a romantic inlet to the north of the Bay of Islands.  Amongst the crew were several Maoris.  One of these, known as George, was a young chief, though serving before the mast.  During the voyage he was twice flogged for refusing to work on the plea of illness.  The captain added insult to the stripes by the words, “You are no chief!” The sting of this lay in the sacredness attached by Maori custom to a chief’s person, which was tapu—­i.e. a thing not to be touched.  George—­according to his own account[1]—­merely replied that when they reached New Zealand the captain would see that he was a chief.  But he vowed vengeance, and on reaching Whangaroa showed his stripes to his kinsfolk, as Boadicea hers to the Britons of old.  The tribesmen, with the craft of which the apparently frank and cheerful Maori has so ample a share, quietly laid their plans.  The captain was welcomed.  To divide their foes, the Maori beguiled him and a party of sailors into the forest, where they killed them all.  Then, dressing themselves in the clothes of the dead, the slayers made off to the Boyd.  Easily coming alongside in their disguises, they leaped on the decks and massacred crew and passengers without pity.  George himself clubbed half a dozen, who threw themselves at his feet begging for mercy.  Yet even in his fury he spared a ship’s boy who had been kind to him, and who ran to him for protection, and a woman and two girl-children.  All four were afterwards rescued by Mr. Berry, of Sydney, and took refuge with a friendly neighbouring chief, Te Pehi.  Meanwhile, the Boyd had been stripped and burned.  In the orgie that followed George’s father snapped a flint-lock musket over a barrel of gunpowder, and, with the followers round him, was blown to pieces.  Nigh seventy lives were lost in the Boyd massacre.  Of course the slain were eaten.

[Footnote 1:  As given by him to J.L.  Nicholas five years afterwards.  See Nicholas’ Voyage to New Zealand, vol. i., page 145.  There are those who believe the story of the flogging to be an invention of George.  Their authority is Mr. White, a Wesleyan missionary who lived at Whangaroa from 1823 to 1827, and to whom the natives are said to have admitted this.  But that must have been, at least, fourteen years after the massacre, and George was by that time at odds with many of his own people.  He died in 1825.  His last hours were disturbed by remorse arising from an incident in the Boyd affair.  He had not, he thought, properly avenged the death of his father—­blown up by the powder-barrel.  Such was the Maori conscience.]

Then ensued a tragedy of errors.  The captains of certain whalers lying in the Bay of Islands, hearing that the survivors of the Boyd were at Te Pehi’s village, concluded that that kindly chief was a partner in the massacre.  Organizing a night attack, the whalers destroyed the village and its guiltless owners.  The unlucky Te Pehi, fleeing wounded, fell into the hands of some of George’s people, who, regarding him as a sympathiser with the whites, made an end of him.  Finally, to avenge him, some of the survivors of his tribe afterwards killed and ate three seamen who had had nothing to do with any stage of the miserable drama.