28

THE WAITANGI TREATY,

macy, was asking certain awkward questions as to Mr. Busby's feat and this French result of it, the Colonial (Missionary) Office now determined to try and get back that which it had just got rid of, and despatched 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 (Missionary) Office to its old allies, Mr. Busby, the missionary landowners, and their confederates the "Thirteen sovereign 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,"* under which, in consideration of being guaranteed their "possessions," for these might some day come useful for the missionary interest, various very independent natives transferred the sovereignty of the country to Queen Victoria, and with great alacrity declared themselves, and their host of absent friends and enemies, British subjects and black John Bulls. This precious document, this "Treaty of Waitangi," this grave State Paper, this blanketbought-missionary Magna Charta, was signed by about five natives in a thousand, and was understood by about five in ten thousand; and if the people of Putney were to give England to the Pope, they would exhibit about the same amount of impudence, would arrogate powers, about as preposterous, as did this handful of Treaty-Signers when by mark of pen they made over what they were told was the "sovereignty" of their country to the Queen. But the ethics of our missionary landowners and their confederates who planned this Treaty must not be too closely scanned. Perhaps they did evil that good might come : the Treaty was their lease of power, and they would use this power not only in getting more land, but in making more converts. So poor Captain Hobson pocketed the document and pulled out his commission, took Auckland for his capital, and hoisted the British flag; and thus in 1840, just seventy years after Captain Cook had gone through a like ceremony short of the

* A blanket was sometimes given for a signature, and it was not every day that a ragged savage, "sovereign native as he might be, could get a blanket for making his mark.

THE NEW ZEALAND COMPANY.

*

"Blanket Treaty," New Zealand again became a possession of Great Britain, and this time a set pearl in the British crown.' 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 now in power; and Lord John seems to have viewed the Association as a body which 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 noble colony the empire had now acquired. The Association received a royal charter of incorporation, became a joint-stock body with a capital of 300,000l. under the name of the New Zealand Company; and in consideration of its surrendering to the Crown every pretension of right or title to all lands acquired under Colonel Wakefield's negotiations with the natives the Crown agreed to make over to it 700,000 acres of such lands for the purposes of colonisation.

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

* We so nearly lost New Zealand to the French through this missionary "coup diplomatique" that Captain Hobson had but just arrived at the Bay of Islands when à French corvette came in to take possession. Finding the British flag planted in the North Island, the French commander determined to try for the South, and hoist the tricolour at Akaroa. His design however was betrayed; when Governor Hobson-who whatever may have been his faults as a civil administrator was an able and quickwitted naval officer-hurried off the English sloop to Akaroa. The sloop arrived first, but so little first that I have somewhere read that she was only saluting the British ensign as the corvette dashed in. The French commander then abandoned the design of seizing New Zealand as a French possession, and landed the nucleus of his pioneer colony at Akaroa-as a friendly French settlement in British dominions. Akaroa remained a small French settlement for many years; numbering at one time some 200 settlers. Most of them have since removed to the rising French colonies in the Pacific; but Akaroa still exhibits pleasing traces of its founders in gardens famous for pear, and plum, and peach. If France had been a month sooner she would have gained a colony worth a hundred Algerias. A colony which would have made her mistress of the Pacific; a colony standing so before the doors of Australia that every wool and gold ship would have had to pass almost within sight of fifty French New Zealand privateer ports-ports amply large enough for the reception of the James Baines, Lightning, Marco Polo, and dozens of sister galleons, and offering unrivalled natural facilities for the building and equipment of frigate and line-of-battle ships.

30

THE COLONIAL (MISSIONARY) OFFICE.

dry on their charter of incorporation, they had extended their 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 institutionruling colonies through governors and small officials, its obsequious tools bowing to its every caprice, and the heading of its every despatch should have been "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 embued with the anti-emigration fallacies of aboriginesprotection 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. The executive instruments of the Colonial Office, the missionary officials in the colony, were ready for the work. Indeed,

* This term is used to signify, generally, the gentlemen who, as advisingamateurs or actually salary-receiving officers, constituted the executive governments of Captains Hobson and Fitzroy. Every missionary was not an official, and every official was not a missionary. But they all echoed and typified the missionary policy of the Colonial Office, and were all deeply imbued with the "missionary spirit." This spirit notoriously ruled

MISSIONARY OFFICIALS.

31

these men had a strong pecuniary inducement to oppose 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, if the emigration Pactolus could be diverted to the north, missionary lands, Auckland Town lots, might become diggings of the rarest yield!

Here, then, it would seem that there was sufficient of "animus and " "motive on the part of the employers and the employed, to explain the cause of that strange and fatal opposition which the New Zealand Company was now to experience from the Colonial Office and its 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 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 the emigrant, but because it loved revenge on those who sent the emigrant.

Every oppression and tyranny is carried on under some cloakery, or mask. Why the ferocious cruelties practised by the missionary on the hapless natives of Mexico and Peru?-the

the councils of the two first governors. Captain Hobson had been accredited to the missionaries; missionaries framed the Blanket Treaty; the original draft is in the handwriting of a missionary; and Governor Fitzroy was far more a missionary ruler than even Governor Hobson. Indeed, Capt. Fitzroy's bosom counsellor was a missionary catechist, a gunmaker by trade, who had been turned into what was called Protector of Aborigines, a Mr. Clark, to whom he once paid the dubious compliment of publicly declaring that he, Mr. Protector Clark, was worth any six of his other officers put together.

32

MISSIONARY MISTAKES.

glory of God. Why Bomba's chains and stripes ?—paternal 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 industrial population of orderly British emigrants-new comers, who would teach the natives the arts of civilisation, introduce the plough and the loom, and by smooth example wean them from the cannibal barbarities of their savage life. 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. Rauparaha might never again boast of his 500 baskets of human flesh. Te Pehi's widow might never again tie an enemy to a tree, pierce his jugular, and drink his blood; there might be no more cannibal feasts cooked in ships' coppers; many a "lag" might fly and the blasphemous debauchery of Kororareka might be checked. But this lawless colonisation must always have remained radically bad, and it could not be stopped. Rude embruted whalers and sailors, peddling traders, and adventurers from the near convict colonies of Sydney and Van Diemen's Land were everywhere spreading over the country. These men were everywhere becoming the teachers and trainers of the natives; and if the missionaries had not been blind they would have seen that the natives wanted other and different trainers, other and different models, those, in short, whom the Company, and the Company alone, could largely and effectually supply.