Walsh. — The Pas&ing of the Maori. 159 



the low swampy grounds where the raw material was to be 

 found ; and here, their cultivations neglected, overworked and 

 half-starved, men, women, and children toiled night and day for 

 months together— spurred by the penalty of death — scraping the 

 flax-leaves strip by strip with a sharp shell. The mortality, as 

 might be expected, was appalling. Men and women sickened 

 and died, and few children were reared. In fact, the entire race 

 was put to a strain from which it has never recovered.* 



The flax was gathered up by traders from Sydney, who 

 cruised round the coast in smart schooners, fitted with boarding- 

 nettings, and carrying an armed crew. Their logs were not 

 generally published, but many stories are told of the inhuman 

 atrocities they committed in their intercourse with the Natives. 

 Every skipper was a law unto himself, and he settled the " Native 

 difficulty " in his own way as he went along. 



One of the heaviest prices paid for the guns — and. in its 

 far-reaching effects, one of the principal causes of the decay 

 of the Maoris — was the institution known as that of the " ship- 

 girls." From the time of Captain Cook, the unmarried women 

 were always very free in their intercourse with the ship's com- 

 panies, and as the visits of vessels became more numerous this 

 intercourse took the form of an organized trade. About the 

 beginning of the last century the Sydney whalers commenced 

 to come to the New Zealand waters, and by the third decade 

 they appeared in considerable numbers, as many as thirty-five 

 la rue ships sometimes lying together off the beach at Kororareka, 

 in the Bay of Islands, where about a thousand white people — 

 escaped convicts, ticket-of-leave men, runaway sailors, and other 

 adventurers — were congregated. The ships usually remained in 

 harbour for several months every summer, victualling, refitting, 

 &c, and during this time it was not uncommon for the captain 

 to take a temporary wife, while a number of girls lived more 

 or less promiscuously with the sailors and with the people on 

 the shore. 



Owing to the number killed in battle during Hongi's wars 

 the women greatly outnumbered the men. Every year, at the 

 commencement of the " season," the chiefs would muster the 

 young widows and girls in the various outlying settlements, and 

 convev them in parties to the Bay of Islands, when they were 

 regularly farmed out, the district of Hokianga alone contributing 

 some two hundred. For several months these future mothers 

 of the race lived in the wildest debauch, the proceeds of the 

 trade being chiefly spent in the purchase of guns and ammuni- 

 tion. Arms had to be got, whatever might be the cost. 



* Of. " Old New Zealand," Chap. xiii. 



