Forty-six being a small proportion of the number of chiefs of rank in the North Island, Governor Hobson circulated the treaty by the hands of trusted agents. The first signatures were appended early in February, 1840, and over five hundred chiefs had signed before the end of June, very few of them accepting the presents offered by the agents, lest it should be considered that they had been bribed into taking so important a step. Thus encouraged, the Governor executed the great measure which caution had bidden him postpone, and on the 21st of May, 1840, proclaimed Queen Victoria's sovereignty over the Islands of New Zealand. To make matters sure, sovereignty over the Middle Island was separately proclaimed on the 17th of June. Governor Hobson now took his second step. The proclamation of the sole right of the Crown to purchase land from the natives plainly gave him control of the acquisitions of the New Zealand Company; the proclamation of the Queen's sovereignty over the Islands justified him in repudiating the Provisional Government formed at Wellington. Of the latter he made short work, sending Mr. Shortland, R.N., the Colonial Secretary, and a company of soldiers to haul down the Company's flag and replace it by the standard of Britain. The act was natural and inevitable; but it made the Company and their representative very bitter against Captain Hobson. The declaration of sovereignty over the Middle Island came none too soon; for the French emigrant ship _Comte de Paris_, convoyed by the frigate _L'Aube_, arrived less than two months later at Akaroa, and fifty-seven immigrants disembarked. The British flag had been hoisted forty-eight hours earlier by Captain Stanley, R.N., and when, in face of this, the French frigate landed six field-pieces, the captain of H.M.S. _Britomart_ thought it time to protest. He protested so effectually, that the French commander acknowledged his immigrants to be settlers in a British Colony, reshipped his twenty-four pounders, and the incident closed. Thus New Zealand, after long delays, became a British Colony, with her status established not only before her own motherland, but in the eyes of Europe as well. It remained for her to shake off the partial allegiance she owed to New South Wales, and then, with all the confidence of youth and sturdy independence, go proudly down the path of the future to the high destiny which awaited her. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 58: Autumn, 1907.] CHAPTER XIV INDEPENDENCE AND ARGUMENT Most people agree that the method adopted by the New Zealand Company in their anxiety to acquire land might have been improved upon, but few will deny them the credit which is theirs in the matter of actual colonisation. They were the first to colonise systematically; they were careful in the selection of their colonists, striving after the finer types of manhood; and they planted settlements with extraordinary rapidity, considering the difficulties of transit and transport.