Governor sent down commissioners, who, after
inquiry, decided erroneously that Teira's party had a right to sell,
and the head chief none to interfere. A fair price was paid for
the block, and surveyors sent to it. The Ngatiawa good-humouredly
encountered these with a band of old women well selected for their
ugliness, whose appalling endearments effectually obstructed the
survey work. Then, as Kingi threatened war, an armed force was sent to
occupy the plot. After two days' firing upon a stockade erected there,
the soldiers advanced and found it empty. Kingi, thus attacked,
astutely made the disputed piece over to the King tribes, and
forthwith became their _protege_. Without openly making war, they sent
him numbers of volunteer warriors. He became the protagonist of the
Maori land league. The Taranaki tribe hard by New Plymouth and the
Ngatiruanui further south joined him openly. Hostilities broke out in
February, 1860.

It should be mentioned that while all this was going on, the Premier,
Mr. Stafford, was absent in England, and that his colleagues supported
the Governor's action. Parliament did not assemble until war had
broken out, and then a majority of members conceived themselves bound
to stand by what had been done. Nevertheless, so great was the doubt
about the wisdom and equity of the purchase that most of the North
Island members even then condemned it. Most of the South Island
members, who had much to lose and nothing to gain by war, thought
otherwise. Very heavily has their island had to pay for the Waitara
purchase. It was not a crime, unless every purchaser who takes land
with a bad title which he believes to be good is a criminal. But,
probably wrong technically, certainly needless and disastrous, it will
always remain for New Zealand the classic example of a blunder worse
than a crime.

[Illustration]

Chapter XVI

_TUPARA_[1] AGAINST ENFIELD

"The hills like giants at a hunting lay,
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay."

[Footnote 1: _Tupara_ (two-barrel), the Maori name for the short
double-barrelled guns which were their handiest weapons against us in
bush warfare.]

In 1860 the Taranaki settlement was growing to be what it now is--a
very pleasant corner of the earth. Curving round the seashore under
the lofty, lonely, symmetrical cone of Egmont, it is a green land of
soft air and many streams. After long delays and much hope deferred,
the colonists--mostly English of the