Eloquent Appeals to the Governor.

There are blended pathos and logic in Tamehana's letters to the Governor appealing for sweet reasonableness in this matter of a Maori King. He could not understand why the Government should fly into a rage whenever mention was made of the Maoris desire for a head of their own in their own district. It was not antagonistic to the white Queen. He had read translations of the history of other countries, and he knew that each people had a king or queen of its own. “What harm is there,” he asked, in a letter to the Governor in 1861, “that, you are so angry about? I suppose that God's things were for us all. God did not make night and day for you only. No; summer and winter are for all; rain and wind, food and life for us all. … My friends, why have you grudged us a King, as if it were a greater name than that of God? If it were that God did not permit it, then it would be right to object, and it would be given up. But it is not He who forbids; and while it is only our fellow-man that is angry, it will not be given up.”

Tamehana went on to administer a dignified yet stinging rebuke to the Governor who had hastily authorised the war in Taranaki in 1860, without properly investigating the causes of dispute. He quoted St. Paul on charity, which “is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.” Hasty wrath (Governor Gore Browne had been nicknamed by the Maoris “Puku-Riri,” or “Angry-Belly”) had been condemned in the Bible; moreover it was childish. A proverb of the Maoris said, “It is a child that breaks calabashes; it is a child that cries for food.” That was the way of children, but it was not fitting for the Governor to do likewise. “Rather is it for you to act deliberately, as you have an example to go by. The Word of God is your compass to guide you—the laws of God.”

Such letters should have convinced the white administrators that Tamehana possessed a calm and judicial mind and that he was anxious to come to an amicable and rational arrangement with the Government for the control of Maori affairs. But all his pleas and attempts to infuse calm reason into the consideration of the crisis were treated as words of defiance.

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