of hard-headed pioneers was a king with no divinity to hedge him round.  Without pomp, almost without privacy, everything he said or did became the property of local gossips.  A ruler so placed must have natural dignity, and requires self-command above all things.  That was just the quality Captain Fitzroy had not.  It was said that the blood of a Stuart king ran in his veins; and, indeed, there seemed to be about the tall, thin, melancholy man something of the bad luck, as well as the hopeless wrong-headedness, of that unteachable House.

For he landed at Auckland in November, 1843, to find an ample legacy of trouble awaiting him.  The loyal and patriotic address with which the Aucklanders welcomed him was such as few viceroys have been condemned to receive at the outset of their term of office.  It did not mince matters.  It described the community as bankrupt, and ascribed its fate to the mistakes and errors of the Government.  At New Plymouth a similar address declared that the settlers were menaced with irretrievable ruin.  Kororareka echoed the wail.  Nor was the welcome of Wellington one whit more cheerful—­a past of bungling, a present of stagnation, a future of danger:  such was the picture it drew.  It was not much exaggerated.  On the coasts of New Zealand some twelve thousand colonists were divided into eight settlements, varying in population from 4,000 at Wellington to 200 at Akaroa.  Not one of them was defensible in military eyes.  There were no troops, no militia, no money.  Neither at Wellington nor Nelson had more than one thousand acres of land been cleared and cultivated.  Labourers were riotously clamouring for work or rations.  Within fifty miles of Wellington was Rauparaha, who, had he appealed to his race, could probably have mustered a force strong enough to loot and burn the town.  Some wondered why he did not; perhaps Hadfield’s influence amongst his tribe supplied the answer.

Governor Fitzroy began at his first levee at Wellington by scolding the settlers, inveighing against the local newspaper, and grossly insulting Gibbon Wakefield’s son when he was presented to him.  At Nelson he rated the magistrates after such a fashion that they threw up their commissions.  He then went to Rauparaha’s pa at Waikanae near Kapiti.  A dozen whites were with the Governor; five hundred Maoris surrounded the chief.  After lecturing the latter for the slaughter of the captives at Wairau, Fitzroy informed him that, as the slain men had been the aggressors, he was to be freely forgiven.  Only one utterly ignorant of the Maori character could have fancied that this exaggerated clemency would be put down to anything but weakness.  Even some missionaries thought that compensation should have been demanded for the death of the prisoners.  As for the settlers, their disgust was deep.  Putting together the haste, violence, and want of dignity of his proceedings, they declared the new Governor could not be master of his own actions.  That Gibbon Wakefield’s brother should have been savagely butchered and not avenged was bad enough; that his fellow-settlers should be rated for their share in the disaster seemed a thing not to be endured.  The Maoris grew insolent, the settlers sullen, and for years afterward a kind of petty warfare lingered on in the Wellington district.