted at this epoch, was a sloop of war for Kororareka with a good magisterial commander (some Yardley in epaulettes), and a hundred marines; with a brig tender to look

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round monthly among the coast whaling stations. Such a force would have been at once a powerful government and police, would have reduced Kororareka to instant order, repressed any budding lawlessness in the little coast communities, and scared the "convict element" out of the country by the mere display of the cat and the hand-cuff.

All that the Colonial Office sent, was a pleasant gentleman named Busby; who was to enforce the discontinuance of murder rape rapine manslaughter and the like pursuits of Kororareka by residing there and calling himself Consul -- accredited to the Missionaries! 8

Happily, poor Mr. Busby's life was not taken by the marine desperadoes and turbulent outcasts to whom the Colonial Office had offered his throat. Indeed his office and appointment seem to have provoked the felon humour. He became a public joke. The very natives whom he came to save likened him to "a man of war without guns;" and Kororareka, with its paper consul, remained exactly what Kororareka had been without him. 9

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Mr. Busby's anomalous office proving an idle sinecure, he turned his attention to diplomacy.

Though New Zealand had been a recognised dependency of the British Crown for nearly half a century, it was abundantly clear to Mr. Busby that the sovereignty of New Zealand was a gem in the British crown which the Colonial Office did not care to keep. In alliance therefore with the Missionaries he brought about what between them they called "The Confederacy of the thirteen northern chiefs;" and then coolly asked the Colonial Office to abandon all British claim to New Zealand and to recognise such Missionary-Confederacy as the sovereign power.

It was about this time that the Colonial Office, seized with what has been termed its "pious fit," commenced that anti-emigration alliance with Missionary societies, Aborigines-protection societies, and Exeter Hall, which it maintained for so many years; and which proved so disastrous to both races in New Zealand. Indeed, from 1830 up to

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1845, the Colonial Office received its inspirations from these bodies, and its true designative style and title during this period was the "Colonial-Missionary Office."

Recollecting that New Zealand was a country larger than Great Britain and Ireland inhabited by numerous distinct independent and for the most part hostile tribes, this missionary confederacy of a few chiefs in one corner of the North Island no more represented New Zealand or the sovereignty of New Zealand, than a confederacy of the people of Cornwall would have represented Great Britain. But a missionary body having prayed our Colonial Missionary Office to abandon New Zealand to this Missionary Confederacy of thirteen chiefs, the Colonial-Missionary Office at once complied; and even sent Her Majesty's ship Alligator to the Bay of Islands in 1835 to endow such confederacy with a flag and to salute such flag as a national emblem. 10

Thus, New Zealand became a Kingdom; or, rather, a "no-man's land." Convict colonists and the sweepings of Sydney had colonised Kororareka; a dozen little communities were growing up to the south on the model of Kororareka; in the north there were the thirteen sovereign chiefs, so sovereign that had one of them ventured fifty miles

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south of his village he would at once have been eaten by some repudiating subject; and in the north there was Mr. Consul Busby and the missionary court--and New Zealand was now prepared to become the splendid prize of any power which wanted a colony; or of any adventurer who needed a country and would found a kingdom. 11

What was the real motive of the Missionaries in setting up this curious "confederacy," is impossible to say--but the position in which they had by this time placed themselves, and their subsequent proceedings, have enabled the world to guess.

It appears that the Church missionary gentlemen, who now numbered some thirty members, had come to like New Zealand. Kororareka was a black spot, but Kororareka was not New Zealand. The natives were still addicted to cannibalism and to preserving each others' heads; but the natives were missionary Christians, attentive in chapel and not bad workmen in the glebe. The climate was delightful, the soil rich, native labour cheap, Sydney a cash market. Their lines had fallen in pleasant places. Liberal of their Society's converting blankets and tobacco, they had already acquired from their thirteen confederated chiefs some 300,000 acres of land--12,000 acres as a little preliminary foun-

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dation for the Society at home, and the remainder for themselves. One gentleman of the fraternity had a loaf of 11,000 acres; another a fish of 50,000 acres; another a slice of 40,000 acres; their able ally, Mr. Consul Busby, 50,000 acres. If the "Colonial-Missionary Office" would only recognise this snug little confederacy of thirteen converted land-endowing chiefs as the sovereign power of the country; take it under protection and occasionally send a frigate to menace Kororareka and hang up two or three of the confederacy's white desperadoes as a warning to the rest--what might not the missionary ministers and advisers of the confederacy and all their kith and kin do and become in New Zealand? New Zealand might become a noble field for missionary enterprise, the exclusive paradise of a family party, the Canaan of every pious bankrupt armed with passport from Mr. Danderson Coates and the Missionary Society. Godless storekeepers might be weeded out of Kororareka; the power of trade, key of native obedience, placed in the hands of elect teachers of Sunday schools; and Exeter Hall boast a model colony where a "Missionocracy" gave both the law and the gospel, and waxed fat in the process; and where the heathen, true labourer in the field, supplied both converts for the next world, and exports for this. But

An event was at hand destined to shatter all

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hopes of tabooing New Zealand for a missionary preserve.

In 1837, an association of gentlemen, including among its members the late Lord Durham and others who had been connected with the company of 1825, was formed in London for the purpose of colonising a portion of New Zealand with chosen emigrants from the mother country. This association submitted its plans to the Colonial Office and duly sought the favour of the Crown--but the Colonial Office had just committed itself to the confederacy of the thirteen chiefs and the missionary designs. Here was a rival body which might throw New Zealand open to tens of thousands of British emigrants, break up narrow monopolies, pull down the missionary dynasty! Such a body could but become instantly obnoxious to the Colonial Office; and after many fruitless attempts to enlist this Department in their favour, Lord Durham and his associates were driven to act independently of it.

New Zealand had been formally proclaimed an independent sovereign State. Sydney traders and adventurers, missionaries and missionary traders had procured lands from the natives and commenced a lawless colonisation of the north--an association of British emigrants had surely as good a right to purchase lands of the natives and commence a regular colonisation of the south.

In 1839, therefore, the Association dispatched its pioneer expedition to New Zealand under the

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late Colonel Wakefield. He succeeded in acquiring large cessions of waste land from the Cook's Straits natives, who were delighted at the idea that the lucrative trade which had long been confined to the hostile tribes in the north was now to be enjoyed in the south; and by the end of 1839, the Association's first settlement was successfully planted at Wellington.

British colonisation having thus taken root at Wellington despite the "Colonial-Missionary Office," it appears to have struck this baffled institution that in surrendering the sovereignty of the islands to Mr. Busby's thirteen confederate chiefs, it had cast away a weapon which would have proved singularly useful in the work of subverting Wellington. And as it was now also discovered that France (utterly regardless of the thirteen sovereign natives) was actually planning an expedition to seize New Zealand for a penal colony; as Lord Palmerston at the Foreign Office who seems to have had a slight contempt for missionary diplomacy was asking certain ugly questions as to Mr. Busby's feat and this French consequence; the Colonial Office now determined to try and get back that which it had just got rid of; and dispatched a second "consul" in the person of Captain Hobson R.N., to procure from the natives the formal cession of the sovereignty of the country --with a contingent commission as Governor in his pocket in case he succeeded.

Captain Hobson, accredited by the Colonial

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Office to its old allies Mr. Busby the missionary landowners and their confederate chiefs, experienced no difficulty in accomplishing his mission. A treaty called the "Treaty of Waitangi," drawn up by the missionary brotherhood, was signed by various sovereign natives (a blanket was sometimes given for a signature and it was not every day that a native could get a blanket for making his X), under which, in consideration of being guaranteed their "possessions," various very independent natives transferred the sovereignty of the country to Queen Victoria; and declared themselves, and their absent friends or enemies, British subjects and black John Bulls. Captain Hobson then read his commission; took Auckland for his capital; the British flag was hoisted; and in 1840, just seventy years after Captain Cook had gone through a like ceremony, short of the "Blanket Treaty," New Zealand again became a British possession, and this time a set pearl of the British crown. 12

Meanwhile the affairs of the Association had advanced: the bankers and merchants of London had urged the Government in its favour. Lord John Russell was in power; and Lord John seems to have viewed the Association body which

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might be made nationally useful in promoting a wholesome emigration from the mother country, and in turning to account the barren wilds and wastes of the new colony the empire had now acquired. The Association received a royal charter of incorporation, became a joint-stock body with a capital of £300,000 under the name of the New Zealand Company; and in consideration of its surrendering to the Crown every pretension of right and title to all New Zealand lands acquired under Colonel Wakefield's negotiations with the natives

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the Crown agreed to make over to it 700,000 acres of such lands for the purposes of colonisation. 13

Thus constituted and encouraged in a moment of official sunshine, the New Zealand Company prosecuted their enterprise with extraordinary vigour and success. Before the ink was well dry on their charter of incorporation they had extended the settlement of Wellington, planted the settlements of Wanganui New Plymouth and Nelson, and safely landed on the shores of Cook's Straits five thousand 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.

Two elements of order and civilisation were thus at last introduced into the beautiful wilderness where nature had done so much and man so little--the Colonial Office missionary-government in the north, the Colonising-Company in the south; and the sad history of New Zealand for the next five years is but the history of the successful intrigues of the former institution to destroy the latter.

The Colonial Office of 1840 was a despotic

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power ruling colonies through governors and small officials, its obsequious tools pocketing handsome salaries whilst they bowed to its every caprice; and the heading of its every despatch might well have been the "Sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione voluntas." We have seen that in these days the Colonial Office was entirely under missionary influence. Its mere political head for a few months might sometimes be a man like Lord John Russell, deaf to the bray of Exeter Hall and a friend to emigration. But the Under Secretary, the permanent man who pulled the strings, was an all-powerful official deeply imbued with the anti-emigration fallacies of aborigines-protection societies and a violent missionary partisan. The New Zealand Company had snapped red tape; had forced this despotic missionary institution to undo a policy; to open New Zealand to British emigrants; to abandon the cherished hope of making New Zealand a missionary preserve. The New Zealand Company must receive a retaliatory lesson, and be put down. Indeed, if it were allowed to flourish, official pride might be wounded official slumbers broken by a dozen other companies knocking and demanding permission to colonise a dozen other wastes in a dozen other colonies. Traditions of office, official routine, the policy of "how not to do it" might be rudely disturbed; and the Colonial Circumlocution Office be reduced either to the vulgarity of activity and usefulness, or to extinction, like the Inquisition. The executive instruments of

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this institution which had so much to avenge on the New Zealand Company, were the Missionary-officials 14 at Auckland!--the very gentlemen who had built up the snug little confederacy which this New Zealand Company had pulled down; and who, in avenging the injuries of their employers would also avenge their own. These gentlemen, too, had a private pecuniary inducement for opposing the Company. They were land speculators--the auriferous stream of capital and labour was beginning to flow into New Zealand but it was flowing to the Company's young settlements in the distant south--if the Company's young settlements could be swamped, emigration-Patroclus diverted to the north--missionary lands Auckland Town lots might become diggings of the rarest yield! 15

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Here, then, it would seem that there was sufficient of "animus" and "motive" to explain to us the cause of that fatal opposition which the New Zealand Company was now to experience from the Colonial Office and the missionary executive.

It is not charged on the Colonial Office and the Missionary party that when they commenced to hunt and to harry the Company they foresaw the fatal end of the chase; for huntsmen and quarry alike bit the dust, and self-preservation if no better motive would have induced them to draw rein sooner. Neither is it charged on them that in ruining the Company's enterprise they wished to ruin the Company's emigrants. In fierce pursuit of the culprit Company they trampled down the Company's settlers as unconsidered emmets. Herodotus tells us of a people who put out the eyes of their slaves that nothing might distract them when

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churning butter. But these people did not practise such custom because they hated slaves, but because they loved butter --and the Missionary-government did not desolate the emigrant's little field because it hated him, but because it loved revenge on those who sent him.

Every oppression and tyranny is carried on under some cloak-cry, or mask. Why the ferocious cruelties practised by the missionary on the hapless natives of Mexico and Peru?--the glory of God. Why Bomba's chains and stripes?--constitutional government. Why negro slavery?--a necessity. Why skin the eel?--he likes it. Why the missionary-ruin of the New Zealand Company?-- the good of the natives!

The cry of the Colonial Office and its missionary officials in their work of ruining the New Zealand Company, was that they feared that the Company's colonisation of a portion of the wilderness would ruin the natives!

Now if there had been no colonisation of any sort; if New Zealand had been a virgin field untouched by the European; the natives an innocent race having had no contact with the white man; there would have been less of flimsiness in this plea. But even then it might have been urged with truth, that if the real object was to civilise and preserve a race like the New Zealanders, such object would be best attained by bringing the New Zealanders into harmonious intercourse with an interspersed industrial population of orderly British emigrants--

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who would practically teach them the arts of civilisation, introduce the plough and the loom; and by smooth example, wean them from their exterminating internecine feuds and the cannibal barbarities of their savage life. 16

But New Zealand was not a virgin field untouched by the white man: there was the Pandemonium of Kororareka, there were a dozen rising Kororarekas. True, now that the British flag was hoisted, the more repulsive features of this lawless colonisation might disappear. We might hear no more of corrosive sublimate, of cannibal feasts cooked in ships' coppers; 17 many a "Lag" might fly

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and the blasphemous debauchery of Kororareka might be checked. But could the Colonial Office, could the missionary officials, could any reasonable

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human being, expect that this irregular colonisation would cease now that New Zealand had become a British colony? The natives, whose dominant passion next to war and cannibalism was trade, were everywhere encouraging such colonisation-- giving their daughters to the white man, building him houses, dressing him flax, growing him corn, collecting him produce, helping him in the fishery, selling him millions of acres of land. Trade and intercourse between the two races, Australian immigration, "squatting," had been steadily growing up for thirty years. The proclamation of British Government in New Zealand gave an instant stimulus to this sort of colonisation. The harbours of Auckland and Kororareka and Wellington and Nelson were thronged with colonial shipping; and every vessel brought speculators, adventurers, land-sharks, eager to buy up wild lands and settle in a country long the wild Eden of the Pacific, and where now there was to be law order and government expenditure. Who with 100,000 warlike

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natives bent on swelling this rising torrent of Australian colonisation, was to stop it?--the Missionaries! Mrs. Partlington stopping the Atlantic with her mop! Surely it passes the bounds of human credulity to suppose that the Colonial Office and its missionary allies could believe that a magnificent country larger than Great Britain and Ireland, when once proclaimed a British colony, could be closed to the million, tabooed to the empire, and locked up as a select preserve for a handful of missionaries and missionary emigrants licensed to plant a home in New Zealand by Mr. Danderson Coates and the Church Missionary Society!

The missionary party must have seen that this irregular colonisation of the country could not be stopped--and seeing this, it appears incredible that they did not see that the only mode of moderating the evils of this irregular colonisation from the convict colonies, was to encourage some regular colonisation from the mother country. They asserted that the bane of the native was that his civilisation model (his trainer) was the Sydney pedlar, the lawless land-shark, the drunken forecastle bully, the embruted whaler. Such "trainers" could not be got rid of--the antidote then would have been to have placed before the native other models to have made his "trainer," the industrious emigrant family, the steady mechanic, the English gentleman: to have done and introduced precisely what the Company wanted to do and introduce.

I cannot but think that the Colonial Office and

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the missionary gentlemen must have seen all these things; and that their opposition to the Company's scheme of colonisation was, in truth, a retaliatory opposition. Yet an opposition so intensified by certain pecuniary considerations, that if the Company had held out the "olive branch" by turning their emigrant capital and labour into the northern neighbourhood of Auckland town lots and missionary glebes, it would have been extinguished; and the Wairoa massacre and the train of disasters which such opposition entailed would never have occurred.

The peculiar means which the Missionary Government hit on for working out its designs on the Company, the modus operandi, was a very simple but very effective one. It was to assume the illegality of the Company's title to the waste lands in Cook's Straits where they had planted their little settlements, and to call on the Company to prove their title good, as against the natives, before a legal tribunal specially constituted for the purpose. And they pleaded that they were morally bound to set up such tribunal by their Blanket Treaty of Waitangi.

The second article of this missionary "coup diplomatique," guaranteed to the natives the lands estates forests fisheries and other properties which they might possess; and Lord John Russell describing this treaty some while after in the House says, "it asserts the rights of the natives to the property of which they are possessed."

Now what did possess mean here?--what was

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the true honest construction of the word? Did not possession of land here mean some beneficial occupancy and enjoyment of land? Surely yes. The New Zealanders were not a hunting people of nomad tribes roaming over the country in quest of game food. They were a village-dwelling, man-eating, farmer-fisher people; subsisting on the produce of cultivated patches of kumera taro and potato, and on eels dog-fish and fern root taken in the near vicinity of their villages. New Zealand was larger than Great Britain and Ireland. The entire population did not exceed 100,000. Immense districts of teeming fertility, literally without an inhabitant, did not produce a mouthful of food for a single human being. They were not an increasing people. For a century they had been a fast decreasing people. When they made their marks to the Blanket Treaty, there were seventy-five millions of waste acres in the country which they did not use and which, humanly speaking, it was certain they never would use.

Their "possessions," then, should, I think, have been construed to mean all their villages fortifications fisheries and cultivations; together with a block of land near every village (say 10,000 acres for every acre they had in crop) as a noble demesne for their possible posterity. And the remainder of the available country (some three-fourths) should have been deemed the estate of the Crown partly as an equivalent for the law order and security which the Crown would introduce; and

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partly as an equivalent for that lucrative trade which Crown colonisation would create, and for the immense pecuniary value which Crown emigrants arts and civilisation would in a few years confer on the native demesne.

Even if the New Zealanders had been one united people with one custom of inheritance and one defined common law of property, this would have been the best the most humane construction of the treaty. But the New Zealanders were twenty independent hostile tribes who had waged ferocious wars with each other for centuries; who had chased each other from village to village, now advancing conquerors, now retreating fugitives; and whose "titles" to lands, to use an expression, were derived or lost through conquest, reconquest, occupancy, non-occupancy, slavery, accidental spilling of blood--through a dozen clashing customs. 18

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Here it would have been doubly prudent and humane to have interpreted possessions in the sense of some "present occupancy." For to tell the slender remnants of the twenty tribes that all New Zealand was theirs to sell, was instantly to revive among them the bitter memory of those title-giving ferocities which had all but extinguished their race. 19

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But no, The Colonial Office and its missionary officials gravely asserted that every one of the eighty millions of waste acres in New Zealand belonged to the handful of natives; and declared (despite the agreement with Lord John Russell, page 43) that as the New Zealand Company claimed a strip of the waste they would set up a tribunal 'to try whether such claim could be proved good at law!

The New Zealand Company's negotiations with the Cook's Straits natives for this strip of the desert had been carried on publicly with the full knowledge and consent of all tribes interested therein. Complying with the savage's idea of purchase, the Company had made the natives satisfactory presents for this strip, and thus had purchased it. But the solid requital they made was the setting apart for the natives an equal-value tenth of all the acquired land--an estate which in a few years might well have been worth half a million sterling. 20 The little portion of the wilderness which the Company asked for, was not to be kept a barren monopoly until created a marketable prize

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by the enterprise and industry of others. It was for the busy field of fruitful colonisation; for the village, the school, the church, the plough, the fleece. The company had planted four flourishing settlements, and to crown this brilliant commencement of colonisation, "to make the desert blossom like the rose," they asked for 700,000 acres of the waste. The five-and-twenty missionary gentlemen alone claimed nearly half this quantity from their confederate chiefs--but the Company was a hostile interloper, a vessel of wrath; and the Missionary government humorously referred the Company to the "little tribunal" which it had set up to try the case.

This tribunal was called "The New Zealand Land Claims Court." An able and as it afterwards proved much to the disgust of his employers, a very independent lawyer, Mr. Commissioner Spain, was to preside, hear evidence, and adjudicate on the legality of the Company's Cook's Straits purchases. And if the reader should think that no lawyer of ancient or modern days bad ever a more hopeless task, set him than that which here fell to the lot of Mr. Commissioner Spain, it is extremely probable that the reader would not be wrong.

The Gordian knot which the learned commissioner had to unravel was simply this:-- First, he had to define a New Zealand law of real property. To lay down for the New Zealanders what constituted their legal right to sell out of the many rights they set up. Whether the right were de-

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rived from partial occupancy of a district since the Hawaiian migration. If so, whether such right had not been lost by the circumstance of some of the members of such occupant tribe having once been eaten by invaders from a hostile tribe. Whether, if such invaders did thus extinguish and gain a right, they had not in turn lost it to some third tribe who had submitted some of them to a similar process. Whether, if tribe A had eaten most of tribe B fifty years ago, tribe A had or had not lost their right to such district because they had never occupied it; and whether, if they had lost it, the right lay with the remnant of tribe B, or with some members of tribe C, who had once caught eels there. Secondly--having settled the principle of inheritance and determined whether occupancy, conquest, re-conquest, cannibalism, or slavery, gave the legal right to sell, he had to discover in whom this "legal right" vested--to ascertain which of the half-dozen parties who claimed it, had it. Thirdly-- having accomplished this, the learned commissioner had to frame a principle of "adequate payment;" to lay down whether the payment was to be goods or money--and whether £10, £100, £l,000, or £10,000. Three-fourths of the witnesses would be excited savages giving contradictory evidence in an unknown tongue; and when the learned commissioner had struggled through the maze and pronounced judgment, it was infinitely less probable that the pack of disputants would bow to his decision, than that they would proceed to

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tomahawk each other before his face, and practically renew in court those slumbering ferocities which the court's inquiries had aroused.

Such were some of the duties and responsibilities of the learned Land Commissioner, and his temper and judgment were soon to be sorely tried.

We have seen that when Colonel Wakefield and the Company's pioneers appeared in Cook's Straits as the heralds of English trade and intercourse they were warmly welcomed by the natives. The settlements of Wellington Wanganui New Plymouth Nelson had been planted amid the acclamations of the Maori. The admirable plan of the "reserved tenths" gave general satisfaction. The natives flocked to the village-towns to barter their pigs and potatoes for the useful novelties of the stores; became amusing "helps" and odd-job workmen, took agricultural contract work, and presented every indication of settling down into a thriving portion of a civilised community.

But the "apple of discord" was ripening hard by.

When, the missionary gentlemen were seeking marks and crosses to the "Blanket Treaty" their emissaries were sent round the country to procure them, and to interpret the document to which such signatures were to be affixed.

These emissaries came to Wellington and held long and semi-secret interviews with the natives. Soon after their departure a marked change came stealing over the demeanour of the natives. Now,

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were first heard among them sneering expressions to the effect that the Cook's Straits white men were not the Queen's people, but, "cookies." 21 Natives, never heard of before, now began to come forward as owners of lands bought of others. Natives who could not deny the sale of land now murmured that in their private subdivision of the "utu" some had taken the lion's share--one family had marched off with the silver meant for two; A, wanting a dozen red blankets had got six blue; C had carried off all the collar-shirts; D coming for tobacco, had been gratified with frying-pan and jews-harp; B had lost his boots. Natives who had never been near a district for years now travelled back and demanded lands on which they found the settler. The Waitangi Treaty and their "possessions" were ever in their mouths--and hundreds of them were now only waiting Mr. Spain's arrival to start up with denials of the Company's purchases, with revivals of old claims, and with every device which the inflamed cupidity of the savage could suggest as likely to serve his great purpose of getting more gold and blankets from the white man who had plenty in the bank and the store, and who might bear considerable squeezing under the sanction of the Law.

Mr. Spain soon appeared, accompanied by certain missionary officials anxious to see justice done --his chief interpreter, general adviser, and the attorney-general for the natives being the son of the

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most active missionary-official in New Zealand. Under these auspices and recollecting the general preparedness of the natives to play their part, it is not necessary to say that the learned commissioner's court was instantly besieged by bands of defrauded natives vociferating for more "utu;" 22 and threatening the settler with the tomahawk if more utu were not instantly accorded. Almost every acre of land where the settlements of Wellington Wanganui New Plymouth and Nelson had been founded was now claimed back; and it seemed probable that the Company and the Company's emigrants after expending thousands in the work of colonisation would now be stripped of every waste acre of the wilderness which they had cleared and planted.

It would be tedious and repulsive to pursue the missionary and the savage through every barbarous maze and greedy wile displayed in Mr. Spain's court. Indeed an event now occurred, the direct fruit of this court, so tragic in its nature so pregnant with disaster, that the mere court during the remainder of its farciful existence becomes a mere shadow on the wall; and may be dismissed here with the glance of contempt and indignation it provokes.

One of the districts which Colonel Wakefield had purchased from the natives was the (Nelson) Wairau Plains. The seller was Te Rauparaha, an expelled outcast from a northern tribe who get-

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ting together a band of desperadoes had destroyed various of the Cook's Straits tribes and planted himself on their lands. His title to Wairau, was the massacre of the few Wairau families he had found there. But he never occupied the waste he made; he lived on the other island at the missionary station of Waikanae; so that when Colonel Wakefield bought Wairau it did not contain an inhabitant. 23 When Te Rauparaha heard of the coming Land Court he like others began to devise means of getting more payment. He decided to dispute the sale of Wairau. The Nelson surveyors were at work on the plain--he crossed the straits with an armed band, burnt down their huts and drove them off. They carried the news to Nelson. The Queen's magistrate issued a warrant for his apprehension on a charge of arson; and went himself, with Captain Arthur Wakefield two or three other gentlemen and some special constables, to execute it. A collision took place. Six-and-twenty white men were slain. The Queen's magistrate and Captain Wakefield were murdered in cold blood after the affray was over. Te Rauparaha took to his canoes and fled back to Waikanae. The settlers at once armed to march on Waikanae and seize the murderer. The authorities at Wellington imperatively forbade the expedition. Missionary officials hinted that missionary law would

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support Te Rauparaha: and as Captain Fitzroy, the new governor, was hourly expected on the spot, the friends of the murdered were coerced to wait. 24 Captain Fitzroy, the missionary tool of Lord Stanley's missionary Colonial Office, 25 arrived in New Zealand--received the missionary-official version of the Wairau massacre--came down to Wellington--proceeded to Waikanae--begged an interview with Te Rauparaha, which that worthy was good enough to grant--told him that he had done wrong in killing twenty-six emigrants and in murdering

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the Queen's magistrate and a Queen's officer in cold blood--but that under the circumstances of the case he (British governor) would look the matter over, and only caution Te Rauparaha (missionary convert and British subject) never to do the like again! 26

Captain Fitzroy's next act of administrative justice was performed at New Plymouth. Here, despite much hard swearing on the part of the natives and the legal aid of their Attorney-General, the learned commissioner of the Land Court decided against the natives, and awarded the Company and their settlers some 70,000 acres of land. Governor Fitzroy instantly reversed the court's award, gave back the whole district to the natives; and after trying to break up the settlement and move the people to Auckland, moved them into a patch of a few acres round the village,--abandoned their cultivations to the natives,--and left the settlers stripped of their lands--a further warning to the white man, a further signal to the black, 27

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These proceedings stopped all further emigration from the mother country--every Cook's Straits

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settler warned his friends from a land where there was no law, where life and property were insecure.

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The natives, triumphant from the murder of Wairau and the land victory their governor had won them at New Plymouth, grew daily more insolent and exacting; and unquestionably at this period, nothing but the knowledge that they might proceed too far, that they might so disgust the white man as to drive him away altogether never to return except as a conqueror and thus deprive themselves of that trade which gave them so many luxuries, prevented them from doing that which would have led to open collision between the races and probably to the

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utter destruction of every young settlement the Company had planted. Many southern colonists now abandoned New Zealand; whilst the majority stopped all cultivation of lands from which they might any day be driven; and hoarding the remnants of their little means kept themselves ready, to re-emigrate to Australia, South America, or some foreign colony of the Pacific, where missionary misrule might no longer imperil their children's lives, or the crazed crochets of aborigines-protection societies make the settler the serf of the savage.

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The New Zealand Company, then, were virtually ruined--their scheme of independent colonisation was a wreck--the retaliatory policy of the aggrieved Colonial Office was a victory--missionary-officials might sing "Io triumphe."

But the triumph was short. The train had been carefully laid, the match applied; a great explosion had shattered the enemy--but a spark had lit another train, and now the engineer was "to hoist with his own petard."

Colonial Office and missionary policy had insisted that the remnant of New Zealanders should claim every waste acre of the immense New Zealand wilderness--it had set up the Land Court, a revival of slumbering feuds and old ferocities--it had winked at the slaughter of twenty-six white men by natives who were trespassers on the spot where the deed was done--in mockery of its own Land Court

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it had surrendered to the natives the garden of New Zealand; a waste Eden where the native had used no acre, where the native has used no acre to this day. There was one speck of gold in the dross of the Waitangi treaty--the agreement of the natives to kill the land-shark by selling lands only to the Crown. The natives demanded that this agreement should be cancelled--Captain Fitzroy assented; and the speculator was again free to acquire disputed rights to millions of disputed acres. The Colonial Office proposed raising a small militia force among the hardy pioneer settlers and backwoodsmen of the bush -- missionary-officials replied that such a measure might be disagreeable to the natives--it was instantly abandoned. Petty robberies, acts of violence, trespasses, stoppages of roads had been committed with impunity; for the magistrate could seldom see a native culprit--and one member of the Bench had already been murdered with impunity---"pour encourager les autres." A succession of public measures of this nature, the similar tenor of all private intercourse between the Missionary Government and the aborigines, had given the latter such an idea of their rights and privileges, had so puffed up and incited them, that they had come to regard themselves as the superior race and to sneer at the white man as an emigrant slave. They took all the advantages of trade and civilisation -- but would part with no custom of barbarism. They would have the profit of law, but they would be above the law. The more

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yielded to them, the more they demanded. And history affords no instance of the character of a barbarous people being so changed and vitiated by the unwise policy of a superior race, as the New Zealander's character was changed and vitiated by the ten years' coddling and petting which he received at the hands of his missionary protectors.

It was a favourite expression of these gentlemen to term the New Zealander a "child." Perhaps he was; and to pursue the cradle image, he proved a child so long humoured in every whim by fond and fatuous parents that he would now smash the mirror, brain the cat, and stab the nurse. Or, to change the figure, Captain Fitzroy and his conjurers having raised the native devil in the south had now to lay him in the north; and were to eat in their own fields, bitter fruits of the harvest they had sown broadcast in the Company's.

Hone Heke, a distinguished missionary chief of the Bay of Islands, had long driven a thriving trade amid the lawless colonisers of Kororareka--bartering his pigs potatoes peaches, slave-girls, and native produce, with whalers and traders for powder guns blankets knicknacks and tobacco. The hoisting of the British flag at Kororareka, the introduction of some law, the imposition of customs duties, had sadly crippled this barter trade; and driven to other shores many of the fishing freebooters who had long revelled on the beach. With the ships, went Heke's income. His mark to this Waitangi

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Treaty had created him a British subject--but it had created customs, stopped the pig trade, and made beauty a drug. The British flag-staff symbolized the customs. He cut it down. Smitten on the one cheek, Governor Fitzroy turned the other. By stroke of pen he abolished customs throughout New-Zealand; 29 when Heke, at the entreaty of his spiritual advisers, sent a note of apology. But whalers did not instantly come back; they had not heard of customs' sudden death. Heke was impatient; he cut the flag-staff down a second time. Missionary authorities remonstrated and set it up once more, this time as they tell us, "sheathed with iron"--but not with majesty. Heke cut it down a third time; then burnt down the town and drove the inhabitants to Auckland. Heke, almost an elder of the church, a chief, as a missionary author tells us, "distinguished for his knowledge of the Scriptures," actually burning down his Queen's towns! slaying and harrying Her Majesty's white subjects! Well might the missionary officials of the Privy Council exclaim, "et tu brute!" They offered £100 for his head. Heke at once replied by offering 1000 acres of land for the governor's head; a high price; but Heke was always a liberal savage. Soldiers

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were got from Sydney; natives, old tribe foes of the missionary rebel delighted to cross tomahawks with him once more, were enlisted as allies, and war burst out. Having long coddled our pervert; we had now to thrash him.

The state of things thus brought about in New Zealand, here began to provoke considerable indignation at home. This non-colonising, aborigines-protecting policy of the Colonial-Missionary Office had been tried for seven years--what were its fruits? The New Zealand Company was virtually ruined--the young settlements it had planted were in process of abandonment, grass was growing in the newly-cleared streets and the little fields won from the wilderness were being given up to the dock and the thistle--many of the pioneer colonists were ruined, many had fled to Australia--trade, agriculture, emigration had ceased--the public revenue of the young colony had been lost--a tax on farm stock, a tax on rooms of houses, the old Spanish alcabala tax had been resorted to--a host of idle officials were clamorous for unpaid salaries--two shilling "assignats" had been issued--a wholesale murder had been passed over without even judicial enquiry--native acts of plunder, trespass, exasperating bravado, had been almost laughed at by the wretched authorities who disgraced the bench--the life and property of the white man were nowhere safe--the law was a mockery,--and the missionary savages, the perverted heathen, for whom all this had been done and suffered, for whom all this dirt

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had been eaten, had just offered a tempting reward for their missionary governor's head, and had struck the first blow of what might well become a merciless and exterminating war of races!

A grave petition from the Cook's Straits settlers and Company's colonists was laid before Parliament; a Select Committee of the House condemned Lord Stanley's missionary policy; and in the session of 1845, the whole case of the "colonisation and misgovernment of New Zealand" was brought before the House of Commons in a three nights' debate. The lamented late Charles Buller member for Liskeard stated the case of the Company and the colonists, as against the Colonial Office and the missionary policy, in a searching and luminous argument, and was ably followed by Lord John Russell, Lord Howick, Mr. Aglionby, Mr. Hawes, Mr. Barkly, Mr. Mangles, the Right Honourable Edward Ellice and Richard Lalor Shiel. To shelter their colleague Lord Stanley, Sir Robert Peel's Ministry made it a Government question, and thus defeated Mr. Buller's motion--but only by a majority of 50 in a house of 400.

Though however the Colonial Minister was saved, his missionary policy was doomed.

Governor Fitzroy was recalled, Governor Grey from South Australia was appointed. Troops and a war steamer were sent out. And the long-suffering colonists were given to understand that missionary councils would be dispensed with; that though the treaty of Waitangi would be respected, Governor

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Grey would make every effort to procure waste lands and promote colonisation; and that even-handed justice would be dealt out to both races, and the native made amenable to the law.

Governor Grey arrived in New Zealand in 1845. Mr. Protector Clark and the missionary gentlemen who had played so distinguished a role in the wrecking of the colony under the patronage of Governors Hobson and Fitzroy, now shook the dust off their feet and departed to the farming of their fields and converts; and from this "dies faustus," New Zealand began slowly to emerge from her seven years' "slough of despond."

Governor Grey's first task was the due chastisement of the Flag-staff rebel. Fresh troops were sent to the scene of action, some vigour was infused into the military operations which had slightly languished under missionary generalship, and Heke, besieged in his last stronghold, his erie of Ruapekapeka, was driven into the wilderness and compelled to sue for peace; which, under guarantees for future good behaviour, was clemently granted him. 30

Te Rauparaha and his principal bully or fighting general, Rangihaeata, since Governor Fitzroy's friendly visit to them on the subject of the Wairau massacre, had openly avowed their contempt both for the white man and the white man's law; and

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in hopes of being bought off, had proceeded to disturb the settlers, fire on the troops, and commit various acts of violence, in a new district on the Wellington river Hutt, to which they never even professed to have any claim, and which had already been twice bought and paid for.

But these worthies had now to learn that all British governors were not missionary governors.

Governor Grey, fresh from Heke's rout, came to the spot; proclaimed these murderers rebels to the Queen; proclaimed martial law; organised a mixed military force of soldiers, settlers and friendly natives; made prisoner of Te Rauparaha; 31 hung, shot and dispersed his band of desperadoes; and drove Rangihaeata to a distant country.

A dastardly murder of a white woman and two children was committed at Wanganui by five up-river natives on the evening of April 18, 1846. A friendly tribe pursued and took them. The officer in command at Wanganui tried them by court-martial on the 24th, and hung them on the 26th. The up-river tribe came down to demand satisfaction. But after several skirmishes in which more powder was burnt than blood spilled, their leading chief Mamaku was slain, and they retired in discomfiture.

This Wanganui affair was the third and last occasion on which any of the New Zealand tribes

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ever appeared in arms against the Queen. And from the time of Governor Grey's reduction of Heke, capture of Te Rauparaha, dispersion of Rangihaeata and execution of these Wanganui murderers, up to the present day (a period of ten years) life and property have probably been as secure in New Zealand as in any county of Great Britain.

Having thus chastised and educated the natives, and made himself at once respected and popular among them, Governor Grey turned his attention to civil matters.

During his administration the whole of the South or Middle Island, and several valuable districts in the North, were effectually purchased of the tribes by Messrs. McLean, Mantell, and other valuable officers of the Crown, and thrown open for settlement. The natives were largely employed in Government works, road-making, barrack-building, and engineering. Hospitals were erected for them. Some were enrolled as policemen, others appointed native magistrates. The payments they received for land were frequently made in instalments of stock, and every encouragement was given them in the pursuits of industry and peace. Emigration began slowly to revive. The Company's settlements of Wellington Wanganui New Plymouth and Nelson which had drooped so low, now began to expand and take firmer root. Otago, founded by an offshoot of the Company in 1846, slowly advanced; Canterbury, founded by another offshoot of the Company in 1848 though

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planted on a false system which entailed many early difficulties, nevertheless proved a successful effort of colonisation which drew much profitable attention to New Zealand. Trade agriculture, and the public revenue of the colony improved. Confidence was restored. And though Governor, now Sir George Grey, K.C.B., was somewhat wedded to that old "despotic sway" to which the Colonial Office had long accustomed colonies and colonial governors, he was unquestionably a wise and able ruler under whose judicious policy New Zealand shook off the "missionary incubus," and commenced a career of slow but solid progress which has never since received a check.

The New Zealand Company, to whose parliamentary exertions the downfall of the Colonial Office missionary policy was mainly due; the Company which had preserved New Zealand from becoming the penal colony of France and the foreign mistress of the Pacific, was not destined to share in the improved fortunes of the beautiful land for which it had done so much. Its public repute and efficiency as a great commercial organ of systematic colonisation was fatally damaged by the "seven years' insecurity of life and property" which missionary policy had inflicted on its early colonists. The emigrant world heard that emigrants who had bought lands of the New Zealand Company had often lost such lands, sometimes life and lands too. This was a death-blow to the Company's colonising power the effects of which

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no after expedients could avert; and it would have been well if, when it had won for its colonists the great parliamentary victory of 1845, it had closed its labors and entrusted the further colonisation of New Zealand to new and undamaged hands. But it attempted to proceed; and after entering into some pecuniary negotiations with the Government which have resulted in saddling the colony with a serious debt, it found that the consequences of early misfortunes were too serious to be overcome, and in 1851 it resigned its functions to the Government, and made over its various settlements to the Crown.

In 1851 the Australian gold discoveries took place, and gave a marked impetus to trade, agriculture and every branch of industry in New Zealand.

In 1853, the new constitution, described hereafter, was proclaimed, and the real government of the colony entrusted to the colonists. And in 1853, Sir George Grey after a brilliant career of several years in South Australia and New Zealand proceeded home and received the governorship of the Cape Colony; where he may find ample field for the display of his peculiar tact in the management and civilisation of savage tribes.

Lieutenant-Colonel Wynyard, commander of the forces, became Governor pro tem, on Sir George Grey's departure, and brought the New Zealand constitution into practical operation. Colonel Wynyard's rule of two years exhibited a period of quiet

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progress; and in 1855 this gallant officer was relieved by Colonel Thomas Gore Browne K.C.B.--a gentleman who appears to win golden opinions from all parties; and under whose responsible rule we may hope to see the youngest but finest colony of our empire enjoy a long career of tranquil prosperity and become a popular emigration field and happy home for thousands of our countrymen.

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Such, I think, is a correct sketch of the leading features of the history of New Zealand from Tasman's discovery down to the present day.

The remarks on "missionary-policy" are dictated by no rancour against missionaries--by no contempt for a savage race. The New Zealand missionary body of the present day, though slightly mistaken in its views and doing good in a manner somewhat different from that which it believes in, nevertheless constitutes a decided element of advance; and boasts men like Bishop Selwyn and various others both of the Church and Wesleyan Missions, who are an honour to their holy cause-- whilst as to the Maori, I yield to no man in desire to preserve his race and to improve his lot.

But I hold that that early Church Missionary and consular party which "got up" the Sovereign confederacy of thirteen land-endowing chiefs from whom it obtained tens of thousands of acres of land --that party which threw away the public revenue of the colony to conciliate a missionary savage at Kororareka; which in very mockery of justice aban-

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doned the garden of New Zealand to the dozen dogs in the manger incited to claim it at New Plymouth; which gave the right hand of fellowship to the murderers of six-and-twenty of our countrymen at Wairau--I hold that that party strayed, from the right path; that it brought reproach on its cloth; and that the policy it pursued in alliance with Lord Stanley's Colonial Office was a selfish, bigoted, revengeful policy--a policy not dictated by the purest motives.

But the early ruin and misery inflicted on New Zealand, the near destruction of both races, must not be charged only on this party. The gentlemen who composed it were more or less the "executive instruments" of a policy, and thus, as most prominent, have been unduly blamed. But these gentlemen were at least in and of the country; they took their share of the perils of the murderous spirit they called forth. If they provoked the battle, they were at least in the battle. Amongst much evil, too, they did some good; and as repentant sinners they may live to do more. Those who most deserved the pillory were angry colonial ministers, pious bureaucrats, missionary bigots, Exeter-Hall Pharisees, the professional and unprofessional philanthropist--

Salaried secretaries of aborigines-destructive societies, id genus omne, -- smooth men who sat at home at ease, and who in revenge of wounded dignity and the snapping of red tape, in dilettante

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or professional pursuit of an idle theory--"cried havoc, let slip the dogs of war;" prayed; and went to bed.

These things are no more. Confederate chief, Exeter-Hall-Proconsul, Magistrate-missionary, Moa, Mastodon, are alike extinct. New Zealand has cast off her long incubus; has free Parliament, rules herself:--

She has been nursed in storms--but the storm-tossed plant grows into the hardiest tree--the hotbed spawns the mushroom. Partial evil, too, has been partial good--the battles of her early colonists have opened a rich and clear field for those who would follow now and renew life in the "Britain of the South."