Page:EB1911 - Volume 19.djvu/656

 slow progress. They were hindered by murderous tribal wars in which imported muskets more than decimated the Maori. Still, cruel experience and the persevering preaching of the missionaries gradually checked the fighting, and by the year 1839 it could be claimed that peace and Christianity were in the ascendant. So far the British government had resisted the considerable pressure brought to bear in Downing Street in favour of annexation. In vain Edward Gibbon Wakefield, organizer of colonizing associations, prayed and intrigued for permission to repeat in New Zealand the experiment tried by him in South, Australia. Lord Glenelg, the colonial minister, had the support of the missionaries in withstanding Wakefield’s New Zealand Company, which at length resolved in desperation to send an agent to buy land wholesale in New Zealand and despatch a shipload of settlers thither without official permission. Before, however, the “Tory” had thus sailed for Cook Strait, it had become known to the English government that a French colonizing company—La Compagnie Nanto-Bordelaise—was forming, under the auspices of Louis Philippe, to anticipate or oust Wakefield. Further obstruction was manifestly futile, and the British authorities reluctantly instructed Captain Hobson, R.N., to make his way to northern New Zealand with a dormant commission of lieutenant-governor in his pocket and authority to annex the country to Australia by peaceful arrangement with the natives. Hobson landed in the Bay of Islands on the 22nd of January 1840, hoisted the Union Jack, and had little difficulty in inducing most of the native chiefs to accept the queen’s sovereignty at the price of guaranteeing to the tribes by the treaty of Waitangi possession of their lands, forests and fisheries. Some French settlers, convoyed by a man-of-war, reached Akaroa in South Island in the May following. But Hobson had forestalled them, and those who remained in the country became British subjects. Meanwhile, a week after Hobson’s arrival, Wakefield’s colonists had sailed into Port Nicholson, and proposed to take possession of immense tracts which the New Zealand Company claimed to have bought from the natives, and for which colonists had in good faith paid the company. Other bands of company’s settlers in like manner landed at Nelson, Wanganui and New Plymouth, to be met with the news that the British government would not recognize the company’s purchases. Then followed weary years of ruinous delay and official inquiry, during which Hobson died after founding Auckland. His successor, Fitzroy, drifted into an unsuccessful native war. A strong man, Captain Grey, was at last sent over from Australia to restore peace and rescue the unhappy colony from bankruptcy and despair. Grey, much the best of the absolute governors, held the balance fairly between the white and brown races, and bought large tracts of land for colonization, including the whole South Island, where the Presbyterian settlement of Otago and the Anglican settlement of Canterbury were established by the persevering Wakefield.

In 1852 the mother-country granted self-government, and, after much wrangling and hesitation, a full parliamentary system and a responsible ministry were set going in 1856. For twenty years thereafter the political history of the colony consisted of two long, intermittent struggles—one constitutional between the central government (first seated in Auckland, but after 1864 in Wellington) and the powerful provincial councils, of which there were nine charged with important functions and endowed with the land revenues and certain rating powers. The other prolonged contest was racial—the conflict between settler and Maori. The native tribes, brave, intelligent and fairly well armed, tried, by means of a league against land-selling and the election of a king, to retain their hold over at least the central North Island. But their kings were incompetent, their chiefs jealous and their tribes divided. Their style of warfare, too, caused them to throw away the immense advantages which the broken bush-clad island offered to clever guerrilla partisans. They were poor marksmen, and had but little skill in laying ambuscades. During ten years of intermittent marching and fighting between 1861 and 1871 the Maori did no more than prove that they had in them the stuff to stand up against fearful

odds and not always to be worsted. Round Mount Egmont, at Orakau, at Tauranga and in the Wanganui jungles, they more than once held their own against British regiments and colonial riflemen. The storming of their favourite positions—stockades strengthened with rifle-pits—was often costly; and a strange anti-Christian fanaticism, the Hau-Hau cult, encouraged them to face the white men’s bullets and bayonets. But even their fiercest fighting leaders, Rewi and Te Kooti, scarcely deserved the name of generals. Some of the best Maori fighters, such as the chiefs Ropata and Kemp, were enlisted on the white side, and with their tribesmen did much to make unequal odds still more unequal. Had General Pratt or General Cameron, who commanded the imperial forces from 1860 to 1865, had the rough vigour of their successor, General Chute, or the cleverness of Sir George Grey, the war might have ended in 1864. Even as it was the resistance of the Maori was utterly worn, out at last. After 1871 they fought no more. The colonists too, taught by the sickening delay and the ruinous cost of the war to revert to conciliatory methods, had by this time granted the natives special representation in parliament. A tactful native minister, Sir Donald McLean, did the rest. Disarmament, roads and land-purchasing enabled settlement to make headway again in the North Island after twelve years of stagnation. Grey quarrelled with his masters in Downing Street, and his career in the imperial service came to an end in 1868. His successors, Sir George Bowen, Sir James Ferguson, the marquess of Normanby and Sir Hercules Robinson, were content to be constitutional governors and to respect strictly the behests of the colonial office. Meanwhile the industrial story of New Zealand may be summed up in the words wool and gold. Extremely well suited for sheep-farming, the natural pastures of the country were quickly parcelled out into huge pastoral crown leases, held by prosperous licensees, the squatters, who in many cases aspired to become a country gentry by turning their leases into freeholds. So profitable was sheep-farming seen to be that energetic settlers began to burn off the bracken and cut and burn the forest in the North Island and sow English grasses on the cleared land. In the South artificial grassing went on for a time hand in hand with cereal-growing, which by 1876 seemed likely to develop on a considerable scale, thanks to the importation of American agricultural machinery, which the settlers were quick to utilize. Even more promising appeared the gold-fields. Gold had been discovered in 1853. Not, however, until 1861 was a permanent field found—that lighted upon by Gabriel Read at Tuapeka in Otago. Thereafter large deposits were profitably exploited in the south and West of South Island and in the Thames and Coromandel districts of the Auckland province. Gold-mining went through the usual stages of alluvial washing, deep sinking and quartz-reef working. Perhaps its chief value was that it brought many thousand diggers to the colony, most of whom stayed there. Pastoral and mining enterprise, however, could not save the settlers from severe depression in the years 1867 to 1871. War had brought progress in the north to a standstill; in the south wool-growing and gold-mining showed their customary fluctuations. For a moment it seemed as though the manufacture of hemp from the native Phormium tenax would become a great industry. But that suddenly collapsed, to the ruin of many, and did not revive for a number of years.

In 1870 peace had not yet been quite won; industry was depressed; and the scattered and scanty colonists already owed seven millions sterling. Yet it was at this moment that a political financier, Sir Julius Vogel, at that moment colonial treasurer in the ministry of Sir William Fox, audaciously proposed that the central government should borrow ten millions, make roads and railways, buy land from the natives and import British immigrants. The House of Representatives, at first aghast, presently voted four millions as a beginning. Coinciding as the carrying out of Vogel’s policy did with a rising wool market, it for a time helped to bring great prosperity, an influx of people and much genuine settlement. Fourteen millions of borrowed money, spent in ten years, were on the whole well