The inevitable shock of battle between the tribesman of Aotearoa and the white man who coveted and needed his surplus lands is a feature of our history which has had no small influence upon our national existence and national type. It coloured our story as no other element could; tragic as it was, it at least redeemed our history from the commonplaces of a sleek commercialism. The white adventurer let go his anchor on these shores with the Briton's characteristic assertion of superiority over the brown races of mankind; the white settler of our beginnings too often exhibited an ignorant contempt for the mat-girt or blanket-swathed aboriginal. The Maori, for his part, swaggering through the settlements with double-barrel gun and tomahawk, ready to fight to the death for a punctilio and avenge in blood some absurd breach of personal tapu, did not trouble to conceal his scorn for the pakeha whose only concern was huckstering and profit-making. Early Governments truckled to savage insolence for the sake of peace; the Maori, sometimes for the same reason, shrugged off the insults and swindlings of the coarser grade of white with a contemptuous “Hei aha!”—“What does it matter!” But it was in the last and unavoidable test, when bayonet met long-handled tomahawk and when British artillery battered Maori stockades, that the two races came to gauge each other's manly calibre, and came, finally, to respect each other for the capital virtues that only trial of war can bring to mutual view. For all the reverses that befell the ill-planned and unskilfully conducted British efforts in the field in the early campaigns, the shrewd Maori soon divested himself of his illusions of military superiority; he came to realize that he had at last met his match, and henceforth his concern was deep lest the incoming shiploads of whites should wipe him off the face of his ancestral lands. On the European's side the conceit which found expression in the declared opinion that a company of British grenadiers could march from end to end of New Zealand and carry all before them was quickly exchanged for an admission that the naked Maori was a better warrior than the heavily armed British soldier, man for man, in the forest environment in which he had been schooled to arms and the trail from his infancy. Each admitted the other's pre-eminence under certain conditions, and each protagonist came to admire the primal quality of valour in his opponent. The Ngapuhi who—to their own amazement—hurled back assaulting columns of the finest British infantry at Ohaeawai had secret tremors at the spectacle of the forlorn hope's desperate courage; well they knew that in the end they could not hope to prevail over men of such mettle. And the soldier who saw women and even children facing death in a beleaguered redoubt of sod walls, choosing to die with their men rather than surrender, first marvelled at the devotion of such a race and then came to love them for their savage chivalry. The wars ended with a strong mutual respect, tinged with a real affection, which would never have existed but for this ordeal by battle.

From the days when venturesome trading brigs and schooners lay at uneasy anchor in New Zealand bays, with boarding nettings triced up and carronades loaded, down to the firing of the last shot against Te Kooti in the Urewera Ranges, the story of contact between European and Maori is full of episodes of the quality which makes the true romance. Those episodes, whether isolated adventures or protracted campaigns, may not have presented themselves to the participants in precisely that light; it remains for the present generation, bred up in peaceful occupation of the Maori islands, to appreciate what may be called the poetry of the last century's work and endeavour in New Zealand, as opposed to the more prosaic story of industrial evolution.

In examining these tales of other days and in testing the historical knowledge of the average New Zealander the fact is too apparent that the young generation would be the better for a more systematic schooling in the facts of national pioneer life and achievements which are a necessary foundation for the larger patriotism. Yet the passionate affection with which the Maori clung to his tribal lands is a quality which undeniably tinges the mind and outlook of the farm-bred, country-loving, white New Zealander to-day. The native-born has unconsciously assimilated something of the peculiar patriotism that belongs to the soil; the genius loci of the old frontiers has not entirely vanished from the hills and streams. Not only the tribespeople of Hone Heke and Wiremu Tamehana and Wahanui, but the New Zealander of British descent; may feel the truth which the Sage expressed in “Past and Present”: “The Hill I first saw the sun rise over, when the sun and all things were in their auroral hour, who can divorce me from it? Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the roots I have struck into my native soil; no tree that grows is rooted so.” And the native-born whose eyes in childhood are daily lifted to Taranaki's high snow-cap, who watches from the farmhouse the morning mists trailing up like the smoke of fairies' camp fires from the gullies of Pirongia, or who sees from afar Ruapehu's icy heliograph flash back the sunrise—this son of New Zealand cannot but come to love the landscape saliencies of his native place with something of the Maori adoration for “my parent the Mountain.”

Regarding these old wars in the light of the ordeal of battle from which the civilized world has lately emerged, the pakeha-Maori conflicts seem chivalrous tournaments. The formidable character of the country in most of the operations, while it increased the hardships of the campaigns, went to keep the casualties low. As in the wars of British and French in the Canadian forests, described by Parkman in “Montcalm and Wolfe,” “the problem was less how to fight the enemy than how to get at him.” And exasperated Imperial commanders, from Despard down to Cameron and Chute, realized as their columns toiled ponderously and painfully over unmapped country in search of a too-mobile foe, through unroaded swamps, bush, and ranges, and unbridged rivers, the truth of the dictum that geography is two-thirds of military science.

It is curious to discover in the early records how little the military commanders and officials realized the military quality of the Maori. We find, even before New Zealand became a British colony, the Resident at the Bay of Islands, Mr. Busby, declaring in a letter to the Colonial Secretary of New South Wales urging the despatch of a detachment of soldiers to uphold the authority of the Resident and the Ngapuhi confederation of native chiefs, “With regard to the number of troops which it might be necessary to maintain, it would, I think, require little knowledge of military tactics to satisfy one who has witnessed the warfare of the native that one hundred English soldiers would be an overmatch for the united forces of the whole Islands. But in fact there is little risk of even two tribes uniting to oppose them.”

From manuscript letter, 8th June, 1837, in Mr. Busby's letter-book, New Zealand archives.

Equally fatuous was the debate in the Legislative Council at Auckland, in 1842, upon the question of arresting the cannibal chief Taraia for his attack upon the Katikati Maoris at Ongare; it was actually suggested that the old warrior should be served with a summons by a constable in his fortified pa. In 1844, after the tragic blunder of the Wairau, Governor Fitzroy reported of the Wellington and Nelson officials and settlers, “No one appeared disposed to give the natives credit for courage or skill in warfare; no one seemed to doubt but that they would fly before a very small detachment of military; the prevailing feeling appeared to be for a collision.” That collision, when it came in the North, revealed the unsuspected capacity of the natives to meet and defeat—given their own conditions of fighting—the best British troops. While Hone Heke and Kawiti were building their stockades and moulding their bullets for their “fighting friends,” the redcoats, the Polynesian cousins of the Maori, the Tahitians, were fearlessly withstanding the French; and, just as the Ngapuhi speedily undeceived the too-confident Despard, the warriors of the Society Islands falsified the boast of the officer who, previous to an encounter in rear of Papeete, was heard to declare, “Give me fifty men and I'll march through Tahiti.”

In Hone Heke's day the Maori population so greatly out-numbered the whites, who were here on sufferance, that the confidence of such commanders as Despard and some of the officials and administrators of the hour is inexplicable except on the theory of an overwhelming faith in the white man's military invincibility. A Government return of the native population of New Zealand, laid before the Legislative Council at Auckland in 1845, gave an aggregate of 109,550, being the estimate of the Chief Protector of Aborigines. Of this number 40,000 were put down as proselytes of the Anglican Church missionaries, about 16,000 under the Wesleyans, and about 5,000 were Roman Catholics; all the rest were termed “Pagans.” The Ngapuhi Tribe was estimated to number 12,000, and the Rarawa 4,000; Ngati-Whatua, 2,000; Ngati-Maru (under the famous chief Taraia), 4,000; making in all 22,000 in the North Auckland districts and on the shores of the Hauraki Gulf and about the Thames River. The East Coast population, from Tauranga round to Hawke's Bay, was estimated at 30,000. Waikato, under the great Te Wherowhero, numbered 18,400. In Taranaki proper there were only 2,000 people; there were in South Taranaki 3,000 of the Ngati-Ruanui and other tribes. The Rotorua people mustered 9,000 all told, and the Taupo clans 1,500 (a curiously small estimate). From Wanganui along the west coast of the Wellington Province and round to the country of the Ngati-Kahungunu at Ahuriri (now Napier) there were 21,950 people, of whom Te Rauparaha headed 5,000 in the Otaki and adjacent districts. In the South Island there were 4,700 Maoris, consisting of 1,000 Ngati-Toa (Rauparaha's tribe), chiefly at Cloudy Bay (Wairau), 100 of the vanquished Rangitane, and 3,600 Ngai-Tahu, whose principal chief was Taiaroa, of Otago.

The New-Zealander of the 2nd August, 1845, commenting upon these figures, said that the return showed there were nearly 70,000 natives within three hundred miles of Auckland. “This most important fact,” it added, “should awake vigilance as well as stimulate firmness and decision in the present crisis.”

In 1847 Lieutenant W. Servantes, interpreter to the Forces, estimated the Maoris' numbers at 90,000. Bishop Selwyn's calculation of the total was 60,000. But Governor Grey, in 1849, estimated the native population at 120,000; and Dr. Shortland, in 1851, agreed with the Governor's figures.

Even taking the lowest estimate, it is apparent that a combined effort by the natives in the “forties” or early “fifties” could have driven the pakeha population into the sea. Had the “Land League” or the Pai-Marire fanaticism been born ten years earlier, or had a military genius like Te Kooti led the Maori tribes against the whites in 1845 and 1846, the story of New Zealand would read very differently. Certainly, had the Maoris but realized their strength, had they then possessed any political organization beyond the tribal, it was in their power to have kept these Islands indefinitely in the semi-savage condition of 1840, tolerating only the missionaries and a few coast-trading pakeha-Maoris. Let it not be forgotten that had it not been for the true benevolence, the hospitality, and the continued friendship of such men as Tamati Waka and Patuone, Te Kawau, Te Wherowhero, and Te Puni, the British flag might not be flying in New Zealand to-day.

Follow the stores-buying captain or chief officer of the “Levi Starbuck” into one of the weatherboard trading-houses, blue with strong tobacco smoke and thick with the tang of tarred rope. This interior is a typical South Sea warehouse; the proprietor is ship-chandler, sea-stock dealer, ironmonger and gunsmith, grog-seller, gunpowder-purveyor, and a dozen other trades. He can provide a ship with anchor and cable, or set the Maoris on the track of Captain Ephraim J. Nye's runaway boat-steerer with admirable despatch; provide a 300-ton barque with a complete new set of sails or sufficient muskets and ammunition to conquer a cannibal island. There are blankets, prints, red sealing-wax, tomahawks, bullet-moulds, iron pots, tobacco by the cask, for the Maori trade; sugar and molasses and rum from the West Indies; salt beef and pork and adamant biscuit for sea-fare; sou'-westers, cutting-in spades, harpoon-line by the hundred fathom, lance-heads, charts, binnacle lanterns, spy-glasses, and boat-compasses; pistols and knuckle-dusters for the afterguard, holystones and squeejees and coal-tar to keep the fists of the 'foremast hands out of mischief.

Now board one of those whaleships lying out yonder at an easy anchor—the ships that made this Bay of Islands famous—and you shall see the most conservative of all craft afloat. While every other phase of sea-life and every other kind of ship has changed out of all likeness to the olden type, the sailing whaler does not alter. Step into the stern-sheets of one of those beautifully modelled carvel-built whaleboats with the tobacco-chewing New England mate standing at the 22-foot steer-oar. See how the crew of five stretch back to it with their ash oars—the long, full stroke of the true whaleman, who will have none of your quick and jerky Navy oarsmanship. A few of those long strokes and we are clambering up a rope ladder on to the white-scrubbed decks of a ship as clean as a yacht for all her greasy trade. The pervading but not unpleasant smell of oil, the stuff that permeates her every timber and fills half the casks in her hold; the rows of sharp-ended 30-foot boats at her cranes and davits; the leather- or canvas-covered harpoons and lances whose long shafts project from each boat; the barrel slung as a crow's-nest at her maintopgallant-masthead—these all proclaim her calling. But there is something more about her that tokens her a ship apart from all others, this barque “Narwhal,” or “Levi Starbuck,” “Canton Packet,” “Pocahontas,” or “Charles W. Morgan,” or however she may be named. The bluff-bowed square-sterned craft, with her sides all hung with boats painted light blue like the sea, has an indescribable air of having been out of the world for years and years. The whale-hunter under canvas seems almost part of the sea, so long are the absences from port, so habituated the crews to the ways of the great deep.

In such a craft as this Herman Melville sails sperm-whale chasing at the time of our narrative; it is from just such a barque as the “Charles W. Morgan” or the “Awashonks” that he deserts to find the beautiful valley of Taipi and to give the world an undying true romance of the South Seas. The “Little Jule” of his Marquesan and Tahitian adventures, or the ivory-garnished “Pequod” of “Moby Dick,” may veritably be one of these far-roving barques that ride at the quiet anchorages of Kororareka and Wahapu this year 1845.

If you are privileged to explore the wrinkled canvas-backed charts to look into the captain's log-book you will see curious symbols that belong to the whale-fishing trade alone. The pencilled zigzag lines of the vessel's cruising course across the Pacific are punctuated every here and there with rough drawings of a whale's flukes, or the head of a great sperm bull, or maybe a school of porpoises. Each pictograph tells a tale of oil-getting, or of “drawn irons” and a lost whale; perhaps now and again a boat lost. Each emblem of a “kill” is figured with the numbers of barrels obtained. “Dirty work for clean money”: sperm-oil these years of 1840–50 rises steadily until it is worth a dollar a gallon, and bone from the “right” whale is quoted at £200 per ton in New York.

Observe that all these merchant ships are armed, some with a single iron carronade or a brass gun on each side, some with whole broadsides of four or six guns, 9-pounders and 12-pounders. Yonder taut-masted brig, a trader from Hobart Town, has a swivel gun on her poop as well as a whole battery on her main deck; she is lately in from a sandalwooding cruise to the New Hebrides and New Caledonia and a voyage to China, and she has used her guns against Western Pacific cannibals and Canton pirates. The merchant sailor of 1845 had to be gunner too; and it is aboard these traders and whalers that some of our young Ngapuhi, making a voyage for the love of adventure and the open sea-road, have learned to load, lay, and fire artillery, a science that is to be of use presently to their war-chief Heke.

Such were some of the distinguishing features of Kororareka Bay in the early years of British sovereignty. The visits of whaleships were all-important, for it was almost solely with them that the business of the white dealers and the Maori barterers lay. In 1845 there were more than six hundred American ships and barques engaged in whale-fishing, and of these a considerable number visited New Zealand annually; and English, French, Sydney, and Hobart whalers also frequented the coast. Mr. John Webster, of Hokianga, related in his reminiscences that when he landed at Russell Town from Sydney on the 1st May, 1841, there were over twenty whaling-ships in the Bay, and the beach was alive with seamen and their officers. It was the season when all the whalers put in for provisions and to fit out for another year's chase of the sperm and the “right” whale. But the number of visitors quickly lessened when the Governor in Council imposed a Customs tariff on the stable articles of trade, thus making the port highly expensive for the whalemen; and, as will be shown, this falling-off in trade created annoyance and resentment in the Maori mind.

The white population of Kororareka in its days of prosperity was about a thousand; by 1845 this number had fallen to some four hundred. In 1842 the town even supported a newspaper, the Bay of Islands Observer, a four-page weekly sold for a shilling. Traders' advertisements in this paper give us an insight into the commercial life of the place, and enable us to picture scenes in the 'longshore stores, with their curious variety of goods stocked for maritime and Maori customers. Thomas Spicer, “Kororareka Beach,” announced that he had for sale such articles as “duck frocks and trousers, muslin dresses, assorted prints, fine Congo tea, fine French capers, iron pots, tobacco, salt, shovels and spades, tomahawks, cartouche-boxes, superfine beaver hats, and crockery.” C. J. Cook and Co. informed the public that they dealt in ironmongery, blankets, tea, sugar, tobacco, policemen's lanterns, umbrellas, spittoons, sealing-wax, escutcheons, solar lamps, shot, powder, tinder-boxes, salt pork, “and all other necessary commodities.” At Wahapu an American, Captain William Mayhew—one of the foreign residents from whom Hone Heke received political inspiration—conducted a large store in which he stocked, among other necessities of life, gunpowder in casks and canisters, flour, tar, anchors, butter, cheese, shot, dungaree, sealskin caps, silk hats, French bedsteads, double-barrelled flint-lock guns, single- and double-barrelled percussion guns, ploughs, pit-saws, blankets, slop clothes, and sarsaparilla.

There was a “Kororareka Observatory.” William Robertson, who owned this establishment advertised repairs to timekeepers, and added: “Commanders of vessels may have their chronometers rated by transit observations and an astronomical clock kept at Greenwich mean time.”

In 1842 the falling-off in maritime trade was already marked; nevertheless, many ship-commanders preferred Kororareka to more populous ports. Small fleets of square-riggers made for the bay in the off-season; for example, in two days (4th and 5th May) in 1842 four American whaleships—the “Triad,” “Caledonia,” “Washington,” and “Fanny”—arrived at Kororareka, bringing in their holds, as the result of their cruises in the Pacific, takes totalling 6,550 barrels of oil and 51,000 lb. of bone. The New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator of September, 1844, said: “The receipts at the Bay of Islands from furnishing supplies to whalers averaged for several years about £45,000 annually, and now this trade is nearly extinct.” Up to the date of Heke's War, however, the number of whaling-vessels using Russell and Wahapu as ports of refitting and refreshing was still considerable. Captain McKeever, of the United States warship “St. Louis,” writing from the Bay of Islands, 13th March, 1845, to the Secretary of the Navy at Washington, said: “Of the high importance of the Bay of Islands to our whalesmen, and of the great value of American interest involved here (there being no less than seventy or eighty of the whalers touching and refitting annually), I presume you are well aware, and I am safe probably in saying that no other port or harbour in the world competes with it in its importance to the American whaling interests.” The Bay of Islands, indeed, was regularly visited for water, wood, and stores, and for the shipping of oil, until, in the final days of the American Civil War, the Confederate commerce-destroying cruiser “ Shenandoah” left a trail of burning New England whaleships across the Pacific; and even in the “nineties” I have seen an occasional whaling-barque, such as the “Gayhead,” of New Bedford, lying at anchor at Russell, boating off her water-casks, as in the early days, from the perennial spring of Waipara.

At the same time, there were whites whom Ngapuhi and Te Rarawa and their kin desired strongly to encourage for reasons of self-interest. These were the captains and crews of the whale-ships—the men who were chiefly responsible at once for the material prosperity and the moral deterioration of the northern tribes. The whaleships supplied practically the whole of the trade of the Bay of Islands and Mangonui, as the kauri timber ships did that of Hokianga; and the decrease in this trade directly following the establishment of British sovereignty went far to convince Heke and Pomare, and the many others who lived to a large extent on the profits accruing from the visits of shipping, that the old regime, when every man made his own laws, was preferable to the new order.

Hone Heke was nephew to Hongi Hika, and married that chief's daughter, Hariata Rongo. He died without issue; but his elder brother, Tuhirangi, of Kaikohe, begat Hone Ngapua, who married Niu, who gave birth in 1869 to Hone Heke the Second, who came while yet a very young man to represent the Northern Maori Electorate in the New Zealand House of Representatives. Hone Heke the First engaged in the intertribal wars of the North while still a youth, and in 1830 he displayed energy and skill in a battle at Kororareka. Three years later he was one of the Ngapuhi men, under Titore, who sailed their war-canoes down the coast to Tauranga, where they attacked Otumoetai and other pas. Heke was wounded in the neck in this expedition. In 1837 he took a leading part in the fighting against Pomare and Te Mau-Paraoa, whose stockaded pa (destroyed by the British troops in 1845) stood on Otuihu, a prominent place on the cliffs above the entrance to the Waikare and Kawakawa arms of Tokerau, and about six miles from Kororareka Town.

In an interval of peace in the “thirties” young Heke lived at Paihia in the establishment of the Rev. Henry Williams (afterwards Archdeacon of Waimate), and the respect and affection for the missionaries then engendered in his mind remained a distinguishing feature of his otherwise turbulent character. It was at Paihia that he learned something of the history of the outer world—a smattering of knowledge which he turned to shrewd account in his arguments with the Government a few years later.

The portrait of Hone Heke is an index to his character. His nose, though not the predatory ihu-kaka, or strong hook-nose, that distinguished some great Maori leaders, was prominent and well-shapen; his prominent jaws and chin denoted firmness and resolution. The old Kaikohe natives of to-day speak of Heke's kauae-roa, his long chin, as the salient character of his face. He was tattooed, but not with the full design of moko, such as that borne by his great kinsman and antagonist, Tamati Waka Nene.

Heke's dissatisfaction with the state of maritime trade after 1840 is scarcely to be wondered at, seeing that in addition to the returns from the sale of food-supplies to the whalemen he had collected a kind of Customs dues from visiting ships. Before the British flag was hoisted he and his cousin Titore divided a levy of £5 on each ship entering the Bay. They collected their dues from the ships outside the anchorage, boarding them in their canoes before Tapeka Point was rounded. Many ships sailed up to the anchorages off Wahapu and Otuihu, in the passage to the Kawakawa and Waikare, and here Pomare collected his toll from each ship, for he was the paramount chief of the inner waters. Pomare also was the principal agent in the disreputable but profitable business of supplying girls as temporary wives to the crews of the whaleships during their stay in port. This was a leading line of Maori traffic with the shipping in unscrupulous old Kororareka and Otuihu, which not even the strong mission influence could extirpate.

In 1841, in a Government Ordinance, Customs duties were set forth in a brief schedule. All spirits, British, paid 4s. per gallon to the Customs; all other spirits, foreign, 5s. Tobacco, after the 1st January, 1842, was to pay 1s. per pound on the manufactured article and 9d. per pound on the unmanufactured; snuff and cigars, 2s. per pound. Tea, sugar, flour, and grain were taxed £5 on every £100 of value; wine, £15 per £100; all other foreign goods, £5 per £100. In 1844 firearms were taxed 30 per cent. And when the storekeeper had passed on the increases to his customers, with no doubt a considerable extra margin of profit for the Maori trade, the warrior who came in to renew his supply of whiri, or twist tobacco, to purchase a new blanket or a musket, or to lay by a store of lead for moulding into bullets, received the clearest proof that the Treaty which he had signed had not improved his condition of life.

To this concrete evidence of trade depression was added a vague but widely diffused belief that the Treaty of Waitangi was merely a ruse of the pakeha, and that it was the secret intention of the whites, so soon as they became strong enough, to seize upon the lands of the Maori. In 1844 the news reached New Zealand that the House of Commons Committee on New Zealand Affairs had resolved that the Treaty of Waitangi was a part of a series