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Life in Early Poverty Bay

[introduction]

‘In the Maori kingdom as in all other Native districts in N.Z. the supreme authority, legislative and judicial, resides in the village runanga. When making laws, the runangas have no idea of any limits to the province of Government. Their regulations extend to the minutest details of private life. They make laws about behavior on Sunday; laws against falsehood, whether slanderous or not; laws to fix the price of pigs, corn and potatoes; laws to fix the payments for which people shall carry the mails. In short, the runanga is a generous tyranny and would be insupportable if it only possessed the power to carry its decrees into execution… But any Native who feels strong enough to redress wrongs received from pakehas, without troubling the runanga, will help himself to a horse or a cow and obtain satisfaction. Any such action will, too, be approved and susstained by the runanga if the original claim to compensation is considered just… . Whilst a runanga may not have power to enforce a sentence, it has the power to banish a man from society until he voluntarily submits… . During the time that I was stationed in the Waikato the Maori king was visited by leading chiefs from Taranaki, Wanganui, Hawke's Bay, East Cape, Tauranga and even from the Ngapuhis in the Far North.”—J. E. Gorst M.A., in “The Maori King, 1860.”

For much of the information that follows concerning the effects of the runanga rule established by the Maoris in the 50's in defiance of British authority in this portion of New Zealand, as well as in most other portions of the North Island, we were indebted to the proprietors of the “Hawke's Bay Herald,” who very kindly placed their early files at our disposal. That journal, for instance, in April 1858, published the following letter from the Resident Magistrate at Gisborne to the Government.