But even Kororareka drew the line.  In 1827 a brig, the Wellington, arrived in the bay in the hands of a gang of convicts, who had preferred the chances of mutiny to the certainties of Norfolk Island.  Forthwith Alsatia was up in arms for society and a triple alliance of missionaries, whalers, and cannibals combined to intercept the runaways.  The ship’s guns of the whalers drove the convicts to take refuge on shore, where the Maoris promptly secured them.  The captives were duly sent to their fate in Sydney, and the services of the New Zealanders gratefully requited by a payment at the rate of a musket per convict.

Alsatia had its civil wars.  In 1831 a whaling-captain deserted the daughter of a chief in the neighbourhood in order to take to himself another chief’s daughter, also of a tribe by the Bay.  The tribe of the deserted woman attacked that of the favoured damsel.  A village was burnt, a benevolent mediator shot, and a hundred lives lost.  Only the arrival on the scene of Marsden, on one of his visits to the country, restored peace.  So outrageous were the scenes in the Bay that its own people had to organize some sort of government.  This took the form of a vigilance committee, each member of which came to its meetings armed with musket and cutlass.  Their tribunal was, of course, that of Judge Lynch.  They arrested certain of the most unbearable offenders, tarred and feathered them, and drummed them out of the township.  When feathers were lacking for the decoration, the white fluff of the native bullrush made a handy substitute.  In the absence of a gaol, the Vigilants were known to keep a culprit in duress by shutting him up for the night in a sea-chest, ventilated by means of gimlet-holes.

They were not, however, the only representatives of law and order in New Zealand.  The British authorities in New South Wales had all along, perforce, been keeping their eye on this troublesome archipelago in the south-east.  In 1813 Governor Macquarie made Sydney shipmasters sailing for the country give bonds for a thousand pounds not to kidnap Maori men, take the women on board their vessels, or meddle with burying grounds.  In 1814 he appointed the chiefs Hongi and Koro Koro, and the missionary Kendall, to act as magistrates in the Bay of Islands.  Possibly the two first-named magistrates were thus honoured to induce them not to eat the third.  No other advantage was gained by the step.  A statute was passed in England in 1817 authorizing the trial and punishment of persons guilty of murder and other crimes in certain savage and disturbed countries, amongst which were specified New Zealand, Otaheite, and Honduras.  Two others, in 1823 and 1828, gave the Australian courts jurisdiction over Whites in New Zealand.  One White ruffian was actually arrested in New Zealand, taken back to Sydney, and executed.  But this act of vigour did not come till the end of 1837.  Then the crime punished was not one of the atrocities which for thirty years had made New Zealand