266 TUTIRA 



early in the nineteenth century that a Church of England Mission 

 Station was permanently established at Paihia in the Bay of Islands. 

 Internecine strife was then everywhere raging betwixt the Maori tribes. 

 In the North Island over the whole wide land, it is hardly an exaggera- 

 tion to say that Paihia was the single oasis of peace and culture, the one 

 good deed in a naughty native world. It was from this missionary 

 centre that influences radiated which in the beginning modified the 

 rigour of strife, and which in the end terminated tribal warfare. 1 



Between this date and that more or less general combination of the 

 Maori clans at a later period against the encroachment of white settle- 

 ment, plants from mission gardens were widely distributed. The pot- 

 herbs, for instance, still found growing on the sites of deserted hill pas 

 of Maungaharuru, must have been taken there at a very early date, 

 for these fastnesses had been abandoned long before the Mohaka mas- 

 sacre in the 'seventies, long before the battle of Omaranui, long before 

 the stocking of Tutira. They survive there still as scraps of past history, 

 as relics of the primordial introduction of Christianity. 



Although, however, the plants of this group have probably all 

 reached Tutira more or less directly from mission sources, I do not 

 mean to say that several of them had not reached New Zealand prior to 

 the advent of the church. The peach (Prunus persica), for example, is 

 certain to have been imported from New South Wales at an early date ; 

 its stone is of just such a size and shape as would lend itself for trans- 

 port, too big to lose readily, yet small enough for easy portage ; peach- 

 stones were habitually carried in early times as gifts to inland districts. 

 We can leave the likelihoods at this, that though the peach and probably 

 the tobacco plant (Nicotiana tabaccum) also had originally reached New 

 Zealand from Australia and had skirted the coast in the trail of the seal- 

 ing and whaling industries, yet neither had been carried far up-country 

 or far from these industrial centres. 



The few Europeans then in New Zealand, sailors and beach-combers, 



1 The old-time Maori's devotion to warfare, and the levity with which he engaged in it, 

 would be incredible were it not attested on all hands. A typical instance related by Darwin 

 in his ' Voyage of the Beagle ' will suffice : " A missionary found a chief and his tribe in prepar- 

 ation for war, their muskets bright and clean and their ammunition ready. He reasoned long 

 on the inutility of the war and the little provocation which had been given for it. The chief 

 was much shaken in his resolution and seemed in doubt, but at length it occurred to him that 

 a barrel of his gunpowder was in a bad state and that it would not keep much longer. This 

 was brought forward as an unanswerable argument for the necessity of dictating immediate 

 war the idea of allowing so much good gunpowder to spoil was not to be thought of, and this 

 settled the point." 



