Chap. I. COMPANY OF 1825— "LAND-SHAEKING." 5 
The views of this Company were submitted to Mr. 
Huskisson, then President of the Board of Trade ; who 
highly approved of the undertaking, and promised 
them the grant of a Royal Charter in case their pre- 
liminary expedition should accomplish its object : but 
the expedition was confided to incompetent manage- 
ment ; its leader was alarmed by a war-dance of the 
natives, performed, there is every reason to believe, as 
a mark of welcome ; and he abandoned his task after 
purchasing some land hi Hokia7iga and iu the Frith 
of the Thames. ;. v 'j • 
The very ideas which belong to contracts for the 
transfer of land as private property had been unknown 
to the natives until 1814, when Mr. Marsden, desirous of 
obtaining a site for the first missionary establishment 
according to the forms of European law, carried with 
him a technical deed of feoffment prepared by lawyers 
at Sydney. This instrument, when its blanks for the 
names of places were filled up, was signed by the mark 
of certain chiefs in consideration of a trifling payment. 
It became the model of a vast number of contracts for 
the sale of land to Europeans, into which natives were 
induced to enter by the number of Whites who now 
straggled into New Zealand from the neighbouring 
colonies, from French, American, and British ship- 
ping, and even from England. This mode of acquir- 
ing land from savages is now well known as land- 
sJiarking ; a name which implies preying on the weak- 
ness of childish ignorance. 
Although the natives were even unconscious of the 
purport of the deeds which they executed, because they 
had not even conceived the idea of private property in 
land according to European notions, they neverthe- 
less set great store by the European goods paid to 
them . for signing the deeds. Of these commodities 
