THE CROWN, THE TREATY, AND THE HAURAKI TRIBES, 1800–1885

The channel between Waiheke and Coromandel was an important conduit to the Auckland isthmus, the Coromandel Harbour serving as a customs entry point in the 1830s, while the Firth of Thames provided access into the Waikato for missionaries and explorers. A CMS station was established at Puriri in 1833, and then shifted to Thames in 1837, in which year a second station was founded at Maraetai.22 A number of large-scale commercial operations were also set up in the decade before sovereignty was negotiated. A trading station dealing in flax and spars was established at Miranda in 1832. Ranulph Dacre, who set up a mercantile and shipping company with his partner William Wilke in 1834, successfully negotiated with Maori for land at Mangaonui, Mercury Bay, and Mahurangi for timber working, ship-building, trading, and stock raising. Dacre operated two spar stations on the Coromandel peninsula, while his associate, Gordon Browne, installed a water-powered timber mill, and a wharf and slipway at Mercury Bay in 1836.23 The American trade; Webster, who married the daughter of Horeta Te Taniwha, a Ngati Whanaunga chief, set up a station at Coromandel in 1836 for the milling of spars and provisioning of the New South Wales market.

Contemporary comment suggests that Maori at Coromandel were engaging strongly in the commercial opportunities offered by the European presence in these years. John Logan Campbell, who first settled on Whanganui Island at the entrance of Coromandel harbour in 1838–1839, noted that resident Maori were in a 'flourishing condition' as a result of their prosperous trade in timber, flax, maize, and other foods, in exchange for cash, tobacco, spirits, and other European goods.24 By 1840, blankets were such common items in the district that the British treaty negotiator, Bunbury, considered them barely adequate as tokens of official regard, reporting to Hobson, from Coromandel:

It is I conceive much to be regretted that objects of ordinary traffic between the natives and Europeans should have been selected as presents for the tribes on the coast; and I fear, therefore that the blankets, pipes and tobacco with which I have been furnished, must only be employed in payment for messengers. ... At a bivouac of natives which I visited, I observed no less than six double-barrelled guns outside one of their huts ... of a very superior quality.25

Maori signatories to the Treaty of Waitangi at Coromandel refused the tendered gift of a blanket each, stating that they wanted cloaks, and that 'the Queen ought to give them something out of the common way.'26

The Hauraki tribes sought to use the growing European presence in a bid to reclaim old ancestral lands, unoccupied after the dislocations of the preceding years. Dacre, for example, encouraged people from the Thames to settle at Mahurangi. This venture was,

22 Monin, 'Islands lying between Slipper Island,' p. 22.

23 Department of Internal Affairs New Zealand, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. vol. one, 1769–1869, Wellington, 1990, p. 97.

24 John Logan Campbell, Poenamo: Sketches of the Early Days of New Zealand. 1881, p. 73. Cited in Stone, p. 6.

25 Bunbury to Hobson, 6 May 1840, end. 3 in Hobson to Russell, 15 October 1840. GBPP, 1841 (311), pp. 100–101, Doc. I, pp. 1–2.

26 E.M. Williams, Journal of a Voyage to the Northern and Southern Islands of New Zealand in H.M.S. Herald. 1840, MS Copy micro 210. ATL.

34