Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.
Origin of the War
Origin of the War.
Yet the incoming ruler was hardly less at fault than the outgoing one, and he was almost as deeply implicated in the causes of the war. Governor Browne had, indeed, made the purchase of land that was to set the whole country in flame, but the root of the strife goes farther back and deeper down. Grey is accused of having, in 1847, committed a grave error of judgment by refusing, out of complaisance to Gladstone, Secretary for the Colonies in July, 1846, to confirm a wise decision of his predecessor, Governor FitzRoy. The war that desolated the North Island in the sixties was already germinating in 1846. The Ngatiawa tribe, resident in Taranaki, had been defeated by Te Whero in 1831, and the remnant fled southwards before the victor, settling on the southwest coast, as other members of it had previously done, but thereby relinquishing none of their rights of occupancy. The New Zealand Company bought, on its usual terms, a large tract of land once occupied by the Ngatiawa, and the sale of a portion of the land was duly ratified. But a large part of the tribal territory had been nominally sold, and to this the absentee Ngatiawa, represented by Te Rangitake, an ally of the Government and chief-peacemaker in the southern district, would not consent. Though he was well acquainted with Maori land-law, which is that of all Aryan peoples, * Grey held that the rights of the absentees lapsed by non-assertion, and while he informed the tribe that he would make "most ample reserves for their present and future wants," he validated the sale. He thus aided in hatching the brood of war that overspread the whole island twelve or fifteen years later. Could he have succeeded in preventing the return of the exiled members of the tribe, as he strenuously and secretly endeavoured to do, he might have killed the seed of the hydra. Hearing that the exiles intended to return, Grey sent orders from Auckland to Wellington to ask Te Puni, a friendly chief, to dismantle the canoes; if he refused, they were to be seized or destroyed. He completely failed in his purpose. The canoes were neither dismantled nor destroyed, and in them the surviving members of the tribe safely effected their collective return. They reoccupied their old locations, and their occupancy of these was the fountain and origin of the Waitara struggle. Grey too had returned, and he found the serpent-brood preparing to strangle the Colony in its Lernæan coils.
It boded little good for his new term of governorship in New Zealand that Mr. Fox was Premier of the Colony when he entered on it. Fox, who had inherited the feud of the New Zealand Company against Grey, had been one of his most rancorous opponents during his first term. His animosity against Grey waxed hotter as the collisions inevitable with such an animus multiplied, and, before Grey's second term came to an end, Fox was to resign his seat in the legislature on the pretext that nothing could be done so long as Sir George Grey was in office. If such were his feelings when Grey returned to New Zealand, they were carefully dissembled. At all events, coming back clothed with prestige as a kind of political Messiah, Grey found him professedly friendly and met with cordiality from his Ministry.
* Sir C. Metcalfe, in Elphinstone, History of India, p. 214.