DISPERSION OF THE NGATIAWA. 453 sky; and as they had learnt that the country around Waikanae, in Cook's Straits, was not occupied by any powerful tribe, and as Waikanae, and Kapite, and Otaki, were becoming considerable whaling and trading stations, they resolved to steal off to that neighbourhood, and put three hundred miles of good ground between themselves and their incensed Waikato neighbours, while there was time. William King was one of this wary section of the tribe; and he had led a party of his followers down the coast, and established himself at Waikanae, some time before that terrible Waikato blow, which he had probably foreseen, fell on his people at Pukerangiora. When, therefore, the fugitives from the siege of Muturoa made their night escape, the majority of them naturally (12) turned their feet to Waikanae, where, as we have seen, a few of the more prudent of their tribe had already found a home. Attacked by several tribes on their way, but still led by Barrett, and two or three old whalers and men-of-war's men, they fought their way down the coast, and eventually reached Waikanae, and there rested a while after the labours of their flight. Some of them settled at Waikanae with William King; others, disliking the country, moved across the Strait to Queen Charlotte's Sound; while others, again, under other chiefs, hired a vessel to carry them to the Chatham Isles, famous for eels, where they at once gave battle to the weak islanders, killed and cooked a portion of their victims on the spot, reduced the rest to slavery in a week, and took possession of the country by right of might (13). Though, however, the remnant of the Ngatiawa tribe thus found or seized new homes, they were much dispersed : some were at the Sugar Loaves, some at Waikanae, some in the Sound, some at the Chathams, some slaves in Waikato; and when the colonisation of the country commenced, and Colonel Wakefield and the pioneer Settlers appeared in Cook's Straits, in 1840, the Ngatiawa were found to be a poor, reduced, broken people, shunning all mention of "Pukerangiora" and "Muturoa," and still trembling at the name of Te Whero Whero, Te Kati, and Waikato. Colonel Wakefield was the representative of the New Zealand Company, whose colonising operations have been described in Chapter II. His arrival in the Tory, with his staff of officers, and his native interpreter, created a profound sen 454 FIRST PURCHASE OF NEW PLYMOUTH. sation among the the Cook's Strait tribes. They were naturally delighted at the idea that English Settlements and English trade, which had done so much to enrich their fellows in the north, were at last to start up in their own neighbourhood; and when it became known that Colonel Wakefield was desirous of purchasing land on which to plant his little Settlements, and that under the beneficent provision in the scheme of the New Zealand Company's colonisation one-tenth part of all land purchased would be set aside as the unalienable estate of the natives (14), various chiefs of the Cook's Strait tribes, prominent among whom we find William King, eagerly opened negotiations with him for the sale of portions of their respective tribal lands lying at Wellington, Nelson, Wairau, Manawatu, Wanganui, and Taranaki. Barrett, who has been mentioned as the fighting leader of the Ngatiawa, had taken service with Colonel Wakefield as a sort of assistant interpreter, and he spoke so highly of the splendid Taranaki country from which the Ngatiawa had been driven a few years before, and which was now all but a perfect solitude, that Colonel Wakefield, wanting a district on which he might plant the New Plymouth Settlement, was induced to receive proposals from William King (15), and the Waikanae natives, and from the Resident natives at Muturoa (described in note 12), for the purchase of such portion of this their old unoccupied country, some 70,000 acres, including the Waitara, as lay between a certain stream called the Taniwa and the islets called the Sugar Loaves. Strangers as they were, and but slightly informed as to native customs, Colonel Wakefield and his advisers, even when this land was first offered them, seem to have doubted whether the Ngatiawa tribe had not lost their right and title to sell any portion of the Ngatiawa country through force of their conquest and ejection by the Waikatoes. But as William King and the Resident Natives contended that the land was still Ngatiawa land because the Waikatoes had never occupied it, Colonel Wakefield purchased of them this block of 70,000 acres-or, rather, we should say, purchased it so far as William King and the Resident Natives could sell it; for no sooner did the news of the transaction reach Te Whero Whero, who had been one of the first to welcome Governor Hobson and the pioneer Settlers at SECOND PURCHASE OF NEW PLYMOUTH. 455 Auckland, than he indignantly declared that he would not sanction it; that Waitara and Waiongona, and Sugar Loaves, and Muturoa, belonged, both by the sacred and immemorial right of conquest, and by the Waitangi Treaty (16), just made with the British Government, to the Waikatoes, and that the quibble that the land was not Waikato land because Waikato had never cared to Occupy it was one worthy of the pettifogging cravens who had dared to make it. The missionary officials attached to Captain Hobson's government, who were the responsible exponents of Maori law, declared that the Waikato right was good; and Te Whero Whero's thunder was so loud, his bands so numerous, that poor Colonel Wakefield instantly saw that no European Settlement would be safe if planted at New Plymouth without Te Whero Whero's consent. William King and the Ngatiawa, wilfully or not, had deceived him, and obtained his money under what had proved te be false pretences-but his desire in coming to New Zealand to purchase land was not, niggardly, to save a few hundreds or a few thousands of the Company's money-it was to procure the fullest and most perfect "right and title" to the lands he bought that he could procure; and as Te Whero Whero had asserted his title to New Plymouth rather to defend the rights of his people than to extort money for them, and as the missionary officials counselled Colonel Wakefield to extinguish the Waikato claim by purchase, an arrangement was eventually effected, and a formal deed was drawn up by the Crown officers, and signed by the two great Waikato chiefs Te Kati and Te Whero Whero, by which they made over to the Queen the whole of the New Plymouth country, extending even from Tongapourutu to Waitotara (17). Thus, the New Plymouth land was at last acquired, and the little Settlement, planted in the beautiful solitude by the handful of Devonshire and Cornish Settlers who formed its earliest pioneers, took root, and looked for a time as if it would grow and flourish; but there was a worm at the heart of this young plant of colonisation—a worm ever sapping its vigour, ever dwarfing its growth-a worm, let us hope, which, after battening on the plant for twenty years, will now soon be cut out and crushed. When Col. Wakefield's exploring ship visited New Plymouth, in order to see what the country was like, there were found in 456 RETURN OF THE NGATIAWAS. the whole of the magnificent wilderness only the few Resident Natives, some 50 odd, described in note (12). A native population, however, soon appeared on the spot when once New Plymouth was fairly founded. This old country of the Ngatiawa was no longer a desolate wilderness where, should Ngatiawa villages again arise, they might any day be swept down by the tomahawks of the Waikato. New Plymouth had become a British Settlement, where Ngatiawa might dwell in peace, and where, moreover, they might drive a thriving trade. These considerations soon began to operate: various parties of the fugitives who had fled from the Waikatoes to Cook's Straits now returned to New Plymouth; and the Waikatoes, now that they had successfully asserted their right to the conquered country, and taken Colonel Wakefield's payment for it, seem to have looked more kindly on the captives they had made at Pukerangiora, and now liberated many of their slaves. These naturally flocked back to the good quarters the White man had made for them at New Plymouth; and the slaves from Waikato, and the returned fugitives from Cook's Straits, were joined, from time to time, by so many kinsmen from the Taranaki people, and by so many outcasts and desperadoes from other tribes, that in 1843-the year when the whole of the Cook's Strait natives, as described in Chapter II., were incited to repudiate Colonel Wakefield's purchases, and the Land Court was approaching-the New Plymouth natives were found to have increased from about 50 to 500. This increase of population would have been most welcome to the Colonists, if the new comers, who had sought citizenship with them, had been content to settle down into orderly industrial members of the mixed community. Indeed, the Natives had proved so useful for a time to the pioneer Colonists of Wellington, that when the Pioneers of New Plymouth first saw their new home there were two, and only two, subjects of complaint among them—the one that New Plymouth had no Harbour, the other that it had no Natives. For some time, indeed, the New Plymouth natives seemed as if they would justify the good opinion the Settlers had formed of them: they took contracts for clearing land, brought their pigs and potatoes to the stores, and presented every indication of becoming friendly fellow-labourers in the work of planting and extending the little Settlement COMMENCEMENT OF TROUBLES. 457 which had been formed, and where, thanks to the White man, they might now dwell in peace and security, undisturbed by fear or thought of Te Whero Whero, Te Kati, or Waikato. But, ignorant of the meaning of gratitude, prompted by the short-sighted greed of gain common to savages, aware of the feeling entertained for the Company and the Company's Settlers by the Missionary government at Auckland, the New Plymouth natives soon threw off the mask; and by degrees, as they found themselves becoming the stronger party, commenced annoying the Settlers by petty trespasses, insults, and threats; refused to accept the ample native reserves which had been set aside for them, took forcible possession of the whole of the Waitara and threatened that on the arrival of the coming Missionary Land Court* they would wrest from the Settlers every acre of the little fields the Settlers had planted at Waiongona, Waiwaikaiho, and Mongaraka. In 1844 the Land Court came, and the farce of trying whether the White man or the Black man was the legal owner of certain New Zealand wild land was again performed as it had been at Wellington and elsewhere. Here, however, despite a great deal of equivocation, subterfuge, and convenient forgetfulness on the part of our Maori friends, the Judge, Mr. Commissioner Spain, ventured to pronounce judgment against them, and the next day the Settlement was in an uproar. Knowing that they would go into this Court with the warmest sympathies of the missionary officials who had established the Court, they were furious at the verdict, and instantly declared their intention of treating it with contempt. The Court, in pronouncing its "award" against the New Plymouth natives, had only agreed with the missionary officials, consulted by Colonel Wakefield four years before, that by the Treaty of Waitangi and by the native laws which that Treaty recognised, the New Plymouth District belonged to Te Whero Whero and his Waikatoes, who, by formal deed of sale, had sold it to the Europeans, and that the Ngatiawa had lost their right by and through their defeat, slavery, and flight. The Court, bound, as it expressed itself, to pronounce such judgment by the Maori * See page 35. |