Our Islands' Stories.

1642 And All That

Introduction

In 1984 I was in a taxi being driven to my new apartment in Palmerston North. The European male taxi driver asked me what I did for a living. I answered I was a University student. He then asked me what I was studying. “I said New Zealand history.” He said, “You could use that to measure environmental change". I hesitated and said, “That is possible". I started thinking here was vox populi. Is it possible I could find a common ground of identity with him? So I spoke about my experiences in the History Department of Massey University. How the European and in particular the male part of New Zealand history was as an academic dogma being endlessly denigrated. Its benefits ignored. Its flaws always high lighted with a gleeful satisfaction. There was a campaign to eventually delegitimise our history and our citizenship. He replied. “We won because we were stronger. That is history. None of that matters. They can’t do anything about it.” So I said to him. “Are you telling me, my earnest endeavours to defend your history and legacy are a complete waste of time and money?“ He said, “Yes”. We parted on good terms. But I left feeling deflated and alienated. To quote my own words at the time. “You are sticking a noose around your necks.” A little more than a hundred years before, there had been a major colonial war in New Zealand. You would think that would register with the Kiwis. In that same year, auspicious 1984, the new Lange Labour Government committed two catastrophic errors. They began to corporatise New Zealand and to turn New Zealand into an Orwellian tribal State. We now have the full blown both. The New Zealand media were trumpeting the new Lange Government as “the most educated Government in New Zealand history”. As I had spent the 1970s at Auckland University and encountered the future leaders of the country, I rather wondered about that. And my worst doubts and fears were realised. To paraphrase C S Lewis. “The new University classes have lost common sense and have never acquired a traditional liberal education to replace it.” This blog will attempt to do what the education institutions have failed to do in the last about fifty years. It will highlight the people who actually built New Zealand. How they achieved it, warts and all. So Kiwis can look around themselves and understand how their country was made. And how it can be progressed. I will also try to write a history that has the romance of history instead of just dry facts. 2022 marks the year that a new Jacindastan history curriculum is mandatory in New Zealand schools. This new curriculum will be the New Zealand version of Critical Race Theory. This blog will be an antidote to CRT for New Zealand students and history readers.

Landfall in unknown seas

Evidence for pre Maori settlement

James Cook’s endeavours

Samuel Marsden the flogging Parson and the Missionary

The Treaty of Waitangi that gave freedom of movement and freedom from tribalism to New Zealand

Governor Grey the liberal benefactor, scholar, creator of New Zealand’s first political constitution, and fighter against the Maori kingdom and the HauHau (a cannibalistic genocidal cult).

The Gold Rush

The Struggle for a New Zealand Constitution

1860s-The Decade of War and Millenarianism

1870s-The Boom and Bust Decade

The Danish connection

The Visit of King Tawhiao to Auckland

The First Frozen Meat Shipment to Britain

The Overthrow of the Maori Kingdom

Landfall In Unknown Seas.

Title from an underwhelming poem by a great New Zealand poet Allen Curnow commissioned by the New Zealand Government in 1942 to celebrate the tercentenary of Abel Tasman’s Voyage. It just goes to show the perils of officially commissioned poems.

On 13 December 1642, two navy boats of the Dutch East India Company sighted the north west of the South Island of New Zealand. The name of the yachts were Heenskerck and its armed convoy Zeehaen. Its captain was Abel Tasman. Nothing else of international note happened in the world that day in 1642. The Dutch East India company was thriving enough for the stingy Dutch East India Company directors to send Abel Tasman on a journey of exploration from Batavia capital of the East Indies to the unexplored South and East-lands for new markets and later conquests. The European colonies on the American continent were also thriving and making great progress in civilisation. Not so lucky in England. On the 23 of August, four months before, the English civil war between the Royalists and the English Parliament had started. Western civilisation was in what Time Life Great Ages of Man series called The Age of Kings. The Enlightenment age would not start until another half century. Royal sovereignty ruled supreme and had its dogmas rarely challenged. But the start of the English civil war, a Parliamentary uprising against the lawful Sovereign, King Charles 1, showed all was not politically and spiritually well in Christendom.

Abel Tasman was born in 1603 in the Netherlands. The Protestant Netherlands had rebelled from King Philip 11 of Spain in 1581 and established its declaration of independence. It would not win full independence as the Lord States General until the Treaty of Westphalia in1648. Its charted Dutch East India company competed in the East Indies with the Spanish Catholic Empire. The Spanish royal territories in the East Indies were named the Philippines after Philip 11. So Abel Tasman’s life was filled with the stresses and surges of war. It might have been with a sigh of relief from landlubber troubles that he sailed with his two boats from Batavia in August 1642.

When the two Dutch boats sighted the landmass of the South Island, there were no signs of human habitation. Tasman ordered a gun to be fired at the shore, maybe as a celebration of their discovery of a new land. That artillery fire might have precipitated the tragic events seven days later. The region was well occupied and the Natives were likely hiding and watching the Dutch boats. The Native men were well primed for conflict and this single firing would have been interpreted as an hostile act. From that moment, the fate of the Dutch ships and Dutch sailors were sealed.

Some reflection should now be made on the people the Dutch sailors encountered in New Zealand. Tasman in his journal at first calls them people instead of natives or savages. The Dutch were looking for trade and good relations. Not for Christian evangelical conversion. After the tragic events, he called them murderers. That was somewhat unchivalrous. The Natives were protecting their people and resources from an intrusive sound shattering power. But Tasman lost four sailors in the December twentieth encounter. Sailors on the sea are a close knit community. At least on a yacht and a fly boat.

The native people encountered have been documented in the nineteenth century as Ngati Tumatakokiri. That means literally the descendants of an ancestral chief Tumatakokiri. Since the landing of Captain Cook’s Endeavour in 1769, explorers and officials have been saying in various versions. “Take me to your leader.” As Maori themselves say, their identity is hapu, (community), and whanau (family). Also iwi (bones) as descended from ancestors. A Maori man unless he was forced to be a slave or join the women, took orders from no one. If he was stronger, he might become a rangatira or even an ariki. He was a hard ass, facing at all times imminent death from those who wished to replace him or just sought vengeance from some real or imagined insult. Then he was likely in the pot. Most likely at the moment of the ill timed firing from the gun, the local warriors were primed to drive out the intruders. Maori warriors were probably following the Dutch ships as they sailed around the coast line. When the ships showed signs of embarkation, they were ready for attack with a flotilla of waka, (canoes).

The first encounter on December 18 must have seemed promising to the Dutch. In Tasman’s journal for December 18

“In the evening about one hour after sunset we saw many lights on land and four vessels near the shore, two of which betook themselves towards us. >>> People in the two canoes began to call out to us in gruff hollow voices. We could not in the least understand any of it; however when they called out again several times we called back to them as a token answer. But they did not come nearer than a stone’s shot. They also blew many times on an instrument which produced a sound like the moors’ trumpet. We had one of our sailors (who could play somewhat on the trumpet) play some tunes to them in answer.”

This encounter recalls the first meeting with the space alien ship in the movie Close Encounters of The Third Kind. However the opportunity to signal, ‘We come in peace” had been lost.

The next morning, December 19, a boat dispatched to shore to store water, was attacked by one of the waka. Four of the Dutch sailors were killed with mere (clubs). The waka then fled back to the shore, taking with them one dead Dutch sailor. He was presumably put in the pot after a hard day of excursion and battle. The Dutch then sailed away from New Zealand for good and Tasman named the area ‘Murderers’ Bay'. The next evening Tasman counted twenty two waka at the shore. Eleven paddled to the Dutch boats. One man on a waka was observed to be holding a white flag. “A truce flag? Utu had been exacted for the invasion? However the Dutch had lost men treacherously slain. The waka were fired upon and one man was observed to fall.

The Dutch East India Company were not overly impressed with Tasman’s exploration voyages. A report wrote they wanted a “more persistent explorer”. However the cautious Tasman had made great strides in oceanic exploration. His voyages circumnavigated Australia. He established Australia was not part of the fabled Southern Continent. He suggested New Zealand might be the western part of the Southern Continent. He named New Zealand Staten Landt. Tasman wrote in his journal 13 December. “It is possible the land joins to the Staten Landt but it is uncertain.” Staten Landt as named then is an island at the tip of South America. and was considered might be the northern tip of the South Continent. The Dutch East India Company were certainly ambitious to have the legendary Southern Continent named after their Dutch State which was still engaged in an existentialist struggle with the Catholic Spanish King. Tasman’s exploration legacy remains in his naming of the Tasman sea and Three Kings Islands off the north coast of the North Island. Also Cape Maria van Dieme the westernmost point of the North Island.

In 1643, Staten Land was discovered by the Dutch explorer Hendrik Brouwer to be an island off the Southern Coast of South America. The efficient Dutch cartographers promptly changed Staten Landt in the south Pacific ocean to Nova Zeelandia. That was Latin for new and Dutch for sealand. Zeeland was a province of the Netherlands, of land reclaimed from the sea. The 1642 encounter between the Dutch and the New Zealand people was so disastrous it is pleasant to note both the Dutch and the Polynesian explorers share a correct understanding that New Zealand was land from the sea.

Notwithstanding the condescension by The Dutch East India Company, the Dutch people have taken Abel Tasman into their hearts as a national hero. Many streets are named after him in the Netherlands and there is an Abel Tasman museum in his native village.

In the seventeenth century, oceanic sea voyages were a highly dangerous endeavour. Robinson Crusoe as an adventure moral story, and Gulliver's Travels as satire were early eighteenth century literary classics and best sellers. Robinson and Gulliver were constantly ship wrecked on distant shores with entire crews drowned. Abel Tasman safely brought his boats with small loss of life back to Batavia.

Sketch by Isaac Gilsemans, Abel Tasman's ship artist at Murderers Bay now Golden Bay in 1642.

We can speculate what might have happened if the Dutch explorers had likewise become ship wrecked marooned on the New Zealand shores. Would in the following centuries, reports circulated of a strange fairy blond and tall people in the mountains and remote bush? There is the Maori legend of the Patupaiarehe people. In Wikipedia. Patupaiarehe are supernatural beings in Maori mythology that are described as pale to fair skinned with blonde hair or red hair, usually having the same nature as ordinary people and never tattooed. They can draw mist to themselves, but tend to be nocturnal or active on misty days as direct sunlight can be fatal to them They prefer raw food and have an eversion to steam and fire. Wikipedia refers later to their large well fortified settlements and having calabashes that were heavy to carry away. They did not engage in warfare unless attacked and would flee at a Maori encroachment. They practised weaving which the Maori in their legends learnt from them. Captain Cook in 1769 observed. “Natives used nets woven exactly like our own.”

Evidence for pre Maori settlement

These Maori legends have brought about much alternate scholarly speculation the Patupaiarehe were of Celtic descent who arrived in New Zealand 3000 years ago. If one tries to examine this more realistically when did Celtic populations acquire maritime skills that might in a pre Abel Tasman era have got them to New Zealand? I would suggest via the Irish currachin in the sixth century A.D. The curragh was made of a wicker-work frame covered with hides which were stitched together with throngs. By the sixth century, Ireland was converted to Christianity and there were thriving monasteries and scripture study. Saint Brendan in the early sixth century is legendary for his Irish voyage with fellow monks to the Isle of the Blessed in a currach. In recent history, theories arose that these Irish monks were the first Europeans to reach the Americas. An adventurer Tim Severin in the 1970s demonstrated that it is possible for a currah to reach North America from Ireland.

Could a sixth century currach sail from Ireland in the sixth century to New Zealand? If its seafarers were determined, skilled and lucky enough over a period of years, I suppose they might. In 2013, an Irish couple completed a 15,000 miles sailing expedition from New Zealand to Ireland in a five foot cruising yacht.

What reason would motivate a curragh voyage to New Zealand in the sixth century? To take part in a sea voyage without hope of return. Did something of an environmental nature happen in that century for such a drastic undertaking and who might have done so? In 2018, a medieval scholar Michael M McCormick nominated 536 as “the worst year to be alive” because of the extreme weather events caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland early in the year, causing, average temperatures in Europe and China to decline and resulting in crop failures and famine for well over a year. This was the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. The Chronicle of Ireland, ecclesiastical records of Irish events from 432-911 AD, record “a failure of bread from the years 536-539”. The Icelandic volcanic eruption spread ash across the Northern Hemisphere, blocking out the sunlight for over a year. ‘For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote the contemporary Byzantine historian Procopius. The world endured a decade of famine and the Plague of Justinian, the Byzantine Emperor. In Ireland without bread, where was there to go except as in Ireland thirteen hundred years later, out to the ocean? Did a flotilla of curragh led by a millenarian prophet embark to find the Isle of the Blessed? Saint Brendan was in his eighties when he sailed to the Isle. That was the 560s. However Saint Brendan’s voyage was not the first voyage to the Isle of the Bless. Another Saint had done the voyage and told him about it. Saint Brendan’s curragh was in the tradition filled with eighteen monks. So half a dozen curraghs would make up about over a hundred men, women and children refugees. The curragh seafarers were simple fishermen. Only their prophet might have been literate in Latin. His followers knew weaving for their fish netting and their boats. Some were skilled in metal work for their tools. Metal weapons they did not know, having always relied on their Irish Lords and Abbots to protect them. But they were well versed in sailing, fishing and singing Christian psalms in Gaelic. They sing them accompanied with the Irish bagpipes.

In the original tenth century manuscript of the Voyage of Saint Brendan, it is recorded thus.” Brendan and his companions, using iron implements prepared a light vessel, with wicker sides and ribs such as is usually made in that country, and covered it with cowhide, tanned in oak bark, tarring the joins hereof, and put on board provisions for forty days, with butter enough to dress hides for covering the boat and all utensils need for the use of the crew.” This report does not mention a sail. Later the report mentions that with breeze a sail was employed. Otherwise under the commands of their Saint, the monks heaved with the oars.

They sailed looking for the Isle of the Blessed. But every land they encountered was occupied and the sun remained gloomy. Darkness still settled over the world as at the beginning of Genesis. It seemed this was end times as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. They sailed around Cape Horn. As they sailed out into the Pacific, they took with them sturdy roots of the kumara and rats. They learnt in their longest voyages to catch rainwater, and drink their urine, and eat fish, rats and semen as fresh food. Then when they were in near complete despair, and the winds were driving them back down into a chilly environment, they sighted a bountiful land empty of people and even of large animals. At the same time as they landed, the sun began to regain its lustre and light returned to the earth. Their prophet announced a miracle. They embarked and sang their Christian psalms to the accompaniment of their pipes. Here, announced their prophet would be their Canaan, their land not of milk and honey but of teeming bird life, rich vegetation and its seas filled with marine life. They built their huts and their stockades. Their smiths fashioned out of fire their tools. Weapons they did not make. There seemed to be no human enemies and their prophet had taught them to live in peace as like their Irish Saints. They took their currachin out to fish in the sea and the rivers and streams. They were master fishermen. The birds were so plentiful and tame they could kill with stones, wooden implements and traps. They planted their kumara and learnt to eat the edible vegetation. They found out many plump birds could not fly. One flightless bird was larger than a man. As pilgrims, they had traded with the peoples they had encountered but had never fought with, enslaved nor raped them. When they were threatened, they promptly took to their boats and the ocean. Their encountered peoples they traded with their fish and their kumara roots. But their metal implements they never traded. Their prophet made them take a vow to always hide them from the native peoples and to never let them see their manufacturing. If the natives acquired these implements and learnt how to manufacture them, they would be exterminated, said their prophet. They also vowed not to teach the natives how to weave their boats and nets. This skill would take away their fishing resource and trade. Each evening, they gathered together and sang their psalms to the accompaniment of their pipes. The native peoples learnt how to cultivate the newcomers’ kumara and preserved legends of fairy white people who arrived in peace, and spoke a strange language in a hissing sound. That sibilant sound they had only heard before from the reptiles.

Generations passed in their new settled islands that were empty of any other people. When their populations grew beyond their resources, groups departed to the next fertile land. Their prophet died. As only he was literate, his bible was neglected and lost in the bush. Gradually over the centuries, Christianity was lost except for their psalms still sung in their Gaelic. Their Gaelic became more primitive and most of the meanings of their psalms were lost. Eventually their psalms only sang of the sky and earth, and life and death. They carved abstract images of flora and fauna, and non tattooed people.

Then one day, five hundred years’ later, a people from the South Pacific Islands arrived on their shores. The pilgrims fled into the bush and up the mountains. These people were warlike and regularly ate human flesh from their enemies and people they had captured to be their slaves. The new peoples were aware of their existence and called them supernatural fairies. Sometimes in the evenings, they would hear their bagpipes and their singing wafting over the wind. When they advanced to look for them, the fairies disappeared. They called them the Patupaiarehe from the sounds issuing from their bagpipes. The Gaelic onomatopoeia for their bag pipes is pillar uilleann. But a chance encounter with the fairy people, taught the newcomers the skill of weaving nets. The newcomers called their fairies, the tangata whenua, the people of the land. They considered them the first people. But thousands of years earlier, another people had arrived on these shores. They were related to peoples in Europe, Egypt and the Americas who built their astronomy based cities and megalith monuments out of stone and without mortar. However after the last Ice Age, a great flood had exterminated that race in New Zealand. New Zealand's proximity to the South Pole had prevented survivors, unlike other parts of the world. An unexplained embargo forbids archaeological digs of their stone cities until 2063!

It is illegal to tamper with an official document unless signed. Why 2063? Is this an allusion to the centenary of JFK assassination and the CIA invention of conspiracy theory? For more information about the twenty five thousand plus acre Waipoua Northland stone city, read Facebook page: facebook.com new zealand history-the truth 6 May 2020, This may be New Zealand's version of Machu Picchu.

Seven foot high skeletons estimated to be three and a half thousand years old. They are thought to have built the stone cities. Now forbidden knowledge.

The Maori who had now taken over the land thought the fairies fled at the sight of fire and steam. The fairies did not fear them. They feared the gruesome cannibal feasts which they considered an abomination. Their currachs, their nets, and their skills at catching birds, was sufficient to feed them. However the lack of plentiful protein made them small and lethargic. As the Maoris encroached further and further into the land, the fairies’ numbers dwindled. Maoris plundered their settlements and took them away as their slaves. They forced the fairies to learn the Maori language until their own language was extinguished. Descendants from Maori and the fairies produced a fairer complexioned and red haired hybrid population. These populations could not compete with their more aggressive Maori tribal neighbours. The fairies never divulged the secret of metal working. The Maori when they plundered the fairies’ gourds were puzzled at their heavy weight. The Maori never forgot the mournful songs and reed pipes of the fairies. They incorporated them into their own songs. When the missionaries arrived, they took readily and familiarly to the new Christian religion.

James Cook's Endeavours

Between 1642 and 1769, the second recorded visit of European explorers to New Zealand, much was stirring in the Northern Hemisphere. 127 years had passed by. In Great Britain, a King had been beheaded by his own Parliament. Great Britain’s Royalty had been replaced by a Commonwealth and then the old Stuart Dynasty restored. They were replaced by a German dynasty, the Hanovers. Great Britain fought several major European wars and a virtual world war to make an Empire of North America and India. English literature flourished with John Milton with the publication of Paradise Lost. In 1769, the Watt steam engine was patented leading the way to the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.

In the meanwhile what was stirring in New Zealand? Maori society seemed to have reached an apogee. Tribal battles were fought and there were constant conflicts of utu characterised by stalking and treacherous killings. Judged from an evolutionary perspective, Maori culture could be described as successful. In a cold and wet land without large animals and much nutrient vegetation, their numbers had grown. They were exceedingly fit and healthy. They intuitively understood contagion from contamination and kept themselves clean. Captain Cook in image above praised in 1769 their latrine habits kept distant from their settlements. Their sick and injured they removed to huts to recover or die. Thereby they ensured their own health and fitness. No skulls have been found of Maori over about thirty four years old. By then, the cold climate and battle had ended them. Still it could be reasonably claimed, the average Maori in 1769 was healthier and if not a slave more free than a British peasant and slum dweller in Great Britain in 1769.

Joseph Banks was the naturalist on the Endeavour. In his journal of the voyage, he spoke highly about Maori culture. He thought a few lived to an advanced old age and were their chiefs. He praised their artefacts and land cultivation, the fierceness and rhythmic grace of their songs and dances, their robust health, their pride and courage. Reporting on Maori culture has echoed Joseph's observations ever since. Joseph was the only literary reporter in detail of Maori culture before its Western influence. In some places and times, Maori culture was Hobbesian (nasty brutish and short). In other places and times, it was Arcadian. No metal nor bow and arrow was invented. They are considered the rudiments of civilisation. Maori culture might be called pre urban Aztec. Both the Aztecs and the Maori were compulsive warriors and cannibals. There is a contemporary theory that peoples without fat meat adopt mass human slaughter and cannibalism to preserve their health and their numbers. If the Maori isolation in the world had been longer, would the Maori have turned their villages into cities? Their constant need to be vigilant from attack made all their cultivated skills communal? No Maori scientist could solitary contemplate how to turn a fibre and stick into a bow and arrow, nor sand into metal?

On 25 May 1768, the British Admiralty under King George 111, commissioned Lieutenant James Cook to command a scientific voyage to the Pacific Ocean. The official purpose of the voyage was to sail to Tahiti to observe and record the 1769 transit of Venus. As a British journalist wrote facetiously. “That is what they told their wives.” Tahiti was a byword for the lascivious South Pacific. I grew up on the East Coast North Island New Zealand with Captain Cook as our founding father. Like the heroes of antiquity, he traveled the land naming every bay from an exploit. He was always above reproach. In historical revisionism, he has been called a pirate whose trail across the Pacific Islands is of violence and blood. However even his worst critics do not deny his voyages into the Pacific were a turning point in Pacific islands’ history. Cook was certainly a hard practical sailor. He literally with his cartography put New Zealand on the world maps.

His sailors probably had mixed feelings about him. The eighteenth century was the Enlightenment Age, and the Admiralty’s often highly impractical orders to him reflected that.

The ship under Cook’s command was HMS Endeavour. Officially, she was a British Royal Navy research vessel. She was a full-rigged bark. That meant a merchant ship purchased by the Admiralty. Her previous role had been a collier. Colliers were sturdy coal cargo ships. Like the mythological Greek hero Jason, commoner Cook whose eponymous ancestor was presumably a cook and whose father was a yeoman, embarked with British heroes from the scientific and artistic communities. They represented the new men in England. With the exception of Cook, they were from rich privileged families but without nobility titles. Cook had acquired the status as Captain and commander over them by his cartographic and leadership genius. Cook was already a legend for his cartography for the Admiralty in North America. Officially however as fitted his lowly commoner status he remained a naval Lieutenant. Everyone except his most intractable enemies would always call him Captain. HMS Endeavour embarked from Plymouth Dockyard in August 1768. All the crew were listed on embarkation, except one curious omission. The eleven year old child Nicholas Young. He figures twice in the Endeavour's logs. First for his recorded sighting of the Coast land of New Zealand. Second for his sighting of England on the Endeavour’s return. Was a child employed for his sharp eyes of sighting land? That could be a matter of life and death. The other or second possibility for a sea voyage for many months and a crew entirely of men is somewhat sinister. Nicholas as recorded later was entrusted to the care of the assistant surgeon. There must have been much jubilation and ahoy lads, and sorrow from women folks and children left at shore. One third of the Endeavour’s crew died on the voyage. A record about double that of the average contemporary slave ship on its voyage from Africa to the British colonies. The slave ships had valuable human cargo. The Endeavour at the deck level had hands. The great majority of the mortality on the Endeavour was in the return voyage from Batavia to Cape Town. Cook attributed the deaths to water taken from an island. Several seamen would die on each day. If the sailors had left records of their voyage, they might have by now be calling the Endeavour a death ship. On 20 March 1771, Cook wrote defensively in his log. "Every newspaper in England will write about and exaggerate the sufferings in the Endeavour and not know the attrition rate of twelve months’ voyages from England were as bad or worse than the Endeavour’s three years voyage." However the Endeavour’s voyage’s achievements silenced any public criticism from the newspapers. Cook returned to England a national hero, courted by the rich and famous. What was said in the taverns and among bereaved families is not documented

The Endeavour stopped briefly at Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic Ocean. At the Madeira tide on September 15, there was the first death. As Cook recorded in his log, “In heaving the Anchor out of the Boat Mr. Weir, Master’s Mate, was carried overboard by the Buoy rope and to the Bottom with the Anchor. Cook blamed the accident ‘owing to the Carelessness of the Person who made it fast” the night before. The next day, Cook recorded. “Received on board fresh Beef and Greens for the Ship’s Company, and sent on shore all our Casks for Wine and Water.” This characterised Cooks revolutionary insistence on greens for his men. Cook didn’t mention how these ship provisions were paid for. I imagine English gold from his cabin. Then there is another curious incident on the next day. “Punished (two sailors) with 12 lashes each, for refusing to take their allowance of Fresh Beef.” British sailors loved their beef, the traditional British sailors’ sea faring diet. Cook whatever else was not a sadist. Were they being flogged for dereliction of duty that led to the fatality two days before? The punishment was light in official eyes at least. Did the sailors agree to it in return for a cover up of the death and a trial back in England that might have brought about their executions?

Meanwhile Joseph Banks the botanist and Doctor Salander the botanists. were enjoying the home hospitality of the Madeira English Consul. Banks saw no need to mention the tragedy in his journal while he enjoyed the hospitality and recorded the island’s botany. An American colonist sailor on the Endeavour, Lieutenant Gore entertained a fellow colonist twenty year old John Thurman most likely at a tavern on shore. The next morning Thurman woke up to find he had been “pressed” to replace Weir on the Endeavour. The Endeavour was on Portuguese sovereign territory. The Admiralty had the legal right to press gang British subjects into the navy. That extended to subjects of British territories outside Great Britain. In 1769, the North American colonies were restive but still under the Empire of King George 111. Press ganging of American colonists was a sore issue in North America among many other grievances. However press ganging from a foreign nation was of doubtful legality. Thurman could have called on Portuguese subjects to rescue him from the hard seafaring life on the Endeavour. Gore perhaps slipped a drug into Thurman’s Madeira wine and carried him comatose to the port. There with the discreet assistance of other Endeavour sailors he was put on the boat and paddled to the Endeavour. Cook in his journal for the day made no mention of Thurman’s press ganging.

On 19 September at midnight, Captain Cook sailed from Madeira after taking Leave from the Governor that day. The Governor did not appear to know about Thurman. But Thurman’s sloop would surely have been looking for him. Departure at midnight seems rather surprising and conspiratorial. Surely midnight is not a good time to embark from a port unless something or someone was being smuggled away.

In his Saturday 19 November entry in his journal Cook wrote. “Punished John Thurman, Seaman, with 12 lashes for refusing to assist the Sailmaker in repairing the Sails.” 12 lashes appeared to be the standard corporal punishment for small transgressions. Thurman’s transgression seems more like mutiny which was a capital offence. Did the young man need a hiding to break him into his press ganging? In his voyages, Cook kidnapped a number of Natives onto his ships where they were given guest treatment and returned to shore with positive feelings at least according to Cook. But white man Thurman was a sailor. Americans of his class would join George Washington’s army in the American revolution a decade later.

The Endeavour crossed the Atlantic, rounded Cape Horn and anchored in Matvai Bay in Tahiti on April 13 1769. Tahiti was already something of a tourist attraction. In that day’s log, Cook wrote. “We had no sooner come to an Anchor >>> than a great number of the Natives in their canoes came off to the ship and brought with them Cocoa Nuts, etc." Two years before HMS Dolphin had harboured in Matvai Bay. In non woke language, Wikipedia writes. "The first contacts were difficult, but to avert an all-out war after a British show of force, Purea, (a chiefly woman) laid down peace offerings leading to cordial relations.” This would be echoed in Cook’s first arrival in New Zealand. The Pacific Natives were primed for battle with any intrusion. After a bloody encounter, the British had withheld fire and the Natives acquiesced to befriend and trade. In 1768, a French expedition also reached Tahiti and were welcomed. After many delightful adventures soured somewhat by Native thieving, Captain Cook departed Tahiti on 13 July 1769. That was a three month stay in Tahiti. A Cook tour as it were. Polynesian folklore accuses the European exploration ships of spreading venereal diseases on the islands. Legends circulated of Cook’s ceremonial marriages to chieftain women. I have heard a rumour that legends of Cook’s voyages circulated in the Pacific. His name and reputation mythologised to Kupe who first sailed to New Zealand to the discovery cry of his wife, “Aotearoa". Long White Cloud Land. Travellers to New Zealand have seen that cloud formation on the Pacific horizon ever since and that name has been part of New Zealand’s identity.

Observations of the transit of Venus were made in Tahiti. They turned out to be mostly useless. Once the observations were completed, Cook opened the sealed orders, which were additional instructions from the Admiralty for the second part of his voyage to search the south Pacific for signs of the legendary rich southern continent of Terra Australis, (Southern Land). Abel Tasman’s voyage over a hundred years before had fostered its legend. Had Tasman reached Terra Australis in the islands of New Zealand? Eventually Terra Australis the southern land complementing the northern land would be discovered. But as the iced over continent of Antarctica. Cook whose passion was not astronomy must have had his heart leap with joy that he would navigate the Endeavour into the uncharted vast waters of the South Pacific. That is if he hadn’t been tipped off in London of the prime goal of his voyage. The Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch had been the world sea explorers. Now it was the British turn to rule the waves as Britannia.

As the Endeavour sailed south into the colder seas, Cook offered in early October a reward of rum to the sailor who first sighted land and promised that that part of the coast of the land should be named after him. When the Coastline of the North Island of New Zealand was sighted by the twelve year old cabin boy Nicholas Young from the masthead on 6 October 2 pm, he was awarded the rum. How the boy disposed of it is not known. 6 October 1769 goes down in world history as the first English sighting of New Zealand. Official celebrations or lamentations have marked that day as the beginning of New Zealand modern history. Cook named on his chart White Island that was sighted on 1 October. He named it after its constant white plumes of smoke and steam. Curiously, Cook made no mention of the discovery of White Island in his journal. The sighting of White Island was therefore the first British discovery of New Zealand. Cook sensibly declined to land on the island. Cook records in his journal for 1 October. “One would think that we were not far from some land, from the Pieces of Rock weed we see daily floating upon the water.” He must have been aware that the coastline of New Zealand was near at hand. Therefore he had the boy posted up in the masthead. However, his first record of land sighting in his journal would be a landing. He would eclipse Abel Tasman with his much inferior boats from the start. Nor would he make Tasman’s error of firing a gun at the shore. The Endeavour would sail quietly into the shore and its boats would land intentionally in peace. Under the maritime law of discovery, after the first landing, Cook would claim the land for King George 111. Abel Tasman’s failure to land on the shore and so to claim New Zealand for the Dutch Lord States General, Cook would not emulate. The Maori name for White Island is Te Puia o Whakaari. The smoking volcano. As the Endeavour sailed towards the island, they saw a long white cloud over the horizon as in the Maori legend of Kupe’s wife’s sighting of Aotearoa, Long White Cloud Land.

On 8 October, the Endeavour in a day of gentle breezes and clear weather sailed into a bay and anchored before the entrance of a river. Cook went ashore with a party of men in the pinnace and yawl accompanied by Mr Banks and Doctor Solander. They landed on the shore. There they had a fracas with Maori whom Cook called Indians. Two warning shots were fired by the coxswain. The Maoris after the second shot continued to charge the pinnace. A third shot was then fired, and a man dropped dead. According to Banks, just as the man was going to throw his spear at the boat. Banks recognised him as the chief. They promptly returned to the ship. Banks described the shot man. “He was a middling sized man, tattowed sic on one cheek only in spiral lines very regularly formed. He was covered with a fine cloth of a manufacture totally new to us.” The identity of the sailor who fired the fatal shot was not given in the Endeavour’s journals. Captain Cook’s report of the fatal encounter is corroborated by other eye witness journals. Cook was in a tricky situation. The safety of his ship and crew was paramount. But he was also bound to the strictures of the Admiralty. His secret signed letter instructions from the Lords of the Admiralty, ordered him, “With the consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain.” The letter continued to instruct Cook to take possession of His Majesty of any other land not discovered by Europeans.” This letter was worked out either by a committee or was Machiavellian. This was the Enlightened age where might clashed with universal humanism.

The Maori appeared to have no historical memory of Abel Tasman’s foray 127 years earlier. In the earliest written reports in1836 of their observations of the Endeavour and crew, they thought the Endeavour was a bird and the British sailors malevolent Atua (Gods). These Atua by a look could make them ill. Interest in history for its own sake is a civilised pursuit. There were no souvenirs to record Abel Tasman’s visit. The fallen Maori chief was remembered as Te Maro. His memorial overlooks Gisborne city. Captain Cook’s statue is in the Gisborne museum as forlorn as the Ancient Mariner.

The chief's sartorial style certainly eclipses the Maori at the Abel Tasman encounter as shown in earlier image above. They appear to have no tattoos. This portrait was drawn by Sydney Parkinson the artist on the Endeavour in New Zealand in 1769. Sydney Parkinson died on the voyage back to England..

After two more disastrous encounters involving taking of Maori life, The Endeavour departed from the Bay with a parting shot from Cook in his log, “I have named Poverty Bay, because it afforded us no one thing we wanted”. However there were two positive developments. Three kidnapped Maori were returned to shore, full of glad tidings about their abductors. At least the Endeavour crew thought so. Tupaia the Endeavour’s chiefly guest from Tahiti, was discovered to share a “perfectly understood language” with Maori. Tupaia died on the voyage back to England.

The rest of the Endeavour’s voyage in New Zealand was relatively plain sailing. No more lives were taken. After six months, charting the New Zealand coast, Cook and his crew resumed their voyage westward across open sea.

The legacy of the first Endeavour voyage belongs to the ages. The legend of Terra Australis was finally squelched. Cook’s map making, with only two inaccuracies in New Zealand, made the South Pacific part of world history and geography. The Endeavour’s scientific reports were a magnum leap in world knowledge. Cook back in England was touted as one of England’s greatest sons. His ocean explorations would continue for another decade until his murder in Hawaii in 1779, thereby demonstrating the fate of those who live dangerously.

Captain Cook's original 1769 physical map of New Zealand.

A foot note to the press ganged American John Thurman. On 3 February on the voyage between Batavia in the Dutch East Indies to Cape Town in the Cape of Good Hope, Cook wrote in his log. ‘Departed this life, John Thurman, sailmaker assistant.” In every other Endeavour death, except this one and the one immediately after, Cook dutifully reported in his log cause of death and sometimes a few details. Thurman had been flogged first for rebellion, and then for theft in Tahiti. The explorations of the Endeavour were over, and they were on their way home to England. Was Thurman threatening to take action against Cook in London for press-ganging in Portuguese sovereign territory? Thurman was from New York where Republican and liberty ideas wafted about freely and would lead soon to the American revolution. I recall my father once saying there was a sailor on the Endeavour who took legal action against Cook for a flogging on the Endeavour. Had my father picked up on a distorted story of the Thurman saga? Was there a cover up about deplorable John Thurman on the Endeavour and in the sea? The two seamen flogged at Madeira, Henry Stephens and Thomas Dunster both survived the Endeavour voyage and might have owed a debt to Cook from the hangman.

Samuel Marsden, the flogging Parson and the Missionary

Samuel Marsden was a small child when the Endeavour returned to England. A Yorkshire man from the artisan class, Marsden by diligence and study became in 1800 the senior Church of England chaplain in New South Wales. He would hold that position until his death in 1838. In 1800, Georgian England and her remaining colonies after the American revolution, were ever upward. 1800 marked the appointment of Napoleon as First Consul of France and the first smallpox vaccines invented by Doctor Jenner in 1796 were being delivered to a vaccine hesitant public. Marsden grew up under the shadows of the American and French revolutions. Cook’s voyages opened up the world to new adventures for the adventurous. Despite or because of his Wesleyan family background, the Church Of England beckoned the youthful Marsden to a missionary life at the far end of the British territories in historic Terra Australis. Cook’s Endeavour voyage to New Zealand had finally debunked the Southern Continent. Terra Australis with New Zealand included would become Australasia. That is Southern Asia. Without New Zealand, she would become Australia. The British colony of Australia was officially a 12 year old frontier and growing New South Wales. New Zealand was where there be savages and cannibals. In the late 1700s, the Maori population discovered by Abel Tasman in the Three Kings Islands had been exterminated by a Maori war party. Three Kings Islands named after the Three Magi at Jesus’s birth now lay silent except for the birds, the witnesses to Maori tribal pagan ferocity. Marsden would pledge his life’s mission to end their darkness. My History professor in the pre Woke era once remarked. The Spanish converted the Natives, the French turned them into Frenchmen, the Dutch and Germans worked them, the British civilised them. Or at least they all tried that.

I grew up with the image of Samuel Marsden as the New Zealand Saint Augustine. I well recall his large picture in my New Zealand history school textbook. Later I was surprised to learn of his infamy in Australia. In Australia, Samuel Marsden is a byword for sadistic floggings and convict labour exploitation. The Australian children’s author John Marsden has spent his life apologising for their shared kinship. A Maori reggae band have named themselves the 1814 in celebration of the first recorded Christian service performed by missionary Samuel Marsden in New Zealand. As far as I know that has not aroused cancel culture in Australia. Marsden’s victims were always white deplorables.

On his farm at Parramatta outside the Port Jackson (Sydney) settlement, Marsden as a chaplain and a Magistrate prospered as an innovative sheep farmer, employing convict labour. As a Magistrate, he won notoriety as “the flogging parson". The English were notorious as floggers. Voltaire had commented about his time in England in the 1720s. He was impressed with the English Constitutional Government and rule of law, instead of the capricious Government of his native France. But the English punishments after proper legal rulings startled him. In his 1759 novel Candide, Voltaire referred to the contemporary public execution of a defeated English admiral. “Pour encourager l’autres.” “To encourage the others.” English legal principles and practices had not reformed in the years between Candide and Marsden’s Magistracy. Good Anglican Christian Magistrates ordered skin flying floggings of convicts that would shock any firm conservative today. However Marsden kept a soft spot for Maori chiefly visitors to his farm. They were “the noble savages” of eighteenth century cultural fashion. God was waiting for Anglican missionaries to convert their benighted souls to Christianity. After the Endeavour exploration in New Zealand. three decades before, exploration European ships had visited New Zealand and had had friendly and beneficent relations with the Natives. In 1769, a French ship the St Jean Baptiste under Captain De Surville had voyaged through New Zealand. They were voyaging in New Zealand at the same time and nearly sighted each other but Cook either didn’t find out or kept it secret. News about the Endeavour must have traveled fast in New Zealand. Wherever the European ships traveled they were met with smiling Natives, eager to trade and to fornicate with the more than willing sailors. De Surville however ended his time in New Zealand with burning a Maori village after accusing them of theft, and kidnapping a chief. The St Jean Baptiste sailed away to South America with the chief. The chief died on the voyage. The French were enamoured with “the noble savage” on a more philosophical and literary level rather than British practical humanism.

However on one occasion, the British were not above kidnapping two Maori chiefs to Norfolk Island to teach its convicts how to weave flax. This was done in 1792 by a British captain with an elastic view of official orders to invite Maori to Norfolk to teach the skill. One of the chiefs in Norfolk drew in chalk a Maori map of the North Island. They were treated akin toroyalty and returned seven months later to their New Zealand homeland. That initial bad event ended harmoniously. However the attempt to teach flax weaving to the convicts failed. The chiefs explained they didn't know how as that was woman's work.

The South and North Islands as developed from the original chalk drawing. They show the Maori metaphysical world.

In 1772, French Captain Du Fresne's two ships’ crews were massacred and eaten at the Bay of Islands. I recall my female University teacher carefully explaining they more or less deserved that for desecrating cultural and resource areas, and overstaying their welcome. She had reasonable points although she would be no doubt very squeamish if confronted with a cannibal feast.

That shocking event made New Zealand for many years a byword for savage treachery and cannibalism. Church missions kept well clear of New Zealand and only European sealers and whalers seasonally inhabited and traded on her shores.

By 1800, a small community of Europeans had formed in the Bay of Islands, made up of flax traders, timber merchants, seamen and ex-convicts. Some convicts escaping the law also. They serviced the ships that regularly landed in the whaling and sealing trade. Maori adventurers worked their way as sailors to New South Wales. There some encountered Marsden at his Parramatta farm. The most distinguished was Ruatara. He spent most of his life in the Bay of Islands. Ruatara left New Zealand still likely a teenager as a crew member on a whaling ship. His great ambition was to meet King George 111. He spent the next four years serving on whaling ships. In the rough conditions of ships, he received both kindness and beatings. Marsden was returning to Australia from England in a convict vessel when he discovered Ruatara. The chief was ill, half starved and neglected. He had reached the English shore but had been forbidden to land and achieve his cherished goal, meeting the King. By now Maori were no longer a novelty and curiosity. Marsden cared for Ruatara and supplied him with clothes. When the convict ship landed at Port Jackson, Marsden took him to his Parramatta home.

Ruatara the great brown hope. The man who brought Marsden and wheat cultivation to his Northland people. In 1814, while Europe lay in a temporary respite from war, Marsden, the great white benefactor delivered the first recorded Christian service in New Zealand on 25 December Christmas day. Ruatara's death from a fever two months later, made him considered a martyr to the Church of England. Ruatara's uncle, Hongi Hika turned the dream of Marsden and Ruatara into a nightmare trail of musket wars throughout the North Island, and a slave Empire. According to New Zealand's first historian, A. S. Thomson, Hongi ended his days entertaining his compatriots by whistling through a musket bullet hole in his lung.

"How do you do, Mr King George," said Hongi Hika with a bow to the English King.

After the death of Ruatara, Hongi took his place as protector of the Christian mission. He expanded agriculture and trade with ships and established more missions. However conversion to Christianity was almost non existent. The new missionary settlements discouraged the trade in muskets. However Hongi always lusted for them. The muskets tipped the balance in Maori warfare. Gun fuelled rampages replaced the tao, the war spear. Hongi's war parties became feared throughout the North Island as the bullet men, the Nga Puhi. They roamed as far as East Cape and Bay of Plenty. Thousands of slaves were taken back to the Nga Puhi territories in Bay of Islands. When I was growing up in East Cape, a hill overlooking our home was reputed to be the descent of the Nga Puhi into Hicks Bay. Nga Puhi were looked upon with negativity by the locals. The slaves, men and women, were put to work on plantations that grew the new crops of potatoes to be traded with the ships for more muskets.

In 1820, Hongi Hika with the New Zealand missionary Thomas Kendall sailed to England. He spent five months in London and Cambridge. His chiefly tattoos were a public sensation. He met King George 1V who presented him with a suit of armour. He would wear this in battle in New Zealand, arousing terror. In England he assisted Professor Samuel Lee in writing the first Maori-English dictionary.

Missionary Thomas Kendall meets with the chiefs Waikato and Hongi Hika

Thomas Kendall was the next generation of New Zealand missionaries. To him lie many honours and a customary disgrace with a Maori woman.

A son of a Lincolnshire farmer, Thomas was born in 1778. After an undistinguished life as a school teacher and tradesman, he got the evangelical calling in a London chapel in 1805. In 1808, he decided to become a missionary. He was thirty years old. Revolutions are customarily started by men in their early thirties. They are old enough to be mature and lead youth. They are young enough not to be disillusioned and fear danger. The Anglican Church Missionary Society was in that era a powerful organisation with allies in high places including Colonial Secretaries. In our secular now Satanic age, the influence of evangelism upon nineteenth century English society is difficult to imagine. One should read a present day evangelical tract as a relic of the literal beliefs and sentiments that drove the actions of the British Colonial officials over pagan lands. By the 1860s, a new scientific and materialist age replaced it with Darwinism and social reform causes.

The Church Missionary Society had adopted in the early 1800s a new policy of sending lay preachers with practical skills to teach Native peoples English civilisation. They might be enticed into Anglican Christianity that materialistic way instead of being persuaded by biblical texts that Jesus was the son of God who rose from the dead to give ever lasting life etc. Then the Native peoples would send their children to the mission schools to be inculcated with Anglican doctrine. Evangelical Christianity had so far been singularly unsuccessful in pagan lands. Natives were converted and at the next pagan ritual dropped Christianity like they might drop their European trousers.

A mission to New Zealand was being promoted by Samuel Marsden in New South Wales. In 1809, William Kendal was chosen to head the first mission with fellow lay preachers William Hall and John King. Kendall and his family left for Port Jackson in 1813. In 1814 Kendall and Hall took Marsden's boat on an exploratory journey to the Bay of Islands. They met Maori leaders including Ruatara and Hongi Hika. These two Maori leaders returned with Kendall to Australia in that year. The Governor of New South Wales Macquarie gave permission for the foundation of the mission. and in same year appointed Kendall as a magistrate. Under the proclamation of the Governor, Kendall was to work with local Maori chiefs in protecting the Natives from unrestricted immigration and kidnapping. The legality of the proclamation was unclear except as an evangelical and humanitarian issue. Kendall joined Marsden at the next visit to New Zealand in time for the legendary 1814 Christmas service. Marsden returned to New South Wales and Kendall diligently set out to learn the Maori language. By the next year 1815, the year of Waterloo, Kendall had written the primer A Korao No New Zealand. As Wikipedia put it,"This was the first book written in Maori". 200 copies were printed in Port Jackson by Marsden in same year.

After five discouraging years in New Zealand with scarcely a sincere convert but a thriving farming and trading mission, Kendall returned to England with Hongi Hika on a whaling ship. The Church Missionary Society had not authorised the visit and with non Christian charity disapproved. After seven years in the Antipodes, Kendall was likely homesick. That affects most expats. Kendall was ordained a priest in New Zealand in same year 1820. Kendall worked with Professor Lee and Hongi Hika in Cambridge. Kendall's understanding of the Maori language structures formed the basis of: A grammar and vocabulary of the language of New Zealand. Hongi Hika's Northland soft consonant pronunciation has been the standard Maori ever since.

The caption reads. "Students at Cambridge or Oxford circa 1820 play practical joke on their Professors." I don't think they played that on Hongi Hika.

Kendall had British Israel beliefs that the Maori were descended from the Ancient Egyptians. Kendall and Hika traveled to Port Jackson after five months in Great Britain. In Port Jackson, Hika traded his English society gifts for 500 muskets, powder, ball, swords and daggers. Hika returned to New Zealand as a conqueror and slave master of much of the North Island in the Musket Wars.

James Busby The Man of War Without Guns

In 1831, Northland chiefs dispatched a letter to King William of Great Britain. He was the uncle of the child Princess Victoria. It was ingratiating with a subterfuge of enticement and threats to win the favour of the British Crown. The Northland chiefs, (Nga Puhi) were facing the threat of revenge (utu) from the victims of the musket wars. They too now possessed large quantities of muskets that outnumbered the Northland tribes. The evangelism of Colenso and the Williams brothers had ostensibly converted many Northlanders to Christianity. They had liberated their slaves who had returned to their tribal homelands as their first Christian missionaries. Would the Nga Puhi receive Christian forgiveness or utu? The Northland chiefs were uneasy.

The letter was composed in the long winded style of Maori oratory. But its English form and reverence showed the hand of a Northland missionary, likely Colenso. The King "was the great chief of the other side of the water." ... "It is only thy land which is liberal towards us. From thee also come the missionaries who teach us to believe on Jehovah God and on Jesus Christ his son." There had recently been sighting in Northland of a French ship. That made the chiefs nervous about utu for the massacre of the French ships' crews in 1772 almost sixty years before. The Maori expected utu for every transgression or slight. They might be now Christians but utu characterised their upbringing. The letter continued. "We have heard that the tribe of Marion, {the name of the French captain in the 1772 massacre} is at hand coming to take away our land, therefore we pray thee to become our friend and the guardian of these islands, lest the teazing sic of other tribes should come near to us, and lest strangers should come and take away our land." The letter concluded with a veiled threat.' And if any of thy people should be troublesome or vicious towards us , for some persons are living here who have run away from ships,) we pray thee to be angry with them that they may be obedient lest the anger of the people of this land fall upon them. "

The Colonial Secretary replied in a salutary letter. He wrote James Busby would be dispatched as His Majesty's Resident. The letter concluded with reference to the:

{British Resident's} protection to the inhabitants of New Zealand... to extend to your country all the benefits which it is capable of receiving from its friendship and alliance with Great Britain."

James Busby was born in Edinburgh Scotland in 1802. His father was a mineral surveyor and engineer. That put the Busby family into the class of Scotsmen on the make. Scottish independence had been lost in the Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland in 1707. Their Sovereigns would follow the English dynastic line in London. But the romance of history in the United Kingdom would be primarily Scottish. The Scots are accredited with building the British Empire with their canny practical skills. One might unkindly say that was their thanks for their material gain but loss of independence. James Busby studied viticulture in France before accompanying his parents to New South Wales in 1824. Viticulture was his first passion. He is regarded as the father of the Australian and New Zealand wine industries as he introduced to the Antipodes from France and Spain the first vine stock. His reports on viticulture and other pressing colonial issues impressed the Colonial Office. His report on the condition of New Zealand gained him appointment there as British Resident. The letter of the Northland chiefs carries a hint of the environment in Northland that gained its sea port Korakoreka the name of "the hell hole of the Pacific" or "Gomorrah the scourge of the Pacific". European settlers in Northland and elsewhere numbered only a few hundred. But Korakoreka had an itinerant population sometimes of thousands of whalers, tavern keepers, hangers on and sex workers. For the whalers on recreation there wasn't much else to do except drink and fornicate. That naturally shocked God's workers. God was a Protestant pious Englishman with sometimes temptations.

A British Resident was an official appointee in foreign territory who carried no magisterial powers. He was a diplomat without an Embassy who represented the interests of the British Government. The Governor of New South Wales Richard Bourke directed Busby to protect "well disposed settlers and traders," to prevent atrocities by Europeans against Maori, and to apprehend escaped convicts". No mention about the whalers. Their master was their captain. Everyone quickly became disillusioned despite the ceremonial welcome to Busby in Northland in 1833. The Maori called him, The Man of War Without Guns.

In 1834, twenty five chiefs gathered at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands in Northland. Missionaries, settlers and captains of thirteen ships also were present. The official British Resident Busby made a speech and then asked each chief to come forward in turn and select a flag from three choices. A Church Missionary Society flag based on the St. George's Cross won with twelve votes. Busby declared the chosen flag the national flag of New Zealand and had it hoisted on a flagpole to a 21-gun salute from HMS Alligator.

The first New Zealand official flag. The original version in 1834 had a black border. This flag has a chequered history. The version we see above was designed in 1839 in the New Zealand Company ship Tory whose passengers founded Port Nicholson (Wellington). This Wakefield settlement declared allegiance not to the new 1840 Government at Waitangi but to the 1835 Busby created Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Niu Tireni (United Tribes of New Zealand ) under this flag. In 1840, the Port Nicholson settlement elected New Zealand's first municipality. In same year 1840, a detachment of thirty soldiers and six mounted police under the orders of the new Lieutenant Governor Hobson arrived on a British warship at Port Nicholson and tore it down. In the uprising against the Covid regime in 2022, it figured prominently as a dissident European and Maori symbol. Again, it was torn down in Wellington by the police in same year. That goes to show the State quickly replaces its kindness with fury when its legitimacy is challenged.

Baron De Thierry. The French revolution refugee and adventurer. His escapades in Europe and the Pacific islands included dodging debts and raising a militia in Tahiti. He met Hongi Hika at Cambridge College and arranged with Kendall to buy on his account forty thousand acres at Hokianga in Northland for thirty six axes. He tried to exchange his bogus land deed with the Dutch and later French Government in return for being appointed the Viceroy and Governor of New Zealand. He alarmed James Busby, the British Resident in New Zealand and the missionary community by issuing manifestos in Tahiti stating that he intended to establish his authority as sovereign chief of New Zealand by force. This prompted the energetic British Resident to establish Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Niu Tireni (United Tribes of New Zealand) to resist a French invasion. We may laugh at a burlesque. But this was twenty years after Waterloo ended French revolutionary hegemony over Europe. The parallel would be a NeoNazi invasion and Government in New Zealand. In 1835, there was no telegraph nor even regular voyage passages in the South Seas. He arrived in New Zealand with his ragtag colonists in 1837 and was granted by Northland chiefs eight hundred acres at Hokianga. His colonists rioted and scattered at the dismal prospects. Thierry tried to make do on his plantation and desperately advertised in France for more colonists. His final hopes were dashed by the extension of British territories and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand in 1840. He later migrated to Auckland and became a music teacher and piano tuner. In the rising prosperity of Auckland, he became a friend of Governor Grey and Catholic Bishop of New Zealand Pompallier, and a modestly successful merchant.

Navy officer and New Zealand's first Governor. William Hobson. With Baron Thierry, he lies in an Auckland cemetery as the unheralded father of Auckland. Another pioneer John Campbell has his statue in Auckland as the father of Auckland in less contentious times. William Hobson was born in 1792. That made him a contemporary of Thierry as born in the shadow of the French revolution. He was born in Ireland and grew up in an Anglo-Irish family. His father was a barrister. That gave him a breeding and mental outlook that paralleled C S Lewis. In 1803 at the age of eleven, like Nick Young, he joined the Royal Navy. To abandon your eleven year old child to the navy sounds incredible. William was three years below the legal age to join the Navy. The nineteenth century British navy was proverbially known as ruled by rum, bum and bacca. Twentieth century variations called the Navy tradition as rum, buggery and the lash. The lash was not a relic in the eighteenth century. However Hobson shone in the Navy and they educated him to his middle class level. He served in the Napoleonic war and by the time he was twenty one was a first lieutenant. From 1822 as a lieutenant commander, he chased pirates and twice was taken prisoner by them in the Caribbean. His capturing of pirate vessels earned him the name Lion Hobson. His seafaring adventures were a British tradition that went back to the privateer or pirate Sir Francis Drake in the sixteenth century. His life story and especially his adventures in the Caribbean became the source of a popular 1833 novel. Tom Cringle's Log by Michael Scott. That was praised as "a most excellent sea story" by the poet Samuel Coleridge.

In 1834, he obtained a Royal naval commission as captain to the East Indies on HMS Rattlesnake. His surveying of the Australian coastline gave the name Hobsons Bay.

In 1837, Hobson sailed on the Rattlesnake to the Bay of Islands to settle tribal disputes at a request from Busby. On his return to England in 1838, Hobson submitted an official report on New Zealand in which he proposed establishing settlements "factories" of British sovereignty over the islands as in Canada. New Zealand now was in international law ,The United Tribes of New Zealand with its own flag. The United Tribes of New Zealand had never assembled again after its foundation in 1835. The tribal leaders did not seem to know about it. But now the British authorities, somewhat hoisted, had to tread warily in New Zealand as a foreign power. In 1839, Hobson was appointed lieutenant-governor under the Governor of New South Wales Sir George Gipps, and later that year as British consul to New Zealand. In New South Wales he was ambiguously deputy to Gibbs. In New Zealand he was the official representative of a foreign power. However the day after his appointment as Consul, the British Colonial Secretary, Marquess of Normanby left no doubt with his detailed instructions to Hobson that he would be the great white chief and peace maker in New Zealand. He was directed to purchase land "by fair and equal contracts". The independence of the United Tribes was reaffirmed. However there was no suggestion that the European settlers lie under the government of the United Tribes chiefs. Such a thought would not have entered any European's mind in the nineteenth century. Rather, the land purchased from the chiefs would form settlements of British law and industry. Their industry would procure capital and labour to support a new British colony. But there was still the legal and practical hurdles of the United Tribes. Their legal existence had to be extinguished. The tribes had to be pacified. Having taken the tentative steps into a new colony in the South Pacific, the British authorities would move fast.

Marquess of Normanby. He is the unheralded father of civilised New Zealand. His clear instructions to Hobson laid the foundation for the Treaty of Waitangi. Normanby bears a distinct resemblance to Byron. Both were authors. Both were House of Lord members. Normanby was a novelist. Byron was a poet. Byron mythologised Greece, Normanby mythologised New Zealand into Arcadias they recalled from their public school days.

It is an appropriate time now, to reflect upon the contemporary culture and history of the soon to be rulers of New Zealand. In New Zealand, the British Crown was a Tory and sometimes Whiggish English Squire. It was fiercely hostile to radicalism and strongly evangelical. It was also pragmatic when confronted with intractable reality. New Zealand would be a testing time for its talents.

In Great Britain, 'the rights of Englishmen' was a rallying cry the British upper classes could never publicly repudiate. It resonated with ancient English traditions of liberty. In the nineteenth century it had acquired further unsettling meanings. The stage coach tempo of life of Dickensian England was fast losing its reality to a new more anonymous industrialised age. Factories and railway lines were devouring the country side into the poet Blake's Satanic Mills. This was the Reform era. Great Britain was being reset into a new normal and the common people had no say unless they rebelled. In 1832, the British Parliament passed an electoral reform Act. The ancient ad hoc electoral arrangements of "rotten boroughs" and voting eligibility was replaced with a streamlined class and economic suffrage eligibility. Urban working class voters would be disenfranchised. The prosperous middle class would now dominate the suffrage. But most British statesmen would remain from the upper class. No women had the vote. Politics was almost universally considered a male domain. It was however legally possible for a non European man to vote. Slavery had been abolished in Great Britain. Heavy racism belonged to the later Social Darwinian age. Then along came the visionary, felon and adventurer Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his famous younger brothers, William, Arthur and Daniel. The founders of the New Zealand Company that brought the gleam in the eye of Hobson to the stark reality of mass British immigration into New Zealand.

Edward Wakefield. He served a three year sentence with his brother William for attempted abduction of a fifteen year old heiress. In the same era, Britons were being hanged for small thefts. They were from a distinguished family and high society seemed to consider them toads or naughty boys.

William Wakefield. He is called the father of Wellington by his leadership of the Port Nicholson settlement, and his successful campaign for the capital of New Zealand to be moved from Auckland to Wellington. Generations of Parliamentarians have privately cursed him at cold wet windy moments in Wellington.

The rat eaten and burnt original Treaty of Waitangi. Now the sacred founding document of New Zealand. Kiwis are all supposed to do obeisance to it every day.

A depiction of the Waitangi signing on February six 1840. A National holiday since 1974

A depiction of the 1840 Treaty signing road show

Treaty of Waitangi text found in a Littlewood family house drawer in 1989. It is dated February fourth 1840 and written on paper with an 1833 watermark. William Colenso, an eyewitness, records in his book, The Signing of The Treaty of Waitangi. "On the morning of February fifth at Waitangi, in an erected spacious tent, Hobson, Busby and Rev. Henry Williams were engaged in translating the Treaty." That appears to be the the Littlewood Treaty being translated into Maori and edited and expanded. Despite much academic hedging, there is no compelling reason except politics to doubt the authenticity of the Littlewood Treaty. The document itself makes eminent sense to convince the proud Northland Maori chiefs to sign a document that promised to preserve their resources won by their warrior prowess. But not to let the cat out of the bag, that they would sign away their chiefly right to practise their traditional way of life without being publicly hanged by the neck. The Littlewood Treaty writes, "The Queen of England confirms and guarantees to all the people of New Zealand the possession of their lands, dwellings and all their property". In the official Maori version, the guarantee " ki nga tangata katoa o Niu Tirani " "to all the people of New Zealand" is to their whenua, lands, their kaianga, resources, and all their possessions, taonga katoa. In the official English version of the Waitangi Treaty most likely translated from its Maori version, that is expanded to "lands, estates, forests, fisheries and other properties". There is no reference to "all the people of New Zealand". British officialdom to appease Maori and their social consciences extended recognition of all the land and water territories of New Zealand to the tribes. In the South Island, the Maori population had been by disease and the musket wars reduced to several thousand by 1840. In Auckland, Maori were likewise reduced to a few hundred by 1840. Thus did the nascent Government of New Zealand make a rod on its back in order to invalidate land speculators such as De Thierry and the New Zealand Company, and to pacify the Natives. They not surprisingly were noticing the flood of white immigrants into their territories. For the next two decades, there were sporadic "fires in the fern" between British and Maori in the Flagstaff war in Northland, in the Wairau massacre in Nelson South Island, at Wanganui and in the Hutt Valley campaign. There was nothing that wasn't eventually pacified with a combination of military action and land sales or compensation. If that aroused animosity and jealousy between tribes and individual Maoris, the aggrieved could come back for more. By 1858, the New Zealand newspapers were boasting that the first official census declared that the white population now outnumbered the Maori population. That was most likely wistful thinking. The new towns were growing rapidly and thriving. But the hinterlands were still Maori land. The boasting was a big mistake.

William Colenso. Printer, linguist, botanist and explorer, defrocked priest and grand old man in provincial politics. Born in Cornwall in 1811, he missed seeing the twentieth century by a year. His family were trades people. His cousin was John Colenso, the famous controversial Bishop of Natal. William's land explorations took him into the hinter lands of the North Island. He entered deep into the Maori spiritual and political life but always remained an upright missionary until his fall from grace. At the age of forty one, he fathered a child from his Maori house keeper. The Church forgave and restored his priesthood forty three years later. There are remarkable coincidences between Kendall and Colenso, separated in time over three decades. Both were fervent Anglican missionaries who "went native" when exposed to Maori spirituality. Both were dismissed from their positions after adultery with a Maori house keeper woman. They were both patriarchs of the Anglican New Zealand Christian Church. Abraham too had his Hagar and Ishmael. That may have crossed their minds.

The Treaty of Waitangi that gave freedom of movement and freedom from tribalism to New Zealand.

In his initial address to the Maori at Waitangi on 6 February, Hobson proclaimed. "The people of Great Britain are, thank God, free, and so long as they do not transgress the law, they can come and go where they please, and their sovereign has not power to restrain them." This is reported by Colenso. Hobson of course had that translated into Maori. The Maori chiefs at Waitangi were schooled in the Maori bible. So the Maori terms were scripture. Freedom is not an expression in the bible. So where did it find its Maori expression? Freedom translates in google Maori as Rangatiratanga. So Hobson was selling the British brand. All signatories of the Treaty would become as Britons- acquire supreme chiefly power. In the Maori bible, Rangatira is the translation for God and the Emperor. The law was the Ten Commandments. Rangatiratanga was in the Treaty ambiguous from the start. The new Treaty promised Rangatiratanga (freedom of movement). Maori needn't now fear an enemy attack . But what would be the response of British officialdom if they were accused of breaking the Ten Commandments?

For the only time in New Zealand history, the Crown, the colonists and the Maoris gathered together in 1840 to freely argue out New Zealand's destiny. Only the European women and Maori slaves appeared to have no direct participatory role in the Treaty negotiations. The European women because they ostensibly stuck to house keeping affairs, the slaves because they were dogs bodies. Seven years before in 1833, slavery had been abolished in the British colonies. Chiefs were already liberating slaves who were returning to their homelands as missionaries and advocates for British colonialism. So many a slave's heart might have been fluttering in 1840.

More major participants at Waitangi Treaty signing

First Catholic Bishop in New Zealand, Bishop Pompallier. Jean-Baptiste Pompallier was born in France in 1801. He came from a bourgeois family with all that means in French culture. He was ordained a priest. In 1836 as Vicar Apostolic, he sailed from France accompanied with other Marist brothers to the new Marist Mission of Western Oceania. In 1838, he reached Hokianga in Northland which he made his Marist headquarters.

Northland ariki, high chief. Hone Heke. Note his aquiline features and those of other Maori chiefly images. The ariki and rangatira jealously guarded their blood lines to their ariki ancestry from Hawaiki, their mythical oceanic homeland. In oral recitation, they would and still do recall their blood lines. The bible in its genealogical lines from Adam paralleled them. They would mix the bible with their own traditions both good and bad. He was born in about 1807, Heke Pokai and his Christian education gave him the name, Hone (John). Maybe from John the Baptist. He attended as a youth the Church Missionary Society school in Kerikeri Northland. He was baptised and became an Anglican lay preacher. He signed the Treaty of Waitangi. Colenso ascribes that he was the first to sign. He objected to a Customs tariff that drastically reduced the whaling ships at Korareka. He imposed his own levy on ships entering the bay. That put him in a collision course with the new Hobson Government that in 1841 moved its capital south from Korareka to the Waitemata harbour. Hobson named his new capital Auckland after the former Lord of the Admiralty who had promoted him to captain, Lord Auckland. Auckland has been from its creation a city of sails. On Auckland's anniversary day, there has been since 1841, a regatta on its harbour. The statue of Lord Auckland in Auckland has disappeared. Both Hobson and Heke were anxious for revenue to fund their enterprises. Legend attributes Heke to the four times chopping down of the British flagstaff at Korareka. The flag staff certainly was chopped down four times and Heke led the uprising. But he was no pantomime nor burlesque hero as New Zealand legends ascribe. I grew up with the legendary hero and outlaw Hone Heke. Many a farmer and townie has at times sighed for Heke when up against Leviathan. The flag-staff was re-erected by Northland Maori and is still there as a tourist attraction.

Waka Nene was born in about 1785 in Northland. His elder brother Eruera Patuone said he ate a pork joint from the Endeavour in 1769, and with Nene he lived into the New Zealand railways era. A number of Maoris in the first colonial era lived to over a century, almost tripling the Maori pre colonial life span. He took part in the musket wars, rampaging through the whole length of the North Island to Cook strait. At his baptism he added Tamati Waka (Thomas Walker) to his name. Thomas Walker was an English patron of the Church Missionary Society. Nene's influence was significant in persuading many chiefs to sign the Treaty. He was the principal chief on the side of the British in the Flagstaff war.

Henry Williams was the leader of the Church Missionary Society mission in New Zealand. He was born in England in 1792 and served in the British wars as a navy officer. He entered the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen. His active war service influenced him to pursue a missionary and peace maker career. He went to New Zealand in 1823 as a missionary. The Maoris nicknamed him karu-wha (Four Eyes). He was the first to make the Northland mission a religious success instead of just a material success. His bravery and energy were considered limitless. He was and no doubt considered himself in the tradition of the early Christian Saints. He survived to old age by his mana (prestige) and his steely glare. The Maori nickname meant much more than a light hearted taunt. Perhaps they meant his seeing was double any mere man. After the flagstaff war, he was accused by the New Zealand press of treachery and leading Maori astray. The Church Missionary Society temporarily dismissed him for alleged improper land purchases.

The younger brother of Henry. William Williams was born in 1800. An Oxford Graduate in classics and ordained an Anglican deacon, he sailed to Northland to join his brother. He was not at the Waitangi Treaty signing as he and his family had left the month before to set up the mission station on the East Coast. One of his pupils at his East Coast mission was a promising boy called Coates named after a missionary. The name was Maorified as Te Kooti. William led the CMS missionaries in translating the bible into Maori and published an early dictionary and grammar of the Maori language. The translations of the missionaries gave concepts to the Maori language that enabled the Treaty of Waitangi English terms to be understood by Maori. Unfortunately for Maori, they were misled to understand the opposite of the meanings of the English terms sovereignty and ownership. They thought they kept rangatiratanga (sovereignty) but only were granted kawanatanga (ownership). In the English version kawanatanga is translated sovereignty and rangatiratanga is translated ownership. A sleight of hand that the Crown officials and missionaries were not above pursuing in interests of high State. The 1835 Maori bible published in Northland translated the text from the English bible. "Na i te tekau ma rima o nga tau o te rangatiratanga o Taipiria Hiha i a Ponitio Pirato, e kawana ana i Huria." My italics. "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontias Pilate being Governor of Judea." The Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses 11 hood winked the Hittite King Muwatalli 11 in 1274 B C in the same way to bring an eighty year peace treaty before the dissolution of the Hittites. Both Williams brothers from a once rich and then impoverished family, and fathers of five children, became notorious for land shark purchases. To this day, the Williams on the East Coast are rich land owners and philanthropists.

On 5 February, about 500 Maori chiefs, Hobson's retinue and settlers gathered on the lawn in a marquee in front of James Busby's house. An elderly Maori lady mentioned in 1990 that she was told while the adults debated and argued the Treaty, the children played on the Waitangi shore. One might imagine under the watchful gaze of their mothers and guardians, the innocent Maori and European children taught each other how to make sand whare nui, (meeting houses) and castles.

In his 1890 History Of The Signing Of The Treaty Of Waitangi, Colenso wrote. "February 5th -

The day was particularly fine, and the spectacle of the most animated description. On the water were to be seen the numerous canoes gliding from every description towards the place of assembly. >>>The boats of the many settlers and residents living on the shores of the bay, together with those from the different ships and vessels at anchor in the harbour; and the ships and vessels decorated with the flags of their respective nations. On shore, in the centre of the delightfully-situated lawn at Waitangi, a spacious tent was erected, which was tastefully adorned with flags, &c., &c., over which England's banner streamed proudly in the breeze; the whites >>>were comfortably walking up and down in different little parties, socially chatting with each other a lAnglais; whilst the countenances and the gestures of the Natives, who were squatting grouped together according to their tribes, bore testimony to the interest which they if not in the business, in the gaiety and life of the day."

Colenso may have well felt nostalgia for an English country fair fifty years ago mixed in with former cannibals and now Anglican Christians. No steam boat disturbed the tranquil settings. The Natives didn't know but this would be their last day of independence.

An hour and a half after the arrival of Hobson, Pompallier arrived in his Bishopric robes. Hence followed a sectarian burlesque. Pompallier walked straight into Busby's house and entered the room where Hobson and others were engaged. The CMS missionaries who hurried after the Catholics were blocked entry to the room. That awed the chiefs that the Bishop was the only friend of the Kawana, (the Governor). Hobson was only officially a Consul in New Zealand. He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Niu Iireni (The United Tribes of New Zealand) still had a rattling corpse existence. However the chiefs seemed to have forgotten about this five year old Busby aborted creation. Hobson left no bones to the chiefs that he was Kawana, the Governor. He insisted the whites address him with his New South Wales official title, Lieutenant Governor. The history books call Hobson before his Governorship, Captain Hobson.The only previous Kawana the chiefs likely knew about was the biblical Pontias Pilate. They knew what happened to him when he tried to obstruct a blood lust from the temple elders. When Hobson and his entourage preceded by mounted police left the house to proceed to the tent, "the Catholic bishop and his priest stepped briefly up close to the heels of the Governor, so shutting us (the CMS missionaries out) unless we chose to walk behind them." 'Brethren', I (Colenso) exclaimed, 'this won't do, we must never consent to this position.' 'No', rejoined the Rev. R. Taylor. 'I'll never follow Rome.' When Hobson entered the tent, the bishop and the priest occupied the seats next to him on his left. Henry Williams was directed to a chair placed on Hobson's right, and the other CMS missionaries were arraigned behind Henry to support their cloth." It would not have been lost to the Anglican officials and missionaries that the Catholics had unwittingly taken the left diabolical side of Hobson. The British comedy, Dad's Army could have performed the scene no better.

The Catholic Emancipation Act was eleven years old. The presence of the Catholic Bishop at the 1830 London coronation had been a likewise contentious symbol. Anglicanism and Catholicism had been at war for three hundred years. Clergy on both sides saw the other as anti-Christ. By 1840, the more educated clergy were not entirely literal in their beliefs.

In 1984, the Northland Maori elder, Sir James Henare, spoke publicly to the historian Michael King on the signing of the Treaty. "I had the privilege of hearing from the sons of the men who had actually signed the document. >>>To them it was a tapu (sacred ) document, that's why they put their moko (signature mark) on it. The actual decision to sign the treaty was made the night before down on the marae, (meeting place). The later discussion in front of Busby's house, including the token opposition was pure ritual."

Sir James came from a dynasty that were Kupapa (loyalists) to the Crown. That was his oral version of Northland history. If the discussion in front of Busby house was pure ritual, the chiefs put on a superb show as Aristotles' critique of drama as catharsis. Catharsis is the purification and purgation of emotions through dramatic art. Even if the chiefs intended to finally sign the treaty, they would put on a show demonstrating their anxieties and hopes for their future. Henry Williams held huge mana (prestige). All the chiefs on the second day February the sixth, signed. However, that could not be taken for granted. The chiefs owed no allegiance to anyone. There is clear evidence of anxiety by the Crown officials and missionaries throughout the Treaty proceedings. Should the chiefs have grasped what was being planned for them, they would have erupted in murderous fury and a generation of missionary and Crown prestige would have been lost. The French or the Americans, Great Britain' s historic enemies, might have moved into their space in Southern Oceania. The moment the tribal assembly unanimously signed on February sixth, they were no longer their own masters. But relying on the words of the Maori text they signed, they did not know that. They would soon find out in the Flagstaff war.

In the exact same time period, the British Crown was enforcing its opium wars on China. Chinese territory was seized, and Hong Kong island was transformed from fishing villages to a British port outpost in 1841, a year after the birth of colonial Auckland. In my peregrinations through Hong Kong, I was constantly struck with its street name and lay out resemblances to Auckland. However Hong Kong was founded on a British East India trade narcotic, New Zealand on Colonial Office evangelical fervour. After the chiefs signed the Treaty, they were supplied with tobacco. So perhaps after all both foundations depended on a narcotic.

Before she went batty as an academic champion of Maori causes, Dame Anne Salmond had some insightful things to say about Maori customs. Historians on the Treaty of Waitangi are required to be always deeply earnest on "New Zealand's founding document". However some of the Dame's insights on Maori custom can be applied to the proceedings on the treaty signing at Waitangi. She wrote, "People best appreciate a speech full of drama and fire-an impassioned denouncement, a series of sly digs and an inspired piece of clowning." The Northland Maoris had enjoyed the missionary peace gradually imposed since Samuel Marsden's Christian sermon in 1814. They had not applied that to their neighbours. However, the years of mostly tranquility since the arrival of Henry Williams in 1823 had given them time to develop their cultural skills in oratory and war dance to imposing even frightening heights.

Colenso concluded the end of the 5 February debate. "Te Kamara, imitating a man handcuffed, addressed Hobson. 'Let us all be alike. Then o Governor remain. But the Governor up! Te Kamara down, low, flat! No, no, no.' Rewa spoke a matakite (prophecy). ' What this land to become like Port Jackson and all the other land seen (or found) by the English.' Rewa then seized hold of the Governor's (sic) hand with both his and shook it most heartily, roaring out with additional grimace and gesture (in broken English), How d'ye do eh, Governor? How do ye do, eh, Mister Governor? This he did over and over, and over again, the Governor evidently taking it in good part, the whole assembly of whites and browns, chief and slave, Governor, missionaries, officers of the man-o-war, and indeed, "all hands" being convulsed with laughter."

This incident ended this day's meeting."

Te Kamara was likely imitating the legendary address of Hongi Hika to King William twenty years before. "How do you do Mr King George?" His humour may have had an edge. Hongi Hika addressed the King of England and the Maori are still independent.

At the end of the day of February 5, Hobson in his report to the Governor of New South Wales, George Gibbs, wrote that he "began to apprehend an unfavourable impression would be produced on the treaty". Hobson's fears might not have been misplaced. But once the consensus was reached, the Maoris acted unanimously. A Maori assembly passionately debated a full spectrum of opinion, but "under the sway of orators would conclude with at least a show off unanimity," according to the Dame.

The first chief to address the 5 February Waitangi assembly was Te Kamara who as noted above had ended the days' proceedings. He began "Health to thee o Governor." He likely said. "Kia ora, e Kawana."Kia ora is now the official compulsory address in New Zealand. Sometimes history does rhyme. >>>"I will not consent to thy remaining here in this country. If thou stayest as Governor, then perhaps Te Kamara will be judged and condemned. Yes indeed, and more than that-even hung by the neck." Te Kamara most likely let out a choking sound and rolled his eyes into a hangdog look to uneasy public laughter. To the British, public hangings was a natural part of British justice. By 1840, hangings were confined mostly to murder and treason. The Maoris after the Treaty signing would be vulnerable to both. The first hanging of a Maori happened two years later for murder. Hangings shocked Maori. The cold blooded British justice was deeply alien to them whose conflicts were sourced from anger, (ira). In 1805, Te Pahi had acted as attorney to three white men sentenced to death for stealing food from a Government store in Port Jackson. His unsuccessful petition as a born again Christian was. Food was to be shared.

Three white deplorables interrupted the 5 February treaty discussions. Johnson said he did not fully understand Maori but he knew what Maoris were saying, and they could understand him. He accused Henry Williams of not translating Maori complaints against the missionary land sales. Henry riposted that if it wasn't for the missionaries none of the whites would be in New Zealand. The British commoners had lost their small franchise in the 1833 British Reform Act. But they had not abandoned their common law right to petition the Crown. However this interruption at Waitangi came to nothing. This was a Maori show. But the white settlers in New Zealand were biding their time.

In Colenso's History, "His Excellency then gave public notice that on Friday, the 7th instant, at 10 a. m. the meeting would be reassembled.

Three cheers were then given for the Governor, in which all lustily joined."

On the embarkation of Hobson to his man-o-war, an odd event happened. An elderly Maori chief raced up to Hobson and laid his hands on his launch, stopping his departure. He stared at Hobson's face and said. 'Auee! he koroheke! Ekore e roa kua mate." Colenso evaded translating the chief's words. But under the duress of Hobson and his retainers, Colseno translated. "He says. 'Alas! an old man. He will soon be dead.' "His Excellency thanked me (Colenso) for it, but a cloud seemed to have fallen on all the strangers present, and the party embarked in silence for their ship." Three weeks' later, Hobson suffered a severe stroke. On 10 September 1842, Hobson died from a second stroke. He was forty nine years old. Colenso described this spooky incident as serio-comic. But versed as he was in Maori spiritualism, Colenso would have recognised a makutu, (a curse).

In the afternoon, tobacco was distributed among the Maori visitors. That ended in a near fight. The Maoris would have been ravenous as they had not thought of bringing food. They took the bible literally and perhaps recalled the parable of the loaves and fishes.

The Maoris were biblical literalists before their secular education in the later nineteenth century. The only literature with which they were initially familiar were the missionaries' bibles. Their own understanding of tapu (sacredness) they naturally applied to these biblical texts. A single biblical page would be venerated by a tribe and might win converts. Literature cast a spell upon them. When in 1852 the first non biblical book was translated into Maori, portions of Robinson Crusoe, a party of Maoris went searching for the hermit on an island. Later they became familiar with newspapers and took literally the settlers' illusions that Maoris were now a minority and were going to become extinct..

Public notice had been given by Hobson that the next meeting would be held on Friday, 7th. However several of the chiefs said they could not possibly remain so long at Waitangi: that they should be "dead from hunger". The chiefs decided that the second meeting would be held on the next day, Thursday.

On Thursday morning, three to four hundred chiefs gathered at Waitangi. Some had returned home. Colenso attributed their absence to the previous day tobacco fight and a previous "murderous affray". Colenso appeared not to consider some had decided to decline the Treaty but not to upset the mana of the British. Colenso described them in small parties, "talking about the treaty, but evidently not clearly understanding it". Hobson had failed to receive the message of this early Thursday meeting. He arrived hurriedly in his boat in plain clothes except for his hat. He said he would take the signatures of the chiefs who were present, but a public meeting must still be held the next day, "pursuant to the notice he had already given". Lieutenant -Governor Hobson would not take orders from the chiefs. But the 6 February meeting concluded with the treaty signing and in the new territory of the New South Wales colony, no such further meeting took place.

When everyone present had assembled in the marquee, Hobson rose and said. "I can only receive signatures this day. I cannot allow of any discussion, this not being a regular public meeting." This was a shrewd tactic by pirate fighter Hobson. Having collected the crowd signatures, Hobson would declare the Waitangi proceedings as closed. The chiefs were now faint with hunger and anxious for their breakfast. At this moment, Pompallier arrived with his priest and they were ushered to the same diabolical left of Hobson. Hobson was persuaded by Pompallier to add on a pencil and paper scrap, the protection of the Catholic faith. Then Colenso on his path to Maori spiritualism and likely to offset Rome, persuaded the hesitant Reverend Williams to add on the paper scrap, "me te ritenga Maori hoki". "And Maori custom". That paper scrap last in the hands of Reverend Williams was lost.

As Hone Heke upon the prompting by Busby was the first to the table to sign, Colenso interrupted proceedings and addressed Hobson. >>> "I have spoken to some chiefs concerning it, who had no ideas whatever as to the purport of the treaty." The day before, Hobson had read the treaty to the chiefs in English and Williams had read the Maori "translation". Now Colenso, who had stayed quiet except for his machinations against Pompallier, would be briefly the troublesome priest.

Colenso expressed worries for the missionaries after the treaty was signed . " 'The missionaries should explain the thing to the Natives, so that it should be their own very act and deed. Then in case of a reaction taking place, The Natives could not turn around on the missionary and say, 'You advised me to sign that paper, but never told me what were the contents thereof'." After Hobson's meaningless and likely irritable reply, Colenso concluded his words. >>> " 'Having said what I have I consider that I have discharged my duty.'" Heke then signed the treaty, followed by the other chiefs. Marupo, after a passionate speech against the treaty, seized Hobson's hat and wished to put it on. Was that uplifting or inspired clowning? I suspect one followed the other. Heke in his address at Waitangi the day before, had said. >>> " 'We Natives are children.>>> We do not know: do you then choose for us. You our fathers-you missionaries.'" Two chiefs declared along with their signing, that Pompallier had urged them not to sign. "Not to write on the paper, for if he did he would be made a slave." Pompallier had left before the signing, most likely back to his mission station in Hokianga. That would have increased British paranoia about French and Catholic incursion into New Zealand. This would climax in a race of a British man- o-war and a French man-o-war to Akaroa in the South Island six months later. The British man-o- war arrived two days before the arrival from France of the French. The British man-o- war raised the Union Jack and British settlement of the South Island was assured. Thus the South Island Maoris were spared the semi slavery of a French colony, and all in New Zealand missed out for a hundred years on the charms of French culture and food

Colenso recorded. Forty-five Northland chiefs signed the treaty. Most were not chiefs of the first rank. Colenso left unclear what he meant by that.

Colenso continued. "As each chief affixed his name or sign to the treaty, the Governor shook him by the hand, saying (in Maori) 'He iwi tahi tatau' ('We are (now) one people') at which the Natives were greatly pleased."

All that were disposed having signed, the Natives gave three cheers for the Governor."

At Hobson's request, Colenso distributed a bale of blankets and a cask of tobacco to the Natives. Each chief signee got two blankets and tobacco. Colenso makes no mention of providing breakfast. Thereupon all the chiefs left, presumably home for breakfast. The somewhat passive proceedings that day may be partly explained for want of food. The treating of the chiefs with blankets and tobacco seems rather mercurial. Treating of voters in contemporary British elections was not less. The Victorian age had not yet started. There is no mention of settler attendance at the February 6 meeting. Maybe like Hobson in the morning, they had not been warned the meeting would take place.

A footnote about Hobson's final address to the chiefs. "He iwi tahi tatau." Hobson most likely was supplied those legendary words by Colenso. Colenso's history is the only primary record of them. Colenso was a Christian humanist. The Maori words meant literally, "We are one bones". That is we are all descended from Adam. In 1890, the year of publication of Colenso's history, New Zealand was a prospering self confident British colony. Racial assimilation of the settlers and the Maoris was the ruling ideology. Official evangelical Christianity was in decline being replaced by secular reform. In 1840, there was no doubt the British and the Maori were two eternally separate peoples. Colenso's history was official propaganda for the New Zealand governing class. They were all British and imperialist.

Another footnote. In the First Article of the Treaty herein is written. "Ko nga Rangatira o te Wakaminenga, me nga Rangatira katoa hoki, kihai i uru ki taua Whakaminenga, ka tuku rawa atu ki te Kuini o Ingarani ake tonu atu te Kawanatanga katoa o o ratou wenua." In the English version, it is written. The Chiefs of the Confederation of the United Tribes of New Zealand, and the separate and independent Chiefs who have not become members of the Confederation, cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England, absolutely and without reservation, all the rights and powers of Sovereignty which the said Confederation or Individual Chiefs respectively exercise or possess, or may be supposed to exercise or to possess, over their respective Territories as the sole Sovereigns thereof." The English version is completely transparent as to the intentions of the British. The rattling corpse of the United Tribes of New Zealand was finally officially laid to rest. No more Busby invented tribal independence paper pellet as Governor Bourke of New South Wales had unkindly described it. In the same year as the Waitangi Treaty signing and the blocking of a French colony in Akaroa, an attempt to revive The United Tribes of New Zealand in the new Wakefield settlement in Port Nicholson was ruthlessly expunged and its flag torn down by Hobson's mounted police. Yet curiously in the Maori treaty version, Whakputanga o Niu Tirani is not mentioned. Instead there is Wakaminenga. Whakaminenga translated in the 1838 Maori bible as congregation and was the expression used by Maori in the 1830s to mean their public meetings.

Hobson signed both the English and the Maori versions of the Treaty. Then the Treaty went as a Crown document both metaphorically and literally into cold storage. A chief might have called February 6 1840. "Te kaikaiwaiu o nga maripi roa." The treason of the long knives." That is an allusion to the Anglo -Saxon conquest of the Britons. But that was done with knives. The treaty was done with ink and Christian morality.

Missing from Colenso's history, there is a quote from the 5 February final declamation of Waka Nene in Hobson's letter written on the same day to the New South Wales Governor, Gipps. "You (Hobson) must preserve our customs, and never permit our lands to be wrested from us." Colenso either missed it or it was edited out. Colenso had said earlier in his 5 February address. Hobson must stay to guide the Maori as "a peacemaker". Waka Nene represented liberal Maori opinion. There was no turning back from the new age. Hobson would be the great white father who would protect the traditional Maori way of life but stop their wars. There were many scores to settle against Nga Puhi.

Most chiefs envisaged the perpetuation of British guardianship. It would be more effective, but they would still have the final sanction. Many were decidedly uneasy but eventually signed the treaty. A minority of chiefs never signed and rumours circulated that Queen Victoria was a girl. That is outside the counsel of men with mana. Mananui (great mana) Te HeuHeu persuaded his tribe Arawa in the isolated centre of the North Island to return the blankets. Mananui pronounced a whaktauki (proverb). "Hau wahine e hoki i te hau o Tawhaki". (That petticoat government should replace the fame of Tawhaki.) Tawhaki was a demi God identified with thunder and lightening. Mananui also spoke out: "Look at me for I do not hide when I say I am Te HeuHeu. I rule you all just as my ancestor Tongariro, the mountain stands over all this land" The mana of the traditional chiefs was identified with the mana of the natural world. In 1846, an avalanche buried Te HeuHeu, his six wives, his eldest son and fifty-four others in his village.

As the British representatives canvassed treaty signatures in the North and later South Islands, the proceedings increasingly degenerated into the jobbery in character with British Parliamentary elections before the 1834 Reform Act. The glass of grog for the working class British voter had its substitute in the coveted blanket. However the practical value of the British red blankets should not be underestimated in the New Zealand climate.

British representatives were at pains in the first months of the road show to convey that the presents were not payments for signatures. "I have forborne to adopt even the customary measure of propitiating the consent of the chiefs by presents or promises; and not until the treaty has been signed did I give them anything," wrote Hobson to New South Wales Governor George Gipps on 6 February 1840. By May 1840, William Williams wrote to officialdom from Poverty Bay. "The blankets have been given at the rate of one to each leading chief and it will require at least 60 more to complete the bounty throughout." The Maori signatories who were successful in signing furthered their mana and became -in British eyes- the local rangatiratanga, (native proprietors). That would have fitted the British squirearchy but made no sense in New Zealand where every non slave male Maori exercised power normally only in conflict. "However for some years after the treaty was signed, the red blanket was considered among the Maoris the hall-mark of distinction, and no chief who had not received the 'treaty blanket was admitted to the select circle of their counsels, " wrote historian Lindsay Buick in his 1914 book, Treaty of Waitangi.

On 21 May 1840, Lieutenant Hobson proclaimed sovereignty over New Zealand. Signatures continued to be gathered until September. British officialdom were no longer in the mood for constitutional niceties. There were rumblings of an independent New Zealand Company municipality being established at Port Nicholson and a French colonisation in the South Island. Both were attempted later in the year and blocked by the energetic but stroke- stricken Hobson. To confirm the British grip over New Zealand, the South Island was declared British by right of cession two months before the French invasion. Stewart Island was declared British in 1840 by Lieutenant Colonel Bunbury by right of discovery. He declared he could not find any Maoris on Stewart Island. The Royal Charter issued from London in November 1840 for "Erecting the Colony of New Zealand" was then promulgated on 3 May 1841. The Charter stated that "the Colony of New Zealand would be established as a Crown colony separate from New South Wales". 3 May 1841 has no resonance in New Zealand as the dry history of rich and powerful white men.

Honest soldier Bunbury. In March 1840, Bunbury, the former commandant of the Norfolk Island convict settlement, was dispatched with one hundred soldiers to uphold British law in New Zealand. He traveled down from Northland through New Zealand, unapologetically collecting treaty signatures and distributing blankets. He remained disappointed he was never offered the Governorship of New Zealand. He was always a soldier never a diplomat. He represented the backbone but never the brain of the British Empire. In June 1840, he arrived in Cloudy Bay South Island on the Waitangi road show. He expressed surprise in his letter to Hobson "at the very clear manner in which he (a chief) explained to another chief the second article of the treaty," the Crown right of pre-emption (sole purchaser of Maori land sales). Right of pre-emption was to protect Maori from land sharks but it restricted their freedom as British subjects. Investigation found out the chief spoke "a little English and had been outside New Zealand". The South Island was ceded by right of discovery in Cloudy Bay. This apparently unnecessary act was perhaps induced by this chief, like Oliver asking for more. I used to think the characters in Charles Dickens' early novels were caricatures. The puffed up and pompous language and actions of the British and French in New Zealand in this era has changed my mind.

After unsuccessful attempts to set up a German colony in the Chatham Islands by the New Zealand Company, the British Crown annexed the Chathams about eight hundred kilometres east of the South Island in 1842. The Crown never offered a legal rationale. A Maori tribe had invaded the Chathams after hijacking a sailing ship in 1835. They had subjected the native pacifist Morioris to a savage and enslavement treatment that made British colonialism in New Zealand look positively benign. Slavery had been abolished in the British Empire in 1833. After the British annexation of Chathams, slavery in the Chathams was illegal. Ending slavery in Chathams could have have been made their legal rationale. The British navy scoured the ocean, hunting down slave ships which were legal under international and African tribal laws. However, whether through lethargy or lack of resources, Moriori slavery was not abolished by the Chathams Resident Magistrate until 1863. That was in the middle of the American civil war which might have spurred on the Magistrate. Does that mean slavery ended in New Zealand in 1863? The Magistrate had neither enforced nor abolished it. Maybe that resembles the British Channel Islands' complicity in the Holocaust. German missionaries had established a mission in the Chathams. The son of one of the missionaries, Johann Baucke insisted that the Chatham Island Maori were "born again" good tempered slavers and allowed the Moriori slaves to idle most days in contentment. Baucke's research was burnt in a Chathams house fire. These observations are forbidden to be hard copy published. Wikipedia ignores Baucke and describes the Moriori enslavement as genocide despite thousands of people proudly claiming Moriori descent today. Be as it may. As final ironical points, the Moriori name for Chathams Rekohu parallels the literal meaning of Aotearoa. The capital of Chathams is Waitangi. The pacifist Maori movement in the 1880s North Island to block Crown land encroachment was led by descendants of the tribe that invaded the Chathams, and they adopted the Moriori white albatross symbol of peace. The leading families in Chathams identify with their Moriori lineage. Maoris dislike the Moriori revival and say they got on very well with the Morioris until the media stirred up conflict. Moriori may be the only people who have received an official apology and compensation for not being colonised early enough.

The man holding the staff among his Moriori kindred is Hirawanu Tapu. In 1862, he wrote a petition signed by the Moriori elders to Governor Grey, for the return of Rekohu to the Morioris. There is a memorial and statue to the last full blooded Moriori in the Chathams as there are statues and memorials to the last of the old time Maori in New Zealand. One day there may be a statue to the white man in a suit with a brief case.

When American Jewish author Jared Diamond wrote his seminal book Guns, Germs, and Steel, that gave a pragmatic explanation for why some cultures send rockets to the moon and others remain in the stone age, he chose the Maori invasion and conquest of the Chathams as exemplifying colonialism. The later conversion of the Maori slavers to Christianity and adoption of Moriori pacifism he ignored. His book is now considered to be racist and a bad career move to refer to it.

Frederick Maning was Anglo Irish born in Dublin in 1812. He grew up in the British colony, Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). He likely took part in the Black Line war against Native Tasmanians. That was a real mini war not a genocide of Native Tasmanians. There are many Australians proud today to call themselves Aboriginal Tasmanians. Contrary to popular myth, it has never been legal open season on Australian Aboriginals. In 1838 after the Myall Creek massacre of unarmed Aboriginals, seven white men were convicted by a jury of murder, and publicly hanged in Sydney gaol. The British Empire always bestowed on all its non slave subjects, the rights and privileges of security of life and property. The Crown did not recognise Aboriginal occupation of land because they foraged it but did not farm it. Maning arrived in Hokianga in 1833 and lived as a Pakeha Maori among the Ngapuhi. He was very popular with them. He was a he man which appealed to their mana. He acted as a translator in the Waitangi road show. In his letter to Gipps in 17 February, Hobson reported that Maning told Maori not to sign because British colonisation would degrade them. Hobson countered that without British law, Europeans would soon take all their lands. During the flagstaff war, Maning interceded for the settlers and organised supplies to Hone Heke's enemies. He wrote a romantic book on the Flagstaff war that imagined the war from the perspective of a Heke supporter. His later book Old New Zealand published in 1876 is a nostalgic look back. He wrote reprovingly of a young Maori horse rider in a cocked black hat and Wellingtons, jogging along, jingling money in his pocket and whistling "Pop goes the weasel." Maning sighed. "What will all this end in?"

After these triumphs of Leviathan over the tribes, French colonists, and municipal independence, it is nice to report a victory of the deplorables in the same year 1840. Samuel Parnell was born in London. He landed on 8 February 1840 at Petone beach to work as a carpenter. This was the New Zealand Company's first settlement. Most of its inhabitants moved in March to nearby Port Nicholson. Samuel was asked on his landing in Petone to build a store. Parnell's reply has entered New Zealand trade union folklore. "Eight of these (twenty four hours) should be for work, eight for sleep, and the remaining eight for recreation." With the scarcity of labour, and lack of Crown coercion, Samuel won out on his demand that working men were also entitled to leisure time. This is reputed to be the world's first successful strike for eight hours a day. In October 1840, a meeting of workmen at Petone resolved to work eight hours a day from 8 a.m. to 5 pm. Sunday would remain the traditional day of Church and rest. Anyone breaking this rule would be ducked into the harbour. Some deny the legend. Later in the early 1840s, Samuel became a farmer fulfilling the ideal of the Wakefield brothers of working men in New Zealand soon rising up to being land owners. The Labour Day Act in 1890 established a statutory holiday in October to celebrate the workers. In the 1970s, I recall in New Zealand the forty hour week. Working hours after that were voluntary and received extra pay as over time. Both Saturday and Sunday labour were voluntary and received overtime pay. Labour Day remains but except for a few die hard unionists as just a holiday. My boomer generation chose to work and have leisure as they pleased. Elderly working men were called old fools and groaners to recall the eight hour working hours tradition.

Mary Taylor, a soul mate of Charlotte Bronte since their boarding school days. Like the Brontes she came from an educated but impecunious family. Both families belonged to "the uneasy class" as coined by Edward Wakefield. Edward viewed them as prime candidates for settlements in New Zealand. He was a visionary and his propaganda on the right people to emigrate to New Zealand was very successful. The reality that New Zealand could never be an idealised version of ye olde England would catch up to its émigrés. However many émigrés like Mary Taylor became very successful by their own exertions in a prospering and rising new British colony. The Wakefields closely resemble Cecil Rhodes. Cecil founded Rhodesia on fraudulent land sales. However Rhodesia was founded in Social Darwinist and racially ideologist Southern Africa. The Wakefields had their personal misfortune to live in an evangelical culturally assimilationist age. In 1838, Doctor Hinds told a committee of the House of Lords inquiring into New Zealand that, "I see no reason as soon as the New Zealander is capable of it against his being Chief Justice, Governor or Bishop. That opinion would have put Cecil Rhodes into an apoplexy. The New Zealand Company's farcical land "sales" in New Zealand were severely repudiated and cut to the legal bone by the Crown representatives. This engineered much strife in New Zealand with both settlers and Maoris.

Mary arrived in New Zealand in 1845. Wellington was a developing and the largest New Zealand town. In the early 1840s, there was much strife in Wellington with local Maori tribes who were surprised and not surprisingly angry that their land and water resources had been "bought" by the New Zealand Company. They never got their resources back which were transferred to Crown lands and compensation paid. Mary set up a successful merchant business and taught music in Wellington. She returned to England in 1860. The impending wars might have encouraged her departure. Mary who appears with her family in the turgid Charlotte Bronte novel Shirley, was considered in New Zealand to be an eccentric English lady for earning her own living and despising women who despite their impecunious condition chose not to do so. In her letters to Charlotte, she, despite her interest in public issues in England never mentioned the New Zealand political and racial situation. No Maoris figure at all. Perhaps she thought as an English lady that was all beneath her.

Te Rauparaha was an ariki in the musket wars. They began from 1807 and intensified with the return of Hongi Hika and his muskets from Port Jackson in 1821. The muskets upset the old order and balance of hand to hand tribal fights. Now chiefs such as Te Rauparaha and Hongi Hika roamed the North Island and upper South Island with multitudes of cannibal warriors spreading mayhem and cruelty. With British colonial imposition and tribal exhaustion and decimation, the musket wars expired by 1840. The musket became replaced with the colonial official's dicta and his backup of colonial soldiers and the hang man. But Te Rauparaha continued his trouble making until his kidnapping by Governor Grey and captivity under martial law in 1846. Captured secret letters showed he was secretly supporting an insurrection by his ally Te Rangihaeta in the Hutt valley. The land discontent in Wellington had spilled over into the Hutt valley. Te Rauparaha was nicknamed "the Napoleon of the South". That was not a compliment. Napoleon was rumoured in England of being a cannibal. When Alexandre Dumas wrote a mock newspaper serial in 1841 of the escape of Napoleon from Elba, in the first headline he is worst as the cannibal, in the second he is the ogre. However there is a resemblance in their aquiline noses and regal stares. Napoleon was no cannibal. But both men epitomised the worst and the best of their native cultures. Both concluded their careers in British captivity and making peace and cultural progress for their peoples. Napoleon was a Corsican. Was Te Rauparaha a descendant of the Patupaiarehe? His haka (war dance) Ka mate ka mate. Ka ora ka ora (Death death life life) has become the existentialist song and dance for the All Blacks, the New Zealand rugby sports team. Unfortunately their spunk seems to go into the haka, and they now consistently lose their games.

Vice-Admira Robert FitzRoy. He succeeded Governor Hobson in 1843. A man of many parts. A pioneering meteorologist who established what became the Met Office and invented the weather forecast. That science was his brightest star. In politics and religion, he lacked finesse and relative failure drove him to suicide. Robert was born in 1805 in England into the upper echelons of the British aristocracy and public service. His father was a Lord and he was descended from King Charles 11. At the age of fourteen, he was a cadet sailor in the navy. In 1835, as captain of HMS Beagle, he accompanied Charles Darwin on his famous scientific voyage. They met the Williams missionary family in Northland. Darwin's views on the Tahitians and the Maoris were the opposite of Cook's in 1769. In Darwin's view, it was the Tahitians who were a higher order of the "chain of being" and the Maoris' natural state and dwellings were "filthily dirty and offensive". Sixty five years had passed between their visits and the down side affects of civilisation were very apparent to Darwin's eyes and nose.

Intractable problems assailed his New Zealand Governorship. The new settler colonies and their Maori neighbours were on a collision course. The New Zealand Company worked to displace the Maori tribes and turn New Zealand into an idealised prosperous England. If the British Crown had not intervened that might have happened. New Zealand would have become as tranquil and dull as Tasmania and with its original sin. The other possibility is the Maoris would have driven the New Zealand Company settlements out of the North Island. In his first Governorship year 1843, there was the official investigation of the Wairau massacre at Nelson in the South Island. Officially that is now an affray. Nine people summarily executed is in international law a massacre. That was Te Rauparaha's deed and it sent shock waves through the settler communities. They were outraged that the Crown more or less said that Arthur Wakefield and the other twenty one settlers deserved death for trespass and armed invasion. In 1844, a letter from the Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley to Governor FitzRoy declared. "The attempted dispossession (by the colonists) without any process of law, was a lawless act, and the resistance was justifiable. Native laws and native customs, when not abhorrent for the universal and permanent laws of God, are respected by English legislatures and by English courts: and although problems of much difficulties will occasionally arise out of this state of things, they have never been such as to refuse all solution, or as to drive the local authorities on the far more embarrassing difficulty of extending the law of England to persons wholly ignorant of our language, manners and religion." That was the customary puffery evangelical language of the mid nineteenth century British Colonial Office. A year later, the Colonial Office would change its tack and send an ex army officer, George Grey, with military reinforcements to replace FitzRoy. Lord Stanley's letter to Grey in 1845 declared. "You will of course require from these people an implicit submission to the law, and you will of necessity enforce that submission by the use of all the powers, civil and military at your command." The Empire struck back.

Lord Stanley in his letter to FitzRoy seems oblivious of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

A settler had not been charged after the murder of his Maori family in his home because of lack of evidence. Earlier, in 1842, Maketu had been hanged for his murder of his settler employer family and a Maori girl. The local Maori tribes supported Maketu's execution as utu (vengeance) for the Maori girl's death. But the judicial clearance of the settler murder suspect infuriated and disillusioned Te Raupraha and his allies. The next deplorable, Charles Marsden, accused by Maoris of a murder of a Maori was judicially hanged in1856 despite his clear innocence. They had threatened to lynch him. Maoris would use tricks and intimidation of settlers for gain. As an example, a settler who bought a horse from his Maori neighbour had a visit from the Maori demanding its foal. Maoris had to learn about trade. Settlers had to learn Maoris were people too. The Enlightenment about the noble savage had not permeated to the lower class Europeans. To most of them, the Maori were little more than two legged beasts. Maori kupapa (Crown loyalists) and even sometimes Maori enemies in the wars changed the views of most by the 1860s.

A legendary event from the Fight At Boulcott Farm in the Hutt valley campaign. A twenty one year old drummer, private William Allen tried to call the alarm. His right arm was nearly severed. He tried to bugle with his left arm and was killed with a blow to his head. Generations of New Zealand were raised on this story. Allen shrunk in school yard legend to twelve years old and the Maori warrior grew to seven feet.

The 1846 Hutt Valley campaign began as skirmishes and became a war of eviction. Maori who lived in the valley were forcibly evicted with little compensation from their lands by British troops and kupapa. Old tribal animosities mixed in with colonial and settler expansion. My mother lived in Poirua town that adjoined Hutt Valley during World War Two. I once asked her did she ever hear anything about this war in her locality. She said she knew and heard nothing. Porirua was a white community. She once remarked she took a bicycle ride into the countryside. When she rode through a Maori village, the children threw stones. None of us thought this was anything more than urchins.

Governor Grey, the liberal benefactor, scholar, creator of New Zealand's first political constitution, and fighter against the Maori Kingdom, and the HauHau (a cannibalistic genocidal cult)。

George Grey became in legend the exemplary British Colonial Governor. He was "good Governor Grey". His career had been a British military officer. Unlike his two navy officer predecessors, he had the support of a large military force recruited from Australia "to fight the daring Maoris". Prior to replacing FitzRoy in 1845, he had served as Governor of South Australia for four years. He was credited by the Colonial Office as an expert on Aboriginal culture and assimilation. The Colonial Office probably said something along the lines of, "George Grey is a gentleman and a scholar. When necessary, he knows how to deliver grapeshot too. Ha ha ha." George was born prematurely in Lisbon in 1812 after his mother overheard about the death of his father in the Napoleonic war in Spain. George was English and Protestant Irish. He served as a military officer in Ireland in the 1830s. His experience of Irish poverty gave him a life long hatred of laissez faire politics. He became a Gladstone liberal. That is he believed in and fought for social reform but never for higher taxes nor revolution.

He served twice as New Zealand Governor from 1845 to 1853 and from 1861 to 1868. He was summarily dismissed from his Governorship in 1868 for protesting at the withdrawal of British troops from New Zealand. He returned to New Zealand and served as Premier from 1877 to 1879. His military actions in the 1861 to 1864 Waikato war have made him a highly divisive figure. His statues have been defaced in New Zealand since 1981. No one dares to publicly like him in New Zealand now despite his many generous bequeaths to New Zealand and his establishment of New Zealand's first political Constitution in 1853. The mainstay of that Constitution, an elected Parliament and rule of law still endures despite Covid depredations.

Also founder of Canterbury Province's biggest city and for two decades its capital, Christchurch. Canterbury is in the heartland of the South Island. Canterbury in England is the centre of Anglican Christianity. John was born in the Anglican gentry in London. He graduated in Classics at Oxford University. There is a fire in his eyes and a stern mouth that seems uncharacteristically Anglican. Perhaps that came from his Irish religious and social environment. He appears neither to be a high Anglican nor a low Anglican. Maybe he was a God fearing pioneer and theologian. He was appointed by Edward Wakefield to found a settlement in New Zealand that would be modelled on the ideals of the Church of England. His political connections as a candidate in a British election helped to secure funds for this new settlement. He and his family arrived in Canterbury in 1850. Eight months later, the four ships of pilgrims that founded the new colony and its leading families arrived at Port Cooper (Lyttelton). Each year on their anniversary landing in December 1850, Canterbury people do the historic walk over the hill from Lyttelton to Christchurch. John Godley's statue was toppled alongside the crashed Cathedral in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. It is now restored

Thomas Burns. The Free Presbyterian Scottish founder of Otago Province and Dunedin for two decades its capital. Thomas was the nephew of Robert Burns. He became much loved when dead. In Scotland, he abandoned his privileged Presbyterian Ministry to live as a poor parish Minister to preserve the freedom of the schism Free Presbyterian Church from the British Crown. He set up in 1848 the Free Church settlement Otago in the Winter frigid southern South Island. Otago is derived from Otakou which is an unknown Maori word. The Presbyterian Scots regarded native cultures as the devil but sometimes appropriated its words. Thomas as the Minister of the settlement was legendary for his hardness and his charity. The name Dunedin is Scottish Gaelic for New Edinburgh. The attitudes of the Free Presbyterian was covertly Scottish nationalist. When the provinces of New Zealand were annulled in 1876, there is a legend the New Zealand Government threatened to send a gunboat to quell agitated Otago. They might fight for their Kirk. Thomas Burns' statue stands in Otago Square.

The Gold Rush

In 1852 there was the first recorded discovery of gold in Coromandel Peninsula near Auckland and Waikato. A decade later there were more gold discoveries around Otago, Murderers Bay, Marlborough and on the West Coast in the South Island. This era coincided with Governor Grey's 1852 New Zealand Constitution. This Constitution set up New Zealand's original six provinces. All of New Zealand was divided into them. New Zealand society has developed from tribal to pioneering to provincial. The six provinces were Auckland, New Plymouth, Wellington, Nelson, Canterbury and Otago. Later as populations grew, three other provinces were carved out and added. The provinces with their elected Superintendents and Provincial Councils ruled by ordinance powers. They were vigorous and enterprising in developing their domains. They had the lion's share of Crown land revenue. The gold fortunes stayed in their localities and gold boom towns such as Dunedin flourished. Thomas Burns could but struggle futilely against the invasion of Gomorrah. Populations from the exhausted gold mines in California and Australia flooded in their tens of thousands. In 1874, Dunedin surpassed Auckland until the end of the nineteenth century as the biggest city in New Zealand.

Dunedin in the 1870s. One cannot escape the thought. Where are the Maoris? There were by 1840 only a few thousand in the South Island. The cold climate naturally discouraged their settlement. But wouldn't they have flocked in to mine the gold? Many thousands of Chinese from China arrived to mine. Their capacity for hard work and ganging together caused white hostility. Mining for gold from the land, instead of from the Government seems not a Maori undertaking. They had already sold the land of the gold mines. That was either a good thing for a bad thing for them.

Hini Te Kiri. Colonial New Zealand's Boudicca or magic Maori. Did this half caste woman invent Aotearoa and an enduring legend of Maori chivalry?

Hine's mother was taken as a slave child in the musket wars to Northland by Ngapuhi. On her death certificate, Hine's father is documented as an Irish sea captain. Hine identified her father as Richard Russel, a ship supply merchant. Hine was born in Northland in about 1840. During the flagstaff war, she was evacuated to Auckland. She attended mission schools in Rotorua and Auckland. She was reputed to be fluent in English, Maori and French. As a child of an English trader, she likely attended tutor lessons in the accomplishments of English middle class girls. That would include recitation, history, French and drawing. Her household languages would have been English and Maori. She became an assistant teacher at an Auckland Maori boarding school. Her biographies say she was a governess. Teaching was the normal sole occupation for nineteenth century educated English ladies. With the outbreak of the Waikato war, she with her family were living in rebel territory. They joined the rebels. She stitched a red silk flag with the legend Aotearoa. It was captured and is now archived in the Auckland Museum. Or was it stitched from a Maori yarn? For a map stitched and abandoned in the bush, it seems magically made and preserved. The first known reference to Aotearoa was in the scholarly papers on Maori culture written by George Grey in 1855. Aotearoa referred solely to the North Island until William Reeves' seminal New Zealand history book published in 1898, The Long White Cloud Aotearoa. William's kid adult romantic history which celebrates New Zealand colonial liberal history with a Song of Hiawatha version of Maori culture soon via New Zealand schools became the conventional New Zealand history.

In 1852, chief Te Horeta Taniwha narrated his story to author John White of meeting Captain Cook in the Coromandel in 1769. He said he as a child boarded the Endeavour and witnessed a chief drawing with charcoal a map of New Zealand that climaxed wth Cape Reinga, the departure of the spirits to the Maori homeland Hawaiki. Te Horeta called New Zealand IkaaaMaui (the fish of Maui). Cook then copied the map on paper. There are no records of this encounter in Cook's and Banks' journals. Maoris were and are great yarners. As imaginative, even if sometimes gruesome stories, they are part of New Zealand's cultural identity. European authors and artists have made much use of them as children's and adults' tales. Weaponised for sovereignty and land demands, they turn tribal Orwellian. This Maori map first appears in the British record of the chief's map drawing in 1792 in Norfolk. Te Horeta was negotiating with British officials the sale of land above the just discovered Coromandel gold mine. He described the Coromandel gold miners as "albatrosses merely seeking food".

The Struggle For A New Zealand Constitution

In the 1840s, British policy in New Zealand was avowedly guided by the terms of the English version of the Treaty of Waitangi. The New Zealand Company and the settlers detested the Treaty as denying the natural rights of Englishmen. But the Crown was bound to the Treaty by reasons of honour and practical necessity. The Maori as the co-signature to the Treaty had first right in conflicts with the New Zealand Company and settlers over natural resources and self-government. That however did not stop the Crown officials from imposing Constitutions and the settlers from agitating for home rule. The first Constitution was imposed with the establishment of the new Crown colony New Zealand on 3 May 1841. It was made up of the Governor and Legislative and Executive Councils. The Executive Council made up of the most senior New Zealand Crown officials advised the Governor, and the Legislative Council of selected notables passed Ordinances subordinate to Crown Acts. This was the standard senior Government machinery in British colonies. The Executive Council made up of the Governor General and the senior Cabinet Ministers still exists to sign the Government executive documents. The Legislative Council that degenerated into a legislative "rubber stamp" was abolished in 1951. Legislative bodies termed rubber stamps seems to me confounding a metaphor and a literal.

The 1840s was "the Hungry Forties" in Europe. This is most infamous in the Irish famine. There was mass hunger throughout Europe induced by over population and bad harvests. In David Copperfield, the waiter stole David's dinner because he was hungry. This led to the Chartist agitation in Great Britain. The Chartists were artisans and traders who looked back to the freemen Witan Councils in Anglo Saxon England and naively thought manhood suffrage in the British House of Commons would restore them. In reality, Great Britain was governed by privileged Royal and upper classes. They had no intention of surrendering their power to the common people. In the revolutionary year of 1848, the Chartists laid London to siege but at the last hour lost their nerve for a revolution. That has been written out of British official history. In 1848, the King of France, the Emperor of Austria and the Pope fled from their capitals. The Queen of England might have fled her capital too if Shelley and Lord Byron were still alive. The artisans and traders were the class that mostly emigrated to New Zealand where State coercive power was usually fragile and the air was much more free. The crushed municipality and successful trade unionism in Port Nicholson and Petone was colonial virulent Chartism. And there were plenty of other cases starting from the fifth of February 1840 at Waitangi where the deplorables agitated over the violation of their traditional English rights.

In 1847, Lord Ashley warned the British Parliament that if it failed to make a stand for a Christian Parliament and admitted non Christian Jews, it would soon have to make a stand for a white Parliament or even in the end for a male parliament. His final reference to Parliament's last stand most likely was facetious and drew laughter. Lord Ashley later became the legendary philanthropist and social reformer, the Earl of Shaftesbury. His contribution to the House debate usefully reflects conventional British political assumptions until the end of World War One, seventy years later. Until then, Democracy which is identified with universal suffrage was a subversive term. The right to suffrage was based on one's social and economic position in society. Female suffrage was blocked after non propertied male suffrage because of common assumptions of women's role being domestic and home carer. New Zealand had universal franchise by 1893. That was considered in respectable Western opinion as almost revolutionary.

One year after the Flagstaff War, Governor Grey promulgated New Zealand's first home rule Constitution. On 28 August 1846, "an ACT to make further Provisions for the Government of the New Zealand Islands" received the Royal Assent from Queen Victoria. This has become known as the 1846 New Zealand Constitution Act. On 23 December, a Royal Charter was issued that divided the Colony into two provinces: New Ulster and New Munster. New Ulster and New Munster were originally the Irish names for the North and South Islands promulgated by Irishman Governor Hobson in the establishment of the Crown Colony in 1841.

'Instructions' in a letter from the Colonial Secretary Earl Grey, to Governor Grey was enclosed with the Charter. "The 'Instructions' were the practical manual to the Act. Issued through the British Executive Council (Privy Council), the 'Instructions' contained elements essential to the functioning of the Act. They were the contentious issues buried from the scrutiny of the British Parliament and press. The Earl Greys have nothing to do with Earl Grey tea except for the popular association of a posh tea with a sedate English upper class family.

In 1845, the House of Commons had debated the colonial question of New Zealand. Both the Parliamentary Parties, the Tories and the Whigs endorsed the principle of political representation for the settlers in New Zealand. The consideration of Maori representation did not appear to cross these statesmen's minds. In the enlightenment of that age, Maoris who lived as the propertied white settlers lived in New Zealand would have been included among them. But there weren't any. There was at least one middle class half caste living a European life, Hini Te Kiri. But Hini was even more excluded as a female. After the Waitangi Treaty signing, the British statesmen saw no need to translate British Constitutional documents into Maori. Maori saw no need to ask for consultation either if they were even aware of these new Constitutional developments. There would remain a European world and a Maori world in New Zealand for another two decades.

In this 1845 House of Commons debate, the Whig Opposition called for the imminent introduction of colonist self-government. The Opposition Leader, Lord Russel argued that only self-government could extricate the colony of its financial difficulties and embarrassments. The Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, endorsed the seventeenth century municipalities in Colonial New England that would be the germ of New Zealand self-government, "widening their sphere by degrees according as the land becomes settled and peopled". Sir Robert meant British people. The only Party contention was the timing.

A steady barrage of petitions and newspaper articles from the New Zealand Company and its supporters had galvanised the parliamentarians into warm support for New Zealand self- government. Most parliamentarians were now amenable. In his A Letter from Sydney in 1829, Edward Wakefield was lyrical on colonial self-government: "The colonists might frame their own laws, in a Colonial Assembly under the eye of a viceroy, incapable of wrong and possessing a veto like the King of England, but whose secretaries like the ministers of England should be responsible to the people." Like the other Englishman, Lord Stanley, Edward seemed not to be aware of Scotland, Ireland and Wales in the British Crown. Edward's radical ideas were incorporated to an idealised image of the traditional English Constitution. In the following decades, Edward through the New Zealand Company would be directing these self-governing ideas to the developing colony New Zealand. The impecunious British middle class had natural attachments to these radical ideas which might make them successful and rich.

In the nineteenth century,"the rights of Englishmen" not only resonated with English traditions of Anglo Saxon liberty and Magna Carta, it had acquired radical meanings upsetting to the British ruling classes. In the years after the 1789 French revolution to the climax of the Chartist uprising in London in 1848, the British lower classes far from always accepted their historic deferential status. The French revolution brought to Britain revolutionary ideas and practical ways of demanding popular sovereignty. British "radicals" adapted these French examples to British conditions. Through public oratory and the printing press, they disseminated them into the culture. Augmented by the widespread impoverishment induced by the Napoleonic wars and in the unsettled conditions of the new industrial age, deference often broke down and was replaced by mass agitation and rebellions against the Constitution. The radical, Feargus O'Connor won a devoted following among the British masses for his public denunciation of "THE THING; the millocracy, the shopocrats or capitalists."

Since the early years of the nineteenth century, British radicals had been applying new radically rational ideas to Crown legislation and administration. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham's legacy of Utilitarianism was the source of many of the concepts of these philosophic radicals. Jeremy had based all his philosophy on his adage; 'the greatest good of the greatest number'. Now the philosophic radicals were applying Utilitarianism to the radical causes of Natural Rights and the rights of labour . Natural Rights emanated from the ideas of Thomas Paine that power that had any source other than the people was contrary to the rights of man. In 1820, James Mill published a reformist tract Government which argued for the reform of the House of Commons on Utilitarian principles. The radical Corbett in 1816 declared: "Suffrage commensurate with direct Taxation, seems to grant that property only ought to be represented: whereas labour makes property, and therefore in the name of common sense ought to be represented."

These ideas made a potent, sometimes explosive, mixture to the popular agitation of the era. They together with a revival of historical memory of the Witans the (Anglo Saxon Councils) inspired the mass Chartist movement that petitioned Parliament in the 1830s and 1840s for manhood suffrage and other causes such as cheap corn. When the Chartists' petitions failed, they resorted to intimidation and insurrection. Class consciousness grew as the 1832 Reform Act set a universal income limit between the franchised and the non franchised. Benjamin Disraeli in his 1845 social novel, Sybil wrote about the rise of two antagonistic nations of England, the rich and the poor.

The 1846 Constitution Act gave to the New Zealand settlers some concessions to their popular demands for Home Rule. The autocracy and prestige of the Governor would be preserved. Crown prerogatives in London of disallowance of colonial ordinances would remain. By an English literacy clause, a Maori role in colonial self-government would be denied. Radical ideas becoming the foundation of a radical self-government would be blocked. A graded property suffrage and the literacy clause would exclude self-government by 'mob' rule. It was estimated in 1848 half the European population in New Zealand could not write and nearly one third could not read. It was also estimated that the literacy rate of Maori was higher. They took to literacy as the path way to biblical Christianity. But their lack of English literacy excluded them from any further part in Constitutional Government since the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Act endowed a restricted colonialist self-government. It would supplant the colonial Governor and Legislative Council model established in 1841. Unlike the Mother country with its ancient traditions of local self-government, the New Zealand colony had to begin almost from scratch. Crown autocracy had disallowed all attempts at local self-government by the settlers. The small dispersed European settlements were under firm protection and governance but were lacking in municipal amenities. In his submission of the Bill to the House of Commons, Colonial Secretary, Earl Grey, stated that "the foundation of the new system would be the creation of municipal institutions from which the general government would evolve". In drafting the Act, British officials copied the contemporary British municipalities model. The 1836 Municipal Corporations Act had implemented their charter. Both the 1832 Reform Act and the 1836 Municipal Corporations Act belonged to an era of constitutional reform by the 1832- 1841 Whig Ministry. Utilitarian and radical principles had influenced their drafting.

The New Zealand municipalities would be governed by locally elected councils which annually elected a Mayor. "Every such common council as aforesaid shall have power at any such meeting as aforesaid to make and ordain bye-laws for the good order and government of the borough" The functions of the councils were policing, public utilities and rates. They also included "establishing schools, hospitals and other eleemosynary institutions". The Mayors and Councilors elected the Lieutenant Governor and the House of Representatives of the Ulster and New Munster Provinces. Each Province had a Crown appointed Legislative Council. The Provincial Assemblies elected the House of Representatives. Both the General Assembly and the Provincial Assemblies enacted ordinances. The voters for the councils were drawn from the burgess roll that required a property qualification of any six months' tenement occupation. This franchise excluded illiterates in the English language, aliens, felons and debtors to the borough. Therefore the franchise at the foundation level of the burgess roll included all male British subjects of sobriety, able to read and write in the English language, and sufficiently set up to at least occupy a shack. Men had to have established wealth to qualify for the Provincial and General Assemblies. All colonial officials were required to swear an oath of allegiance before discharging their duties. The Governor and the Lieutenant Governors were required to swear a traditional oath of allegiance to the established Church of England. All non Anglican British Christians could do so since 1829. So New Zealand never had the heritage of official exclusion of Catholics and dissenters.

The literacy clause excluded the Maori without any recourse to racially exclusive language. A Crown colony was the antithesis of a Native Government. Crown officialdom did not recognise any obligation to gift the suffrage upon any Maori. But it made Maori increasingly hostage to a hostile settler population. The evangelical Aborigines Protection Society promptly attacked the Constitution Act as "a deliberate violation of the Treaty of Waitangi and an incitement to racial conflict".

In his 1846 letter to Governor Grey, Earl Grey wrote:

"With the increase of Christian knowledge of civilization, of the use of the English tongue, and of mutual confidence between the two races, these distinctions of law and legal customs will I trust, become unnecessary and obsolete."

Earl Grey was expressing a pious hope that that evangelical Christianity would overcome the Maori religion and customs before the inequities in the suffrage induced racial conflict. In the Colonial Office, guided by Governor Grey's glowing dispatches, the Maori were making rapid progress in their tutelage in British civilisation. In his February 1847 letter to Earl Grey, Governor Grey wrote, "The natives now resorted freely to our courts of justice and our character for justice stood far higher than at any previous time."

Earl Grey's December 1846 letter instructed Governor Grey to demarcate Maori and European settlements into provincial and aboriginal districts. The legacy of the New England municipalities merged with evangelical pieties when Earl Grey wrote:

"With an increasing British population and with the advance of the natives in the arts of civilized life, the provincial districts will progressively descend into the aboriginal, until at

length the distinction shall have entirely disappeared."

The British statesmen in their youth at the English public schools had been inculcated in the maxims of the Roman Empire. They could all recite famous Latin quotations. Veni, vidi, vinci. Came Saw Conquered. Parere subjectis et debellare superbos. To spare the vanquished and subdue the arrogant. Pax Romanus. The Roman peace.

But of practical knowledge, how to govern an Empire to the ends of the earth, they were exceedingly remiss. The high sounding phrases from the Colonial Office and Parliament did not match the reality of New Zealand many thousands of miles and months of time distant. That was left to the New Zealand officials to deal with. Governor Grey was the Colonial Office's instrument for the peaceful development of New Zealand for all her population. In his December letter, Earl Grey alluded to "topics of the greatest importance to the future good government of New Zealand. Governor Grey was ordered to next introduce British courts, political institutions, schools and churches. The 1846 New Zealand Constitution was designed by British officialdom to be the foundation of the transformation of a British colony of thirteen thousand European colonists and a much larger Native population into an antipodean idealised English civilisation.

The pre -1840s New Zealand settlers numbered only about two thousand and by 1846 were a small minority of the European settlers. They immediately became very unpopular as having "gone native". Their accommodation to Maori cultural practices and language made them suspect or even accused of treachery. The missionaries and a few officials sympathetic to Maori rights were derided. Philo-Maori was the most polite and educated accusation. The general British assumption was their Maori neighbours were savages. Both populations were rough in their dealings. Maori were now adopting European livestock and crops. There were constant feuds over land boundaries. In their trade dealings, Maori did not often grasp the principle of supply and demand. Trade was not in their culture. The Europeans would abuse them in degrading language. The New Zealand Company which represented general European opinion in New Zealand never deviated in its propaganda to encourage British settlement and imposition over the whole of New Zealand. It and the settlers unceasingly agitated for British colonisation and colonist home rule over the whole of New Zealand. In his December letter, Earl Grey had ordered all "waste land" in New Zealand to be registered as Crown property. The greater portion of Maori land usage was in this "waste land" category. This Crown decree was quickly revoked after an uproar by humanitarians and Maori leaders. The settlers had been jubilant. This was a sign how with growing British settlement, officialdom was moving to support settler interests. In its 1846 Report, the New Zealand Company had referred to the Treaty of Waitangi as "a fraud on the ignorant Natives and a sham towards more intelligent people".

In December 1847, the British Government decided to suspend the New Zealand Constitution Act for at least five years. The Suspending Act became law on 7 March 1848. The designated House of Representatives was replaced with a more inclusive appointed Legislative Council. The designated Provincial Lieutenant Governors and General Assemblies were replaced by appointed Provincial Legislative Councils. However, the designated municipalities were implemented, At the local level, elected Mayors and Councils flourished or foundered. A tradition was started and not yet ended of government and civic development at grass roots. Governor Grey in his letters to the Colonial Secretary had concertedly protested that the imposition of a minority settler population over the Maori population would cause the evils considered most harmful by officialdom. The Maori would feel insulted by their inferior position. This would encourage Maori separatism and nationalism.

This suspension of the now generally despised colonial "despotism" induced an eruption of organised movements for representative government. In Wellington, a public meeting composed a memorial to condemn "the longer postponement of a Representative government". The colonial newspapers and public meetings of constitutional associations orchestrated a campaign against "philo-Maori" politics, and the autocracy of Governor Grey. Settler leaders realised full home rule was not yet realistic. The colony was still rudimentary and marred with racial problems. However, Grey's non consultative approach engendered an alienation and anger at the colonial government. Grey's further constitutional reforms in preparation for home rule were always construed as sops to public discontent.

When the Constitution Act was promulgated in New Zealand, it was nowhere publicly greeted as a progressive step in the constitutional evolving of the colony. It was greeted with scorn by the newspaper editors and with apathy by their readers. The estimated illiterate third of the settler population most likely like the Maori knew nothing about it. A male British "respectable" gentry was the Crown's ideal for home rule. They were expected as the colonial aristocracy to be the best qualified. But New Zealand's circumstances did not fit. Established settler family wealth to dominate New Zealand had not developed. Most settlers were not amenable to "rule by the best". They had immigrated to New Zealand to build a less difficult and more equal way of life. The Maori still held the ascendancy in strategic occupation of the North Island and moral and Treaty claims on Crown favouritism.

In 1852, the Colonial Office and Governor Grey tried a new Constitution for New Zealand. The 1852 New Zealand Constitution Act. Between the suspension of the 1846 Constitution Act and its successor, there was organised public incitement against the Governor. At the Wellington Settlers' Constitutional Association meeting concerning taxation without representation, Mr Buckle's address was received favourably."We the legitimate source of all true power....Shall we tamely submit; quietly to receive the yoke of serfdom?" This was according to the Southern Cross newspaper 10 October 1851. At their 1851 public meeting, the Nelson settlers drew up a petition to the Crown for home rule with "universal suffrage" They were careful to point out in their petition, universal suffrage did not mean a Native representation. The Maoris "are not yet sufficiently advanced in civilisation to be able to exercise the franchise with but very few exceptions." As the Wairau massacre was nine years before, they may have been especially wary to stress that. However it might be noted they at least publicly did not preclude Maori suffrage when Maoris lived settlers' lives. They most likely thought that would never happen in significant numbers. The Nelson petition claimed its public meetings were attended "with scarcely an exception, by every male adult residing in the district". The exceptions were most likely drunks and a small number of Maoris. If women attended the meeting, their presence was not noted in the petition.

The 1852 Constitution Act checked the constitutional demands of these colonial demagogues. In his address in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister Lord Derby pronounced that property would continue to be represented in the New Zealand Legislative Council. This appointed Council would become "a valuable check on the democratic principle". The colonial "aristocratic element" would evolve to "approximate to the principles of the British Constitution". As with the 1846 Constitution Act, the 1852 Act was initially drafted by the Colonial Secretary Earl Grey with input from Governor Grey and settler leaders. The appointed Legislative Council and the lack of the secret ballot in the Act would make property represented as in the British Constitution.

On 30 June, 1852, the New Zealand Constitution Act received the Royal Assent. "An Act to grant a Representative Constitution to the Colony of New Zealand". The new constitution retained essential elements of the 1846 Act. But while the Legislative Council would remain Crown appointees, the House of Representative would be elected by direct vote. The number of Provinces would be increased to six. Provincial Governments would be by directly elected Provincial Councils and Superintendents. The Superintendents replaced the designated Provincial Governors. By title at least, the Governor need not fear rivalry from a provincial nabob.

The Provincial Governments made laws and ordinances for the "Peace, Order and Good Government of such Province". The provinces were responsible for minor civil and criminal law. They had no jurisdiction independent of the New Zealand Governor and Parliament. The municipalities remained to collect rates and run local utilities. The bigger municipalities were soon designated as cities. Christchurch was first in 1856. The different ethnic and cultural make up of the provinces was not recognised.

In the preamble of the 1852 Constitution Act , the constitutional history of New Zealand was told from its beginnings as a Dependency of New South Wales. A separate Maori historic and future constitutional role was not mentioned. The Treaty of Waitangi was a ghost in the Act. The Crown right of pre-emption of Native land remained. The Act prohibited the Provincial Governments from "Inflicting any Disabilities or Restrictions on persons of the Native Race to which Persons of European Birth or Descent would not also be subjected." The literacy qualification was abandoned. Instead to thwart "mob" rule, a small property qualification was included. As a temporary expedient measure, Native districts "should for the present be maintained for the Government of themselves". The electors would be every qualified "Man of the Age of Twenty-One or upwards". While the Constitution excluded non British subjects and felons, it unlike the former Constitution granted the vote to felons who had completed their sentence. Electoral districts would be proportionally equal to the number of electors. The new franchise would be male, partly democratic, and British (including an insignificant number of Maori descent),

All House of Representative and Legislative Council members were required to swear "true Allegiance to Her Majesty or at least an "Affirmation or Declaration".

There would be no Government by inherited wealth which in New Zealand scarcely yet existed. The colonial statesmen had cut their political teeth in the constitutional agitation against Governor Grey. They brought into the House of Representatives and Provincial Councils once radical ideology, now elitist.

From the first elections under the Act in 1853, the settlers generally treated wth contempt the property qualification. All settlers claiming the right to vote were allowed to vote. The scandalous electoral rolls were tolerated except when there were attempts to enroll Maori. If a Maori stepped up to vote, there is no record of it. The Maori semi- independent districts drafted in the Constitution Act were never gazetted. Crown law appeared settled that the Maori had no independent constitutional status.

In the 1853 New Zealand elections, the hustings went unnoticed among the Maori except in Auckland. On nomination of the candidates' day, large bodies of Maoris gathered in the Auckland streets to watch the proceedings. When the hustings were completed, several Maoris ascended the platform and addressed the crowd in comic mimicry of the speakers.

The New Zealand electorate from its beginning in 1853 until the end of the nineteenth century rarely voted for working class candidates and distribution of property. Working class were scarcely represented in Parliament. If they were, they were self made business men. As in England, men of property and superior education were voted into Parliament and were expected to set an example of sobriety and good governance. New Zealand was the land of rising expectations. Even the workers aspired not for class solidarity but to join the nobs. After 1858, the appointment of special revising officers enforced a more legitimate electorate and partially reduced this "crowd" politics.

The Constitutional reformers in New Zealand were opportunistic ad hoc radicals. By their superior income and class, they became the natural leaders in Parliament. Their agitation in public meetings and newspapers for "Englishmen's rights" in New Zealand made them democrats. Their demagoguery claimed public altruism. But their advocacy had the end result of development of a professional political class. They were in origin nearly all professional men and pastoralists.

After the 1853 election, London ceased to interfere in the political affairs of New Zealand except on Maori issues. The New Zealand Parliament made the laws which were signed off by the Governor. Sometimes the Legislative Council rejected populist House of Representative Bills. Or the Governor reserved Bills to London which fobbed them off. But over the second half of the nineteenth century, the radical element in Parliament worked to undermine the conservative checks. The checks were the rear guard actions of "respectable" political opinion. The Legislative Council was stymied from the start from real power and influence by the Governor's right to appoint and pack them. The Governor took the advice of the Secretaries (Ministers) drawn from the House of Representatives. The 1856 New Zealand Parliament was the first "Responsible Government". That meant the House of Representatives was able to get its act together and appoint a Colonial Secretary (Premier) and subordinate Secretaries with majority Parliamentary support to promulgate the laws and advise the Governor. Ever since, that has been the model of the New Zealand Parliament. In 1856, New Zealand had three Colonial Secretaries. The first one, the pacifist Henry Sewell lasted less than a fortnight. That seems a bad governance precedent. Or perhaps a good democratic precedent. Three heads of Government followed by years and years of one head of Government has happened in New Zealand every few decades.

The Premier, by 1864, eclipsed the Governor. That was a lucrative but a morally dismal year in New Zealand history. The new settler Government moved rapidly to dispossess land from the Maori rebels, expel them and plant in their place British settlements. More about that later.

In 1868, in a seminal symbolic event, Governor Grey was replaced by an ineffectual Governor and the British army withdrawn from New Zealand. New Zealand was left to sink or swim. Later that year, the wars flared up again in great escapes and massacres.

Isaac Featherstone. One of New Zealand's founding fathers. Born in 1813 in England, Isaac qualified as a medical doctor. He arrived in Wellington in 1841. He served in Parliament from 1853-70. Except for the first two years, that was in a Wellington electorate. He held two Ministerial positions. He was the first Superintendent of Wellington Province in the same years as his years in Parliament. Before it became the capital in 1865, Wellington was a struggling raw amenities town. As is the way of all capitals, Wellington soon got all the amenities that the colony could afford. Isaac struggled and prospered with the colony's fortunes. Upon his arrival in New Zealand, he clashed with the Wakefields. He found out his New Zealand Company purchase of productive land was a worthless swamp. He questioned Edward's honesty in a newspaper editorial. That insult to a gentleman's honour led to a duel in 1847 in Wellington. He was Edward's doctor. Isaac fired and missed. Edward fired into the air, saying he would not shoot a man with seven daughters. In 1856, Isaac was quoted as saying about Maori, "to smooth down their dying pillow". Isaac meant the extinction of the Maori way of life which he considered was holding back the progress of the colony. He could have chosen his words more carefully. He led troops in the New Zealand war in a dressing gown, holding a cigar instead of a gun. He was noted for his unscrupulous land dealings which made him vey rich. A North Island town near Wellington, Featherston, is named after him. Isaac was called affectionately "the little doctor".

1860s- The decade of war and millenarianism

In reports published in Parliamentary records, Governor Grey from his return to New Zealand in 1861, repeatedly warned the rebellious tribes of dire consequences and seizure of their land, if they could not stop blood curdling threats, and random attacks on law abiding settlers. Men, women and children were wantonly murdered. The Maori King movement set up a separate, independent State in the Waikato, the heart of the North Island. Peaceful co-existence might have ensured if the attacks on settlers had stopped. The British Empire was not then in an expansionist mood, and was generally content to rule indirectly through Native Kingdoms, rather than conquer them. Mass lethal munitions war had not started. War was a risky and expensive business in an Empire mindful of costs. But the Maori warrior spirit was stirred to restore Te Ika a Maui to tribal rule. In parallel, British patriotism was stirred at the progress of her new colony, New Zealand. No person, such as the gentle Henry Sewell, or the peace maker and statesman, Tamihana could stop a flagration that ravaged most of the populated rural districts of the North Island. Few buildings in the war districts were left standing. Populations mostly Maori and also European were rendered destitute, and made refugees. A British army was brought in from Australia to fight the Maori rebels. The conflicts began in Taranaki when settlers arrived to take up their lands purchased from conquering tribes, only to find the tribes defeated in the musket wars had returned to reclaim their ancestral lands. The blood feuds characteristic of wars happened. However, after the Maori King Tawaio declared a cessation of conflict in 1865, the Waikato war ended. Guerilla warfare by the HauHau, a fanatical religious sect led by Titokowaru, and the Te Kooti war continued. In 1872, the last shots were fired by New Zealand militia, and Te Kooti slipped away to exile in the Maori Kingdom. The British army and the militias did not in the documented records engage in wanton massacres. There is a curious dearth of records of Maori prisoners in the Waikato war and historian James Cowan makes elusive reference that dead Maori combatants were thrown into the river. Waikato Maori prisoners were imprisoned on a hulk at Auckland harbour. They escaped back to their homes with the apparent connivance of Grey. Arguably worse than massacring them, the British engaged in wanton destruction of the rebel Maori food crops. The Maori population from deprivation and starvation dropped drastically. Disease was the third apocalypse. The little doctor lamented it while he brightened at the progress of the colony and his own growing wealth. The wars were confined to the North Island. About four percent of the land in New Zealand was confiscated from the Maori rebels. About half of this land was later returned. Maori tribes in districts around Auckland were expelled and their land taken because they refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. They constituted a security threat to Auckland but this was not George Grey's shining hour. The South Island was in a boom from gold and pastoralism. South Island Provincial leaders petitioned for the South island to break away and form a new colony. Many North Island tribes kept neutral initially, but plunder of their resources and their warrior spirit propelled them to take sides. Maori tribes that fought for the Maori king became known as Kingites. Those that fought for the British became known to the British as friendlies and to themselves as Kupapa Old tribal animosities going back to the musket wars and earlier motivated them.

Hini Te Kiri became a legend for giving water to wounded British soldiers at the battle of Gate Pa. Other Maori Kingites veterans disputed that. They said their women and children were sent away before a battle. With the rise of the HauHau cult, Hini changed to the settler side. She preferred civilisation after all. She finished her life as a temperance worker.

An unpleasant comment from a Taranaki newspaper, "We would rather you were dead" has been turned into a solo-quay in a New Zealand show. Songs To Uncle Scrim. It is taught in New Zealand Colleges. In the interest of nuance, it should be included with Titokowru's song of the settlers slithering down his throat. After shock and awe, the Maori leaders, including Titokowaru settled for the British peace. That is: We British will be hypocrites but we won't be thieves. In return, you can live a Western lifestyle with your remaining land that if you work hard and well, could make you rich.

If you travel through the North Island with a sense of history, you become aware that the lands that were kupapa or stayed neutral, remain Maori demographic and cultural strongholds. In 1883, all the Maori rebels were pardoned by the New Zealand Parliament. Parliament was anxious to settle the wars and develop the colony.

Te Kooti. The most legendary of Maori rebels. A successful trader and roustabout, he was imprisoned in 1865 in a Government dragnet of troublesome Maori men. They were shipped to the Chatham Islands in events that recall Guantanamo prison. While they did not receive British justice, they did not receive American psychosis either. Te Kooti was named after an English missionary, Coates. But a legend circulated, he was given the name because he kept on calling out,Te Kooti, meaning the Court. He led a daring escape back to his home territory, the East Coast. For several months he held out in the bush and attempted to negotiate a peaceful return to his and his followers' homes. But as has been noticed. There is nothing the country likes more than a good man hunt. Perhaps perishing from hunger, he led his followers back to his home territory, and led a fearsome massacre and rapine. It was reported there were sights too terrible to mention. In 1889, he attempted to return again to his home territory. Te Kooti was now pardoned and there were no legal grounds to stop him. However the constabulary arrested him and he was sent to Mount Eden prison in Auckland. After taking the vow of abstinence from temperance ladies, he was released after two days. He was reported to have said. "He regretted his atrocities but once you put Maoris on the warpath you can't stop them." In his unsuccessful return to his home territory, he was championed by New Zealand born, radical Desmond Arthur. Desmond was thrown out of public meetings for being the only white person to defend Te Kooti. Desmond after years of radicalism, made his final home in America. Desmond was in the Nietzschean socialist tradition of his contemporary, Jack London. Desmond is now one of the most famous "far right" literary ideologues in America. Te Kooti's war on established wealth and property inspired him for a "tooth and claw"world view. Te Kootti was also a builder, a healer and a prophet. He founded the Ringatu Church.

King Tawhiao was the second Maori King and a religious leader. He was from the Waikato tribes and was born in 1825 in what became known as the King Country. When his father, Potatau, the first King died in 1860, he succeeded him. He reigned for thirty-four years. After the wars he became a pacifist and. a Mormon. He discouraged integration into the Western world. Maori education and prosperity was held back in consequence. Maori Royalty has continued to reign over Maori ceremony but not to rule.

1870s- The Boom and Bust Decade

Julius Vogel. Premier and visionary. Born in London in 1835 from a moderately wealthy Jewish family. In 1841, Oliver Twist with its diabolical Jew Fagin was published in London. In 1838, Julius attended a private secular school. Undersized with Hebraic features, one imagines him heavily bullied. The Rothschilds were then entering into London society and politics as fabulously wealthy cosmopolitans rather than deicide Jews. Julius left his school and London after one year for a Jewish school. He returned to his old school two years later. After work in his grandfather's London merchant office, and study at a mining school, Julius departed with a male friend to seek his fortune in the recently discovered gold fields of Victoria. He was seventeen. Julius had a liberal but restricted education. Among the swells, he was always the outsider, likely called behind his back, that Yid and horrid Jew. Cartoons always stressed his Jewish features and portrayed him as a con man if not swindler. His career and reputation closely paralleled his near contemporary Benjamin Disraeli. However opposite to Disraeli, he did not become a beneficiary of the Rothschilds and lived his later life in extreme financial difficulties.

When I was in the third form at secondary school, our teacher made us draw a line in our exercise books. Before in New Zealand was tribalism and backwardness, after was the progress and prosperity to an advanced country of "the Vogel era". As for Maori history, I can only recall his stories of the escapes of the outlaw Te Kooti. I don't know what my Maori classmates were thinking. Their Maori background appeared to be Kupapa. Did they slightly wince as when I was taught at University about the antics of the ADL?

Julius soon left his mark in Victoria and from 1861 in Dunedin, as a boom and bust entrepreneur. Also as a journalist and author. I have yet to hear of someone who succeeded both as a businessman and a visionary. Even Mark Zuckerberg is fitting the pattern of boom and bust. Julius founded and edited newspapers. He was prominent as both a provincial and national politician. In provincial politics, he was Superintendent of Otago and led the campaign for South Island separation as a new colony. In national politics, he was Premier for three years at two different times from 1873 to 1876. His most famous act was his 1870 budget as Treasurer. It caused shock and horror in the House of Representatives and in all conservative circles by borrowing ten million pounds. With this London loan, New Zealand ceased to be an indebted backward war ravaged colony and became the progeny of Vogel. That is boom and bust from new mass immigration, railways and the dissolution of the Provinces in 1876. Vogel envisaged New Zealand as "The Britain of the South Seas". A flourishing population rich with agriculture and industry. Britain without the poverty, pollution and overcrowding. New Zealand is a multitude of volcanic islands, wild forests and dangerous rivers. Not a rich fertile land of hills and canals. Vogel's career has parallels with Te Kooti. He became Treasurer in 1869 after the fall of the previous Ministry from Te Kooti's outlawry. That instigated his 1870 budget.

Like Te Kooti, he was a visionary, gambler and debauchee. Both ended their days ridden with gout, Vogel in his house in London, Te Kooti at his local country pub. Te Kooti was buried by his followers in a grave known only to them. Vogel was buried in the London Jewish cemetery. There is a statue of Disraeli in London. There are no statues of Vogel and Te Kooti. Vogel is a non person in Otago having supported the dissolution of Otago and all the other Provinces in 1876 two months after his Premiership. Thereby living up to his reputation as not a gentleman and untrustworthy. However there is in Lower Hutt, Vogel House, the former official residence of the Prime Minister.

In 1871, New Zealand had her first secret ballot election. Now the voters would not be beholden to the local swells.

In his novel published in 1868, Captain Grant's Children, French author Jules Verne has scenes set in the North Island during the 1860s war. As a Frenchman he of course took the Maori rebel side while being startled at their savagery. He likely was thinking of Julius Vogel and his milieu when he praised the colonial British genius for fighting a survivalist war and continuing to develop the colony at the same time.

The Danish connection

Ditlev Monrad. The Danish Prime Minster and Churchman who after leading his country in the Second Schleswig War against Prussia took sanctuary in New Zealand. The war was catastrophic for Denmark, drastically reducing her territory and her European power status. Ditlev, depressed and disillusioned, bought land and settled near the North Island provincial town, Palmerston North. In the tradition of the first pioneers, he first lived in a small hut and then erected a timber house. He and his family cleared bush, and farmed cows and sheep. Ditriv helped many other Scandinavian immigrants find land to settle in New Zealand. After disturbances by HauHau, he and his family became refugees in Wellington. He returned to Denmark in 1869 to resume his political and Church career. The HauHau had legitimate land grievances but their return to savage pre Christian practices made them as popular as ISIS. Ditlev bequeathed his collection of European art treasures to New Zealand. They are now stored in the national museum, Te Papa. Colonies of Scandinavians under Vogel's public work projects emigrated to Ditlev's former district in the lower North Island. They founded farming communities and later towns as they cleared the bush and planted civilisation. Their largest town is Dannevirke, named after the Viking age fort in Denmark. That was considered the cultural origin of the Danes. In the Second Schleswig War the site had fallen to the Prussians. Monrad intermediate school is named after Ditlev in Palmerston North.

Sir John Hall. He was born in about 1824 in England. His father was a master mariner and ship owner. At the age of ten, his father sent him to a Swiss school to learn foreign languages. Like Julius Vogel, his schooling was private secular, and aimed him for a commercial career. He was appointed in 1845 as a junior clerk in the British Post Office. In 1848, he was a special constable in London in the Chartist uprising alongside Louis Napoleon, later Emperor of France. In 1852, John sailed into Lyttelton. He settled in the new Province of Canterbury as a sheep station owner and farmer. John soon entered national and Canterbury politics. He was elected to Parliament in 1855. He was Premier in 1879-82. He won a majority in Parliament by enacting two radical reforms of his predecessor George Grey. They were and remain to this day: manhood suffrage and triennial Parliaments. John was always the rear guard reactionary voice in New Zealand politics. But he was not above horse trading for political power and soothing his conscience with good governance and frugal fiscal measures. Maori manhood suffrage had been granted in 1867. It had originally been implemented for kupapa as a reward. But Maori allies and former rebels took to elections enthusiastically, bringing them into their own culture. That made Maori men the first unpropertied class to officially receive the vote in New Zealand. On the issue of women suffrage, John was a sincere advocate. He worked closely with the suffragettes as their most stalwart Parliamentary champion. Woman's suffrage was as much a moral cause as a radical cause. John was on the side of the moral cause. Female suffrage would balance out the radical male vote.in support of healthier communities and homes. John was almost as much a Church man as a statesman. In 1881, there was the stain of Parihaka. My fifth form history book called Parihaka "the humorous burlesque".

Te Whiti. Born in about 1830. A warrior, later pacifist and prophet. He founded the village of Parihaka in Taranaki as a refuge for Maori dispossessed by the wars and Crown land confiscations. Te Whiti after the defeat of the rebels, renounced war. A tohunga (expert in Maori culture) he envisaged a New Zealand future with European skills but Maori rule. The Europeans had other ideas. His pacifist followers had a reputation for threatening and riotous behaviour against the local white farmers. In 1881, around fifteen hundred armed constabulary and volunteers, led by the Native Affairs Minister John Bryce, invaded Parihaka. Rumours had abounded that Parihaka had guns. Whether co-incidence or design, the invasion happened on Guy Fawkes anniversary day. The soldiers were greeted by singing children. Parihaka had become nationally notorious for its unsanitary conditions and sheltering of men considered dangerous including the now peace maker Titokowaru. The women were solicitous to the soldiers with food and comfort. Parihaka and its food crops were destroyed by the soldiers and an estimated sixteen hundred followers were expelled. The leaders Te Whiti and Tohu were imprisoned in the South Island for two years. In 1903, William Baucke met Te Whiti. In their previous encounter, William and his brother as small boys had crouched together at their home all night in terror in the Chathams during a "Maori scare" led by the warrior Te.Whiti. Te Whiti pointed to mount Taranaki and said to William. "Ask that mountain, Taranaki saw it all."

Liberal opinIon in the metropolitan newspapers mocked the invasion of Parihaka as eight years later it mocked the public panic at the return of Te Kooti to the East Coast, and the other "Maori scares". Liberal opinion held to the delusion that the racial conflicts had ended with the final shots fired at Te Kooti's warriors in 1872. New Zealand was now a land of peace, prosperity and racial assimilation. Liberal opinion always held its tongue until the scares were over.

Te Whiti has become a folk legend since Dick Scott wrote his Cultural Marxist history, Ask That Mountain in 1975. Parihaka has grown to mammoth proportions as the unsourced inspirer of Gandhi and the first town in New Zealand to have electricity. The latter indeed is entirely fake history. Poetry, songs and paintings have honoured Te Whiti. A University history teacher in 1992 once went into a tirade "All you hear about is Te Whiti". He later made a humble apology to his class.

The visit of King Tawhiao to Auckland

1882- The year of two marvels in Hall's last year of his Premiership. The Maori King came out of the cold to Auckland, and New Zealand mutton was refrigerated for export to England. The first refrigerated export mutton has become New Zealand folk lore. The other event has been conveniently forgotten about by most white people in the ever upward colony New Zealand.

What the king saw in Auckland

New Zealand Herald newspaper. January 18-19 1882.

The first frozen meat shipment to Britain

A paean to the white men who didn't hui much but did plenty of doey to make New Zealand in less than a hundred years one of the world most prosperous and technologically advanced countries. New Zealand's first successful shipment of frozen meat to Britain in 1882 had a huge impact on the colony, paving the way for the trade in frozen meat and dairy products that became the cornerstone of New Zealand's twentieth century economy. The Dunedin's voyage was organised by the entrepreneurial William Davidson. For six years, as general manager of an Australasian land company he had experimented with the science of shipping frozen meat around the world. William fitted out a passenger sailing ship, Dunedin with a coal-powered freezing plant. Mutton and lamb carcasses were sent by rail to Port Chalmers. The carcasses were frozen aboard the Dunedin. The Dunedin sailed with its cargo on 15 February. When the vessel became becalmed in the tropics, the crew noticed that the cold air in the hold was not circulating properly. To save his cargo, Captain John Whitson crawled inside and sawed extra air holes, almost freezing to death in the process. Crew members managed to pull him out by a rope and resuscitated him. When the Dunedin arrived in London, only one carcass was condemned. More than a single successful shipment was needed to create a new industry. William set to work creating a marketing and insurance structure to underpin refrigerated shipping. The new technology ultimately enabled the owner-operated family farm to become the standard economic unit in New Zealand for the next century. The Dunedin made another nine successful voyages before disappearing in the Southern ocean in 1890.

The Overthrow of the Maori Kingdom

In 1890 this happened. In this event reported in the press as "The Pukekawa Affair," the Maori Kingdom was overthrown. Heri Kaihau was Secretary to the King. He made a proverbial joke which aroused uneasy laughter among the Pakeha (white people). "While the Maori's eyes were raised to Heaven, the Pakeha snatched the land from under his feet." King Tawhiao had converted to pacifism. He complained that under the peace agreement the Kingites had destroyed all their guns. This seminal event that ended the Maori Kingdom curiously is a vacuum in New Zealand history. I have seen one cryptic book reference. Pukekawa was not mentioned. The King was described during the raid as sitting on a hill. Pukekawa means in Maori bitter hill. Pukekawa was the headquarters of the King in the Waikato war. After the 1882 settlement, the king moved to Pukekawa and made it his capital. The Maori Kingdom had its own laws and policing. Since 1882, the Kings have petitioned for the return of their lost lands and the restoration of the Maori version of the Treaty of Waitangi. So have other Maori leaders and prophets. The King traveled to London in 1884 to petition Queen Victoria. All petitions to the Crown have been referred to the New Zealand Government. which has ignored them. There appears to be no public memory of Pukekawa's Royal history. If Waikato Maori know about it, they keep it secret. Pukekawa has become infamous for two events. The 1920 Eyre murder and Thorne trials; and the 1970 Crewe murders and Thomas trials. Both happened three months after a Royal arrival in New Zealand. Both Thorne and Thomas have avowed their innocence. The Pukekawa Affair was a cryptic code for the final crushing of Maori independence. It was celebrated by the conservatives as progress that it was achieved peacefully, and condemned by the liberal press as "electioneering tactics". I personally regret the lost Maori Kingdom. That turned its proud subjects into catchment labour.

To be continued in my blog: The Liberal Years

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