We have already seen that a lieutenant in Her Majesty’s service thought it no crime in 1793 to kidnap two chiefs in order to save a little trouble.  We have seen how Cook shot natives for refusing to answer questions, and how De Surville could seize and sail away with a friendly chief because some one else had stolen his boat.  When in 1794 that high and distinguished body, the East India Company, sent a well-armed “snow” to the Hauraki gulf for kauri spars she did not leave until her captain had killed his quota of natives,—­two men and a woman,—­shot, because, forsooth, some axes had been stolen.  If such were the doings of officials, it came as a matter of course that the hard-handed merchant-skippers who in brigs and schooners hung round the coasts of the Islands thought little of carrying off men or women.  They would turn their victims adrift in Australia or on some South Sea islet, as their humour moved them.  With even more cruel callousness, they would sometimes put Maoris carried off from one tribe on shore amongst another and maybe hostile tribe.  Slavery was the best fate such unfortunates could expect.  On one occasion the missionaries in the Bay of Islands rescued from bondage twelve who had in this fashion been thrown amongst their sworn enemies.  Their only offence was that they had happened to be trading on board a brig in their own port when a fair wind sprang up.  The rascal in command carried them off rather than waste any of the wind by sending them on shore.

An even more heartless piece of brutality was the conduct of a certain captain from Sydney, who took away with him the niece of a Bay of Islands chief, and after living with her for months abandoned her on shore in the Bay of Plenty, where she was first enslaved and finally killed and eaten by the local chief.  The result was a bitter tribal war in which she was amply avenged.

Another skipper, after picking up a number of freshly-cured tattooed heads, the fruit of a recent tribal battle, put into the bay of the very tribe which had been beaten in the fighting.  When a number of natives came on board to trade, he thought it a capital joke—­after business was over—­to roll out on the deck a sackful of the heads of their slain kinsfolk.  Recognising the features, the insulted Maoris sprang overboard with tears and cries of rage.

[Illustration:  MAORI WAHINE

Photo by GENERAL ROBLEY.]

A third worthy, whilst trading in the Bay of Islands, missed some articles on board his schooner.  He at once had the chief Koro Koro, who happened to be on board, seized and bound hand and foot in the cabin.  Koro Koro, who was noted both for strength and hot temper,P Land.  They were varied by tragedies on a larger scale.  In 1809 the Boyd, a ship of 500 tons—­John Thompson, master—­had discharged a shipload of English convicts in Sydney.  The captain decided to take in a cargo of timber in New Zealand, and accordingly sailed to Whangaroa,