for the government to acquire as much land as possible without having to consider Maori interests.⁷

Ten months earlier, the threat that Grey’s Ministers posed to both his job and Tauranga lands had been sensed by Henry Tacy Clarke. Clarke, Resident Magistrate at Tauranga from 1862, had written to Civil Commissioner T. H. Smith in Maketu from Auckland in October 1863 predicting the fate of Tauranga and the degree of influence Grey’s Ministers would have in the matter:

I have no wish to go back to Tauranga till I see how matters progress – I am thoroughly disgusted with the heartlessness of Ministers[.] [W]ith them, Auckland is their great – I was going to say sole anxiety – you and I may get on as well as we can …. I look at as a certainty, that Tauranga is fated to fall in to the hands of the military settlers. The Governor has assured the Tauranga Natives that he will not go there as ‘he has no quarrel with’. I believe he will be forced to do it.⁸

Indeed, Stokes has argued that ‘Fox and other ministers were pushing for the confiscation of all the Tauranga lands’ and the Katikati Te-Puna purchase, happening so soon after Grey’s promise to return three-quarters, might be viewed as a means by which this aim was partially effected.⁹

After the pacification hui, Clarke was instructed by Fox to hold a separate meeting with ‘rebel natives’. Clarke held this other meeting, apparently ‘for the purpose of endeavouring to ascertain their wishes on the subject of the land which the Governor should retain as satisfaction for their having joined in the rebellion’, on the evening of the official hui, and immediately reported its outcome to Colonial Secretary Fox.¹⁰ Clarke’s later version of the meeting, written in June 1865 for Walter Mantell, the Native Minister under the Weld Ministry 1864—1865, stated that:

before the Governor declared the terms upon which he would accept the surrender of Ngaiterangi, I was instructed by the late Ministers, Messrs. Whitaker and Fox, to meet the Natives and try to induce them to give up some specific block of land.¹¹

Clarke’s comment suggests that Whitaker and Fox, in arranging this alternative meeting before the terms of the surrender were negotiated between Governor Grey

⁷ For full details see J. Rutherford, Sir George Grey: A Study in Colonial Government, London, 1961, ch. 33.

⁸ H. T. Clarke to T. H. Smith, 6 October 1863, Letters 1861-1866 (typescript), Tauranga District Library (TDL).

⁹ Stokes, The Allocation of Reserves, vol. 1, p. 34.

¹⁰ Clarke to Fox, 7 August 1864, AJHR 1867, A-20, p. 6.

¹¹ Clarke to Mantell, 23 June 1865, AJHR 1867, A.-20, p. 12.