290 ADVENTURE IN NEW ZEALAND. Chap. XII. 
people in England required it for sails and rigging of 
ships, for shirts, trousers, sewing- thread, and other 
innumerable objects, while the potatoes and pigs were 
only tit to supply the mouths of a few thousand settlers 
until they could supply themselves. And as I per- 
severed in my old system of treating the natives whom 
I employed as friends, companions, and retainers, 
rather than as mere hired servants, and took pains to 
excite their emulation, watch and praise their efforts, 
and rather to lose money than to encourage the slight- 
est haggling or overreaching on either side, I was 
soon almost as great a favourite among the Ngat'trau- 
kawa of Otakit\Ohau, and Manawatu^ as among my 
older friends at J'f^anganiii. 
But I had printed several hundred circulars in the 
Maori language, signed with my Mauri name, which 
were despatched by various opportunities to all parts of 
the coast where I had been seen or heard of. In these 
I recommended earnestly the general adoption of the 
manufacture ; and I proposed to myself, in the course 
of time, to superintend the renovation of it all along 
the north coast of Cook's Strait. 
I engaged in this pursuit in the same way as I had 
engaged in pig-trading and shopkeeping at JVanganui, 
not for the sake of profit, but in order to benefit the 
natives. I had become by this time nmch attached to the 
Maori ; I was well acquainted with their language, their 
customs, and their predilections ; and I was delighted 
to see, in a trade which would realize such immediate 
profits to large numbers of natives, an easy means of 
facilitating the civilization of the weaker race, and 
their adaptation for intercourse on equal terms with 
the White man. As the Reserves might have been 
applied to save the chiefs from degradation, so a well- 
regulated commerce of this kind would seem calculated 
