writ to run beyond their aukati or frontier, or let boats and steamers come up their rivers.  Amongst themselves the more violent talked of driving the Pakeha into the sea.  Space will not permit of any sketch of the discussions and negotiations by which attempts were made to deal with the King Movement.  Various mistakes were made.  Thompson, while still open to conciliation, visited Auckland to see the Governor and ask for a small loan to aid his tribe in erecting a flour-mill.  Governor Grey would have granted both the interview and the money with good grace.  Governor Browne refused both, and the Waikato chief departed deeply incensed.  A much graver error was the virtual repeal of the ordinance forbidding the sale of arms to the natives.  Because a certain amount of smuggling went on in spite of it, the insane course was adopted of greatly relaxing its provisions instead of spending money and vigilance in enforcing them.  The result was a rapid increase of the guns and powder sold to the disaffected tribes, who are said to have spent L50,000 in buying them between 1857 and 1860.  Between July, 1857, and April, 1858, at any rate, 7,849 lbs. of gunpowder, 311 double-barrelled guns, and 441 single-barrelled guns were openly sold to Maoris.

Finally, in 1860, came the Waitara land purchase—­the spark which set all ablaze.  The name Waitara has been extended from a river both to a little seaport and to the surrounding district in Taranaki, the province where, as already said, feeling on the land difficulty had always been most acute.  Enough land had been purchased, chiefly by Grey, to enable the settlement to expand into a strip of about twenty miles along the seashore, with an average depth of about seven miles.  During a visit to the district, Governor Browne invited the Ngatiawa natives to sell land.  A chief, Teira, and his friends at once offered to part with six hundred acres which they were occupying.  The head of their tribe, however, Wiremu Kingi, vetoed the sale.  The Native Department and the Governor sent down commissioners, who, after inquiry, decided erroneously that Teira’s party had a right to sell, and the head chief none to interfere.  A fair price was paid for the block, and surveyors sent to it.  The Ngatiawa good-humouredly encountered these with a band of old women well selected for their ugliness, whose appalling endearments effectually obstructed the survey work.  Then, as Kingi threatened war, an armed force was sent to occupy the plot.  After two days’ firing upon a stockade erected there, the soldiers advanced and found it empty.  Kingi, thus attacked, astutely made the disputed piece over to the King tribes, and forthwith became their protege.  Without openly making war, they sent him numbers of volunteer warriors.  He became the protagonist of the Maori land league.  The Taranaki tribe hard by New Plymouth and the Ngatiruanui further south joined him openly.  Hostilities broke out in February, 1860.