took them as wives and lived in New Zealand.
These men generally acted as sealers. They caught the seals that
abounded on some parts of the coast, and gathered their skins until the
ships called back, when the captain would give them tobacco and rum,
guns and powder in exchange for their seal-skins. These the sealers
generally shared with the Maoris, who therefore began to find out that
it was good to have a white man to be dwelling near them: he brought
ships to trade, and the ships brought articles that the Maoris began to
value.

#8. Maoris visit Sydney.#--In 1793, Governor Hunter at Sydney directed
that the convicts at Norfolk Island should be set to weave the fine flax
that grew wild in that island. They tried, but could make no cloth so
fine and soft as that made by the Maoris out of very much the same sort
of plant. A ship was sent to try and persuade some Maoris to come over
and teach the art. The captain of the ship, being lazy or impatient, did
not trouble to persuade; he seized two Maoris and carried them off. They
were kept for six months at Norfolk Island, but Captain King treated
them very well, and sent them back with ten sows, two boars, a supply of
maize-seed and other good things to pay them for their time. When King
became Governor of New South Wales he sent further presents over to Te
Pehi, chief of the tribe to which these young men belonged, and hence Te
Pehi longed to see the sender of these things. He and his four sons
ventured to go in an English vessel to Sydney, where they were
astonished at all they saw. On his return Te Pehi induced a sailor named
George Bruce, who had been kind to him when he was sick on board ship,
to settle in the tribe; the young Englishman married Te Pehi's most
charming daughter, and was tattooed and became the first of the Pakeha
Maoris, or white men who lived in Maori fashion. Pleased by Te Pehi's
account of what he had seen, other Maoris took occasional trips to
Sydney, working their passages in whaling ships.

#9. Friendly Relations.#--Meanwhile English vessels more and more
frequently visited New Zealand for pork and flax and kauri pine, or else
to catch seals, or merely to take a rest after a long whaling trip. The
Bay of Islands became the chief anchorage for that purpose, and thither
the Maoris gathered to profit by the trade. Some of the more
adventurous, when they found that the English did them no harm, shipped
as sailors for a voyage on board the whale