New Zealand

by Reginald Horsley

The startling feature of the story is that the Company had no title to land in New Zealand, nor any right to sell it. The significant lines did not occur to them, "The man that once did sell the lion's skin while the beast lived, was killed with hunting him."

After a voyage of four months, the Tory dropped anchor in Port Nicholson on the 20th of September, 1839. The shores of Cook Strait had been for many a year the scene of fighting among the Maori and, as first one and then another tribe came uppermost in the struggle, the question of the actual ownership of the land became decidedly matter for argument. It will be remembered that, by Maori law, conquest of land constituted ownership. True; but if the conquerors of to-day were likely to be turned out to-morrow by the recently vanquished, or by another set of combatants, it does not need much demonstration to show that intending purchasers would require to be very careful as to the soundness of their own right and title, or entirely careless of any law but that of possession.

The Company's agent stayed not to inquire as to Maori disputes regarding land. He ascertained through an interpreter the names of this cape, that river, those islands, and yonder mountain, and asked the chiefs Epuni and Wharepori of the Ngati-Awa, who had come aboard, whether they would sell the entire landscape.

"Yes," answered the chiefs, who had little better title to the land than had the Company who had sold it before buying it. And so, for a collection of articles which included blankets, guns of various sorts, axes, spades, and fish-hooks—not to speak of Jew's-harps, soap, trousers, pencils, sealing-wax and cartridge-paper, the Company acquired (justly, perhaps, in their opinion) a territory about the size of Ireland, embracing both the east and west coasts of New Zealand.

This astonishing bargain, begun on the deck of the Tory, took some months to complete, and by that time the agent had taken formal possession of the fine bay known as Port Nicholson—Poneki in the Maori tongue—and planned out the settlement of Britannia at the entrance to the charming valley of the Eritonga, better known now—if not so musically named—as the Hutt river.

Fast in the wake of the Tory followed the Aurora with the first instalment of immigrants, whose feelings may be imagined, when they realised that nobody could give or sell to them the right and title to the lands they desired to call their own. They learned this much in March 1840 from the Maori themselves, when, owing to its faulty position, the settlement on the Hutt was abandoned, and the town of Wellington founded upon the flats of Thorndon and Te Aro, which lay in a more sheltered bay of the great basin of Port Nicholson.

Other emigrants from England and elsewhere soon arrived; the first steamer puffed and churned its way into the harbour; and the astounded Maori demanded anxiously whether "all the tribes had left England and come to settle among them?" They were not disinclined to welcome the settlers; but Puakawa and other chiefs strongly objected to part with their lands, which they averred had been sold by people who had no right to dispose of them.

This was sad hearing; but, if a Company choose to "buy" twenty million acres from some fifty people whose right to sell them is hotly disputed, it is to be expected that the ten thousand or so who claim ownership of those acres will have something to say on the subject.

Mercifully for the settlers, the Maori near Wellington had no objection to their lands being occupied, but merely wished to make it clear that they had not been sold outright. So the settlers became aware before long that the Company's purchases were not good, and that, if they, the immigrants, bought land of the Company, their own title to it would be equally not good, and would in the natural course of events become liable to investigation.

But why this concern about right and title? On the one hand are white men desirous of acquiring land, and, on the other, coloured men who have felt the touch of civilisation without having been greatly influenced thereby, and who, while undeniably owning the land, use but little of it. Why bother about their rights? Why not oppose to the protests of the brown man the impudence of the white man, whose argument has too often been, "What I desire I take, and what I have I hold"?