NEW ZEALAND
NEW Zealand, together with her newly acquired possessions among the Samoan Islands, is one and a quarter times as large as England and Scotland together. The population is 1,500,000, of whom 143,000 live in Wellington, the capital, which is situated on the North Island.
It was first seen by Abel Tasman in the year 1642 and was called by him after that southern island province of his native land in which the first part of this geography was written. Some three centuries before it had been discovered by the Polynesian canoemen, those marvellous mariners of the Pacific, whose queerly shaped straw maps were so dependable that they could sail thousands of miles from home and always be sure of finding their way back.
These Polynesian conquerors became the ancestors of the warlike and handsome race of the Maoris, of whom there were some 50,000 left in the year 1906 and who since then seem to be again on the increase. The Maoris are evidently one of the few examples of a native stock which has been able to maintain itself against the white man and to adopt some of the more agreeable virtues of western civilization without at the same time drinking itself to death. They have given up several of their ancient habits and customs, such as eating their enemies and tattooing their faces and they send representatives to the New Zealand parliament and build churches which are in every way as unattractive as the chapels constructed by their white masters, all of which bids well for the future, as far as the racial problem is concerned.
During the first quarter of the nineteenth century both the French and the English tried to get hold of these islands by means of their respective missionaries. But in the year 1833 the Maoris put themselves under the protection of the English and in the year 1839 the English formally took possession of all New Zealand territory.
If the French squadron had been three days earlier, New Zealand would to-day be a French colony like New Caledonia aad the Marquesas and so many other islands of the Pacific. In 1840 the islands became a dependency of the Australian colony of New South Wales and in 1847 an English Crown Colony. In the year 1901 New Zealand was given a chance to join the Australian Commonwealth but, proud of the face that it had never been a penal establishment, it declined the honour. Since 1907 it has been an independent dominion with an English governor-general but a representative government of its own.