126
MURDER AT BAY OF ISLANDS
[Chap. V.
1841
great excitement and alarm, but that he could not hear that any number of natives had assembled in the neighbourhood, and that many circumstances concurred to show that the murder had been an act of individual vengeance. It did not appear to me necessary to interfere any further; I therefore directed the force to be withdrawn as soon as their fear of an attack had subsided, as the civil authority was sufficiently powerful to arrest the murderer, who, of course, had fled into the bush. The natives had long threatened to repossess themselves of the island which Mrs. Robertson's husband had purchased several years before; for they thought when they sold their land it would again revert to the tribe on the decease of the purchaser. Mr. Robertson was drowned in sight of his own house shortly before this melancholy event, and Mrs. Robertson had the day previous to it attended the Court of the Commissioner for settling the claims to land, and had substantiated her right to the island in question: the murder following so immediately, led to the supposition that the deed had been done by the tribe who claimed the island, and that they intended to establish their claim by force. But the following account of the horrid tragedy which is given by Mr. Marjoribanks in his recent account of New Zealand, places the event in its true light. He says that Mrs. Robertson, the widow of a Captain Robertson, was a Sydney lady, and resided on one of the numerous islands from which the Bay of Islands derives its name. It had belonged to
