Award of Commissioner Spain.

• 40. I need not trouble your Grace with any account of the troubles which accompanied, as might have been foreseen, the return of the absentees and manumitted captives of the Ngatiawa. From 1841 to 1844 there occurred a series of disputes which kept both races in a state of chronic irritation and excitement. At last, in May, 1844, Mr. Spain, Her Majesty's Commissioner for determining Titles to Land, held his Court at Taranaki for the investigation of the case.
• 41. The circumstances of that officer's award must be too familiar to your Grace to require any detailed reference to them. Mr. Spain disallowed altogether the claims of the Ngatiawa captives and absentees, and gave judgment for the issue of a grant to the New Zealand Company for sixty thousand acres, including the whole of Waitara. This award was reversed by Governor Fitzroy, as will be presently stated; but after careful reconsideration Mr. Spain remained of the same opinion, and formally reiterated the judgment he had given on the spot. In doing so he laid particular stress on the fact that no claim had been asserted on behalf of the absentees, though he afforded every opportunity to the Protector of Aborigines, who specially represented the Native interests during the investigation, to adduce such evidence, as was admitted by that officer in his address to the Natives; and he called attention to the further important circumstance that, if the Protector had entertained the idea of the Ngatiawa captives having any just or equitable claim to the land, he ought to have brought forward such claim and urged its recognition, whereas his speech afforded abundant proof that he then held no such doctrine. And in support of this view, Mr. Spain quoted the opinion of the Rev. S. Ironside, a Wesleyan missionary of acknowledged experience and intimate acquaintance with the Taranaki question, who strongly deprecated any payment whatever being made to the Ngatiawas.
• 42. The reports of Protectors Clarke and Forsaith, made immediately after delivery of the Commissioner's judgment, in no way impugned his decision or suggested its reversal: nevertheless the Governor reversed it, as I now proceed to state.