G.—2

the sale of any more land to the Europeans. Their second step was the equally important one of the attempt (also originating in the same district) to create what had never before existed, a national autonomy under the headship of a Maori King. Many of the largest and most warlike tribes joined these combinations, and the rude machinery of the institutions set up by them in Waikato was soon in full operation, over extensive tracts of country, to the absolute exclusion of the Queen's authority. With such smouldering fires it wanted but a breath to make a conflagration, and this was supplied by the unfortunate events which occurred at Waitara in 1860. The apparent ground of dispute was the right of a tribal chief to control a sale of 600 acres of land by a man of lesser rank, who claimed ownership by possessory right. But the Land-Leaguers and followers of the King saw in it a wider basis. To them it meant resistance to a sale of land to the European, and the power of the King to enforce that resistance. It enlisted the sympathies of the Waikato tribes, and they made the war their own. After a short local campaign in 1860-61, in which they took a part as allies of Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake, the battle-field was changed in 1863 to Waikato itself, and the King's standard, was hoisted in aggressive attack upon our colonists, as the rallying-point of defiance to the Queen's authority, and of the expulsion of the English people from the Islands. In all the fighting which followed, these were the watchwords of the Maori warriors; and wherever they prevailed, the attempt more or less successful to sweep the settlers away, was the thing they really aimed at. The great Waikato war was fought out in 1863-64, ending in the complete defeat of the King party in the Waikato district and Tauranga, and the occupation of their country by our people; and the result was, in those portions of the country, final. But the war was not yet over in the Waikato, when it broke out fiercely on the West Coast, and thence spread across the Island to the East, involving tribes that had either not at all or only partially been engaged in previous hostilities. It was in this stage that the West Coast Natives with whose territory we, under Your Excellency's Commission, have had to deal, began their connection with the events we are recording; and it happened in this way. The Natives resident in the country between Waitotara and Patea, belonging to the Ngatiruanui and Whanganui tribes, had sold a tract of land to the Government immediately adjoining Waitotara on the north. It was being occupied by settlers, and a road in course of construction there, when emissaries from the Ngatiruanui tribe residing farther north in the neighbourhood of the Waimate Plains, came down the coast and attacked our road-parties. Early in 1865 General Cameron took the field with several regiments of Imperial troops and large militia and Native contingents; and a campaign began wmich lasted several months, ending in the complete defeat of the insurgent tribes, nearly all whose people, except Te Whiti, Wiremu Kingi Matakatea, and a few other chiefs, had been engaged in hostilities against us. At the end of this war in September 1865, the whole Coast from Whanganui to the White Cliffs, 40 miles north of New Plymouth, was confiscated under the powers of the New Zealand Settlements Acts. But the Natives were not driven from their territory. They were all, by very liberal arrangements of the Government, restored to a large part of their country, and continued in seemingly friendly relations with us for nearly three years. Then again in 1868, in sympathy perhaps with a renewed outbreak by Te Kooti on the East Coast, a portion of the West Coast Natives under Titokowaru raised the standard of rebellion, and swept away nearly all the settlements, over a space of forty miles, which had in the interval been planted in the country between Waitotara and Waingongoro. This outbreak ended in the defeat of Titokowaru, who fled with the most part of his followers through the fastnesses of the great forest into the Ngatimaru country behind Waitara: while amongst the resident Natives nearer Waitotara, the Pakakohi were taken prisoners, and the Ngarauru were removed for a time into the Whanganui district. The country between Waitotara and Waingongoro being again open for settlement, was reoccupied by our settlers; and afterwards the Pakakohi and Ngarauru people were brought back and placed on reserves, defined and surveyed for them by the Government, where they have continued to live to the present day. The substantial interests of these restored

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