HUNDRED YEARS AGO,

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 July 1938, Page 10

HUNDRED YEARS AGO,

POLICING THE NEW ZEALAND COAST H.M.S. “PEL'ORUS” IN DOMINION WATERS. A MAN-OF-WAR WITH GUNS. One hundred years ago H.M.S. Pelorus was at Coromandel Harbour. She was patrolling the New Zealand coast. Her work was to see justice done wherever Europeans were settled. In the course of this work a very interesting letter of warning to the Maori chiefs of the Thames district was written by her commander, and is now published for the first time. Within .twenty years, of Cook’s exploration of thq New Zealand coast a convict settlement was established at Sydney. In the following years whalers and. sealers, and traders in flax and spars began to reach New Zealand. Escaped convicts and fugitives from the justice' of many lands were sprinkled plentifully amongst them. The evil reputation of the New Zealand coast spread early beyond her shores. Even Sydney mildly- shuddered; and humane Englishmen recoiled in horror. In 1814 the first step to deal with New Zealand lawlessness was taken (strangely absurd and fantastic it seems in retrospect), Hongi and Korokoro, along with Thomas Kendall, were made J.’sP. In 1832 James Busby was appointed British Agent in New Zealand. He lacked any coercive power, and he had not the gift of ruling by persuasion; but he provided the New Zealand tribes with a national flag, and drafted for them a parliamentary constitution. - But it was not enough to appoint a “man-of-war without guns,” as Busby has been called, to rule men who both had guns and knew how to use them. The advent of the missionaries had added to the urgency of the problem, and even the British Government acknowledged its • existence. Periodiclaly ships of the Royal Navy were sent on cruises round tlje New Zealand coast. One of them—H.M.S. Pelorus; — was in New Zealand waters in July, 1838. In the course of her visit she called at a large number of coastal settlements where Europeans were living. On July 22 she was at Coromandel Harbour. On the 28th she arrived at Maraetai on the Waihou (or Thames) River, where Lieutenant Chetwode, her commander, found that an attempt had been made the previous day to extort goods by threat of force from Mr Fairburn in charge of the mission there. The recalcitrant Maoris had departed before the ship arrived, but Chetwode, deeming some action necessary, wrote a circular letter to the chiefs of the district. ' I AM THE CAPTAIN” “I am the Captain of the British Man-of-War,” he wrote, “and sent to New Zealand by the Queen of England to protect all her subjects who may have settled on these shores for the purpose of carrying on a lawful traffic with the natives so long as they abide by the established laws introduced among you, “While I am prepared to carry into full effect these instruction I wish it to be perfectly understood that I do not intend to favour any individual who has conducted himself in a manner unbecoming the character <Jf the nation to which he belongs. At the same time if I find that you have behaved ill towards any British subject your conduct shall be visited with the severest punishment. “That single ship lying at . a short distance which I command is sufficient to destroy not only you who are now collected here, but the whole population of New Zealand in a few hours, and if the infamous practices that have been carried on by some of your party be still persisted in, the Queen of England will be obliged (though greatly against her will) to cause these threats to be carried into execution. That the Queen of England is very' favourable towards you is evidenced by her sending out so many Missionaries to be your Instructors. “If you have cause to complain of any Englishman residing amongst you bring him before me at once; if I find on examination that he is in the wrong he shall be taken on board my ship, punished and removed from the Island.” ■ , ATTACK ON MISSIONARY’S HOUSE. “Even so late as a few days since some of your party dared to attack the house of Mr Fairburn threatening in a letter to that gentleman to burn his house to the ground to endeavour to extort some goods from him. You confined him to his house, allotting a small portion of ground as the boundary of his communication with the natives around. Had it not been for the prompt and active measures adopted by Mr Fairburn’s native friends, who deserve great credit for their conduct, you might have succeeded. This conduct on your part I could not possibly have overlooked had not Mr Fairburn himself solicited in your behalf and requested me only to speak to you about it. Mr Fairburn by this shows the good feeling he entertains toward you, altho’ you havq endeavoured to wrong him and had it not been for this particular request to the contrary I should have felt it my duty to have confined the Principal Chiefs until the offenders were delivered up for punishment. I hope therefore you will all look towards Mr Fairburn and thank him for his lenity. The disgraceful act you were guilty of not long since, plundering the Hokianga, convinces me your are scarcely to be trusted even by your friends —however as restitution has been partly made and the remainder promised, I have only to assure you that unless these promises are . fulfilled, disagreeable consequences . will ensue. Although the Man-of-War will sail from this place tomorrow she is never at so great a distance but that any British subject can acquaint me in a short time if he has been ill used, when I shall not fail to answer his complaint and see him

righted. Unfortunately for the tribe to which you belong it is not the first or second time that you have been brought into notices for similar outrageous acts and if you continue to persist in them, nothing but very severe punishment will satisfy.” NAMING OF PELORUS SOUND. The Pelorus sailed southwards from the Thames to visit the whaling stations of the Cook Strait area. On August 22 she arrived at Port Underwood; the ship remained there a week taking in water and firewood while a survey of the harbour was made. While there Chetwode was visited by John Guard, whose name was already well known because of his connection with the incident of four years before. He claimed to have seen a river between Queen Charlotte Sound and and Admiralty Bay, which Chetwode thereupon determined to explore, taking Guard as pilot. On September 1 Chetwode sighted the inlet —it proved to be a sound —and named it Pelorus after his ship. The ship sailed for forty miles up the sound, and then, water becoming too shallow, a pinnace was launched, and exploration carried on for a further fifteen miles. Leaving Pelorus Sound on September 8 the ship made for Admiralty Bay. From there she sailed to Queen Charlotte Sound, turned into Tory Channel, and anchored at the whaling station of Te Awaiti. Periodical visits by a man-of-war were essential, to the maintenance of order, among the almost a hundred Europeans who lived at the settlement; but on this occasion Chetwode found, too, that the leader of the station had recently been robbed by the local Maoris. “As they were living only two miles from where the vessel lay, I went immediately to the spot to demand restoration,but the very name of a man-of-war had so frightened them (as it was the first they had ever seen) that the principal chiefs and all those who were any way concerned with the robbery had fled to the bush in great consternation, leaving their slaves to deliver up the property we were in search of; ih addition to which they brought numerous articles scarcely before missed, and during the whole of that night they were constantly passing and repassing the ship returning plundered goods,” wrote Chetwode' in his log. Before leaving, Chetwode landed and spoke to the Maoris who had returned. He told them he was the friend of the good and the upholder of justice; if they did not interfere with Englishmen he was their friend. A message had arrived, meanwhile, telling of trouble at Mana Island on the other side of the Strait. A whaling captain had been killed by a Maori named Mitikakau. Thither the Pelorus hastened. A Court was set up, and the local Maoris compelled to promise that the murderer, who had fled into the bush, would be brought to justice within two months. At Kapiti another captain of a whaling ship drowned himself while drunk. Again the Pelorus hastened northward in the performance of her duty. “INTERNATIONAL” CONFLICT. From Kapiti she sailed south again, arriving at Port Underwood as a smouldering conflict between two whaling parties was about to burst forth into actual gunfire. A shore whaling party at Cloudy Bay and an American whaling ship both claimed a certain whale. The British party had gained possession of it, but the Americans had cleared their decks preparatory to opening fire when the Pelorus arrived. It was only by Chetwode’s tact and “firing practice” by the Pelorus that order was restored. And so proceeded the round of duties of an English man-of-war and her company in New Zealand waters a hundred years ago. In a country whose inhabitants knew nothing of the subtelties of sovereignty and extraterritorial rights, a country whose warriors had been described by Charles Darwin as the most warlike in the world, in a country where the largest body of Europeans were, to quote Chetwode, “a disreputable and lawless set, distrusting each other and telling innumerable falsehoods to support their villainy,” in such a country life was not easy for officers or men of the Royal Navy. Nor in the absence of established government and in the presence of a growing body of Englishmen of all types (but predominantly of the worst) could their services be dispensed with. But not in itinerant justice and, policing of the coasts alone was to be found a solution of New Zealand’s problem. Waitangi and ,the establishment of British rule were already inevitable; events were leading steadily on towards the climax -of that rapidly growing and increasingly clamant demand, which was so soon to make itself heard even by British statesmen who would fain have been deaf to its significnce.