result of the operations of these causes, we find only a few hundred acres immediately round Te Papa in actual occupation.¹²

Nevertheless, while military settlement at Tauranga failed, Stokes writes that ‘it did bring in a small nucleus of Europeans who had established a precarious toe hold in the region and formed the basis for further European colonisation during the 1870s’.¹³

The purchase of land was one activity that occupied some of this small nucleus of settlers and inevitably, Maori land that was either Crown granted, or about to be, gained the attention of local buyers and occasionally, those from Auckland. The choice and availability of land, however, was governed by the progress made in the government’s return of land by the Commissioner of Tauranga Lands, whose main task was to award land to Maori after ‘due enquiry’. H. T. Clarke held this office of Commissioner from July 1868 until December 1869 and reappointed in January 1871. By the late 1860s, barely any titles to ‘returned’ lands had been investigated and awarded, thus putting pressure on the reserves set aside for Maori in the Confiscated and Katikati-Te Puna blocks (figure 4).¹⁴

Clarke often complained that overwork interfered with the return of land.¹⁵ In his examination of the Commissioners’ activities, the historian Tony Nightingale has also suggested that the Commission’s progress was influenced by the degree of support given by the government to the Commissioners.¹⁶ There were, however, other causes for the delay. It seems that title investigations were deliberately postponed by Clarke during his second stint as Commissioner. In July 1871, Clarke mentioned in a letter to Sir Donald McLean his reasons for postponing his enquiry: ‘I am going to open my commission on the 17^th July under Tauranga District Lands Act. I have delayed [it] to

¹² AJHR 1872, D-6, p. 2.

¹³ Stokes, Te Raupatu, vol. 1, p. 179.

¹⁴ Stokes, The Allocation of Reserves, vol. 1, figure 12, p. 88. Stokes, The Allocation of Reserves, figure 14, p. 102.

¹⁵ In March 1868, for example, when asked furnish information about the district for the new Governor, George Ferguson Bowen, Clarke could provide only an interim report because the ‘present numerous and pressing engagements prevent my giving that time and proper attention to the subject which it demands’. ‘Reports on the State of the Natives at the Time of Sir G. F. Bowen’s Arrival’, Report from H. T. Clarke, Civil Commissioner, Tauranga, 7 March 1868, AJHR 1868, A-4, p. 9.

¹⁶ Tony Nightingale, ‘The Commissioners of Tauranga Lands 1868-1886’, Waitangi Tribunal, November 1996, Wai 215 #A4, p. 41.