IN THE CAUDINE FORKS
I would rather be governed by Nero on the spot than by a Board of
Angels in London.--_John Robert Godley_.
Though Governor Hobson landed in January, the formal annexation of the
Colony did not take place until May. He had first to take possession;
and this could only be effectually done with the consent of the native
tribes. The northern chiefs were therefore summoned, and came to meet
the Queen's representative at Waitangi (Water of Weeping). Tents and
a platform were erected, and the question of annexation argued at
length. The French Bishop Pompallier appeared in full canonicals, and
it was found that chiefs under his influence had been well coached
to oppose the new departure. Behind the scenes, too, that worst of
beachcombers, Jacky Marmon, secretly made all the mischief he could.
On the other hand, Henry Williams, representing the Protestant
missionaries, threw his weight into the scale on the Governor's side
and acted as translator. While many of the chiefs were still doubtful,
if not hostile, Waka Nene, the most influential of the Ngapuhi tribe,
spoke strongly and eloquently for annexation. His speech gained the
day, and a treaty was drawn up and signed. By the preamble, Queen
Victoria invited the confederated and independent Chiefs of New
Zealand to concur in Articles to the following effect:--
(1) The Chiefs of New Zealand ceded to Her Majesty, absolutely
and without reservation, all their rights and powers of
Sovereignty.
(2) Her Majesty guaranteed to the Chiefs and Tribes of New
Zealand, full, exclusive, and undisturbed possession of their
Lands and Estates, Forests, Fisheries and other properties;
but the Chiefs yielded to Her Majesty the exclusive right of
Pre-emption over such lands as the proprietors thereof might
be disposed to alienate, at such prices as might be agreed
upon.
(3) Her Majesty gave to the natives of New Zealand all the Rights
and Privileges of British Subjects.
Nearly fifty chiefs signed the treaty there and then, and within six
months--so energetically did the missionaries and Government agents
carry it throughout the tribes--it had been signed by five hundred
and twelve. Only about one chief of first-class rank and importance
refused to sign it. This was that fine barbarian, Te Heu Heu, whose
home lay at the foot of the great volcanoes by Lake Taupo on the
plateau in the centre of the North Island. Te Heu Heu was the last of
the old heathen warriors. Singularly fair-skinned, and standing fully
six feet high, he looked what he was, a patriarch and leader of his
people. Scoffing at the White men and their religion, he defied
Governor and missionaries alike until his dramatic end, which came in
1846, when he and his village were swallowed up in a huge landslide.
At present, as he could neither be coerced nor persuaded, he was let
alone. For the rest, it may fairly be claimed that the Maori race
accepted the Treaty of Waitangi.
They had very good reason to do so. To this day they regard it as the
Magna Charta of their liberties. They were fully aware that under it
the supreme authority passed to the Queen; but they were quite able to
understand that their tribal lands were guaranteed to them. In other
words, they were recognised as the owners in fee simple of the whole
of New Zealand. As one of them afterwards expressed it, "The shadow
passes to the Queen, the substance stays with us."
At the same time Governor Hobson had announced to the white settlers
by proclamation that the Government would not recognise the validity
of any of their land titles not given under the Queen's authority. It
is not easy to see how else he could have dealt with the land-sharks,
of whom there had been an ugly rush from Sydney on the news of the
coming annexation, and most of whom as promptly retreated on finding
the proclamation to be a reality. But at the same time his treaty and
his proclamation were bound to paralyse settlement, to exasperate the
entire white population, and to plunge the infant colony into a sea
of troubles. Outside the missionaries and the officials every one was
uneasy and alarmed. All the settlers were either landowners, land
claimants, or would-be land purchasers. Yet they found themselves at
one and the same time left without titles to all that they thought
they possessed, and debarred from the right of buying anything more
except from the Crown. And as the Governor was without funds, and
the Crown, therefore, could not buy from the natives, there was a
deadlock. Space will not admit here of a full discussion of the vexed
question of the land clause in the Treaty of Waitangi. As a rule
civilized nations do not recognise the right of scattered handfuls of
barbarians to the ownership of immense tracts of soil, only a fraction
of which they cultivate or use. However, from the noblest and most
philanthropic motives an exception to this rule was made in the case
of New Zealand, and by treaty some sixty to seventy thousand Maoris
were given a title guaranteed by England--the best title in the
world--to some sixty-six million acres of valuable land. Putting aside
the question of equity, it may be observed that, had not this been
done, the Maoris, advised by the missionaries, would certainly have
refused their assent to the Treaty. The millions sterling which have
had to be spent in New Zealand, directly and indirectly, in acquiring
Maori land for settlement, supply of course no argument whatever
against the equity of the Treaty. When honour is in the scale, it
outweighs money. Yet had Captain Hobson been able to conceive what
was entailed in the piecemeal purchase of a country held under tribal
ownership, it is difficult to think that he would have signed the
Treaty without hesitation. He could not, of course, imagine that he
was giving legal force to a system under which the buying of a block
of land would involve years of bargaining even when a majority of its
owners wished to sell; that the ascertainment of a title would mean
tedious and costly examination by courts of experts of a labyrinth of
strange and conflicting barbaric customs; that land might be paid for
again and again, and yet be declared unsold; that an almost empty
wilderness might be bought first from its handful of occupants, then
from the conquerors who had laid it waste, and yet after all be
reclaimed by returned slaves or fugitives who had quitted it years
before, and who had been paid for the land on which they had been
living during their absence. Governor Hobson could not foresee that
cases would occur in which the whole purchase money of broad lands
would be swallowed up in the costs of sale, or that a greedy tribe of
expert middlemen would in days to come bleed Maori and settler alike.
Yet it would have been but reasonable for the Colonial Office to exert
itself to palliate the effects of the staggering blows it thus dealt
the pioneer colonists of New Zealand. They were not all land-sharks;
most of them were nothing of the sort. It was but natural that they
felt with extreme bitterness that the Queen's Government only appeared
on the scene as the friend and protector of the aborigines. For
the Whites the Government had for years little but suspicion and
restraint.
It would have been only just and statesmanlike if the recognition of
Maori ownership had been accompanied by a vigorous policy of native
land purchase by the authorities. But it was not. Captain Hobson was
only scantily supplied with money--he had £60,000 sent him in three
years--and did not himself appear to recognise the paramount need for
endowing the Colony with waste land for settlement. He is said to have
held that there need be no hurry in the matter inasmuch as the steady
decrease of the Maoris would of itself solve the problem. Nearly
sixty years have passed since then, and the Maori race is by no means
extinct. But Captain Hobson, though a conscientious and gallant man,
was no more imbued with the colonizing spirit than might be expected
of any honest English naval officer. Of such money as he had he wasted
£15,000 at the outset in buying a site for a town in the Bay of
Islands on a spot which he quickly had to abandon. Moreover, he was
just what a man in his irksome and difficult position should not have
been--an invalid. Within a few weeks after the signing of the Treaty
of Waitangi he was stricken with paralysis. Instead of being relieved
he was left to be worried slowly to death at his post. To have met
the really great difficulties and the combination of petty annoyances
which beset him, the new governor should have had the best of health
and spirits. The complications around him grew daily more entangled.
In the North the excellent settlers, who with their children were to
make the province of Auckland what it is, were scarcely even beginning
to arrive. The Whites of his day there were what tradesmen call a
job lot. There were the old Alsatian; the new speculator; genuine
colonists, _rari nantes_; a coterie of officials; and the
missionaries, regarding all with distrust. The whole barely numbered
two thousand. Confronting the Whites were the native tribes, who, if
united and irritated, could have swept all before them. Hobson, a man
accustomed to command rather than to manage, was instructed to control
the Maoris by moral suasion. He was to respect their institutions
and customs when these were consistent with humanity and decency,
otherwise not. How in the last resort he was to stamp out inhuman
and indecent customs was left unexplained, though he asked for an
explanation. Certainly not by force; for it would have been flattery
to apply such a term to the tiny handful of armed men at his back.
Troops were not sent until the war of 1844. During the five years
after that the defence of New Zealand probably cost the Imperial
Government a round million, the result of the starving policy of the
first five years.
[Illustration: VIEW OF NELSON
Photo by HENRY WRIGHT]
Moreover, for the reasons already sketched, the English in New Zealand
formed a house divided against itself. The differences in the north
between Maoris' officials, Alsatians of the old school, and settlers
of the new, were sufficient to supply the Governor with a daily dish
of annoyance. But the main colony of New Zealand was not in the north
round Governor Hobson, but in Cook's Straits. There was to be found
the large and daily increasing antagonistic element being brought in
by the New Zealand Company. With an energy quite unchecked by any
knowledge of the real condition of New Zealand, the directors of the
Company in London kept on sending out ship-load after ship-load of
emigrants to the districts around Cook's Straits. The centre of their
operations was Port Nicholson, but bodies of their settlers were
planted at Wanganui, at the mouth of the fine river described in
the first chapter; at New Plymouth, hard by the Sugar-Loaves, in
devastated almost empty Taranaki; and at pleasant but circumscribed
Nelson in the South Island. Soon these numbered five times as many
Whites as could be mustered in the north. Upon them at the very outset
came the thunderbolt of Governor Hobson's proclamation refusing
recognition to their land purchases. Of this and of the land clause
in the Treaty of Waitangi the natives were made fully aware by the
missionaries. Rauparaha, before told of and still the most influential
chief near Cook's Straits, was exactly the man to take advantage of
the situation. He had taken the muskets and gunpowder of the Company,
and was now only too pleased to refuse them the price they thought to
receive. It was, as already said, impossible to justify all, or nearly
all, of Colonel Wakefield's gigantic purchase. But it was certainly
incumbent on the Government to find a _modus vivendi_ with the
least possible delay. On the one hand they had thousands of decent,
intelligent English colonists newly landed in a savage country, and
not in any way responsible for the Company's haste and ignorance. The
settlers at any rate had paid ample value for their land. They had
given £1 for each acre of it. Angry as the English Government had been
with the New Zealand Company for the defiant dispatch of its settlers,
Lord John Russell had instructed Hobson's superior, Sir George Gibbs,
that the emigrants should be regarded with kindness and consideration.
On the other side were the native tribes, who, as the price of land
went in those days, had certainly received the equivalent for a
considerable territory. There was room for an equitable arrangement
just as there was most pressing need for promptitude. Speed was the
first thing needful, also the second, and the third. Instead of speed
the settlers got a Royal Commission. A Commissioner was appointed, who
did not arrive until two years after the Governor, and whose final
award was not given for many months more. When he did give it, he cut
down the Company's purchase of twenty million acres to two hundred and
eighty-three thousand. As for land-claims of private persons, many of
them became the subjects of litigation and petition, and some were not
settled for twenty years. Why three or four Commissioners were not
sent instead of one, and sent sooner, the official mind alone knows.
Meantime, the weary months dragged on, and the unfortunate settlers of
the Company were either not put in possession of their land at all, or
had as little security for their farms as for their lives. They
were not allowed to form volunteer corps, though living in face of
ferocious and well-armed savages. Yet the Governor who forbade them
to take means to defend themselves had not the troops with which to
defend them. To show the state of the country it may be noted that
the two tribes from whom Colonel Wakefield bought the land round
Port Nicholson quarrelled amongst themselves over the sale. The
Ngatiraukawa treacherously attacked the Ngatiawa, were soundly beaten,
and lost seventy men. At first, it is true, settlers and natives got
on excellently well together. The new-comers had money, and were good
customers. But as time went on, and the settlers exhausted their funds
and hopes, they ceased to be able to buy freely. And when they found
the Maoris refusing to admit them to the farms for which they had paid
£1 an acre in London, feeling grew more and more acute. The Company's
settlement at Port Nicholson was perversely planted just on that place
in the inner harbour which is exposed to the force of the ocean. It
had to be shifted to a more sheltered spot, and this the natives
denied they ever sold. That was but one of a series of disputes which
led to murder and petty warfare, and were hardly at an end seven
years later. The settlers, though shut out of the back country, did,
however, hold the townland on which they had squatted, and which is
now the site of Wellington, the capital of New Zealand.
Cooped up in their narrow plots by the sea, Colonel Wakefield and his
settlers established a provisional Government. Captain Hobson,
hearing probably some very exaggerated account of this, sent down his
Lieutenant, Mr. Willoughby Shortland, in a Government vessel, with
sailors and marines, to put down this act of insubordination. Mr.
Shortland, who suffered from the not uncommon failing of a desire to
magnify his office made the process as ridiculous as possible. He
began by stealthily sending a scout on shore at daybreak to haul down
the Company's flag in Wellington and hoist the Union Jack instead.
Then he landed amongst the settlers, who had gathered to welcome him,
in the fashion of a royal commander sent to suppress a rebellion.
The settlers consoled themselves by laughing at him. Apart from one
circular visit occupying two months, Captain Hobson himself kept
sedulously away from the southern settlements, and stayed in the
north, then a longer journey away from Wellington than Australia is
now. Under the rather high-sounding title of Chief Protector of
the Aborigines, Mr. Clarke, a missionary, was appointed to be the
Governor's adviser on native matters; yet Mr. Clarke, the settlers
complained, was a larger land claimant than any of themselves. It
is not to be wondered at if a feeling grew up among the New Zealand
settlers directed against both officials and missionaries, which at
times intensified to great bitterness, and which took many years to
die down. Even now its faint relics may be observed in a vague feeling
of dislike and contempt for the Colonial Office.
The New Zealand Company, however, cannot be acquitted of blame in more
respects than one. The foundation of the Wakefield theory rested on a
secure supply of useful land. This not available, the bottom dropped
out of the whole scheme. When in New Zealand the Company's estate was
put into chancery, the Wakefield system could not, of course, work.
Not only were the Company's purchases such as could not be sustained,
not only did the directors hurry out thousands of settlers without
proper knowledge or consideration, but they also committed a capital
error in their choice of localities for settlements. Wellington, with
its central position and magnificent harbour, is undeniably the key
of New Zealand. It was in after years very properly made the seat of
government, and is always likely to remain so. But it was an almost
criminal error on the part of the Company to plump down its settlers
in districts that were occupied and certain to be stubbornly held by
warlike natives. Nearly the whole of the South Island had no human
occupants. Shut off by the Kaikoura mountains from the more dangerous
tribes, the east and south-east of that island lay open to the first
comer. Moreover, the country there was not only fertile, but in
large part treeless, and therefore singularly suited for rapid and
profitable settlement. It is quite easy to see now that had the New
Zealand Company begun its first operations there, a host of failures
and troubles would have been avoided. The settlement of the North
Island should not have been begun until after an understanding had
been come to with the Imperial authorities and missionaries, and on a
proper and legal system of land purchase. This and other things the
Company might have found out if it had taken early steps to do so. The
truth is that the first occupation of New Zealand was rushed, and,
like everything else that is done in a hurry, it was in part done very
badly.
So little was known or thought of the South Island that sovereignty
was not proclaimed over it until four months after the Governor's
arrival in the north, and even then the royal flag was not hoisted
there. The consequence was a narrow escape from an attempt by the
French to plant a colony at Akaroa in Banks Peninsula. The French
frigate _L'Aube_ put in at the Bay of Islands in July, 1840, bound for
the south. Her captain, hospitably entertained by Hobson, let fall
some incautious words about the object of his voyage. Hobson took the
alarm, and promptly dispatched the _Britomart_ to hoist the English
flag at Akaroa. Thanks to bad weather, the _Britomart_ only reached
the threatened port a few days before the Frenchmen. Then it was found
that an emigrant ship, with a number of French settlers, was coming
with all the constituent parts of a small colony. The captain of
_L'Aube_, finding himself forestalled, good-humouredly made the best
of it. A number of the immigrants did indeed land. Some of them were
afterwards taken away to the Marquesas Islands in the South Seas:
others remained permanently settled at Akaroa. There around a bay,
still called French Bay, they planted vineyards and built cottages in
a fashion having some pathetic reminiscences of rural France. There
they used to be visited from time to time by French men-of-war; but
they gave no trouble to any one, and their children, by removal or
intermarriage, became blended with the English population which in
later days surrounded them.
Captain Hobson had to choose a capital. After throwing away much good
money at Russell in the Bay of Islands, he saw that he must come
further south. A broader-minded man might have gone at once to
Wellington, and planted himself boldly amongst the English settlers.
But the prejudice of the officials and the advice of the missionaries
combined with Hobson's own peculiar views of the Cook's Straits
colonists, to keep him in the north. From his despatches it is clear
that he regarded the immigrants in the south--one of the finest bodies
of settlers that ever left England--as dangerous malcontents of
anarchical tendencies. As he would not go to Wellington and take his
natural position at the head of the main English colony and at
the centre of New Zealand, he did the next best thing in going to
Auckland. In pitching upon the Waitemata isthmus he made so good a
choice that his name is likely to be remembered therefore as long as
New Zealand lasts. By founding the city of Auckland he not only took
up a strategic position which cut the Maori tribes almost in half, but
selected a very fine natural trading centre. The narrow neck of land
on which Auckland stands between the winding Waitemata on the east and
the broader Manu-kau Harbour on the west, will, before many years, be
overspread from side to side by a great mercantile city. The unerring
eye of Captain Cook had, seventy years before, noted the Hauraki Gulf
as an admirable position. Hobson's advisers, in choosing it as his
seat of Government, are said to have been the missionary, Henry
Williams, and Captain Symonds, a surveyor. As the capital of New
Zealand it was the wrong place from the first. From every other
standpoint the selection was a master-stroke. Twenty-four years later
Auckland ceased to be the capital of the Colony; but though in this
she had to yield to the superior claims of Wellington, she could
afford to lose the privilege. First in size and beauty, she is to-day
second to no other New Zealand city in prosperity and progress.
In 1841, however, by way of making as bad a start as possible, little
Auckland began with a land boom. Forty-four acres were sold at auction
by the Government for £24,275. Small suburban lots a few months later
fetched £45 an acre, and cultivation lots £8 an acre. For one or two
picked city frontages as much as £7 10s. a foot was paid. The hanging
up of the northern land claims, and the inability of the Government to
buy native land while it refused to let private persons do so, joined,
with a trade collapse in Australia, to make the condition of the
Auckland settlers soon almost as unenviable as that of their
fellow-colonists in the Company's settlements.
Governor Hobson died at Auckland after ruling New Zealand for a little
less than three years. His best monument is the city which he founded,
and the most memorable verdict on his life is written in a letter
addressed by a Maori chief to the Queen. "Let not," said this
petition, "the new Governor be a boy or one puffed up. Let not a
troubler come amongst us. Let him be a good man like this Governor who
has just died." When these words were written, the judgment of the
English in New Zealand would have been very different. But time
has vindicated Hobson's honesty and courage, and in some important
respects even his discernment. He anticipated the French, baffled the
land-sharks, kept the peace, was generous to the Maori, and founded
Auckland. No bad record this for the harassed, dying sailor, sent to
stand between his own countrymen and savages at the very end of
the earth, and left almost without men or money! If under him the
colonists found their lot almost unbearable, the fault was chiefly
that of his masters. Most of his impolicy came from Downing Street;
most of his good deeds were his own. It must be remembered that he was
sent to New Zealand, not to push on settlement, but to protect the
natives and assert the Queen's authority. These duties he never
forgot.