“The Little White Church.”

The first room we stepped into had been Bishop Selwyn's reception room at Kohimarama, Auckland, and had been brought up on a scow to its present resting place by one of the Bishop's admirers. Overlooking the building is Flagstaff Hill, of Hone Heke renown, while a few steps to the right, a short distance from the shore, is the little white church, that has witnessed the drama and tragedy of so many pioneer lives—the heralds of civilisation. The church was erected in 1835, the first to be built in New Zealand by the Church Missionary Society. Among the list of subscribers is the notable name of Charles Darwin. H.M.S. Beagle was a visitor in the bay at the time, and the officers and captain, with Charles Darwin, subscribed the handsome sum of £15 towards the building fund. In 1837 Samuel Marsden visited the church, in December, 1838, Bishop Broughton, the first Anglican Bishop of Australia, preached a consecration service, and on the 29th January, 1840, in the same building, Captain Hobson read the Crown proclamation and his Commission as Lieutenant-Governor. A church loved by pakeha and Maori alike, so loved by the latter that during the war of 1845, the Maoris placed a guard over the church to prevent it from sustaining injury.

The white tombstones, rising from the green carpet of Mother Earth, untrammelled by fence, or border, as is befitting these pioneers of the free wilds, lift the veil and let us peer into the dramatic past. The tallest monument, and close to the church, on our right, as we walk up the path, is the stone erected by the Governor of the colony to Tamati Waka Nene, Chief of the Ngapuhi, for thirty-one years a loyal subject of the Great White Queen. He died in 1871. His voice raised at an opportune moment changed the destiny, not of kings, but of thousands of lives. We see him, while the Treaty is being read and interpreted, with bent head, deep in thought. Unlettered, but possessed of the heritage of a more cultured era, he is able to look into the future and compare it with the past. Raising his arm to quell the rising intonations from the gesticulating chiefs, he speaks with the ease and inherent poetry of his race, and the fate of a country is sealed.