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 tribal divisions.  A severe snubbing from Mr. Busby’s official superiors in Australia was the only consequence of this attempt to federate man-eaters under parliamentary institutions.

The still-born constitution was Mr. Busby’s proposed means of checkmating a rival.  In the words of Governor Gipps, this “silly and unauthorized act was a paper pellet fired off” at the hero of an even more pretentious fiasco.  An adventurer of French parentage, a certain Baron de Thierry, had proclaimed himself King of New Zealand, and through the agency of missionary Kendall bought, or imagined he bought—­for thirty axes—­40,000 acres of land from the natives.  He landed at Hokianga with a retinue of ninety-three followers.  The Maoris of the neighbourhood gravely pointed out to him a plot of three hundred acres, which was all they would acknowledge of his purchase.  Unabashed, he established himself on a hill, and began the making of a carriage-road which was to cross the island.  Quickly it was found that his pockets were empty.  Laughed at by whites and natives alike, he at once subsided into harmless obscurity, diversified by occasional “proclamations,” which a callous world allowed to drop unheeded.