If you had been a fly on the wall on 6 February 1840, the apparently most important person around would have been William Hobson, naval captain and Governor-designate, chairing the proceedings.
We sometimes think of him as an outsider, a bit like the angels in the Christmas story, dropped in from a different world. But Hobson was an experienced "Law and order" man. He had spent years chasing pirates in the Caribbean, and he had visited New Zealand in 1837 to check on law and order here, and had written a report for the British Government, especially in relation to the crimes committed by convicts who had escaped from the penal colony across the Tasman Sea.
His most important goal was to get a piece of paper from those in authority in the Maori world, which would authorise him to arrest wrongdoers, along with his warrant from Queen Victoria. Because the main gripe of most people here was that no-one could control the criminals. They considered themselves outside the law, because the British authorities had no power here.
So Hobson was in a hurry; he wanted a clear statement of final authority from Maori as from London, and he wanted it before the French or the Americans got into gear.
There was no-one else in sight who could have done a better job, and the British Government at that time was in the hands of more liberal and more humane forces than it had been for a while.
The deal done at Waitangi could have been a lot worse!
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