thought the chief town ought to have been at Port Chalmers; another small coterie asserted that the distinction should have been conferred on the Clutha district; the majority, however, heartily approved the choice. Unfavourable comments were also made by the newspapers in the neighbouring settlements as to the character of the community. Nelson and Wellington were particularly pointed and venomous in their remarks. "The inhabitants" were represented as being "poor, characterized by inertness or laziness in their proceedings; that having seen the harbour with its bar, its squally gusts, its steep precipitous shores, the town with its surrounding wilderness of hills, and the Taieri with its formidable swamp, the judgment which would inevitably be pronounced as to the capabilities of the place would be unfavourable in the extreme."
Against these malign remarks the more sanguine in their expectations pointed with satisfaction to the utterances of the Bishop of New Zealand and Governor Grey, both of whom said that a man must see every settlement in the colony before he could know and appreciate the advantages of Otago, and also to the fact that the new arrivals had of course the option of choosing where they liked, and yet all of their own accord, with two exceptions, selected their quarter-acre sections in Dunedin. Again, the settlers on the rural land, all but four, had gone to the Taieri instead of the Clutha, not because it was better land, but as it was nearer a town and market. Nay, even one landed proprietor who went to the Clutha district, returned, finding life there but a Robinson Crusoe affair after all.
At the outset the settlers were rather dismayed by seeing the announcement in a Wellington paper of April, 1848, to the following effect:—
"Mr Strode proceeds to the Otago settlement for the purpose of swearing in three or four gentlemen as Justices of the Peace, and Sergeant Barry with four privates of the mounted police are likewise under orders for the same destination."
This was, indeed, a projected farce, which happily for the reputation of the "authorities" was never carried out, as Mr Strode arrived as chief of the police, with a half-caste Maori as his only assistant. The idea of sending an organised semi-
