purchase by the authorities. But it was not. Captain Hobson was
only scantily supplied with money--he had L60,000 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
L15,000 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 mi