This charming island ought also to have escaped the convict infamy, for it was already occupied by honest settlers. Oddly enough, it was this very occupation, associated with the needs of commerce, which helped to overcome the shyness with which men regarded New Zealand, and eventually induced them to people her beautiful bays and fertile valleys.
The new product, the now famous Phormium tenax or New Zealand flax, samples of which had aroused the greatest enthusiasm in England, set manufacturers longing for a substance which would lend itself to so many useful purposes.
The manufacturers had to go longing for many years; for the prospect of forming the pièce de résistance at the dinner-table of a Maori chief failed to attract traders, who left New Zealand severely alone. Then came the settlement of Norfolk Island, and men of commerce were immensely cheered; for the much-desired Phormium tenax was found growing there, wild and in profusion.
But the Norfolk Island people failed utterly to manipulate the fibre as cleverly as the brown men to the south of them, and there was little use in exporting the fibre in the rough. Besides, their failure rendered them uncertain whether they had the right plant.
Twenty years after the death of Marion the effect of his tragic story had not worn off; but instruction being absolutely necessary, and as only Maori could give it, a couple of them were coolly kidnapped and carried off to Norfolk Island.
But the biters were bit. One Maori is very like another in the eyes of the Pakeha, and the kidnapper ignorantly carried off an ariki and a rangatira, men utterly unused to manual work. During the six months they spent among their abductors not a word had these two to say upon the all-important subject of cleansing flax-fibre.
"It is women's work," they declared with lofty contempt. "What should we know of it?"
Governor King had some compunction at the manner in which things had been managed, and at last redressed the wrong. He had treated the chief and the gentleman with scrupulous courtesy and unvarying kindness during their enforced stay, and now, after heaping presents upon them—not the least of which were a bag of seed corn and a drove of pigs—he took them back with honour to the Bay of Islands.
Generous themselves, the Maori responded heartily to Captain King's advances, and their behaviour, together with his own perception of their unusual intellectuality, induced the Governor to write home glowing accounts of the New Zealanders, and warmly recommend the establishment of friendly relations with them. For this good man was far-seeing, and recognised the capacity for civilisation which lay beneath the crust of savagery. Therefore, in agreement with Benjamin Franklin's previously expressed opinion, he strongly advised that shiploads of useful iron articles be sent to induce the Maori to barter, and not beads and such gewgaws, which they most surely despised.