Chiefs, traders, missionaries, settlers, policemen from Sydney who had come over with William Hobson in the ship Herald, and even that French priest Pompallier whom the Anglicans and Methodists distrusted - all the Europeans for miles around had turned up to see what the chiefs would do.Īnd Mr Busby was being a bountiful host to them. On the beach below and out on the bay the foreshore was thick with canoes and the sea a-bobble with anchored ships. In front of the house, sailors had rigged a huge tent. The day was like a big picnic outing, even for the uninvited hangers-on, and as the crowds walked up the hill to see what was happening they could buy their lunches at takeaway stalls beside the track: bread and roast pork, beer, rum and brandy. Everything, in fact, wore the appearance of cheerfulness and activity.” Colenso wrote that even the cicadas “sang livelier than usual.

It cleared on Wednesday, and on Thursday it was one of those days that make you believe summer will last forever. The weather started showery for the week of the big meeting up on the hill at the Busbys’.

He was a printer, and in the early evening of January 30, 1840, he completed the last of a hundred invitations asking Northland chiefs to come to Mr and Mrs Busby’s house the next week to meet the “chief of the Queen”, who had arrived from Sydney to be “a governor for everyone.” Six years and one month to the day after landing at Paihia in the Bay of Islands William Colenso finished a rush job.

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