the low swampy grounds where the raw material was to be found; and here, their cultivations neglected, overworked and half-starved, men, women, and children toiled night and day for months together—spurred by the penalty of death—scraping the flax-leaves strip by strip with a sharp shell. The mortality, as might be expected, was appalling. Men and women sickened and died, and few children were reared. In fact, the entire race was put to a strain from which it has never recovered.^*

The flax was gathered up by traders from Sydney, who cruised round the coast in smart schooners, fitted with boarding-nettings, and carrying an armed crew. Their logs were not generally published, but many stories are told of the inhuman atrocities they committed in their intercourse with the Natives. Every skipper was a law unto himself, and he settled the “Native difficulty” in his own way as he went along.

One of the heaviest prices paid for the guns—and, in its far-reaching effects, one of the principal causes of the decay of the Maoris—was the institution known as that of the “shipgirls.” From the time of Captain Cook, the unmarried women were always very free in their intercourse with the ship's companies, and as the visits of vessels became more numerous this intercourse took the form of an organized trade. About the beginning of the last century the Sydney whalers commenced to come to the New Zealand waters, and by the third decade they appeared in considerable numbers, as many as thirty-five large ships sometimes lying together off the beach at Kororareka, in the Bay of Islands, where about a thousands white people—escaped convicts, ticket-of-leave men, runaway sailors, and other adventurers—were congregated. The ships usually remained in harbour for several months every summer, victualling, refitting, &c., and during this time it was not uncommon for the captain to take a temporary wife, while a number of girls lived more or less promiscuously with the sailors and with the people on the shore.

Owing to the number killed in battle during Hongi's wars the women greatly outnumbered the men. Every year, at the commencement of the “season,” the chiefs would muster the young widows and girls in the various outlying settlements, and convey them in parties to the Bay of Islands, when they were regularly farmed out, the district of Hokianga alone contributing some two hundred. For several months these future mothers of the race lived in the wildest debauch, the proceeds of the trade being chiefly spent in the purchase of guns and ammunition. Arms had to be got, whatever might be the cost.