NEW ZEALAND.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 14, Issue 727, 18 October 1869, Page 3

NEW ZEALAND.

THE WAS, AND WHAT LED TO IT.. The Hobart Town Mercury, 16th August, says :—The interest created, by the lecture delivered by the Rev. S. Ironside, at the Mechanics' Institute, on Thursday evening. la-1, lias induced us to publish a full report for general information. The chair was occupied by the Hon. Mr Kennerley, M.L.C. The Rev. lecturer spoke a* follows : After the last session of the New Zealand Parliament, twelve months ago, the Government there feeling the heavy pressure of a large and increasing war expenditure, and the Colony not being able to provide the means for meeting it, having a debt of seven or eight millions to provide interest for, (which debt had been contracted mainly to pay war expenses), the Colonial Treasurer, Mr Fitzherbert, was instructed to proceed to England to request the Home Government to guarantee a loan of one and a half millions to enable the Colony prosecute the war to a successful finish-. As the Colony was not responsible for. the war (it having been undertaken in the interests of the Imperial Government), the request of the Colony was, to say the least of it, a reasonable one. " Earl Granville, in a despatch dated March 11th, a copy of which is published in the papers which arrived last week by the mail, refuses to comply with the request of the Colony. * It is unfortunate that the noble Earl should have been so very ill-advised as to write a despatch containing mis statements and unkind aspersions upon the English residents in New Zealand. He writes, no doubt, from information received, but that information has misled him, and the colonists in NewZealand are unjustly aspersed. I do not join in raising a clamor against the poor misguided aborigines. I desire, as far as possible, to take a calm, dispassionate, unprejudiced view of the circumstances of the war,' and present it in the clearest, simplest light I can. First, I observe that the war is an Imperial one : between the English represented by his Excellency the Governor, and a section of the native tribes. Not half, not one-fourth of the native population, were engaged in it till very lately. The whole of the" Ngapuhi and Rarawa tribes from Auckland northwards are loyal to. the Queen, and have been since 1846. The whole of those about Wellington, from Manawatu right round to the Wairarapa, as well as all residing in the Middle Island, are equally loyal, or at any rate neutral, and have been since 1847, Most of the punishment inflicted on the rebels in the early part of the war was inflicted by loyal natives fighting for the Crown and for the settlers against their own fellowcountrymen. When the tribes in the North heard of the murder of the Rev. J. Whiteley, their indignation was roused to the highest degree, and had they been permitted, they would have come downtoTaranaki and exterminated the murderous horde. The war began ten years with a very small fraction of natives residing on the banks of the Waitara, a river 12 miles north of the town of New Plymouth. The noble Earl, Secretary for the Colonies, in his despatch, extracts from which I have read, charges the colonists of that Province with coveting the lands of the natives. It is true the charge is somewhat palliated by its being called a {< not unnatural desire." But it is not true. During the whole of my residence in that province from 1855 to 1858, I witnessed none such covetous greed of the natives' lands. It was the prevailing desire of the settlers to live in peace with their Maori neighbors. 11 is a calumny to charge the origin of the war on the unfortunate settlers of New Plymouth, and when raised by parties who know better, or ought to know better, it is a wicked calumny. It is an old charge, often made, and as often disproved. I remember some fourteen years ago when the charge was first made by a high and much respected dignitary of the Church of England (Dr. Selwyn.) I would not differ from that gentle-

piaa upon flight grounds, He is sne of nature's noblemen. While at. the head of the Episcopal Church in ]Xew Zealand, he was foremost in £very good work. He spared himself in nothing that inyolved toil And privation for the good of the Maoris. He was an eminent example for bis clergy. But he held Jirmly- to the idea that the Colony was formed for the benefit of the native race. Their interests were to be paramouni, all other interests And considerations were to give way. He too readily believe 1 any state inents that the natives made to the prejudice of the colonists. During a visit of his to New Plymouth, in August, 1855, he issued a pastoral in which the charge of .coveting the natives' lands first appeared. , I, the lesident minister of the English settlers, felt it my duty to raise my earnest protest against. that, complaint, in a letter to the local newspaper, dated 22nd September, 1855, a copy of which I have here. (The lecturer here read an extract from the letter.) Whatever teasing of the Governor about landb there was, was from the natives themselves. A large and intelligent section of the native population was, from the first, very anxious to sell, The reluctance of the Governor to purchase land was a great source of grievance to all the well disposed natives of that province; clearly it was not the settlers' greed for land which had originated the war. There is another paragraph in the despatch of the noble Earl which is calculated to mislead those at a distance, not acquainted with the country. It is quite true that the European population of the Colony is in round numbers 220,000, and the native race does not exceed 40,000 ; less than one fifth of the settlers. But 140,000 of the whites are on the middle island, hundreds of miles away from the natives, and in no way concerned in the war, save having to bear a heavy pressure of taxation, far too heavy for their resources and capabilities. Although not mote interested in the war than the people of this Colony would be with one on the Australian continent, they have nobly supported the Colonial Government in the prosecution of the war, submitting without murmur to the fearful load of taxation which the war expenses have caused. But they have a strong feeling that the Imperial Government is acting the part of an unnatural stepmother to them. They contrast the lavish expenditure of between eight and nine millions for the rescue of a handful of captives in Abyssinia, with the utter neglect that their fellow-colonists in the Northern Island are receiving, although scores of their number, including ladies and infant children have been cruelly maltreated, mangled, murdered, by the rebel natives. I may say here, that from the very beginning of the Colony, until within the last six or seven years, native interests were in the single irresponsible hands of his Excellency the Governor. By the treaty of Waitangi, executed in February, 1840, the Governor alone had the power to purchase lands from the natives When a constitution was granted to the Colony in 1853, native interests were reserved to the Crown exclusively. Neither Parliament nor executive had any control whatsoever. I think I have shown that the state ment of Earl Granville attributing the war to the " not unnatural desire" of the settlers of New Plymouth to acquire lands from the natives is not in accordance with the facts. In further proof I would ask your attention to the small map of the province, on which is shown the very small portion of lands occupied by Eui opeans in that province after it has been settled nearly thirty years, not a fortieth part, yet the Europeans outnumber the natives. I now proceed to show what were the true causes of the To comprehend •the position, it will be needful to go back some 30 years in the history of New Plymouth, where the war originally began, *and where it still rages, as proved by the terrible massacre of Lieut. Gascoyne and family, ftnd the Be v. John Whiteley, a missionary vrho had labored among that very people for 36 years. At that period, 1830, the whole of that

country, from Mokau, in the to Otumatua, in the South, was depopulated, a desert waste, without inhabitants, caused by the native wars. It is the richest district in all New Zealand—has been well described as the garden of New Zealand. Miles upon miles of country south of New Plymouth were covered, when I travelled over, with native flax growing high up above our heads, say at least eight or nine feet high. The natives of Waikato and the North visited it periodically foi war and plunder. Hundreds upon hundreds of its people were killed and eaten by the savage conquerors, and hundreds more were driven into the Waikato and held in helpless slavery there. On one occasion, at Pukerangiora, not less than 1,000 unfortunate natives were taken in the pa and butchered and eaten. Sq fierce and continuous were the raids from the North, that the people exiled themselves from their native place, migrating south to both sides of Cook's Straits, and some of them, not feeling secure there, chartered a ship and emigrated to the Chatham Inlands, some 400 miles eastward of New Zealand. These in their turn conquered and dispossessed the aboriginals of both sides of Cook's Straits, the Ngatiapa and Rangitane tribes. A few of these unfortunates were held in slavery by them. When the country was thus a desert, Col. Wakefield, Agent of the New Zea land Land Company, visited Cook's Straits in th? ship Tory, and negotiated the purchase of lands there, Wiremu Kingi, the chief, often mentioned in the early history of the war, was then living in exile in Queen Charlotte's Sound. He urged upon Colonel Wakefield the purchase of Taranaki, told him what a fine country it was; and the Colonel, nothing loth, bought the district from these exiles. They received a large payment in blankets, spades, axes, tobacco, and other articles of European trade. The ship then visited Taranaki, and made large presents to some twenty or thirty natives who were living on the Sugarloaf Bock, about a mile off shore, coming to land in the daytime to plant, and for fear of Waikato, going back to their

rocky islet to sleep. These natives willingly signed the deed of sale, and agreed to put up large temporary houses for the expected settlers from Plymouth, Devonshire, and Cornwall. This New Plymouth settlement was hailed by the trembling remnants, and also by the exiles in Cook's Straits, as likely to prove a wall of defence for them against their ancient foes, the Waikato They judged that Waikato would never venture to molest Ihem if they had a white man's town at hand. Waikato, hearing of the sale of Taranaki by these taurekareka, these es, as they called them, were very angry, and resolved to come down in force, and utterly destroy the remnant there. But there were hundreds of sincere Christians in Waikato, chiefly under the care of the Bev. John Whiteley at Kawhia, and the James Wallis at Whangaroa. Christian natives opposed the design of their heathen relatives, and further resolved to give freedom to their Taranaki slaves, and escort them back to their native pi are. If their heathen relatives resolved to exterminate the remnant, they would go with their manumitted s 7 aves and protect them. At the annual meeting of the We'4eyan clergy stationed in and near Waikato, in May, 1840. I was directed to go with these Christian natives on their errand of mercy. I went on this journey attended by some hundreds of Waikato natives, Christian and heathen. At Mokau we left all sign-; of population behind us, and for sixty miles travelled through a silent wa r, te of country. On nea ring New Plymouth, the few inhabitants, not over twenty, took the alarm, hurried into their canoes, and paddled off to their rock, leaving the food cooking in their iron pots upon the fire. It was only after considerable persuasion that they ventured to come ashore, We «pent two or three days in discussion, and at length the Waikato natives, receiving a large portion of the purchase money for the country, and firing off their guns in memory of their dead there, and in token of

their rights, returned home, leaving the poor Taranaki people in peace. Governor Hobson, to further satisfy the claims of the Waikato, paid Te Wherowkero, afterwards the first Maori king, the sum of £4OO, If you haye gone with me thus far, you will see that the Taranaki district of which Earl Granville speaks in his despatch, and the coveting of portions of which he charged upon the settlers there as the origin of the war, was bought by Colonel Wakefield, in 1839, from the exiles in Cook's Straits, and from the remnant on the spot; that Governor Hobson in fur ther satisfaction of the Waikato claims, paid Te Wherowhero .£4OO. The New Zealand Company surveyed the land, and it was sold in England, chiefly about Devonshire and Cornwall. These west country farmers paid in England some £2OO for a land order, which them a quarter-acre of town land, 50 acres of suburban land, and 150 acres of country land, lam not quite clear as to the precise figures, but the above are nearly correct. These land owners, with a large number of enii grants, came and formed the town and settlement of New Plymouth, so called from Plymouth, their port of embarkation from the old country. The little settlement throve and prospered—meanwhile, all fear of Waikato being now over, the exiles leturned, and as is usual with men who have been down-trodden and enslaved, finding themselves free and safe, began to bounce and threaten, and claim the ownership, of the soil they were only too glad to sell three or four years before. (To be concluded in our next issue)