e
prisoners by friendly and pacific means. Arrived on the scene, the
captain sent his only two interpreters on shore to negotiate. They
were Guard himself and a lying billiard-marker from Kororareka. They
promised the natives ransom--a keg of gunpowder--if the captives were
released; an offer which was at once accepted. They did not tell the
captain of their promise, and he, most unwisely, refused to give the
natives anything. All the captives were at once given up except the
woman and the children, who were withheld, but kindly treated, while
the natives awaited the promised payment. A chief who came down to the
shore to negotiate with a boat's crew was seized, dragged on board,
and so savagely mishandled that the ship's surgeon found ten wounds
upon him. Yet he lived, and to get him back his tribe gave up Mrs.
Guard and a child. The other child was withheld by another chief.
Again a strong armed party was landed and was peacefully met by the
natives, who brought the child down, but still asked, naturally, for
the stipulated ransom. The sailors and soldiers settled the matter by
shooting down a chief, on whose shoulders the child was sitting, and
firing right and left before the officers in charge could stop them.
Next day these men made a football of the chief's head. Before
departing the _Alligator_ bombarded _pas_, and her crew burnt villages
and destroyed canoes and cultivations. If the man-of-war without guns
was a figure of fun, the man-of-war with guns excited disgust by these
doings even as far away as England. The whole proceeding was clumsy,
cruel, and needless. A trifling ransom would have saved it all. The
Maori tribal law under which wrecks were confiscated and castaways
plundered was, of course, intolerable. Whites again and again suffered
severely by it. But blundering and undisciplined violence and broken
promises were not the arguments to employ against it. So long as
England deliberately chose to leave the country in the hands of
barbarians, barbaric customs had to be reckoned with.

From this discreditable business it is a relief to turn to Mr. Busby's
bloodless puerilities. In 1835 he drew up a federal constitution for
the Maori tribes, and induced thirty-five of the northern chiefs
to accept it. This comical scheme would have provided a congress,
legislation, magistrates, and other machinery of civilization for
a race of savages still plunged in bloodshed and cut asunder by
innumerable feuds and t