So little was known or thought of the South Island that sovereignty was not proclaimed over it until four months after the Governor’s arrival in the north, and even then the royal flag was not hoisted there.  The consequence was a narrow escape from an attempt by the French to plant a colony at Akaroa in Banks Peninsula.  The French frigate L’Aube put in at the Bay of Islands in July, 1840, bound for the south.  Her captain, hospitably entertained by Hobson, let fall some incautious words about the object of his voyage.  Hobson took the alarm, and promptly dispatched the Britomart to hoist the English flag at Akaroa.  Thanks to bad weather, the Britomart only reached the threatened port a few days before the Frenchmen.  Then it was found that an emigrant ship, with a number of French settlers, was coming with all the constituent parts of a small colony.  The captain of L’Aube, finding himself forestalled, good-humouredly made the best of it.  A number of the immigrants did indeed land.  Some of them were afterwards taken away to the Marquesas Islands in the South Seas:  others remained permanently settled at Akaroa.  There around a bay, still called French Bay, they planted vineyards and built cottages in a fashion having some pathetic reminiscences of rural France.  There they used to be visited from time to time by French men-of-war; but they gave no trouble to any one, and their children, by removal or intermarriage, became blended with the English population which in later days surrounded them.

Captain Hobson had to choose a capital.  After throwing away much good money at Russell in the Bay of Islands, he saw that he must come further south.  A broader-minded man might have gone at once to Wellington, and planted himself boldly amongst the English settlers.  But the prejudice of the officials and the advice of the missionaries combined with Hobson’s own peculiar views of the Cook’s Straits colonists, to keep him in the north.  From his despatches it is clear that he regarded the immigrants in the south—­one of the finest bodies of settlers that ever left England—­as dangerous malcontents of anarchical tendencies.  As he would not go to Wellington and take his natural position at the head of the main English colony and at the centre of New Zealand, he did the next best thing in going to Auckland.  In pitching upon the Waitemata isthmus he made so good a choice that his name is likely to be remembered therefore as long as New Zealand lasts.  By founding the city of Auckland he not only took up a strategic position which cut the Maori tribes almost in half, but selected a very fine natural trading centre.  The narrow neck of land on which Auckland stands between the winding Waitemata on the east and the broader Manu-kau Harbour on the west, will, before many years, be overspread from side to side by a great mercantile city.  The unerring eye of Captain Cook had, seventy years before, noted the Hauraki Gulf