314 ANNUAL REPORT. 



R.S. TAS. 



the same year, a Commissioner came from England to look 

 into the titles of the New Zealand Company to land they 

 had acquired from the Maoris, Mr. Clarke was chosen to 

 accompany him as the medium of communication between 

 the Maoris and the Court, first as interpreter and after- 

 wards as Maori advocate. Mr. Clarke was also made jDro- 

 tector of the natives through all the territory claimed by 

 the company. In these capacities Mr. Clarke accompanied 

 the Commissioner in his inquiries, first at Wellington, a 

 settlement formed by the company before the British 

 annexation of New Zealand in 1840, and afterwards at 

 Wanganui, Taranaki, and other districts, and he was able 

 to give much assistance to the Maoris in resisting the 

 claims of the company. In 1844 Mr. Clarke was sent to 

 Otago, to assist in the purchase of a large block of land 

 for the Scotch settlement that was then projected. Mr. 

 Clarke acted for the natives, and the purchase of over 

 400,000 acres in the vicinity of what is now Dunedin was 

 arranged. Mr. Clarke, in his Notes on Earhj Life in 

 New Zealand (Hobart, 1903), from which this account of 

 his life in New Zealand is taken, remarks with pride that 

 no dispute has ever arisen from this purchase. From 

 Otago Mr. Clarke returned to Auckland. The first Maori 

 War, against Heke, a chief of the Bay of Islands, broke 

 out about this time, and during the war Mr. Clarke took 

 a prominent part in negotiations between the Government 

 and friendly chiefs, and he assisted in bringing the war to 

 an end.^ 



In 1846, much against the advice of Sir George Grey, 

 the Governor of New Zealand, Mr. Clarke resigned from 

 the service of the Government, so that he might qualify 

 himself as a Christian minister. From New Zealand he 

 came to Hobart, at the invitation of his father's old friend, 

 Henry Hopkins; and early in 1847 he went to London 

 and entered New College. In 1851 Mr. Clarke was or- 

 dained in the Congregational Church, and at once returned 

 to Hobart, where he accepted a call to the pastorate of 

 the Collins-street Congregational Church. Of Mr. Clarke's 

 ministry at this church, and at the new and larger church 

 scon built in Davey-street to replace it, some account is 

 given by Mr. Charles E. Walch in an obituary notice in 

 the Congregational Year Book of Tasmania for 1913. "How 

 effective that ministry was," says Mr. Walch, "was evi- 

 "denced by the large congregations which filled the church. 



* Much of Mr. Clfirke'.s correspondence (lurinfi liis life in New Zealand, includ- 

 ing reports on the war, is in the Hocken Library at Dunedin. 



