eurs. Head-sellers
at times would come forward in the most unlikely places. Commodore
Wilkes, when exploring in the American _Vincennes_, bought two heads
from the steward of a missionary brig. It was missionary effort,
however, which at length killed the traffic, and the art of tattooing
along with it. Moved thereby, Governor Darling issued at Sydney, in
1831, proclamations imposing a fine of forty pounds upon any one
convicted of head-trading, coupled with the exposure of the offender's
name. Moreover, he took active steps to enforce the prohibition. When
Charles Darwin visited the mission station near the Bay of Islands
in 1835, the missionaries confessed to him that they had grown so
accustomed to associate tattooing with rank and dignity--had so
absorbed the Maori social code relating thereto--that an unmarked face
seemed to them vulgar and mean. Nevertheless, their influence led the
way in discountenancing the art, and it has so entirely died out that
there is probably not a completely tattooed Maori head on living
shoulders to-day.

Cook had found the Maoris still in the Stone Age. They were far too
intelligent to stay there a day after the use of metals had been
demonstrated to them. Wits much less acute than a Maori's would
appreciate the difference between hacking at hardwood trees with a
jade tomahawk, and cutting them down with a European axe. So New
Zealand's shores became, very early in this century, the favourite
haunt of whalers, sealers, and nondescript trading schooners.
Deserters and ship-wrecked seamen were adopted by the tribes. An
occasional runaway convict from Australia added spice to the mixture.

The lot of these unacknowledged and unofficial pioneers of our race
was chequered. Some castaways were promptly knocked on the head and
eaten. Some suffered in slavery. In 1815 two pale, wretched-looking
men, naked, save for flax mats tied round their waists threw
themselves on the protection of the captain of the _Active_, then
lying in the Bay of Islands. It appeared that both had been convicts
who had got away from Sydney as stowaways in a ship bound for New
Zealand, the captain of which, on arrival, had handed them over to the
missionaries to be returned to New South Wales. The men, however, ran
away into the country, believing that the natives would reverence them
as superior beings and maintain them in comfortable idleness. They
were at once made slaves of. Had they been strong, handy agricultu