The sealers and whalers of the first four decades of the nineteenth century knew our outlying islands well. Of the interior of our mainland they knew nothing whatever; but they searched every bay and cove of the butt-end of the South Island, of Rakiura, and of the smaller islets for the whale and fur seal. The schooners and brigs that carried these rough-handed adventurers commonly hailed either from Sydney, Boston, or Nantucket, places that were not in those days schools of marine politeness or forbearance. The captains and crews that they sent out to southern seas looked on the New Zealand coast as a No Man’s Land, peopled by ferocious cannibals, who were to be traded with, or killed, as circumstances might direct. The Maori met them very much in the same spirit. Many are the stories told of the dealings, peaceable or warlike, of the white ruffians with the brown savages. In 1823, for instance, the schooner _Snapper_ brought away from Rakiura to Sydney a certain James Caddell, a white seaman with a tattooed face. This man had, so he declared, been landed on Stewart Island seventeen years earlier, as one of a party of seal-hunters. They were at once set upon by the natives, and all killed save Caddell, who saved his life by clutching the sacred mantle of a chief and thus obtaining the benefit of the law of Tapu. He was allowed to join the tribe, to become one of the fighting men, and to marry a chief’s daughter. At any rate, that was his story. It may have been true, for he is said to have turned his back on Sydney and deliberately returned to live among the Maori.