arming humour. He lived to see savagery replaced by
colonization, and to become a judicial officer in the service of the
Queen's Government. Some of his reminiscences, embodied in a volume
entitled _Old New Zealand_, still form the best book which the Colony
has been able to produce. Nowhere have the comedy and childishness of
savage life been so delightfully portrayed. Nowhere else do we get
such an insight into that strange medley of contradictions and
caprices, the Maori's mind.

We have already seen that a lieutenant in Her Majesty's service
thought it no crime in 1793 to kidnap two chiefs in order to save a
little trouble. We have seen how Cook shot natives for refusing to
answer questions, and how De Surville could seize and sail away with a
friendly chief because some one else had stolen his boat. When in
1794 that high and distinguished body, the East India Company, sent
a well-armed "snow" to the Hauraki gulf for kauri spars she did not
leave until her captain had killed his quota of natives,--two men and
a woman,--shot, because, forsooth, some axes had been stolen. If such
were the doings of officials, it came as a matter of course that the
hard-handed merchant-skippers who in brigs and schooners hung round
the coasts of the Islands thought little of carrying off men or women.
They would turn their victims adrift in Australia or on some South Sea
islet, as their humour moved them. With even more cruel callousness,
they would sometimes put Maoris carried off from one tribe on shore
amongst another and maybe hostile tribe. Slavery was the best fate
such unfortunates could expect. On one occasion the missionaries in
the Bay of Islands rescued from bondage twelve who had in this fashion
been thrown amongst their sworn enemies. Their only offence was that
they had happened to be trading on board a brig in their own port when
a fair wind sprang up. The rascal in command carried them off rather
than waste any of the wind by sending them on shore.

An even more heartless piece of brutality was the conduct of a certain
captain from Sydney, who took away with him the niece of a Bay of
Islands chief, and after living with her for months abandoned her on
shore in the Bay of Plenty, where she was first enslaved and finally
killed and eaten by the local chief. The result was a bitter tribal
war in which she was amply avenged.

Another skipper, after picking up a number of freshly-cured tattooed
heads, the fruit of a rece