the consent of Māori chiefs. The resultant Treaty of Waitangi was signed on 6 February 1840, at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands. This laid the foundation for the later proclamation of British sovereignty over New Zealand on 21 May 1840. Following that declaration, Britain decided to make New Zealand a separate colony, and a Charter for Erecting the Colony of New Zealand was issued on 16 November 1840. Queen Victoria became New Zealand's head of state. In 1852, the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 was passed, establishing responsible government in New Zealand. Queen Victoria's second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, became the first British royal to visit New Zealand. He landed in Wellington on 11 April 1869, aboard his ship HMS Galatea. In 1907, New Zealand achieved the status of 'Dominion', which denoted that it was a country of the British Empire (and later the Commonwealth of Nations) with autonomy in domestic and foreign affairs. In 1917, letters patent of King George V set out the powers, duties and responsibilities of the governor-general and the Executive Council. The governor-general remained an appointee of the British Crown on the advice of the British Cabinet. The concept of a fully independent New Zealand sharing the person of the sovereign with the United Kingdom and other countries only emerged gradually over time through constitutional convention. A series of Imperial Conferences held in London, from 1917 on, resulted in the Balfour Declaration of 1926, which provided that the United Kingdom and the Dominions were to be considered as "autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown". The governor-general of New Zealand, as with all the other governors-general of the Dominions, became the direct representative of the monarch in person, rather than a diplomatic channel between the New Zealand and British governments. The Crown was further separated amongst its Dominions by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, an Act of the British parliament, which gave New Zealand and other Dominions the authority to make their own laws in all matters, while requiring them all to seek each other's assent for changes to monarchical titles and the common line of succession. The British Parliament specifically gave up any claim to legislate for a Dominion, save at its own