Chap. I. RESIDENT— DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 9 
more than nferely nominal. He was described as re- 
sembling a man-of-war without guns, 
During the years immediately following this un- 
meaning arrangement, the wars of the natives con- 
tinued with all the aggravation of destructiveness 
occasioned by the use of fire-arms ; — outrages were 
committed by the white settlers upon each other, and 
upon the natives, and by the natives upon them ; — 
European vices and disease were spread among tl^e 
diminished native population ; — and, according to the 
testimony of every eye-witness who has given evidence 
upon the subject, including that of the most intelli- 
gent and zealous of the missionaries, the numbers of 
the aborigines visibly decreased. At length, in 1835, 
another attempt was made to establish some kind of 
authority in New Zealand. 
The Baron de Thierry, before mentioned, had not 
lost sight of the project which he had formed at Cam- 
bridge during the visit of Hongi and Mr. Kendal. 
From more than one place in the South Seas he gave 
out that the acquisition which Mr. Kendal had made 
for him in 1822 amounted to a right of sovereignty 
over the islands, and that it was his intention speedily 
to take possession of It. Some interest in his pro- 
ceedings had been excited in France, by means of the 
newspaper press. Not a little alarmed at the pros- 
pect, however slight, of a French dominion, the lead- 
ing missionaries now joined with the more decent of 
the settlers at the Bay of Islands in desiring the esta- 
blishment of a national power in the country. But 
instead of applying to the Crown for the full exercise 
of that British dominion which had resulted from the 
acts of Cook and the Government of New South 
Wales, they induced thirty-five chiefs of the little 
northern peninsula to sign a paper, by which they de- 
