HISTORY OF A NEW ZEALAND ADVENTURER.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 705, 29 May 1879, Page 2

HISTORY OF A NEW ZEALAND ADVENTURER.

The JRangitikei Advocate contains a long notice of the somewhat remarkable career of George Buckland Worgan, recently sentenced to two years' imprisonment at Wanganui for forgery. We extract the following : — " Some years ago he was clerk in the Resdent Magistrate's Court at Wairoa, in the Havvke's Bay District, and was deprived of his office for faithlessness to his trußt, and corrupt trading with the Mauris. He afterwards followed a oareer of equivocal honesty as a native land agent, interpreter, and surveyor, with the varying degrees of success that commonly attend men driven to casual expedients as a last desperate struggle for existence. He would appear on the stage of public notice for short intervals, and when he disappeared always left a strong smell of brimstone behind. His personal fortunes changed with the fluctuating temper of the native mind about the sale of their lands, and with the facilities which war or peace afforded him for the questionable means, or the attainment pi his dishonorable ends. He often oscillated between a surfeit and a famine. His receipts were irregular and precarious, his hauls problematical and lumpy, and his mode of living prodigal and dissolute, so that he spent much of his time in fighting against difficulties, and extricating himself from embarrassments. Now and then he fleeced a greenhorn, and again his intended dupes would occasionally prove too wily for him. But he understood the secrets of his unscrutable trade so well, and had served so valuable an apprenticeship in the arts of chicanery that, through living so long on the brink of a volcano he managed to elude the momentarily apprehended ruin which was regarded as his certain fate. Justice was not slow to overtake him, perhaps only to furnish another reminder that the whirligig of time brings about its revenges. A golden opportunity of retreat from a life of fraud was unexpectedly opened to him in 1872, when the late Sir Donald McLean, in defiance of common sense, experience, and repeated warnings, appointed • Worgan Native Commissioner on this coast, at a salary of £450 a year, and liberal allowances. But long experience with crooned pursuits had destroyed all vestige of habits of honest industry, and blunted every h'ace of moral perceptions. A brain so luxuriant in disease speedily demoralised the system of the public department which he worked, and the Native troubles were quickly perceived to be pregnant with most danger whenever Worsan's star was in the ascendant. The Preßs very properly raißed a warning voice against the hazardous risk of continuing such a man in the Government employment, and for this Worgan commenced an action for libel against Mr. Duigan, who was at that time proprietor of the Wanganui CJironicle. Brass triply bronzed was requisite to dare the exposure of such a career in a court of justice, but Worgan was equal to the occasion. He appeared in the witnessbox, and the most interesting points in his biography were extracted from his own mouth by defendant's counsel, who shivered to atoms on the forensio rack the hypocritical semblance of outraged innocence which Worgan tried to assume. It required no very public pleader to burst the bubble of such pretentious claims to- virtue, and to convince the public that for any one to represent Worgan as an injured man would be an outrageous caricature. Subsequent to this, Worgan has again appeared in the Supreme Court as plaintiff in an action against Dr. Curl, to prosecute a claim for large participatory profits in a land negotiation, in which it was proved he had never invested a single farthing. We have seen him in the Bankruptcy

Court, and later still in the Police Court, to answer a charge of neglecting to support his family. And within the last few weeks exertions were made to take him out of the gaol at Wanganui, to put him in the dock at Napier, on a charge of conspiracy in still another instance of his treacherous land-jobbing. * Last week, however, at the criminal sessions at Wanganui, the curtain dropped on one complete act of his life's tragedy, and confined him in a felon's cell, after a gushing and piteous appeal for mercy, on account of that very family, for whose maintenance the keen instrument of the law was latterly set in motion against him."