however, unsuccessful, the residents being driven out by Ngapuhi opposition and the depredations of a visiting European vessel.27 Many years later, Paraone of Ngati Maru told the Native Land Court that kauri on Waiheke and at Waiau (Coromandel) had been traded with visiting vessels in order 'to obtain powder to enable them to fight Waikato [Ngati Haua].'28 Eventually, however, the European presence helped stabilise tribal warfare in the Auckland region, providing an alternative outlet to internal competition, but also fuelling early years of land and resource selling.
Hauraki's heavy involvement in transactions at Tamaki, Mahurangi, Mercury Bay, and the gulf islands in the late 1830s and early 1840s fits well with the Parsonson thesis of 'sale' as a means of asserting mana over lands for which other groups were in direct competition. Underlying the signing of deeds for lands at Waiheke, Mahurangi, Coromandel, Mercury Bay, Tamaki, and Piako was a desire to affirm authority over those areas, and to cement useful, ongoing relationships with traders and missionaries. The Waitangi Tribunal has recently found in the parallel context of Muriwhenua that early transactions were unlikely to have been seen by the 'vendors' as 'sales' in the European sense, bestowing permanent and exclusive possession to the purchaser.29 Their own ties with the land were not severed. Events at Great Barrier Island serve as an example of the assumption of Hauraki Maori that they retained rights over lands for which they had signed deeds of 'sale'. Months after they had supposedly sold the island to Webster and his partners, Marutuahu fought off a party of Ngati Porou and Ngapuhi who had landed there, and stripped one of their cultivations. Monin points out: 'Demonstrably, this group showed that in its view the transaction had not terminated fully and finally its relationship with that land:30 Comments by C.W. Ligar, as Surveyor General, would also seem to support the view that Maori saw deeds as signalling a social contract whereby the presence of a particular individual was secured, and did not envisage that occupation and use of the land concerned would pass on to strangers or to the Crown. He complained with reference to Katipa's obstruction of the survey of Dalziel's boundary which was being drawn to include the portage, thereby threatening Maori control of 'so important a line of communication', that:
Enough also transpired in the various discussion to convince me that the natives make a great distinction between the claims of an individual European to land and the Crown. The rights of the former would be more cheerfully admitted while the rights of the latter although derived from the same person would be concealed and denied.31
During these years, 'Ngati Paoa' signed deeds covering much of their interest on the isthmus and in the islands of the Waitemata harbour. In 1838 CMS missionary, Hamlin, 'purchased' a block of land, spanning from Waipuna to Otahuhu, from Ngati Paoa said to be 'residing in the district of Thames'. Ten chiefs signed: Ruinga, Herua, Puhi,
27Dacre to Colonial Secretary, 4 February 1841. OLC 1978–981. Repro 1681. The community was eventually evacuated owing to continued depredations of Ngapuhi and by European vessels.
28Waiheke Minute Book 1, p. 51. Cited in Monin, Waiheke Island, p. 38.
31Ligar to Colonial Secretary, 28 October 1851. 1A 11851/2165.
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