180 TEA AND SILK FARMING IN NEW ZEALAND. 



kindness. This outrage was quickly followed by other atrocities 

 on both sides ; mutual carnage becoming the order of the day, 

 thus strengthening and prolonging the dismal vendetta. 



It was not until 1814 that a rift in the gloom appeared, in the 

 arrival of the first missionaries, who were presently succeeded 

 by further reinforcements, when the process of civilisation slowly 

 commenced. About this period the horrible traffic in preserved 

 New Zealander's heads began. The natives had long been 

 accustomed to decapitate their captured enemies, pickling and 

 keeping their heads as trophies of their prowess, as the North 

 American Indians did scalps. This habit had been noted with 

 an eye to profit by some degraded European trader who, as a 

 speculation, exported a few of the tatooed, dried, and ghastly 

 objects ; and these loathsome relics were eagerly purchased by 

 curiosity-mongers in Australia and elsewhere. In a very short 

 time the experiment expanded into a recognised occupation, 

 and as prices advanced with the increasing demand and the 

 diminishing supply taken in war, so did the original trade 

 in the heads of the slain quickly merge into fearful bargains 

 with assassins for the heads of persons who were still alive. 

 There can be no possible doubt that this odious traffic, con- 

 ducted as it was, according to the author of Old Neiv Zealand 

 (pp. 54-59), by the skippers of many of the colonial trading 

 schooners, and the scum of the European settlers, retarded for 

 years the progress of civilisation ; paralysed the best efforts of 

 the missionaries, as the Anglo-Indian opium traffic is now doing 

 in China, and kept ever inflamed the moral sores originally pro- 

 duced by mutual treachery and violence. Fortunately, about 

 1830 the grim barter in human heads ceased ; but it affords an 

 eloquent satire upon the vaunted success usually claimed for 

 the colonising ability of the Anglo-Saxon race, that up to the 

 year 1839 only about two thousand emigrants had settled in the 

 country. But the eradication of one evil seemed only to pave the 

 way for another. Public attention had now been specially drawn 

 to New Zealand, and during this year the first of the great 

 quarrels connected with repudiations of bargains by the natives and 

 encroachments by the settlers commenced. A tract of country 

 as large as Ireland had been secured from the chiefs by a Colonel 

 Wakefield for £1500 worth of Jew's harps, tomahawks, muskets, 

 gunpowder, and other articles ; or at the rate of about sixpence 

 per 1000 acres. Difficulties both with the Maories and with 

 the British Government ensued, the former asserting that their 

 chieftains had no right or authority to sell the land, and the 

 latter deciding that " no subject could be permitted to enter into 

 contracts with the natives in which they might be ignorant and 

 unintentional authors of injuries to themselves." In conse- 

 quence of this and similar disputes, an important change was 



