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Almost from the moment of his landing in America, Williams had interested himself greatly in the welfare of the Indians. The principal cause of his expulsion from Massachusetts was his contention that the land belonged to the Indians and not to the King of England, who therefore had no right to give it away, so that the colony's charter was invalid.
These were the more important complaints. In behalf of the colony, Sir Henry appeared before the Privy Council, and in able argument showed that many of the charges were without foundation; that some of the colony's acts which were complained of as unlawful were well within her charter privileges; and that the decisions of her courts, far from being illegal, had, in nearly every case, when brought to the attention of the English government, been approved by it.
With hardly anything else to do, it was as hardly possible to resist a visit, with nearly everybody else, to Ballarat. So I appeared there on the 3rd October, and, as senior member for Melbourne in the colony's first Parliament, and first President of the recently established Chamber of Commerce, I was, of course, "a man in authority."
A third encounter was signalised by the most heroic incident in the Colony's history. Some three hundred Maoris were shut up in entrenchments at a place called Orakau.
The two men are substantially in agreement in the pictures they draw of the colony's early governors and of life as it was in New South Wales down to the twenties. Lang and Therry both relate anecdotes of King. The stories do not present him in a light to command respect; the official records rather confirm than contradict the stories.
Not a single house was left standing. Cabins, storehouses, the colony's grinding mill all were reduced to a mass of ruins. Cameron's duplicity had been crowned with success; Alexander Macdonell's armed marauders had finished the task; Lord Selkirk's colony of farmers-in-the-making was scattered far and wide. Nevertheless, the Nor'westers were not undisputed masters of the situation.
When he came to Quebec as Vicar-Apostolic in 1659, he was only thirty-seven years of age. His position in the colony at the time of his arrival was somewhat unusual, for although he was to be in command of the colony's spiritual forces.
At last, when Blackbeard sailed up into the very heart of Virginia, and seized upon and carried away the daughter of that colony's foremost people, the governor of Virginia, finding that the governor of North Carolina would do nothing to punish the outrage, took the matter into his own hands and issued a proclamation offering a reward of one hundred pounds for Blackbeard, alive or dead, and different sums for the other pirates who were his followers.
Labour, too, preferred in many cases, and not unnaturally, to earn from 15s. to £1 a day at shearing or harvest-time to entering on the early struggles of the cockatoo. Nevertheless, many workers did save their money and go on the land, and many more would have done so but for that curse of the pioneer working-man drink. The Colony's chief export now came to be wool.
The present Governor of Trinidad, Sir William Robinson, is a man of spirit and intelligence, keenly alive to the grave responsibilities resting on him as a ruler of men and moulder of men's destinies. Has he, with all his energy, his public spirit and indisputable devotion to the furtherance of the Colony's interests, been able to grapple successfully with the giant evil?
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