Land for Settlement.

For many a year he was chiefly engaged in negotiations for land on which to settle the incoming shiploads of pakehas. He mended the mistakes made by the Wakefields in their page 27 defective purchases for the New Zealand Company. He bought in one district and another many hundreds of thousands of acres. He was the father of Napier and Hawke's Bay; he found it a vast waste country with a few Maori cultivations; he left it a land of pakeha wealth, of great flocks and herds, of great pastoral properties, the stage that preceded close settlement. He was never in a hurry; he never rushed the Maoris into bargains. His scrupulous fairness, his tolerance of the spirit of “taihoa,” gained confidence and the end desired where the importunities of other officials failed. Edward Gibbon Wake-field, who arrived in New Zealand in 1853, called him “the great Maori mystery man.” That described the popular view of his peculiar success in smoothing over native difficulties.