pared 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 thousand more to be raised and to follow him. Success again attended his arms; and, flushed with victory, he 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 he 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 Messionary Station, which had been commenced at Wangaroa a year or two 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 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, bade his followers sit still, whilst he and a few of his friends went to see

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20

HONGI'S DEATH AND BURIAL.

the corpse, lest Hongi's people should be alarmed, as they had blockaded all the entrances to the pa. At first he was refused 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 pihi, 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."

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, shore whaling stations were planted in Foveaux Straits, sealers sought their spoil in Dusky Bay and along the rugged coasts of the south-west, whilst 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 had 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

FIRST ATTEMPT AT COLONISATION.

21

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, and supported by Mr. Huskisson the President of the Board of Trade, was formed in London for colonising a portion of New Zealand; and a piece of land for the pioneer settlement was purchased at Hokianga by the Company's agent, Captain Herd. Sixty settlers were sent out in 1826; but on landing they were so terrified at the sight of a war-dance, and at the tales told them of the native fights ever raging in their locality, that most of them left the country, and Lord Durham's first attempt at colonisation proved signally unsuccessful.

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, and long 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, whilst the bulk consisted of runaway sailors, "Lags," gaol-birds, and scoundrels of every mark and brand, from Sydney and Van Diemen's Land. The floating population of the place was worthy of the resident: convict skippers and ticket-of-leave mates of Sydney traders, with rude embruted crews of whalers and coasting traders, all rushing ashore for a "spree," and running ferociously festive "mucks" until they fell. Every second house was a grog-shop, and the population might have been divided into those who sold rum and those who drank it. Sterne's Uncle Toby relates that our army swore terribly in

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22

THE ALSATIA OF THE PACIFIC.

Flanders. But the common conversation of Kororareka displayed 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 Messalinas, 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 nor policeman 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. This lawless colonisation of the country, too, was spreading, and many of the little whaling stations in Cook's and Foveaux Straits, and on the east coast, were little other that budding Kororarekas, promising a full bloom.

*

The Missionaries, utterly powerless to turn or stem this flood of vice and violence which had flowed into Kororareka and which bade fair to 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; recollecting that a large amount of British property was at stake, the whale fishery increasing, and ships of various nations constantly visiting the ports; recollecting that the Colonial Office professed vast sympathy for the natives and must have seen that if Kororareka

* The men occasionally empowered by the New South Wales governors to put J.P. to their names in New Zealand were, for the most part, rude squatters or petty traders themselves; mere magisterial Dogberrys, without a constable to execute a warrant; and who, for all purposes of enforcing law and order, might as well have written themselves P.P. as J.P. Indeed J.P. in New Zealand was generally read Judge of Pigs.