Governor Fitzroy was no more successful in Taranaki.  There the Company, after claiming the entire territory, had had their claim cut down by the Commissioners’ award to 60,000 acres.  But even this was now disputed, on the ground that it had been bought from a tribe—­the Waikato—­who had indeed conquered it, and carried away its owners as slaves, but had never taken possession of the soil by occupation.  When Colonel Wakefield bought it, the land was virtually empty, and the few score of natives living at the Sugar-Loaves sold their interest to him readily enough.  But when the enslaved Ngatiawa and Taranaki tribesmen were soon afterwards released through the influence of Christianity, they returned to the desolated land, and disputed the claim of the Company.  Moreover, there were the Ngatiawas, who, led by Wiremu Kingi, had migrated to Cook’s Straits in the days of devastation.  They claimed not only their new possessions—­much of which they sold to the Company—­but their old tribal lands at Waitara, from which they had fled, but to which some of them now straggled back.  On this nice point Captain Fitzroy had to adjudicate.  He decided that the returned slaves and Ngatiawa fugitives were the true owners of the land.  Instead of paying them fairly for the 60,000 acres—­which they did not require—­he handed the bulk of it back to them, penning the unhappy white settlers up in a miserable strip of 3,200 acres.  The result was the temporary ruin of the Taranaki settlement, and the sowing of the seeds of an intense feeling of resentment and injustice which bore evil fruit in later days.

Nor did Captain Fitzroy do any better with finance than in his land transactions.  His very insufficient revenue was largely derived from Customs duties.  Trade at the Bay of Islands had, by this time, greatly fallen away.  Whalers and timber vessels no longer resorted there as in the good old Alsatian days.  Both natives and settlers grumbled at the change, which they chose to attribute to the Government Customs duties.  To conciliate them, the Governor abolished Customs duties at Kororareka.  Naturally a cry at once went up from other parts of the Colony for a similar concession.  The unhappy Governor, endeavouring to please them all, like the donkey-owner in AEsop’s Fables, abolished Customs duties everywhere.  To replace them he devised an astounding combination of an income-tax and property-tax.  Under this, not only would the rich plainly pay less in proportion than the poor, but a Government official drawing L600 a year, but owning no land, would pay just half the sum exacted from a settler who, having invested L1,000 in a farm, was struggling to make L200 a year thereby.  The mere prospect of this crudity caused such a feeling in the Colony that he was obliged to levy the Customs duties once more.  His next error was the abandonment of the Government monopoly of land purchase from the Maoris.  As might be expected, the pressure upon all rulers in New Zealand to do this, and to allow