26 Transactions. 
occupying the taken district, to the utter exclusion of its original owners or 
other tribes ; thus, in a war of the celebrated Hongi, he drove all the tribes 
out of the Auckland district into Waikato, and even as far as Taranaki; but 
though the whole district thereby became his, yet, as he did not occupy it, the 
conquered tribes, on his return to the North, came back to their own lands ; 
and we found them in occupation when Auckland was established as an 
English settlement. Again, in the case of a tribe which had been conquered 
and had become extinct, with the exception of those who had been made 
slaves by the conquering party, these slaves could, by purchase, recover the 
ownership of their tribal rights to land, or they could be liberated and return 
to their own lands on a promise of allegiance to the conquerors, rendering 
them any assistance, if required, in times of war, and supplying them, for the 
first few years after their return, with a certain amount of rats, fish, and fern- 
root ; and eventually, on presenting the conquerors with a greenstone battle-: 
axe (the mere pounamu), they were again allowed to be called a tribe, and 
claim the lands of their fathers as though they had never been conquered. 
The claims in connection with lands given to a tribe for assistance rendered 
in war are more complicated than any other. Although the land was given 
to the leader of the tribe rendering such assistance, it did not thereby become 
vested in that individual leader, inasmuch as the assisting tribe were seldom 
alone, but had brought their allies, and, if these allies had lost any of their 
chiefs in battle, each relative of the decéased chiefs had a claim in the land 
thus given ; and each relative of any chief who had been killed, of the tribe to 
whose leader the land was given, had also a claim. But the complication of 
land claims does not end even here. It was necessary that the land given 
should be occupied so that possession of it be retained, and as the assisted and 
assisting tribes became related by intermarriage, the tribal lands of the 
assisted tribe were claimed by the issue of these marriages, according to the laws 
relating to the ownership of land as affected by the marriage tie, so that after 
a few generations their respective claims not unfrequently became the cause of 
another war. An instance of this happened about four generations ago. One 
of the northern tribes rendered assistance in time of war to a southern tribe, 
now residing not far from Auckland, and a portion of land was given to the 
northern tribe ; shortly afterwards the daughter of the southern chief was 
taken in marriage by one of the chiefs of the northern tribe ; the two sisters 
of this woman were married to chiefs of the southern tribe, and thereupon 
their children’s claims held good ; but when the time came for the offspring of 
the sister, who had married the northern chief, to give up their land, the 
colonization of New Zealand had commenced, and land became a marketable 
commodity. This offspring retained their claims against all right and argu- 
ment, and to this day there is a rankling feeling between the tribes concerned ; 
