2. (See Page 4.)

The Alsatia of the Pacific—"Kororareka, a noble harbour in the Bay of Islands, in the midst of a large native population and the missionary stations, and long the favourite rendezvous of the whalers and Sydney traders, had from the first been the chief seat of this irregular colonisation; and a more lawless little Pandemonium than this village-port of Kororareka had grown up to be by 1831 neither old nor new world had, probably, ever seen. The most reputable of its denizens were trading adventurers from a convict colony, while the bulk of the community consisted of runaway sailors, of "Lags," gaolbirds, and scoundrels of every mark and brand from Sydney and Van Dieman's Land. Its Visitors, too, were fit company for its Residents: convict skippers and ticket-of-leave mates of Sydney traders, with rude embruted crews of whalers and coasting traders, all rushing ashore for a spree, and running ferociously festive "mucks" till they fell. Every second house was a grog-shop, and the population might have been divided into those who sold rum and those who drank it.

Sterne's Uncle Toby relates that our army swore terribly in Flanders; but the common conversation of Kororareka displayed a boldness and originality of figure drawn from the whaler's forecastle and the chain-gang, a malicious heartiness of ribald damning, far beyond the powers of page 78 our army in Flanders. Convict training and antecedents, blasphemy and the debauchery of drunkenness, were all intensified, too, by debauchery in women. Bark Helens, aboriginal Messalinas, swarmed in Kororareka. Every resident kept a mistress, every visitor came for one. Native women were as common an article of barter between chiefs and whalers as native pigs; and to the daily fights and quarrels which arose in such a community through rum and whiskey were to be added those which arose through the passion of jealousy and the disputed possession of the slave girl. There was neither magistrate nor policeman at Kororareka, neither law nor order nor gospel; every ruffian, and there were many, did what seemed good to him; and in 1831, this New Zealand Village-Port was the veritable "Alsatia" of the Pacific, dashed with a convict Wapping. This lawless colonisation of the country, too, was spreading, and many of the little whaling stations in Cook's and Foveaux Straits, and on the east coast, were little other that budding Kororarekas promising a full bloom." Hursthouse's New Zealand, the "Britain of the South."