NEW ZEALAND REMINISCENCES.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIII, Issue 113, 13 May 1878, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND REMINISCENCES.

The editor of the Wananqa thus narrates tbe failure of the first bank and the first newspaper atarted in this colony forty- two years ago:— ln the time when some of the visitors to New Zealand vainly imagined that New Zealand was ruled by club law, viz., "that might was right," in the days when the names King, Government, or Sovereign were not heard in our then so-called " Cannibal Land," we could boast of a British resident. We could then speak of our "Confederation of chiefs," who assumed the right to hold New Zealand as intact against the intermeddling of mushroom-politicians. In those days (1835) we could boast of a bank. At the time of which we speak the three monied men, and the only men in New Zealand then who had any cash, formed themselves iuto a firm, and under their auspices they opened a bank in the Bay of Islands. Eor some time the hank canied on business for all the then world of New Zealand— that is for a smail village called Kororareka (the sweet penguin). The manager was a subject of the stars and stripes, who with one clerk were the only members of the so-called "Bank of New Zealand." At that time the Bay of Islands was the resort of the whalers which plied for oil for the American people in these seas. One fine morning the doors < of the bank were not opened at the % usual hour, and on enquiry it was found tbafc the "mana ger, only clerk, and tha cash box, with all the etceteras of the bank had taken a trip unauthorised in an. American whaler to, the North Pole in-order, as some of the non-Bhare-holders of the bank surmised, to open a branch with the Esquimaux, About the same time, some of our literary men of that day clubbed together and bought a printing; press, and issued a paper called the Bay of Islands Observer, which, for a long time was the only newspaper in these, islands* As we J were a small people at that time, each knowing the other and all being known to everybody, our local scribblers amused themselves with puns and wit on their friends, to the intense amusement of the whole public of the small village ; but in IS4O, strangers came into pur midst. A captain of one of our English men-of-war was appointed Governor 1 of New Zealand. Our only newspaper,' of course, could not at once get out of the groove of fun and wit, and it immediately; pub •_ lished a notice of a sale of broken down horses, which was to take place at Okiato (the then seat of Government in the Bay of Islands). Some of the— to us strange beings — Government officials imagined they were lampooned by thiß notice, and out of their wrath came threats of actions of law, a subject to which we, the ancients of New Zealand, :Uad,.in^Qur absence from civilisation, forgotten. , These ominous /words sent a thrill ;ojf horror into all and sundry others who were concerned in the little newspaper; and from tbis.came a disease which sunk the soul, body, and name of our bantling into oblivipn. J, Thus the first bank eloped, and thus perished the first newspaper of New Zealand.