Northern chiefs petition King William IV

In September 1831 the Bay of Islands rangatira Rewa was in Sydney with the missionary William Yate when a French naval corvette, La Favorite, berthed at Port Jackson. Its captain, Cyrille Laplace, had no orders to claim New Zealand, but talk in Sydney said he meant to. Rewa and Yate brought the rumour home on the Active, which reached the Bay on 20 September. The French carried a long memory in the north. In 1772 the crew of Marion du Fresne had taken revenge for his killing, and Māori still spoke of the French as 'te Iwi o Marion', the tribe of Marion.

On 28 September several chiefs went to the missionary Henry Williams to discuss writing to the King, and on 4 October a hui at Kerikeri agreed the wording. La Favorite appeared off the coast on 3 October and anchored the following afternoon; its visit turned out to be entirely peaceful. Some signatures may have gone on before it arrived, but others were added on 5 October, the date on the letter. Thirteen rangatira drew their moko on it: eight from the Bay of Islands, among them Rewa, Tītore and Wharerahi, and five from Hokianga, among them Patuone and Nene. In Yate's English version they said they had heard the tribe of Marion was coming for their land, and asked the King to become 'our friend and guardian of these Islands'. They also asked him to be angry with his own troublesome people, some of them runaways from ships. The missionaries soon accepted that the French meant no harm, but they did not withdraw or change the letter.

Whose letter it really was is still argued. Peter Adams thought the missionaries almost wholly responsible, and the French explorer Dumont d'Urville called it a missionary ruse. Others, Phillipson among them, pointed to the many powerful and independent-minded chiefs who signed, and to a lingering Ngāpuhi fear of French reprisal. Claimant witnesses before the Waitangi Tribunal also differed. Nuki Aldridge read its language as directed by missionaries, while Patu Hohepa judged it fluent, formal Ngāpuhi. The Tribunal thought the safer ground was to call it a joint initiative of the missionaries and Ngāpuhi, while cautioning against illusions about the missionaries’ own long-standing aims, noting that its plea for control of British subjects repeated one Whare had made to Governor Darling in April 1831.

From Sydney, Governor Richard Bourke sent the petition to London with a dispatch of 23 December 1831. By then the Colonial Office had already resolved to appoint a British Resident, acting on a dispatch Governor Darling wrote after the Elizabeth affair, and Lord Goderich confirmed the decision in January 1832. Goderich also wrote the King's reply, dated 14 June 1832. It welcomed the news that the alarm had passed and promised to curb and punish British offenders where possible. James Busby took it with him to the Bay and read it aloud at Paihia in May 1833. The reply spoke of 'friendship and alliance with Great Britain'. The Tribunal found that rangatira took the relationship to be growing stronger after 1831, though it doubted there was ever an alliance in the formal sense used between states.