tonnages of food, flax, and timber which were transported . . . around the gulf at first by canoes, which were later supplemented by schooners and ketches, some of Pakeha, some of Maori construction.16 Maori seem to have taken over the design adopted by European shipwrights in the colony, with floors and framework built of pohutukawa and planking of kauri, making for vessels of 'extraordinary strength'.17 (Monin has alerted us to the fact that schooners had more than an economic function: 'schooner-ownership' gave a 'boost . . . to mana', of both chief and hapu.18) There were other signs that Maori had begun playing the white man's game very well indeed. At the third official agricultural show in Auckland held on the site of the rope walk in Mechanics' Bay, Maori exhibitors won the classes for pigs, grains and vegetables.19

A dramatic instance of the extent of Hauraki participation in the Auckland trade is provided by William Swainson's classic description of the visit of a Hauraki flotilla to the capital in 1853.

Never, perhaps, is [the Waitemata] seen to so great an advantage as when once or twice a year the native chief Taraia [Ngakutu to Tumuhia] and his tribe, from the eastern boundary of the Gulf, pay Auckland a visit in their fleet of forty sail of well-manned war canoes. Drawing them up in a line upon the beach, and with their masts and sails pitching a long line of various coloured tents, they encamp themselves for several days.20 The neighbourhood of their camping ground presents the appearance of a fair: pigs and potatoes, wheat, maize, melons, grapes, pumpkins, onions, flax, turkeys, geese, ducks, fowls, and firewood, and exposed for sale in great abundance, and meet with a ready market. But the money they receive in payment does not leave the town: for several days the shops and stores are frequented by careful, curious, keen-eyed customers. Their 'shopping' ended, they take their departure with the first fair wind, laden with spades and blankets, ironware and clothing of various kinds; their fleet departing, homeward bound, in a body as it came, the canoes extending over the surface of the harbour, with their many-shaped sails of mat and canvass wide-spread to catch the western breeze.21

The Souring of a Relationship, 1850s

Maori trade with Auckland came to a peak about 1855. Thereafter it fell away sharply. Past commentators, such as Sorrenson22 and Waititi,23 have discerned, as a cause of rising antagonism, the resentment of settlers over Maori ability, using traditional cooperative practices, to undercut the Pakeha price for labour and produce. More recently, Monin has suggested that Hauraki Maori as a whole had developed a mood of independence from seeing how those of their kin in close continuing contact with Pakeha had suffered 'damaging effects'.24 However, disentangling and measuring

16 Turoa, 'Nga Iwi o Hauraki'.

17 Kalaugher, Gleanings, p. 99.

18 Paul Monin, 'The Maori Economy of Hauraki, 1840-1880', New Zealand Journal of History, Vol.29, No.2, Oct. 1995, p. 200.

19 Kalaugher, Gleanings, p. 53.

20 Their encampments stretched from Mechanics' Bay (Te Toanga Roa) along the shoreline to St George's Bay (Wai-a-Taikehu). Produce was usually sold at the outcrop of rock by the mouth of the Horotiu at the foot of Queen St or in the auction rooms of merchants in Shortland St, where most of their purchases were also made.

21 W. Swainson, Auckland, the Capital of New Zealand, and the Country Adjacent, London, 1853, pp. 33-34.

22 M.P.K. Sorrenson, 'The Maori People and the City of Auckland', Te Ao Hou, No. 27, June 1959, p. 11.

23 John Waititi, 'An Outline of Auckland's Maori History', Journal of the Auckland Historical Society, No.3, Oct. 1963, p.10.

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