their introduction into these pages. The Marquesas, we believe, still continue to resist the efforts of the missionaries, whether Protestant or Catholic, their wild inhabitants continuing idolators and cannibals to this day; while in the Friendly, Navigation, Hervey's, and various other groups a fair proportion of the inhabitants are already Christians.

CHAPTER II.

NEW ZEALAND.

THE exception alluded to at the conclusion of the last chapter is New Zealand, an island of the South Pacific, which although about twelve hundred miles distant from the new continent is, politically, one of the Australian colonies of Great Britain. We here arrive at a point where it is expedient that some change should take place in the plan of the present work. We have traversed the old regions whose manners and institutions belong to history; we have touched lightly upon the little fungi of the southern ocean, which have ripened in a hot-bed of European civilization, and grown up into a spongy and unwholesome maturity before our eyes; and we now arrive at a series of great countries without recollections, without stability, whose past is a blank, and whose present is a whirling chaos. The proper contributors to Australian history are as yet the journalists, who float on with the current of events, and whose aggregate labours will one

day supply what is wanting; but a Book, which would not at once grow out of date like a newspaper or a magazine, must confine itself, in a great measure, to general views, without aspiring to paint the protean forms of the time.

New Zealand was discovered in 1642 by the Dutch navigator Tasman, and visited by Cook in 1769; the latter giving his name to the strait which divides the two principal islands. Both these great captains found the natives fierce and inhospitable; and Cook killed four of them in an encounter sustained by the savages with heroic bravery. A French ship, however, about the same time, was received with much kindness, which the captain repaid by treacherously seizing and carrying off one of the chiefs; and in three years after, twenty-seven officers and men of the same nation, after being lulled into security by a show of confidence and friendship, were murdered and their bodies devoured. In 1773 ten more Frenchmen met the same fate, and their bodies the same unnatural tomb; and it was not till towards the close of the century that the formidable savages were prevailed upon to accept the advances of foreigners. By degrees, however, they submitted to their fate; and an amicable intercourse appeared to be completely established, when, in 1809, another terrific massacre-the slaughter of a whole ship's crew, consisting of nearly seventy persons, perpetrated on very slight provocation-appeared to interpose an impassable barrier between the two races. This barrier, notwithstanding, was overleaped by the heroism of the Church Missionaries, who commenced their labours in 1809; and in a wonderfully short time the beautiful deserts of New Zealand echoed not only to the songs of Zion, but to the cheerful voices of the ploughman

and artisan.

While the gospel was thus spreading over the land, and the wild natives were acquiring at least the external habits of civilization, the government of Great Britain continued to look on passively at a spectacle so interesting even in a political aspect. New Zealand was a country as large as Great Britain and Ireland, with a population of only one hundred thousand souls, or one inhabitant to about seven hundred acres. It was, in fact, almost wholly unoccupied ground, and its fine climate, natural resources, and relative position to the Australian settlements, and the smaller islands of the Pacific, held out irresistible invitations to colonists. The misfortune was, that the invitations were accepted, in the first instance, by a class of persons who could bring with them only the vices and miseries of civilization,-deserters from ships, escaped convicts, and needy and worthless adventurers of all kinds, who were glad to leave behind the trammels of decent society, and the restrictions of regular government. In New Zealand the poorest found land, and the most vicious friends; and there being no law to restrain, they followed in the track of the missionaries, to devour like locusts the fruits of their pious toil.

In the mean time the attention of various influential persons in England was attracted towards these islands, and the irregular and vicious system of colonization under which they were suffering; and in 1825 a company was formed, which at the time, however, had no results,for the purpose of founding a settlement of a better kind. Another society, still more respectable in means and number, was instituted in 1837, but they declined to proceed upon a royal charter without an act of parliament, and their bill was thrown out in the House of Commons. In 1839, as they had gone too far in their preparations to recede without loss, they would have been

it

satisfied with the royal charter of incorporation at first tendered to them; but this being in turn refused by the government, they determined to act as an independent body. The government and parliament, it must be observed, had expressly recognised New Zealand as an independent state under the rule of its chiefs; with whom was, of course, the business of the Company to treatand a very easy business it was found to be. The notion that twenty thousand savages (the highest number it is possible to assume of adult males) were the real owners of a country as large as Great Britain and Ireland, was one of the wildest hallucinations mentioned in history; but the New Zealanders made no scruple about the matter, accepting with much complacency whatever was offered to them, although doubtless much puzzled to know what it was they gave in return. Thus the Company became all on a sudden great proprietors, and before the end of the year the first body of their emigrants had sailed from England to take possession of the promised land.

The government, in the mean time, while discouraging the Company, were not blind to the signs of the times. They knew that so large a body as the English settlers constituted (even before the new emigration) could not be left to their fate, and that the movement, in and out of parliament, in favour of the islands, could not be treated. with contempt. The result of their deliberations was that the settlers of the New Zealand Company were very speedily followed by a consul who, agreeably to his instructions, entered into a treaty with the chiefs for the transference of the sovereignty of their country to the British crown; and this was accordingly proclaimed, just in time to prevent the French from taking possession of the territory.