HIS EXCELLENCY SIR GEORGE GREY, K.C.B., AND THE RUNAWAY NATIVES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume I, Issue 266, 19 September 1864, Page 4

HIS EXCELLENCY SIR GEORGE GREY, K.C.8., AND THE RUNAWAY NATIVES.

REFUSAL OP THE NATIVES TO RETURN. THE SETTLERS' CATTLE SLAUGHTERED. Ouu readers will recollect when the ' Miranda' left the harbour on the 12th instant with Sir George Grey, that Mr. T. A. White and the Native chicf Te Oriori accompanied his Excellency to the Ivawau. to ascertain the correctness of the report which had reached Auckland, namely, that the Native prisoners had escaped to the mainland. This report, as we all know, turned out to be but too true. The action taken by the Governor on discovering this fact is important, as showing on whom rests the responsibility of the present crisis. On finding that his proteges had lied to the mainland, Sir George Grey, before he returned, and could consult the wishes of the responsible ministers of the count ry, despatched Mr. G. White and Te Oriori to tlie late prisoners, to endeavour to induce them to return to the Kawau.

We have liere tlie question of who is to 1)1 in lie for tlie escape, and the consequences that may ensue from it, conclusively settled. Sir George Grey has himself put that matter at rest, s,i:id even if he were inclined to dispute his previous responsibility, his subsequent action cannot excuse him from the odium which the consequences arising out of his lax custody of the natives may occasion. What those consequences may be, we leave our readers to judge from the following information which we place before them.

The Queen's ship ' Falcon' returned on Saturday evening, bringing back the native chief Tc Oriori, and further information of the movements of the late prisoners, since their escape from the Kawau. They have passed inland, as we stated on Saturday, to a place about sixteen miles from Matakana, where they have taken up their abode for the present, and from which place, in answer to the solicitations and suiny of Sir George Grey, made through the native chief Tc Oriori, they have resolutely refused to return to the island. They have shot two of the settlers' cattle, and indeed seemed puzzled how to maintain themselves. They have about a dozen double-barrelled guns, and have intimated that if any attempts are made to recapture them they will resist, and retaliate vjpon tic European settlers in the north.

At the interview held with them by Mr. "White mid To Oriori, they coolly avowed that the plan of their escape had been laid almost as soon as they were sent to the Kawau by Sir George—so that all the kindness shown them there, kindness which is but part of a system only too probably carried out to court popularity and patronage, did not induce them to abandon their design. A few of them were willing to return with Mr. "White, but the great majority are resolute, and declare that they will, not return alive.

This, then, is tlic position of affairs. The British honor has been again compromised, and the Representative of England's Queen, with an able General, and ten thousand troops of the line at his hack, is reduced to the humiliating position of suing rebels and murderers to return to the charge of the law, which they have outraged. There is one alternate more humiliating still, that these Natives may continue to refuse to comply with these solicitations, and that the fear of involving the Northern districts in war may induce Sir George Grey to put up with this open defiance, and allow the late prisoners to remain at large.

The position is indued n painful one. It is tlic consequence of the slanders, official and otherwise, which have so acted 011 the mind of the ]mperial Government as to cause them to retain in the Colony, in conjunction with our Responsible Ministry, a Governor whose feelings and instincts are opposed to those of the colonists—whose very policy is an element of antagonism to civilisation, law, and order, and therein opposed to the able and humane policy of the Ministry, which is indeed the policy of the Assembly, and the desire of ninety-nine men out of every hundred in the Colony. Nor is it alone the European inhabitants of this Colony who withhold that moral support from its ruler without which his usefulness is as nothing. The Natives themselves, however much they might dislike Governor Browne, at least respected him. For His -Excellency Sir George Grey they have neither respect nor confidence. They likened his action to that of " the working of a mole underground"—and the very men whom he lakes from the kindly care of the Colonial Government distrust his motives when lie places them upon the Kavvau, and escape with the alternative of death in arms sooner than return as they suspect as slaves to eke out tl 10 remainder of their lives in tilling the infertile lands of the Kawatt.