Kororāreka, the busiest port in the Pacific

By the late 1830s more than a hundred ships a year called at the Bay of Islands. The town that served them had a settler population of a few hundred living under Māori authority, with no courts and no police. Missionaries wrote horrified reports to London, settlers formed a vigilante association, and both became arguments for annexation. Within five years of the Treaty the town was sacked in the Northern War.