Crozet moralizes on the malignant and unprovoked treachery of these savages.  He pours out his contempt on the Parisian philosophes who idealized primitive man and natural virtue.  For his part he would rather meet a lion or a tiger, for then he would know what to do!  But there is another side to the story.  The memory of the Wi-Wi,[1] “the bloody tribe of Marion,” lingered long in the Bay of Islands.  Fifty years after Captain Cruise was told by the Maoris how Marion had been killed for burning their villages.  Thirty years later still, Surgeon-Major Thomson heard natives relating round a fire how the French had broken into their tapu sanctuaries and put their chiefs in irons.  And then there were the deeds of De Surville.  Apart from certain odd features in Crozet’s narrative, it may be remarked that he errs in making the Maoris act quite causelessly.  The Maori code was strange and fantastic, but a tribal vendetta always had a reason.

[Footnote 1:  Out-Out.]

Thus did the Dutch, English, and French in succession discover New Zealand, and forthwith come into conflict with its dauntless and ferocious natives.  The skill and moderation of Cook may be judged by comparing his success with the episodes of De Surville’s roughness and the troubles which befel Tasman, Furneaux, and Marion du Fresne.  Or we may please ourselves by contrasting English persistency and harsh but not unjust dealing, with Dutch over-cautiousness and French carelessness and cruelty.  One after the other the Navigators revealed the islands to the world, and began at the same time that series of deeds of blood and reprisal which made the name of New Zealand notorious for generations, and only ended with the massacre of Poverty Bay a long century afterwards.

[Illustration]

Chapter V

NO MAN’S LAND

“The wild justice of revenge.”

The Maoris told Cook that, years before the Endeavour first entered Poverty Bay, a ship had visited the northern side of Cook’s Strait and stayed there some time, and that a half-caste son of the captain was still living.  In one of his later voyages, the navigator was informed that a European vessel had lately been wrecked near the same part of the country, and that the crew, who reached the shore, had all been clubbed after a desperate resistance.  It is likely enough that many a roving mariner who touched at the islands never informed the world of his doings, and had, indeed, sometimes excellent reasons for secrecy.  Still, for many years after the misadventure of Marion du Fresne, the more prudent Pacific skippers gave New Zealand a wide berth.  When D’Entrecasteaux, the French explorer, in his voyage in search of the ill-fated La Perouse, lay off the coast in 1793, he would not even let a naturalist, who was on one of his frigates, land to have a glimpse of the novel flora of the wild and