The Crown having now assumed sovereignty over New Zealand, it became necessary to administer its affairs impartially in the interests of both Maori and pakeha population; and, in this connection, one of its first and most pressing duties was to make an honest effort to unravel the complex web of land claims, in which both races had become unhappily entangled. The Government of Lord John Russell accordingly appointed as a commissioner to adjudicate upon claims of all classes of buyers Mr. Spain, an English lawyer, who, it is said, had been a prominent electioneering agent on the side of the Liberals. Mr. Spain arrived in New Zealand on December 8, 1841, and immediately took steps to establish his court. He has been described as a man of solid intelligence, but burdened with a good deal of legal pedantry; slow in thinking and in his apprehension of ways of dealing with new emergencies; steady and plodding in his methods, thoroughly honest in his intentions, and utterly inflexible to threats, though, perhaps, not unsusceptible to flattery. Considering the magnitude of their alleged purchases, the claims of the New Zealand Company naturally took precedence over all others in the business of the court; and, having regard to the temperament of the Commissioner, an inauspicious start was made by the representatives of the Company metaphorically shaking their fists in his face. In some degree their annoyance may have been pardonable, for they, believing themselves to be the pioneers of a great colonising scheme, had flattered themselves that not only the merit of their cause, but the fact that they had made their purchases prior to the proclamation of the Queen's sovereignty, would have placed them outside the exacting conditions of the Treaty of Waitangi.
The coming of Mr. Spain, and his insistence upon an exhaustive examination of their titles, was a heavy blow to them, which they at first thought to ward off by affecting an attitude of amused indifference. They laughed at the treaty, with its engagement to respect Maori rights in land, and its elevation of the Maori to a civil status equal to themselves. But amidst this simulated merriment they exhibited an ill-concealed chagrin that the little self-governing community, which they had hoped to set up on the shores of Cook Strait, had been so unceremoniously superseded by the sovereignty of the Queen, and they resented with fear and anxiety the appointment of a commissioner, who might deem it his duty to ask awkward questions regarding their titles. Their policy was, therefore, one of delay and evasion, which was inaugurated by their raising technical objections to the constitution of the court, its jurisdiction, and its forms of procedure, but, most of all, to Mr. Spain's determination to call native evidence. That was surely an unnecessary elevation of the savage, and a corresponding degradation of the white man. In fact, they openly asserted that to put the testimony of the one against the other was a gratuitous insult to the dignity of the British subject. But this was not the full measure of Spain's offending in the eyes of the Company's champions. He was audacious enough to ask Colonel Wakefield to submit proof that those natives who had signed the Company's deed had the right to sell the land which they thus purported to convey to the Company; and some of them made themselves conspicuously offensive in the manner in which they ridiculed this demand as preposterous and ridiculous.
The proceedings of the court at Wellington[150] do not materially concern our purpose, for Te Rauparaha took no part in the sale of Port Nicholson, nor need we burden the narrative with the interminable finesse which took place before the court was able seriously to attack the work which lay before it in other districts. When this condition was at length reached, Spain soon saw that he was faced with a most serious problem. That the Company's purchases were in most instances bad he had little hesitation in declaring. But there was no blinking the fact that hundreds of settlers had risked their all on the assurances of the Company that they could give them a title, and it would have been cruel indeed to visit the sins of the Company upon the unfortunate colonists. Spain, therefore, halted between justice to the Maoris and equity to the settlers, satisfying the requirements of his office by issuing interim reports, hoping that in the meantime some workable compromise might be evolved. This was ultimately found in an arrangement whereby Mr. Clarke and Colonel Wakefield were to agree upon what additional compensation was to be paid for the land purchased, and, failing their arriving at an understanding, Mr. Spain was to be the final arbitrator. At the outset of these negotiations, Mr. Clarke stipulated that the natives were not to be evicted from their pas or their cultivations, nor were their burial-places to be disturbed; but to these reasonable reservations Colonel Wakefield could not at first be induced to frankly agree, while his unwillingness, or his inability, to comply with the ultimate awards tended to accentuate rather than to soothe public irritation.
Meanwhile, Rangihaeata had been busy entering his practical protest against what he believed to be a violation of his rights at Porirua. He, in conjunction with Te Rauparaha and Te Hiko,[151] stoutly contended that Porirua, like the Wairau, had never been sold; and when, in the early part of 1841, the Company's surveyors went there to survey, Rangihaeata blocked up the forest track, levelled the surveyors' tents to the ground, and, at the end of each day, undid all the work which they had performed. This interference with the survey was obviated by an assurance being given to the chief, that, even if the land were surveyed, the Company's title must still be investigated by Mr. Spain before the settlers would be permitted to enter upon it. But, in defiance of this assurance, Colonel Wakefield, in April, 1842, issued leases to four settlers—Joseph Hurley, Thomas Parry, Benjamin Lowndes and Josiah Torr—who at once proceeded to erect houses and occupy their holdings. Two of the houses were nearly finished when the intelligence was brought to the chief. Rangihaeata immediately gave the settlers notice of his intention to pull their houses down; and this threat, so chivalrously declared, was duly executed next day, without any unnecessary violence, by the chief and a band of fifty men. The indignation which followed this assertion of native authority found expression in a public meeting at Wellington, at which the arrest of Rangihaeata was violently demanded, and those present declared their readiness to assist the Sheriff in effecting his capture. With the mandate of this meeting Mr. Murphy, the magistrate, refused to comply,[152] and when, in the following June, the huts were again demolished, he wrote to the Governor declaring his determination not to interfere "to prevent any natives keeping land which they state they have not sold, until Mr. Spain decides upon the claims." This determination to regard the Porirua land claims as sub judice met with the entire concurrence of Captain Hobson, but was as bitterly assailed by Colonel Wakefield, who committed the indiscretion, almost criminal under the circumstances, of declaring, when speaking at Wellington, that he had not treated with the natives for a settlement of their claims, but preferred to employ the inconvenience created by these claims as grounds of complaint against the Government, and as arguments in aid of his efforts to secure the removal of the Governor. With such a feeling of declared insincerity pervading Colonel Wakefield's conduct, it is small wonder that the differences between the natives and the Company were slow of settlement, or that the efforts of Spain and Clarke to that end were unduly protracted. Equally true is it that thereby the cares and worries of the Governor were unnecessarily aggravated, while both brown and white populations were exasperated almost to the point of desperation by the vexatious delays. The irritated state of the public temper thus engendered not only made acts of violence possible, but even encouraged them, and these only added fuel to the threatened conflagration. A native woman was found by her friends murdered at Wellington, and suspicion fell upon a European. Only a few months later a settler was discovered lying upon the Petone road with his skull fractured, and questioning eyes were at once turned in the direction of the Maoris. The burial-grounds of the natives were being repeatedly desecrated by pakeha looters in search of greenstone ornaments, and in the prosecution of this shameful traffic, deep offence was given by the secret exhumation of the body of Te Rauparaha's brother, Nohorua, at Cloudy Bay. For this act of violence to the honoured dead the natives would at one time have taken swift vengeance; but, acting under the restraining counsel of Mr. Clarke, they consented to refer their complaint to the Government for settlement, a forbearance which the Protector, in his letter to Captain Hobson, assured the Governor greatly surprised him.[153] The weight of these and other accumulating troubles began to tell heavily upon the frail physique of Captain Hobson, and borne down by the stress of his increasing responsibilities, he died at Auckland in September, 1842. Before his successor, Captain Fitzroy, arrived in the Colony, the tragedy for which the country was being rapidly prepared had been enacted, and the faithlessness of the New Zealand Company had been written in letters of blood on the floor of the Wairau Valley.
[127] "Amongst these, there was a great chief named Tu-Hawaiki in Maori, 'Bloody Jack' by the Englishmen, because in his English, which he learned mostly from the rough whalers and traders, he often used the low word 'bloody'" (Memoirs of the Rev. J.F.H. Wohlers). Tu Hawaiki was both the patron and the pupil of the whalers, and was referred to by them as an evidence of what they had done in civilising the aborigines. "He was undoubtedly the most intelligent native in the country in 1840, and his reputation for honesty was such that Europeans trusted him with large quantities of goods" (Thomson).
[128] "Just like the Governor."
[129] Travers doubts the occurrence of this incident, holding that had Te Rauparaha been guilty of such conduct towards his own people, he could never have retained the respect of his fellow-chiefs. Wakefield, on the other hand, insists upon it, and it is also referred to in a Ngati-Toa account of Te Rauparaha's life found in White's Ancient History of the Maori.
[130] A modified version of this incident states that all the crew were drowned except an old woman, who escaped by clinging to the overturned canoe. Tu-Hawaiki and his friends waited about the shore for some days until the bodies were cast up, and then the old woman was killed, her death being part of the religious rites performed at the funeral ceremonies. But there are discrepancies in the tradition, upon which it is now impossible to arbitrate.
[131] This war is known in Maori history as the Hao-whenua war.
[132] Te Heuheu's peace was made at Kapiti. He took a taiaha and broke it across his knee. Some people then gave him a long-handled tomahawk, and Hoani Tuhata gave a sword, and peace was made (Native Land Court Record).