STORY OF AUCKLAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 270, 14 November 1928, Page 6

STORY OF AUCKLAND.

WHEN WAR WAS BREWING. PRELUDE TO THE WAIKATO CAMPAIGN. GREY'S ADMINISTRATIVE METHODS.

(By JAMES COWAN.)

No. xvn.

Sir George Grey, Auckland's great benefactor, has often been described by admiring disciples and biographers a» the most successful of native administrators. But in my view, after long study of Grey's character and career, his capacity to form a sound judgment and execute a sound policy in Maori affairs has been over-rated greatly. Grey proved incapable of taking an unprejudiced view of the Maori King movement, and of conceding the clear right of the tribes led by Wiremu Tamehana to preserve their nationality and administer their own affairs, within certain broad limits. He could, constitutionally, have proclaimed native districts where native customs and laws could have prevailed, always subject to the supreme oversecrship of the British Crown. Indeed he claimed in after years that he did make some offer of this kind, but half-licartea concessions at the last moment were useless.

In one all-important direction Governor Grey's strength was weakness. Sir William Fox, in his criticism ot the native policy of the day, says that Grey in his first Administration), while personally ingratiating himself with ths Maoris, utterly failed in attaching them to British laws and institutions. "Under him they continued a separate people, almost as much as when Tasman or Cook saw the first canoe. But this personal link was one which necessarily snapped when he left the colony. No permanent or stable bond of union had been established between the native race and British authority. He sacrificed our national position to his personal position; and when he departed (in 1853) he left the natives without helm or pilot." The Kohimarama Conference and Donald Maclean

In the time of Grey's successor, Governor Gore Browne, an effort was made to retrieve the position by that large conference of native chiefs from many parts of the island held at the Kohiniarama mission establishment in 1860. The Kingite leaders did not attend. In this conference Mr. Donald Maclean (afterwards Sir Donald), the most able administrator of native affairs that New Zealand has ever seen, was the chief moving spirit. But Maclean was not then invested with the full authority he acquired nine or ten years later. It is quite possible that had such a man as Maclean, with his knowledge of the workings of the Maori mind and his sympathy—because of his Highland ancestry—with the hereditary clan feeling of natives, been in full control of affairs in the 'fifties, the war would not have occurred.

The Governor's Powers. Unfortunately at that period of our history the Governor exercised unlimited power in native administration, he was not responsible to the Legislature for his actions affecting the Maoris, and he could proclaim war or peace. Fox, writing on September 4, 18G0, complained that though the Governor drifted into the Taranaki War in February of that year, the General Assembly did not have an opportunity of discussing it until it met in the ordinary way at the end of July. So a war was raging for six months in a country with a Parliament which was unable to give expression to its opinion until too late. An Alarm of 1860. Nearly three years before the beginning of the Waikato War there was a bush frontier episode, that revealed the touchy and suspicious temper' of the South Auckland Kingite tribes, one of those incidents which sometimes precipitate a breach between two peoples. During the Taranaki War

m lstiO-61 the nationalist Maoris in our district became very excitable, and it needed but small provocation for them to break out into open hostility. It was then that Bishop G. A. Selwyn and Archdeacon Maunsell laboured with all their might among the Waikatos to prevent war. Towards the end of October, 1800, the body of Eriata, a Maori of Patumahoe, was found shot dead in the bush, and although the wound was apparently an accident, the natives around Mauku, Patumahoe and Waiuku concluded he had been murdered by a European. Mr. (afterwards Sir Donald) Maclean, Mr. Rogan (later a Native Land Court judge) and Archdeacon Maunsell, of the Native Department, visited Patumahoe and endeavoured to pacify the Maoris, and at an inquiry a jury of Europeans returned the verdict of accidental death. Dr. Giles, afterwards magistrate of Auckland, who iB with us 6till, at a great age, was the medical man who examined the body. The following items from the private diary of the late Mr. S. Percy Smith, who was at that time surveying land near Waikato Heads, indicates the perilous nature of that meeting in the bush:

"October 18 (18G0). —Messrs. Maclean and Rogan returned from Waiuku, and I hear that they had a very narrow escape from being murdered (at Patumahoe). It all depended upon the 'tangata wero' (the spearsman who advanced to challenge a party of visitors) as to how he would throw his spear. But Ihaka Takaanini (the chief of Ngati-Tamaoho) forcibly prevented the man from throwing it, or they, together with other white men present, assuredly would have been killed. The Maoris have agreed to let the supposed murder pass by this time, but in the next accident of the kind they 'will not require anyone to go and investigate the matter.'"

This chief Ihaka, known to the settlers as "old Isaac," whose home was at Papakura, was a great friend of the pakehas; nevertheless he wart arrested in 1863, at the beginning of the war, and kept prisoner until hie death after the war on Motu-hnrakia Island, in the Hauraki Gulf Waikato's War Casoe Expedition. The relatives of the dead man sent to Waikato asking that "utu" should be taken for what they regarded as a murder, and a war party of Maoris came sweeping down from Ngaruawahia to Tuakau in a flotilla of canoes. The Government dispatched a small vessel, the cutter Raven, from Onehunga to the Mauku Creek, and the settlers of Mauku and Patumahoe and their families, numbering 50 or 60 all told, spent an anxious night on the little craft at anchor in the river near the Bluff. Some of the people had buried their valuables in the ground before leaving their homes. In the morning the men went ashore, and late in the afternoon the Rev. Dr. Purchas and Mr. J. Keleher came galloping down the track with the news that Bishop Selwyn and Archdeacon Maunsell had met the war party of | over 200 men at Tuakau and persuaded them to abandon their expedition.

That war with the Waikatos was thus narrowly averted in 1860 was attributed by the settlers and citizens chiefly to the strenuous effoits of Bishop Selwyn. But it must be related also that Wiremu Tamehana accompanied the Waikato expedition for the purpose of preventing war, and it was just as much due to his remonstrances and his peace-making speeches to his people that the flotilla returned peacefully to the Kingite headquarters at Ngaruawahia. There were many fiery spirits in those war canoes, bent upon a trial of strength with the pakeha and aching to use their double-barrel guns. Their opportunity was not long in coming. The war feeling across the frontier was heightened' by the sight of the Imperial soldiers' camps that presently were established along the track from Drnry, where the military road was to run through the bush Waikato-ward. be eontanued.V