rest, could not then raise the money at fifteen per cent. Mr.
Shortland next drew bills on the English treasury, which were
dishonoured, though the mother country afterwards relented so far as
to lend the sum, adding it to the public debt of the Colony. Finally,
the Governor, who on arrival superseded Mr. Shortland, made a
beginning by publicly insulting that gentleman. With proper spirit the
Secretary at once resigned, and was sent by Downing Street to govern a
small island in the West Indies.

If neither Captain Hobson nor Mr. Shortland found official life in New
Zealand otherwise than thorny, their career was smooth and prosperous
compared to that of the Governor who now appears on the scene.
Admiral--then Captain--Robert Fitzroy will have a kind of immortality
as the commander of the _Beagle_--Darwin's _Beagle_. His scientific
work as a hydrographer at the Admiralty is still spoken of in high
terms. He was unquestionably a well-meaning sailor. But his short
career in New Zealand is an awful example of the evils which the
Colonial Office can inflict on a distant part of the Empire by a bad
appointment. It is true that, like his predecessors, Fitzroy was not
fairly supported by the authorities at Home. They supplied him with
neither men nor money, and on them therefore the chief responsibility
of the Colony's troubles rest. But a study of his two years of rule
fails to reveal any pitfall in his pathway into which he did not
straightway stumble.

Captain Fitzroy was one of those fretful and excitable beings whose
manner sets plain men against them, and who, when they are not in
error, seem so. Often wrong, occasionally right, he possessed in
perfection the unhappy art of doing the right thing in the wrong way.
Restless and irascible, passing from self-confidence to gloom, he
would find relief for nerve tension in a peevishness which was the
last quality one in his difficult position should have shown. An
autocratic official amid little rough, dissatisfied communities of
hard-headed pioneers was a king with no divinity to hedge him round.
Without pomp, almost without privacy, everything he said or did became
the property of local gossips. A ruler so placed must have natural
dignity, and requires self-command above all things. That was just
the quality Captain Fitzroy had not. It was said that the blood of a
Stuart king ran in his veins; and, indeed, there seemed to be about
the tall, thin, melancholy man something of