and partly out of a pride and desire to show a contrast to the reeking hovels of the Maori.  As a rule she did her best to keep her man sober.  Her cottage, thatched with reeds, was perhaps whitewashed with lime made by burning the sea-shells.  With its clay floor and huge open fireplace, with its walls lined with curtained sleeping bunks, and its rafters loaded with harpoons, sharp oval-headed lances, coils of rope, flitches of bacon or bags of flour, it showed a picture of rude comfort.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Wakefield, Adventures in New Zealand; Shortland, Southern Districts of New Zealand; S. Thomson, Story of New Zealand:  Sir W.T.  Power, Sketches in New Zealand; G.F.  Angas, Savage Scenes.]

If the seats were the joints of a whale’s backbone, there was always food in plenty, washed down with grog or tea made from manuka sprigs.  Whale’s heart was a delicacy set before guests, who found it rather like beef.  Maoris, sharks, and clouds of sea-gulls shared much of the flesh of the captured whales’ carcasses.

Maori relatives learned to envy and, to some extent, to copy what they saw.  They took service as oarsmen, and even bought and equipped boats for themselves.  They learned to be ashamed of some of their more odious habits, and to respect the pluck and sense of fair play shown by their whaling neighbours.  As a rule, each station was held by license from the chief of the proprietary tribe.  He and tenants would stand shoulder to shoulder to resist incursions by other natives.  Dicky Barrett, head-man of the Taranaki whaling-station, helped the Ngatiawa to repulse a noteworthy raid by the Waikato tribe.  Afterwards, when the Ngatiawa decided to abandon their much-harried land, Barrett moved with them to Cook’s Straits, where, in 1839, the Wakefields found him looking jovial, round, and ruddy, dressed in a straw hat, white jacket, and blue dungaree trousers, and married to a chief’s daughter—­a handsome and stately woman.  It was Dicky Barrett who directed Colonel Wakefield to what is now Wellington, and who, in consequence, may be recorded as the guide who pointed out to the pioneer of the New Zealand Company the future capital of the colony.

Nor was Barrett the only specimen of this rough race whom New Zealanders may remember with interest.  There was Stewart, ex-Jacobite, sealer, and pilot, whose name still conceals Rakiura, and whose Highland pride made him wear the royal tartan to the last as he sat in Maori villages smoking among the blanketed savages.  There was the half-caste Chaseland, whose mother was an Australian “gin,” and who was acknowledged to be the most dexterous and best-tempered steersman in New Zealand—­when sober.  He needed his skill when he steered an open boat from the Chathams to Otago across five hundred miles of wind-vexed sea.  Chaseland’s mighty thews and sinews were rivalled by those of Spencer, whose claim to have fought at Waterloo was regarded