The Katikati-Te Puna purchase was also, at this time, being guided to completion by Whitaker. Clarke commented on Whitaker’s involvement in both the purchase and the award of lands to those affected by the confiscation:

In the month of April 1866 Mr Whitaker then Superintendent [of Auckland Province] and was also General Government Agent …. made awards to those people who were entitled to receive land or who were at any rate entitled to receive compensation.¹⁹

Mackay, too, noted that at the July 1866 hui ‘some friendly Natives, who had lost considerable pieces of land within the 50,000 [confiscated] block, applied for reserves, and they were promised that their cases would be heard’.²⁰ By the time Mackay tabled this comprehensive report he had compiled a list of applicants for reserves in the purchase area. These were then mapped at a slightly later date.²¹ (See also figure 2 and figure 3).

Mackay’s June 1867 report strongly suggests that other criteria influenced the award of reserves. In a discussion of the confiscated block, Mackay commented very directly on this point:

As it also appeared to me that some of the loyal natives had lost a good deal of land elsewhere, I offered to make certain reserves which with those previously sanctioned by Mr Whitaker made a total of upwards of six thousand acres within this block’.²²

The allocation of the reserves to Maori, therefore, bore a direct relation to raupatu. As noted above, allocating land to loyal Maori was formalised in the Confiscated Lands Act 1867. Moreover, while customary tenure was not entirely jettisoned as a criterion for the award of land, the political concerns of the Crown influenced this process as well.

The creation of the reserves was also couched in terms of judicial and political expediency. Mackay wrote to the Under Secretary of the Native Department in July 1867:

The great meetings held at Tauranga in June and November 1866 were convened with the intention of disposing of the loyal claims and thus superceding the necessity of a sitting of the Compensation Court, that is, if there ever was any necessity.²³

¹⁹ Clarke, Le 1 1873/10, cited in Stokes, The Allocation of Reserves, vol. 1, p. 151. See also Raupatu Document Bank (RDB), vol. 1, p. 81.

²⁰ Mackay, to Richmond, 22 November 1866, AJHR 1867, A-20, p 27.

²¹ The map is attached to Le 1/1867/114, NA. See also Stokes, The Allocation of Reserves, vol. 1, p. 44 and Stokes, Te Raupatu, vol. 2, between pp. 116-7.

²² Mackay, Le 1 1867/114. See Stokes, Te Raupatu, vol. 2, p. 113.