ABSTRACT
Events in the colony conspired to widen the breach between the Colonial Office and the Company. Hobson never succeeded in overcoming his dislike of the southern settlements. He earned the name of Captain Crimp by carrying away labourers from Wellington to Auckland in a government vessel. He fought stubbornly agai.nst that tendency to dispersion which owed its origin to nature as well as to man, by refusing to allow the establishment of the Company's second settlement at Port Cooper, the most eligible site, ~nd by endeavouring to pass a Bill to the effect that land claims should be selected from certain districts near Auckland only. Hobson was suffering from paralysis, a disease which does not improve the temper, and should not be too harshly judged. In any case the personal animosity of the Governor soon became of minor importance in comparison with the investigation of the Land Claims Commissioner. Colonel Wakefield's chickens were coming home to roost. Mr. Commissioner Spain, an honest and capable official, soon found that these hasty purchases of his had been in many cases purchases only in name. This at once raised a difficult question. Did the rights of the Company rest exclusively on the validity of their Agent's purchases? Was it not rather the duty of the Government under the terms of the agreement to settle outstanding native claims in the districts to be granted to the Company? So the Company argued, in a letter protesting against Spain's proceedings;Z and acting upon this view they instructed Colonel Wakefield to make no further paymentsthereby losing, as Spain at least believed, a chance of setting at rest in return for quite a small sum the claims to most of the disputed lands, pahs and cultivations excepted.3 Stanley
as uncompromisingly took the opposite view, rnaintaining that the agreement proceeded on the assumption that the purchases were valid. But, said the Company, it is a mere bagatelle: we are quite willing to accept a proviso omitting from the grant any lands in the actual occupation or enjoyment of the natives. I At once another divergence of view stood revealed: Lord Stanley believed that there were lands that could fairly be called waste, but in his opinion the restriction of the natives to lands in their actual occupation or enjoyment would be contrary to the Treaty ofWaitangi.2 Talk of the treaty rights of the natives stung the Company to fury. 'We did not believe that even the Royal power of making treaties could establish, in the eye of our courts, such a fiction as a native law of real property in New Zealand. We have always had very serious doubts whether the treaty of Waitangi, made with naked savages by a consul invested with no plenipotentiary powers, without ratification by the Crown, could be treated by lawyers as anything but a praiseworthy device for amusing and pacifying savages for the moment.'
