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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 10

3. (See page 4.)

3. (See page 4.)

French Race for New Zealand—" We so nearly lost New Zealand to French that Governor Hobson had but just arrived at the Bay of Islands when a French corvette came in to take possession. Finding the British flag planted in the North Island, the French commander determined to try for the South, and hoist the tricolor at Akaroa. His design, however, was betrayed; when Governor Hobson-who, whatever may have been his faults as a civil administrator, was an able and quick-witted naval officer—hurried off the English sloop to Akaroa. The sloop arrived first, but so little first that she was only saluting the British ensign as the corvette dashed in. The French commander then abandoned the design of seizing New Zealand as a French possession, and landed the nucleus of his pioneer colony at Akaroa—as a friendly French Settlement in British dominions. Akaroa remained a small French Community for many years; numbering at one time some 200 Settlers. Most of them were afterwards removed to the rising French colonies in the Pacific; but Akaroa, when I visited it a few years since, still displayed pleasing traces page 79 of its founders in gardens famous for peach, and plum, and pear If France had been a month or two earlier in the field she might have gained a colony worth a hundred Algerias; a colony which would have made her mistress of the Pacific; a colony standing so before the doors of Australia that every wool and gold ship would have had to pass almost within sight of fifty French-New Zealand ports—privateer ports amply large enough for the reception of the James Baines Lightning, Marco Polo, and dozens of sister galleons, and offering unrivalled natural facilities for the building and equipment of frigate and corvette." Hursthouse's New Zealand, the "Britain of the South,"