Speech By Tuhawaiki.

Addressing Colonel Wakefield, Mr. Symonds, and Mr. Clarke, Tuhawaiki delivered a most eloquent and pathetic address which, fortunately, was taken down by Clarke. (“Karaka is the Maori version of Clarke): ‘Look here, Karaka,’ he said, ‘here, and there, and there and yonder; those are all burial places, not ancestral burial places, but page 46 those of this generation. Our parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, children, they lie thick around us.

“We are but a poor remnant now, and the pakeha will soon see us all die out, but even in my time, we Ngailaki^* were a large and powerful tribe, stretching from Cook Strait to Akaroa, and the Ngatimamoe to the south of us were slaves. The wave which brought Rauparaha and his allies to the Strait, washed him over to the Southern Island. He went through us, fighting and burning and slaying. At Kaikoura, at Kaiapoi, and at other of our strongholds, hundreds and hundreds of our people fell, hundreds more were carried off as slaves, and hundreds died of cold and starvation in their flight. We are now dotted in families, few and far between, where we formerly lived as tribes. Our children are few, and we cannot rear them.

“But we had a worse enemy than even Rauparaha, and that was the visit of the pakeha with his drink and his disease. You think us very corrupted, but the very scum of Port Jackson shipped as whalers or landed as sealers on this coast. They brought us new plagues, unknown to our fathers, till our people melted away.

“This was one of our largest settlements, and it was beyond even the reach of Rauparaha. We lived secure, and feared no enemy; but one year, when I was a youth, a ship came from Sydney, and she brought measles among us. It was winter, as it is now. In a few months most of the inhabitants sickened and died. Whole families on this spot disappeared and left no one to represent them. My people lie all around us, and now you can tell Wide–awake (Wakefield) why we cannot part with this portion of our land, and why we were angry with Tuckett for cutting his lines about here.”