carved.
2. Greenstone club (_mere pounanu_).
3. Club (_onewa_) of stone.
4. _Kotiate_ of wood or bone.]

The wanton cruelties committed upon these people by the commanders and
crews of many of the vessels that have been of late years in the habit
of resorting to their shores, are testified to, by too many evidences,
to allow us to doubt the enormous extent to which they have been
carried; and they are, at the same time, too much in the spirit of that
systematic aggression and violence, which even British sailors are apt
to conceive themselves entitled to practise upon naked and unarmed
savages, to make the fact of their perpetration a matter of surprise to
us. We must refer to Mr. Nicholas's book[H] for many specific instances
of such atrocities; but we may merely mention here that the conduct in
question is distinctly noticed and denounced in the strongest terms,
both in a proclamation by Governor Macquarie, dated the 9th of November,
1814, and also in another by Sir Thomas Brisbane, dated the 17th of
May, 1824. So strong a feeling, indeed, had been excited upon this
subject among the more respectable inhabitants of the English colony,
that, in the year 1814, a society was formed in Sydney Town, with the
Governor at its head, for the especial protection of the natives of the
South Sea Islands against the oppressions practised upon them by the
crews of European vessels.

The reports of the missionaries likewise abound in notices of the
flagrant barbarities by which, in New Zealand, as well as elsewhere, the
white man has signalised his superiority over his darker-complexioned
brother. But it may be enough to quote one of their statements, namely,
that within the first two or three years after the establishment of the
society's settlement at the Bay of Islands, not less than a hundred at
least of the natives had been murdered by Europeans in their immediate
neighbourhood. With such facts on record, it ought indeed to excite but
little of our surprise, that the sight of the white man's ship in their
horizon should be to these injured people in every district the signal
for a general muster, to meet the universal foe, and, if it may be
accomplished by force or cunning, to gratify the great passion of savage
life--revenge.

The circumstances of this attack are all illustrative of the New Zealand
character; and, indeed, the whole narrative is strikingly accordant
with the accounts we have from other sources of the