Hero Stories of New Zealand
[Protected by Copyright.]
The Taranaki Maori Leader.
This drawing, by G. Sherriff, shows
the Government armed forces at Parihaka, November 5th, 1881.
(See pages 236–246.)
Hero Stories
of
New Zealand
By
James Cowan
Harry H. Tombs Limited
22 Wingfield Street.
The Copyright of all stories and illustrations
appearing in this book is
strictly reserved.
appearing in this book is
strictly reserved.
Printed by
22 Wingfield St., Wellington, New Zealand.
Preface
It has been said more than once that one of the things New Zealand conspicuously lacks is an historical sense. This deficiency in the popular mentality and outlook is being made good to some extent, especially through the recent efforts of that great and discerning Englishman, Lord Bledisloe, who never tired, in his capacity of Governor-General, of urging the people of the Dominion to cultivate a greater pride of country and a deeper appreciation of New Zealand's individuality and nationhood. He reminded his audiences that New Zealand possessed heroes and heroines whom at any rate posterity would record as having illuminated the country's history. Would that all our own people were as keenly appreciative of dramatic pages in the nation's past! This country has a history, in its first century as a British land, adventurous and romantic in the widest senses of those words, but ignorance of that story, vivid and stimulating as so much of it is, is widespread. The young generation is apt to conclude, from its popular reading and the cinema, that one must go abroad for frontier tales, preferably to America. Such occasions as the gathering of Maori and pakeha at the
The lack of accurate knowledge is general. In the preface to an anthology of New Zealand short stories this editorial statement occurs:
“Our country lacks much romantic material usually found in a new land. We have had no frontiersmen, no epic struggle with mighty forces….. Our settlement victory was prosaic and swiftly won.”
An elementary knowledge of this country's history and its settlement conditions should have prevented such a palpably inaccurate summing-up of our past. If ever there was a country that developed the spirit of the frontier it was New Zealand. Explorers, scouts, bush-fighters, frontier settlers we have had in multitude, men (and women, too) who lived adventurous days and nights and suffered and endured. I have known many men who were as well entitled as any hero of America's West to the title of frontiersmen, men who lived wild days on the border. Such pioneers, living all their lives on the edge of romance between the two races, were always on the skirts of settlement. Explorers and surveyors—frontiersmen of the best type. Our backblocks settlers making homes in the danger-filled bush; ten thousand British troops fighting their slow way against the Maori on his native fern-heath and in his stockades; the gold-seekers who carried their swags through icy torrents and over snowy mountains in a wilder land than California—the sum of their efforts would seem to have constituted a true epic of conquest and colonisation. Enough of that! We have had a few borderers in our day.
Human effort, human resolution and action proceed on much the same lines on all frontiers. New Zealand, however, presented unusual difficulties in the era of its breaking-in. The mountains, ranges, forests and swamps, and above all the very independent and war-loving Maori made the frontiers here formidable and arduous out of all proportion to the size of the country
Patriotism flourishes best upon the soil of history, and the uses of history are two-fold. For one thing, it teaches—or should teach—what should be avoided in the present and the future, and for another, it supplies us with examples of human conduct at its highest, of self-sacrifice, endurance, bravery conjoined to intelligence and skill.
The New Zealander perhaps is not sufficiently conscious of the fortune that is his in being able to call this country Home. He is too apt to look over the seas to the lands of his forefathers for leadership instead of cultivating the spirit of nationhood for himself. There are so many agencies here operating to destroy the natural beauty and historical places of the land, so many people trying to make this country a copy of some other rather than to maintain it as a place apart, with a great and peculiar genius of its own.
The stories of courage and endurance in New Zealand's dangerous days can never be told too often. They are a perpetual incentive to a spirit of duty, bravery and comradeship. Maori and pakeha combatants of that era of great hazards were the heroes of a war that was still a chivalrous thing, fought at close quarters, when the human factor had not yet been submerged by the diabolical tide of machines for scientific wholesale slaughter.
“It is one of the curious things about war,” an American historian recently wrote in the “
Memories! One cannot learn or write history exclusively from written documents. The generals' despatches, the officials' bluebooks, do not give you the real meat of history. The generals and colonels did not know the war from the Maori side The officials did not know the frontier. I have spent years in gathering the real story on the spot. Memories of old
Often on the site of a fortification or a battle-ground I heard a Maori veteran's narrative of his warpath days. Sometimes both pakeha and Maori were there to describe the incidents of the fighting from opposite sides: old antagonists now firm friends. Many such meetings, treasured in memory—they can never come again. The men have gone; the times have changed.
In this book some typical stories of action, of bravery and endeavour, are given in chronological order, covering the past century in New Zealand. For some of the episodes, unpublished MS. narratives given me have been drawn upon. Soldiers and Maori warriors, missionaries, settlers, bush scouts, sailors, heroic women are the leading figures in these tales of the true romance. A great many like episodes could be narrated; the present selection should be sufficient proof that New Zealand's record is full of the “flaming faith and gallantry” of the past, a spirit which, as Lord Birkenhead remarked in his preface to a recent book of great deeds, “will yield an atmosphere helpful to valiant enterprise in the future.”
.James Cowan
Contents
List of Illustrations
Note.—The original drawings in the above illustrations are protected by Copyright by Author and Publishers, and must not be reproduced. The photograph of the New Zealand Cross is an exclusive photo for this book, from the Cross awarded to
The Last Stand ofTe Amotu .
THE forest called by the Maoris Tahuna, which covers the level land between Lakes Rotoiti and Rotoehu, a belt of a little more than a mile, was a very lovely tract of woodland in the days before road-widening and timber working had robbed it of some of its tallest trees and destroyed its original quality of unspoiled beauty, a sanctuary of Tane-Mahuta. The winding road through it, the Ara-a-Hongi of cannibal days' story, was narrow and arched over by the leafy branches, matted with great bunches of flax-like kiekie and festooned with creepers and swinging lianas like ships' cables. Now it is less shady, more straightened out; the olden charm of cool forest depth has gone from the road itself, for motoring speedways inevitably demand sacrifice of beauty. But there is left much to please the eye, and Hongi's Track is one of the things that every visitor to Rotorua sees. The bush between the road and the great mountain wall of Matawhaura, that drops vertically into the east end of Lake Rotoiti, is untouched by the scenery improvers. The sacred matai tree Hinehopu, at whose hollow foot travellers of both races place leafy offerings, still stands beside the road, and that grand old patriarch of a tawa tree that spreads its branches over the avenue near the Rotoehu end of Hongi's Track has been spared. The historic associations, too, remain.
The authentic story of the track goes back over a hundred and twenty years, and the little stream called Taupo that runs through the bush to Rotoiti murmurs
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When kauri craft across the forest levels to Rotoiti. Te Wera led his warriors through the bush on the west
pa called Puketapu, where huge pohutukawa trees grow in the ancient entrenchments. There Ngapuhi, most of whom were armed with newly acquired flintlock muskets, made a quick attack, shooting through the palisade and soon killing or capturing the few inhabitants.
There was at this juncture a chief of Ngati-Pikiao named Te Rakataha living at Tapuwae-haruru, the principal village of the tribe, on the long beach at the east end of Rotoiti. He and his people had, of course, not been without warning of the Ngapuhi invaders' arrival on the coast at Waihi, but they did not imagine, apparently, that the dreaded musketeers of the North were so close at hand. The first signal that they were even then on the shore of Rotoiti was the banging thunder of Te Wera's guns at Otairoa, the reports echoing in terrifying reverberations from the lofty precipices of Matawhaura. Te Rakataha's first thought was for his kinsfolk at Puta-atua, a small stockaded village on the lake shore between Otairoa and Matawhaura. The principal man there was the chief Te Amotu Takanawa. Amotu is pronounced with the accent on the last syllable, and Takanawa with the accent on the second syllable.
Te Rakataha at once launched a fast canoe, manning it with ten paddlers, all that were on the beach at the moment, and off they dashed to the rescue across the shining blue face of Tawhitinui, the wide eastern bay of Rotoiti.
They reached Te Amo's beach just in time to get him and nine or ten of his people into the canoe—most of the inhabitants had gone in the only large canoe to Mokoia Island some days before for safety.
By this time Te Wera and many of his men had launched a canoe at the village they had captured and they appeared in chase the moment Te Rakataha had embarked his friends.
Now there was a desperate contest, both crews paddling with all their might for the beach at Tapuwae-haruru. Spray flew from the blades as the canoes tore through the smooth waters. The Ngapuhi men were the stronger in numbers and they were rapidly overtaking the Ngati-Pikiao when the first canoe touched the sands. Te Rakataha and Te Amotu Takanawa and their party, some twenty altogether, dashed on shore only a few moments ahead of their pursuers, and rushed for the shelter of the forest, to join their friends at Rotoehu. Their foes had been too busy with the paddles thus far to give them a shot, but now some of the musketeers fired on them, without effect.
There were several women and children among the fugitives. These Te Rakataha and Te Amotu pushed on in front, themselves taking the rearguard duty. All this was a matter of seconds; the cannibal conquerors were close on their heels.
The Ngati-Pikiao took to the Tahuna trail—very soon to be Hongi's canoe-road—a narrow foot track walled in by dense undergrowth and roofed by the low bending boughs of the forest.
“Run, run!” cried Te Amotu. “On, on, and join Tautari!” To his comrade Te Rakataha he panted, “Go on, Ra! I shall keep them back! Save our people!”
Just on the further side of this Taupo stream Te Amotu turned about and confronted his foes. He was armed with a taiaha, the two-handed broadsword and spear in one, that most effective of weapons in the hands of a master of fence. The foremost men of the pursuers had no guns; the musketeers, reloading, had been passed by the swifter runners.
A Ngapuhi man, splashing through the shallow brook, rushed at Te Amotu with a long-handled tomahawk. The duel, fought with lightning-like blows and parries, was prolonged by Te Amotu as much as possible, to delay the pursuit of his friends. Only one man could attack him at a time on that narrow trail, and the gunmen behind the tomahawk wielder could not fire for fear of hitting their own man.
At last Te Amotu, warding off a furious down-slash, felled his opponent with a jaw-breaking blow and instantly ran the spear-tongue of his taiaha into his throat.
On sprang the second warrior. He had a flintlock pistol thrust through his belt, but he used a stone patu, the sharp-edged club, for the combat. Him Te Amotu soon disposed of by giving him the point of his taiaha in the stomach and dealing him a crashing stroke on the head as he doubled up.
With the fierce fatalism, the utter indifference to death that the Maori calls whakamomori, the keeper of the track awaited his next foe. Every moment he held that one-man way took his people nearer to safety.
But the third Ngapuhi had a loaded musket. As he levelled it Te Amotu sprang at him. The report of the flintlock thundered through the forest, the first gunshot ever heard in the woods of Tahuna. When the little cloud of smoke cleared, the gunman lay sprawled on the ferny bank of the Taupo, with Te Amotu on top of him. In his dying convulsion Te Amotu, shot through the body, had felled his foe with a stunning head-blow.
Pausing only to make sure of their gallant enemy with tomahawk cuts, the Ngapuhi dashed on in pursuit. But Te Rakataha and his party were safe in their secure refuge, the secret places of the bush. They presently joined Tautari, the chief of Ngati-Makino, whose fortified village stood on a headland above Rotoehu. He and his people made night attacks on Hongi's men when they camped on the lake shore, and killed and carried off several of Ngapuhi. In the meantime, the slayers of Te Amotu returned to Tapuwae-haruru beach to await Hongi. They had their brave foeman's head stuck on a pole, to address with tauntings, and his body for the oven.
But Te Wera, veteran of many campaigns, regarded those silent, stern features with a warrior's respect for a fearless opponent, and it was he who, when peace was made after the fall of Mokoia Island, told the people the story of Te Amotu's last stand from the Ngapuhi side, and his story linked up with the moving tale of self-sacrifice as narrated by Te Rakataha.
And Ngati-Pikiao set up a white stone on the trackside, which one may see to-day, to mark for the genations that were to come the sacred spot where one man
“Now,” said Wineti, when he had told his story of the stone by Taupo stream, “you may wonder why Te Amotu, and not Te Rakataha, took the rearguard position on this track that day. The reason was that he fought here not only to save his tribe by delaying the chase, but to repay the service done by Rakataha in hastening to rescue him when the first reports of Te Wera's guns were heard. He died for his friends because he loved them, but he died also out of gratitude to the man who had risked his life for him.”
The Swimmer.
How Te Rau-o-te-Rangi Crossed the Strait of Kapiti.
IT was from Aperahama, of the tapu, resting there upon the breast of Hinemoana, with one narrow cloud-streak belting its sentry summit, Titeremoana, the Ocean Look-out of the olden Maoris. It looked a fairy isle, one of those dim romantic spots we read of in the old Arthurian legends or in the classic pages of the Greeks.
“Across yon sea-channel,” said the old man Aperahama, “the rangatira woman Te Rau-o-te-Rangi swam; and Ripeka, the little child who rode upon her shoulders over the ocean, and who grew to be a woman, lies in that graveyard of Wainui just below there.” And later I heard the story in detail from Te Rau's only surviving child, the old lady Heni te Rau, the half-caste, who was born on Kapiti Island in 1835, and also from Te Whataupoko, the grandson of the great Rauparaha's tohunga.
This narrative of a woman's courage and endurance refers to a period of more than a century ago, when this was Maori Land indeed, and when Rauparaha and Rangihaeata and their all-conquering men-at-arms held Kapiti Island as their sea-girt citadel. The coast-dwelling Maoris of the old days were almost as much in their element in the sea as on the land. Te Rau-o-te-Rangi was a water-queen amongst them. Her swim covered seven miles at least. Kapiti Island lies five miles from the nearest part of the mainland, but the swimmer crossed the intervening sea in a diagonal direction. Hinemoa's much-sung swim across Lake Rotorua to her lover on Mokoia Island is far outdone by Te Rau-o-te-Rangi's feat, for the distance to the island from Owhata village, where Hinemoa took to the water, is not more than two miles. And the lake was smooth and calm, whereas the heroine of Kapiti had to cross a treacherous current-vexed sea and face the surf at the end of the swim.
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In the Twenties of last century the young chieftainess
Early one morning in the year 1826 Te Rau-o-te-Rangi's man-slave, one Patetere, came to her in much agitation to say that he had dreamed a dream of evil omen, a warning from the spirit-world. In his vision of the night he beheld a great ope, or army of foemen from the northern mainland assembling and advancing on the island in their war-canoes. Kapiti would surely fall, and
“Wait a while,” said Te Rau calmly, “wait until they appear; then we shall see.”
They had but a few days to wait. Patetere had implicit faith in that warning from the land of dreams, and he kept vigilant watch each night on the rocky horn of land which forms the northern end of Waiorua Bay. One quiet midnight his dream came true. In the moon-light he saw far away on the sea, in the direction of Otaki, a number of black dots, which gradually grew larger. They were canoes, a whole flotilla of them, apparently paddling slowly so as not to reach their destination too soon.
The slave ran into Te Rau's whare and roused her. Her husband and her father, and many of the tribe, were away on the mainland, and she was in the faithful old bond-servant's care. Te Rau hurried out to the point, where the rocks of Kuru-Kohatu dip down to the surf, and satisfied herself that a great fleet of canoes was indeed approaching. “They are dipping their paddles gently,” she said; “they will lie off until just before dawn and then dash in when the kaka parrot cries its first call to the day.”
Bidding Patetere quietly arouse the chiefs of the village, Te Rau went to the tohunga, the medicine-man of the tribe, whose name was Te Whataupoko, and requested him to karakia her, repeat over her his most potent death-averting spells, for she had resolved upon a great and perilous deed.
“I shall go to the mainland,” she said, “but I shall not take a canoe, for it would be seen, even the smallest canoe. I shall swim the Strait—I shall take my little daughter with me; and I shall rouse the people to save Kapiti.”
Leading his relative to the sacred place of Waiorua, on the brink of the waterside, the tohunga karakia'd her for the great task, reciting spells and charms over her, soul and body, strengthening invocations, and prayers to the deities of sea and air, to avert from the swimmer danger by taniwha and shark and overwhelming wave.
Then, returning to the hut, Te Rau threw off her garments and stood there naked, and her slave-woman, Rau-Huihui (Patetere's wife) anointed her from head to foot with oil, and rubbed her strong, beautiful young body all over with kokowai, or red ochre, to protect her from chill. And on the mother's shoulders Rau-huihui securely fastened the bewildered little child, supported on a thick mat or pad of the buoyant dried leaves of the raupo reed, so that the tiny girl might rest high and safe. And then wading into the sea, the brave woman struck out for the Ao-marama, the land of light and life.
First Te Rau swam southward along the coast of Kapiti, keeping in the shadow of the hills, lest she and the child be seen by some long-sighted warrior in the canoes. Then, when she judged it was time to make toward the Waikanae shore, she changed her course boldly across channel. She swam with long, powerful, but easy strokes, turning her head now and again to speak a petting work to her frightened little daughter. After a while she tired and lay there floating quietly; she could not turn on her back to rest because of the child. She murmured a little nursery-song, an oriori, to her infant; and presently on she swam again.
The sea-swell grew heavier; and now Te Rau could hear the long roar of the surf on the mainland beach. A haze had come down over the sea with the setting of the moon; and she would have lost her direction but for the roll of the breakers. She reached the shore a long distance south of the Waikanae mouth; she rode easily in on the top of the seas she saw in the dawning; now she touched bottom, and another breaker threw her up on the sands. Struggling up the beach, she sank down on the firm white sand, and unfastening her poor little half-perished baby from her stiff and weary shoulders, she clasped it to her thankful breast.
∗ ∗ ∗
Kapiti did not fall. Its garrison, fighting with the utmost fierceness and desperation, beat off the invaders and took many prisoners, and there were many killed for the cannibal cooking ovens. The reinforcements summoned by Te Rau-o-te-Rangi only came over in time to share in the triumphant war-dances of
The brave swimmer was a woman of importance in after years; she and her relative Topeora were two of the three women who signed the
The Missionaries of Matamata
MUCH has been written of the pioneer missionaries' life and work in North New Zealand, where there were many to chronicle the trials and successes of the Church toilers and where there was frequent contact with the outside world by ship. Conditions were very different in the interior of the country, in particular at Rotorua and the station established in the remote Maori stronghold that is now the beautiful and closely-settled district of Matamata. From a manuscript narrative left by the
A kind of forlorn hope; the station had to be abandoned through stress of war. But while it lasted it was a little epic of heroic effort, an enterprise of self-sacrifice and stout endurance in a barbarous place far from help. By comparison with this far-back outpost of the Church, the missionaries of the
At various times during the brief life of the mission, 1835–36, the Revs. John Morgan,
I pass over the more harrowing descriptions; Mr. Morgan could paint blood-curdling pictures. Here are some of the milder bits:—
“The little children have been fetched away from our schools to feast upon the bodies of the enemies carried home by the returning warriors. I have known about sixty bodies cooked in a day… . I have often seen that after feasting for several days upon human flesh, their (the warriors') eyes protrude exceedingly, and become bloodshot, and their countenances altogether assume a much more savage appearance.”
The great warrior chief
The missionary described the daily and nightly scenes at the pas at Matamata when the victorious war parties had returned from Rotorua after the fierce battles there in 1836: “All was bustle and excitement; every exertion was made to put the forts into a state to resist an invasion from the Rotorua tribes. After prayers all the mission natives returned for the night within the forts half a mile distant from our station. No one except the missionaries would sleep outside the stockades. As night came on the sound of the pahu, or war-gong, rang across the plain. The pahu was an oval of wood, partly hollowed in the centre, and suspended by cords on a stage 15 ft. or 20 ft. from the ground. It was beaten with a mallet by a man seated on the stage. The watchmen, or kai-whakaara, went their rounds, and with a loud voice called upon the people to watch lest they be surprised by the enemy. Young and old chiefs and slaves, of both sexes, assembled within the pas, and there danced their savage dances and made the air ring with their horrid yells and songs. Everything without reminded us that we were no longer in a Christian land.”
When the invading war parties arrived from the Arawa country the missionaries, though momentarily expecting to be attacked, resolutely stood their ground. Morgan and Brown packed a box containing changes of clothing for their wives and themselves and a few valued articles, and at night dug a deep hole in the station garden and buried the box, “which ere long might contain all we could call our own in this wilderness.” It was necessary to take up the box about once a week to air the clothing. This was done with the utmost caution,
“We found ourselves isolated in a savage land,” wrote Mr. Morgan in another letter. “Mrs. Maunsell and Mrs. Morgan were at Matamata, but they did not appear anxious for their personal safety, or desirous to be removed from that scene of strife and bloodshed. In fact, during the long season of anxiety and war through which we had to pass I never heard any of the wives of the missionaries regret that they had left their native land, the comfort and quiet of the family circle, to engage in mission labour and bear the heat and burden of the day in a foreign and savage land. On the contrary, they wished to work while it was called day, and endeavour by every means in their power to bear in company with their husbands their part in the labour of love and mercy. When the state of affairs became such that we deemed it our duty to remove them, they left their stations with regret, earnestly desiring the time when they should be recalled.”
When war parties from other tribes were roving the country, the missionaries were cut off from communication with their friends outside; they could not send out messengers without risk of being killed by the murdering parties who lurked in the bush and laid ambuscades on the tracks. On one occasion, when Mr. Morgan was taking his wife and the other women down to Puriri station, seventy miles away, for safety, he and his Maori party had to be very careful of their fires lest the
On some of the journeys to and from the mission station the white women were carried in litters made of saplings laced with supplejack and flax, across the deep swamps between Matamata and the canoe landing. But the Maori carriers stipulated that if they were attacked by their foes on the way they would put their burdens down anywhere and escape, leaving the pakehas to look after themselves.
Te Aroha Mountain, looming so nobly over the plain, was a kind of bastion of safety to those danger-surrounded pioneers who sought with little success to change the heart of the savage. As they toiled through the deep swamps of flax and raupo toward the Waihou, never knowing when some band of warriors might descend on them, they ever looked toward the lofty “Mountain of Love,” feeling that once they had reached its base and camped on the eastern side of the river they would be safe.
In September of 1836 the final blow fell. A party of pakehas and the Maori children under their charge. But Tarapipipi, pa to which it had been taken. The looters took strange liberties with some of the ladies' clothing which was being sent down to Puriri. “Our patience was tried,” Mr. Morgan wrote in his mournful way, “by some of the sights we saw.” A warrior who paraded in front of the party he was leading, dancing about and brandishing his gun, proudly wore a black silk bonnet belonging to Mrs. Chapman, tied under his tattooed chin. That and a strip of print tied round his neck formed the whole of his attire. Another of the robbers wore a missionary's white shirt. Tarapipipi rushed at him, and the shirt changed hands in a few moments. It may be imagined that any garments recovered were somewhat the worse for wear.
Some of the Rotorua chiefs had expressed their determination to destroy the stations at Tauranga and Matamata, and carry the missionaries and their families as prisoners to Mokoia Island in Rotorua lake. It came to pass that before the close of the long war, and after the Matamata mission had been abandoned, Mokoia of romantic memory was an isle of refuge for two years for Morgan and Chapman and their wives and children. The Rotorua tribes were then their friends; Mokoia was the only place where they could be secure from the expected attacks of the warriors of
At last, in 1840, Chapman and Morgan decided that the time had come when they could establish a new station on the mainland. So, loading their canoes, they and their native helpers crossed to the eastern shore, where, at Te Ngae, they formed a station which became an oasis of cultivation and beauty in the wild country. One of the Morgan children had died on the Island. “The
So gradually ended that heroic phase of mission endeavour in the dangerous land, slowly but certainly giving place to an age of peace and civilised progress. Chapman carried on at Te Ngae; he and his wife were the apostles to the Arawa for nearly thirty years. John Morgan went to the Upper Waikato to take over the work begun there in the mid-Thirties. He was the teacher of the tribes of the Waipa district, with pakeha feet cross their thresholds to-day.
The Pirates of the Wellington Brig.
How the Chief Mate of
The Sisterscaptured a Convict Crew.
“I DON'T like the looks of that brig, sir,” said Mr. Tapsell, the big red-bearded chief mate of the London whaleship The Sisters. He addressed his captain, Robert Duke, who had just returned from a brig called the Wellington, which had anchored off the beachside settlement of Kororareka, in the Harriet—the only other vessel in the bay—had gone out to the brig when she was reported in the offing.
“Why, what's wrong with her, mister?” asked Duke, in an abrupt, surly tone, eyeing his officer unpleasantly.
“There are a great many people on board,” replied Tapsell, who had been scanning the brig intently through his long spyglass, “and they all seem to be quarterdeck hands.”
“Oh, no, it's all right,” said the captain, “she's got convicts from Sydney for Norfolk Island, as I've already told you. I saw them below. She was blown out of her course and she needs water and firewood.”
But Tapsell was not satisfied. He was a greatly-experienced sailor, had commanded ships himself, and his keen eyes and his seamanly sense told him that all was not right. He was a far more alert, intelligent man
Wellington narrowly; she lay a cable's length from the whaleship, and between that vessel and the beach. There was an unusual number of people on her main-deck and poop, some walking about in groups, loudly talking, several carrying muskets, and all apparently on a footing of familiarity. The more he scanned the vessel and thought over Duke's words the stronger his suspicions grew. He came to the conclusion that she had been run away with. He recalled several stories of pirated vessels, stolen by convicts who overpowered the crew and military guard.
Walton, the man in command of the brig, was invited on board The Sisters to dinner. The Harriet's captain was also invited. Tapsell studied the guest closely. Walton seemed uneasy, furtive.
Tapsell rose when the meal was over, and addressing the man from the Wellington said, sternly:
“Walton, you have run away with that vessel.”
Walton, greatly startled, trembled and clutched the table edge. “I have!” he replied. “I couldn't help it.”
“That will do for me,” said Tapsell, and he went on deck.
The pirate commander of the Wellington was permitted to return to his ship; an armed boat's crew came for him.
A gale of wind blew next day. Mr. Tapsell was restless, uneasy about that brig. He wondered what had
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The Wellington was owned by
Just before dawn one morning, when they were within a hundred miles of
Then the mutineers discussed their immediate future. Walton pressed his mates to sail for the South Sea Islands, land the unwanted crew somewhere, and then go cruising eastward ho!—perhaps as far as South America—in search of pleasure and plunder.
But, unluckily for their plans, the Wellington was short of water. Walton, who took command of the brig,
The Rev. Wellington soon after her arrival and was passing the captain's cabin, when a note was slipped into his hand. When he opened it, unseen, he read that the brig had been seized by the convicts and that the captain was forcibly detained below. Mr. Williams told Duke and Tapsell that he had mustered all the Maoris he could and urged them to capture the brig, but they would not risk an encounter with the well-armed desperados.
As Mr. Williams went over the whaleship's side into his boat, he said to the chief mate: “I hope you will not let her go.”
“She shall not go,” said Tapsell.
The brig's people were busily engaged that day in filling their water-casks at the Waipara spring, the usual watering-place of shipping under the wooded Maiki Hill, in the northern corner of Kororareka Bay. Walton hurried on his preparations for sea. He realised now his fatal mistake in putting into the Bay. Next morning he was ready, and Captains Duke and Clarke went on board to pilot him out. One anchor was hove up and the other hove short on. Some hands went aloft and loosed the foretopsail, ready to hoist, but the wind was very light.
When Tapsell saw the brig hoist her foretopsail, he blew his whistle and summoned all hands. When the crew came aft, he said, standing at the break of the poop:
“Men, you see that brig. She's in the hands of a lot of bloody pirates. They've got the officers and crew and the guard down below locked up, and they'll murder them when they get to sea. It will be disgraceful if we let her go.”
“We're with you, sir!” said the spokesman of the crew. “You give the word and we'll obey.”
Tapsell gave orders for some of the crew to get the hawser up and clap a spring on the cable, and the rest to mount the guns and gets the muskets and ammunition ready. Most of the ship's carronades were down below; a swivel gun was permanently mounted on the poop.
Walton, in the Wellington, desperately anxious to get to sea, did not miss any of the warlike preparations in the whaleship lying outside of him. He said to the two captains who were with him: “You are here to sail
The pusillanimous Captain Duke protested that it was not his doing and that whatever his chief mate was about it was for his own protection in case the brig should drop alongside The Sisters. He gave his word of honour that the Wellington should be allowed to go to sea. On this the two whaleship commanders were allowed to leave the brig.
There was an angry scene when the two captains reached The Sisters. “What the devil d'ye mean by it—getting ready to fire on the brig?” Duke demanded.
“I'm going to prevent that damned rogue from going to sea!” declared Tapsell.
The cowardly Duke made a gesture of helplessness. “What can we do?” he asked. “Consider; there are eighty-five desperate characters on board.” (The real number was about sixty.)
Tapsell stuck to his guns. He turned to Captain Clarke, who was just as chicken-hearted as Captain Duke—and asked if he would permit the Harriet's crew to take a hand.
“I'll have nothing to do with it,” said Clarke, “but you can go and ask them.”
Tapsell went off in one of his whaleboats and saw the Harriet's mate. “I've got a wife and family,” said the mate, “and I'll not interfere.”
Tapsell heartily cursed the cautious mate as he returned in hot anger to his ship, and reported the result of his quest.
“There you are, Mister,” said Duke. “No one but a madman would have anything to do with it.”
“Then I shall act the madman's part,” exclaimed Tapsell, and he went ahead with his gunnery preparations.
The wind had dropped to almost a calm; the pirated brig could not move. She lay at anchor all that night.
∗ ∗ ∗
There was a light breeze at daylight next morning Mr. Tapsell took command of the operations. His captain contented himself with looking on. The Harriet's captain had now decided to assist in the capture.
Both the whaleships hoisted the British ensign. Mr. Tapsell saw that all his guns were loaded and more ammunition ready. Then he carefully laid and fired the swivel gun on the poop.
It was well aimed. The nine-pound round shot struck the Wellington's foretopmast, and so damaged it that it presently carried away.
A cheer went up from the crew of The Sisters. Tapsell and his gun-crew reloaded the long swivel, and fired another shot. This, too, was a lucky one. The cannon-ball struck the brig's mainmast and cut it half through, two feet above the deck.
The main-deck guns now were fired. Tapsell ordered the gunners to fire at the masts and rigging, to avoid injury to the soldiers and crew in the hold.
By this time, Captain Duke, seeing that the brig was not going to make a fight of it, had plucked up courage. He stamped up and down the poop; he yelled, “Go it, me hearties! Give it to her! At her, me lads, let them have it hot!”
Now the Harriet took up the firing, and delivered four or five cannot-shot. Altogether the two ships fired about a dozen rounds.
It was quite enough, for the convict brig was crippled. And not a single shot was fired in reply. Walton and his pirate crew had bolted down below when the one-sided naval engagement began.
Tapsell ordered “Cease firing.” He lowered a boat, and with an armed crew pulled over to the brig and took possession.
Walton was in a state of abject submission. He sat in his cabin, shivering. The crew—such of them as had not joined the pirates—and the soldiers were released and their irons knocked off, and the captain, Harwood, was restored to his command. The convicts were put in irons.
The Maoris now came off to the ship bringing several of the convicts who had been on shore; they had tied them up like pigs, with thongs of flax. Five or six remained uncaptured.
The Sisters and the Wellington, when the brig had been repaired, sailed in company for Sydney. At Captain Harwood's request thirty-two of the prisoners were taken on board The Sisters for safe keeping, leaving twenty-seven in the brig. The vessels kept in touch at night by signal lanterns. It was a terribly anxious voyage for Tapsell. The convicts were handcuffed with their hands behind them, but a clever scoundrel named Drummond slipped out of his manacles and loosed some of his companions. Drummond was sentenced to be flogged, and was triced up to the main rigging. After receiving two or three lashes he offered to reveal a plot for the seizure of the ship, and he was cast loose. The convicts had planned to seize the vessel and murder Tapsell. Captain Duke was to be spared.
The plucky chief mate scarcely dared to take any rest on the voyage to Sydney. He went constantly armed, sometimes he continued to walk the deck while he dozed. Everything depended on him. It was a tremendous relief when at last the two ships sailed in through Sydney Heads, on the 9th. February, 1827, and dropped anchor.
The prisoners were charged with piracy. Of the fifty-nine, nine were sentenced to death. Four of these had their sentences commuted; the other five were hanged. All those not hanged were sent to the
As for Mr. Tapsell, his reward was to be “broken” by his mean-spirited captain, deprived of his position as chief officer, a coward's revenge. Presently, however, the brave sailor was off to New Zealand again, this time in command of a large Sydney schooner. But for his resolute action at the Wellington brig would probably have gone the way of many a ship's crew in the old pirate traditions. At the best, they would have been cast adrift in an overcrowded boat in mid-ocean, perhaps to perish, or marooned on some desert island in the Pacific.
The Storming Party at Ohaeawai.
“The siege it has lasted long enough,
And a breach it has been made,
And this night we must take the town
By assault or escalade.
Brave boys, by assault or escalade.
Our gen'ral he must have the place
Before to-morrow's dawn;
And our captain dear does volunteer
To lead the hope forlorn,
Brave boys, to lead the hope forlorn.
—Old Song, “The Forlorn Hope.”
ALONGSIDE the main road from Kaikohe township to Ohaeawai and the Hokianga head-waters, in North Auckland, is the puriri-dotted battlefield where Colonel Despard and six hundred British soldiers met the warriors of the Ngapuhi tribe in a memorable test of arms which seems a chivalrous tournament by comparison with the horrors of modern warfare. This scene of peace and beauty, five miles from Kaikohe, in the heart of the North, was the site of Péné Taui's great palisaded fort in 1845, when the troops, under instructions from
On June 24th, 1845, Despard, after reconnoitring the Maoris' position, prepared for a regular siege and opened fire with his four small cannon. Ohaeawai
puriri timbers; in some parts there were three rows of timber, and there was a trench inside from which the defenders fired through apertures on the ground level. The outer wall, ten to fifteen feet high, was masked with a padding of green flax leaves, which deadened the impact of bullets. The Maoris had some artillery, too—four old ship's guns gathered from one quarter and another; the largest were two 9-pounders. These were mounted in bastions and angles; one was loaded with a long bullock-chain of iron.
The garrison numbered considerably fewer than the British force, probably not quite half. Hone Heke, who had been wounded in the previous fighting at Omapere, was not in the pa; he had been carried to a safe place of retreat, at Tautoro, in rear of Kaikohe, until he recovered.
A third of a mile from the pa on the north-west side was a wooded hill, Puketapu, on which Despard planted two of the small guns, and later a fifth piece, a 32-pounder gun from the frigate Hazard, lying in the
Soon after the 32-pounder opened fire there was a daring sortie from the pa, which resulted in the capture of a British flag from Despard's Maori allies on Puketapu hill. Colonel Despard, greatly irritated by this incident, resolved to storm the stronghold. Protests
At three o'clock the bugles sounded the assembly. Volunteers were called upon for the forlorn hope, the party which was to lead the attack on the stockade. The whole of the men of the 58th Regiment—the famous old “Black Cuffs”—stepped forward. So did the men of the 99th Regiment. A selection was then made by ordering the right-hand men, front and rear rank, of each section to the front. When the various parties were chosen and formed up, the forlorn hope was composed of twenty-two men under Lieut. Beattie (99th) with two assaulting columns under Major McPherson (99th), Major Cyprian Bridge (58th), and Captain Grant, with some Hazard seamen and Auckland militia Pioneers. The whole numbered about 250 officers and men.
The storming parties stood ready in their places, while the guns in rear of them threw solid shot and some shells into the stockade. The lines of bayonets glinted in the occasional sunshine of a wintry afternoon; the campaign-stained red tunics and white cross-belts, too, were brightened by those gleams of gold beneath the drifting clouds. Many a uniform was torn and roughly patched; some of the men were barefooted, some had their battered boots tied on their feet with strips of
A nerve-trying half-hour of standing-to, then out blared the bugle, the “Advance.” There was a quick fire of orders from the commanders of columns—“Prepare to Charge,” “Charge,” and with a cheer the advance party dashed up the fern slope towards the north-west angle of the pa. Major McPherson's column quickly followed; then up came Major Bridge's bearded campaigners. As the stormers neared the great war-fence the Maoris fired those of their guns which bore on them. The piece loaded with a bullock-chain was fired when the troops were close up to the bastion. The chain flew through the air like a fiery serpent, and killed or wounded several men.
“We were in close order, elbows touching when we crooked them,” said the last surviving veteran of the stormers, a fine old Irish soldier, pa when the advance began. When we got to within about fifty paces of the pa we
“The whole front of the stockade flashed fire, from the loopholes, and in a moment we were in the hopeless fight—gun flashes from the foot of the palisade and from loopholes higher up,—yells and cheers and curses and men falling all around. The forlorn hope just ahead of us were nearly all down. Not a single Maori could we see. They were all safe in their trenches and pits, poking the muzzles of their guns under the foot of the outer palisade. We tore at their fence with bayonets and hands, but it was hopeless. The Pioneer party left all the axes and tomahawks behind; the sailors had their cutlasses but they could do little more than slash at the lashings of the fence. We were in front of the stockade for I suppose not more than two minutes and a half. From the time we got the order to charge until we got back to the hollow in which we formed up was only five to seven minutes. In that brief time we had nearly forty men killed and seventy wounded, some mortally. In our Light Company alone in the 58th we had twenty-one men shot in the charge. As we rushed at the pa a man was shot in front of me, and another was shot behind me. When the bugle sounded the retreat I picked up a wounded man and was carrying him off on my back when he was shot dead. I picked up another wounded mate and carried him out safely. Our Captain, W. E. Grant, an officer for whom all of us had a great liking, was shot dead close to the stockade. Lieutenant Beattie, who led the forlorn hope, was mortally wounded. That plucky young naval officer,
Such was the last “Black Cuff's” narrative of his share in that tragic afternoon's work. Another veteran, a warrior on the opposite side, the last survivor of the defenders of Ohaeawai, old pa at the time, using a musket for the first time in battle. “The soldiers fell on this side and on that,” the crippled whitebeard said, with an expressive gesture of his hands. “They fell right and left before our fire, like that, like so many sticks thrown down.”
That sorrowful failure was redeemed by many deeds of gallantry and devotion. Several men returned repeatedly through the fire to carry wounded comrades off. One private of the 58th rescued in this way at least five men of his own regiment and the 99th.
That charge against the palisades of Ohaeawai was as rash and useless and as desperately brave as the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Ohaeawai was a bitter lesson in the folly of charging blindly at the front of a position of unknown strength. British commanders were stubborn and slow to learn, impatient of advice. But, while it failed, the Maoris who repulsed that forlorn hope knew that the men who rushed with a front of steel against the stockade must be victors in the end. Tragic as it was, that encounter taught both sides something. The British troops henceforth had more respect for the tattooed Maoris' fighting capacity and military
∗ ∗ ∗
Now a Maori church and burying ground, surrounded by a high lava-stone wall, occupy the site of that stockade. Within the churchyard walls lie the bones of forty British soldiers who fell in the battle. Above them stands a Celtic cross, with an inscription in Maori. Governor Sir George Bowen, in a dispatch in 1870 to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, mentioned a visit he had recently made to Ohaeawai, and said that the Maoris there had just erected a pretty church on the site of the fortifications of Heke's war, “among the now decayed palisades and rifle pits,” and that they had reserved the whole of the pa as a burying ground. “When the Bishop of Auckland,” the Governor continued, “shall have consecrated this new burial ground the Maoris intend to remove into it the remains of our soldiers who now lie in unmarked graves in the neighbouring forest, and to erect a monument over them, so that, as an aged chief, formerly conspicuous among our enemies, said to me, ‘The brave warriors of both races, the white skin and the brown, now that all strife between them is forgotten, may sleep side by side until the end of the world.’
“I question,” the Governor said, “if there be a more touching episode in the annals of the warfare of even civilised nations in either ancient or modern times.”
Rags of Glory: The Colours of the 58th
THE Queen's and regimental colours of the 58th Regiment (the “Black Cuffs”) are preserved as a sacred relic in the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The age-worn flags were left in the care of the citizens of Auckland when new colours were presented the Regiment on its departure for England. During the period the 58th were in New Zealand, thirteen years, more than thirteen hundred men served in its ranks. Over a thousand of these took their discharges here and became permanent settlers. The regiment, what was left of it, sailed from Auckland for England in 1858. The scene at the last parade in the Albert Barracks on the departure of the remnant of the Black Cuffs is a subject one would like to see some of our artists set on canvas, a picture of pathos and patriotic devotion. This was the old soldiers' farewell as described by an eyewitness that day (November 19, 1858):
“….. As the corps formed up to the call of bugle and beat of drum, only 120 men gathered round the tattered and shot-riven colours. The survivors of the wars had fallen into the ranks of civilian life, and were engaged in the heroic work of colonisation, for peace has its victories as well as war, and the glory of saving life is greater than that of destroying it. The women and children had embarked in the transport, and all that remained was the last parade and roll-call, and final march to the wharf. Then I saw one of those incidents which no man could witness unmoved. On that parade
ground were gathered grey-bearded and bronze-visaged men, whose well-knit and martial figures bespoke the old veteran, who had tramped, some of them, thirty and forty miles through wretched bullock tracks from the bush, to bid ‘Good-bye’ and ‘God bless you’ to old comrades who had been with them in the baptism of fire at Okaihau, at Ohaeawai, at Ruapekapeka, the Hutt and Wanganui. Some of those veterans, in their travel-stained clothing, went up and, reverently baring their heads, with tears coursing down their manly cheeks, kissed the old tattered colours under which they had fought and bled and were prepared to die if need be.”
There is inspiration there for a picture, surely!
The Bugler of Boulcott's Farm
THE fog of early morning enveloped the bush and the rough farm clearings along the banks of the
The farm was the homestead of Mr. James Boulcott, in whose house and barn and in various small buildings and tents a detachment of the 58th Regiment was stationed, under Lieutenant Page. It was an outpost of the British forces in the little war waged for the possession of the Hutt Valley. There were forty-two soldiers. One of the number was a young private named William Allen. He was bugler to his company. His name will be remembered as long as the story of the wars between Maori and Pakeha is told.
It was the morning of May 16th, 1846. A sentry paced his beat, in front of the inlying picket's tent near the low banks of the river. He shivered at the chilly touch of the hour that precedes daybreak. As he turned, with musket and fixed bayonet at the slope, his glance fell upon some low bushes seen dimly through the curling mist. They seemed nearer, he thought, than
“Maoris!” the sentry shouted, and he levelled his Brown Bess musket and fired. He snatched another cartridge from his pouch and ran to the picket tent, trying to reload as he ran, but he was overtaken and tomahawked.
A volley was delivered from fifty Maori guns. The assailants fired low, to rake the floor of the tent. A second volley, then on came the Maoris with the tomahawk. At the first shot Bugler Allen leaped up from his blanket. He was not a boy of thirteen or fourteen, as some writers have stated. He was about twenty years of age, a tall, well-drilled young soldier. He seized his bugle, and, rushing out of the tent, he put it to his lips to blow the alarm. In the act of sounding the call, he was attacked by a Maori, who leaped at him like a demon, tomahawk in hand. The sharp blade sank into his right shoulder, nearly severing his arm. The shock felled him to the ground.
Struggling to rise, the brave young fellow seized the bugle in his left hand and again attempted to blow the call, but a second terrible blow fell, cutting deeply into his neck. It silenced him for ever.
The heroic bugler's alarm, however, was not needed, for the sentry's shot and the answering volleys had aroused the camp. Not a soldier of the picket escaped. Those who were not killed by the first two volleys fell to the tomahawk.
The garrison of Boulcott's, reduced to fewer than forty men, so rudely roused from sleep, was now fighting desperately against about two hundred well-skilled warriors,
The British commander, Lieutenant Page, rushed out of the farm-house, on the first alarm, with his sword and loaded pistol. He and a few others fought their way to the large barn, where most of the soldiers were quartered.
The place had been surrounded with a light stockade of posts and slabs. (This was strengthened after the battle, as shown in Lieutenant Page's drawing of the palisaded position.) The Maoris had calculated on completely surprising and slaughtering the troops, but what they did not accurately estimate was the steadiness of disciplined Regular soldiers.
Page, having hacked and shot his way to the shelter of the fence, assembled his men and, leaving a small party to hold the fort, came out into the open again and boldly attacked his foe. Extending the men in skirmishing order, with fixed bayonets, he advanced. In the height of the battle a party of seven of the Hutt Militia came gallantly to the assistance of the hard-pressed redcoats and fought side by side with them. Their arrival was the turning point in the fight. Other reinforcements arrived; the rebels fell back, and at last were driven across the
Six soldiers lay dead when the fight was over, and four were severely wounded; one of these, Sergeant Ingram, died from his wounds. A farm labourer employed by Mr. Boulcott was also mortally wounded; so the total death roll was eight. The losses of the Maori war party were never accurately known, for all their dead and wounded were carried off the field, as was the usual way in native warfare wherever possible.
The bugler was not the only youthful hero of that morning in the bush. Soon after daylight
“Be Jasus, boy, go back, go back! The Maoris have attacked the camp!”
But Cudby did not turn his team. “I dursen't go back,” he cried in his broad English tongue. “I dursen't go back! I've got the rations to deliver!”
The carters whipped up their horse and pounded on, while Cudby, fearing every moment a volley from the dark forest that walled him in, but resolved to carry out his duty, drove along to Boulcott's. When he reached the camp the Maoris had been driven across the river and the fight was over, but that did not diminish the merit of his share in the morning's work.
That scene of bloodshed and of gallant deeds, in Wellington City's infancy, is now completely transformed. The olden battleground is now the golfers' links; a golfclub house stands near the site of Boulcott's farmhouse, but the repeated changes of the river's course have altered the original contour of the country.
A stone memorial stands on the side of the main Hutt road, at the corner of the road leading to the storied field, and inscriptions on tablets tell the wayfarer of the battle of Boulcott's Farm stockade. As for William Allen's bugle, it was recovered before many weeks had passed. When the British troops were advancing up the Horokiwi Valley, after the Maoris had been driven northward, it was found in a thatched hut in an abandoned camp, where the main road from Wellington begins the ascent to
The Dispatch Carrier
VICTORIA Crosses and New Zealand Crosses have been won and generals' plaudits proclaimed for gallant deeds of dispatch-carrying in our national soldiering story. But there was no cross or medal for one of the pluckiest deeds of this kind in the Maori War days. It was a civilian who bore a dispatch that saved Wellington town from attack in its infancy. The story is very little known; here let me record it as an example of cool, resourceful courage under circumstances of peculiar peril.
Richard Deighton was a young Englishman who, with his brother Samuel—afterwards a magistrate on the East Coast—had settled in Wanganui. The brothers were two of the first passengers to land from the pioneer immigrant ship Cuba at Wellington in 1840, and both in a very few years became excellent speakers of Maori and obtained an intimate knowledge of native ways. In 1846 the little war between the hostile Maoris and the British troops and settlers was being waged in Wellington, and in July of that year pakeha outposts in the Hutt Valley.
Deighton at once went to the Wanganui Magistrate,
“That,” said Deighton to the Magistrate, when he called on him again about the war-party, “is clearly a subterfuge. I am convinced there is going to be a combined attack on Wellington; the town is really in great danger. Now, if you will write an urgent dispatch, I will volunteer to take it to Wellington and deliver it into the Governor's hands.”
The risk was discussed. Deighton fully realised the danger of discovery, but was determined to go through with it. So Mr. King wrote a letter on very thin paper in Indian ink, and one of Deighton's sisters sewed it up securely in his coat collar.
On the following day the war-party set out on the march down the coast to Wellington, accompanied, as was the Maori way, by a number of women who carried food and cooked for their lords on the journey; some of these women had their young children with them. The pakeha dispatch-bearer marched with them, telling the leader, Maketu, that he was anxious to reach Wellington as soon as possible because there was a box of goods awaiting him there from his father in England. On the first night of the journey the column halted at the inland native village of Whangaehu. Deighton carried
wharepuni, the large meeting-house. He was engaged in boiling his billy to make tea, when one of the young warriors came up to him and quietly warned him that he believed the Maoris had come to the determination to kill him. This was at the instigation of a man named Po-ngahuru, an emissary from pakeha was carrying letters to the Governor. Deighton's young friend earnestly advised him to leave his camp under cover of darkness and return to Wanganui.
The dispatch-carrier, with a courage equal to his resourcefulness, resolved to brave it out with the warriors, and with Rangihaeata's messenger in particular. He entered the large assembly-house of Whangaehu, where the principal men of the war-party were assembled, and thus addressed them:
“I am told that you have resolved to kill me because it is reported that I am carrying letters to the Governor. Now, who is the man who has suggested this? There is only one among you who would accuse me of such a thing, and there he is!”—and Deighton pointed to Pongahuru. “That man,” he said, “comes from the tribe of pikau, while I remain here.” Deighton turned out the pockets of his clothes and showed them that they contained no papers.
The Maoris took him at his word and sent a man to search his swag. No papers of any kind were found there. Now old Maketu stood up and metaphorically cast his mantle of protection over Deighton, telling him that he might go back to his meal, for no one would harm him. The dispatch-bearer, feeling his head more secure on his shoulders than it had been a few minutes previously, returned to his fire with an excellent appetite and slept undisturbed. Next morning Maketu confidingly sent for him and dictated a letter to
The next night's camp was pitched on the sand dunes of the coast near the mouth of the Rangitikei River. Po-ngahuru the suspicious here tried to catch the pakeha tripping, in this manner, as related in Deighton's own words:
“The sun was just setting, and Maketu, thinking it inadvisable to travel over the sand hills in the dark, determined to bivouac on the dunes and at daylight start inland for the Rangitikei village, where he expected an accession to his column. So, while they were all busy making sleeping places, I took the opportunity of counting, as well as I could, the number of firearms there were. On casting my eyes a little way off, I beheld my friend carefully shepherding me. Po-ngahuru, I suppose, divined what I was doing. Coming up to me, he said: ‘You are, I know, a friend of our Wanganui people, but for what reason are you counting the guns?’
“At once, laughingly, I replied: ‘I counting the guns? Why, I am counting the women and children, so that the
Boulcott's Farm Stockade, Hutt River
This drawing, from a water-colour by Lieut. G. H. Page (58th Regiment), shows the Stockade around James
Boulcott's Farm buildings,
(See pages 40–44.)The Death of Captain Swift (65th Regiment)
In the bush near Cameron Town, Lower Waikato, 1863. (See pages
69–77—“How Sergeant McKenna won the Victoria Cross.”)pakehas will at once perceive, when I tell them the number, that it is a weeping party going to meet Te Mamaku, and not a war party.'
“The suspicious fellow was satisfied, or appeared so, and, depend upon it, I was pleased at getting out of that awkward fix.”
Next morning the column broke off inland to gather in men at Rangitikei, and Deighton was left, much to his relief, to pursue his journey alone. He summoned up all his powers to make a quick march to Wellington. That night he slept at the mouth of the Manawatu River. Next morning a fierce southerly gale sprang up, with squalls of rain and sleet. He set out, immediately he had eaten his breakfast, determined to make as much progress as possible ahead of the advance guard of Maketu's force. He trudged on, soaked and shivering, and feeling rather unwell; he was now feeling, too, the nervous strain of his perilous march. He was scarcely able to move when he reached a village of the
The gale had abated in the morning. Deighton gave his kindly hosts some tobacco, and set out determined to reach the British military post at the mouth of Porirua Harbour that evening. It was the longest day's march of all, ordinarily a two days' journey, but anxiety pressed him on. He tramped along the great beach of hard sand—long afterwards it was the coach thoroughfare before the days of the Manawatu railway—forded
He was in safety now, but he was anxious to get his dispatch into the Governor's hands at the earliest moment. At daylight he was conveyed by boat up Porirua Harbour to its head, and from there he pushed on along the military road then being formed through the forest and over the hills to Wellington. Weary, but tremendously elated, he walked into Wellington town and up to Driver for Auckland.
Deighton explained his mission, took off his coat, ripped open the collar and handed over the dispatch from Wanganui and the letter from Maketu to Rauparaha.
Governor Grey read the documents carefully, then turning to the dispatch-carrier thanked him in the name of the Government and the colony for the service he had rendered. He appointed him straightway a special or extra interpreter and directed him to repair on board the Driver and await instructions. The rest is recorded history, the dramatic seizure of Rauparaha at Taupo at break of day two mornings later, and the disarming of Driver, and his two years' captivity thereafter in the frigate Calliope, part of the time at Auckland.
Maketu and his war party, their plan of campaign frustrated, turned back to Wanganui. Had they joined
I do not know whether the dispatch-carrier ever encountered his suspicious acquaintance Po-ngahuru in after years. If he did I should like to have heard the dialogue.
Manihera's Farewell
WAIARIKI, on the south-eastern shore of Lake Taupo, where the old trail from the north approaches the Tokaanu hot-springs village, was the scene of a tragic and heroic episode in the early years of mis-missionary enterprise in the heart of the Maori country. That the missionaries who were the chief figures in the story were Maoris themselves heightens the value of their devotion to a noble ideal and their self-sacrifice in the cause of intertribal peace. The incident is an illustration also of old Maori customs and of the passion for revenge in satisfaction of a defeat in war.
utu—compensation, vengeance.
This was the position when
Te Manihera travelled by way of the East Coast and thence to the Arawa country, and he left Rotorua early in March of 1847 on his mission to the
It happened that at this time the tribe of Tokaanu, headed by tapu pertaining to such carved houses would presently be removed by the priests, with the ancient prayers and charms, and the ceremony of the whai-kawa, or taingakawa-whare. In former times a human sacrifice was often made at such ceremonies, to give the ritual added mana and ensure the stability and good luck of the house. The head or the heart of a suitable victim was buried at the foot of the principal post supporting the ridgepole, or under the threshold.
When the chiefs of Tokaanu heard that the apostles of patunga-tapu) for our house. Let them come; like flying-fish crossing the bows of our canoe they will be caught.”
Te Manihera and Kereopa were well aware that danger threatened; Manihera had forebodings of death. But strong in their faith and in their fervent hope of bringing about lasting peace between the tribes they held on their way. They crossed the swamps of the
manuka thickets, they were suddenly fired upon from ambush by a small party of men led by the old chief Te Huiatahi. Kereopa fell mortally wounded. Manihera, too, received a wound, but stood upright, calmly facing his foes who surrounded him. Te Huiatahi struck at him with a tomahawk and inflicted another wound.
Summoning up all his vital powers,
“You must die with your companion!”
Te Manihera, bleeding from his wounds, fast weakening, supported himself with his walking staff. Feeling his strength rapidly leaving him, he made one last request. He asked but one thing, he said; he would sing his own lament, his farewell to his wife and friends far away, to the Ao Marama, this world of light.
His captors assented to this. They stayed their hands until they had heard their victim's death song.
Then the dying man chanted his waiata poroporoaki, his farewell and his dirge. This is the English of his song (I translate from the original, sent me by a venerable
E hora te marino, horahia i waho ra“):—
“Spread out afar The calm lake gleams So smooth and fair and bright. The stream flows strongly by, Like Pakihi's waters far away. My heart throbs high with grief For my beloved one. My doom is fixed— Death's terrors chill my flesh, My shrinking skin is stung As by the ongaongathorns.
Ongaonga—the New Zealand nettle (urtica ferox), a shrub the leaves of which are covered with fine spines or hairs that inflict severe stings on the skin.Would that I could cross those heights, To thee, O Harata, Wife of my fond embrace. My spirit shall return to thee, Return to the tribe I love.”
The doomed man's foes, hemming him around, listened with the utmost intentness to his chant. When he had ended the lament, the chief of the Tuwharetoa said:
“Sing it again.”
So Te Manihera chanted his death-song once more. His listeners kept perfect silence. They were memorising the song, as was the Maori way; they would be able to chant it word for word.
Then Te Manihera bowed his head. The fearful tomahawk flashed once, twice, and he fell. There he lay, by the side of his friend, from whom the life had passed.
utu account; the defeats of the past were finally avenged.
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The executioners did not regard the victims as missionaries; they considered nothing but the fact that they were members of a hated alien tribe. It is not known exactly whether the sacrificial offering was made as intended for the carved-house opening ceremony. It is probable, however, that in accordance with the savage custom of the times, the hearts of the two victims were cut out and offered up to Uenuku, the god of war. The Rev.
The Ngati-Tuwharetoa men concerned repented of their deed, when all was made clear to them, and they had listened to the missionary. All but old Huiatahi, who maintained that he was justified in exacting utu. The chief méré. This was a peace-offering and a tangible admission of wrongdoing and a tribute of sorrow. The Ngati-Ruanui accepted the gift, and the peace-making was cemented with much eloquence of speech and shedding of tears. That weapon is venerated for the stories of the warrior past which it brings to mind, but most of all for the heroic memory of the fearless comrades who went calmly to a cruel fate in the cause of peace and goodwill among men.
The Swordsman in the Swamp
THEtaiaha, the most shapely and effective wooden weapon of the Maori, is a kind of two-handed sword, with the added advantage that both ends can be used, the tongue-shaped point as well as the broad blade. A tall man with a good long reach was a most formidable taiaha-wielder. The Ngati-Maniapoto people have a story of a renowned giant warrior, Kiharoa, whose pa was one of the Three Sisters hill-cones at Tokanui, just to the south of the Puniu River. With his enormous reach of arm he swept all before him in battle; his weapon was the taiaha; it was so long and heavy that no other man could have used it. But even he was not invincible. Rushing down from his pa against an invading war party, sweeping his huge taiaha about him and felling a foe with every blow, he slipped on some karaka leaves and fell, and before he could rise his opponents swarmed on him, and in a few moments the chief of the attackers was dancing triumphantly, flourishing the giant's head.
The expert taiaha-user has been known to defeat a swordsman. This is a story of a combat in the Maori wars which is as worthy of record and fame as any knightly battle of Old World chivalry.
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A short distance south of the town of Waitara, with the black ironsand beach of the North Taranaki Bight but a little way off, is the battlefield of Puke-takauere, where the British forces suffered a severe cutting up at the hands of the Maoris on June 27, 1860.
The fight was a woeful day for the 40th Regiment; its Grenadier and Light Companies met the heaviest storm of bullets of the day. Thirty officers and men were killed, and 33 were wounded; and of the manner in which one of the “Fighting Fortieth” officers met his end this story from the Maori side will tell.
In Wells' “History of Taranaki” it is stated that Lieutenant Brooke, of the 40th Regiment, was “barbarously killed in a swamp after surrendering his sword to the enemy.” That was the report of the commanding officer, Major Nelson. Another Taranaki account said that Brooke defended himself “like a Paladin” with his sword until he was tomahawked from behind. Neither of these versions is correct.
The chief Haowhenua was a veteran fighting man of Taranaki and taiaha. Unlike Kiharoa the giant of Tokanui, he was not tall, not more than 5ft. 9in. or 10in., but he was lithe and active and exceedingly quick on his feet. He was a thorough master of fence; none was his superior with the taiaha. It was he who slew Lieutenant Brooke, the Queen's soldier, in the swamp that day of 1860, and with no other weapon than his taiaha of akéaké wood. Such is the Maori story, and I think it is perfectly true.
“I have heard,” said Haowhenua, in telling the story of Puke-takauere to an old pakeha-Maori acquaintance of mine, who lived with the Taranaki Maoris for fifty years, and who became a thorough native in all his ways, “that the white officer was treacherously slain. Not so, my friend! I killed him in fair and open fight. It was towards the end of the battle of Wai-kotero.
taiaha, this very weapon which I hold in my hand now. I said to him, ‘Come out, come out!’
“I pointed to his sword, and asked him to give it to me. Now, had he reversed it and handed it to me hilt first, holding it by the point, I would have taken it as a token of surrender; I would not have killed him but permitted him to make his escape. But he held it out to me point first, and that as you know means death. So, seeing in that that the officer did not mean to submit, I attacked him and the fight began.
“The Queen's officer—it was long after that battle that I was told it was Lieutenant Brooke—was a good swordsman and a brave man. We fought there in the water and rushes, near the edge of the swamp, with many of my people looking on. Again and again he made a blow at me, but I parried every cut and every thrust, and his steel blade glanced harmlessly off my hardwood weapon. I struck him a blow on the cheek and he staggered, and I cried to him in Maori: ‘Go down on your knees and bid farewell to your God!’ This was to give him a chance to poroporoaki, to say a last dying word or a prayer. Probably he did not understand what I meant; at any rate, he continued to fight with great determination.
“At last my pakeha opponent, raising his sword, made a cut at me. He was furious at not being able to get
taiaha, and next instant, before he could recover, I struck him with all my force on the temple. It was with the broad end of the taiaha, the blade. The blow stunned him, he fell, and as he fell I quickly reversed my weapon and thrust the point into his throat. I slew him—he fell in the swamp—he died—there in the swamp he died!
“And when I stood there, recovering my breath after the fight, and I looked down at my fighting friend, lying there in the rushes, I felt sorrow for him. Yes, I wept tears for him! I tangi'd over the pakeha I had slain. Do not think it strange that I should tangi over my fallen foe. It was but the way warriors should honour each other. And I cried farewell to him as he lay there in the swamp. ‘Haere ki te Po, e hoa!' I said—‘Depart, O friend, to the Night!’ And I stooped and picked up his sword, a chieftain's weapon, as my trophy of the combat, and I have it now. Was it not a fair and open fight? I took no unfair advantage of him. If his spirit were to meet mine in the Reinga, we would greet each other as warriors.”
The Scouts in the Flax Bush
A
AN American would have called each of them a two-gun man, those two scouts, crouching in the heart of a thick flax-clump on the outskirts of a great Maori armed camp. One was a foreign-looking fellow with long black hair curling out under an old felt hat; across his blue uniform tunic were two shoulder belts, each with a holstered revolver; at his waist belt hung a long bowie-knife in a battered leather sheath. His companion, big-framed and whiskered in the Dundreary mode, wore a cavalry uniform, minus the high boots and spurs. His breeches were tucked into long stockings, and he was shod infantryman fashion, like the other. He, too, wore a brace of revolvers, but instead of the sheath-knife a short-handled tomahawk was thrust through his belt, after the Maori manner.
The pair of them, on their knees, peered through cautiously-parted openings in the flax-bushes, whose dew-laden blade-tips rustled a man's height above them. They looked out at the clay lines of an entrenchment, ditch and bank, one tier above the other, on the curving bank of a clear little river, and at an encampment of thatched huts, some of them semi-subterranean, straggling along the creek banks. They were almost within the lines they had come out the previous night to reconnoitre. The place was swarming with Maoris, and they could almost touch some of the shawl-kilted or blanket-robed warriors on the marshy track that wound among the flax bushes.
The bowie-knife man was the veteran
That night march through the enemy country had its nervous moments. Once the scouts thought they were being followed by stealthy-footed foes. Now and again they went down on their hands and knees and remained there scanning the skyline and listening intently. Once they were startled by what McDonnell took to be an outlying picket of the Maoris, forms lying asleep, wrapped in white blankets. They dropped flat on their faces, then crawled on, to discover that it
The first of the grey damp dawn was faintly lightening the sky when they found themselves at their destinations; in fact, almost before they realised it they were within the outer lines of the Maori position, and crept into cover in the high flax just as they heard the sounds of an awakening camp. They debated whether to remain there or take to the shelter of a tract of tall bush which towered in deep shadows on their right front. As events soon proved it was fortunate that they chose the flax-bush cover and not the forest. A shower of rain fell after they had settled themselves there.
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From the flax-leaf nest in the dawn, the scouts, squatting down close to each other, scarcely daring to breathe, saw a tattooed warrior on horseback, with a gun and a dispatch-bag slung across his shoulders, ride rapidly toward their cover. His bare feet brushed the flax-leaves as he trotted along the narrow trail. He passed them and was soon out of sight at a bend in the track. He was on his way to Meremere, evidently a messenger to the Maori King's camp. Here I shall let
“The Maoris were bent on sport that morning,” wrote
“Suddenly I heard the bark of a dog, pig-hunting. My comrade heard it. We had heard enough of dogs during the night and morning, but we knew that this peculiar yelp was given in chase of a pig. We listened anxiously for the direction of that bark. It seemed to go round us in a circle, but the circle seemed to grow narrower as time went on, and then, convinced of the certainty of detection, our eyes met. No word was needed to say to one another, ‘The time has come.’
“I drew my bowie-knife from its sheath,” continued
“But the bark of that dog, when very near, grew less vehement, and then it ceased. I must confess I drew a long, long breath of relief. The other noises continued, but I cared not about them. Man's ingenuity I felt capable
That tense moment over, the two scouts wondered what time it was. Neither of them had a watch, and they anxiously looked for the position of the sun behind the clouds. Twice they agreed it was noon, but a watery glimpse showed them that the sun was not yet nearly high enough. It was a long day to them. They ate some tinned meat and army biscuit. They changed their cramped positions in the flax-clump, and waited.
No anxious farmer in a dry season, no thirsty castaway sailor looked more eagerly for the increase in those fine drops than the scouts did. There was no doubt that the early morning's rain had saved them by drowning the scent of their tracks. A heavy fall now might make them perfectly safe, and turn back the pot-hunting sportsmen in and around the forest, with their dogs.
“How we blessed that rain!” wrote
When it was quite dark, out of their hiding-place they crept, those two scouts. They listened intently to the sounds of the Maori camp. All the people were in the shelter of their whares; danger from them was over, though there might be danger ahead. Before they left the place they decided, in their light-heartedness, to play a joke on their unsuspecting foes. McDonnell broke up some biscuit and laid an artistic trail from the flaxbushes along the track for a few yards. That biscuit and the empty meat tins in the bivouac would give the Kingites something to talk about next day.
This business done, the scouts cheerfully padded along the home trail, ten miles of it, now and again stopping to listen for a few moments. They crossed the swampy ground and ascended the clay slopes leading to Koheroa and Whangamarino. They met no one; the horseback messenger probably was warm in some Meremere dug-out shelter, waiting for daylight for his return journey.
“It's a pity,” said McDonnell, “we can't bail him up and take him and his dispatches to the general.”
It was after midnight when the adventurous comrades reached the Whangamarino Redoubt. They answered the sentry's challenge, and were admitted to the camp, where Lieutenant Pickard, the gunner, joyfully received them, and rousted out the cook to get them a hot meal. “Better than that flax-bush camp, eh, Von?” said Mac, as he emptied his comforting jorum of commissariat rum.
When the scouts reported to Colonel Nixon at the Queen's Redoubt the good old veteran was greatly relieved to see them safely back. “I threw my cap in the air when I saw you coming, my boys,” he said. He had been very anxious about them, and indeed reproached himself for letting them go on so desperately dangerous a mission.
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As for the warriors of Paparata, I should like to have listened that morning to their remarks when they found that biscuit trail on the track and turned out the relics in the flax-lair of the scouts. What consternation in the camp when they realised that pakeha spies had been in their very midst all day! Their confidence in their fortified position was rudely shaken. What would the pakeha do next?
They held on there for a few weeks, but immediately Cameron's gunboats on the Waikato passed up the river beyond Meremere, bombarding and outflanking the long lines of rifle pits and the gun-positions there, Paparata was abandoned, and the garrison fell back southward, to help hold the mid-Waikato plain against the invaders.
How Sergeant Mckenna Won the Victoria Cross
A Night in the Maori Bush
STANDING sentry over the broad reach of the Lower Waikato at Tuakau, the massive fern-hung bluff on which the Alexandra Redoubt was built in 1863 dominates river and plain and bush, a castle hill of the oldtime Maori, a tower of strength for British troops in the early part of the war. The broad parapets and deep trenches of this fort, enclosing a large area of camp ground, are well preserved to-day; it is the only large earthwork which remains as a memorial of the Waikato campaign. In one of the angles is a monument to the soldiers of the 65th Regiment who fell in the engagement described in this story.
In September, 1863, the Alexandra Redoubt—newly built, and named in honour of the young Princess Alexandra, whose marriage to the then Prince of Wales (pakeha water transport corps were busy taking munitions up the river to the British Army in the field, and an attack made on one of these canoe transport flotillas led to a punitive expedition from the Redoubt. The work of this party is memorable as an example of the fine courage, devotion to officers and perfect discipline of the Regular soldier. It won for a cool and plucky N.C.O., Colour-Sergeant E. McKenna, an ensign's commission and the Victoria Cross.
Down the river, near Waikato Heads, was the military depot called Cameron Town, after the General commanding the field forces. Here, on September 7th, a canoe party conveying munitions and stores from the barque City of Melbourne, lying inside the Heads, was ambuscaded by a war-band of Kingites, who shot down several of the canoe-men in the canoes and killed also a Government officer, Mr. Armitage, magistrate on the Lower Waikato, who was in charge of the transport arrangements, forwarding cargoes to the Mangatawhiri River, for the Queen's Redoubt at Pokeno. Fugitives from the party of friendly natives took the news of the tragedy to the Alexandra Redoubt, and reported that after killing Mr. Armitage and some of his companions the King Maoris had looted the depot and set fire to the buildings.
In half an hour after the news reached the Redoubt a party was ready, consisting of Lieut. Butler, Colour-Sergt. McKenna, two sergeants, a bugler and fifty rank and file, the whole under command of Captain Swift. The objective was nine or ten miles away, a difficult and dangerous march through bush, swamps and streams. It was late in the afternoon when the force approached the foot of the wooded spur on which the pa of the friendly natives stood, above the Cameron Town depot. Nothing could yet be seen but the jungly forest.
I now take up Colour-Sergeant McKenna's narrative given by him at
“I asked and obtained leave from Captain Swift,” said McKenna, “to advance forty or fifty yards in front of the men, as scout. I took a direct course through the bush towards the spot where the natives were supposed to be. About 5 o'clock I reached a large opening, where I could see the Maoris' encampment in the bush about four hundred yards in advance. Crossing the clearing in a stooping position and at a smart pace, I again made for the bush, followed by the whole detachment. The Maoris were laughing and chattering, which led me to think they had been making free with the rum they had seized in the canoes. I returned and reported this to Captain Swift. The order was at once given to fix bayonets and charge. Our men advanced, led by Captain Swift, Lieutenant Butler, and myself, three abreast, the path not admitting more. When we had stolen up to within a few yards of the rebels, our leader gave the word ‘Charge!’
“The word had scarcely passed his lips when the whole bush was lighted up with a terrific volley. It seemed as if one of the extinct volcanos had suddenly opened its crater. The enemy were so close when they fired that some of their coarse powder was actually found sticking to the faces of our soldiers. For a moment our men staggered beneath this heavy fire, but, immediately recovering themselves, they closed up in a line of skirmishers in the bush, and opened fire. I had taken cover behind a tree close to Lieutenant Butler, to reload my rifle. Butler stood at the left front, a little in advance, cheering on the men by voice and example. He discharged his revolver right and left. Three Maoris fell beneath his fire, and were dragged
“Surprised at such an order, I looked round to see where the Captain was, and there he lay by his side, mortally wounded. If he had been my own brother I could not have felt it more.
“ ‘Are you wounded, sir?’ was my first exclamation. “‘Oh, yes, McKenna; very severely,’ he replied.
“On seeing me loading my rifle, he said: ‘Never mind loading. Take my revolver and lead on the men!’
“These were the last words this good and gallant soldier ever spoke to me. I took up the revolver, gave one last look at my dying officer, and then shouted:
“‘Men, the captain is wounded; charge!’
“I rushed on at the head of the men, and we drove the Maoris before us. We now found ourselves in a small opening on the crest of the hill. The natives found shelter in the bush to our left and front, where they opened fire on our little band of thirty-eight men. Our position was critical. One of our officers was mortally, the other severely, wounded; ten miles of swamp and bush lay between us and any succour; around us were three hundred warriors. I ordered my men to extend in skirmishing order across the clearing, and to keep up a steady fire. My object was to hold the place for a time, till the advance guard, attracted by the firing, should join Corporal Ryan and the four men left in charge of the wounded officers, so as to have them carried well on to
“The Maoris had been encamped on the spot now occupied by our party and had left a great many things, such as tents, sacks and kits of potatoes, behind. These our men formed into a sort of breastwork, and kept as well under cover as they could. Several of the Maoris climbed the trees to fire over the breastwork, and one of them was brought down by Private Smith of ours; he fell with a thud. After waiting till about six o'clock I resolved to retire by the way we came; but I had scarcely given the order when we were met with a tremendous volley from the very quarter by which we intended to retreat. Three of our men fell badly wounded. I then brought the party back to our former position, and sent for my brother sergeant to consult with him as to what should be done. His proposal was to run the gauntlet through the Maoris, and to make for Mr. Armitage's pa, which was about 150 yards further on in the bush. He thought we could establish ourselves there and hold out till we received assistance; but I knew the thing was impracticable. The pa was commanded by a hill from which the enemy could have amused themselves by shooting us at leisure.
“A poor fellow of the name of Stephen Grace, always ready to offer his advice, proposed that we should form three sides of a hollow square, and retire down the hill to our rear, which was not wooded. I could scarcely help smiling at such a foolish proposal, when all at once I heard a deep sigh at my elbow, and on turning round saw poor Grace rolling down the hill in mortal agony till his head lodged in a fern bush. I
“I now ordered the wounded to be taken down the hill to the rear by a path that led across the valley to the dense bush on the other side. I felt sure that a native path in that direction would lead to the Mauku or Pukekohe East, both military posts. I told the front rank of skirmishers to fire a volley and retire down the hill, giving at the same time a cheer as if about to charge. As soon as they were established below I ordered the rear rank to do the same thing. Nothing could be better than the conduct of the men at this trying moment; the movement was executed with as much steadiness as if they had been on parade. On reaching the foot of the hill we found, to our delight, a beautiful stream of clear water, I then gave my orders for the night: every man had to put on his great-coat (all had brought them
*This order is an indication of the difference between the Regular soldier and the colonial. No Ranger or other New Zealand soldier would have needed such a command.
“Our joy was mingled with sorrow on learning that Captain Swift had died at seven o'clock the previous night. Corporal Ryan and Privates Talbot and Bulford remained with him to the last. They carried him in their arms for some distance after he received his death-wound, but the agony he suffered was so intense that he requested them to lay him down on the ground. They placed him behind a fallen tree and concealed him as well as they could, and crept down beside him. On hearing the heavy firing, he said to Corporal Ryan, ‘I am sure McKenna has gained the pa.' Soon after they heard the natives coming through the bush; the shots told them that the Maoris had attacked the advanced guard hastening to their assistance.
“After a short skirmish the advanced guard had to retire to make for the Redoubt, which they reached about nine o'clock the same night. In this affair the natives, in firing, actually came behind the tree under which Captain Swift was lying with Ryan, Bulford and Talbot. He begged of them not to leave him. They assured him that they would stay by him till the last. But his moaning, they said, might attract the notice of the enemy. On hearing this, the poor fellow placed his hand on his mouth to restrain his agony till the Maoris retired. His last words to Ryan were, ‘Give me your hand!’ He pressed it, and then died as quietly as if he had been falling asleep. They covered the body with fern, and started for the Redoubt at break of day. On their way they met the party sent to their relief.
“I must now return to Lieutenant Butler. Privates Thomas and Cole remained with him all the night in the bush. He suffered much from his wound, and complained bitterly of the cold, though the men had thrown their two greatcoats over him. Private Thomas took off his blue serge shirt and put it over him, remaining all night in his cotton shirt and trousers.
“I sent back a guide with Colonel Murray's party to take them to the scene of action, and pushed on for the Redoubt, which we reached at eleven o'clock a.m., worn out. In the evening Colonel Murray's party returned; they brought in Captain Swift's body, but could find no traces of the two men who were missing. They gave up the search as hopeless, and, embarking on board the steamer Avon, returned to headquarters. About ten o'clock next morning a hundred men of the 70th Regiment marched in; they had been guided through the
At the Queen's Redoubt Sergeant McKenna was sent for by
When the 65th Regiment left Auckland for England, after about twenty years' service in New Zealand, Ensign McKenna took his discharge and remained in the Colony. He entered the Government Railway Service and for many years was stationmaster at Wanganui and also at
The Church in the Forest
How the Settlers held Pukekohe Stockade
OUR New Zealand frontiers were defended for many a year with military redoubts, stockades and blockhouses, chains of defensive posts garrisoned either by British regulars or by colonial troops. In the Waikato War not only was the South Auckland frontier studded with such works, chiefly earthwork redoubts, but some of the churches and farmhouses of the pioneer settlers were converted into garrison-houses and forts. A correspondent of that period, describing the remarkable sight of a country church being made bullet-proof and pierced with loopholes for rifle fire, remarked that it was “a visible transubstantiation of a bulwark of faith into a bulwark of earthly strength.” In many places the stout-hearted settlers remained to garrison the defence buildings and attend to their farms while their wives and children were in refuge in Auckland town.
So, in the midst of well-settled countrysides there are the scenes of war-time episodes often all but unknown to the present generation of farmers who enjoy the fruits of a land that once was held only by virtue of the rifle and bayonet.
In the beautiful farm country intersected by the Great South Road and the Main Trunk railway between Auckland and the Lower Waikato there is a little church that holds for some of us a story appealing more to a sense of the adventurous and the heroic in New Zealand settlement than even the battles in which British generals met the Maoris with horse, foot and artillery.
This tiny church, built by the pioneer settlers of Pukekohe East, stands on the eastern rim of a deep grassy basin, an ancient volcanic crater, with its western side broken down. The building is seen on the skyline as one looks out from Pukekohe town, a mile and a-half away. Around it are the comfortable farms cleared from the olden puriri forest. Some of the huge old trees remain near the church, to remind us of the days when Maori musketeers perched in their branch forks and sniped at the hard-beset garrison of the stockade.
The defenders had had very little military training, but they could shoot. There were about twenty in all; more than half of them were farmers and bushmen and the others special constables or militia enlisted to help in the local defences. The only well-drilled man was Sergeant Perry, who was in command of the post.
Scottish settlers took the leading part in the defence of the church fort. The scant population of those parts was largely Scottish and Cornish. There was a family of McDonalds, three generations of them. Their two homesteads were within long rifle shot of the church. The three generations shared in the battle—the old
In those war days of 1863 the site of the present town of Pukekohe was a swampy forest of tall kahikatea. The farm clearings were all to the east, on the slopes that trended up to the beautiful hills where Bombay settlement stands. The Presbyterian church was newly-built; it was opened only five months before the fight and was entrenched and palisaded soon after the war began. The inner wall was of small logs laid horizontally; they were kohekohe trees, squared on top and bottom of the logs, so as to lie flat; most of them were about nine inches in diameter. They were spiked to large posts. The loopholes, cut with the saw, in the uppermost logs about 4 ft. 6 in. from the ground, were three inches high and six inches wide on the inside, and slightly larger on the outside to give a broad sweep for a rifle. These firing apertures were cut in both the logs and the slabs which formed the outer part of the wall. The slabs were split kahikatea, which made a wall, set upright, 7 ft. high in most places. They were 2 inches thick and 7 to 12 inches wide. The slabs were nailed on to the logs all round except on the south side; there were not enough to complete the wall so some large sawn planks, 1 inch by 18 inches, were set in place there; that was the steep side above the gully. The north side was level clear ground.
No logs showed on the outside of the work; it appeared there simply a slab palisade. The loopholes were about 5 ft. apart. In the fight there were two men at each of those facing the north, east and west, taking turns in firing and loading. The bush about the place was chiefly puriri, with tawa, rimu and kohekohe; the logs were nearly all kohekohe, because that small timber was easy to work. Part of the stockade was unfinished, so that the head cover there was not more than about five feet, and the taller men had to stoop when loading and firing. The whole defence work, as measured by the trench depressions to-day, was 21 paces long by 13 paces wide at the two flanking bastions. One of these bastions constructed for enfilading fire covered the gateway, fronting on the road on the east side of the church. This part of the defences was held throughout the fight by
The attack on the stockade was delivered by a war-party of about two hundred men of tohunga Hopa te Rangianini and the high chief Wahanui; another was
“The first shot in the fight,” said Mr. McDonald, “was fired about 9.30 in the morning; it was a Monday. We thought there might be Maoris nearby, but the ordinary work was going on. Our dinner was being cooked, in a shed which stood on the road in front of the church. One of our men, who was a sentry outside, fired the first shot, more by way of a lark than anything else. He called out, ‘Come on, boys, there's some work before us!’—perhaps he saw a head or the glint of a gun at the edge of the forest—and he fired into the bush in front of the church, across the road.
“There was a reply in a moment, a great scattered volley from the Maoris hidden in the bush, and the fight was on. From all sides they came running out of the bush; there seemed to be hundreds of them. Sergeant Perry ordered ‘Fix bayonets!’ and then ‘Independent firing!’ There was no volley firing. The men were cautioned not to waste shots.
“The Maoris, after the first charge, fought mostly from behind stumps and trees. One fine tall young warrior, very conspicuous and energetic in leading the attack, was heard calling on his men to come on to storm the place. If they had all been like him I would not be alive to-day. We did not have much ammunition; only about ten rounds per man. The first troops who came up to reinforce us had plenty, 70 rounds each, but until then it was an anxious three hours or more with us. There was one Maori shooting steadily from behind
rimu tree. One of our fellows, Corporal Donald, shot him at last.
“I was in and out of the church carrying ammunition and serving it out from the boxes opened in the church, and also percussion caps; these were in small packets of ten. Many bullets came through the walls of the church. Once when I was inside the building a bullet came right through the slabs of the wall and smashed a basin to smithereens. Yet not one of us were wounded in the fight.
“When the Maoris fell back after the fall of several men, some of them would come up on their hands and knees and tie supplejack vines to the feet of the dead and wounded, and presently the bodies would be seen disappearing over the side of the hill. During the first hour there were several attempts to charge. At times the firing had to be so rapid to keep the Maoris back that the rifle barrels became too hot to handle, and our men had to keep their fingers on the woodwork. But yell and shout as the leaders would the attackers wavered when they got near the stockade.
“The Maoris ate our dinner. The beef and potatoes were cooking in the open shed outside when the fight began. After repeated attempts, they got away with the pots into the bush. But they had several men hit, so the food cost them dearly.
“Two of our settlers, James Comrie and J. B. Roose, happened to be riding back from Drury when the church was attacked, and when they heard the firing and saw the Maoris charging out from the bush they turned and galloped off to the British camps at Ramarama and Drury for assistance. The first reinforcements reached
“About four o'clock in the afternoon we heard a bugle in the bush, and presently up came about a hundred and fifty soldiers, of the 65th Regiment and the Royal Irish, the 18th, led by Captain Inman. Now the Maori and the pakeha forces were about equalised, and there was some hard fighting, a good hour of it, in the clearing at the bush-edge. The troops made a bayonet charge down the hill below the church and killed many Maoris. Altogether, the Maoris most have lost about forty men killed that day. The British lost three killed; we in the stockade had no casualties at all. But had it not been for the reinforcements, the attackers would have won the day, I'm sure.”
A curious incident of that hot morning's work was the visit of a bush-pigeon, which perched on top of the church and remained there through the fight. McDonald said he saw it sitting there, on the little pinnacle
When the British troops made a charge down the hill in the rear of the church they shot a Maori in a rimu tree, just below the churchyard. They did not see him in the tree at first, but they heard the snap of a cap — his gun missed fire—and, looking up, they got him like a pigeon in the branches. After the fight, two Maori wounded were brought in—one was almost disembowelled by a wound, but was conscious—and the settlers knew them quite well. They used to come round before the war selling pigs and peaches.
Such is the brief story of an episode in which the farmers proved their fighting worth and in which a fourteen-year-old served like a veteran soldier. But there was no medal for that plucky boy; no mention in despatches. The score of defenders could all have been killed had the two hundred Maoris only realised their own overwhelming strength. But they could not bring themselves to meet the fixed bayonets that bristled out of the stockade loopholes.
That little church, showing many a scar and splinter of the fight, remained a fort and bulwark for Pukekohe's “embattled farmers” until the tide of war had rolled far southward, into the heart of the Upper Waikato.
The Weird of Macgillivray
A Tale of Second Sight
“But I have dream'd a dreary dream
Beyond the Isle of Sky;
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.”
—“The Battle of Otterbourne”
(Old Ballad)
“He looked in the face of the man,
And lo! the face was his own;
‘This is my weird,’ he said,
‘And now I ken the worst,
For many shall fall the morn,
But I shall fall with the first.’”
—“Ticonderoga”
(Robert Louis Stevenson .)
THE old Mauku church is there to-day, on the mound above the village and the stream, picture-like on its green hill, as a country church should always stand. It is of the early colonial design of totara timber, its steep-pitched roof is shingled, dark with age, its slender spire lifts above the tree-tops; the gentle knoll on which it rests is white-dotted with the gravestones of the pioneers who built it and worshipped in it. This little shrine of the bush farmers, St. Bride's of the Mauku, was the settlers' garrison house in the days of the Maori War. Stockaded and entrenched, it was at once a tabernacle and a fort. The farmer-riflemen cut loopholes in its walls—I counted fifty-four of these rifle-slits in the timbers; they are now plugged with wood
The Mauku hills and levels have a well-tilled serenity of landscape to-day, the result of three generations of settlement. In the Sixties it was forest nearly everywhere; an almost continuous dark-green blanket of foliage covered the land. The fortified church was the focus of life in the clearings that made little oases of civilisation in the wilderness of puriri and rata and totara and white pine. The British flag floated from a tall staff; bell tents whitened the slope between the church and the Mauku stream that went coiling through the valley to the salt-water creek of the South Manukau. Bullock-carts came creaking along the heavy road from Drury camp, their drivers cracking their long whips and cursing the mud, the “cow-horses,” the troops, the ammunition loads. Sentries with loaded rifles paced the lines before the church; the sergeants drilled their squads on the level below.
One of the Militia men in the garrison of the church-fort in the forest, this early spring of 1863, was Farquhar MacGillivray. He was a private in the 1st Regiment of Waikato Militia. Tall, dark, rather dour, serious beyond his years, there was a touch of the mystic about him. That at any rate was the impression one of his tent-mates formed; he was Highland-born like MacGillivray. The stern-avised Gael was a competent soldier; maybe he had served in one of his native Highland regiments; he walked as if he trod the heather to the sword-like sound of the pibroch. A good tent-mate, too, unselfish; tender as a woman nurse to one of his comrades who fell sick. He smiled in a grim kind of acquiescence when Jim Capper, who had been a man-o'-war sailor, said Farquhar was too long for everyday use; he'd call him Jack for short.
“Jack let it be, then,” said MacGillivray; “we'll keep Farquhar for my gravestone.”
A contrast, that pair of mates. Capper was short and very thick through of chest and as jolly as any Christmas pantomime hornpipe-dancing sailorman; given to yarn-spinning and chantey-singing. MacGillivray spoke little; he read often in the tent from a little Gaelic Testament he carried in his breast-pocket. Once in a cheerful mood he showed his comrades, after setting out their bayonets on the ground, how the sword-dance of his clan should be danced. “Ah,” he said, as he stopped short in the Gillie-Callum steps, “but it wants the music, and there are no pipes in this army whatever.”
There had been Maoris in the bush, hovering about the clearings and cultivations from which they were
One still night of stars and frost in October Farquhar MacGillivray came off outlying picket duty, and turned in. He wrapped blankets and heavy coat about him, and he slept, and as he slept he dreamed.
∗ ∗ ∗
In the morning the Highlander's tent-mates observed that he looked strange. Always quiet, often sombre, his stern features bore a deeper cast of thought, a veil of melancholy mystery had fallen over his keen dark eyes. He was withdrawn into himself. “He looks fey,” thought his fellow-Scot.
“Why, Jack,” asked one of the tent-mates, big Bill Smith, “you seem a bit queer this morning. What's the trouble, old chap?”
“Oh,” interposed Capper, “I expect Mac's got a touch of indigestion from those fat eels we got in the creek yesterday. One can have too much of a good thing, you know.”
But the Highlander was not to be drawn that morning. He went about his camp duties in his methodical thoughtful way. In the evening at last he broke his silence.
“I had a dream last night,” he said. “I dreamed I was back home in the old place, the old glen at Strathlanoch. I saw my people, I spoke to them. They spoke to me, but I did not hear what they said. Then I was back here, but not in this camp. It was in the bush, a clearing in the bush, just like those farm clearings up yonder along the track. There were fallen trees, and alongside them on the ground there were white naked bodies stretched out side by side. They had all been tomahawked about the head and face and body. I looked at them but I could only recognise one of them. And it was my own face that I saw.”
It was a long speech for MacGillivray. There was silence for some moments. Then Capper said, lightly, “One dreams all sorts of queer things, Jack. But you shouldn't take any notice of that sort of dream. You know they always go by contraries. It'll be Maoris that we'll lay out in the bush one of these days. But there's not a Maori about just now.”
But MacGillivray shook his head. “It's no joke to me,” he said. “It was my wraith that I saw.”
That dream came again to MacGillivray two nights later. Next midnight it came yet again, the battle vision, the row of mutilated corpses, stripped, blood-bathed, laid side by side in the forest.
The Highlander told his comrades that he had dreamed the wraith dream three times. “That's the last time, the third,” he said. “I know my weird. Weird—Scottish Highland expression for fate foreshadowed by a dream or second-sight vision; portent of death.
MacGillivray spoke very little more. He did camp duty, he ate with his mates, he mended his uniform. But he did all like a man in a dream. His spirit perhaps was already half withdrawn beyond the veil.
∗ ∗ ∗
Nearly a mile south of the Mauku church is a rounded hill of red volcanic earth, richly grassed, crowned by a farmer's homestead and traversed by the road to Waiuku. This abode of peace and fruitfulness to-day was a roughly cleared farm at the time of our story; much of it was still tall timber; there were masses of felled trees at the bush-edge. Its Maori name is Titi; it was the settler Wheeler's farm. Beyond on the south the land slanted to a long deep valley and on the farther side rose into the heights of the Bald Hills. Six miles away was the Waikato River; the intervening forest was threaded by one or two narrow tracks, the Maori war trails.
The banging of heavily-charged guns—the Maoris had a way of using too much powder—in the valley below Titi Hill, startled the pickets of the little garrisons at the church and the other stockade, nearer the Manukau waters. Maoris were shooting cattle on Wheeler's farm. Lieutenant Perceval, of the 1st Waikato, went off at the double from the lower stockade, making for the bush around the crown of the hill, to take the marauders in the rear.
The Maoris, having ended their cattle-hunting, turned their attention to the human game. Skirmishing from tree to tree like Indians, they extended their flanks until they almost encircled the pakehas.
The smoke of battle on the bush-edge was now in plain sight from the Church stockade, and off dashed the Forest Rifle Volunteers under Lieutenant Lusk, with some Militia-men, MacGillivray and Capper among them.
Advancing at the double up the long slope, the reinforcements were soon in touch with Perceval's men, who were hard pressed by the raiding warriors. Now the united force boldly attacked, and advancing with fixed bayonets forced the Maoris in their turn to fall back, through a strip of felled but unburned bush to a narrow open clearing.
But the skilful brown fighters, moving with the utmost rapidity, spread out in a kind of rough half-moon, to outflank their opponents. They were stripped to a waist-mat or a bit of blanket; their ammunition belts were buckled around their waists and over their shoulders; each warrior wore at least two of those cartridge-holding hamanu; thrust inside their belts were their short tomahawks. Some of them carried long-handled tomahawks; at close quarters they threw down their now cumbrous muzzle-loading guns and used those fearful weapons, the kakauroa, with both hands. There were about sixty white riflemen; these were outnumbered by the Maoris by more than two to one.
Green leaves, masses of ferns and creeping shrubs, dark tree-trunks, puffs of smoke from behind trees and stumps and logs. There was at first little to see at which to fire. Moving quickly from cover to cover, firing over logs and from behind black burned stumps on the ragged bush edge, the volunteers and Militia-men for a while kept their foes at a distance. But presently the
Now a desperate fight, often hand to hand, developed as the Maori King's men charged with reckless determination on the troops. Often only the width of a black stump or the trunk of a fallen tree separated the antagonists. Sometimes there were duels, bayonet countering long-handled tomahawk. Gunpowder smoke hung heavily over the clearing and befogged the woods. The sharp fumes of saltpetre made noses tingle and eyes smart. Tomahawk blades flashed in the air as the warriors delivered terrific lightning-swift blows. Many Maoris fell before the accurate fire of such marksmen as Lusk. Perceval, an impetuous young officer, jumped on a log calling on his men to charge. He used a rifle with skill and shot three of his opponents. At last a bullet stilled his brave heart. His fellow-lieutenant, Norman, too, was shot dead, and several other men fell, dead and wounded.
Lusk was now without officers to help him, but a big powerful Militia-man, Corporal Michael Power, a veteran of the 65th Regiment, took charge of his comrades with cool efficiency. “Steady, lads!” he called to the men around him, “don't fire wild! Take cover and wait for your target.” But the target often did not wait for the bullet, but sprang at the pakeha like a tiger. Most of the Maoris fought silently; their chiefs' voices rose in high yelping cries, “Patua, patua! Raunatia! Tahuna, tahuna!” (“Kill, kill! Surround them! Fire away!”)
The Forest Rifles officer, outflanked on both sides, shouted to his skirmishers to retire into the cover of the bush on the north. In the withdrawal the Maoris' cross-fire felled several more men. One of the Forest Rifles, busy reloading, was in the act of using his ramrod when a Maori killed him with the tomahawk. Corporal Power, the last to retire, shot one Maori and bayoneted another. He was recovering his bayonet, which he had driven right through a giant warrior's body, when the Maori, with a desperate dying effort, swung his kakauroa high above his head and brought it down with fearful force before his foeman could withdraw his steel. Power's head was split down from crown to nose, and there the two lay across a log, Power's weapon still fast in the Maori.
Under the shelter of the bush, the Forest Rifles and the Militia-men made accurate shooting and kept the Maoris to cover. A breathing space after the combat at close quarters. It was now late in the afternoon. Pakeha dead lay in the clearing, with many of their enemies, but it was impossible to carry them off the field. Lusk re-formed his men, and drew off, firing by sections as he retired down the partly wooded slopes to the church stockade. After the church was reached a glint of steel was seen in the rays of the setting sun on the bank of the Mauku stream which the force had just crossed. A party sallied out from the stockade and found a badly wounded man lying there. He had crawled down after his comrades and just had strength enough to wave his bayonet in a forlorn hope of attracting attention.
A sad and anxious night. The roll call showed six men missing, besides the two officers shot dead. And one of the six was Farquhar MacGillivray. In the heat of the fight no one had seen him fall.
∗ ∗ ∗
Reinforcements, cavalry and foot, came in by morning, and early a strong force was marching up the slopes to the battlefield. Volleys were heard in the distance. Long afterwards, when peace came, the Maoris told how a second war party met the retiring fighters, carrying off a score of dead and many wounded. On learning that they had not fired a volley after the battle by way of claiming the victory, the second band marched in and fired their guns over the bodies of the slain, and retired as quickly as they had come.
A fearful sight that clearing on Wheeler's farm in the morning light. Side by side on the ground, grass and leaves sparkling wet with the morning dew, there were stretched out side by side the fallen whites. They had been stripped of their uniforms, their arms and equipment were gone. The Maoris had carried them from where they fell, and set up a stake with a white haversack on it. They lay there stark, and everyone had been mutilated with the tomahawk. The faces and heads had been chopped about; the noses of some had been cut off.
Capper and his tent-mates bent over the dead, sick with grief and anger. Some of the bodies were unrecognisable as to features, but there was no mistaking the dark stern-faced Highlander.
“Poor old Jack!” said one of the comrades. “How soon his dream came true!”
Second-sight—the matakité of the Maori, the “seen-face”—may be scoffed at by the matter-of-fact Sassenach. But to the Celt, like the Polynesian, it is a fact well verified in families of seers and mystics.
∗ ∗ ∗
In the days of peace, twenty years after the war, one of those tent-mates told the story of Farquhar MacGillivray to
One morning Bracken and Smith were sitting in the lobby and Capper passed. Smith beckoned him over and said: “Capper, I want you to tell my friend Bracken that story of MacGillivray's dream that came true. He might write something about it.”
So the battle of the Titi Hill was fought again and that story was the inspiration of “McGillviray” is Bracken's spelling in his poem, but those who knew the man in life pronounced it “MacGillivray” and spelled it as the Highlander himself spelled it, therefore I adopt their version.
Bracken amplified the soldier's story of his wraith-dream, the vision and the portent; he wrote of the old home in the Highland glen, the wandering one's reunion in spirit with his loved ones. To his comrades the soldier seer says:
“A hand has beckoned through the gloom, And signalled me away, away.”
To the kindly tent-mate who attempted to laugh him out of his premonitions, he replies:
“Ah! friend, you were not nursed beneath The Highland hills where every glen Is filled with those who've conquered death— Is tenanted with ghosts of men.”
∗ ∗ ∗
But that comrade who told the poet the story could well understand the Gael's belief in second-sight and wraiths and weirds, for he was born in the Inverness country. In his old age he told me the story himself, that sailor and soldier and world-wandering adventurer, the last survivor of all those who had known Farquhar MacGillivray in the flesh and fought in the battle of Titi Hill.
The Defenders of Orakau
Old heroes who could grandly do,
As they could greatly dare,
A vesture, very glorious,
Their shining spirits wear
Of noble deeds….
—“Sir Richard Grenville's Last Fight.”
(Gerald Massey.)
*Orakau means “Rakau's Place,” or “The Place of Trees.” It is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable.FOR more than a hundred miles south of Auckland authentic tradition and history give a living interest to the main highway that penetrates the heart of Waikato. The road along which so many motorists speed to-day is rich in human associations, and it is this kind of background which so greatly heightens the charm of beautiful scenes. In more than usual measure the romance of stirring deeds steeps a cross-section of the Upper Waikato, a dozen miles or so of the old army trail that is now part of the main route to wonderful Arapuni. This portion of the highway, which may be described as the Via Sacra of Waikato, crosses the exact ground of famous Orakau Pa,
That sacred spot is in my earliest recollections of childhood, for my father's farm included part of the battlefield, the pa site was close to our homestead, and the traditions and place-magic of Orakau became part of my very being. I have seen old tattooed warriors halt
Orakau was a Maori Thermopylae. Here, for three days (March 31st and April 1st and 2nd, 1864), a band of men and women belonging to various tribes resisted the British and Colonial troops. There were three hundred and ten Maoris, whose chiefs had resolved to make a last stand against the conquering army of
∗ ∗ ∗
“Let me die here,” said the old chief Te Paerata, striking his spear-staff into the ground at Orakau when the chiefs held council about the most suitable site for a pa. He was not the leading war-chief of the tribes, but his gesture fired the gathering of warriors with a determination to make that spot the fighting ground. Orakau was a beautiful fruitful place; there were several villages there; it was a land of abundant food. There were many groves of peaches and fields of corn and potatoes; long before the war the Maoris sent wheat from there all the way to Auckland, and flour, too, was produced, for the tribes of this district had their own flour-mills driven by water-power. So there,
The chief in supreme command was pakeha. Another body came from the western shores of Lake Taupo.
Rewi's own tribe,
The Maori redoubt, a small and really insignificant earthwork, was about eighty feet in length by forty feet in width. It was a rectangular entrenchment, with inner and outer trenches, some interior dug-outs and shallow covered ways, and a low parapet, outside of which a post and rail fence around part of the little fort made a further obstacle, but a flimsy one. The diggers
“We were at prayers outside the pa in the early morning,” said Tupotahi, Rewi's cousin and lieutenant, in describing to me the siege and defence. “Our minister, Wi Karamoa, was praying to pakeha. We had our hands over our eyes, when I glanced up and saw the look-out on the parapet beckoning to me and pointing, and there, looking in the direction of Kihikihi I saw the fixed bayonets of the soldiers glittering in the sun. The army was marching against us. I waited until the prayers were over, and then gave the alarm. So we ran to our stations, each tribe, loaded our guns, and prepared for the battle that we all felt was a battle of desperation (whakamomori). Still we were in good spirits; we were elated at the prospect of a battle in which we would uphold our names and defend our rights to the land of our ancestors.”
For three days and two nights the Maoris held the fort, a noble three hundred and ten against six times their number of well-armed, well-fed soldier foes. “We lived in a circle of fire and smoke,” said Paitini, a man of the Urewera, who was severely wounded there. There was a supply of food, but the water was exhausted by the end of the first night. To the rifle fire of hundreds of soldiers, a bombardment with two six-pounder Armstrong guns was added, and on the third day handgrenades were thrown into the pa from the head of a
manuka wood as bullets, saving their lead for the day time; and they even broke off the legs of their iron cooking-pots to serve as projectiles.
On the second morning of the siege, a thick fog enveloped the battlefield. The straits of the defenders were so serious that Tupotahi made request of the council of chiefs that the pa should be abandoned under cover of the fog. The runanga debated this, and decided to hold the fort. This was the announcement made by Rewi, which clinched the decision:
“Listen to me, O chiefs of the runanga and all the tribes! It was we who sought this battle, wherefore then should we retreat? This is my thought: Let us abide by the fortune of war. If we are to die, let us die in battle; if we are to live, let us survive on the field of battle.”
“So,” said Tupotahi, continuing his narrative, “we all remained to continue the fight. The fog presently lifted from the battlefield, and then again began the firing.”
By that evening, the sufferings of the garrison had become intense. Dead and wounded were lying about the pa. The wounded were crying for water. There was none to give them. Rewi now considered it advisable to evacuate the place in the night. But the Taupo men
∗ ∗ ∗
The third morning dawned in the haze that presaged a hot day. Tupotahi now proposed to Rewi: “Let us charge out before it is day. If we go now we may fight our way through the soldiers.” Rewi smiled grimly, and bade Tupotahi consult the other chiefs. “We shall remain here,” they declared; “we shall fight on.”
The morning haze swept away; the roar of the Armstrongs and the crack of rifles and carbines answered the bang of the Maori shotguns. It is recorded that forty thousand rounds of Enfield ammunition were fired by the troops in the siege. (No wonder we youngsters found bullets in the ground turned up by the plough, and explored the scarred old peach trees with our pocket knives for bits of lead.)
The story of the afternoon of April the second, 1864, imperishably remains as an inspiration to deeds of courage and fortitude. Nowhere in history did the spirit of pure patriotism blaze up more brightly than in that little earthwork redoubt, torn by shellfire and strewn with dead and dying. The grim band of heroes proudly refused the surrender demanded by
To the General's request, delivered by the interpreter from the head of the sap, the reply was made by a chief who was Rewi's mouthpiece: “Peace will never be made, never, never!” A further reply, in words that will forever live, was delivered: “Friend, I shall fight
*The current popular version of the Maori reply is: “E hoa, ka whawhai tonu ahau ki a koe, ake, ake!“)Ka whawhai tonu matou ake, ake, ake!” (“We shall continue to fight for ever and ever and ever!”) However, the Maori survivors' narratives I have gathered do not give those exact words. The reply, according to these informants, was in the first person singular, as in my text. The chief who answered Mair of course spoke for the whole garrison.
The interpreter, Mr. Mair (afterwards Major) said: “That is well for you men, but it is not right that the women and children should die. Let them come out.”
A voice asked: “How did you know that there were women and children here?”
Mair replied: “I heard the lamentations for the dead in the night.”
The chieftainess Ahumai, daughter of the old chief Te Paerata, called out to the interpreter: “If the men are to die, the women and children will die also!”
So went on the hopeless fight, but not for much longer. Rewi gave the word; his warriors loaded their guns with their last cartridges, and, with the women and children in their midst, they charged out in a body, going at a steady trot at first, until the amazed soldiers opened a fearful fire upon them. That retreat through the fern and swamp to the Puniu River and beyond was, like the defence of the *Since this was written, pa, full of deeds of gallantry and self-sacrifice. Rewi himself was surrounded by a small bodyguard of his devoted kinsmen. One of those gallant fellows, his nephew,
When the sun went down on Orakau a hundred and sixty Maoris lay dead on the battlefield, and on the line of retreat to the south side of the Puniu River. There were many poignant and touching incidents. When the pa was rushed by the troops an old warrior lay dead with his gun pointing over the parapet. One leg had been shattered earlier in the siege and he had bound it up with flax-leaves and sticks for splints, so that he could prop himself up against the bank and go on fighting. A young man kept some of the pursuers back by repeatedly turning and kneeling and presenting his gun at them. When at last he was shot dead it was found that the reason he had not fired was because his gun was empty all the time. He was trying to cover the retreat of his old people. [A pretty half-caste girl captured had an arm broken by a bullet.] Two women were bayoneted to death by the soldiers who charged into the pa. One of them was a high chieftainess of the
Of the British, seventeen were killed and thirty-five wounded. The dead and wounded soldiers were carried in rough transport carts back along the road to
The Maori dead were buried where they fell, scattered over more than a mile of country. Nearly forty men and women were buried in the field on the north side of the road as you drive over Orakau. Their parapets were just tumbled in on them. When the trench graves were filled in, the clenched hand of a Maori protruded above the ground, and a soldier tramped on it to tread it under. The last gesture! Defeated, but unconquerable.
∗ ∗ ∗
More than half of the Urewera or Tuhoe contingent were either killed or wounded. Thirty of their dead were left on the field; three of these were women who had accompanied their husbands on the war-path. One of the survivors, Paitini te Whatu, who was grievously wounded and whose father was killed, described to me thirty years after the battle the sorrowful reception of the defeated warriors when they returned to the Ruatahuna Valley, in the heart of their mountain land. An apakura, a lament for the dead, was chanted by all the assembled tribes folk as the survivors entered the village square and stood in silence with bowed heads. This is part of the great and moving dirge that rang through that forest valley:
“We saw the fire of omen, The lightning flashing downward On our sacred mountain peaks, Portent of warriors' doom— Defeat and death. Alas for Ruatahuna! Bereft of all but women; Manawaru's proud crest Is borne away, A needless sacrifice. By Marata, by reckless Penewhio, Ye were led foolishly to death! Cold in the earth our warriors lie, Ye return to us no more; 'Tis now as it was said of old, The offspring of Tuhoe go wastefully down Into the night of death.”
The closing lines in the original are an ancient proverb of this mountain race of desperate fighters, who ever braved fearful odds:—
“ Ko te uri a TuhoeMoumou tangata ki te po.”
There is a lament of
“The land is swept and desolate, Mournfully rolls the tide of Puniu, The waters sob as they flow.”
We on the old frontier lived on the very ground that was salted down with the flesh and blood and bones of scores of the gallant dead. That sacred bit of ground at the north side of the old pa was fenced in as a tapu spot by my father in 1870; he planted some bluegum trees to mark the graves. But the farm has since passed through many hands; the tapu is disregarded, the fence and the trees have gone, and now cattle graze over the graves. Yet years of cultivation and depasturing have not smoothed out that rough turf where the heroes and
A noble and touching tribute to the defenders of Orakau appeared in a New Zealand newspaper (the Christchurch “Press”) on April 16th, 1864, when the story of the siege and the capture of the pa became known in the Colony. The article was written by that eloquent and warmhearted Irish pioneer,
“….Without food or water they waited the final assault, when the messengers of peace made them the last offer—their lives and good treatment if they would but surrender to a fate which was inevitable. No human situation can be conceived more desperate or more hopeless—their lands gone, their race melting away like snow before the sun, and now their own turn come at last; with enemies surrounding them on all sides, and nothing but certain death staring them in the face, this is the last answer which they give to a proposal or peace and surrender: ‘Friends, this is the reply of the Maori—“We will go on fighting for ever, for ever, for ever!”’ We make bold to say that in whatever tongue the colonisation of the New Zealand islands by the Anglo-Saxons be written, this reply of the last of the Waikatos will be held for a memorial of them and men will ask in after times, was it good to destroy a race who could so defend their native land? There certainly does seem to be a sort of curse upon our army in this unhappy conflict… There will be men in after times whose pens will narrate the
causes and outcomings of this contest, and who will seek in the objects of the war the key to its disasters [to British arms]. They will say it was not a war for safety or for law, or for truth or liberty, but it was a war dictated by avarice and prosecuted for spoilation. It was a war to remove a neighbour's landmark, to destroy a race that we might dwell in their tents. No doubt these critics of the past will be wrong. They must be so, for is not the whole voice of the age against them? An enlightened, Christian, money-making people, we are quite satisfied with the morality of our own conduct; but still the events of the war remain unexplained. Still it will remain to be solved why more money, time and life should have been sacrificed in this war against a feeble foe, for a smaller result, than in any war in which England has yet engaged. For our own parts, we have long ceased to speculate on the causes of these things; we wait and wonder. But if there be anything in the whole miserable story to excite the admiration of a generous mind, it is this sad spectacle of those grim and tawny figures, gaunt with the watching and weariness, the wounds and nakedness of a long campaign in the bush, staring over their ragged palisades on the hosts of their conquerors from whom escape was impossible, and wailing out their last chant of death and defiance: ake, ake, ake!—for ever, for ever, for ever!”
Brave Women
THE courage and devotion of our New Zealand women, both pakeha and Maori, in the pioneer era of this Colony, have perhaps not been recognised adequately by those who followed after them in the days of peace when the rough places had been made smooth and the frontiers of settlement obliterated. Those whose memories carry them back to the times when there was a “furthest out,” when work on the land and travel were alike hazardous, know of the trials and dangers to which many frontier women were exposed. But the new generation cannot know these things at first hand; the times have changed, and New Zealanders, present and future, must rely on printed records, and these are all too few so far as the adventurous phases of Colonial life are touched upon. The real history of New Zealand was not made in the towns or in Parliament, but on the farms and the long, irregular border lines where Maori and pakeha touched each other, sometimes with friendly hands, sometimes at short rifle range or the point of the bayonet, or the swing of a tomahawk.
The wives and daughters of the outback farmers had their anxious days and nervous nights, in the period of raids and alarms. Many a frontierswoman had cause to dread the bush or the high fern that grew close up to the home, and masked the movements of Maori hostiles.
Many a Maori woman deserved a war medal for deeds of courage, even in the firing line. The white
whata, a high food platform, and waving her shawl she shouted her rallying cries, calling on her people to turn and charge. They did so, and
But the shining example of women's heroism in my mind just now is Ahumai te Paerata, whose deeds of noble courage were twofold; she fought for her national cause and she saved a pakeha's life when no other arm was stretched out to defend him. Ahumai of Orakau—she is one of those whose names will never die in our country's story. She is mentioned in “The Defenders of Orakau” (see page 105) as the woman who gave the reply to the British request that the women and children should be sent out of the beleaguered redoubt so that they would not meet the fate of the men. pa had refused
From a photo in 1883. Rewi died in 1894. (See pages 99–110—“The
Defenders of Orakau.”)
From a painting by G. Lindauer. (See pages 115–119).
Two Brave Women
The heroine of Orakau. From a drawing by T. Ryan,
Taupo, 1901. (See pages 105, 112–115.)
“
E pai ana tera mo koutou tangata; engari kaore e pai kia mate ai nga wahine me nga tamariki. Tukuna mai era.” (“That is well for you men; but it is not right that the women and children should die. Send them out to us.”)
A young woman of noble and fearless bearing stood up on the firing-step inside the earth parapet and cried to Mair:
“
Ki te mate nga tane, me mate ano nga wahine me nga tamariki!” (“If the men are to die, the women and children will die also!”)
That was the final word of the defenders. Mair did not know then who the woman was, but soon after the war he discovered she was Ahumai. Indeed she was not a woman to be forgotten. She bore to her last days the marks of Orakau. On that fatal second of April, 1864, she suffered terrible wounds. She was shot in the right side, the bullet going through her body and coming out on her left side. She was shot through the right shoulder; the bullet went out at her back. She was also hit in the wrist, hand and arm. Yet wounded almost unto death as she was, she struggled through the swamp of death that lay between the Orakau ridge and the Puniu River, the line of retreat on which scores of her comrades were killed. She survived, she reached her distant home at Waipapa, near Lake Taupo, with her gallant brother Hitiri te Paerata and the mournful remnant of her tribes, the Ngati-Te-Kohera and the
In the year after Orakau Ahumai's tribe had become Hauhaus and were desperately eager to obtain revenge for their losses at Orakau. She was with them at a small village on the bush edge near Oruanui (on the present road from Atiamuri to Taupo) when an adventurous white man rode in to the settlement. He was Lieutenant Meade, of H.M.S. Curacoa; he had been escorted to Taupo by Pai-Marire, the chanting and processions round the Niu, the sacred flag-pole of worship. The tohunga seized the occasion to demand the sacrifice of the pakeha to the Hauhau war gods. A Maori stood behind the white man with a ready tomahawk, awaiting the word to strike. Meade, who sat on a log with his guide, was ready, for his part, to fire his hidden revolver through his coat if the executioner raised his tomahawk. But this would have availed him little in the midst of those armed men. The wild service ended; a council of war began; it looked dark indeed for the white man in the midst of his enemies.
But at the height of the barbarous council, a woman, wrapped in a shawl, rose from the seated crowd. She walked slowly across the marae. Without a word she sat down at the young Naval officer's feet. She was Ahumai; her wounds at Orakau scarcely yet healed. She had abundant reason for bitterness of soul. Yet she was generous enough to forgive all that, and risk the anger of her tribe, to champion the friendless pakeha when the grave was opening for him.
Her silent act of succour and her high tribal rank saved Meade's life. He and his guide were allowed to leave the village; they rode off with thankful hearts from the nest of Hauhaus where they had all but resigned themselves to death.
Europeans at Taupo long years afterwards sometimes saw the tattooed white-haired dame as she hobbled into the township for her old-age pension. The stray traveller perchance would see in her merely a decrepit old Lieutenant Meade wrote a book narrating his adventures in New Zealand and the South Seas (“A Ride Through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand”), and illustrated it with some of his sketches. There is a small drawing of the scene in the bush village where he so nearly fell a sacrifice to the Hauhau spirit of war.wahine. But in Ahumai I recognised a truly heroic spirit who could face death without flinching, and defy her people so that she could save a friendless man of her enemies from the tomahawk. Ahumai died at Mokai, near Taupo, in 1908. Her warrior brother Hitiri, whom I knew very well and from whom I heard much of the history of Orakau, was not long in following her to the Reinga.
The second subject in this sketch of courageous women is Huria (Julia) Matenga, the young chief-tainess of Whakapuaka, on the Nelson coast, whose bravery and humanity at the wreck of the Delaware in 1863 earned her the admiration and praise of both races. She came to be called “New Zealand's Grace Darling.” She was foremost in saving a distressed crew at the risk of her life, in a stormy sea, and her deed of bravery even excelled that of the plucky English
Julia Matenga, whose Maori name is the native form of both Marsden and Martin, was the wife of a young half-caste chief named Hemi Matenga (James Martin), who had been named after Te Puoho's amazing march from the Nelson country down the West Coast and into Otago and Southland is narrated in the book “Tales of the Maori Bush”. (Cowan).pakeha-Maori blend than Hemi Matenga, erect and straight-backed and powerful even in his seventies. His beautiful wife was the granddaughter of a renowned warrior, Te Puoho, of the
Hemi and Huria lived on their farm at Whakapuaka, near where the cable-station was afterwards established.
Early on the morning of September 4th, 1863, the Maoris saw a vessel lying wrecked on the rocks off Whakapuaka. This was the Delaware, an English brigantine of 241 tons, a new vessel recently out from London; she had sailed from Nelson the previous day for Napier. A strong gale was blowing, and in endeavouring to beat out against it the vessel was driven on the rocks, about 100 yards from the cliffs, where she lay with the seas sweeping over her. The mate made ready to swim ashore with a line, but a sea caught him and dashed him on a rock, and he was hauled back badly injured. The natives on shore saw the wrecked
Delaware, eager to succour those in distress; some of them lit a fire on the shore and prepared for the reception of the imperilled mariners.
The three who came to the help of the crew were Julia Matenga, her husband, and a man named Hohapeta Kahupuku. One of the crew threw a light rope, a lead-line, overboard, and Julia and the two men threw off their clothes and swam out, in spite of the great seas. They had no canoe or boat, but no small craft could have lived in that boiling surf. A terrifying sea was rolling in before the N.E. gale and breaking over the brigantine.
The three Maoris had a desperate struggle; it seemed half-an-hour before they were near enough to get the line which the sailor had thrown out. A rope was bent on to the ship's end of this line, and the Maoris hauled it ashore; the ship's end was made fast to one of the masts and the Maoris secured the other to a boulder on the narrow beach at the foot of the cliffs. Julia was the foremost of the swimmers and was the first to grasp the lead-line which the sailor threw. The swimmers dived under the great rollers that came roaring in.
The line between ship and shore having been hauled taut, all but one of the crew struggled to the land holding to the rope, assisted by the three Maoris. This was a task of great difficulty. As each man neared the beach the Matengas and their companions rushed out, sometimes up to their necks in the surf, sometimes swimming, and helped him to the beach. All this time
One life only was lost. The mate, a young Englishman named Henry Squirrel, who made a gallant attempt to swim to the beach with a line soon after the vessel struck, was badly hurt and was laid in a bunk apparently dead. But after all the others were safe on shore, they were amazed and greatly distressed to see him climb into the fore-rigging and wave for help. Hemi Matenga asked the captain, “Why did you not tell me there was still one of your men on board?” The Maoris would have brought him on shore had they known, but now it was quite impossible, the tide was rising, and the seas were thundering right over the brigantine. The poor mate was washed off and drowned.
So all hands but one were rescued, thanks to the fearless, powerful Maori swimmers. Julia and her men were very much cut and bruised by the rocks, in their efforts to get the sailors to the shore, and Hemi Matenga related afterwards that when he rode the twenty miles into Nelson town to report the wreck he was scarcely able to sit his horse.
The Nelson townspeople were greatly excited by the news of the Delaware wreck and the rescue by the Maoris. A fund was immediately raised, and a public presentation was made to the three swimmers. Julia and her husband each received an inscribed gold watch, and their companion, a youth, and the helpers on the shore each were given a silver watch. Sums of money were also presented to them. Julia's portrait hangs in
Delaware, wrecked at Whakapuaka, September 3, 1863.”
The brave woman of Whakapuaka died at her home there in 1909. Her stalwart husband followed her in 1912, at the age of seventy-seven. Hemi, who was half-brother of Delaware forty-six years before.
A Can of Cold Water
The Heroine of the
QUIET Tauranga town, pleasant place of tree-groves and gardens and pretty homes, on its green tongue of land overlooking a white-beached harbour, was a great military camp in the early months of 1864. Ngai-te-Rangi were out, almost to a man, for the Maori King; so were the Piri-Rakau, the tribe of bush-dwellers, whose homes were along the forest fringe of the broken ranges that made a blue skyline in rear of the
Up yonder, a bare two miles from the big camp, were those rabbit burrows, masked by frail stockades hurriedly built with posts and rails sledged by night from a farm (Mr. Samuel Clarke's, near the British camp), with manuka stakes, with sticks of the tupakihi shrub (tutu) and even with korari, the flower-stalks of the native flax. The trenches were narrow, winding ditches
pa-site), and stretching across the hilly neck of land, the gateway between harbour and forest hinterland. The flimsy fence loomed like a stockade of which the staff had had unhappy experience in the Waikato and Taranaki. So up they brought their big guns; their 8-inch mortars, their Armstrong field-pieces; they planted them yonder half a mile or less on the harbour side of the “fortress”; and one day of cloud and drizzle the battle of the
∗ ∗ ∗
Yonder where the little memorial Church stands to-day on the right-hand side of the road as you motor down into Tauranga town, through dairy farms and orchards, is the spot where gallant pa, an unfinished entrenchment on the Maori left flank; this was held by a party of about forty men, chiefly of the Koheriki, a small sub-tribe who had fought all through the Waikato war. With these people was one woman, a young half-caste wahine who carried a single-barrel gun and wore a belt of cartridges about her waist. This female warrior had already made a name for herself in the war; she had carried a baby on her back through the earlier campaign, like many another woman who followed the fortunes of her kinsfolk on the war-path. Her name was pa on the day of battle.
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Turn to the British forces marshalled for the attack on the Kingites who had been so rash as to challenge—and that in a half-jocular way, they were so indifferent to danger—the power of the pakeha army. There were 1,650 officers and men, including a Naval Brigade of over four hundred, and of purepo, the artillery, there were all these to thunder against those manuka stakes and flax-sticks and rabbit burrows: a 110-pdr. Armstrong gun, two 40-pdr. and two 6-pdr. Armstrongs, two 24-pdr. howitzers, two 8-inch mortars, and six Coehorn mortars. One of the Armstrongs was taken across the swampy arm below the pa on the British right front and hauled up on the opposite hill, to deliver an enfilading fire. Soon after daybreak (it was the 29th of April, 1864) the batteries opened fire—the heaviest fire in the war—at ranges of from 800 to 650 yards.
The fire was directed chiefly against the left of the main redoubt to make a breach for an assaulting party.
The unsubstantial palisade soon was smashed in many places by the shells, and some of it only hung together by its ties. The earth of the parapet was sent flying in showers of clods and dust. But the bold chieftain Rawiri strode fearlessly up and down the centre of the pa, on the exposed ground above the dug-outs, or rua, and along the parapet on the left of the main work. “Kia u, kia u!” he cried to his people; “Kaore e tae mai te pakeha!” He was bidding them “Stand fast, stand fast,” the enemy would not reach them. He shouted, when his eager men showed signs of wishing to charge out on the advancing foe, “Ko te manawa-rere, ko te manawa-rere, kia u, kia u!” (“Impetuous ones, be firm, stand fast!”)
There were two tohungas, or priests and chaplains, in the entrenchments. Both were killed by the artillery fire. One was an old Maori priest named Te Wano, who recited the ancient karakia for victory. The other was a Christian minister, or lay-reader of the English Church, named Ihaka (Isaac). This minister was standing up to invoke a blessing when some of the garrison were about to eat a meal of potatoes. Just as he uttered the Maori words of the prayer, “May the grace of our tohunga was killed in a similar manner by a shell while standing up reciting his karakia Maori.
The old warrior
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By four o'clock in the afternoon the breaches in the works, chiefly in the Maori left, were considered large enough for the entrance of a storming party. Had the staff but known it, the breach did not matter much one way or the other; the troops could have pulled down enough of the fence with their hands.
Really the small earthworks constructed for the batteries were almost as strong as the Maori position. The bugles rang out as the artillery preparation ended, and up the ferny slopes of Puke-hinahina advanced the storm troops, three hundred of them, four abreast—two sailors and two soldiers. Commander Hay, of H.M.S. Harrier, commanded the Naval party, Lieut.-Colonel Booth, of the 43rd Regiment, was at the head of the soldiers. The rest of the Naval Brigade and the 43rd Regiment followed as a reserve.
At the double the stormers covered the last hundred yards of the advance. Into the breach they poured. Close quarters now! Rifle and bayonet met tomahawk, Navy cutlasses clashed on double-barrel guns and old
kakauroa, the deadly tomahawk-blade on a long handle, which gave the brown warrior a glorious reach for a blow that shore through neck and shoulders or split a skull in two. Now for it, ye tars, yelling like fiends, ye big whiskered linesmen! Into the Maori ranks they go, shouting, slashing, thrusting. Behind them come the supports, led by gallant Captain Hamilton of H.M.S. Esk.
Victory is almost theirs—it would have been theirs but for this labyrinth of rabbit burrows. The men rush charging here and there, they find themselves confronted by brown tattooed warriors everywhere—some of those defenders, wavering, are driven back by the 68th Regiment in the rear, and they seem to the now bewildered troops like reinforcements. Officers and men fall, a fearful proportion of officers. Captain Hamilton, calling on his men, tumbles from a parapet with a bullet through his brain. The leader of the soldiers, too, is down. The troops are in a dreadful confusion. It becomes a panic that seizes the bravest men.
They give way before the infuriated onset of the garrison. Out again the survivors pour; there is a disorderly retreat such as no army likes to think about afterwards.
That was the debacle of the pa next day—but by that time it was empty.
Hori Ngatai said of this “glorious fight,” as he described it: “We Maoris, although victorious, had suffered severely. My old relative Reweti fell with seven
pas, but particularly that from the small one. The soldiers and sailors were all mixed up together, and were equally fearless. I was amused,” continued Hori, “at the coolness of one of our old warriors in the thickest of the hand-to-hand fight. He was a deeply tattooed old man, of the past generation of toa. He had six or seven bullets in his body, and being shot through the thighs was quite helpless. He sat leaning up against the remains of the parapet, and had taken out his pipe for a consoling smoke, but couldn't get a light. So he kept calling out, ‘Give me a light, give me a light!’ but no one heeded him when everyone was fighting for his life. Amidst the din of war he could be heard calling out for a match, then his excitement would overmaster him and he would cry, ‘Fight on! Fight on! Give it to them! Give it to them!’ With one breath he would ask for a light, then with the next he would urge us on to the combat.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Turn now to the Koheriki wing of the pa. It was there just where it joined the main redoubt, that the 43rd soldiers rushed in with the bayonet, led by Lieut.-Colonel Booth. The little band of defenders fought with the fury of utter desperation. The young woman Heni te Kiri-Karamu, warrior-vivandiere, was with them; when she had fired a shot out of her single-barrel gun she jumped back into the shallow trench to reload.
pa in pursuit, but were recalled by a shout from their leader Wi Koka, and firing began again. Heni fired several more shots. By this time an almost choking pall of gunpowder smoke was over the pa, and a small drizzly rain began to fall; it seemed dusk though it was only half-past four or so in the afternoon.
Heni was in the firing trench when she heard an English voice behind her calling feebly: “Water—give me water!” She turned and saw a wounded officer lying there; near him were some soldiers in like distress. She remembered that there was some water in rear of the trench where an earth-oven had been made to cook the breakfast that the warriors never had an opportunity of eating, for a cannon-shot had sent potatoes and all flying. She slung her gun over her shoulder by its strap and jumped out of the trench.
“Where are you going?” called the young woman's brother.
“The wounded men are calling for water,” said Heni. “I must obey the call.”
Not a word more said the brother. He stood with his gun-butt planted on the ground, his hands gripping the muzzle; he watched his sister intently while she ran to fetch the water.
Heni went a few yards in rear of the trench. As the fence in front was almost demolished she must have been fully exposed to the enemy's view. There was an old iron nail-can full of water which had been brought from the swamp before the battle began. She had to spill about half of it before she could conveniently carry it. She
The young woman dropped down by her dying foeman's side, and took his head on her knees. “Here is water,” she said, in English.
Tipping the can, she poured some of the water into her cupped hand, which she held close to the officer's lips so that he could drink. Eagerly he swallowed; he said “God bless you!” and drank again from her hand.
Leaving the colonel, Heni went to the other wounded soldiers, lifted them up so that they could drink, and gave them water one by one in the same way. Then, placing the nail-can so that it would not spill, she ran back to the trench, reloaded her gun and stood ready with her comrades to meet the expected second assault, which never came.
∗ ∗ ∗
That night the Koheriki party abandoned the battered pa and took to the swamp below, into which the British fired every now and again. Heni, before leaving, gave the soldiers some more water and left the can with a little water in it by the officer's side. He was still alive when the British entered the pa next morning; he died in the military hospital.
The Ngai-te-Rangi had already evacuated their dugouts when the Koheriki left; they were still ready to fight but their ammunition was exhausted. They realised that they would be attacked in overwhelming force next day. All told the defenders of Puke-hinahina lost about
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The chivalrous fighting of Ngai-te-Rangi and their allies in the cannon-battered pa knew anything of the code of fighting drawn up by the chiefs at Poteriwhi some days before the battle. The Koheriki only came in from the bush the evening before the fight. Heni, in succouring the wounded, simply obeyed her own womanly dictates of humanity. She fought gallantly on the Government side in the years following the
The Defence of Turuturu-Mokai Redoubt
The “Rorke's Drift” of New Zealand
“HALT! Who goes there?”
The sentry's sharp challenge was followed by a rifle shot. He had seen the fern moving and fired at what he felt sure was a crouching Maori.
The instant reply was a thundering volley from the darkness. The gun flashes stabbed the night and by their sudden light the sentry saw for a moment wild figures leap from the cover of the bushes and rush towards him.
“Stand to your arms, men!” the sentinel yelled, as he ran for the Redoubt, with a crowd of Hauhaus racing behind him. He had been wounded in the shoulder by one of the first Maori bullets. But the foremost swift runners of the war-party cut him off from the entrance and he turned and ran down hill towards the foggy stream that curved about the base of the redoubt hill.
There were two sentries on duty that gloomy bleak morning of July 12th, 1868, outside the little Turuturumokai Redoubt. They had come on watch a few minutes before, when the posts were relieved at five o'clock. Garrett Lacey, an ex-private in the 57th Regiment, was the Armed Constabulary sentry who had challenged and fired. The other was a young Military Settler,
Yelling, shooting, flashing long-handled tomahawks, the bush warriors charged on the so suddenly roused defenders. It was a desperate surprise attack, delivered an hour before daylight. The blaze of battle lit up the ramparted post, the low earth walls—fatally low—and the bell-tents of the garrison. Shaggy-headed figures leaped like demons at the open gateway, jostled each other on the slippery plank, fired their guns into the tents and the thatched storehouse. They charged hard on the bare heels and flying shirt of the garrison commander, Captain Ross, whose raupo-thatched hut stood a chain outside the redoubt. He was up at the first shot, and snatching sword and revolver in a moment, raced for the fort entrance and reached it a moment ahead of his foes. The gateway was screened by a low parapet just inside the entrance.
“Who'll hold the gate with me?” the Captain shouted.
“I'll make one, sir,” said a tall whiskered fellow clad in grey shirt and ammunition belt. He was
“All right, Gill,” said Captain Ross. “Any more?”
Four men ran forward with their rifles. Soon three of them were shot down. The Maoris at first concentrated their attack on that gallantly defended entrance, desperately intent on carrying the redoubt by force of numbers.
Captain Ross headed the defence, firing revolver shot after shot and then using his sword. But an athletic naked bushman bounded in and shot him down, and snatching a tomahawk from his belt, slashed open his breast. He thrust in his hand and tore out the still beating heart, and with a fearful yell dashed out again, holding high his dripping trophy. Another warrior charged in and tomahawked one of the riflemen. This defender, William Gaynor, was in the act of firing over the low parapet that screened the gateway when he was killed. He slid down, turning round as he fell, and remained there, and there he was found when daylight came, sitting as if asleep, his back against the parapet, his rifle resting in the hollow of his arm.
The Redoubt, only about 20 yards each way, had two rounded flanking bastions, at diagonally opposite angles. In these angles most of the defenders took post after the first few minutes of the fight. There they went at it, firing away for their lives whenever they could get a target. There were no loopholes in the badly-built parapet; and the defenders had to expose their heads whenever they fired. One after another the whites were shot down, until most of the garrison were casualties; the party numbered only twenty-two, against about seventy Maoris. The firing was at very close range; the trench was full of Maoris, and only two or three yards separated the defenders from their enemies, striving desperately to swarm in over the walls. Some of the Hauhaus plied their tomahawks on the parapet, trying to undermine it. Two or three of the defenders, firing from the north-west angle, kept the gateway clear after the first attack.
Both sides were yelling madly at each other, cursing. “Come on! Come on, you bloody Hauhaus!” some of the Constabulary men shouted. “Come out! Come out!” the young Hauhaus replied, in English. Then were heard through the smoke and fury of the fight the high exhortations of their chiefs Haowhenua and Nuku: “Puhia, puhia! Patua, patua!” (“Fire away, fire away! Kill them, kill them!”)
The smoky battle scene was lit up now by the flames of the thatched buildings outside, set on fire by the attackers.
The war rites of old Maoridom were revived. The canteen-keeper, a man named Lennon, was the first pakeha killed. He was tomahawked while running from his canteen, a raupo-reed hut, to the Redoubt. In the midst of the fighting, the yelling and shooting and the crackling of the burning huts, the ancient ceremony of the whangai-hau was performed, the offering of a foeman's heart to the gods of battle. Tihirua, a young warrior, was the war-priest. The chief priest of all, the Hauhau general,
Taking a match from his leather pouch, Tihirua struck it and held the small flame under the heart until the flesh was slightly singed and began to smoke. Then crying loudly, “Kei au a Tu!” (meaning that the war-god
So went on the combat, rifle and carbine against double-barrel gun and tomahawk. The defenders cast many a quick anxious glance towards Waihi, the military headquarters only three miles away. Surely the firing had been heard there, and the gun-flashes and the burning whares must have been seen. Would relief never come? The Maoris could be heard chopping and digging away in the ditch. Once the parapet gave way anywhere, the enemy would be in and the slaughter of all and the capture of the Redoubt and the arms and ammunition would be certain. It was inexplicably long in coming, that help from Waihi; it was long after daylight before
Meanwhile, in the two hours' battle, man after man went down. Out of twenty-two, ten were dead or mortally wounded. Only six men remained unwounded; all the rest were casualties. (Garrett Lacey, the veteran Irish soldier who was wounded on sentry, is included in the defenders; he did his duty although he had to escape to Waihi.)
Every survivor of such a fray has a different story to tell, for every man fights for his own hand. I heard the narrative of Turuturu-mokai from three survivors, many years after that red morning of 1868, and each one had his own bloody experience branded on his memory. Two of those were men who had suffered wounds. One, George Tuffin, of the Armed Constabulary, received five wounds; he was out of action early
From another, John G. Beamish, of Patea, I heard on the scene of the battle—we explored the grassy site of the old Redoubt and traced out the lines in the uneven turf—a description of the defence dramatic and thrilling in the picture it brought before me, yet quietly, soberly told by that good old settler from far-away County Cork. There were two Beamish brothers, who had only joined the A.C. Force a few months before the fight. John was severely wounded; Alexander, his younger brother, was mortally wounded, and before he died he told his brother that he believed it was a white man who shot him as he looked over the parapet to take aim. This pakeha would have been a fellow named
Yet another survivor,
“The Turuturu-mokai Redoubt, which had been built in 1866 by a company of the 18th Royal Irish, was in bad repair when we began to occupy it in 1868,” he said. “It had been used by a settler, Captain Morrison, as a yard for his sheep. The parapets were not high, not more than four or five feet on the inside, and then there were no loopholes. The ditch which surrounded it was about six feet deep, quite enough to stop a war party temporarily. We set to work to put it in order, but had not properly repaired it when we were attacked. We improved it after the fight; the Constabulary had learned their lesson. We made a drawbridge we could haul up, and also made loopholes in the parapet with timber; these loopholes we plugged up with fern in the daytime to make the rampart look like a solid wall. Fern was generally used between the layers of earth in the building up of these defensive works. We could pull out these plugs from the inside at night. There was a plank walk running along the inner side of the parapet, a fire-step or banquette, but it was not quite finished when we were attacked, and it was so wet and slippery that I had asked the captain to let us do sentry duty outside.
“I was armed that morning of the fight with a long Enfield rifle and fixed bayonet, and carried 80 rounds of ball cartridge in the big pouch at my hip, besides 20 rounds loose in a pouch in front. The Enfield was a good straight-shooter; it would kill a man at a mile.
“I was wearing a Glengarry cap—I had no uniform, as I was a volunteer settler then. A man fired at me over the parapet at such close range that the explosion blew my cap off, and sent me down half-stunned in a sitting position. Now we heard some of the Maoris in the ditch cutting away at the parapet with their long-handled tomahawks, in an attempt to undermine it. We shouted out from time to time, ‘The troopers are coming!’ but the Maoris only laughed fiendishly, and continued their chopping and digging. It was well after daylight before help arrived, from Waihi Redoubt, just in time to save the remnant of the garrison from the tomahawk.”
There were deeds of desperate valour there, and there was a shameful flight. Three men jumped the rear parapet soon after the attack began and ran down the slope into the darkness, making for the opposite side of the stream that flowed in a broad curve around the battle-hill, and for Waihi Redoubt. Their names were Wilkie, Burrowes and Cobb. When they first cried out that they were going to “make a bolt for it,”
By contrast to these recreants there was the pluck of
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A wintry dawn, daylight slowly spread over the dismal landscape and the scene of fire and bloodshed. Those who could shoulder rifle or carbine were still firing away in that beleaguered Redoubt. Suddenly the Maoris ceased firing at a shout from one of their look-outs. The troops were coming from Waihi. As the Hauhaus retired hastily to the edge of the bush the few unwounded men ran out of the Redoubt and gave them the last shots. And then the lads in blue, sixty of them (No. 5 Division, A.C.) came up at the double, with fixed bayonets. “Why didn't you come before?” and “Where are the troopers?” Had the thirty mounted Constabulary at Waihi been sent out the place would have been relieved earlier, and some lives would have been saved.
The interior of the work was a dreadful scene. Dead and wounded men, two of the dead mutilated with the tomahawk, lay about the place. Two dead
mawé of the battlefield, a sacred trophy and votive offering.
But the little garrison held the fort, and prevented the Hauhaus obtaining the arms and ammunition they needed. The gallant defence has been compared with that desperate affair, the defence of the Rorke's Drift in the Zulu War. The forces engaged here were of far smaller dimensions, nevertheless Turuturu-mokai held something of the dramatic incidents and all the high valour that the defenders of Rorke's Drift displayed against enormous odds. Everyone of those survivors of Turuturu-mokai deserved a special mark of honour. It was considered that
Most of the defenders of the Redoubt were Irishmen. Several were veterans of British regiments who had taken their discharge in the Colony and joined the
The attacking party numbered about seventy picked men, commanded by the chief Haowhenua. They had been chosen by taiaha, which was supposed to be influenced by the breath of the war-deity Uenuku, and they were farewelled with a poi dance by the women of the bush tribes gathered in the stockade. It must be remembered that the Maoris were fighting for the re-possession of their tribal lands, taken from them by force of arms and declared to be confiscated. They were justified therefore in attempting to clear the invaders out of the country. Turuturu-mokai was selected for the first surprise attack because it was an isolated post and not strongly entrenched. The garrison commander was strangely unobservant, or very trustful of the Maoris, whose spies were openly friendly with the Constabulary and military settlers, and came in frequently selling potatoes and fruit.
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The site of this Redoubt is now a tapu spot, a national reserve vested in the Hawera municipal body. It is near the crown of a hill above the Tawhiti stream, about a mile and a half from the town of Hawera. Near the sacred scene of the combat are the ruined earthworks of the massive ancient Maori pa, a stronghold and battleground of the cannibal era. The great entrenchment, with its high, broad parapets, was the work of the Ngati-Tupaea tribe three centuries ago.
pa embodies a memory of the warriors of old. It means the short pointed stakes on which the dried heads of the principal men killed in a battle were set in ceremonial display. After the capture of the fortress by the enemies of Ngati-Tupaea, the bodies of the chiefs were decapitated and the tattooed heads preserved by being smoked over a fire of green wood, and were then placed on the turuturu before the conquerors, whose orators paced to and fro, addressing their victims as if they were still in life, taunting them, and proudly describing the incidents of the battle.
Brown Skin and White
A Tale of the West Coast Frontier
“TAKE care, Pirita, O-cord-that-binds-my heart,” the Maori girl was saying, earnestly and lovingly, as she tightly held the white man's hand. “Some night you will be surprised by the Hauhau murderers, those man-eaters from Oika! Do not ask how I know, but laugh not at my warning. The Hauhaus will be down upon you and your companions when you least expect them. Therefore, Pirita, keep watch! ‘Tis just before dawn that they will come! And I shall send you word, or bring it to you myself, should there be talk of a raid. Take care, Pirita!”
The tawny-bearded young settler smiled as the young girl dropped his hand. He patted her soft, brown cheek, and said: “You're a good little girl, Paré, but don't worry about us; we're all right. My head isn't going to ornament a Hauhau war-fence just yet.”
Paré sighed. She took up her pakeha's strong, rough hand again and stroked it affectionately. She was a child of the bush, and the Maori girl does not mask her sentiment. “Pirita” was strong and fearless, and he was kind to her. She lived in her mother's home in Parikama Pa, the large village of the Waitotara friendly Maoris, on the south side of the river, half-a-mile away, and she found many opportunities of visiting her pakeha Pritchard, who lived in a comfortable nikau-thatched whare with his partner Langley, a young colonial stock-raiser, as adventurous and self-reliant as himself. Langley, too, had a brown-girl sweetheart, in
koroi berries, and that delicacy, the white and juicy tawhara fruit.
Those days of Sixty-eight were pleasant enough on the Waitotara, in spite of the wars and rumours of wars. It was an independent, untamed life, and Pritchard and Langley were care-free fellows who did not believe in going out of the way to meet trouble. The West Coast had been war-troubled for the last seven or eight years, but so far the rebel Maoris had not carried gun and tomahawk as far south as the Waitotara. To the northward the Taranaki forests were the scenes of fight after fight, and skirmish after skirmish, and ambuscade and murder without end. Less than three months before, tapu war-party, had been seen at Oika, on the
Still, the young settlers said, “Taihoa! We'll wait and see,” and went on with their usual duties. They grazed cattle and ran sheep on both sides of the Waitotara, on a large block of land they had leased from the friendlies of Parikama. They would be rich some day, but there
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But the blow fell, and that one night, when, as the Maori girl had predicted, it was least expected. The Tekau-ma-Rua, like other Maori war-parties, usually chose the hour just before the dawn for their surprises, the time when man slept soundest.
Silently and stealthily as Red Indians on the scalping trail, a Hauhau kokiri, a picked war-party of sixty men, loped out from Oika Pa in the black night and crossed the Waitotara in their quietly-paddled canoes. They surrounded the Parikama Pa, awakened the inhabitants, and depriving them of their arms, grimly requested them to come and see the two pakehas tomahawked and eaten. Marching over the ferny hills they silently surrounded the white men's hut while it still wanted nearly two hours to the dawn of day. Meanwhile a smaller war-party had been despatched downstream to Ihupuku to secure two or three other pakehas who dwelt there in a lone whare close to the riverside.
So quietly did the Hauhaus invest the hut where the two men lay sleeping, unconscious of their danger, that no bark of dog or sound of foot gave the alarm. The Maoris squatted there silently awhile; then one of their chiefs knocked imperatively on the door and ordered the inmates to come outside.
The white men jumped up and ran to the little window. In the moonlight they saw a crowd of wild-looking fellows, some armed with long-handled tomahawks— frightfully effective weapons in a hand-to-hand engagement—and the rest with guns. At the sight of the pakeha faces they set up a great yell. The chief who had ordered them outside said, “Put on your clothes, pakehas! Be quick!”
Pritchard and Langley had not the slightest doubt but that their last day had come. “This settles us!” said one of them; “It's come at last! Well, we may as well be decently dressed, anyhow. Where's my collar?” And the two of them, lighting a candle, dressed themselves fully, and even put on their paper collars, articles de luxe that did not trouble the pioneer much unless he was bound to a wedding or a funeral. And this did not look much like a wedding. They had a rifle and a double-barrel gun in the house, but defence was impossible.
Their dressing completed, the two white men, putting on as brave a face as they could, walked out of their hut. A couple of Hauhaus, gripping long-handled tomahawks, bounded up, one on either side, and marched the captives out through a double line of armed men, ferocious in their black and red war-paint, smeared on brow and cheeks, and their shaggy, unkempt heads of hair. At the end of this lane of Hauhaus there was a ring formed by the rest of the people. The whole of the Parikama Pa inhabitants were there, amongst them the pakehas' old friends and acquaintances. Armed men formed the inner part of the ring, and a fire which had been kindled in the middle of the circle threw its dancing light on their fierce, cruel faces, and their glittering
When the white men reached the ring they were ordered to sit down. Their tomahawk-armed guards sat ominously near, one on each side.
Out from the crowd jumped a savage figure, a big man, tattooed of face and body, very nearly naked, a tomahawk in hand. He was an old man, white-haired, but as active as any young athlete, for he bounded from side to side with incredible swiftness and energy, smacking his naked thigh with his disengaged hand as he did so. He came to a sudden stop in front of the prisoners, and ripped out a ferocious speech, quivering his hatchet and slapping his tattooed breech between the sentences.
“Now we have them!” he was saying; “Now we have them! This is what we have waited for since Te-Ngutu-o-te-Manu! Once more shall I taste the flesh of man, the real food of the warrior. You young men listen to me! You are not as your fathers were; you have not the same courage, the same determination. You are becoming soft. Why is this? I shall tell you. It is because you no longer eat the flesh of man, the sweet flesh, the white flesh! That is the meat that makes the heart as hard as stone, that ever keeps alive the desire for war. If you would conquer in this war and drive the pakeha out of the land you must eat those whom you capture. I have eaten Maori and pakeha. You, my sons, must also eat
pakeha, that you may be brave! Patua, kainga! Patua, kainga!—Kill them, eat them!”
The old cannibal ceased abruptly, and squatted down again, and two other speakers followed, with similar actions and virulent orations. “We have two pakehas,” they said, “but there are others down at Ihupuku. Let us get them all!”
“They will be here presently,” said one of the Tekau-ma-rua. “Kereopa will have his grip on them by now!”
A young Maori girl, gliding through the crowd, pressed into the front of the ring. It was Paré. She cried, while the tears ran down her cheeks, “Do not slay the white men! Save them! They have done you no harm; they have not fought against you!”
There was silence for a while. The girl sat down; drew her shawl over her black head, and quietly wept.
A man of milder speech than the orators who had preceded him, rose to his feet and addressed the people, suggesting that the prisoners should not be killed, but should be kept as slaves and forced to fight on the Hauhau side.
A sharp and sudden shower of rain came down, in a cold and heavy squall, sending the crowd scampering for shelter. The speeches were cut short. The white men were each bound hand and foot with ropes of flax and thrown on the ground. Their guards ran into the whare, where a fire was now blazing in the wide sod chimney-place. There was not much chance of their prisoners escaping.
Wet to the skin and chilled through and through, the two white men lay there, miserably waiting for the tomahawk.
A soft voice breathed in Pritchard's ear. He turned his head in wonder, and a nose was pressed to his and a hand caressed his cheek. “Aue! Aue!” sadly breathed the voice, and hot tears fell on his face. “It is I; it is Paré!” said the girl, and again she pressed her nose to the white man's in the greeting of the hongi, and wept over him. And over the helpless form of his comrade he saw another shawled figure bending. The two faithful girls of Parikama had crept out from the hut to tangi over them and succour them.
“Be quiet!” Paré whispered. “Lie still and utter not a sound. You shall not die. I have a knife; I shall cut you loose and I shall leave the knife with you. But don't attempt to get up yet. Lie still and watch your chance!”
The white man silently blessed the loving heart of the Maori girl as he felt his bonds relax. His wrists and legs were free. He felt for the knife and slowly and cautiously reached out and cut Langley free. He looked round for the two girls, but they had vanished.
For two or three minutes the two white men lay there side by side, waiting till the numbness should have left their limbs. Just then, in the distance, they heard the distant sound of voices on the river, Maoris yelling war-songs. It was the party which had been despatched to Ihupuku, returning without the pakeha “fish,” but well primed with pakeha grog.
“Let's bolt for it now! They'll be out upon us!” whispered Pritchard to his mate; and leaping up the two men ran for their lives. Only just in time, too, for they had barely disappeared in the wet blackness of the
whare; they had heard the chants of the returning canoe-men.
There was vociferous anger and confusion when the escape of the prisoners was discovered, but presently some swift runners were on the fugitives' trail. They knew that the white men would make in the direction of the Weraroa redoubt, and they probably would have recaptured them had it not been for another curious interposition of white man's luck. As Pritchard and Langley raced along, parallel with the river's course, but making for the high ground, they came to a landslip extending from the hill-top down to the flat which bounded the river. Down this landslip they slid, making as little noise as possible, and at its foot they crouched in the bushes. As they expected, their pursuers kept along the top of the slip, and in a little while they heard them returning. Then the two escapees resumed their painful journey, crawling along on hands and knees at first, until they considered they were well out of sight, then travelling on as rapidly as the dark and the rough ground and the thickness of the fern and scrub would allow. When it was light enough to see they were well out of sight from the river or the Hauhau camp; but so roundabout a course did they have to steer that it was not until well on in the afternoon that they breasted the Weraroa hill, and saw before them the hospitable redoubt.
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Those great boasting words about the eating of white man's flesh were no idle ones, for only a week after this episode the Hauhaus defeated
Pritchard's and Langley's bones have been dust this many a year, and their sweethearts of long ago, too, have gone the way “golden lads and girls all must.” That midnight raid was the end of the sweethearting, for Pareé and Pikirakau, sorely weeping, were taken away across the border river and given in bush-marriage to two Hauhau braves. The thatched whare and the low-bending karaka where Paré used to play plaintive little ruriruri airs on the jews'-harp to her pakeha those summer days of ’Sixty-eight have disappeared long, long since; and the peaceful cow-farmer of Waitotara fills his milk-cans on the spot where the two despairing men lay in the rain one dim day-dawning, waiting for the tomahawk.
The Midnight Warning
IF you have lived or travelled much in open fern country you will know how the native bracken when trodden down short by stock and lying close to the soil like a great springy carpet, acts as a kind of sounding-board. On a still night, man or beast passing rapidly over this ferny ground can be heard a considerable distance off, just as in the Thermal Country, where the pumice soil is particularly susceptible to sound-waves, and is set all a-quiver by movements on its surface that would have little effect on more solid ground.
That was why the sound of a runner travelled far through the quiet midnight on the banks of the Waitotara, and reached the half-asleep ears of a white man lying in his bunk in a thatched hut. A brown figure sped down the long fern slopes on the northern side of that dark, winding stream, running as if for life. Issues of life and death did, indeed, hang upon his fleetness. He was a Maori, a short, solidly-set fellow, barefooted and bareheaded. He ran hard, and the regular pat-pat-pat of his feet sounded like the beat of some machine that softly-breathing night. As he neared the valley through which the Waitotara crept in murky twistings, he stopped for a moment and looked back and listened. In the distance lights glittered from a native village, and the sound of angry voices came down on the night air, and then a sudden thud-thud, as from a body of running men.
The Maori instantly leaped on again and bounded down the slope towards the hut, a whare of raupo
“Who the devil's that?” he called, in an alarmed, angry voice.
“Haere! Haere!” cried the Maori. “Up and run for your lives. Run now, quick, or you'll be tomahawked! The Hauhaus are just behind me! No time for your clothes—run, run!
There were four other white men in the house sleeping on bunks ranged along the walls in a double row, ship fashion. They were out of their blankets in an instant, and out they rushed, clad only in their shirts, snatching up what garments they could as they ran.
The dogs were barking furiously, and just over the hill-brow the first of the runners appeared. The white men, followed by the Maori—who had his blanket under his arm—ran round the side of the hut and across a patch of ploughed ground at the back, making for a belt of bush that rose like a black wall ahead of them, indicating the Waitotara's banks. They heard the yells of the Hauhaus behind them, and for a few dreadful moments thought they were seen and that all was over with them. But it was the shouts the savages raised when they caught sight of the settlers' whare. They thundered down the hill, a solid body of them, forty or fifty strong, their tomahawks and guns glittering in the moonlight, and into the thatched hut they charged, just as the Maori runner had rushed a minute or two before them.
“Quick, quick, get into the bush!” said the man who had saved the sleepers. “No time to look behind!”
There was a lagoon in front of them, a backwater of the Waitotara, which was flooded by recent rains. Into this and through it the six of them splashed, each of the white man expecting every moment to feel a tomahawk crashing through his skull. Through the reeds they pushed and scrambled, and then the friendly bush received them.
Just before they threw themselves into its gloom a sudden weather change came on. Thunder clouds hid the moon, and a sharp shower of rain fell. This, no doubt, helped to save their lives that night. Into the bush they tore, until in a few moments they had passed through the jungly timber-belt and stood on the banks of the sucking current of the Waitotara. But not all together. The fugitives had separated. The three whose further adventures we will follow crouched on the bank alongside each other—Charles Durie, kainga, keeping away from the settlers' hut, for it was crammed with the loot-hunting Hauhaus.
This Maori, whose midnight run had saved them from the tomahawk, was little Timoti, of Ihupuku, who had crept out through a hole in the rear wall of the meeting-house when the Hauhau war-party entered and announced
pakehas had to thank in the first place for their escape. Pirimona had been in Wanganui town, where in some mysterious way, known only to the Maoris, rumours had reached him of the projected raid. He rode back to his kainga as hard as his horse would carry him, but the Hauhaus from Oika and Papatupu were in possession. He made a sign to Timoti, as he sat in the meeting-house, and the quick-witted and fleet-legged runner did the rest.
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Durie and Lingard and the lad O'Neill crouched shivering on the muddy banks of the Waitotara. It was a cold night, and they were very scantily clad, just as they had jumped from their bunks, with what garments they could snatch as they ran out—one had a coat, another someone else's trousers. They were scratched and torn and bleeding; and their bare feet were lacerated by the sharp stumps and infernal hooks of the bush-lawyer. They spoke in whispers, wondering by what miracle their lives had been preserved so far. Then Durie remembered that only that day they had got in six months' supplies of provisions from Wanganui, including a keg of rum. No doubt, when Big Kereopa and his painted war party rushed into the whare that keg of rum presented irresistible attractions. At any rate,
whare were two or three double-barrel shotguns, and what use would they be against a horde of well-armed and practised fighting men?
The three of them huddled there on the river-bank, wondering how they could cross the deep and flooded river. Presently they heard voices on the water and the splash of paddles. The Hauhaus had taken to their canoes and were paddling up and down hunting for signs of the pakehas on the bank. Durie and his companions crept beneath a great bush of prickly lawyer, and there they remained through that horrible night.
Daylight came and found them there, half-dead with the cold and the damp. They dragged their stiffened limbs to the river-side, and peered out for traces of the Hauhaus. The raiders, however, had paddled off home up the river. Cautiously emerging from the bush, the three fugitives anxiously scoured the foggy river-side and the ferny hills for signs of their pursuers. They did not dare to venture back to their whare, which, for all they knew, was still in possession of the enemy. They decided to make for the Weraroa Redoubt—a difficult and dangerous enough task, for it lay on the other side of the river, and they had to cross a country now infested by their foes.
On their hands and knees the bruised and bleeding trio crawled over the open ground, fearing every moment to hear a Hauhau shout proclaiming their discovery. In such fashion they crawled across the clearing
Now came the steep Weraroa Hill. The fugitives' feet were so cut and sore that they could scarcely walk. But they reached the top somehow, and there before them was the redoubt, with its parapets and its flag-staff and its friendly smoke—a joyful sight after the toils and dangers of that flight. Lame and exhausted, with their legs and hands and faces blood-covered, they staggered into the camp. And as they reached it the first man they met was their friend Pirimona, who had been on the look-out for them since daylight. He rushed up and warmly shook their hands, and almost embraced them in his delight at seeing them alive. The Hauhaus, he said, had seized him the previous night and prevented him warning them of their impending fate, but he had despatched Timoti, and had heard of his friends' marvellous escape from their hut.
All the Waitotara settlers made the redoubt that morning; all had escaped Hauhau bullet and tomahawk. And now, as soon as they were fed and clothed again, they planned to return to their stations, although the north
A Meal at Paewhenua
“A DANCE will be held in the Paewhenua Hall on (such-and-such a date). Good music. Good floor. Gents, 2/6; Ladies, 1/6 or Basket. Otorohanga Patrons—Metalled road to the door.”
That was a notice the other day in a King Country paper. “Ladies, a basket” is a customary dance-night formula in the outback, and a convenient arrangement it is. Those liberal baskets of home-made dainties outdo anything you can buy for the money in your town shops.
But there was a day before white-collar “gents” and crepe-de-chine ladies foxtrotted on a King Country floor, when a visitor was fortunate if he were given a basket of cold boiled potatoes at this same Paewhenua—fortunate indeed that his precious head was not carried round in the basket by a mob of yelling Hauhaus. The story told me by an old frontier neighbour and friend, the farthest-out settler on the King Country border, came to mind when that social invitation in the Otorohanga “Times” caught my eye.
It was in 1868, when the Old Frontier was still new and raw, and when pioneer settlers anywhere along the Upper Waikato line of demarcation between pakeha and Maori, from Maungatautari to Pirongia, were never quite sure of their Hauhau neighbours across the confiscated boundary. Sometimes the farthest-out farmers went across the Aukati line to trade with Maoris for horses, cattle and pigs, and they were on friendly terms with many of the Kingites. Sometimes there were alarms of impending raids.
One day
Paewhenua was a long ride over narrow tracks, with a succession of deep swamps and many streams to be forded. It was a very tired and hungry settler who rode into the green square between the groups of raupo-thatched houses in the afternoon. He was puzzled and annoyed at the cool nature of his reception. He was met with sulky looks and reticence, strangely different from the vociferous welcome usually given to strangers, even to those whose farms might become the objective of a raid some night. Most of the people appeared to be gathered in the large nikau-thatched meeting-house.
The pakeha called for a boy to come and take his horse, but no one stirred.
“It's always a trump card to tell a Maori you're hungry,” said my old friend, in telling me of this adventure. He said to the people around him: “Well, I've come a long way and I'm tired and hungry. This is not the way the Maori usually treats a visitor.”
This appeal had some effect. A small flax basket of cold boiled potatoes was brought to him by one of the
Long afterwards Kay heard the reason for his strangely inhospitable treatment by Hauauru's tribe. When he rode into Paewhenua that day a most desperate and implacable foe of the pakeha race, Kereopa, the Hauhau leader from the
Kereopa had with him an armed party of his Hauhau disciples from the Urewera Country. They sat in the meeting-house with their double-barrel guns by their sides, their tomahawks in their belts. The cannibal prophet was addressing the people of Paewhenua when Kay rode into the village.
A Maori of the Urewera tribe, one of Kereopa's men, who had observed the white man's arrival, went in to his chief and said: “A pakeha has come. What shall we do with him?”
The grey old ruffian was speaking to the assemblage of Ngati-Matakore and their kin from his place in the quarters usually given to guests of importance, the place on the matted floor near the sliding window of the house. He ceased his passionate exhortation and looked
Captain John Fane Hamilton (H.M.S ESK).
Killed in the assault on the The New Zealand Cross.
This Cross is the rarest military decoration in the British Empire. Only twenty-three awards were made. In order of merit it is equal to the Victoria Cross and next in precedence. The New Zealand Cross was instituted in 1868 as a special decoration for the Colonial forces for deeds of exceptional valour. Unlike the Victoria Cross, it is of silver and gold. The first award made was that to Trooper W. Lingard, of Bryce's Kai-iwi Cavalry, Wanganui, in 1869, for an act of great gallantry in saving a comrade under heavy fire at Tauranga-ika Stockade.pakeha, who had just dismounted, and was waiting for someone to put his horse in a paddock while he transacted his business with the tribe.
Kereopa's eyes glittered, his hand went to the big horse-pistol he wore thrust through his flax belt. “A pakeha!” he exclaimed. “An omen, an omen! A pakeha—a sacrifice! He is the flying-fish that crosses the bow of the war-canoe!”
With those words that boded a sudden end for that unsuspecting frontiersman, Kereopa walked towards the door of the whare. But his way was instantly barred by a woman.
This was Tuhipo, the wife of old warrior Hauauru. She was a tall, handsome woman, much younger than her husband. With a determined tilt to her tattooed chin, she bade the Eye-Eater return to his place. “You shall not pass!” she said. “That man is our pakeha. You shall not touch him. It would be treachery to kill him. Go and sit down!”
Hauauru, a splendid old chieftain with a face deeply engraved by the moko-artist's chisel and pigmented so closely that it looked quite black, sat there silent but ready to take quick and fiery action. He smiled grimly at his wife's peremptory words. It would be sufficient to leave it to her.
Kereopa made to push past Tuhipo. “Sit down,” she cried angrily. “You shall not leave the house. The pakeha is mine, I say!”
The Hauhau leader could have forced his way out perhaps, but only at the risk of offending the Ngati-Matakore and of alienating any sympathy they and
Not a step would the chieftainess move from the doorway. Kereopa stood there angrily demanding that she let him pass. By this time his men were angry too, and hands were laid on guns and tomahawks. But Tuhipo stood with her arms outstretched across the entrance, and there she remained until the white man had ridden away, unconscious of his narrow escape from the Hauhau tomahawks.
It was many days before mana upon which none might trample saved the border farmer's life that day.
Kereopa did not trouble the King Country long. He and his murderous band soon rode off to the Patetere country and the forest of the Urewera, there to be chevied again by the tireless pakeha farming Paewhenua has long forgotten those dangerous days of Hauhau plottings; indeed, I do not suppose anyone there to-day has ever heard of Kereopa Kai-Whatu's recruiting visit or of Tuhipo's dauntless barring of the door in the Matakore council hall.
The Last Cartridge
A Memory of the Whakatane Valley
PLAIN and ranges quivered in the heat of summer when I heard this story of Heketoro's escape and his wonderful leap down the scarps of Cabbage-Tree Hill. The steep outline of the little mountain trembled in the sun dazzle; the trees on its sides and top, like pencils with fuzzy heads, danced in the midday shimmer. The Maori calls that heat-wave dance the haka of Hine-Raumati. Two shining rivers drew a half-loop about the farms at the hill foot; the Waimana, liberated from its mountain gorge, made junction with the Whakatane; just to the north was the township of Taneatua. To the south the Urewera mountains rose in a long notched wall, blue, enchanted, beckoning. Puketi is the Maori name of this Cabbage-Tree Hill. It is boldly cut, somewhat like Auckland's volcanic cone Mount Wellington in shape, but much smaller, and with a more flattened top. Its carved slopes and terraces are softened with fern and flax and tupakihi bushes. It was the ancient Tini-o-Toi who populated these valleys, and scarped and trenched these hill-castles. To-day their descendants, the Tuhoe or Urewera, live in the upper part of the valley. In the lower parts, between Taneatua and Whakatane Harbour, the Ngati-Pukeko tribe have their villages and farms. The two tribes were opposed in politics. The Urewera were all Hauhaus.
One morning towards the end of 1868 three Maoris of the fortified village of Rauporoa, on the west bank of
The three horse hunters gathered up some strays from the levels and worked them up toward Puketi. A winding track led steeply to the flat summit of the hill; by this track they drove the small mob up to the top and there, blocking the only easy exit, they caught the horses they wanted and tethered them to the bushes. As there was no water there, they descended to the bank of the Waimana River, where they cooked and ate their evening meal, then climbed the hill again to spend the night there.
The horse hunters' doings had not escaped the sharp eyes of the Maoris living in the villages south of the river junction. These Hauhaus, of the Urewera, were the owners of the upper valley, and Puketi was just within their territory. Heketoro, in strict fact, was a trespasser; but he relied on his Tuhoe companion Te Whakaunua's presence, and the horses belonged to Ngati-Pukeko. The Hauhaus quickly prepared to spring
pakeha Government. A party of some forty men quickly armed, and, led by the chief Rapaira, of Ruatoki, they marched on Puketi; they could see the horsemen moving about the summit.
In the dusk of the evening the Urewera stealthily surrounded the hill pa. Rapaira so disposed his men as to catch the horse hunters in a trap. Peering out from the bushes of the overgrown trenches in which they had taken cover, the Hauhaus saw their intended victims ascending the hill, and felt certain that the three were within their grasp.
Suddenly the little party disappeared from the view of their foes. The Ruatoki warriors could see nothing more of them, and they were compelled now to wait until morning.
Heketoro and his companions, unsuspicious of danger, had simply descended into one of the large circular ruas or dug-in storehouses for potatoes and kumara, near the summit of the pa, on a terrace just below the topmost scarp. This food pit, with its comparatively small mouth and hollowed-out interior, was screened by the fern and made a dry and sufficiently roomy shelter for the three tired men.
In the early morning Heketoro was aroused from sleep by some earth falling on him from above. Instantly all his senses were on the alert. He could dimly see in the first faint light of dawn dark faces staring down into the gloom of the rua. Then he heard a voice:
“Who are you down there?”
Heketoro silently grasped his gun in his left hand and felt in his pocket with his right for a percussion cap. He remembered that his gun was loaded. Cautiously he put the cap on the nipple.
It was Te Whakaunua who answered the question. “It is I, Te Whakaunua,” he said.
“Come up out of that,” was the command. Heketoro knew what that meant. His Urewera companion would be saved; he and the lad from Rauporoa would be sacrificed.
Te Whakaunua was pulled out of the potato pit by the Ruatoki men, and his two comrades followed. They found themselves surrounded by a savage band. Eyes glared hatred, murder; weapons were raised. A few moments more would have seen the end of Heketoro.
But the old warrior's quick eyes had seen a possible way of escape. On the north side of the pa there was a narrow opening which was not filled by a foeman. It was the way to the edge of the terrace, where there was a quick drop down to the lower slopes and the bank of the Waimana River. Te Whakaunua was safe, and therefore Heketoro had only himself and his young kinsman to consider.
“To the river!” he whispered. In a flash the lad had darted through the cordon and down over the steep escarpment into the brushwood. Heketoro was close behind him, but at the sudden fall of the bank he whirled about, dropped on one knee, and fired at the men bounding after him. The leader was the chief Rapaira. Heketoro's bullet penetrated his stomach and entered the chest of the man immediately behind him, mortally wounding both.
In a lightning bound the old hero was over the edge of the scarped hill, his gun held high as he leaped. It was a drop of more than twenty feet, but Heketoro landed lightly as a deer in the fern that broke his fall. Another astonishing bound and he was far down the hillside.
A thunder of shots followed him. Bullets sang over his head. He went on towards the river, leaping from side to side to escape a hit. The young fellow was waiting for him at the river bank.
They dashed in together. The water was shallow but running swiftly. Some of the pursuers were close, and they forded the river under a hot fire.
A bullet, one of those smashing round balls weighing an ounce or more, broke one of the lad's arms. Next moment Heketoro was shot in the thigh. A bad wound, bleeding greatly. But he reloaded and capped his gun while he was wading the water. In scrambling out and up the ferny bank he lost his only spare cartridge. The solitary charge left was that in his gun.
Taking cover in the bushes on the bank, Heketoro coolly waited until his pursuers were close enough to give him a target he could not miss. The foremost man was more than half-way across the river when the old man fired. The Hauhau fell, shot through the chest. He disappeared in the swirling water. That last shot stopped the pursuit. The enemy lost sight of the plucky two, and feared an ambush.
The pair now separated. The lad, suffering his agony in silence, was told to travel as quickly as he could down the valley to Rauporoa and give the alarm. Heketoro, binding up his wound with a piece of his shirt,
In this way he came at last to the waterside village at Rauporoa, just as a party of armed men was about to set out to his rescue. His young comrade had struggled in only a little while before him.
A half-dead but happy warrior was old Heketoro. A bag of three, with two bullets, was a satisfying morning's work. The horses?—let the Hauhaus have them and welcome. Many horses would not wipe out for them the annoying memory of their surprise party that failed on Puketi.
The Defence of the Mill
The Story of a Gallant Frenchman
THERE is a beautiful old place known as Mill Farm on the east side of the Whakatane River, in its lower part where it flows gently between willow-shaded banks. Whakatane town, on the seaside, is a little over three miles away. The Farm is bordered by the main road leading inland to Taneatua and the Urewera Country. It takes its name from the fact that on it there once stood a Maori flour-mill, driven by water-power. The low grassy mounds which indicate the sites of the mill and a small redoubt alongside it can still be seen, if one knows where to look. Probably very few passers-by indeed have ever heard of the place, and so are not likely to notice anything as they speed past in their motor cars. Yet those silent crumbled earthworks have a story of tragedy and heroism of which New Zealanders should not be ignorant.
Te Poronu, as the Maoris call the spot, was the scene of one of the most courageous defences in the history of the wars. The ground where the brave French miller,
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pakeha guests. He had a Maori wife, handsome young Erihapeti (Elizabeth) Manuera, called Peti for short; with them lived Peti's sister Monika, a pretty girl of sixteen or seventeen.
The Ngati-Pukeko brought in their wheat, by sledge and bullock-cart and canoe, and Te Poronu was a happy scene of industry and contentment. But not for long. The age of peace was rudely broken by a Hauhau invasion, early in 1869.
Te Kooti and his band of warriors from the East Coast, reinforced by many Urewera men from Ruatoki and the Upper Whakatane, suddenly descended on the plains and laid siege to the wheat-growers' large entrenched pa at Rauporoa. This tribal refuge and rallying-place stood on the west bank of the Whakatane, not more than a third of a mile from the mill, but on the opposite side of the river. There was a small earthwork redoubt alongside the mill; this had been built the previous year as a means of protection in the event of any raid by the mountain tribes, but it was not garrisoned in 1869.
While Te Kooti and his main body surrounded Rauporoa Pa, a company of a hundred men of the rebel force was detailed to attack the mill and redoubt, and soon the continual bang and crackle of gun-fire resounded across the plain. It happened that there were only seven or eight people, including the two women, in Te Poronu when the attack began, and the defence of the mill devolved chiefly on the stout-hearted French-man. Guerren sent his wife and sister-in-law into the redoubt, while he remained alone in the mill to hold it against the fierce Hauhau foes.
Jean possessed a good double-barrel gun and plenty of ammunition. When firing began he gave the enemy a taste of his markmanship. He was a very accurate shot, and firing from an upper window of the mill he soon killed or wounded several of the Hauhaus. His shooting was supported from the redoubt by a young man named Tautari and the others. The sisters, Peti and Monika, handed out cartridges and helped to load the guns.
For two days and nights the tiny valiant garrison kept the Hauhaus off. The defence was so well sustained that its raiders imagined there must be a considerable number of men in the place. They dug trenches for shelter from Jean's straight shooting. At last, the Maori scouts ascended the near hills of the range on the eastern side of the valley, a few hundred yards from the mill, and there, being able to see down into the redoubt, they discovered the weakness of the garrison. They reported this to the main body and the attack was pressed home.
The Hauhaus, working up in skirmishing order, got close to the walls, and while some tried to set fire to a large raupo hut which occupied the middle of the redoubt others endeavoured to scale the parapet. Jean, still fighting splendidly, had now been forced to abandon the mill. Firing right and left, he dashed into the redoubt to join his people. Now he defended the gateway, a narrow opening on the east side of the work. At last a Hauhau bullet pierced his brain and he fell dead across the entrance. Before he dropped, he killed the leader of the war-party, Wirihana Koikoi, and another chief, Paora Taituha.
The Hauhaus swarmed over the earth walls and through the gateway to tomahawk the defenders. The only two men jumped the rear parapet when the final rush was made and ran across the flat to the Whakatane River and Rauporoa.
A few moments after Jean was killed, his wife Peti and Monika were surrounded. Peti flung herself down, her long hair flowing in disorder about her, and clasped the knees of the man who had seized her, a chief named
After the sacking and burning of the mill,
(It was buried in the redoubt.) He obeyed the savage command. Down his tomahawk flashed and poor little Monika died a cruel but mercifully quick death. He took the weeping Peti to Tarawera when the Whakatane raid was ended, and she lived there as his wife until her death.
Relief by the Government forces—
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The old people of the plains had not forgotten the name and the brave stand of Jean the Frenchman. They speak of him as Hoani te Wiwi, the native form of “John the Oui-oui.” But to the young generation of Maori, as well as to the pakeha farmer, the story is all but unknown. No memorial stands at Te Poronu; those shapeless mounds where cattle graze on the rich grass alone remain to show where a gallant son of France fought and died at the gateway of his post.
The Bugle in the Mountains
An Episode of the First Urewera Campaign
The echoes—still the echoes!
The bugles of the dead
Blowing from spectral ranks an answering cry!
The ghostly roll of immaterial drums
Beating reveille in the camp of dreams!
—“The Call of the Bugles” (Richard Hovey).
FROM peak to peak echoed the bellowings of the sulky war-shell and the wooden trumpet, blown by strong mountain lungs, and from the ridges on the flanks of the bush-girt glen blue columns of signal smoke rose to mingle with the mists of the ranges. They were the note and slogan of battle, those bull-like roarings, for they warned the scattered villages of the Urewera highlanders of an invader's approach. The pukaea and the pu-tatara, those were the mountaineers' war-horns; one was a long trumpet-trombone bound with aka bush-vine; the other was a Triton conch-shell. Down in the narrows of the lower Ruatahuna Valley an armed enemy toiled through the defile, and from all the hill camps of the Urewera the tribesmen gathered to defend their so-far inviolate sanctuary, the heart of the mountain land.
The roarings of the signal-horns were soon succeeded by the crack of advance skirmishers' rifle shots, then frequent heavy volleys, and rapid independent firing that sent continuous reverberations from range to range. The crack and thunder of war increased in volume as
It was the left wing of
Constabulary, young veterans whiskered like gold diggers or bushrangers, came steadily on, carrying one position after another—the river crossing at Te Pari-pari (where gallant young Lieutenant White was shot), the steep wooded range of Hukanui, Te Whenuanui's earthwork fort at the Tahora. Now by mid-day this 8th of May, 1869, the column was in front of its last objective, the parapeted and stockaded pa Orangikawa, at Tatahoata, the centre of the Ruatahuna clearing. Below, in a narrow valley, flowed the Mangaorongo stream, to join the Whakatane. Within rifle range was the village of Mataatua, the ancient capital of this Urewera tribal territory.
The attacking force, in open order, came skirmishing up through Mataatua and worked up to the pa, and the
kaka parrots screeching for miles around. Running, crawling, dodging from tree to tree, the Government men worked round two flanks of the pa. High up, on the opposite side of the creek that rushed along below the lower end of the fort, a Maori watcher shouted instructions and warnings to his friends below. Like a hawk he watched every movement of the A.C. men.
For four hours the fighting went on. Puffs of smoke rose from behind every fern clump and flax bush, every tree and every log, and now and again a Government man dropped to the bullet of an invisible foe.
Captain Travers wore a bright silver badge on the front of his uniform cap. “You'd better take off that badge, old man; it's too good a target for the Maoris,” said a brother officer. Travers thought such a precaution would be unsoldierly. Foolishly he would not accept advice to take shelter like the old campaigners. “A British officer does not take cover,” he said. A few minutes later he fell with a bullet through his brain.
The late afternoon sun flooded the glen of Ruatahuna as the last scattering shots of the Maori defenders were fired, and the Constabulary, with fixed bayonets, rushed the redoubt. They dashed in, only to find it empty. The active Urewera were all clear away in the safe shelter of the bush.
The weary invaders threw off their heavy packs within the parapets, tended their wounded and buried their dead, four of them. They listened to the defiant
The commander of the column, Lieutenant-Colonel St. John, was not at all satisfied with the position. Here he was, in the heart of the enemy country, in a position that might be attacked in the night or early dawn by a great force of Maoris, and he was almost out of ammunition. A tremendous amount had been fired away in the two days' heavy fighting. Some of the men had exhausted all their supply, many had only a single cartridge left. He ordered additional earthworks thrown up, and everything strengthened in case of an attack. This was the day fixed for the junction here with
The golden haze of sunset darkened and deepened; down the ranges the night mists drifted, from every creek rose the fog; already it was gloom in the deeper ravines. The Constabulary, their earthworks strengthened, smoked the pipe of brief peace on the marae of the captured pa. The shouts of the hidden bushmen had died away, though the pu-tatara's doleful moans still came at intervals from the misty forest.
It was quite dark, when suddenly, from the valley, came the thin but clear sound of a bugle. A tiny voice, that bugle—but what excitement it raised! The Government Maoris rushed yelling for their rifles and manned the parapets.
“
The colonel rushed out to the west parapet of Orangikawa, where his Constabulary had gathered under arms. “What the devil's all this row about?” he demanded.
“A bugle sounded just now, sir, away in the bush, down yonder to the west,” said one of his officers. “The Maoris say it must be
“Silence, everyone!” shouted St. John. “Bugler, sound the Officers' Call.”
Every man, pakeha and Maori, was as quiet as death; one might have thought the redoubt bare of life instead of sheltering four hundred men within its walls. The young bugler put his instrument to his lips, then there pealed through the gloom over valley and river and forest the high, clear notes of the martial call. The wild music rang from hill to hill, thrown back from the high ridges of the Ruatahuna, and died in a whisper of melody far up in the mountain gulches.
The camp waited eagerly, scarcely daring to breathe. Was it, indeed,
A minute passed—two minutes. Then came from the dark valley of the Upper Whakatane, in the west, piping clear, the answering sound of a bugle—the Officers' Call again.
“It's Whitmore all right!” said St. John to his group of officers. “
And it was Whitmore. Half an hour later he and his advance party came tramping into camp, led by a captured Maori whom the staff had induced, with a little forcible argument, to guide them to Orangikawa. The bugle was blown again as they crossed the creek below the pa. A great cheer went up from the whole force when the hard-fighting little colonel entered the redoubt. He shook hands heartily with St. John.
“Good work, St. John!” he said. “I knew you'd do it! I'd have been here myself this morning but we had a skirmish across the range yesterday and that delayed us.”
“We've had our share, sir,” said St. John. “Our fellows did splendidly, but we lost poor Travers and White and three men. I was getting anxious. We're very short of ammunition; in fact, some of the men hadn't a round left when we rushed the pa.”
“That's all right, St. John, we've plenty. I'll have the column up in the morning.”
Whitmore had left his main body under Major Roberts in bivouac on the other side of the Whakatane River, and he had hurried on through the dark, determined to keep his promise to meet St. John's force that day at Ruatahuna. That afternoon from the lofty ridge of Tahuaroa, which rises like a green wall above the Upper Whakatane, he had seen through his field-glasses many figures moving about Ruatahuna, and he concluded correctly that the left wing had reached its destination. Good work indeed, that junction on the appointed day of two columns each fighting its independent way through the arduous ranges of an unknown country.
Ears in the Forest
THE railway and the quick-change town-building which followed the iron line have so transformed Taumarunui that it is not easy to discover the old camp grounds and locate the scenes of an era when this alluvial flat at the meeting of the rivers, was the most secluded Maori settlement in the North Island. By reason of that remoteness and seclusion, at the head of canoe navigation of the Wanganui, it was also a refuge place of broken men and council-place and camp of plotting and preparation for raid and war. When last I was in Taumarunui, I looked for that wooded ridge below which we once camped, where Rochfort the surveyor's stilt-legged pataka, or storehouse, stood. Springs of water oozed from the hillside where the rimu trees grew, and formed a runnel through a maize patch. Now the railway runs through the old maize ground, the levels are covered with the shops and dwellings and churches of a modern town. I looked, too, for the “Scouts' Hill.” It was not without some casting about that it was possible to pick the ridge slope where the two Government Maori scouts from South Taupo spied on
After the fight at Te Porere, away inland yonder on the tussock plain at the foot of the Tongariro Range, the rebel leader
Preece, at Te Poutu camp, on the shore of Lake Roto-a-Ira, discussed the scouting operations with some of his trusted Maoris, and told them he believed the fugitives had made for the head of navigation of the Wanganui, at Taumarunui or Maraekowhai. He asked for men who would be willing to undertake the decidedly dangerous mission of scouting over the plain and through the bush to Taumarunui.
Two young men of the Ngati-Tuara sub-tribe, of Rotorua, immediately volunteered. Their names were Te Honiana and Wiremu. They were given their instructions, to get as close as possible to the village at Taumarunui, ascertain whether
Armed each with a carbine, revolver and tomahawk, and a good supply of ammunition, and carrying light swags of rations, the two scouts travelled across the Porere and Waimarino plain by night. They traversed
With the first streaks of dawn, very carefully, leaving no trail that would betray their presence, the two daring fellows crept along the hill, as close as possible to the main village on the flat.
A dark green curtain of bush covered the hills that rimmed the sheltered basin of the Taumarunui waters-meet. On the ridge where the two scouts crouched the forest extended almost to the foot of the hill close to the outer huts of the kainga. Honiana and Wiremu, after a consultation, unloaded their carbines, a precaution against accidental discharge when they were crawling through the dense undergrowth. Their holstered revolvers they kept loaded. With the utmost care they worked slowly down through the close cover of ferns that matted the ground until they were half-way down the slope, where, peering out, they could see the village square and the large thatched meeting-whare in which
The sun was shining into the valley when the scouts took up their dangerous spy-place. Presently the people were out on the marae for the morning meal. The village women and girls came from the cooking ovens bearing steaming baskets of food, and set them on the mats before the men; they came with a swinging, half-dancing
“I wish they would bring us some of that good hot pork and potatoes,” whispered Wiremu to his comrade. “It makes my mouth water.”
After the meal the whole of the people in the kainga, squatting in a half-moon formation in the marae, where a Hauhau war-flag of red and black flew from a pole, were addressed by whare; and there was another Hauhau service on the marae presently. pakeha. He would march to Waikato, and he would thereafter attack Tauranga or Rotorua. The route of march was discussed. There was a speaker from the Upper Waikato, a man of the
The scouts made a scanty meal of the hard biscuit they had carried in their swags from McDonnell's camp. Their drink was cold water from a hillside spring. It was a cold night in their fireless camp; they took turns at sentry watch till daylight came.
All that second day of their spying Honiana and Wiremu listened to the Hauhau speeches and chants and watched for signs of a forward movement. They could see some of the men making up cartridges to fill their hamanu or ammunition holders. More people arrived from down-river by canoe; they were received with songs of welcome and waving of shawls and blankets as they marched on to the assembly ground.
For one thing the scouts were thankful. They had been in dread lest some of the village dogs would scent them out where they lay in hiding and rouse the village youth to a pig-hunt. But no kuri came prowling in their direction. Once indeed they did greatly fear detection. They saw two men leave the flat and climb the ridge in their direction along a track that led to the east, the trail towards Waimarino. The Hauhaus passed their hiding-place so closely that they could hear them talking to each other as they climbed this hill. The men went on to an open fern hill—the elevation on which the Taumarunui Hospital stands to-day—and there remained till nightfall. They were scouts, or rather sentries, watching the trail.
The spies talked in low tones. They decided that it was time to be going. They had heard sufficient to justify their conclusion that
So in the midnight hours the scouts left their secret bed among the ferns and the mangémangé and crept cautiously out to the Waimarino track. They listened intently awhile as they looked down on the sleeping village, then padded swift-footed along the narrow trail, joyful at the thought of their news for the Colonel.
“What a pity we couldn't have shot him!” was their one regret.
Both men believed they could have picked off marae addressing his magic words to the faithful.
Two days later Te Honiana and Wiremu, weary, famished but intensely elated, trudged into the redoubt camp at Poutu and reported to their young pakeha captain. Preece took them immediately to Colonel McDonnell. First a tot of commissariat rum—the only decent nourishment in the camp, Preece said—and then Te Honiana reported the outcome of the mission. He described
McDonnell was so pleased with this information—all of which presently proved correct—that he presented the scouts with the Government carbines which had been issued to them for the expedition, in place of the cumbrous long Enfield rifles.
This, it seems to me, was in the nature of an anti-climax. They certainly deserved something more than that after all their breath-taking perils. It was a meagre reward for a deed of extreme skill and prudence conjoined to daring. Soldiers have received V.C.'s for services of less value. But Te Honiana and Wiremu were quite content with those handy new carbines which they need not return to store when the war was over. They would be just the thing for pig-hunting.
A Running Battle
How
“FOOLS, madmen!” shouted the shawl-kilted young officer, carbine in hand, who rushed along the track below Pukeroa Hill, that looks on the lake of Rotorua. “Madmen, to trust that treacherous murderer! Throw down that flag, throw it down!”
The excited pakeha, who was followed by a party of armed Arawa men, was addressing the leading men in a procession moving out from the hot-springs village of Ohinemutu towards the south. A chief at their head carried a white cloth mounted on a long stick. About three hundred yards away, on the south, another band of men was advancing to meet them, also with a white flag. The Rotorua men were the principal chiefs of the place, headed by Petera te Pukuatua and Te Amohau. They were on their way to meet pakeha intervened. It was gallant
Mair, running up to Petera te Pukuatua, tore the white flag from the chief's hands, threw it on the ground and jumped on it. “You would trust that treacherous fellow, would you?” he said. “You would be the first to feel the tomahawk blade!”
Then, calling to the young men to follow him, Mair turned about and opened fire on the nearest Hauhaus. After his first shot—fired to prevent that specious peacemaking, which would be the prelude to massacre—he rapidly reckoned up his man-strength for the coming fight.
“Follow me, the Arawa!” cried Mair as he reloaded and ran towards the enemy.
The old chiefs tried to bar the young warriors' way by holding their weapons across the narrow track in the fern and manuka. But Tohe te Matehaere, a big lad armed with a rifle and tomahawk, burst through and dashed past his officer, eager for the battle. Mair called him back. “Steady, my boy,” he cried, “we shall have a long fight to-day!”
Meantime the Hauhau advance guard, seeing that the peacemaking pretence was unmasked, had turned about and was in retreat towards
It was now midday, a hot midsummer day—the 7th of February, 1870. The Hauhaus had a long start; by the time Mair had a few men round him and was pelting up the hill slopes south of Rotorua, Te Kooti was two miles ahead. The long running fight was on.
Te Kooti told off his best warriors for the rearguard, led by the savage half-caste Eru Peka te Makarini, the greatest desperado and killer in the rebel ranks. These men every now and again turned about to lay ambushes for their pursuers at places where there was good cover.
The first hot skirmish was near the Puarenga stream, at the junction of the present motor roads, the Waiotapu and Atiamuri routes. Here Mair, running well ahead of his company, was closely engaged, and shot his first Hauhau of the day. A little further on, in the Waikorowhiti Valley, two more were shot, and at Ngapuketurua, six miles from Rotorua, the principal encounter took place. At every knoll or ridge Peka and his rearguard turned to fight. It was only Mair's personal courage and quick and accurate shooting that saved his Arawa party, who were greatly outnumbered. Only a few of the strongest runners could keep up with the tireless pakeha leader.
Ngapuketurua—the two hills—is a steep ridge covered with sparse manuka, trending parallel with the Waitaruna stream and the present main road from
Presently ten or twelve of his Arawa came panting up and joined in the combat. Seven Hauhaus were shot; one who fell to Mair was Timoti te Kaka, a desperate fighter from Opotiki. Quite seventy men opposed Mair's score or so here.
On the run again the survivors of the ambush turned to the right and made across the open Kapenga plain for Tumunui Mountain, passing to the west and south of Pakaraka village. Mair expected the Tuhourangi men from Rotokakahi to intercept
It was nearly seven o'clock in the evening when the final skirmish took place. Mair and three men ran right into the Hauhau rearguard under Peka, among the rocks at the foot of square-topped, earthquake-fissured Tumunui Mountain. Mair was fifty yards ahead of his men. Peka, who had about thirty men under cover, jumped up, fired a shot at Mair, and rushed at him, ferociously, with clubbed rifle. Mair let the big half-caste come within about fifteen paces, and fired, smashing Peka's right hipbone. The fallen man snatched at his revolver, hanging at his belt, but Mair ran up and got it, and a little later Te Warihi finished
Mair took from Peka a bugle, on his cross-belt, a trophy of the escape from Chatham Islands in 1868. The half-caste was the Hauhau bugler. Peka was so fair-skinned that he seemed a pakeha, startlingly white in his scanty fighting costume, simply a pair of tweed trousers rolled up above the knees. He was barefooted and bareheaded; cartouche-belts were strapped round his waist, a short-handled tomahawk was held by his leather girdle. Across his broad chest was tattooed in blue letters, in the shape of a half-moon, his full name, “Peka te Makarini,” and on one arm was the name of his sister, “Huhana.” Fastened to his swag was a leather case, in which Mair found a flag, with many devices on it; this was
This ended the battle; it was nearly dark. Mair had only two cartridges left; he had fired 58 shots that day.
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Mair received his captaincy for that day's good work, which was described by his superiors as a turning-point
wiwi grass and patchy manuka, and we had to give up the exploration in the tangled gullies of the Kapenga.
Captain Mair lies buried in the little churchyard by the lakeside at Ohinemutu, in the midst of his well-loved Arawa people, where he wished to be laid. Now and again one of his old soldiers—only two or three of them now—bares his head before the stone and murmurs a greeting and a farewell to “Tawa,” or “Kapene Mea.” Undoubtedly “Tawa” saved Ohinemutu, with its hundreds of all but defenceless people, from massacre that day of 1870, for
Maro and Her Lovers
MARO was a girl of the Whakatohea people, the tribe of the Opotiki alluvial plain and contiguous coast. They were her mother's folk; her father was a man of the ancient Kareke clan, descendants of the first inhabitants of that part of the pakeha to be the handsomest along the coast. Maro was, in her day, the prettiest woman in Opotiki. I knew her and her stalwart pakeha husband in their old age, and even then she was not without beauty. Theirs is a story of love and fidelity that endured for more than half a century. Five years before the faithful old couple passed to the Spiritland—they died within a very few months of each other—I heard from them at their home on the shores of Ohiwa Harbour, the tale of their early days' true romance, and the story of the man whom they both had loved more than anyone on earth except each other.
The two young frontiersmen were firm and trusty comrades in the bush-fighting years of the ’Sixties. Side by side they fought in one Maori campaign and expedition after another. The one who survived told me that they had been in more than thirty skirmishes together. They were christened “David and Jonathan” by their mates. Jonathan was
Rushton was a Yorkshireman; and though he had been in New Zealand for nearly sixty years when I knew him, the North Country accent was still strong on his tongue. He served in three different corps of Rangers; first in Taranaki in
The Taranaki forest fighting over, the comrades returned to the
That year, 1867, was one of alarms and raids and expeditions, an unrestful time for the people of Opotiki, hemmed in by hostile ranges on three sides. On one of the numerous excursions up through the forest defile of the Waimana against the Urewera and the hapus of the Whakatohea, still on the warpath, Rushton and White exchanged shots with the old warrior chief of the Kareke, who afterwards became their father-in-law.
Each of the rangers asked Maro to be his wife. She hesitated long, in indecision. She liked both of those strong, tall, bearded young scouts well enough; each would make a good husband, each would love and protect and cherish her. Which should it be? She was in no hurry to decide. The lovers and comrades agreed to leave it to her; their friendship would not be severed by love of woman.
Maro, not at first believing that the two suitors would remain friends if she married one of them, was secretly troubled by the thought of a quarrel between the two Englishmen who were as brothers to each other. At last she spoke to them both and made them promise that if she accepted one of them the other would not be jealous and dispute her choice. They must remain comrades, they must not fight for her possession. Moreover, she said, it was a time of danger and sudden death. Any day or night might see a raid or a skirmish
The promise was given, and on this understanding Maro took David. The pair were wedded and they set up house—a raupo-thatched whare on David's section. But it was brief joy for Maro and her lover.
A few months later
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Maro, down in her lonely whare at Opotiki, wept long and bitterly for her man. Rushton did not serve in that expedition; had he joined the march he might have been leading the scouts in place of White. But he was under orders to remain at Opotiki in charge of one of the defending blockhouses. He was there on duty when the news came of his comrade's end.
The two bereaved ones mourned with each other. Six months passed. Then Rushton renewed his proposal, and they both spoke of the promise made before she took David. So presently the pair of lovers rode along the coast to Tauranga, and there they were married in the little mission church.
And at Opotiki, and later on at Ohiwa, the Yorkshireman and his Maori wife lived and grew old together. It was a restless, anxious time for a year or two after they were married, for the Hauhau spirit still was strong among the tribes that roved the ranges, and
And on their little section at Paewiwi, on the green shores of Ohiwa Harbour, hard by Kutarere, the venerable pair lived their quiet life, the calm evening of a stormy day. Rushton was still straight and soldierly as of old when we talked there some fifteen years ago. Maro was growing bent and feeble, but one could well believe she had been a lovely woman. There they lived, growing their food crops, now and again launching
Patriots of the Taranaki Border
THAT picture of mountain and forest is sharp in the mind's eye to-day even after many years, the view of glorious old Taranaki from the little Maori kainga called Hokorima, eight miles from Hawera town. The grassy fields, the semi-primitive dwellings and the gardens of potatoes and maize, and the distance between spires of soft foliage filled in with a wash of smoky-blue forest and the soaring white-topped peak of a godlike serenity lifting eight thousand feet into the glowing sky. The mountain crest hung in the heavens, utterly removed from the lower world. It seemed the Tikitiki-o-Rangi, the shining throne of Io of the Hidden Face. On the green marae in front of the principal house in Hokorima, the head-village of Nga-Ruahine, we sat and talked with Tauke, the grand old man of that fighting sub-tribe of
Tauke, sitting there that morning on his sunny lawn, with a coloured blanket girt about his waist, his old white head bare, his spectacles on his nose, poring over the ecstatic visions of the Dreamer in “Te Whakakitenga,” the Book of Revelation, looked the mystic and the priest. He was a priest of two religions, the ancient Maori and the pakeha, the lay-reader of his people and at the same time the last of the tohungas of whare-maire, the school of legend and tradition, genealogies and the Polynesian-Maori religion from remote generations; for the Taranaki Maoris were, at that time, if they are not still, intensely conservative and inimical to the European faiths and ways. His beliefs were a curious blend of ancient and modern, the old faith overlaid by the missionaries' Rongo-Pai. Long ago he was one of the desperate warriors whom the Pai-marire priests of battle led in furious assault against British frontier forts. Now in his wise old age, well on in his eighties, he was able in his half-humorous way to regard with calm introspective vision those fiery years when he fought for land and Maori nationality.
The old man laid aside his fifty-year-old Maori Bible, and took off his glasses, when we greeted him, and he courteously pointed to the flax mats on the lawn beside him. Calm, deep penetrating eyes peered out from under white-bushed buttresses of brows. One of his hands was scarred and mutilated, the thumb and part of a finger missing. “That happened at Te Morere,” said Tauke.
He was steeped in warrior ways from his earliest youth. He was born in captivity; his parents were taken away from the Waimate Plains in one of the raids of the Waikato cannibal tribes of more than a century ago. When peace returned he and many of his people were liberated and returned to Taranaki. As a young man he was one of the Taranaki chiefs who went to the Waikato to share in the uplifting of
It was a mad endeavour; Tauke admitted as much himself with a grin, when he told the story of his wounded hand.
Hepanaia, the Prophet, led the attack; he was more valiant than prudent. There were fifty men of the 57th Regiment in the redoubt; the steep hillside was scarped nearly twenty feet high all round the little fort, making it practically impregnable to any Maori war party. However, Hepanaia, Kingi, hapu by hapu, and after a Pai-marire service they advanced up the hill upon the redoubt, in close order. As they went they steadily recited their prayers. “Hapa, hapa, hapa! Pai-marire!” This was the incantation to ward off the enemy bullets. Tauke
As the Hauhaus breasted the hill, shoulder to shoulder, gripping gun and long-handled tomahawk, the top of the parapet blazed fire and down the head of the column was swept. Repeated rifle volleys spread death and mutilation among the deluded warriors. More than fifty were killed; some the Hauhaus dragged off the field, and thirty-three were buried there by the British after the fight. A bullet struck Tauke's hand, and he was a disabled man for some months thereafter. Eight of his Ngaruahine relatives fell in that desperate assault upon a parapeted redoubt in open day. There was one satisfaction: Hepanaia, the false prophet, who had foretold an easy victory—for the pakeha bullets would be sure to fly wide of the faithful—found a grave on the field of battle.
That story of the recklessly valiant charge on an impregnable fort was told with dramatic gesture and more than a touch of the youthful fighting fire. “But now,” he said, “the years that remain to me are few. I read my Bible, and I teach my young people of karakias of our fore-fathers. Now there is peace, and the guns lie at rest in the house, and the sounds of cultivation work are heard on the warriors' parade-ground. Our ramrods are made into fish-hooks to catch hapuku out there beyond the river-mouth.”
It was perhaps in keeping with the complex of ancient priest and latter-day sage in Tauke's character that the burial ceremony, when he was laid to rest in 1916, should have been preceded by a poi dance by the women of pakeha rites that blessed him in the bosom of his Mother-Earth.
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There was one of Tauke's fellow-tribesmen and war-comrades who was less of a calm philosopher, more of a still militant-minded patriot of Taranaki, with whom I had more than one greatly-revealing talk. He was Te Kahu-pukoro, the leading chief of the
His farm, of good volcanic soil, enriched by ages of forest, was still encumbered with half-burned and felled bush. His young people tended the crops and the dairy herd. “We are tamed now,” said the old man, “we are a tribe that works at milking cows [iwi-wahi-mirika].”
Te Kahu-pukoro was a tall, thickly-built broad-shouldered man, of large open features, clean shaven. His wild, glittering eyes heightened the dramatic fire of some of his narratives of the wars, the battles in which he engaged while still a boy, and they glared as fiercely when he declaimed against the land-confiscation that had stripped his defeated but unconquerable people of most of their ancestral domains. That warrior glint seldom left the dark, shining eyes of
“I was only eight years old when I first watched a battle between pakeha and Maori,” said Te Kahupukoro. “That was the fight at Waireka and Kaipopo Pa [in 1860], Four years later I was in the fighting ranks; I was a big strong lad, quite fit for the warpath. I was armed with a single-barrel gun, and I used it, in the attack of our Pai-marire war-party on the British fort at Te Morere, with Tauke. Many of my relatives fell there. My father, Tiopira, and his brother, Hapeta, were killed on the field, and my grandfather,
“We were perfectly fearless in that attack; we were whakamomori [desperate, reckless, despairing] because we were inspired by the spirit of our new faith, the Pai-marire. Families fell there; my tribesmen, young and old, fell in heaps. I cried ‘Hapa, hapa, hapa!’ [pass over], waving the bullets of our foes over my shoulders, as karakia lost its magic before the pakeha bullets; one of them struck me in the left shoulder, and another penetrated my left hip, but missed the bone. But I was so excited and crazed by the fury of battle that I did not feel the first bullet until I felt my shirt wet with blood. When we retreated I went down to a little stream and bathed and stanched my wounds, and then we all retreated to Manutahi, where my wounds were treated and healed.”
There was many another battle and bush skirmish for Te Kahu-pukoro. He was wounded again at Punga-rehu, when that bush village was attacked just before
So telling, with glare of eye and vigorous gesture—now and again forgetting his rheumatism and jumping to his feet in the excitement of his narrative—the veteran of the old campaigns returned to that Sentry Hill attack that failed. It was Taranaki's day of mourning, a Flodden Field of the Maori. He chanted in a strong hard voice the great tangi chant composed by his grand-father,
“Hikohiko te uira i tai raKapo taratahi ki Turamoe,Ko he tohu o te mate e nunumi ake nei.”(“The lightning flashes seaward yonder, It strikes downward on Turamoe hill; ’Tis heaven's omen of battle and death.”)
It is a long and thrilling poem (given in full in my “History of the Maori Wars”). This is the concluding portion of my translation; the chant proceeds, after lamenting the fall of Tiopira and Hapeta:
“O heroes of my house, How brave that charge, Beyond Whakaahurangi's woods that day! Lonely I lie within my home Beside Kapuni's river mouth. And cherish bitter thoughts, and ever weep— My sons! Still o'er the forest, still above the clouds Towers Taranaki; But Kingi's gone. Wise in council, Foremost in the fight. I searched the reddened field; I found him dead At Morere! How vain your valour, vain your charge Against Morere's walls! Lost on that rocky coast of death Are all my crews— Tainui, Tokomaru, Kurahaupo, Aotea— Ah me! My wrecked canoes Lie broken on the shore!”
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That poem of mourning for the warrior dead was chanted over Te Kahu-pukoro himself when the old soldier of the Tekau-ma-rua (“The Twelve,” the term applied to
Readers of Celtic history and bagpipe lore may be reminded of “MacCrimmon's Lament for the Children,” the famous pibroch of mourning composed by the ancient piper Padruig Mor MacCrimmon, of Skye, in memory of his seven stalwart sons carried off by death.
The Missionary and the Hauhau Apostles
COURAGE and resourcefulness in emergency distinguished several members of the famous Williams family of pioneer preachers, teachers and counsellors. The hero of the episodes here recounted was Arch-deacon
Williams the Second (who was not then Archdeacon) had, like his fighting father, great influence with the Maoris, and when the Pai-marire religious war spread to the mana and persuasive powers in combating the rebel propaganda. He was in St. Kilda to Napier for him, and asked him to do what he could to counter Pai-marire.
First of all, Mr. Williams went to Opotiki, where the pa at Waerenga-a-Hika, close to
As Mr. Williams entered the village there was sudden absolute silence. Not even a dog barked.
Mr. Williams went up to the chief prophet and challenged him to exhibit his supernatural powers, saying: “I hear that you are able to bring vessels ashore by your magic incantations. Well, there is the Government steamer out at Turanganui yonder. Come and drag it ashore and you can then have all on board to offer as a sacrifice to your gods.”
An old Maori catechist came up and asked: “Do you really mean what you say, Wiremu?”
“Yes, I do,” said Mr. Williams. “If the prophet is able to drag that vessel ashore we will give up ourselves as a sacrifice to his gods.”
There was tense expectant silence for a while.
Then Mr. Williams rose again and said: “You have all read the Bible. You will recollect that when Elijah by himself met the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and they were challenged to bring fire from Heaven, they failed to obtain any response to their prayers. You will remember also that when Elijah in his turn called to his God, the fire came down and consumed not only the sacrifice but the very stones and water; and then he cried out to the people to take the prophets of Baal and not let any escape; and this they did and all were slain. Now, if this prophet fails to drag that vessel ashore, be careful that neither he nor any of his party escape. Let all be taken and slain!”
This bold demand completely changed the aspect of affairs. The people who had been deceived by the Hauhau preachers were overcome with amazement and shame, especially the younger men, and these now ran for their guns.
A Taranaki Military Post.
The Opunake Redoubt, garrisoned by the New Zealand Armed Constabulary. The Redoubt (now demolished)
was a massive earthwork, a parapet and trench, with two loopholed blockhouses at diagonally
opposite angles; barrack buildings inside the work. From a drawing by G. Sherriff, 1881.
The War-Dance
This depicts the tutu-waewae, or leaping-parade of a Maori war-party, preliminary to marching against
the enemy. In the Taranaki wars of the Sixties, the battle songs shouted by the leader and responded to in
chorus by his men frequently invoked the sacred guardian mountain Taranaki (Mt. Egmont), seen in the
background of this picture. From a painting by A. H. Messenger.
But the fanatics did not wait to put their magic to the test. There was still danger, for the Pai-marire cult had spread among the Turanga people. The incident described, however, held the intruders in check sufficiently long to allow the Mission Station to be evacuated. St. Kilda for Napier, with the
At Napier, early in 1866, wharepuni there filled with people. One of the old chiefs of the place, Mr. Williams' friend Te Hapuku, the leading man of the
“O Hapuku,” said the missionary, “What are you all doing here, and what mischief is going on among the people?”
The old chief replied, “Alas, friend Wiremu, they have been bewitched! They have become mad, and they will not listen to me. I am awaiting my death.”
Mr. Williams entered the house, followed by Te Hapuku. The place was crowded with men, women and children. At the far end of the house a prophet was exhorting the rapt audience and uttering all manner
This man was Panapa (Barnabas), a minor chief of the Ngati-Hineuru tribe, the war-loving mountain clan whose homes were at Ohinekuku, Te Haroto, and other high-set villages on the trail over the ranges to the Upper Rangitaiki and Taupo.
Panapa's eyes glittered wildly as he paced to and fro, taiaha in hand, reciting his Pai-marire prayers and exerting his utmost powers to bring his audience under his mesmeric spell.
The missionary calmly walked along the mat-laid passage through the middle of the long hall. With a smile he regarded the prophet; he listened awhile to the mixture of Maori and pidgin-English in the mountain man's karakia. At last he raised his hand, and said: “Stop! You are talking foolishness to this ignorant crowd of people. Let us two talk in the Hebrew tongue [Hiperu], for that is the language of the gods.”
“I do not know the Hebrew tongue,” said the prophet, after a long pause.
“What?” exclaimed Mr. Williams, “You profess to be a prophet of the gods and yet cannot speak the sacred language? Who are you? You must be of this earth, and very low down in it too!”
And with inimitable skill of language he stripped the Hauhau orator of his pretensions. The half-mesmerized audience wondered, then they began to laugh.
The apostle of Pai-marire crouched down among his sympathisers at the end of the house. He said no more; and in the semi-darkness he made an opening in the raupo wall and slipped outside and off.
By this time Te Hapuku had come up to Mr. Williams, the blanket off his head and around his shoulders; he was rejoicing at the changed situation.
Later on in 1866, when the Hauhau war party marched from Te Haroto, and came down to the plains, led by
Farmers of the Frontier
How the Waitotara Settlers saved their Stock.
IT was in the early Seventies that life on the Upper Waikato border was at its most hazardous, when rumours of coming raids kept settlers and military alike on the alert. pakeha side that he and his Hauhau recruits would combine with the Waikato and
Who could blame Waikato for their wild schemes of revenge? We lived on their best lands from which they had been driven by British rifles and bayonet and artillery and grenade. What wonder if many of the men whose thatched kaingas stood a few miles to the south of the Puniu River had one ruling passion, the hope to ride with gun and tomahawk from one farm and one township to another across the border, exacting utu for the seizure of their lands by the strong hand, the ringa kaha. There was more than once a condition of standing to arms along the Waikato frontier. It created anxiety throughout the colony. The calmest people of all were the furthest-out settlers. They were organised for defence; their plucky wives often tended the farm while the men were out drilling or riding on cavalry patrol along the border tracks.
There were several frontiers besides Waikato—Taranaki, the Patea-Waitotara border, the pakeha and Maori.
The most hotly-contested frontier of all was Taranaki North and South. A huge extent of Maori territory was confiscated in South Taranaki, tribes were driven off their most fertile lands; the country was surveyed and cut up for military settlement sections.
The Maori patriot view was expressed with simple eloquence in a letter sent by
“To whom does England belong, and to whom belongs the land on which you are now standing? I shall tell you. The heavens and the earth were created in the beginning. Then was man created, and also all things that are in the world. If you believe that God created them all, it is well; we are agreed thus far. But you were formed a pakeha; and England was named for your country. We are Maoris, with New Zealand for our country. There has been fixed between you and us a great gulf, the ocean. Why did you not take thought before you crossed over to us? We did not cross hence over to you. Away with you from our land to your own country in the midst of the ocean; away with you from this town.”
The authors of the confiscation laws were legislators who seldom ventured into the field; the Maori blows
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On the north bank of the twisting, muddy Waitotara River there lived, in 1868, two young settlers named William Brewer and Charles Durie, who had a block of land, intersected by the river, leased from the friendly Maoris of the Ihupuku Pa, which lay about half a mile from their See pages 151–157.raupo-thatched hut. They had about 1,000 sheep and 300 cattle grazing on the block, and were in a fair way to become prosperous men when
The Hauhaus were in almost full possession of the countryside, from the bush to the sea. But Brewer and Durie determined to make an attempt to save their stock from the rebels.
A few days after Brewer and Durie had so narrowly escaped that Hauhau raid, old Pirimona came to them and said:
“Now's the time, pakehas, to shift your cattle and sheep! There's going to be a big fight up there across the river”—nodding his head towards the Waitotara. “How do I know? Never mind! I tell you, in three days there will be a battle at the Moturoa, where the Hauhaus have built a great and strong stockade. They are all gathered there now, and are waiting for Whitmore. Then, when Whitmore attacks, get your stock away. Do it in one day, or you will never see them again, for I believe the Hauhaus will beat Whitmore. Don't ask me any questions, but do just as I say.”
Brewer and Durie decided to follow Pirimona's advice. They had with them
“Couldn't think of it—couldn't think of it!” said the little Colonel. “It's a most foolhardy business. Your stock will have to take its chances. I can't spare you a single man. I want all my force; I'm moving against the Hauhaus to-morrow. I can't help you.”
Amongst the waggon-drivers and others about the Constabulary camp, however, the two settlers managed to pick up five or six volunteers for the risky job, and the whole party, armed and mounted, crossed the Waitotara one wet and foggy morning just at dawn, and set about mustering the stock. It was the morning of November 7th, 1868, a tragic date, for in front of the Moturoa palisades that day Major Hunter and more than a score of his comrades were killed, and more than that number were wounded.
It certainly was a risky business, stock-mustering almost under the guns of hundreds of Hauhaus. But it was the only chance. “The roughest day of my life,” said one of the two survivors of that droving party, who told me the story. “We were wet through from the start, then we had to scour the hills for our stock, doing everything at top speed, for we never knew when we might get a volley poured into us.”
After fording the Waitotara the little band of pakehas rode northward for four miles, until they were within about three miles of the Wairoa Redoubt (where the township of Waverley now stands). Then they circled round seawards, gathering in the stock as they went.
The first alarm of “Hauhaus in sight!” came soon after they had crossed the river. A party of Maoris, mounted, suddenly came in view, riding towards the white men. Brewer and his companions instantly prepared to do battle. They galloped up a hill commanding the Maoris' line of approach, and prepared to open fire. Several of them had rifles, the rest double-barrelled
“It's all right!” cried Lingard; “they're showing the white flag!” One of the Maoris was waving a white handkerchief tied on the end of a stick; and, much relieved, the white men rode down towards the others, who proved to be friendlies of the Waitotara tribe. There was a short talk, and as they were speaking to one another, the sound of heavy musketry came rolling down on the still morning air.
“Listen to that!” said one of the Maoris. “Whitmore is attacking the Moturoa Pa. But he'll never take it!
With the distant rattle and roll of that bush battle in their ears, the settlers rounded up their stock, and worked them down towards the Waitotara. It was a difficult task, for the country was rough, unbroken, much of it in high fern, and there were swamps intersecting it. Half the party collected the cattle, and the rest gathered in the sheep, and, with much galloping to and fro to head off refractory steers and much cracking of stockwhips and barking of dogs, the whole of Brewer's and Durie's four-footed wealth by the afternoon was on the swampy banks of the Waitotara.
Crossing the stock was no easy matter, but it was done at last, and by nightfall every animal was safe on the southern bank. Fortunately the Waitotara was low and not swift of current. The sheep had to be swum over, and two of the men got into a canoe to help. And
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At the first peep of light next morning they were at their task again. Brewer and Durie and another man got the cattle moving, and took them out along the seabeach and down in the direction of Wanganui. By night time they had reached Nukumaru, and there they camped for the night in the settler Handley's woolshed. After dark Lingard and the rest of the party joined them.
Lingard and his companions had had a terribly trying time of it with the sheep. Those animals, with a hungry enemy not far away, were exasperatingly slow. And the Hauhau scouts soon discovered the pakehas. Lingard and another man rode up on to the sandhills skirting the beach, to keep a lookout as their comrades worked the sheep along below. Armed Maoris, obviously enemies, rode parallel with them, a little distance inland, all the way to Nukumaru. Creeks had to be crossed, and at these and a score other places the little party could have been wiped out had the Hauhaus come down in force. But the cherub that watches over the frontier settler kept his eye on them that day; and the Hauhaus evidently were unaware of the real strength—or weakness—of the Europeans. No doubt they imagined there was a much larger force on the beach.
The greater part of the flock of sheep had to be abandoned on that beach and sandhills march. Three hundred out of the thousand were all that Lingard and his companions finally paddocked at Nukumaru, and
That night at Nukumaru was a night of alarms. Now and again in the middle of the night the dogs barked furiously, and the men stood to their arms. None of them dared to sleep, for at any moment the Hauhaus might be upon them. The next night, after bringing in the sheep a stage further, the musterers decided to seek a safer resting place than the station woolshed. Near the deserted Handley homestead was a small lake, the shallow, reedy water-sheet called Nukumaru. In the middle of this lake there was a little island, low and shrub-covered, about half an acre in extent. On this islet the settlers and their helpers decided to seek refuge from the marauding rebels. There was a small canoe lying moored at the bank, and in this canoe they ferried themselves across, making two or three trips before all were safely landed. Under the karaka trees which grew in a clump in the middle of the island, surrounded by a belting of taupata and tupakihi shrubs, they made themselves as comfortable as they could, but the consolation of a camp fire was denied them, for it would have betrayed their hiding place to any night-roving band. They lay there and talked in low voices. There was little sleep. It was obvious that the Hauhaus could easily have surrounded the tiny island and killed every soul. They were very thankful when daylight came at last and enabled them to move on their stock.
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Soon those alarms and excursions were over, for a troop of Wanganui cavalry, under Captain O'Halloran,
The Last of the Scouts
Tales of the Guides and Forest Rangers
THE adventurous conditions of life in early Colonial days produced two kinds of frontiersmen. There were the rough unlettered bush-fighters and scouts and borderers, many of whom lived semi-Maori lives and married native wives. There were men of gifts and culture who made capable leaders, who became perfect in their knowledge of forest warfare, and who in days of peace held official positions in the service of their country.
There were many of the former class who could be cited, hard plucky fellows who fought in the Maori way and whose wives sometimes followed them on the war-path, fit mates for their tough bushranger-like pakehas. Most of these men were colonial-born and used to rough conditions of living from their youth. Their officers were such men as Roberts, the Mair brothers, McDonnell, Northcroft, Gascoyne, Preece, Jackson, Messenger, Gudgeon, Harry Atkinson—they were some of the natural leaders who emerged from the ranks of the settlers, with here and there a surveyor and a sailor. Some came from military families; most were farmers and many of them New Zealand-born. When the gunpowder smoke cleared away from the outer lands they served their country well in the cause of peaceful settlement.
These men have all gone; the conditions of life that produced them have vanished before the now levelled out and standardised New Zealander. Their like can
pakeha-Maori bushmen scouts so distinctive of the breaking-in age of the Colony. Like the vanishing birds, their life was bound up with wild forest life. Their highest development was attained through grim necessity in the frontier warfare of the ’Sixties and early ’Seventies, in bush chases, scouting expeditions, ambuscades, often lone-handed adventures, not surpassed in peril even by the episodes of the Indian border warfare in America.
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The last survivor of the old bushman-scout type was also the last survivor of the gallant little band who wore the New Zealand Cross. This decoration, the rarest of all military honours in the British Empire, was awarded to only twenty-three officers and men, and pakeha-Maori, was the last to go. He died in the home of his half-caste Maori family at Kopeopeo, Whakatane, in 1933. When I last talked with him there, in 1921, he lay disabled by an accident to his legs on Whakatane Wharf, but he was a cheery soul, always ready to recall the old forest days and to narrate his Hauhau-chasing days and long hard marches through the unroaded forests and mountains.
Ben Biddle was as clear-cut a character as any Leatherstocking or Quartermain of fiction. He was an Aucklander-born, the son of an old British regular soldier. He was short and stocky, very thick through the chest and shoulders, and with his jolly ruddy face and hearty downright manner, a voice fit for a deep-sea bo's'n in a gale, he reminded me of
He made a name in the Hauhau wars for his enterprise and disregard of danger. He was sometimes in trouble with military officers who had incurred his contempt by their ignorance of bush warfare or their excessive caution, but when men were needed for the fighting line the call was always for Biddle and men of his kind. In his youth he was a sailor on the coast, and he served in Captain Jones' cutters trading to the pakeha-Maori. His wife was a native of Whakatane, and she sometimes accompanied him on the war-path.
To his abilities as tracker and scout, and his capacity for hard marching in rough bush country with a heavy swag of ammunition and provisions, Biddle added exceptional skill with rifle and revolver. He was considered the best revolver shot in the Armed Constabulary at the end of the ’Sixties. With his six-shooter he could split a thin stick set in the ground twenty-five paces away, just raising his revolver easily and scarcely pausing to take aim. On the warpath he carried two revolvers, and always had a tomahawk in his belt.
Our old warrior served on both the East and West Coasts in the campaigns of 1868–70. At the siege of the hill-fort Ngatapa, in the
Biddle was a member of Colonel Lambert's force despatched to Mohaka, Hawke's Bay, immediately after the massacre there by
Long after the wars, when Biddle was squatting in one of the Urewera villages at Ruatoki—his wife was partly Urewera—some disagreement arose with the tribe. His Maori neighbours threatened to send him out of the place and put him across the confiscation boundary line which divided the Maori land from the European-owned Opouriao run. A meeting was held, and six strong young Maoris were told off to remove him. Ben was forewarned, and when the eviction party entered the garden plot in front of his whare and marched toward him, he went out to meet them with his loaded revolver in his hand.
“What do you want here?” he asked sternly.
“We have come to shift you, Ben,” the leader of the party replied.
Ben levelled his old six-shooter and roared: “Haere atu! Get out, or I'll shoot!”
It was enough. “They could not get out of Ben's garden quick enough,” said a neighbour of the old scout.
The veteran was not molested again. He was not a man to be bullied. But he presently left Ruatoki, and lived with his half-caste family at Kopeopeo until his death at ninety.
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There were three stalwart brothers who joined the Wanganui Cavalry Volunteers in 1865, three young frontier giants, all well over six feet in height, big-framed, erect as a pine-tree of their native forests; men of bush-bred strength and hardihood. All three of them were good horsemen and were equally capable on the march in the bush, carrying heavy swags, and often going barefoot on long forest expeditions in the fighting
Tom Adamson won the New Zealand Cross for his daring scouting work in the bush between the Waitotara and the back country of Wairoa (now Waverley), in 1869. His comrade in that mission of peril, in search of
Physically, Tom Adamson suited well the wild, rough part he often played in the bush. He was as straight and hard as a lancewood of his own native forests, and extremely powerful. In the bush and on the march he dressed like his companions the Maoris. He very seldom wore boots in the field, and he was almost as barbaric a figure as any Maori warrior, with his rapaki or waist shawl in place of trousers, his big sheath-knife, his tomahawk stuck through his belt, and a flax kit containing his rations and Maori loot strapped across his shoulders with green flax leaves. Carbine in hand, carried easily at the trail but ready for instant use, sharp eyes searching every thicket, and ears alert to the slightest suspicious sound that might indicate ambush by the trackside, big bare feet hard as nails, padding noiselessly as a wild cat's on the ground—that was Tom Adamson, bushman-scout, on the warpath. In the West Coast campaigns he marched often with the Wanganui Maori Contingent. He was pakeha-Maori; he had married into the tribe.
Big Bill Adamson was a bullock-team driver in the transport corps of
But the youngest brother of the three Adamsons was the stalwart frontiersman I admired most. Like his brothers he was living a hard, strenuous life at an age when most lads are at school or college. He served under Chute and Whitmore, and he carried carbine and tomahawk with his brother Tom in the great bush chase of tangi. Hemi had had a presentiment of his approaching fate, and had asked me to take his revolver back to his wahines.”
The unlucky thirteen scouts having been reduced in numbers by the Hauhau bullets at Ngaputahi—the wounded were sent out to Galatea—Steve scouted on barefoot with his comrades in advance of Whitmore's column to Ruatahuna. After all the skirmishing and the long, hard marching, the brothers met again out at
Steve Adamson's service in that Urewera campaign was indeed a wonderful feat of hardihood and endurance. And the tough old son of the bush died with his boots on, at the age of eighty. His end came suddenly in 1932 while he was sitting watching a football match in Auckland; a cheerful old sportsman to the last.
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There were the Forest Rangers, whose very name carries a flavour of adventure in the Dangerous Lands, suggests tales of scouting and skirmish and ambuscade, and bush marching and camping in wary silence. There were several corps of Rangers in this period 1860–70. The first were picked men of the Taranaki Rifles, whom Atkinson and Messenger led on many a scouting and fighting excursion in the rear of
Service in the Forest Rangers was the ideal kind of campaigning for the young adventurer, but not every man fitted the job. The process of selection was severe and effective, and in practice it was found that the town-bred man was more at home in the sentry-go and tent life of the Militia. The Rangers did not trouble about tents, except when they rigged up their blue blankets against rain; a bundle of fern was their bed and the forest foliage was their roof. Young colonial farmer-bushmen, gold-diggers, and sailors were the best material for the force. They had learned to look after themselves, to carry heavy loads, and to act swiftly in emergencies. When the Waikato War ended many of the men settled down to pioneer farming, but for others the warpath had attractions irresistible, and long after Waiari and Orakau the veterans strapped on their fighting equipment again and followed “old Von” to Wanganui and Taranaki to do battle against the Hauhaus. And when
A bowie-knife, made on the pattern of the famous American blade named after Colonel Bowie, of Arkansas, was part of the fighting equipment of
The inventor was
“That's one of old Von's bowie-knives,” he said.
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The Patea Rangers, young adventurers who settled on their miltary-grant farms after the wars, were a hard-faring corps of good bushmen and carbineers. They were about fifty strong, and only the best of guerilla fighters could last long in that little company of stalwarts. They fought in Taranaki, and at Pipiriki up the Wanganui River, and they were the first of the Government expeditionary force to land at Opotiki after the murder of Volkner and Fulloon. For a year they garrisoned Opotiki and made many bush expeditions in search of the ruffian Kereopa. That elusive cannibal warrior Tamaikowha kept them busy on the bush-edge. They prided themselves on their efficiency and on their constant readiness for emergencies. Whenever the call came, “Turn out, Rangers!” they were at the rallying point in a few moments, belted and armed. They did not wait to fall in in parade order when an alarm was given.
One of the last of these Rangers, Richard Foreman, of Hawera, told me that the Rangers often went barefooted in camp, saving their boots for rough work in the bush. On a certain famous occasion, when
“Young man, why do you turn out in such a dress as this?”
“Because it's the only one we've got, Madam,” replied the Ranger.
“Do you mean to say you haven't anything else? Have you no boots?”
“Some of us have,” said Foreman, “but we keep them for rough country.”
The indignant lady thereupon demanded of her husband that the destitute Rangers should immediately be supplied with proper uniforms, and as Foreman remembered, a supply, which included trousers, presently was shipped to Opotiki. The patient Colonel probably did not venture to inform his wife that the Rangers preferred their bush-ranging costume, and would not wear trousers if they had them—on active service at any rate.
Such rough-faring, hardy, efficient fellows were the salt of the Colonial forces. The Rangers learned to fight the shaggy, tattooed bushmen in the Maori way, and they brought to their skirmishing a fearlessness blended with caution that made them the perfect forest soldiers. They are all gone; they are but a name. Yet those corps names should not be forgotten; they embody a peculiarly heroic phase of our nation-making. One of their basic principles of forest fighting should, too, be remembered; it may be given a new “forest-conscious” application to fit the changed times. “We learned early in our service,” said a veteran officer of Rangers, “to look on a tree as a friend. If a tree sheltered an enemy it could shelter a Ranger too.”
Te Whiti of Taranaki
The Story of a Patriot and Peacemaker
HISTORY has seen some remarkable changes in the popular estimation of prominent figures in the life of the nation. The lapse of time brings a more balanced and better-informed view of disputed causes; and a more generous attitude towards those who were once regarded as enemies. Maori leaders who in their day were denounced as rebels have been vindicated by historians; their principles and actions are now recognised as those of patriots fighting for their people's rights. Wiremu Tamehana te Waharoa, the Kingmaker, the leading figure in the cause of Maori nationalism before the Waikato War, was essentially a peacemaker, and had his altruistic plans for native self-government been adopted by the rulers of New Zealand there would have been no war. He was a man inspired by pure love of country.
Te Kooti was a different type of leader, yet his long and desperate combat with the Government could have been avoided had he been justly treated in the beginning. Exiled without trial, detained on
A different character again was
Te Whiti in his time was a much misunderstood man. To-day it is admitted that his policy of patience and non-resistance saved the colony from a disastrous renewal of war. The story of his life is an illustration of the frequent failure of Governments to deal justly with political opponents. Might sometimes was confused with right.
It is a classic name, Lord Worsley when that vessel was wrecked on the Taranaki coast in 1862. He and his fellow-chiefs pakehas on a hostile shore. They procured carts for them and saw them all safely conveyed to
Like many a pakeha preacher he gave strange and twisted interpretations to some of the Scripture chapters over which he pored. His favourite book was Revelation. (
It has been said that tokotoko or walking-staff and directed his men. They relied on the magic Pai-marire incantations taught by the prophet
In 1868 he fixed upon Parihaka as his home, and stirred little from that spot—except when the Government haled him off to prison for his principles. He adopted the raukura and the poi ball as his emblems;
poi symbolised peace and hospitality. He never swerved from his gospel of peace and non-resistance, and he gradually acquired a marvellous influence over the tribes of not only Taranaki but the whole of the West Coast, and to a large extent Waikato also. Maori pilgrims to Parihaka came, if not to scoff, at any rate filled with breathings of war against the Government; they remained to worship with
It was hard for some of the warriors to accept tamely the amiable counsels of the Prophet of the sacred Mountain.
It is strange at this time of day to recall the condition of the Taranaki frontier in that tense period, 1878–81, culminating in the advance on Parihaka and the arrest of
In protest against the occupation of Maori land—which had been confiscated, but which Sir Donald
muru-whenua, that is, the forcible taking of land without giving any equivalent for it. Probably the view held by the ruling politicians in the Sixties was that the Maori race was a dying one, bound to disappear
pakeha, and that it was therefore not necessary to consider the future generations of the Maori, and the innocent children of the combatants. At any rate they were dispossessed of their best lands, and what reserves were made for them as a kind of afterthought were inadequate.
That was the position in Taranaki; that was the issue that embittered the Maori mind, and would have led to a renewal of the disastrous wars but for one man, and that man was
Peace, peace, was ever pakeha opponents, “shall no longer be the protection of man. Our weapon is forbearance, patience, non-resistance. God is our refuge and our strength.” He made strange oracular utterances that often mystified the pakeha; he was described as a fanatic and a madman, but his fine madness saved his people and the country from fearful strife.
Had that great and sagacious Native Minister, pakeha occupation,
pakeha had free play.
The good lands of the Maori beyond the Waingongoro River excited the longing of Government and white speculator and settler alike. They must have those Wai-mate Plains; the Government of the day even sent off advertisements to Australia offering land for selection that was in Maori occupation. A change of Government occurred, and Sir John Hall became Premier, with pakeha. This was a totally inadequate provision out of a very large area which the natives considered rightfully theirs. Roadmakers and surveyors began work on Maori land. The natives did not know where their reserves were. Survey obstruction continued as a protest.
Taranaki by this time was a great military camping ground. There were redoubts and stockades everywhere but at the Maori villages, and a force of about 1,500 Armed Constabulary and Volunteers was assembled, under Major Roberts, with Mr. Bryce practically the commanding officer. The Maoris had no fortifications, had no arms except a few shotguns. The Government decided to break up Parihaka and disperse the Maoris. Bryce, after various proclamations, marched into Parihaka
marae of the village.
The Maori leaders, and in fact all their people, behaved with a calmness and dignity strangely at variance with the military strong hand of the autocratic Bryce. korowai robes, the classic garb of old Maoridom; they eschewed all pakeha clothes that day. It was a dignified act, that reversion to the kakahu Maori. There was dignity, and a patience and resignation, in the pathetic leave-taking of
Te Whiti and Tohu were kept in custody by the Government for about two years without a trial. pakeha opinion, which had sssumed a kind of frenzy. One perfectly ferocious newspaper editor wrote, in 1879, when
“Perhaps, all things considered, the present difficulty will be one of the greatest blessings New Zealand ever experienced, for without doubt it will be a war of extermination … . The time has come, in our minds, when New Zealand must strike for freedom, and this means the death-blow to the Maori race.”
So New Zealand struck for freedom in the manner prescribed by the warlike editor, and found a perfectly unarmed, peaceful foe, whose little children carried loaves of bread to the troops, and whose most formidable act was a performance by some poi girls who would not get out of the way of the advancing Constabulary.
There was truth in many of
“Though I am killed, yet I shall live. The future is mine, and little children will answer in the future when questioned as to the author of peace, ‘
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In the year 1904 I was riding round the Mountain, from Hawera to raukura of mana in the old patriot party, and I was received, though a stranger, with all the hospitality for which
That evening poi parties rehearse their dances for the coming monthly festival of the faithful, the 18th, the anniversary of the beginning of the never-forgotten Waitara war, in 1860. The poi dance was more than a mere amusement in Parihaka. It was a semi-religious ceremony; the ancient songs centuries old were chanted, and pakeha.
“Sit with me here,” said the prophet, “and tell me what you think of my poi girls.” Many of the people, men and women, seeing their leader bring a guest on to the dais, spread with soft mats, came up to hongi
Those poi song and dance acts were altogether different from those of other parts of the Island. They were very wild and high, unrestrained in voice and action. The tossing white plumes with which every one of the dancers, about thirty-five of them, had decked her flowing black hair, the bright, glittering eyes, the vigour of the women's hip-swinging, the undulating rhythm of the old Polynesian tarekareka, in perfect time to the songs, gave the poi a touch exciting to the senses. But it was the high ceremonious chanting that was the most thrilling part of it. The songs were ritual, historical, sacred.
It was fitting that the Prophet of the Mountain, when he was laid in his grave yonder, beside his Parihaka home—that was three years after my visit—should have been farewelled with the chant of the Aotea canoe from far Tahiti and the invocations of the ancient days, to the tapping sound of many poi balls. To the Maori fancy the wise old chieftain's spirit still lingered, with a smile on the spirit lips, to hear once more the music of his beloved rangi poi.
Explorers And Pathfinders
The Spade of Rakaihaitu
THE story of heroic exploration in this greatly mountainous and forested country goes back a very long way. Polynesian sailing-craft voyaged to the shores of these islands a thousand years ago and more, computing the period from Maori genealogical recitals. These lists of ancestors are usually reliable, until the tradition-keepers wander so far into “the dark backward and abysm of time” that they introduce the mythological names of gods and the powers of nature. There were many successive waves of immigration. Very probably some of the earliest comers were from the islands of Melanesia, north of New Zealand, before the later comers arrived from the Polynesian islands far away to the north-east. By the time the Arawa, Tainui, Takitimu and other celebrated vessels arrived from Tahiti and Rarotonga in the middle of the fourteenth century there were thousands of people in these islands—the tangata whenua, as the Maoris call them, mostly of Polynesian blood, with a touch of the Melanesian tarbrush.
Forty-two generations ago in Maori word-of-mouth chronology, which is to say about 1,050 years ago—approximately 900 A.D.—a Polynesian exploring navigator whose name was Rakaihaitu landed on the sands of the South Island from his sailing canoe, the name of which, as the traditions of his descendants tell, was the Uruao. These traditions are quite unknown in the North Island; they were preserved in the memories of
kaikas over thirty years ago. Rakaihaitu was the first great explorer of this wild land, long before even the name Aotearoa had been given to it; that name came from later immigrants from Tahiti. He preceded that other Polynesian explorer of fame, Tamatea, commander of the Takitimu (or Takitumu) canoe, by four centuries, again computing the period from the genealogies.
Rakaihaitu travelled from north to south of the unpeopled island, spying out the goodness of the land, noting its food supplies, its plenty of birds for food, and its fish-teeming estuaries. Rakaihaitu was a magician; like Ngatoro-i-Rangi, the priest and wizard of a much later Hawaikian migration, he was “a god in himself,” as the Maoris say; and he performed some marvellous deeds.
According to the legend narrated by his descendants, he formed some of the great lakes of the Island. The first whose bed he made was Rotoroa, in the north of the Island. Then, coming south, he formed Wairewa, which we call Forsyth, the long narrow lake lying between the steep volcanic heights on the fringe of the Banks Peninsula ranges. Striding southward like a giant he paused to form a lake in many places. The great lakes we know he made—and how? He gouged them out with his digging-implement, the long sharp-ended ko, with lashed-on foot-rest, used by the ancient cultivator. His crowning work of magic was Wakatipu; with many fervent incantations to aid his efforts he scooped out with his mighty ko that long deep winding trench between the mountains. He dug out also the
In the same spirit of hero-worship and ancestor-worship the old Maoris have a figurative expression for the cliffs of the East Coast of the South Island; they speak of them as “Nga whata tu a Rakaihaitu,” likening them to the whata or storehouse set on tall legs or posts, in which food was kept.
This nature-myth of lake-making preserves in figurative Maori fashion the story of the explorer's discoveries as he travelled through the Island. It is curious that the formation of all the lakes mentioned in the legend given me—with the exception of Wairewa—is traceable to glacial action. Rakaihaitu's ko was the ice-plough of the Alps, the glacier, which, with its enormous excavating power, scooped out the channels of the lakes and deposited terminal moraines that confined the waters in their deep bed. The legend is one of the many proofs of the ancient Maori's keen eye for land contours and an appreciation of geological and physiographic facts, and as was his way he crystallised these impressions in symbolic folk-talk.
Some of our own people, too, have this gift of poetic imagery in describing the facts of nature. Some years ago I was discussing with an old Irish farmer friend the ice-striated rocks and the smooth-backed “roches moutonees” so familiar a sight in the country at the base of the Southern Alps. He had seen similar rocks,
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Tamatea-pokai-whenua (“Tamatea who penetrated the land”), as the chief of the famous Takitimu came to be called, explored not only the South Island, but a great part of the North. From Southland (Murihiku), where he left his canoe stranded (heroic legend avers that the Takitimu Range, overlooking Lake Manapouri on the plains side, is his capsized canoe) he travelled to Lake Te Anau, thence northward to the hills above the inlet that is now Lyttelton Harbour, and still northward. Making a canoe, he and his people crossed to the North Island, and made their way up the Wanganui River (properly Whanganui) as far as they could paddle and pole. Then Tamatea explored the heart of the Island, Lake Taupo and the volcanic mountains, and so on across the ranges and plains until he came to the East Coast; and there he rejoined the section of his crew who had landed near the East Cape. A heroic traverse indeed; it occupied years; and Tamatea left his mark on many places by bestowing names which have persisted to this day. The small lakes popularly called the Tama lakes, near the base of Ngauruhoe volcano, are in full Nga Puna a Tamatea—“The Water-springs of Tamatea.” And there is that often-quoted and usually misspelled name of a hill on the explorer's trail from Taupo to East Coast which preserves his memory at portenteous length: Te Taumata
koauau was a small flute blown with the nostrils).
There was an enterprising explorer in the Tainui canoe, a chief from Tahiti, named Rakataura; he was the tohunga or priest of this party of immigrants. He explored the great region now known as the King Country, from Kawhia and Pirongia Mountain southward and westward, giving names to features of the landscape and noting the products of the land, the abundance of birds for food. Tainui traditions say that he named, among many other places, Pureora Mountain, the highest peak in the King Country, and also Te Aroha Mountain.
First over the Alps
The Epic of Raureka and the Greenstone
COLD and hunger, daily risk of death were the lot of the first explorers and gold-prospectors who penetrated the ravines and climbed the rocky ranges and forded the mad torrents of the Southern Alps and the mountain world where travellers now speed in smooth comfort from Canterbury to Westland by a wonderfully engineered railroad.
But long before the golden days of the Sixties, long before ever a pakeha foot pressed New Zealand soil, brown adventurers, clad in flax mats and shod with flax sandals, pressed up through these gale-swept mountain solitudes and descended on the West Coast in search of the most precious thing of their era, the pounamu or greenstone. And even before their day a Maori woman made the first crossing of the Southern Alps; she travelled east, from the Greenstone Coast to the plains that are now Canterbury.
This woman was
In the heart of the Southern Alps, close to Mount Cook, there is an ice-peak which the map-makers have named Mount Raureka to memorize this long-gone explorer. It is on the dividing range, looking down upon the Hooker Glacier. It would have been more fitting, however, had they given the name to one of the mountains above Browning's Pass, far to the north of the Hooker, for it was there that Raureka made the crossing. Unlike the white pioneers, it was from the west that Raureka came, and it was in a curious way that the first Alpine trail-maker made known to the tribes of the plains the existence of the wild and mysterious land of Poutini, as the Maoris called the West Coast.
About two hundred and fifty years ago Raureka, as her descendants relate, left her village at Arahura, as the result of a quarrel with the people of her tribe, and with one companion, a slave named Kapakeha, wandered far up into the mountains at the head of Lake Kanieri. Quite accidentally the fugitives discovered a pass between the Alps that overlooked the head waters of the Arahura, and toiling on, high into the snow-powdered heights, shod with paraerae, or sandals of flax leaves, they crossed the divide. It was midsummer. They descended the valley of the Rakaia, and emerged on the Canterbury Plains. They trudged across the gently sloping prairie, a great lone land of tussock and cabbage trees, until they came to a place near where the town of Geraldine now stands. Here, exhausted
Raureka's few handfuls of food were quite exhausted when the pounamu which she had carried across the mountains. And she softly chanted a rhythmic song to herself as she chipped away with the little axe at a piece of kauru, the saccharine root of the ti-palm which she was scraping preparatory to cooking it. This is a translation I have made of the chant she crooned, a karakia or charm used by her people when felling forest trees and supposed to give additional efficacy to the woodman's axe and more strength to his brawny arms:—
I lay my sharp axe to the foot of the tree.How it bites, O my sons,How it sounds through the woods!How keenly I longFor this tall child of Tane!For Tane the Tree-God,Towering so high—Tane felled, prostrate, at my feet.See how the chips fly from my axe!Bared to the light of outer dayAre Tane's children,Once pillared lofty in the forest shades,Now stripped and prone,On Tane's sacred day.For the original Maori of this chant see “Maori Poetry” section, “Legends of the Maori,”
J. Cowan (Harry H. Tombs Ltd ., publishers).The name Tane (in full Tane-Mahuta) is pronounced Tah-nay.
While Raureka was telling her story, one Puhou, a warrior of the pounamu treasure, and he determined to steal secretly away and exploit this rich new land for himself.
In the morning the expedition continued to march northward across the tussock plain to Taumutu and Kaiapoi. The artful warrior contrived to secure charge of Raureka, and as he had to all appearances been asleep when the woman displayed her axe of pounamu no one suspected him when he announced that he and several of his companions intended to make a scouting detour and rejoin the main body further north. Out of sight, Puhou and his men travelled inland and ascended the valley of the Rakaia. He induced Raureka to pilot him across to Westland by the pass she had discovered. She gave him her little axe and taught him the magic “chopping song,” and, moreover, became his wife.
The scouts made pararae, sandals of flax leaves, for the rough passage over the trackless range of rocks and snow, and by devious and perilous days, by mountain, flood and forest, they reached Raureka's home at Arahura. There they made friends with the Ngati-Wairangi and became possessed of much pounamu in the rough, and also in the form of weapons and ornaments. It was a treasure house of the Maoris, that camp on the bank of the Arahura.
Puhou explored the country as far north as the forestgirt lake named Te Kotuku-whakaoka (“The Darting Heron”), now known as Lake Brunner. Then he returned to Arahura, and he and his companions loaded themselves with all the greenstone they could carry, and set back over the range to the East Coast, skirting Lake Kanieri and crossing the mountains by Raureka's Pass.
They had been absent from the East Coast several months and it was summer when they emerged from the Rakaia Valley and kindled a great fire on a hill overlooking the homes of their tribe.
The Ngai-Tahu at once realised the truth. “Aue!” they said, “the cunning of that sleeper! He has outwitted us all. He has found the Fish-of-Poutini.”
And wearily but triumphantly Puhou and his greenstone-bearers marched into the village square, set down their heavy burdens, and exhibited their spoils of pounamu.
This was the beginning of annual expeditions across the mountains to Arahura, the wonderful Greenstone River, the totara-bark and sea-kelp baskets to
Te Whaiti, Whirinaki Valley, in the Urewera Country.In 1869 Colonel Whitmore's right column, invading the Urewera Mountains from Fort Galatea (Rangitaiki),
advanced up this valley, on the way to Ruatahuna, joining there the left column which had fought its way
up the Whakatane Valley. In the middle distance is the ancient terraced hill-fort Umurakau. From a water-colour drawing by T. Ryan, 1890.
Explorers of Fiordland.
From photographs at Milford Sound, 1888. (See pages 270–278.) Quinton McKinnon; E. A. Mitchell.
(Discoverers of McKinnon's Pass.)
Explorers of Fiordland.
From photographs at Milford Sound, 1888. (See pages 270–278.)
After several generations of fighting, peace was at last made between the East and West Coast people, cemented by the giving of a Ngati-Wairangi girl in marriage to Te Whatarangi, a chief of Kaiapoi. The peace was not a permanent one, for the pounamu-greed was on the outer tribes again, and in the early years of last century Tuhuru and other Kaiapoi chiefs ravaged the Poutini coast with pakeha Government agents in 1864.
There are three passes at the head of the Rakaia waters—Browning's Pass (4,800 feet) above the source of the Wilberforce, a tributary of the Rakaia; Mathias Pass, and Whitcombe's Pass. These give access to the West Coast, but it is Browning's Pass, although the highest of the three, that Raureka discovered, as it is the most readily reached from the Arahura, by way of Lake Kanieri, and it was used for generations by the trans-Alpine Maori pilgrims and warriors.
The Cruise of the Gipsy
A Pioneer Surveyor on the Golden Coast
THE first systematic survey of the principal part of the Westland coast, from the Grey River southward, was carried out in 1863–64 by an adventurous and plucky young Canterbury man under conditions of difficulty and danger strange to think of to-day. The narrative of this early-days surveyor, who found the Greenstone Land as wild and rugged a wilderness as it was in Brunner's and Heaphy's day, is quite an Odyssey of toil and peril by sea and shore. Sailoring in a tiny vessel on a stormy coast, shipwreck, trail-breaking through the unknown forest, navigating strong rivers, fording Alpine torrents, bushcraft of all kinds, were incidents in this first official traverse of this new, raw land.
In 1863 the West Coast of the South Island was all but unknown to Europeans. The Admiralty charts showed the principal headlands, but nothing inland except the general line of the Alps. It was, however, well known to the Ngai-Tahu Maoris, who had a regular route, albeit a very rough, hard trail, from Kaiapoi, in Canterbury, by way of the Hurunui and Taramakau Rivers to the Arahura. The Provincial Government of Canterbury decided to have a survey made of the whole of their West Coast, and with this in view, tenders were invited for the survey in two
The young surveyor left Christchurch on June 10th, 1863, for Nelson, where he set about getting an outfit and chartering a vessel to take his men, stores and equipment to the Coast. He obtained a fore-and-aft schooner, the Gipsy, of only fifteen tons burden. He bought about a ton of bacon and enough flour and general stores to serve ten men about twelve months. All the small stores were put in drapery cases and filled up with flour; the zinc lining was well soldered down watertight, and the cases extra-heavily hooped, so that they would be perfectly safe from water and rats.
All the goods and the little schooner were ready by August 7th, and on the 8th the Gipsy sailed from Nelson. The ship's company comprised Jack McCann, the
The galley was simply a large tin-lined packing case, with a small stove in it, and a chimney through the top of the case. This was right enough in fair weather, Dobson narrated, but when it blew a gale of wind cooking had to be postponed till fine weather.
On the morning of the 9th of August, when off Separation Point, a strong N.W. wind got up and the Gipsy ran in behind Tonga Island and anchored for shelter. On the 10th they got up anchor and sailed for Farewell Spit, but the nor'-wester was too strong. The schooner had to run before it and sailed across the Bay to Croixelles Harbour, and anchored near the Maori village. A heavy gale with rain now set in and continued until the 13th. The crew gathered pipi shellfish on the beaches.
On the 13th the schooner left the Croixelles with a light S.E. wind, which took her into the Strait, and well towards
“It was far from comfortable for ten men,” Mr.
“On the 25th August we sailed with a fair wind. On the 27th we were off the mouth of the Buller River, where there was a small settlement (now Westport), chiefly storekeepers and others, to supply the few miners who were working gold up the Buller. By the 30th we lay off the entrance to the Grey River, but the sea was far too rough to attempt taking the bar.
“We were now looking to see if we could find any river we could enter south of the Grey: and with that end in view kept near the land whenever the weather permitted. It was very thick, with rain squalls, and a heavy sea. Every now and again it blew very hard; the spray would break all over the ship, and all we could do was to heave-to, lash the tiller, and go below, leaving the little craft to ride it out under a storm-jib and close-reefed mainsail.
“On the 11th September, when we were about a hundred miles south of the Grey, the weather cleared, and we had an excellent view of Mount Cook. Just under the snowfields of great Aorangi lay the head of a glacier, the terminal of which was a quite low elevation, and was in amongst the beech forest at the edge of the level land. I did not name this glacier, as it was not in the block of country comprised in my contract survey,
“In gales on that wild coast we didn't know quite where we were sometimes. Rain and mists and clouds hid the mountains from us. I knew our longitude, but for latitude I had to wait until I could get a sight of the sun. I took sights when the weather cleared on the 11th. I used a box sextant I had with me for the survey work. We were right down off Okarito then, and when I found our position we put about and sailed north for the Grey. The skipper was not a navigator; I was the only one on board who could take sights and ascertain the position.
“By the afternoon of next day, September 12—we had made fast sailing with a good fair breeze—we lay off the Grey River bar—five weeks out from Nelson!
“We were now short of water, and we were inexpressibly anxious to get into the river and set foot on land again. With a favourable breeze we stood in for the bar. It was high water, but unfortunately the sea was far rougher than we anticipated, and on getting into the first break of surf, the wind was not strong enough to give us steerage way. The schooner was soon broadside on to a heavy sea, every wave breaking right over us. We were all stripped to our flannels ready for a swim. We were knocked about against the masts and deck as we clung to the running rigging. It seemed a
“The bulwarks were torn off, some of the planking beams broken, and the hold was half full of water. The deck was swept bare. We all dropped off the bowsprit on to the drift timber, and found a large party of Maoris with four white men ready to help.
“The Canterbury Provincial Government had a few weeks previously sent a schooner to the Grey and established a relief store, which was placed in the hands of a Mr. Townsend, who had with him a cook and a carpenter. There was also a young man named Sherrin, who had been gold prospecting but who was now looking for a chance to get back to the diggings on the Buller River. (Townsend soon afterwards was drowned on the Grey bar, with two of his men.)
“As it was spring tide and we had come ashore on the top of high water, in a short time the schooner was high and dry. Before dark, with the help of so many hands, we had everything ashore, and well housed under a big tent we had made with the sails. As all my stores had been packed away in drapery cases well soldered up and strongly hooped, the soaking in the hold had done no harm.
“My men were very pleased to get ashore; they were very sick of the long unpleasant voyage. But the first news we had set them thinking, and that was that Mr. Charlton Howitt, surveyor, who had been sent out by the Canterbury Government to open up a foot track on the
Later information received by Mr. Dobson regarding Mr. Howitt's death was that Howitt had cut a track to the Taramakau and down that river, and across the open land to Lake Brunner. He made a canoe of white pine (kahikatea) for eel-fishing by spearing; not realising that the new and unseasoned dug-out would sink, he went out eeling one night with two of his men, and was never seen again. The cook, Harnett, having cut his foot with an axe, had been left in camp. When Mr. Howitt and his men did not return next day the cook make a raft of dry kahikatea logs and paddled all round the edge of Lake Brunner, but without finding any trace of his companions. Nothing was ever heard of them.
So adventurously opened Dobson's surveying expedition to the wild West Coast. Many of the incidents of this really great and difficult task, which occupied twelve months, were narrated in his MS. story given to me in 1926.
After Dobson had retrieved his supplies from the wrecked schooner he found his men were thoroughly disheartened by the perilous voyage, the depressing outlook in the lonely, wild, inhospitable country of the West, and the risks of death by drowning. His reply was to pay them off and give them plenty of stores to carry them over the pass at the head of the Taramakau into the Lake Sumner country in Canterbury, where there were sheep stations. He now decided to work with the Maoris for his survey. He was fortunate in making the Maoris his good friends; fortunate also because there were many canoes on the rivers. The Maoris were skilful canoemen in navigating their swift strong streams. Fred Reed, a half-caste who lived at the Mawhera (where Greymouth town now is) spoke a
“As I had several hundred pounds' worth of stores at Mawhera,” narrated Mr. Dobson, “I was esteemed a rich man, and the Maoris were quite ready to do business with me. They had canoes at every river, huts in many places, and several whatas (storehouses built on wooden piles, for fear of damage by rats and water). I arranged to rent some of these whatas, and paid the natives to swag stores down the beach to them. I also offered to pay for the use of the canoes when required. In a month's time I found I was in an excellent position. The natives were thoroughly honest, the inhabitants of the little villages along the Coast were always pleased when my party came along, and were always ready to help in any way, knowing they would be well paid in stores or with orders they could cash in Kaiapoi, across in Canterbury. At all the river mouths there were small settlements, with hidden canoes available for those who knew where to find them.
“By the end of December, 1863, I had surveyed the Mawhera to its junction with the Arnold, up that river to Lake Brunner, and southward from there to the Taramakau at about where the railway bridge now crosses. During January I traversed from the Mawhera
“Whilst surveying up the Taramakau I was joined by a number of natives going over the mountains to Kaiapoi. We numbered in all 25 men, women and children. We bought a large canoe capable of carrying nearly two tons up the river to above the junction at the Otira, where we hid it in the bush for our return. I carried the traverse over the Alpine pass into Canterbury about seven miles down the Hurunui. There I parted company with my party; I wished to hurry on to Christchurch. They could not travel fast on account of the women and children, so I pushed on with a white man whom I picked up trying to make his way back to the east from an unsuccessful trip to the Taramakau. The Maoris had served me very well indeed, but they had by now earned what seemed to them a lot of money and they were going to have a good long spell at Kaiapoi, and were in no hurry to return to work.”
The first section of his heavy task successfully accomplished, Mr. Dobson made his way back by horseback in 1864 to complete the bush and coast survey.
In the meantime he had discovered the Alpine saddle now known in Arthur's Pass. This important exploration was made in March, 1864.
When Dobson returned to Westland he had four ex-sailors, including a whaleship's cooper, who was a good carpenter. Presently this handy artisan was at the head of his gang in a novel job of work, hewing out a canoe Maori fashion.
“I had canoes available for crossing all the rivers and creeks along the Coast,” Mr. Dobson narrated, “and for the survey of the Hokitika River I had had a large canoe made for me by one Hakiaka, a renowned canoe-maker at Hokitika. That was before any white men had settled there. I was detained by very wet weather at the Taramakau, so in order to be independent of the natives at that strong, swift river, I selected a large kahikatea log, and, with my new gang, headed by the ship's carpenter, set to work to dig out a waka. In five days we had cut out and finished a fine large canoe, two tons burden. This did excellent service on the river. The canoe, though cut out in one solid piece, was a close imitation of a Maori canoe with fitted topsides. The lines were more flat-bottomed than those of the native waka, and it was not so cranky as the Maori-made canoe in poling up the rivers. Some of the native canoes were so tender that, although you could pole in them when standing up, you would at once capsize if you sat down, unless there was a good deal of ballast aboard.
“A clipper canoe was made on the Grey when I was there. When it was launched on the river a number of the Maori girls jumped into it, before any ballast was put in, and sat down. It immediately rolled over and capsized them into the river, amidst great laughter. I asked the owner if he had named it, but he said he had not made up his mind. Next time I came I found he had selected as a suitable name, ‘Tahuri Tonu’ (‘Complete Capsize’).”
Mr. Dobson, discussing those old bush days, said he always had plenty of food distributed in little whata storehouses, Maori-fashion, along the Coast too, and so, after a while the party never had to swag their supplies any distance. As to camp comfort in that land of ever-dripping bush and over-much rain, he said: “Throughout the whole of the work, which occupied twelve months, I never once had wet blankets or wet clothes to sleep in. All my sleeping gear was all day long tied up in a waterproof envelope, with matches and a little bit of dry wood for kindling, ready to start a fire when we returned to the camp.
“Gold had been found in the Hohonu, a tributary of the Taramakau. The Maoris and a few white men were working there. The Government had blazed a track over the Hurunui Pass and down the Taramakau, through the bush, wherever the river-bed could not be used, and prospectors were swagging their way through from Canterbury. With my men and horses, swimming the horses behind the canoes where the rivers were too deep to ford, I went down the Coast to the Whataroa River, then worked steadily north, traversing each river up to the mountains. By the end of September, 1864, I
Nelson, and returned to Christchurch laden only with my field books, my contract carried out.”
(Mr. Dobson was knighted in 1931 in recognition of his pioneering and development work in the Dominion. He died in Christchurch in 1934, at the age of ninety-two years.)
Explorers of Fiordland
TWO names stand out above all others on the roll of South New Zealand explorers who have drawn the veil of mystery from the Dominion's most rugged and formidable region, the Fiordland National Park, home of the torrents and the crags, mighty waterfalls, profound canyons, and all but impenetrable forests. With that strange, savagely beautiful land between the heads of Milford Sound and Lake Te Anau the memories of Donald Sutherland and Quinton McKinnon are imperishably linked. Each was essentially a lone-handed explorer. Sometimes in the trail-blazing each had the company of others, but they did not require the backing of human society; the solitary life had no terrors for them, even in that land of tremendous, overpowering landscapes and vast difficulty of travel.
It is more than thirty years since I first met Donald Sutherland, in his home at the head of Milford Sound, on the spot where he had pitched his tent in 1876. He was a type that fitted that unconquerable dour country, his native Highlands on a far grander scale. A big, gruff, hard man, who had been sailor, soldier, bush-scout, gold-digger, for many years before he came to an anchor for good in the towering gloom of Milford Sound, to enjoy what he described as “the quiet life.”
Talking there on the inner shore of the great fiord, with the Bowen Falls making a perpetual background of water thunder, and again by the blazing tawai logs in the living-room of his accommodation house, Donald
pa-stormings and skirmishes in his time. He had wild tales to tell of bush warfare, and of head-hunting in the pursuit of
In the early Seventies the well-seasoned sailor and carbineer was serving before the mast in a Government steamer under Captain Fairchild, and on one of the vessel's cruises around the coast he was several times in Milford Sound. That was the period when whaling and sealing were the two chief industries of the far south. The old barque Chance, of which one reads in Cachalot,” was waddling around Foveaux Strait with her Maori and half-caste crew under Captain Paddy Gilroy; and schooners and cutters and even open whaleboats went cruising round to the West Coast Sounds after fur seals. Sutherland conceived the notion that Milford was a likely place for gold, and when he finally resolved to settle there he
Stella brought him once every six months. This strong, tough, level-headed Scot deliberately chose to live by himself in the most savage spot in all New Zealand, a place full of dangers for most people, very grand of scenery but oppressive to the mind in its tremendous cliff architecture, the stormy gloom of its enormous mountains that stand about the narrow fiord so closely that it seems but a sea-trench cut through a mass of solid granite. Sutherland lived in Milford quite alone for two years before he was joined by a mate, John Mackay, with whom he afterwards prospected much of this formidable country for gold. His canny Scottish brain was not unbalanced by the inconceivable loneliness of this existence, with only his dog for company. After the noise of the money-chasing world, and after six or seven years of soldiering, this gigantic, silent place seemed to him an excellent spot to live his own life, undisturbed by others' talk, unworried by orders, his own master, able to choose his own day's work or not to work at all if the fit took him. His dog, his gun, his boat, and his seal-hunting and gold-prospecting expeditions gave him all the company and the occupation he needed, and there in his tent and then his whare, in the little backwater of a basin near the Bowen Falls, he spent many and many a month in perfect solitariness, the only human being on the shores of all the Fiord Country.
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Early one morning in 1878, the Government steamer Stella entered the Sound, on her six-monthly trip. The
“It's fine to see you, John.”
“Aye, Donald. It's a grand lot o' glens ye have here all to yourself.”
“It is that, but I wish there were some of our good Sutherland deer roaming the Cleddau yonder. I'm weary of weka and pigeon. I'd almost give away Bruce here, the deevil, for a dinner of venison chops in the frying-pan.”
Mackay pitched his tent alongside his friend's and the two planned prospecting and exploring expeditions around the coast and up the valley of the Arthur that led inland they knew not how far.
Sutherland and Mackay, with guns, slash-hooks, and prospecting-dish, and Bruce, were clambering the rocky side of Lake Ada. They made a rough bush bivouac. In the morning, with the mists clearing from the Arthur valley, the prospectors tested the Arthur's sands for gold. No luck; they moved on. They discovered a very beautiful series of falls. The cascade descending through the forest was named after Mackay. The two Scots discovered also the curious Bell Rock on the river bank.
On the evening of the third day from Milford the explorers camped in a very deep and mossy forest, where the trees, hung with green beards, leaned over them in fantastic attitudes. In camp that night, they heard the steady dull thunder, rising and falling with the breeze, of some great cataract.
“Hear yon watter falling doon,” said Mackay to his mate.
“Eh, but it's beyond the ordinary. We'll see something grand in the morning.”
After their bush breakfast, the pair slashed their way through the ferns and mossy trees, in the direction of the great thudding sound. It shook the very earth as they approached. They could not see anything until they were nearly at the foot of the vast precipice over which it poured. Then suddenly they emerged from the forest and saw the cataract, dropping almost from the clouds. The explorers stood in amazement, gazing up at the waterfall. Mackay broke the silence.
“What do ye think o't, Donald?” he asked.
“Eh, John, but it's a de'il o' a drop!”
“How high d'ye make it?”
“A mile of water on end,” said Sutherland. “That nick in the cliff must be nearly as high as Mitre Peak, and that's more than five thousand feet high. Aye, but this will be a sight to tell the Government about when they come in to Milford again.”
“But they'll no' believe us, Donald, I'm thinking?”
“Oh aye, John, they'll no' believe us.”
That discovery was made on November 10th, 1880. It was eight years later before the Government sent surveyors in to explore the unknown hinterland of Milford, and to measure the height of the great water-fall, which had been named after Sutherland. The Chief Surveyor of Otago, Mr.
The mile-high estimate was reduced to 1,904 feet by the surveyors' measurements; it is divided into three leaps. Even so, it is the highest waterfall in New Zealand, or in any part of the Southern Hemisphere, except perhaps some of the great cataracts in the forests of Brazil towards the Andes.
∗ ∗ ∗
While the Adams party was at the foot of the Sutherland Falls, another explorer, a fellow-countryman of Sutherland's, was bravely fighting his way over the unknown country between Lake Te Anau and the Arthur Valley. This was Quinton McKinnon, great-heart of the wilds, an explorer whose ambition it was to discover a pass over the tremendously rugged lands of mystery between lake and ocean. He had vanished from all human ken for many weeks; no one knew where he was.
One morning, in the upper part of the Arthur Valley, Mr. Adams met one of the road cutters.
The roadman said: “I saw three explorers come over the Pass this morning.”
Mr. Adams: “What do you mean?”
The roadman: ‘Well, I was up this morning at daybreak, and I saw three black swans flying over to this side of the mountain from inland. You know birds generally fly over the lowest gap in a range. I wouldn't be surprised if that was where the pass is that you want to find.” And he pointed up to the lofty wall above him, between two huge precipitous mountain peaks, a gateway of the gods.
McKinnon, his gun slung over his shoulder, swag on his back, slash-hook in his hand, clambered slowly, clinging on to shrubs and snow-grass, up the cliff of that tremendous cirque of granite rock, the head of the Clinton Canyon. He had a companion, his staunch comrade E. A. Mitchell, who had been his mate on exploring expeditions from the western fiords of Te Anau towards the coast. The pair reached the passtop, the first human beings to scale this wonderful saddle down between the cloud-hung crags of Mt. Balloon and Mt. Hart.
They looked long at the grand panorama of ice and rock peak around them, then crossed the narrow pass, with its small tarns like green eyes, to the other side, the precipice that looked down on the new unknown valley that trended seaward. Two thousand feet below the little mists drifted about the tree-tops; a green riot of forest filled the profound gulch; and streams and cascades glinted like threads drawn through the green
The precipice below seemed vertical, overhanging in places. How could they descend that fearful wall? Well they knew from experience that it was more difficult and dangerous to descend a cliff than to scale one. But slowly and carefully they went down the wall, zigzagging their way, clinging to snow grass and the tough shrubs that here and there had tenacious roothold in the granite cliffs. Avalanches crashed from the impending glacier, echoed in long thunder rolls from side to side of the glen. They reached the deep-down forest at last. With bounding hearts they slashed their way through the mossy and tangled jungle, and forded its fierce little streams that tore down the gulch.
That day was the 16th of October, 1888. The explorers camped about half-way between the Pass foot and the Sutherland Falls; next day they came to Sutherland's track, near the camp now known as the Beech Hut. Presently they saw a tent gleam through the green; this was a 10 × 12 ft. tent belonging to Mr. Adams' party. They followed the track to the boat landing on the Arthur River at the head of Lake Ada. Finding no one there they returned to the camp at night, a fearfully rough journey in the darkness. They heard the thunder of the Sutherland Falls and next day went along the track, found a newly-built hut, and gazed up in wonder at the cataract. It was the day after that before they heard the first human voices in that vast forest solitude and met Tom McKenzie and his exploring
Free-roving Quinton McKinnon was soon back in the heart of his beloved wilderness, exploring, track-cutting. Four years later he was drowned in Lake Te Anau while sailing his whaleboat single-handed in squally weather. His boat was discovered stranded; he was never found. A Highland cairn, built of granite rocks by the Gaelic men of the South Country, now stands on the pass-top, fittingly rugged memorial to the discoverer who linked lake to sea-fiord by this route that has become one of the world's great wonderpaths.
The Coracle of Disappointment Island
A Story of Sea Heroes
ON the wall of the main hall in the Canterbury Museum there was fastened some years ago the sea-battered framework of a singular little craft, a kind of round-ended flat-bottomed boat made of the gnarled and twisted branches and trunks of shrubs. It was nothing more nor less than a coracle such as the ancient Britons made thousands of years ago; such craft, called curragh, are still in use on some remote parts of the West Coast of Ireland. This coracle frame, stripped of its original tattered canvas covering, is a relic of as inspiring a deed of dogged perseverance and courage as ever was recorded in the long story of maritime adventure. To my mind this pitiful makeshift canoe was the most significant and epic-laden, human thing in the whole range of collections in that museum. It was the coracle in which the survivors of the lost ship Dundonald made their escape after many months from the isle of starvation fitly called Disappointment, in the sub-Antarctic Aucklands, and reached the depot on the main island, with its food and clothing and shelter.
One black midnight in March, 1907, the four-masted barque Dundonald, a beautiful steel clipper of 2,200 tons, British built and British owned, was plunging through heavy seas, in half a gale of wind far to the southward of New Zealand. She was on the first long slant of her great circle sailing across the Southern Ocean; she was bound from Sydney to England, deep-laden
That dreaded cry, “Land ahead!” came through the blackness from the look-out on the foc's'l-head. The captain, who had been bending over the chart, rushed out and shouted, “All hands wear ship!” Mr. Jabez Peters, the sturdy old mate, yelled for the watch below, and the men came tumbling out from their quarters to join the watch on deck already singing out at the braces.
But the despairing manoeuvre failed. The ship missed stays and drifted broadside toward the awful cliffs, which could now be seen defined by the flash of breakers crashing at their base.
Hopeless now, with the towering seas taking her irresistibly in to that lee shore. She struck stern first on a rocky buttress, then swinging in until nearly the whole length of her doomed hull was grinding on the jagged rocks, where a fissure indented the black precipice.
The boats? It was impossible to launch them. Heavy seas thundered over the ship. Most of the crew, under the chief mate, got forward to the fo'c'sl-head. The
Disappointment Island, and The Wreck of the Dundonald.In 1907 the British four-masted barque Dundonald was wrecked
on Disappointment Island, on the west side of the Auckland
Islands. The survivors, after great sufferings in winter on the
desolate Island, reached the N.Z. Government boat and provision
depot in Port Ross, near the north end of the main island.
Sketch map by A. H. Messenger. (See pages 279–285.)
As the first dull gleams of day struggled through the darkness, a Finnish sailor, Michael Pul, contrived to struggle on to a rocky ledge in the cliff from the top of the jigger-mast. He crept along the cliff, feeling his way in the gloom, until he was opposite the foremast. He called out for a line. One of the men who had been on the fore-topgallant-yard returned to the foretop and cut some of the running gear below and threw a line to the scarcely visible figure ashore. It was made fast at both ends and by this means all the men forward managed, after a desperate struggle, to get on to the cliff edges.
Of those on the jigger, three managed to follow the Fin safely; one who had earlier swung on to the rocky wall was numbed and stiff; he lost his hold and dropped helplessly into the drowning surf.
Bruised, wet and shivering, the survivors clambered to the top of the cliffs of their desolate place, and the chief mate mustered them in the raw early day. There were sixteen saved out of a ship's company of twenty-eight. They were scantily clad; few of them had coats or caps. They had a few dry matches; on these few in one of the men's boxes their lives depended in that dreadful solitude, with the southern winter coming on. They kindled fires; they kept them going night and day. Their first thought then was salvage from the wreck; but of that there was faint hope.
Jabez Peters, the mate, had reckoned the ship struck on the main Auckland Island, where there was a provision depot maintained by the New Zealand Government for the use of shipwrecked crews. But an exploration of the place soon convinced him that it was the small island charted as Disappointment Island. The main island, with its store of food and clothing in a hut, was separated from the isle of the wreck by five miles of ocean.
There they were on the most forlorn place in the range of the seven seas. They were fated to live for seven hard months marooned on that dismal gale-swept isle in Fifty South, where the only sounds but their own voices were the whistling winds, the growling surf, and the shrieking, screaming and squabbling of innumerable flocks of seabirds.
In most stories of castaways on lonely islands the sailors contrive to save some food and a variety of useful articles from the wreck. But the Dundonald's unfortunates were destitute of everything, except a few matches, which enabled them to start a fire and keep them going once they established a camp of a kind. All they saved from the wreck when they returned to it for salvage before it disappeared was some ropes and canvas, two or three of the lighter sails on the foremast, with all the cordage they could get. They made canvas shelters, but presently they burrowed shallow dug-outs and roofed them with tussock-grass, and in these they crouched from the bitter gales, the hail, snow, sleet and rain of those stormy latitudes. They lived on the birds and hair-seals, they drank cold water. The most plentiful of the birds were mollymauks. It was difficult to
“I'd like to be lying under that seaweed; it's a proper old sailor's grave. I can't live much longer. When I'm dead just put a few sods on top of me, so that the birds can't get at me.”
The two surviving officers, D. McLaughlin (second mate) and K. Knudsen (third mate), knew that there must be a provision depot for shipwrecked crews on the main island of the Aucklands, and that a New Zealand Government steamer visited the group periodically, on the look-out for castaways. They must cross the four miles of stormy strait to that main island, but how? There were no tools to build a boat, and the only wood was the short crooked veronica shrubs that grew on the island. They discussed the problem with their comrades and decided to attempt the almost hopeless task.
With vast industry and ingenuity they made a primitive boat, nine feet long, three feet wide and three feet deep, using the tough and twisted veronica trunks and branches for the framework, and frapping it tightly with canvas, the sailcloth saved from the ship, and some of their canvas trousers. Their craftsmanship was of the stone age; they had to use sharp stones from the beach to hack the scrubby timber and burn off portions in the fire. Needles made from the wing-bones of
In this determined way, overcoming all difficulties, they finished their coracle. Three men—an Australian, a Spaniard and the Russian Finn—crossed to the main island in the crazy craft, using paddles made of sticks and bits of canvas. But the little craft had to return. Another boat was begun; the first one was swamped and smashed. The second boat built was more successful. Its crew of four men made a safe crossing and after a search of four days found the provision depot huts. In the Government boat they discovered there they returned to Disappointment Island and rescued the remainder of the castaways. They had spent seven months on that awful desert island. Now they all revelled in the fare that was luxury to them after starvation camp, though it was only tinned meat and ship's biscuit, and in the comfort of clothes, with a rainproof roof over their heads.
There was a further wait of a month until November, when the Government steamer Hinemoa called at the Island on her annual round of the southern outlying islands, and was joyfully hailed by the sailors. She brought the Dundonald survivors up to the Bluff, and the coracle which was the means of saving them from starvation was brought up too, and was presented to the Canterbury Museum, to tell its silently eloquent story of hardships and difficulties overcome far more formidable than any which confronted Robinson Crusoe on his tropical island.
Those rescued castaways were men of many nations—English, Scottish, Irish, New Zealand, Australian,
There was a favourite poem in the old school-readers, “Napoleon and the Young English Sailor.” It may be too old-fashioned for present-day anthologies, but look it up and read that story of the poor little craft in which the British tar was prepared to venture the passage of the English Channel in his essay for liberty. His material was a barrel; he interlaced the staves with wattled willows:
“Heaven help us! ’twas a thing beyond Description, wretched: such a wherry Perhaps ne'er ventured on a pond, Or crossed a ferry. For ploughing in the salt-sea field, It would have made the boldest shudder; Untarred, uncompassed and unkeeled, No sail—no rudder.”
You must multiply many times the troubles and difficulties of that sailor of Napoleon's day before you can appreciate to the full the plight and the achievements of those resourceful castaways of Disappointment Island, in the roaring seas and icy gales of Fifty South.
Notes.
Pages 14–21, The Missionaries of Matamata.—The principal parts of the narrative are taken from MS. letters and journal written by the
Pages 22–30, The Pirates of the Wellington Brig.—The story of this episode at the
Pages 69–77, How Sergt. McKenna won the Victoria Cross.—From official despatches and narrative by McKenna at
Page 125, The Battle of the Gate Pa.—Captain John Fane Charles Hamilton, of H.M.S. Esk, killed in the assault on the Pa, was 43 years of age. He had served in the Crimean War. He was the son of Lieut.-Col. P. Hamilton, of the Scots Guards, and grandson of Major-General Digby Hamilton, who fought in the Peninsula War and was with
Pages 270–278, Explorers of Fiordland.—Donald Sutherland died at Milford Sound in 1919. He had lived there for more than forty years.
Index.
-
Adamson, three brothers 225–230
-
Ahumai te Paerata 105–115
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Alexandra Redoubt (Tuakau) 69–77
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Allen, Bugler W. 40–44
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Amotu, Te (Takanawa) 1–7 -
Auckland Islands 279–285
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Beattie, Lieut. (99th Regiment) 33–35
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Biddle, Benjamin (N.Z. Cross) 222–225
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Booth, Colonel (43rd Regt.) 124–129
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Boulcott's Farm Stockade 40–44
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Brooke, Lieut. (40th Regt.) 58–61
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Bridge, Major Cyprian (58th Regt.) 33–34
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Cameron Town (Lower Waikato) 70
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Capper, James 89–98
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Rev. Thomas Chapman 14–21 -
Cudby, John 43–44 -
Deighton, Richard 45–51 -
Despard, Colonel 31–37
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Disappointment Island 279–285
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Dobson, Sir Arthur Dudley 258–269 -
Forest Rangers 63,230–235
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Forest Rifles, Mauku 87–96
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Free, Lieut. W. H. 34–36
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Gill, Michael 131–139 -
Grant, Capt. W. E. (58th Regt.) 33–35
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Guerren, Jean 169–173 -
Guides, Whitmore's Corps of 228–229
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Hamilton, Captain (H.M.S. Esk) 125,286
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Heketoro's Escape, Puketi 163–168
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Heni Pore (Te Kiri-Karamu) 120–129 -
Johnston, Cosslett 130–139
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Kapiti Island 8–13
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Kay, Andrew 158–162 -
Kereopa (Maori missionary) 53–57
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Lingard, William (N.Z. Cross) 153–157,215–220 -
Manihera, Te 52–57 -
Matamata 14–21
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Matenga, Huria (Julia Martin) 115–119
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MacGillivray, Farquhar 87–98
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McDonnell, Ensign T. (later Lieut.-Col.) 62–68
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McKenna, Colour-Sergeant E. 69–77
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McKinnon, Quinton 270–278
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Mitchell, E. A. 276–278
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Mill Farm, Whakatane 169–173
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Morgan, Rev. John 14–21 -
Ngatai, Hori (atGate Pa ) 123–125 -
Ohaeawai Stockade–31–37
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Opotiki 193–197
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Orakau Pa, Siege of 99–110,112,113
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Page, Lieut. G. H. (58th Regt.) 40–44
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Patea Rangers 233–234
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Peka, Eru (Makarini) 189–192
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Pukekohe East Church Stockade 78–86
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Puke-takauere, Battle of 58–61
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Rau-o-te Rangi, Te 8–13
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Rewi Maniapoto 101–110 -
Rushton, Captain J. R 193–198
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St. John, Lieut.-Col 177–179
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Sentry Hill Redoubt 199–206
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Sutherland, Donald 270–278 -
Turuturu-mokai Redoubt 130–141
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Victoria Cross 69–77
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Waharoa, Te 15 -
Waharoa, Wiremu Tamehana te 19–236 -
Whiti-o-Rongomai, Te 236–246
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Whitmore, Col. (later Maj.-Genl.), 175–9, 196, 211, 215, 217
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Williams, missionary family 207–211