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This book is not a work of fiction. It is a plain narrative of real life in the New Zealand bush, a true story of adventure in a day not yet remote, when adventure in abundance was still to be had in the land of the Maori. Every name used is a real one, every character who appears in these pages had existence in those war days of forty years ago. Every incident described here is a faithful record of actual happenings; some of them may convince the reader that truth can be stranger than fiction.
Numerous instances are recorded of white deserters from civilisation who have allied themselves with savages, adopting barbarous practices, and forgetting even their mother-tongue. In the old convict days of pakeha-Maori. Ever since 1865—when he first “took to the blanket”—he has lived with the New Zealand Maoris. For thirteen years he was completely estranged from his fellow-whites; he had deserted from a British regiment and a price was on his head. British troops and Colonial irregulars alike hunted him and his fanatical Hauhau companions. His hairbreadth escapes were many; he had to risk death not only from British bullet and bayonet, but from the savage brown men of the forest with whom he lived. When at last he came out of hiding, and dared once more to face those of his own colour, he had almost forgotten the English language, and could speak it but with difficulty and hesitation. He has been out of his bush exile many years, but is still living with his Maori friends, and is still known by the Maori name, “Tu-nui-a-moa,” which his chief
One of the most remarkable portions of Bent's narrative is his account of the revival of cannibalism by the Hauhaus in 1868. Vague stories have been heard concerning the eating of soldiers' bodies by the bushmen of
I first met
In confirmation and extension of Bent's story, I have gathered data at first-hand both from pakeha-Maori's narrative.
The 1868–9 portion of the book is, therefore, practically a history of the
Many of the settler-soldiers who survive from those wild forest days now farm their peaceful lands within sight of the battle-fields of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu, and Pungarehu, and Moturoa, and Otapawa. With them the recollections of bushmarches and ambuscades and storming of Hauhau stockades are still fresh and vivid. But the younger generation know little of the dangers and troubles through which the pioneers passed. The available histories deal very meagrely and often very inaccurately with the story of the Ten-Years' Maori War, even from the white side, while the Maori view-point is absolutely unknown to all but a few colonists. Therefore it is fortunate, perhaps, that one has been enabled to gather before it is too late from the old Hauhau warriors themselves the tale of their ferociously patriotic past, and to place on record this true story of wild forest life from the lips of one of the last of that nearly extinct type of decivilised outlander, the pakeha-Maori.
For information and assistance in regard to various engagements in
On the banks of the Tangahoé—The runaway soldier—A Maori scout—Off to the rebel camp.
On the banks of one of the many swift rivers that roll down to the
Less than an hour previously he had left his comrades' camp, the tented lines of Her Majesty's 57th Regiment, on the ferny flats of
After the soldier had sat and smoked a while he rose, and making his way to a slight elevation on the banks where he could see over the top of the
rarauhe fern, in some places ten feet high, he looked around him. Directly across the river the bush began, the seemingly impenetrable forest solemn and dark, pregnant with danger and mystery Turning in the other direction, and facing the northwest, he could just discern in the distance the tops of a number of bell-tents—the camp he had left behind him. And as he looked his last on the tents of his comrades and his tyrants, he heard the sweet notes of a bugle sounding a call. The mid-winter air was very clear and still. It was the midday mess call—“Come-to-the-cookhouse-door.”
“No more cookhouse-door now, that's a moral,” said the soldier aloud. “Pork and potatoes for you, me boy—or else a crack on the head with a tomahawk.”
Beyond the tents, another tent-shaped object took the soldier's eye. It was a lofty snowy mountain, glittering in the midday sun. It was far away in the nor'-west, so far that its base was hidden by the intervening bush, and only the white symmetrical upper part of the vast cone, a wedge of white culminating in as perfect an apex as any bell-tent, was visible to the eye from this part of the great plains. It was the peak of
Satisfying himself that there was no one in sight and that he was not followed, the soldier
Suddenly he started up and listened intently. He heard something, and any noise meant danger. The sound was the trotting of a horse.
Scrambling through the fern a little space back from the bank, he found that a narrow track wound through the tangle of tall brown bracken. Peering out from his shelter place he saw—first, the glitter of the muzzle of a long rifle above the fern; then, next moment round a turn in the path came a mounted man, a Maori. He was a tall, black-bearded fellow, wearing a European shirt and trousers, but bare as to feet. Each stirrup-iron was thrust between the big toe and the next one, as was the universal Maori mode when riding bare-footed. In his right hand he held an Enfield rifle, of the pattern used by the white troops in those days; the butt rested on his thigh, cavalryman fashion. Round his shoulders hung a leather cartouche-box; there was another buckled round his waist, from which there hung also a revolver in its case. A Hauhau scout, evidently, venturing rather daringly close to the British camp.
The white man hesitated only a moment. Then he boldly stepped out on to the track, directly in front of the startled Maori, who pulled his shaggy pony up sharp, and instantly presented his gun at the white man.
Seeing the next moment, however, that the white man was unarmed and alone, the Maori brought his rifle-butt down on his leg again, and stared with wonder at the forlorn-looking white soldier before him.
“Here, you pakeha!” he cried, in mixed English and Maori; “go back, quick! Haere atu, haere atu! Go 'way back to t'e soldiers. I shoot you suppose you no go! Hoki atu!”
“Shoot away!” returned the white man. “I won't go back. I'm running away from the soldiers. I want to go to the Maoris. Take me with you!”
“You tangata kuwaré!” the Maori said. “You pakeha fool, go back! T'e Maori kill you, my word! You look out.”
“I don't care if they do,” replied the soldier.
“I tell you, I want to live with the Hauhaus.”
“E pai ana”! (“It is well”), said the scout.
“All right, you come along. But you look out for my tribe—they kill you.”
“I'm not frightened of your tribe,” said the soldier.
“What your name, pakeha?” was the next question.
“pakeha.
The Maori attempted the pronunciation of the name, but the nearest he could get to it was “Kimara Peneti.”
“Too hard a name for t'e Maori,” he said.
“Taihoa; we give you more better name—good Maori name. If”—he qualified it—“my tribe don't kill you.”
Then the swarthy warrior dismounted and ordered the pakeha to get into the saddle; he saw that his prisoner was dead-tired. He turned the horse's head back towards the Maori country, and the strangely-met pair struck down along the banks of the Tangahoé, the Maori striding in front.
For about three miles the track wound down through the fern and flax, parallel with the course of the river. Then the travellers came to a ford. They crossed safely, and clambering up the steep muddy bank on the other side, they marched on towards the blue hills of the rebel country.
While the runaway soldier is riding on to the camp of the brown warriors of the bush—a journey which is to be the beginning of a wild and savage life leading him for many a day, like Thoreau's Indian fighter, on dim forest trails “with an uneasy scalp”—there is time to learn something of his previous history and adventures.
Perhaps the impulse that led to his passionate revolt against civilisation and rigid army discipline came from his American Indian blood.
The roving wayward element in young Martin, and spent three years aboard her, cruising along the
Paid off from his frigate at the end of his three years, Bent returned to his people as unexpectedly as he had left them. But he didn't stay in Eastport long. The prosaic life of the old town was no more to his liking than when first he had run away to follow a sailor's life; so he soon took to the seas again. He gathered together what money he could—a considerable sum, he says, for his father was indulgent—and took ship across the
But no man-of-war life for him. He booked his passage in a barque sailing for Liverpool, resolved to see something of life in the Old World.
When he landed in the big city he “made himself flash,” to use his own expression, and went the pace with a few like-minded young fellows, and one way and another his stock of cash soon vanished, and he found himself stranded, friendless, and alone—his companions of the “flush” times had no more use for him. One day, as he wandered disconsolate along the streets, his eye was taken by the scarlet tunic and lively bearing of a smart recruiting-sergeant, and on the impulse of the moment he took the Queen's shilling and was enlisted in Her Majesty's 57th Regiment of Foot. This was in the year 1859.
The young Eastport sailor soon bitterly regretted the day that his eye was dazzled by the Queen's scarlet. The British Army was less to his taste than life in Uncle Sam's Navy. He was sent to Cork with a draft of two hundred other recruits, and the interminable drill soon gave him an intense disgust for the routine of barrack-yard instruction.
A Maria, happened to be lying at one of the tees, and her skipper, one Captain Cann, Bent, to his joy, found to be an old acquaintance. He unfolded his dejected tale, and the sailor at once offered his assistance in rescuing a fellow-countryman from
But not for long. Bent's misfortunes were only beginning. When about three hundred miles off the land a furious easterly gale began to blow, and the old barkey sprang a leak. Hove-to in the storm, all the crew could do was to stand to the pumps. The huge
All those terrible days of storm and fear the
Maria's hands had nothing to eat but hard biscuits soaked with salt water. There was no place to cook and no means of cooking, for the galley with all its contents had been washed overboard. While the crew laboured at the pumps, the captain tried to cheer them up and put a little life into their weary bodies and despairing hearts by playing lively airs on his concertina and singing sailors' chanteys.
“One day,” says Bent, “a German brig hove in sight and spoke us. Seeing our signal of distress she asked the name of our barque and the number of the crew. We signalled our reply, and she answered that she could not help us, there was too much sea. Then she squared away and left us. All this time we were labouring at the pumps to keep the old barque afloat. Next day another brig, a
To Bent's intense disappointment he found that the brig that had rescued him was bound for the wrong side of the
The 57th spent two years in
The journey from Poona to
Embarked in a troopship at
After a voyage of eighty-nine days, the troopship anchored in Auckland Harbour, and her soldiers spent their first week on New Zealand soil in the old Albert Barracks, where the bright flower-gardens and tree-groves of a beautiful park now crown the hill that in those troubled days was girt with a massive crenellated wall, and was alive with all the martial turmoil of campaigning-time. Then the new arrivals were sent down to
. . . . .
So opened
In those war-days of 1860–70 dense forests covered the wide plains of this pakeha calls mana.
Under the shadow of pakeha bullet should harm them if they but repeated their magic incantations; and brandishing before the ranks of their devotees the dried and smoked heads of
pakeha's march through the plains below.
. . . . .
In March, 1864, the 57th were ordered from pas dotted the outskirts of the great forests on the farther side of the Tangahoé, and whose war-songs could sometimes be heard from the white soldiers' camp. At
Meantime there was fighting in the northern and western parts of the
. . . . .
“Look here,” he said, “this is no day to send a man out cutting wood. The officers can stay in their tents laughing at us fellows out in the rain. We're treated like a set of blessed dogs.”
“Oh, you won't go, won't you?” sneered the corporal, rejoicing at having irritated the soldier into insubordination.
“No, I won't go,” said Bent defiantly; “so you can do what you like about it.”
The corporal reported Bent to his immediate superiors, and the soldier was arrested and lodged in the guard-tent. Next morning he was brought before a court-martial and tried for disobedience of orders. Major Haszard was the president of the court. With him sat Captain Clark, Lieutenant
The triangles were then a familiar institution in every military camp in the
One of the regimental surgeons, Dr. Andrews, examined Bent, as was the practice before flogging was inflicted, and he reported that in his opinion the young soldier was not constitutionally fit to endure the fifty lashes ordered.
Soon after Bent had been taken to his tent under guard, one of the officers of the court-martial came in to see him. This was Captain Clark, a fine jovial young Canadian-born soldier, who had rather a liking for the unfortunate man from his end of the world.
“Cheer up, Bent,” he said; “you'll only get twenty-five—the sentence is reduced. And put that in your mouth when you go to the triangles,” and he threw down a sixpence. Then, when the guard-tent corporal was not looking, the kindly officer took a flask of rum from his breast-pocket, laid it on the tent floor, and walked away to his quarters.
When Bent was called out for punishment, he quickly drank off the rum, and put the sixpence in his mouth. He knew the old soldier's recipe for a “stiff upper lip” in the agony of flogging—“bite on the bullet.” The sixpence would serve him as well. It would keep his teeth from biting through his tongue in the throes of that horrible punishment.
A bugle sounded the “Fall in.” No. 8 Company was paraded in review order on the drill ground to “witness punishment.” Bent was marched down to the square; he was stripped to the waist and tied to the triangles. The big drummer of the Company stepped to the front; he was the flagellant. Bent bit on his substitute for a bullet as the cat swished through the air and fell like a redhot knife on his quivering back. Again and again came the frightful cuts, criss-cross upon his back and shoulders, till the tale of twenty-five was complete. Then the prisoner was cast loose, swearing in his pain and passion to have the drummer's life. A blanket was thrown across his raw and bleeding shoulders, and he was inarched back to the guard-tent, where the surgeon prescribed for him in rough-and-ready fashion; then to prison—he refused to go into the camp hospital.
Bent served some months in Wellington Prison, doing cook-house work, in expiation of his offence
So he bided his time for a favourable opportunity to steal from the camp; and soon his chance came. It was on June 12, 1865, that he broke camp and fell in with the Hauhau scout on the banks of the Tangahoé.
In the Maori country—Arrival at a Hauhau Pa—Maori village scenes—The ceremonies round the sacred flagstaff—“Riré, riré, hau!”—The man with the tomahawk—A white slave—The painted warriors of Keteonetea—The blazing oven.
The saturnine Hauhau spoke little to the white man during that journey to the rebel camp. He stalked silently on in front, his rifle over his shoulder, turning quickly now and again to assure himself that the soldier was still following him. Presently they forded another stream, which Bent afterwards came to know as the Ingahape, and passed through a deserted settlement, with its tumble-down dwellings of raupo reeds, and its old potato-gardens. A few minutes later they came in sight of their destination, the Ohangai pa. A high stockade of tree-trunks sunk in the ground, some of the upper ends hewn into sharp points, others with round knobby tops that suggested impaled human heads, surrounded a populous village of thatched huts. Just beyond it was the bush, stretching away as far as the eye could carry.
wharés which could be seen through thé gateway and the openings in the palisade, and its squares of maize and potato cultivations, sheltered by the friendly belt of dark green forest.
Some little, nearly naked children were playing about on the open space in front of the palisades. When they suddenly beheld a white man riding along towards them, with a Maori walking by his stirrup, they stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and then rushed helter-skelter into the pa, calling out at the top of their voices, “He pakeha, he pakeha!”
What a commotion that cry of “Pakeha” aroused in the slumbering pa! Men leaped from the flax whariki (mats), where they had been drowsing away the afternoon awaiting the opening of the steam ovens, and poured out of the narrow gateway armed with their guns and tomahawks. When they saw that the European was a harmless, unarmed individual, and that he was apparently the prisoner of one of their own people, the clamour died away, and they escorted the soldier and his captor into the pa. Bent quickly perceived that his companion was a man of some importance, from the peremptory orders he issued and the alacrity with which they were obeyed. The scout was, in fact, the chief Tito te Hanataua, a rangatira
It was a wild scene that met the young soldier's gaze when he entered the stockade, and his heart sank before the savagely hostile gaze of a crowd of armed, half-stripped warriors, the black-bearded and shaggy-headed men of the bush, and their scarcely less savage-looking women.
A strange ceremony began.
In the centre of the village square or marae stood a rough-hewn pole or flagstaff, about fifteen feet high, on which flew one or two coloured flags. This was the Niu, the sacred staff which the Hauhau prophet Niu was in more ancient times the name of a peculiar ceremony of divination often resorted to by the tohwngas or priests; it is perhaps worth noting, too, that in the Islands of Polynesia, the traditional Maori Hawaiki, it is the general name for the coco-nut-tree.] All the inhabitants of the village—men, women, and children—formed up, and began to march round and round the Niu, with a priest in their midst, rushing frantically to and fro, and brandishing a Maori weapon as he yelled a ferocious-sounding chant. The people, too, lifted up their voices as they marched, and, after listening a while, Bent found to his astonishment that part of what they were chanting in a
“Riré, riré, hau!” This meaningless gibberish formed part of the incantations solemnly taught to the Hauhaus by pakeha's New Testament spoke; his disciples fondly believed that they were endowed by their prophet's “angel” with wonderful linguistic powers.
The singular march suddenly ceased, at an order from the shawl-kilted tohunga in the centre, and then the people filed into the village meeting-house, a large raupo-reed-built structure, taking Bent with them. He was motioned to a seat beside a Maori, whose name, he afterwards found, was
Sitting opposite Bent was a white-bearded old fighting-man, a dour-faced savage, his brown face deeply scored with the marks of blue-black tattoo; his sole attire was a blanket; in his right hand, and partly concealed by the blanket, he held a tomahawk. His hand twitched now and then, as if he were about to flash out the tomahawk and use it on the pakeha, from whose face he never withdrew his fierce old eyes. He was the chief, Te Rangi-tutaki.
A long talk began.
“Pakeha,” said Kerei, “they want to know if you will ever leave the Maori and go back to the soldiers.”
“No,” said Bent; “tell them I'll never run away from the Hauhaus. I want to live with them always; I don't ever want to see a white man again!”
“Kapai!” said Grey good-humouredly. “That the talk! All right, I tell them true.”
When Kerei had interpreted the white man's reply, the old man with the tomahawk leaned over and said, very earnestly, tapping the blade of the weapon with his left hand as he spoke:
“Whakarongo mai! Listen, pakeha! You see this patiti in my hand? Yes. If you had not at once replied that you would never return to the white soldiers I would have killed you. I would have sunk this into your skull!”
After this brief speech, delivered with a fierceness of mien and glitter of eye that made the refugee tremble in spite of his efforts to appear calm, the old barbarian shook hands with him.
Then Tito te Hanataua—the man who had brought the soldier to the pa—rose and said:
“O my tribe, listen to me! Take good care of the pakeha, and harm him not, because our prophet has told us that if any white men come to us as this man has done, and leave their own tribe for ours, we must not injure them, but must keep them with us and protect them.”
Tito's word assured Bent's safety, and the tone of the people changed to one of friendliness; many of them shook hands with the lonely white man The women cooked some pork and potatoes for him in an earth-oven, and he was given to eat, and received into the tribe. Henceforth he was as a Maori.
Now began for the runaway an even harder life than that which he had endured in the army. He found that he was virtually a slave amongst the Maoris. He had had fond imaginings of the easy time he would enjoy in the heart of Maoridom, but to quote from his own lips, “they made me work like a blessed dog.” Soon after his arrival in the pa a party of men was sent off to Taiporohenui—a celebrated old village and meeting-place near the present town of
Tito was, says Bent, a man of about forty-five years of age, a stern, but not unkindly owner, with a pretty young wife of seventeen or eighteen, whose big, dark eyes were often turned with an expression of pity on the unfortunate renegade pakeha.
The people watched the white man closely, thinking no doubt that as he was being worked so hard he might be tempted to run away if he got the chance. And whenever he went out of doors the old man who had sat opposite him in the meeting-house on the day of his first arrival followed him about, never speaking a word, with his tomahawk in his hand.
The news that a white soldier had run away to the Hauhaus soon spread amongst the pakeha to that settlement.
“What do they want with me?” asked Bent, when Tito told him that the envoy was waiting for him.
“They want to see the colour of your skin,” replied Tito.
Bent, in alarm, begged Tito not to send him to Keteonetea, for he greatly feared that he would be killed.
Tito reassured his white man, telling him that the Keteonetea people were his relatives, and that he was not to be alarmed at their demeanour, because they would not harm him.
The messenger and his white charge tramped away through the bush to the village, a lonely little spot hemmed in by the dense forests—long since hewn away and replaced by grassy fields and dairy farms. A palisade surrounded the kainga; within were clusters of large well-built reed wharés, and the inevitable Niu pole stood in the middle of the marae.
Bent found a large number of Maoris, about three hundred, assembled on the marae, the village parade ground. The scene still lives vividly in his memory—an even wilder, more savage spectacle than that of his first day at Tito's pa. The men's faces were painted red, in token of war—red smudges of ochre on their cheeks and red lines drawn across
pakeha might well have imagined himself back in the days of ancient Maoridom, before missionaries or traders had changed the barbaric simplicity of the aboriginal life. The only modern note was the firearms of the warriors; all the men carried guns (most of them double-barrelled shot-guns, and a few rifles and carbines), and wore tomahawks stuck in their broad-plaited flax belts. Most of the women were as primitive in their garb as the men; their clothing consisted chiefly of flaxen cloaks; a few wore shawls and blankets.
“The people looked at me very fiercely as I came into the marae” says Bent, “and I felt my heart sinking low, in spite of Tito's assurance.” They put him into a raupo hut by himself, and fastened the door—a proceeding that did not at all tend to elevate his spirits.
The ex-soldier was left to himself in the dark wharé for quite a couple of hours. He could hear the people gathered on the village square discussing him excitedly; one orator after another declaiming with frantic energy. At length a Maori unfastened the door of the wharé, and, taking Bent by the hand, led him out on to the marae. The native could speak English; Bent afterwards found that he had been an old whaler, and had lived amongst white people for many years; his name was Kere
pakeha, with some show of kindness, that he must not be frightened, that no one would harm him, but he must go to the sacred Niu and promise that he would never return to the pakehas.
The first thing that met Bent's eyes on stepping out through the low doorway of the wharé was a great fire blazing in the centre of the marae, surrounded by a ring of short stakes. Accustomed as he was by this time to sights of terror, this struck a fresh note of alarm.
“Good Lord!” he said to himself, “are they going to burn me alive?”
“Friend,” he said to Kere, “tell me, what's that fire for?”
The Maori explained that it was an ahi tapu, a sacred fire, used in the Hauhau war-rites.
Bent was very doubtful. “I'm afraid,” said he to his companion, “that it's for me! Are they going to throw me into it? I've heard they do such things.”
“No, no, pakeha! It's all right. You'll be safe. But remember, do as the tohunga tells you, and promise him you'll never go back to the pakeha soldiers, or you'll die!”
The Maori led the white man up to the foot of the Niu pole, a tall ricker, with rough crosstrees and with flag halliards of flax rope. Bent was told to sit down at the foot of the poie. The people all gathered around in a ring.
A tall old warrior stood in the middle of the ring, facing Bent—the prophet of the Niu. He was naked from the waist up; his face was completely covered with tattooing. He was a tohunga, or priest, Bent afterwards discovered; by name Tu-ahi-pa, or Tautahi-ariki, a man held in much awe by the people as a worker of makutu (witchcraft).
For a long time the old wizard closely eyed the pale-faced stranger before him. Then he said, through the interpreter, Kere:
“You behold this ring of people, the people of Keteonetea?”
“Yes,” said Bent.
“I ask you this, will you return to your people or remain with us?”
“I will never return to the pakehas,” Bent replied; “I want to live with the Maoris and to make them my people.”
“Good!” exclaimed the Hauhau priest. “Now, turn your eyes upon yon fire, burning there upon the marae. Well, if you had not promised to become a Maori and live with us, the tribe would have thrown you into that blazing oven. It is well that you have spoken as you have.”
This, to Bent's great relief, ended the ordeal. The Hauhaus, at a cry from the priest, began their mad march round the Niu—men, women, and children—chanting as they went their savage psalms,
Riré, riré, hau!”—the last word literally barked out from the hundreds of throats.
When the Hauhau ceremony was at an end, a young woman who had joined in the march round the Niu came to Bent, took him away to a hut and gave him a meal of pork and potatoes, and then led him to her father's house. The father was the principal chief of the kainga, and, as it turned out, cousin to Bent's rangatira Tito.
Here the white man spent the night, the chief's daughter lying across the entrance just inside the doorway, for fear—as the chief told him—that some young desperado might take it into his head to earn a little notoriety by tomahawking the pale-face. Outside, the Maoris were gathered on the marae, by the light of great fires, the chiefs making speeches and taki-ing up and down in excited fashion, weapon in hand; now and again the fanatic crowd would burst into a loud Hauhau chant that echoed long amidst the black encircling forest. So the wild korero went on, far into the night.
The return from Keteonetea—The hill-fort at Otapawa—A korero with the Hauhaus—Bent's one-eyed wife—“The wooing o' 't”—Bent is christened “Ringiringi.”
Morning came at last, but the solitary white man in this nest of savages had hardly closed his eyes. More than once he fancied some one was trying the low door of the wharé, and he looked round the dimly-lighted hut—a small fire was kept burning in the centre of the floor—in search of a weapon, but found none. Bent lay there, listening intently, and longing with an inexpressibly bitter longing for the old camp-life, hard though it was, and for the sound of a white comrade's voice. It had not always been “pack-drill and C.B.” in his army life, in spite of the tyrant sergeants. But now it was the bush and the wharé for the rest of his days—or, in other words, for just so long a period as he might be able to save his head from the tomahawk.
Daybreak—and no sooner was it light than the Hauhaus began to gather round the pakehd's hut,
hangis—the earth steam-ovens—for the first meal of the day. “Come out to us!” they yelled; “come out, pakeha!” They ran to and fro in front of the wharé, and raised barking cries that sounded fearfully menacing to the pakeha sitting on his low mat-bed, and feeling not in the least disposed to respond to the invitation to come outside and be killed.
But the old chief speedily ended the uproar by opening the sliding door and shouting angrily:
“Haere atu! Haere atu!” an imperative phrase that the deserter had already learned to recognise as one that could be exactly translated “Clear out!”
Thereafter there was comparative peace. The white man was under the protection of the chief, and was allowed to wander round the village pretty much as he chose; but he was warned not to go far, or some warrior might take a fancy to his head.
Four or five days passed without incident, and then a horse was brought up for Bent, and he returned to Tito's kainga, escorted by the chief's daughter and ten armed men, all mounted. Tito seemed relieved to have his pakeha back again in safety, and after feasting the Maori guard on the best the village women could lay on the dinnermats, he sent them back to Keteonetea loaded with new clothes and baskets of kumara (sweet potato)
taro—another tropic root-food brought from Polynesia by the ancestors of the Maori, but now no longer grown by the
Soon Bent was on the tramp again. His chief, Tito, set off one morning, taking his white man with him, for a fortified village called Otapawa, where the Hauhaus were preparing to offer a strong resistance to the British troops. Otapawa was about four miles away by a narrow and winding forest track. A small river, the Mangemange, had to be forded on the way, and here Bent had a taste of some of the minor adventures of the bush. Bent being a rather small man and Tito a big, powerful fellow, the Maori good-naturedly took his pakeha on his back to pikau him across the stream. Bent was rather heavier than Tito had imagined, and after balancing to and fro precariously on a slippery place in the deepest part of the ford, the Maori's feet suddenly went from under him, and he and his protégé were capsized in the middle of the creek. Tito, however, kept a tight grip of the white man, and, though the stream was running swiftly, they managed to struggle out to the opposite bank in safety, and after drying their clothes as well as they could continued their bush journey.
About midday the Hauhau chief and his companion emerged from the solitudes of the forest to find themselves in the Otapawa clearing. A hill about three hundred feet high rose like an
rimu and rata woods that compassed it on every side; at the back ran the Tangahoé River. At the foot of the hill there was some cultivation; a steep winding path led to the top; here were a ditch and a bristling double stockade of tall tree-trunks set solidly in the ground, connected by cross-rails lashed with forest vines; within was the Hauhau village. The only access to the interior of the stockade was through a low and narrow gateway, painted red.
A shawl-clad figure with a gun rose from a squatting position just outside the pa gate as the two travellers walked out from the shade of the forest and began the ascent of the mound. A loud cry of astonishment and warning brought out the villagers, one after the other, bobbing their heads as they ran through the gateway. Then the shout was raised, as they recognised Bent's companion:
“Aue! Here comes Tito with a pakeha! A pakeha!”
Waving shawls and blankets and weapons, the people cried their greetings to the chief, and the white man and his protector walked in between two lines of wondering men and women and children, who pressed in close behind the new-comers as they passed into the palisaded pa.
A long, low-eaved, thatched house stood near the middle of the pa, somewhat apart from the smaller wharés. Into this building Tito and Bent were
pakeha skull to keep a prisoner long. The korero over, food was brought in in freshly plaited baskets of green flax—boiled pork, dried shark (a present from a seaside tribe), boiled taro and kumara—quite a bountiful meal for a war-time bush camp.
Up to this time the deserter's adventures had been, if not exactly tragic, at least of a severely unpleasant turn. Now, however, they took a humorous twist—humorous from an onlooker's view, though to the white man himself it seemed rather the final pannikinful in the bucket of his misfortunes.
A woman was brought into the wharé. She walked over and seated herself on the flax whariki by Bent's side.
The white man turned and looked at her in some surprise. Her vision still haunts the memory of the old adventurer as that of a particularly ugly woman. She was not old, probably not above twenty-five, but she was blind in one eye, her lips were of negroid thickness—such “blubber” lips
The woman spoke some words of greeting to Bent, but he steadily gazed on the floor and said nothing.
Then a Maori sitting near by, who could speak a little English, said, “This woman wants to marry you!”
“Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Bent. “What for? I don't want to get married.”
An old man, whose name was Peneta, and who was draped from shoulder to ankles in a red blanket, walked up to the white man and, halting in front of him, pointed to the one-eyed woman.
“Pakeha,” he said, with a quiet grimness in his tone, “this is my niece, Te Rawanga. You must marry her (me moe korua). If you refuse, you will die! That is all.”
This was translated to Bent.
Here was a dilemna, indeed! Bent had nothing to say. He looked at the woman by his side, and she smiled at him as coquettishly as her one good eye allowed. He looked, and the more he looked
Bent eyed his prospective uncle-in-law again. The old man was impatient. He said again, “Take my niece as your wife.”
“Ae,” assented the white man, who could see no hope of escape. “I'll take her.”
So the young soldier was mated, to the satisfaction of every one but himself. “She wasn't my fancy, to put it mildly,” he says. “But I suppose it was her last chance, and the old man would have tomahawked me if I hadn't taken her.”
Mrs. Bent's wedding-furnishings, which she bundled a little later, with determined air, into the corner of the communal house assigned to the white man, were spartan and primitive in the extreme.
They consisted solely of a large plaited whariki (sleeping-mat) and a wooden pillow, which, to the white man, seemed alarmingly like some weapon of chastisement.
Matrimony amongst the Hauhaus was simplicity itself.
Bent, now fully received into the tribe, had a Maori name given to him. It was “Ringiringi,” a name he bore for two or three years, until the
The origin of this name “Ringiringi” may be explained, as an example of the way in which the Maoris so frequently acquire new names often from very trivial incidents. It was a contraction of “Te Wai-ringiringi,” which was one of Tito te Hanataua's nicknames, bestowed upon the chief about two years previously. A party of taki'd up and down, spear in hand, in the usual energetic manner of the Maori speech-maker, he spoke so rapidly and fluently that the Kingites dubbed him “Te Wai-ringiringi,” meaning “The Pouring Water,” because his words poured from his lips like water. Tito was rather proud of this nickname, and his bestowal of it upon Bent was in a sense a mark of favour.
Bent at this time was a thin, rather weak-looking man, and his slimness was made the subject of a haka chorus amongst the people, a little song for which his one-eyed wife was responsible. These were the words:
The poroporo is a forest shrub which bears an abundance of large red berries, a favourite food of the tui and pigeons, which become very fat on this rich bird-fare.
The white man, however, as he told his wahiné, preferred to leave the poroporo to the tuis, and to fill out his attenuated waist, which the people looked upon with some amusement, with good Maori pork and potatoes.
Pai mariré faith—“Charming” the British bullets—Bent's interview with the prophet—His life tapu'd—Preparing for battle—Life in the forest pa.
About this time taiaha—a chief's halbert or broadsword of hardwood, flattened at one end in a blunt blade, and sharpened at the other into a tongueshaped point, and decorated with tufts of red kaka feathers; in a plaited flax belt round his waist was thrust a green-stone mere.
karakia, or incantations—some of them a curious medley of Maori and English—which they
Niu in their village squares. These incantations and chants he professed to have heard from supernatural visitants, the spirits who came on the four winds, and from the angel Gabriel, who spoke in his ear as he lay asleep in his raupo hut and bade him go abroad and spread a new religion, which should band together the tribes of the Maori nation. Many strange tales Bent had heard about the prophet and his wondrous mana.
The absolute faith the Hauhaus reposed in Hapa! Pai mariré!” (“Pass over me! Righteousness and peace!”) The expression “Pai mariré” was adopted as one of the designations of the Hauhau religion; and the sign of the upraised hand became the outward sign and symbol of the warrior faith. To-day, should you visit the large European-built house of the late pakeha bullets aside—“Hapa! Pai mariré!” And many a deluded Hauhau fell to the rifles of the white men before the Maori confidence in the efficacy of the charm was shaken. But pakeha bullet refused to be waved aside and insisted on entering the body of a “righteous and peaceful” son of the faith, it was because the stricken man had lost faith in the karakia—the ritual—and, very properly, suffered for his unbelief.
A sublimely simple explanation, and one that was perfectly satisfactory to the prophet and every one concerned, except perhaps the Hauhau who had happened to stop the bullet.
Even when the glacis of the Sentry Hill redoubt was strewn with the dead bodies of Hepanaia and fifty of his red-painted braves, the best manhood of Hapa! Pai mariré! Hau!”—the faith in houris with welcoming arms; no eternity of fleshly bliss. No, it was just utter blind bravery, a sheer trust in a mad creed of Death-to-the-Whites and Maori Land for the Maori Race.
So the visit of the high-priest of Hauhauism was a great event in the bush pa. The prophet was received with a powhiri, or chant and dance of welcome, by the people of the village; then the tangi and the doleful hum of weeping for the dead. The tangi over, the prophet addressed his disciples in the meeting-house; and hearing that there was a white runaway soldier in the pa, he sent for Bent.
It was a curious interview. The white man no longer appeared in the soldier's uniform, which he had worn for some time after deserting, but had taken to the garb of the savage. He was bareheaded and bare-footed. His sole garments were a shirt made of pieces of blanket and a flax mat tied round his waist. He entered the crowded councilhouse and stood before the prophet.
E noho ki raro” (“Sit down”), said
By the prophet's side was a flax basket containing some potatoes and pork, with which he had been breaking his fast after his journey. This food being appropriated to his use was, of course, tapu in the eyes of the assemblage.
“Now,” said the prophet, “you are tapu—your life is safe; no man may harm you now that you have eaten of my sacred food. Men of Tangahoé! This pakeha is my pakeha; and if any other white men should come to us as this man has done, fleeing from their people and forsaking the pakeha camps for our pas, you must protect them, for the gods have sent them to us.”
“You are a Maori now,” added
Bent, in his imperfect Maori, informed the prophet that he had already been supplied with a wife by the Maoris, but, like a prudent man, made no comment on her imperfections.
“That's all right then,” said the prophet. And he gave Bent a large cloak of dressed flax, called a tatara. “Wear this,” he said; “it is a tapu garment and sacred to you; no other man may wear it.”
During the next few days, before pakeha tobacco. Though something of a madman, like most Maori prophets, Pai mariré to the outer tribes. Had Kereopa, for instance, come to Otapawa, Bent would, in all probability, have fallen under the tomahawk as a sacrifice for the savage ritual of the Niu, and his head would have been smoke-dried and carried over forest-trails from distant tribe to tribe, or stuck up like a scarecrow on a palisade-pole.
Bent learnt a good deal of the personal history of the prophet, and of his peculiar delusions.
The outward and visible sign or incarnation (aria) of ruru, or owl. This bird is sacred amongst atua, a god, and has a hundred eyes.
An incident which Bent relates as occurring in another bush settlement where he and atua.” He recited an incantation, calling the ruru by name, and when the karakia was ended the bird as noiselessly flew back to the forest.
Soon after the wandering prophet rode out of Otapawa, word reached the pa by a spy who had been in the British camp that the troops under General Chute were preparing for an advance against the Hauhaus, and that it was probable the hill stronghold, being so close to the white men's base of operations, would shortly be attacked.
All was excitement in the pa when this became known. The palisading of the pa was strengthened with stout timbers from the forest; trenches and rifle-pits were dug within the walls. The natives worked away like mad, and Bent with them. He had caught the fever of the moment, and in all but
Day after day passed, and the Maoris lay behind their strong stockade waiting for the attack. The underground food-stores were well supplied; water was carried in in taha, or calabashes, made by scooping out the soft inside of the hué gourd; bullets were cast and cartridges were made. Then, as no troops appeared, and the scouts who kept constant watch on the forest outskirts reported that there was no sign of immediate action on the part of the enemy, the tension of garrison life relaxed, and the ordinary avocations of the kainga were resumed,
In a clearing hewn and burnt from the heart of the woods were the cultivation grounds. Here all the able-bodied men of the fort were set to work, turning up the rich black soil and planting potatoes, kumara, and taro. Planting over, the lengthening days were spent in hunting wild pigs, and in gathering wild honey, which was plentiful in hollow trees in the forests; or in strolling, pipe in mouth, about the pa; playing draughts (kaimu) on the marae in Maori fashion; singing songs and narrating old stories and legends. Night and morning there were
pa, old Tukino, who was one of
Life in this bush-fort presented to the lonely pakeha a picture of barbaric simplicity. Few of the people had European clothing; the men's working garb was just a rough flax mat hanging from the waist to the knees. They lived on the wild foods of the forest until their crops were ready for digging; snared kaka (parrots) and the sweet-tongued korimako, or bell-birds; tui, or parson-birds, and the swarming wood-pigeons, and shot or speared the pigs that abounded in the dense woods. They lived to a large extent, too, on aruhe, or fern-root, which they dug up in the open patches of fernland; and in the bush they gathered the berries of the hinau-tree, steeped them in water to rid them of their astringency, dried them in the sun, and then pounded them into cakes, which made a sustaining if not very palatable food. Another food-staple was kaanga-pirau, or maize steeped in water until it was quite decayed. “The smell of this Indian corn,” says Bent, with an emphasis begotten of unpleasant memories, “was enough to kill a dog. Nevertheless, I had to eat it, and in time I got used to it.”
“I had at this time,” continues the deserter, recounting his wild days in Otapawa, “no boots, no trousers, no shirt—just Maori flax mats to cover me, and a mat and blanket for my bed. I had
British forces attack the stockade—The bayonet charge— Flight of the Hauhaus—Through the forest by torchlight— Doctoring the wounded—The Tangi by the river.
Summer was on the forest. The beautiful mid-summer of Maori Land, with its soft airs and brilliant sunshine, its blaze of crimson blossom on the grand old rata-trees, and its showering of scented, white, peach-like flowers on the thickets of ribbonwood. Birds flooded the outskirts of the bush with song; the early morning chantings and pipings and chimings of the tui and the korimako made a feast of melody to which the brown forest men were in no way deaf, for they delighted as much as any pakeha in the sights and sounds of the free, wild places, and the call of the creatures of the bush. “Te Waha-o-Tane,” literally “The Voice of the Tree-God”—the Song of Nature—they called these morning concerts of the birds; it was their poetic expression in the classic tongue of old Polynesia for the sounds that betokened the daily
ku-ku-ing to each other, with blue necks and white breasts gleaming in the sun, went sweeping across the clearing on softly winnowing wings, and flapped from tree to tree and shrub to shrub in search of the tenderest leaves, for it was not yet the season of the choicest bush fruits, the big blue tawa berry, the sweet yellow koroi, and the aromatic miro.
Life went easily in the These flags, displayed on the war-poles in the Hauhau villages in 1865–70, carried many a strange device. The ground was white calico, on which red patterns and lettering were sewn or painted. Favourite designs were a red half-moon, like the crescent of Islam, a five-pointed star representing pa when the early harvesting was over. There was little to do but eat and sleep and lie about in the sun, or join in the daily prayers and the procession round the Niu pole, where the brightly coloured war-flags hung.Tawera, “the bright and morning star,” and what was called a Kororia, in shape like the half of a méré-pounamu, or greenstone club, cut longitudinally. These colours had been made in the hangis and arranged the well-cooked food in little round flax baskets, which they presently carried off, women and girls in a double line, keeping time with a merry old dance-song—the lilt of the “tuku-kai,” the “food-bringing”—as they marched on to the green marae and laid the steaming meal before their lounging lords.
It was all very pleasant and idyllic from the point of view of the brown bushmen. But “Ringiringi,” the pakeha-Maori, though he led by no means a hard life now that the heaviest work of the year was over, had an uneasy mind. He was— or had been—a civilised man, and he could not forget; moreover, he often woke from unpleasant dreams. One was a vision of a British regiment charging him with fixed bayonets and pinning him against the palisades of his pa. Fervently he hoped that he would not be in the fort when the troops marched to the assault, and that the Hauhaus would not compel him to level a tupara against his one-time comrades, the old “Die-Hards.”
This peaceful state of things did not endure for long. In a few days—it was early in the year 1866 —the long-expected attack on Otapawa was delivered. Before the troops came, however, the prophet of the pa ordered all the old people and most of the women and children to retire to the
kai had been left in the pa.
Early one morning the sound of cannon was heard in the distance, then heavy rifle-volleying, followed by desultory firing.
The Queen's soldiers were storming the fort.
Here I may give a more detailed description of the defences of Otapawa than has appeared in the preceding pages, to enable the reader to realise the sort of place the white general was attacking. Curving round under the rear of the pa and partly protecting it on the flanks, flowed the Tangahoé River. The hill-top where the pa stood was flat, and the rear dropped precipitously to the Tangahoé, The only access to the interior of the stockade was through a low and narrow gateway. Just within, the entrance was blinded by a short fence, so that an enemy could not charge straight, even if the gate were open, but would have to turn first to the left for a short distance and then to the right, exposed
marae was reached. The pa was defended by two rows of palisading, with a ditch between, and another shallow trench inside the inner stockade. The outer stockade, the pekerangi, was about eight feet high, and was the lighter fence of the two. The principal timbers were six or eight inches thick, but the stakes between were smaller and did not quite reach the ground; they were fastened with bush-vines and supplejack to the sapling rails that ran along the stockade. The open spaces at the bottom of the fence were for the defenders in the outer trench to fire through. The inner fence, the tuwatawata, was a stouter structure, of strong, green tree-trunks set solidly in the ground, and with openings here and there for rifle-fire, And finally—an important thing in Maori eyes— there was the “luck-stone” of the fort, the green-stone whatu. This was buried under the foot of a large stockade post, close to the right-hand corner nearest the river, as one approached from the pa gate.
It was soon after daylight that the pa was attacked. The assailing British force was assisted by some Colonial troops and a contingent of “friendly” Maoris, or Kupapas, chiefly men from the
As the storming party of Imperial soldiers, with bayonets fixed, doubled eagerly up the hill face to the front stockade, the Hauhau chiefs, Tukino and Tu-ahi-pa, cried to their men, crouching in the outer trench with levelled guns:
“Sons! Be steady, and wait till they come close up, then let them have it!”
As the first files of the soldiers dashed up to the stockade, “Puhia!”—“Fire!”—shouted the chiefs, and under the thundering volley many whites fell. Another volley, and then the soldiers were at the stockade, firing through the gaps in the obstruction, and slashing at the ties of the fence. Hand-grenades were carried by some of the stormers, and one of these bursting in the outer trench wounded fierce old Tu-ahi-pa, who had just killed a soldier in the act of cutting away at the pekerangi in an endeavour to force an entrance.
The Maoris did not wait for the bayonet. The wild rush of the maddened troops was irresistible. Leaving seven of their men killed in the trenches and about the palisades, the defenders gathered their wounded and fled. The trenches led to the steep bank overlooking the Tangahoé River. Down
As Bent had expected, it was his old regiment, the 57th, that stormed the pa. The 57th were led by Lieutenant-Colonels Butler and Haszard, and were supported by the 14th regiment, who were very jealous of the famous old “Die-Hards.” Eleven whites fell and twenty were wounded. One of those who received his death-wound was Lieutenant-Colonel Haszard. It was generally reported afterwards that he was shot by pa was attacked he was at least three miles away, on the northern side of the Mangemange stream. “It is false to say that I killed my old officer,” says he, “or that I ever even fired at him. I never fired a shot against the whites all the time I was with the Hauhaus.” This is confirmed by the Maoris, who say that Bent was not allowed to handle a gun in an engagement for fear he might use it against the Hauhaus themselves.
. . . . .
The refugees in the bush-camp with Bent waited anxiously for news of the fight. Was it a victory or a defeat? Soon, the first of the defenders of the pa dropped into camp, blood-stained and angry. And then, as the afternoon went on, the rest straggled in. Many were wounded, and seven dead bodies were carried in on hastily made litters of supplejack vines lashed to poles. Then the full story of the battle was told.
It was a sad and angry camp, that remote pocket between the hills. Most of the Hauhaus came in nearly naked, just as they had jumped up when the first shot was fired in the grey dawn. They were desperately sullen and grief-stricken over their dead and the loss of their stronghold, which to them had seemed almost impregnable, for it was the strongest stockaded position they had yet built. Many a dark look was bent upon the white man as he sat by one of the fires, not daring to speak a word.
That night the camp was suddenly abandoned by order of the Hauhau leader, who feared pursuit, not by the Imperial soldiers, who had no relish for “bushwhacking” at night—or, indeed, at any other time—but by Kepa's Government warriors, hereditary enemies of the pa, they set off in single file through the thick forest, making for the banks of the Tangahoé River, which they reached before
aka vines, so intricately interlaced and festooned across their path, before a passage could be made for the litter-bearers. There was no moon; it was an intensely dark night, rendered more Cimmerian still by the unbroken roof of foliage overhead. The Hauhaus made torches of pieces of dry pinewood, bound together with scraps of flax torn from their scanty mat garments, and with these they managed to dimly light their way through the forest—a wild and savage band; the warriors in front and rear, their cartouche-belts over their naked shoulders, and guns slung across their backs, or carried in their left hands; in their right they gripped their tomahawks and slashed away at the twining impediments of the jungle.
A camp was made near the banks of the Tangahoé, There is an interesting Maori proverb concerning this rapid Tangahoé stream and the Tangahcé tribe who lived on its banks. This is the proverb, or This, being interpreted, is: A pepeha:Tangahoé tangata, e haere;Tangahoé ia, e kore e haere.”pepeha which recalls Tennyson's “Brook”:wharau, or rough huts, of saplings, thatched with the long fronds of the nikau palm and the mamaku tree-fern. Here the wounded men were attended to as well as the primitive methods of the bush allowed. Women were sent out to search the river-banks for flax-plants; the flax-roots were dug up, boiled, and the resultant mucilaginous juice poured over the gunshot and bayonet wounds. This was the Maoris' most favoured method of treating injuries of this character, and it generally bore good results.
“Ringiringi” himself took a hand in the bush-surgery, for he had watched army surgeons at their work, and the Hauhau wounded, though most of them preferred their own people's doctoring, were grateful to the white man for his efforts to ease their sufferings.
A picked band of the fugitives scouted back through the forest and cautiously reconnoitred their captured fort, which had been set on fire by the troops, and was now a heap of blackened ruins. The Government force had by this time passed on to the attack of other pas, and the scouts reentered their destroyed fortress and searched for their dead.
The scene in the camp by the Tangahoé waters when the war-party returned from Otapawa was one that “Ringiringi” never forgot. It was the first great tangihanga, or wailing over the dead, that he had witnessed. The people gathered in the middle of the little clearing, and for hours the sound of lamentation rang through the forest, often rising into a wild, heart-breaking shriek as some blanket-draped or mat-kilted woman, her long hair unbound, and her cheeks streaming with tears, cried her keening song for her slain. The chiefs taki'd up and down, weapon in hand, and told of the deeds of those who had fallen; each ended his mournful speech with a chanted dirge. When the song was a well-known one, the whole tribe would join in and sing the lament with an intensity of feeling that made their very bodies quiver. It was the full and unrestrained outpouring of the soul of the savage.
Wild days in the forest—The Hauhau hunters—Maori woodcraft—Bird-snaring and bird-spearing—The fowlers at Te Ngaere—The slayer of Broughton—Another runaway soldier, and his fate—The tomahawking of
For some weeks the fugitives remained in their well-hidden camp by the Tangahoé's stream. When the wounded were able to travel, “Ringiringi” and his Maori companions took them a few miles through the bush to a place called Rimatoto, the overgrown site of an olden village. All the able-bodied men of the tribe now set to work to build a new settlement. Thatched nikau-palm houses were quickly run up, and the forest rang day after day with the axes of the bush-fellers, clearing the ground for potato-planting.
As it was intended to make this a permanent kainga—always providing Kepa's dusky forestrangers did not find their way to it in their scouting expeditions—a large clearing was made. The felled trees were allowed to lie for about three months until they were dry enough to be fired; then the potatoes
pikau fashion.
Four miles away by a rough bush track, a track hardly discernible to any but a Maori, was the Maha village. There the white man was taken by his rangatira Tito, after the bush-felling work was over, and three or four peaceful months were passed, varied only by occasional armed scouting expeditions to the forest edge, and by long fishing, birding, and pig-hunting trips into the great wilderness of jungle-matted timber that hemmed in the lonely village on every side.
Bent had now been a year with the Maoris, and had thoroughly settled into the native life. He had quickly picked up the language of his adopted people, and there was nothing of the pakeha about him but the colour of his skin, and that was browning with constant exposure and outdoor labour. A waist-shawl or a flax kilt was his single article of everyday clothing; in cold weather a shoulder-mat or a blanket was added. In this village of the woods there were few emblems of civilisation except the weapons of the warriors. Stories of battle and skirmish now and again reached the bushmen by
wharepuni, the communal council-room and sleeping-house.
Bent's half-Indian temperament soon adapted itself to this wild life in the forest. No drill day after day, no parades, no sentry-go, no buttons to polish, and no uniform to mend—surely this savage life had its compensations. When the Maoris had urgent and laborious work on hand they worked like fury, and compelled—with the spur of a tomahawk—the white man to toil with equal industry, if not willingness. Fort-building, trench-digging and timber-felling were undertakings in which the whole strength of the community laboured from dawn till dark, and the chiefs as hard as the common men and slaves. It was warrior's work. But there were periods of halcyon, lazy days in Maoridom, when “Ringiringi” and his ragged comrades of the bush, their work over, could just “lie around” and smoke and eat, and take no thought for the morrow so long as they could procure a pipe-full of strong torori (tobacco) and a square meal of potatoes and pork. Tito proved a not unkind master, when he found that his white man neither attempted to escape
The paheka soon became an adept in the woodcraft of the Maoris. He accompanied the young men of the tribe on their forest expeditions, bird-
snaring and bird-spearing; these camping-out trips sometimes lasted for a week or more. Far into the solitudes of the great woods the little hunting-parties penetrated, always armed, for they never knew when or where the Government Maori scouts might be encountered. The days were spent in birding and pig-hunting, and the long nights by the blazing
tangi-songs and love-ditties without end.
Powder and shot were too valuable to waste on the birds of the forest in those days. One of the Maori snaring methods, as practised by “Ringiringi” and his companions, was to cut out wooden waka, or miniature canoes or troughs, fill them with water, and place them in some dry spot in the forest where pigeons and tui were plentiful. Just over these troughs flax-snares were arranged, so that when the birds, thirsting for water after feasting on the bush-berries, flew down to drink, and stretched their heads through the running loops, they were tightly noosed. Other snares were set on the miro-trees, of whose sweet berries the pigeons and tui were particularly fond. “Ringiringi” quickly learned the art of setting snares of flax or cabbage-tree leaf with cunning slip-loops in the branches of the fruitladen miro; in a clump of these pines he sometimes caught in a single day as many as three hundred or four hundred birds—kaka parrots, tui, and pigeon—for the forests were alive with feathered creatures, and in the autumn time, when the wild fruits were ripe and abundant, they were to be taken with little trouble; the noisy kaka parrot was the most easily lured of all. The only forest bird that was not welcomed by the hunters was the owl, or ruru; should
atua, a spirit or the incarnation of a tribal deity.
Bird-spearing was another forest art widely practised in those times. Long slender limber spears of tawa wood, twelve feet long and more, were used.
In making the bird-spears, the pole from which each was cut was scorched with fire till very dry, then it was scraped and scraped down with pawa-shells and scorched again, and once more scraped and shaped with great care and industry, until it had been reduced to the size desired and was perfectly smooth. These spears were armed with barbed tips, often of bone, sometimes of iron. The villagers trailed the weapons after them as they travelled through the forest, until they came to some tree where tui and pigeon perched in numbers; then the spear was slowly and cautiously pushed upwards until close to the unsuspecting bird, and a sudden, sharp thrust impaled it on the barbed point.
The pakeha was carefully schooled in the art of using the spear, and was enjoined, above all, never to strike the pigeon full in the breast, because the bone would often snap the barb-tip off; it must be speared in the side. In the late autumn the pigeons were “rolling fat"; and many hundreds of them were preserved or potted in Maori fashion by the birding-parties in taha, or cabalashes (the hué
One foraging expedition which Bent accompanied was farther afield than usual, up northwards to the great Ngaere swamp, a huge morass near where the present township of Eltham stands, and where dairy cattle now graze on fields that in those days of'66 were seemingly irreclaimable bogs and wildernesses; lagoons, where millions of eels crawled, snake-like, in the ooze, and where countless thousands of wild fowl and water-birds fished and screamed and squabbled all day long. To the edge of the great swamp came the food-hunters; they waded across to the two islets which rose from the middle of the bog—ancient refuge-places of fugitive tribes—and camped there, catching and smoke-drying huge quantities of eels for winter food in the home kainga, and snaring many ducks and other birds. In this primeval spot the beautiful kotuku, the white heron so famous in Maori song and proverb—now never seen in the kotuku's daily haunts; a day seldom passed without a heron being found flapping and choking tightly noosed in the snares of the fowlers.
One day in the spring of 1866, when Tito and his hapu, their bird-hunting expeditions over for the season, were gathered in their bush-village Rimatoto, three strange Maoris, fully armed, entered the settlement. They had travelled overland from the
In the crowded wharepuni that night, when the
“Why don't you kill him?”
“He is my pakeha,” said Tito, “and I will protect him, because our prophet tapu'd him, and ordered us not to harm him.”
“That is indeed a soft and foolish way to deal with pakehas,” exclaimed a fierce-looking young warrior, one of the pa.”
Tito laughed. “Ringiringi is going to be useful to us,” he said. “Besides, he is a Maori now.”
Next morning Tito despatched the white man and an old Maori named pa requesting them to return the colours for which the king had sent. This mission accomplished, Bent stayed a while in Te Putahi, where he was treated with much kindness, because of his association with Tito.
On the morning after his arrival a man came to his sleeping-hut and, without saying a word, placed on the mat before him a couple of blankets and a watch.
The history of the watch was afterwards explained to him by pakeha was Mr. marae.
Broughton's slayer, despite his repulsive antecedents, became a friend of Bent's, and they were close comrades until 1869, when the old man was killed in the act of charging furiously on the Armed Constabulary at the attack on the Papa-tihakéhaké stockade.
At Te Putahi “Ringiringi” was astonished to find another white man, clothed like himself in a blanket. This man walked up and greeted him, and the pakeha-Maori recognised the long-haired, roughbearded fellow as an old fellow-soldier. His name was pa at Te Putahi.
Murphy, it appeared from his own story, had been taken over as a taurekareka, a slave, by one of the Hauhau chiefs when he deserted, and had been sent as a food-carrier to Te Putahi by his owner, who treated his “white trash” with scant consideration. At Te Putahi he had been taken over by the two local chiefs. The deserter bragged to Bent, as they sat side by side on the village marae, that
While Murphy was speaking, a young Maori girl sat by quietly listening.
When the runaway soldier rose and walked off to his hut, the girl said:
“Ringi, I heard what that taurekareka white man was saying. I have learned enough of the pakeha's tongue to know that he is going to kill his rangatira and steal his money.”
“Kaati! Don't say a word about it,” cautioned Bent.
But the girl rose up in the meeting-house one night after “Ringiringi” had departed to his home at Rimatoto, and repeated the threat she had overheard from Murphy's lips.
That settled the taurekareka's fate. Bent, some time later, inquiring after Murphy from one of Tito's men who had been on a visit to Te Putahi, was told that he had been killed. The Hauhaus had a short way with such as he. He was quietly tomahawked one night as he lay asleep, and his despised remains dragged out and cast into the Whenuakura River that ran below the village.
At this time there were at least four white men living with the Hauhaus in South
Life in Taiporohenui—A great praying-house—The ritual of the Niu—Singular Hauhau chants—“Matua Pai-mariré”—Bent's new owner, and his new wife—The tattooers—Another white renegade
Another summer came, and the crops were gathered in, and the men of Tito's hapu, after nearly a year of comparative peace, wearied for the war-path again. Rimatoto and other small bush-hamlets were deserted, and the tribes gathered in, bearing their food supplies to the Hauhau council-village of Taiporohenui—close to where the town of mana, as the Maori would say—amongst all the tribes from Whanganui to
This Hauhau praying-house and council-hall, constructed of hewn timber with We have survivals of this widespread ancient custom amongst ourselves, in the practice of placing coins, etc., under the foot of a mast of a new ship, and under the foundation-stone of a church or other important building. The cult is found amongst many savage nations in its primitive form. Here is an instance narrated by Mr. It was the olden Maori custom to place a human head beneath the central pillar of a sacred building, and to have a human sacrifice at the opening of a new house.raupo-reed walls and nikau-thatch roof, is described by Bent as the largest building of native construction that he had seen. It was about one hundred and twenty feet in length, and was of such exceptional size that the ridge-pole was supported by four poutoko-manawa, or pillars, instead of one or two, as in the ordinary Maori meeting-house; there were five fires burning in it at night, in the stone fireplaces down its long central aisle; on either side were the mat-covered restingplaces of the people. The timbers of the house were of the durable totara pine. The inside was lined with beautiful tukutuku work, of kakaho reeds and thin wooden lathes artfully fastened with kiekie fibre, arranged in many handsome geometrical patterns. Beneath the first large poutoko-manawa in the house was buried a large piece of greenstone in the rough, the whatu, or “luck-stone,” of the sacred house. It was the Maori custom when the centre-pole of a large meeting-house or the first big palisade-post of a fort was set in position, to place a piece of greenstone, often in the form of an ornament, such as an ear-drop or a carved tiki, at its foot.Folk-Lore (Vol. XX., No. 2, 1909) on “Head-hunting amongst the Hill-tribes of
In front of the great house on the marae, or village square, stood the sacred Niu-pole, a totara pine flagstaff, nearly fifty feet in height, with a yard about fourteen feet long; the staff was stayed like the mast of a ship. The war-flags of the Hauhaus were flown from the Niu, and the people daily marched around its foot in their “Pai-mariré” procession, intoning the chants their prophet had taught them. This Niu was one of the first worship-poles planted in whatu of the sacred pole; this block of pounamu is still there, says Bent.
Round this staff of worship, where the bright warflags hung, the people marched daily in their strange procession, chanting their wild psalms. Tito te Hanataua was one of the priests of the Niu, and he led his tribe in the services after the Hauhau religion.
Porini, hoia!” (“Fall in, soldiers!”); then “Teihana!” (“Attention!”), and they stood waiting. Then they chanted, as they got the order to march:
Round the sacred flag-staff they went—men, women, and children—chanting:
And so on, a marvellous farrago of Maorified English words and phrases. It was
Night and morning, too, the sound of Hauhau prayers rose from the great camp. Here is one,
Waiata mo te Ata”), in imitation of the English Prayer-book:
The more warlike chants ended in a loudly barked “Hau!” the watchword and holy war-cry of the
Niu.
Several skirmishes between the whites and Maoris occurred in the winter and early spring of 1866, and one of these had some concern for the exile. About three miles away from Taiporohenui was a village called Pokaikai, to which “Ringiringi” was sent awhile by his chief. While he was there the prophet wharés in which they imagined Bent was sleeping. A young volunteer named wharé to bring out a dead Hauhau, and while he was there the Rangers— hearing some one say there was a white man within—fired a volley into the hut, which unfortunately
pakeha killed in the fight.
When “Ringiringi” heard of the Pokaikai affair from the fugitives who fled through the bush to Taiporohenui, he felt that the Hauhau prophet had indeed been his good angel, for it was only
About this time “Ringiringi” changed hands, much as if he were a fat porker or a keg of powder or any other article of Maori barter. Rupé (“Wood-pigeon”), a chief of Taiporohenui, made request of Tito—to whom he was related—for his pakeha mokai, his tame white man. He had never owned a pakeha, he explained, and would like one all to himself, and he knew that “Ringiringi” would be a handy man to have around, to keep his armoury of guns, of miscellaneous makes and dates, in repair, and to make cartridges for him. So “Ringiringi” was passed over to his new owner, whom he served, with the exception of some short intervals in the war-time and in the period of exile on the Upper
Soon after “Ringiringi” had become one of Rupé's household, his chief's son, a young lad named Kuku (another name for the wood-pigeon), fell seriously ill. The white man doctored and carefully nursed the boy, and under his treatment he recovered. Rupé's gratitude to his mokai took a chieftain-like form. As payment, or utu, for curing his son, he led up his daughter, a young girl of fifteen or sixteen, and presented her to “Ringiringi” as his wife.
“Indeed, she was a pretty girl,” says the old pakeha-Maori, recalling the dead past. “I'll never forget her. She had handsome features, almost European, though she was of pure Maori blood. Her lips were small, her hair was wavy and curly, instead of hanging in a straight, black mat, and she had what was very strange in a Maori, blue eyes—the first blue-eyed native I have ever seen. She was a very gentle girl—she never kanga'd or said unpleasant things about others, never quarrelled with the other women. She did not smoke either, which was unusual. Her chin was tattooed, but not too thickly or deeply. She had, too, the rapé and tiki-hopé patterns engraved on her body, the hip, and thigh, tattooing which was in fashion in those days, and which the girls and women were proud of displaying when they went out to bathe.”
With this agreeable young wife, whose name was Rihi, or Te Hau-roroi-ua, Bent lived for nearly three
pakeha-Maori's great sorrow. His one-eyed wife, the lady of Otapawa, had left her unwilling husband some months before he took Rihi in Maori marriage.
Amongst the primitive arts of the Maori with which “Ringiringi” became familiar about this time was that of moko, or tattooing. The kauae tattooing—on chin and lips—was still universal amongst the native women, though few of the men now submitted their faces to the chisel or the needle of the tattooing artist. A popular form of tattooing amongst both sexes was that technically known as tiki-hopé, the scroll-patterns on the thighs and other parts of the body usually concealed by the waist-shawl. The white man saw numbers of women as well as men decorated in this fantastic fashion. In fact, he was so thoroughly Maori by this time that he was about to undergo the operation himself, in the winter of 1867, when living at the village Te Paka, near the old fort Otapawa. He had the ngarahu, or kapara, the blue-black pigment, ready for the dusky engraver, and would shortly have been made pretty for life in Maori eyes had not the tattooing been peremptorily forbidden.
“I wanted my face tattooed,” says Bent, “for I was as wild as any Maori then. I intended to have the curves called tiwhana, or arches, tattooed on my forehead, over the eyes, and the kawekawe lines on
It was tapu'd him, and explained that to moko his skin would be a violation of that particular brand of tapu. To the white man this was not quite clear; nevertheless, he agreed to obey the prophet's Mosaic command “to make no cuttings” in his flesh, and remained a plain, undecorated pakeha.
However, he acquired some skill himself with the tattooing instruments, and exercised it in printing names and sundry devices on the persons of the villagers. He learned, too, how to manufacture the indelible ngarahu, or kapara, pigment. In making this tattooing-ink the soot from fires of white-pine (kahikatea) wood was used. A cave-like hole was dug in the side of a bank, with an opening resembling a chimney in the top. A large fire was kindled in the cave, or rua, and for several days was constantly fed with the resinous timber of the kahikatea. Above the earth-chimney were arranged a number of twigs of the karamu shrub (a coprosma), with the bark stripped off, set up in the shape of a tent, and covered with a layer of leaves. The dense
karamu sticks. For some days the fire was kept up; then the twigs were removed, and the soot scraped off into wooden receptacles. It was mixed with water, and worked into little round balls. The sootballs were then placed on a layer of poroporo leaves in an umu, or earth-oven, and steamed for about three hours, when they were taken out and set to dry. In later times, after the war, Bent often employed himself in the manufacture of this tattoodye; and was, he says, accustomed to receive ten shillings for a ball of ngarahu the size of a peach.
To Te Paka village there came one day another renegade white man, an Irish soldier named wharé in Te Paka for some time. He was exceedingly bitter against his old officers, and, in fact, against his fellow-whites in general; so much so, that he boasted of his intention to fight against them, and, as will be seen later, actually did so in the attack on the Turuturumokai redoubt. Like most of the soldiers who traitorously deserted their colours in those war-days, he fell at last a victim to the tomahawks of his Hauhau companions.
The two eel-fishers—Bivouac in the bush—A murderous attack—The
Far away to the east and north of the great Hauhau council-camp stretched the forest, clothing hill and valley with one endless wavy garment of unvarying green. For weeks one might tramp through these vast, jungly woods and not see or hear sign of man, or of any living thing but the twittering birds in the tree-tops and a stray wild pig rooting in the soft, fern-matted earth or scampering away through the thickets. The free, unspoiled wilderness of Tane-Mahuta.
Climbing to the wooded crest of some of the steep little hills that rose from the gently undulating plain, one might here and there, through the gaps between the towering tiers of foliage, catch narrow glimpses of the surrounding country; and perhaps far away to the nor'-west see between the branches, set like a picture in its forest-frame, the pure white snowcone of tent-shaped
Deep in these bush solitudes one day, when the
tui and the kaka parrot that cried above them in the trees.
Mid-line in the file was a fairer-skinned young forester, bare-footed like the rest, clad only in a “home-made” shirt that seemed to have been cut out of a blanket and a coloured shawl strapped round his waist. He had a thick beard, and his hair was so long that it would have fallen down over his shoulders had it not been caught at the back of his neck and tied with a piece of flax. This was “Ringiringi,” the pakeha-Maori, wearing as little clothing as his Hauhau companions, and to all appearance as seasoned a bushman as they, as he bent along the jungly way with the easy, noiseless jog of the Maori scout.
This party had been despatched from Taiporohenui by Rupé, to work inland through the bush to the upper waters of the
The white man's companion on the eel-fishing excursion was an old Maori from the “King” Country, a rata and the pines nearly everywhere held over it. It was a tributary of the Upper
The eel-fishers bivouacked where the twilight found them, in a tiny nook near Orangimura, where there was just room to build their camp-fire and
ratas and the creekside.
“Ringiringi” had a little cold food in his pikau kit, potatoes and kopaki corn; that is, maize in the sheath. He was about to grill some of the fat eels on the fire when his Maori companion stopped him.
“E tama!” he said. “Don't you know it is unlucky to cook the tuna in the night-time? Do not touch those eels until the morning; should you disobey, it will surely bring heavy rain.”
The superstitious old warrior was so insistent that “Ringiringi,” to please him, agreed to his wishes; he contented himself with the little he had in his kit, and then, filling his pipe with torori tobacco, lit it, and smoked as he lay beside the camp-fire. His Maori mate squatted smoking on the other side.
The warmth of the fire, and the low, murmurous singing of the little river—the wawara-wai, the babble of the waters, in the musical Maori tongue—pleasantly lulled the tired pakeha. He lay there, with his scanty bush-ranging garments wrapped about him, listening, half-asleep, to the lazy run of the creek, and to the songs that his savage old com-panion recited to himself in a monotonous chant. War-songs of Aukati line, the frontier of the haka-song the Hauhaus of pakehas in general, and of the pakeha Governor in particular. It likened Governor Grey to a bush-bullock devouring the tender leaves of the raurekau shrub—a Maori simile for the landhunger of the whites:
The old Hauhau, warming to the haka, almost yelled the virulent words. The chant broke the white man's drowsing, and he sat up and listened as his companion repeated the vigorous dancesong.
“Well, pakeha!” he said; “that is our ngeri, our war-cry. That is what we think of the Governor—and of all pakehas! I hate all white men! They are thieves and pigs. I could cook and eat them all! All, every one! I would not leave a white-skin alive in this island! They are slaves, taurekarekas—like you! Now go to sleep, for we must rise when the kaka cries,”
And the old man curled up by the fire, while “Ringiringi” found uncomfortable reflection in the fact that he was here alone, far in the heart of the forest, with a murderous old savage who was armed with a war-tomahawk, while he, the weaker man, though the younger, had nothing with which to defend himself. But by this time he was familiar with the face of danger, and worked and slept in the midst of alarms; so simply remarking to the Maori, “Friend, I am sleepy,” and throwing some fresh fuel on the fire, he lay down again on his ferny whariki.
However, he had his suspicions of the old savage, and presently he glimpsed the Maori eyeing him dangerously through his narrowed lids and handling his tomahawk restlessly. When he lay down to rest, the white man had drawn his blanket partly over his face, as if he were asleep, but he kept one eye lifting. Once the Maori half rose and looked cunningly over at his companion, with his hand on his war-axe, then he sank down again.
The little dark brook went singing on beneath the forest; the fire gradually burned lower and lower as the night wore on; the morepork now and then cried his sharp complaint of “Kou-kou!” from the shadows. The two fishers lay silent; to all appearance both were asleep. But in the Maori's heart was black, treacherous murder.
Utu—payment, satisfaction, revenge—summed up in a word the darker side of the Maori character.
The lone pakeha's head would be indeed a trophy to bear back through the wilderness to his tribe. He would be a hero; he could brag to the end of his days how he slew a white soldier in single combat, and none could contradict him. He saw himself already taki-ing and prancing up and down the home marae before his admiring clan, the pakeha's head in his hand, his tomahawk—the victor's tomahawk!—flashing in air. Ah! That, indeed, would be utu—though long-deferred utu—for his kinsmen who fell to the pakeha bullets at
It must have been nearly midnight, and “Ringiringi” was half-asleep with fatigue, in spite of his fears, when suddenly all his senses were awakened. Through his half closed eyelids he saw the Maori rise, tomahawk in hand; he rose from his blanket noiselessly, then cautiously stretched one foot across a tawa log that lay on the fire, with its end projecting. His eyes blazed, his face was frightful, with intent to murder plain upon it in the firelight.
He was just in the act of stepping over the log, with his little axe upraised, when the white man suddenly threw off his blanket and leaped for the savage.
The old fellow flew at him with his upraised tomahawk glittering in the little light that the bivouacfire yet threw out.
But “Ringiringi” was too quick for him. He ducked dexterously, and caught the Maori by the ankle, and, with a lightning twist that he had learned from his
The murderer-in-intent fell on his back and almost on the fire, and the tomahawk dropped from his hand.
“Ringiringi” pounced on the furious old savage as he fell, and with a knee on his bare chest, and one hand on his throat, reached out with the free hand for the tomahawk, which lay just within his grasp.
The Maori would have continued the struggle, and in the rough-and-tumble would probably have got the better of the white man, had not “Ringiringi,” now roused to murderous mood himself, threatened to split his head in two if he moved, and emphasised his words by bringing the weapon down until the blade was within an inch of the old fellow's ugly, tattooed nose.
The Maori sulkily promising to lie quietly in his sleeping-place for the rest of the night, the pakeha relinquished his grip of the old man and backed to
The old Maori pulled his blanket over his face and pretended to go to sleep, but “Ringiringi” did not take his eyes off him the rest of that night. He sat by the fire till daylight, the captured tomahawk between his knees.
In the morning the two enemies silently packed their takes of eels in their kits, and slung them on their backs by flax-leaf straps, for the home-journey.
The little river had to be forded. It was about knee-deep. The Maori hung back, waiting for Bent to cross first; but the white man knew that if he did so his enemy would spring upon him or trip him up and try to drown him in the creek.
“Now, you go first,” ordered Bent, when he had settled his pikau on his shoulders and stood, tomahawk in hand, facing the Maori, “and walk in front of me all the way home, or I'll kill you!”
So the old fellow sulkily stepped into the stream and waded across, Bent following him, and in this order they travelled.
So they made their way homewards, striking west through the pathless forest, wading watercourses and climbing and descending hills, until they emerged on the fern country. “Ringiringi,” immensely
Rupé was furiously angry when he heard the story of the pakeha.
“The kohuru!” he cried, as he leaped to his feet.
“The murderer! I shall slay him this instant, on the marae, though all
The old fellow, when the chief rushed out at him like a madman, turned and fled from the village, and ran for his life until he disappeared in the shelter of the bush. Rupé did not pursue him far; his fit of anger was soon spent, and he returned to his wharé, and made his white man relate again, with Maori wealth of detail, the story of the eel-fishing bivouac.
“Ringiringi's” would-be slayer was never heard of again; at any rate, he did not venture back to the camp of the Hauhaus; and whether he ever succeeded in taking a pakeha head in settlement of his utu bill no man knows.
The war-chief mana-tapu —Bent makes cartridges for the Hauhaus—A novel weapon.
The year 1867 was one of little activity amongst the Hauhaus with whom “Ringiringi” lived, except in respect of their interminable meetings and Niu-parades and prophesyings. Hostilities had been suspended by both sides for the time, but the temporary peace was only the prelude to the fiercest fighting of the Ten-Years' War.
The white man worked for his master Rupé all that year, digging and planting, carrying wood and water, and performing, in fact, the duties of a household slave. But it was a slavery that had its privileges and its compensations, and there were long days of abundant food and little work, in the intervals between the seasons of communal labour in the potato-fields and the periodical birding and eeling and pig-hunting expeditions.
It was while living at Te Paka that “Ringiringi” became well acquainted with the celebrated marae, urging the people to renew the war. He was travelling from village to village, haranguing the Hauhaus, and explaining his new plan of campaign, which briefly was to make surprise attacks on small isolated redoubts garrisoned by the white soldiers, and to lay ambuscades. He declared, too, that his tactics would be, not to build any more stockaded forts in positions where the Europeans could easily reach them, but to entice the troops into the midst of the forest, where the Maori warrior would have the advantage. This scheme met with general approval, and the tribespeople signified their intention of joining Titoko and fighting his battles for him whenever he gave the word to begin.
pakeha, for he frequently appeared in a black “hard-hitter” hat and a full suit of European clothing. He carried no weapon but his sacred taiaha, his tongue-pointed staff of hardwood, ornamented with a plume of red kaka feathers.
The war-chief revived many a half-forgotten savage practice in the campaign that followed. Besides being a Hauhau “prophet,” he was a tohunga, or priest, of the ancient Maori religion.
Before despatching a war-party he invariably recited the customary spells (karakia) to ensure their success, and the worship, or rather placation and invocation of Uenuku, the war-god, was resuscitated in every armed camp and on every battle-field.
Titoko possessed, in a strong degree, what the Maoris termed mana-tapu—personal tapu, or sacred prestige, heritage from his priestly forefathers of Ariki rank. His body was sacred in Maori eyes, and he was accredited with many a singular supernatural attribute: “Even the winds of heaven are his,” said the Hauhaus. When the whakarua, the north-east breeze, blew, it was a fitting time for the war-parties to set out, for the whakarua was the breath of Uenuku, Titoko's deity, and his familiar spirit, and it was an omen of success in battle.
Bent gives some curious instances of mana-tapu. Once, when the white man was tapu, and consequently unfit to be eaten. So the old fellow had to cast his day's rations into the bushes and go fasting.
pa. Now and then it happened during the war-days that some budding tohunga would arise and prophesy things, in bold opposition to the chief, and announce that his familiar spirit, or his ancestral gods, had conferred priestly powers upon him. Titoko had “a short way with dissenters.” His usual and most effective method of silencing the pretender was to take a basket of potatoes in his hand and seek out his rival.
“What,” he would say, “have you then an atua, a god of your own?” Should the Hauhau be so imprudent as to answer “Yes,” Titoko would lift his potato-kit and set it on his rival's head. “That for your atua!” It was enough. The other's tapu —if he ever had any—would be immediately destroyed by such an act, for the head of man must not be touched by food, and any self-respecting atua would desert a tapu-less Maori without delay.
“Ringiringi” had now been nearly three years with the Maoris, and spoke their language well. “I lived exactly like a Maori,” he says; “worked like a nigger, and always went about bare-footed. They would not give me a gun, nor did they make me fight—for tapu, and would not permit me to go out on the war-path—but I had to make cartridges for them. They managed to get plenty of gunpowder; I have often seen it brought in in casks and in 25 lb. weights. They got a good deal of it from the neutral and so-called ‘friendly’ tribes, who procured it from the pakehas. The Puketapu tribe, and some of the Whanganuis, helped us in this way. I know there was a white man, Moffatt, living on the Upper
In those bush-whacking days the Hauhaus made use of some remarkable devices against their enemies. One of these Maori engines of war was called a
tawhiti, or trap. It was a sapling of some tough and elastic timber, matipo for choice. When a suitable one, about ten feet long or so, was found growing in a likely position outside a pa or alongside a bush-track by which the enemy were expected, it would be stripped of its branches, and bent down and back without breaking it, until it was lying in as near as possible a horizontal position, so that it would sweep the road. The end was fastened with flax in such a way that any unsuspecting person marching along the track or approaching the village and touching the trap, would cause the flax to slip, and release the tawhiti. The tree in its rebound could inflict a terrible blow.
In 1866 Bent saw ten or twelve of these Compare this with the ingenious form of “spring-gun” which an English exploring expedition found in use in 1910 amongst the Negrito pigmies on the slopes of the Snow Mountains, in tawhiti set on the tracks just outside Te Popoia, a small pa near Keteonetea. The place was attacked by the Government forces in the night, and in the darkness several of the Kupapas, or Government Maoris, who formed the advance guard, were injured by the unexpected release and rebound of these savage traps.
The stockade at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu—In the Wharékura—Singular Hauhau war-rites—The “Twelve Apostles” —The enchanted taiaha—The heart of the pakeha: a human burnt-offering—An ambuscade and a cannibal feast.
Early in 1868 “Ringiringi” and his Hauhau comrades took up their quarters in the stockaded village of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu (“The Beak-of-the-Bird”), soon to be the scene of the sharpest action of the war. This settlement was deep in the rata forest, about ten miles from where the town of
Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu was now the headquarters of the hapus who crowded the “Bird's-Beak” pa. The front of the village faced a cleared stretch of fern-land, but the forest surrounded it on the other sides; at the rear ran a little creek. There were no trenches or earthparapets; the principal defences were stout palisades, solid tree-trunks and split timber, eight to ten feet high, sunk firmly in the ground, and connected by cross-ties of saplings, fastened to the posts with forest vines. Close to the palisades were some great rata-trees, very ancient and hollow; several of these the Hauhaus converted into miniature redoubts. Some of the hollow trees were cunningly loopholed for rifle-fire, and within them stagings were made for the musketeers; rough stages, too, were constructed up among the rata branches, where the dense foliage and the interlacing boughs formed a perfect shelter for the brown-skinned snipers. One of the tree-platforms, just inside the pa walls, was used as a taumaihi, or look-out tower.
At one end of the village was the large Hauhau meeting-hall and praying-house called Wharé-kura (“House of Learning,” or “Red-painted House”), after the olden Maori sacred lodges of priestly instruction. This building, built of sawn timber in semi-European style, was about seventy feet in length. It was erected by Wharé-kura was consecrated by tapu.
As often happened in Maori warfare, the first intimation the Hauhaus gave of their intention to renew the fighting was the murder of two or three incautious pakehas on the frontier.
Tekau-ma-rua, or “The Twelve.”
This term, though applied to the whole war-party, really belonged to the first twelve men, the advanceguard, who were usually the most daring and active warriors of all, but who had been selected in a peculiar manner which will be described. These twelve were tapu, and were all tino toa—tried and practised fighting-men. They numbered twelve because of the mystic force or prestige supposed to attach to that number. pakeha Scriptures—Tekau-ma-rua proper could be touched by a bullet in a fight if they but obeyed the instructions of
Singular heathen ceremonies were practised in the selection of these war-parties. The spirit of ancient Maoridom was but slightly leavened by pakeha innovations and missionary teachings; and the savage gods of old New Zealand took fresh grip on the hearts of these never-tamed forest-men.
“Ringiringi” on several occasions witnessed the rites of the Wharé-kura what time the one-eyed general picked out the soldiers of the Tekau-ma-rua.
On the day before an armed expedition was to set forth from “The Beak-of-the-Bird,” wharé chanting a song which began:
Then the people would all file into the sacred house and seat themselves on the mat-covered floor, the
pa in front. The war-chief took his seat cross-legged on his sacred mat that was spread on an elevated stage at the rear of the Wharé-kura, with a short rail in front; this dais was tapu to him. The men all chanted together a wild haka song, and then sat silent as death, waiting the will of Titoko's war-god and the divination-by-taiaha.
The chief stood, grim and stern, facing his people, his sacred carved hardwood taiaha, called “Te Porohanga,” in his hand. His wild eyes glittered as he recited in quick sharp tones his invocation of the war-god Uenuku and the battle-spirit breathed on the wings of the whakarua breeze. Then, balancing his long plumed weapon in a horizontal position on his thumb and forefinger, the tongue-shaped point directed at the warriors, he stood stiff and motionless as in a trance. He was awaiting the message of his atua, the guiding-breath of Uenuku.
Suddenly, apparently of its own volition, and without any visible movement or effort on the part of the chief, the weapon would move. It would slowly, slowly turn—watched with intense, breathless earnestness by hundreds of fanatic eyes—until its tongue pointed so as to indicate some particular man. Ha!'Twas the breath of Uenuku, deity of blood and fire, that gave it its impulse; Titoko was but the medium of the gods!
The warrior indicated would be questioned by the war-chief, and asked whether his “heart was
Tekau-ma-rua, the sanctified advance-guard.
Again and again this strange method of divination was repeated, the balanced weapon indicating—to the perfect satisfaction of the superstitious Hauhaus —the men whom the Maori war-god desired as the instruments of vengeance on the whites. Name after name the priest and chief pronounced, as his taiaha pointed along the squatting ranks, until the tale of bare-legged warriors was complete.
Then, when the taua, or war-party, had filled their cartridge-belts and seen to their weapons, there was a ceremony of a livelier sort. The women and girls of the pa attired themselves in their waist piupiu of coloured flax, decked their hair with feathers, dabbed ochre-paint on their cheeks, and lined up on the marae for the poi-dance, to send the warriors off “in good heart,” as the Maori has it. Hakas, too, were danced by the men and boys of the village, and the merry poi-songs and the loudly yelled war-chants put a brisker jig into the feet of the brown soldiers as they marched out of the settlement and struck into the forest, hunting for pakehas.
As the men of the Tekau-ma-rua left the stockade,
“Patua, kainga! Patua, kainga! E kai mau! Kaua e tukua kia haere! Kia mau ki tou ringa.” (“Kill them! Eat them! Kill them! Eat them! Let them not escape! Hold them fast in your hands.”)
Should the Tekau-ma-rua meet with success in their murderous raids, it was usual for the leader of the party to chant in a loud voice, as the homepalisades were neared, a song beginning, “Tenei te mea kei te mou ki toku ringa,” meaning that he had in his hand a portion of the flesh of a slain pakeha. This was called the mawé; it was an offering to the god of war. The mawé was almost invariably a human heart, torn from the body of the first man of the enemy killed in the fight.
On two or three occasions Tihirua died at Ohangai, near mawé, the ancient rite of the Whangai-hau. The heart (manawa) or other piece of human flesh, was brought into the marae and given to a man named Tihirua, who was the priest of the burnt sacrifice. He was a young man about twenty-five years of age, belonging to the tapu to Uenuku. This was an ancient war-custom of the Maoris; pakehas
marae, tear out the bleeding heart, hold lighted matches underneath it until it was singed, and then throw it away.”
A more frightful scene still that the sun looked down upon in that forest den was a cannibal feast. On June 12, 1868, a party of about fifteen Hauhaus from the pa, prowling out in the direction of the
pakeha chief at Mawhitiwhiti, seems to indicate that he was a cannibal of the most ferocious sort, unless, as is quite possible, he was speaking of his people generally when he used the first person singular. In this letter, addressed to Puano, and dated “Wharé-kura, June 25, 1868,” he wrote this emphatic warning:
“Cease travelling on the roads, cease entirely travelling on the roads that lead to Mangamanga (Camp Kua hamama tonu toku korokoro ki te kai i te tangata. I shall not die, I shall not die. When death itself shall be dead, I shall be alive (Ka mate ano te mate, ka ora ano ahau).—From Titoko.”
Hauwhenua's war-party—A night march—Attack on Turuturu-Mokai Redoubt—A heroic defence—The heart of the captain—Touch-and-go—Relief at last.
One biting cold evening in July, 1868, the whole population of the “Bird's-Beak” pa gathered on the marae to watch the departure of a fighting-column launched by wharé than for the war-path, but the omens were propitious for the expedition, and the war-god's sacred breeze, the whakarua, breathed of Uenuku, blew across the forest.
The sixty warriors of the Tekau-ma-rua took the trail with the lilt of the dance-girls' poi-chant in their ears, and the war-choruses yelled by their comrades in the village gritted their battle-spirit. They were fittingly and thickly tapu'd for the night's work, karakia'd over with many hardening and bullet-averting karakias, and thoroughly Hauhau-bedevilled for the fight.
Some of the warriors, belted and painted, carried long Enfield muzzle-loaders, some double-barrelled guns, some stolen or captured carbines, and a variety of other fire-arms. Each rifleman's equipment included a short tomahawk thrust through his flax girdle; a few—the storming-party—were armed with long-handled tomahawks, murderously effective weapons in a hand-to-hand combat. Though a winter's night, most of them were scantily clad, as befitted a war-party. Some wore shirts and other part-European dress; some only flax mats and waist-shawls.
Up and down the village square, as the Hauhau captain, Hauwhenua, led his band out into the forest, strode taiaha, he shouted, “Kill them! Eat them! Let them not escape you!” And as they disappeared in the darkness he returned to his place in the great council-house, where on his sacred mat he spent the night in commune with his ancestral spirits and in reciting incantations for the success of his men-at-arms.
In single file the Hauhau soldiers struck into the black woods. As they entered the deeper thicknesses of the forest, where not a star could be seen for the density and unbroken continuity of the roof of foliage above them, they chanted this brief karakia, a charm invoking supernatural aid to clear
Away through the bush they tramped, lightening the march with Hauhau chants, until their objective was neared—the little redoubt of Turuturu-Mokai.
One word of warning Tekau-ma-rua when he chose them for this expedition. taiaha and the demon-like red tongue of the high priest's sacred weapon turning now to one silent warrior, now to another. He heard
“Kaua e haere ki te kuwaha o te pa; kei reira te raiana e tu ana! Ka pokanoa koutou, ka ngaua te raiana ia koutou!” (“Do not charge at the gate way of the fort; there stands the lion! Should you disregard this command, the lion will devour you!”)
This caution was designed to restrain the more impetuous of the young warriors, for
The leader of the taua, old Hauwhenua, must have been nearly seventy, but he was as active and agile and keen-witted as any young man of his fighting band. He was a product of the ferocious old cannibal times when every tribe's hand was against its neighbour's, and when year after year
Marching with the savages of the Tekau-ma-rua was the white man—pakeha camps, also accompanied the warriors, but he denies this, asserting that he did not stir from the pa all night; this is confirmed by the Maoris. “Kingi,” he says, was a fiercely vindictive man, and swore to have a shot at the white men from whom he had cut himself off for ever.
Emerging from the forest, the warriors stole
pa, Turuturu-Mokai. Hauwhenua passed round the word to hide in the fern and remain in cover there as close up to the redoubt as possible, until he yelled the “Kokiri!” cry—the signal for the charge.
The Turuturu-Mokai redoubt was but a tiny work, so small that the officer in charge, Captain raupo hut built outside the walls. The entrenchment, consisting of earth-parapet and a surrounding trench, was being strengthened by its garrison of twenty-five Armed Constabulary, and the work was not quite finished when the Maori attack was delivered.
The night dragged on too slowly for the impatient and shivering warriors. Some wished to rush the white men's pa at once, but Hauwhenua and his sub-chiefs forbade it till there was a little more light. Several of the younger men began to crawl up through the fern towards the wall of the little fort. The form of a solitary sentry was seen, pacing up and down outside the walls. He could easily have been shot, but the Hauhaus waited.
The sentry was relieved at five o'clock in the morning. The new sentinel was not left in peace very
The darkness—it was not yet dawn—was instantly lit up by the blaze of a return volley, and, with a fearful yell, the host of half-naked Maoris leaped from the fern and rushed for the redoubt.
The white soldiers, roused by the firing, rushed from their tents and manned the parapets and angles of the work, so furiously assailed by the swarming forest-men.
Captain wharé, armed with his sword and revolver, and clothed only in his shirt. He just managed to cross the ditch by the narrow plank-bridge ahead of the enemy, who missed the plank in the darkness.
The captain quickly called for volunteers to defend the gate.
“I'll make one, sir!” cried
“All right, Gill,” said the captain; it was pitch dark, but he knew Gill's voice. “Any more?”
Yes; they rushed for the gate—
Private
“Hello, old man!” cried the captain; “are you hit?”
Young Tuffin lay there, unable to reply.
“Where's your rifle?” asked the captain; he was reloading his revolver while he spoke.
Tuffin pointed to where his gun was lying on the muddy ground beside him.
“Come on, boys!” yelled the captain;” they're coming in at the gate!”
Those were the last words Tuffin heard his commanding officer utter. A few moments later, in that fearful confusion of attack and defence in the darkness, the gallant
A Hauhau charged right into the redoubt, and killed the captain with his long-handled tomahawk Making a clean cut in his breast, he tore out the heart, a trophy for the terrible ceremony of the mawé offering. Then he darted back as quickly as he had come, yelling a frightful cry of triumph. And another heart was torn from a white man's body even before it had ceased to beat. This was the corpse of Lennon, the keeper of the store and canteen. He had been killed alongside his little hut, just outside the redoubt, when the fight began. He was tomahawked almost to pieces and his heart cut out.
And in the very midst of that battle in the dark the pagan ceremony of the whangai-hau was performed, the oblation to the god of war. The priest of the war-party offered up one of the pakeha hearts —some Maoris say it was Captain mata-ika, the “first-fish” slain, which was usually the one offered to the gods. The savage tohunga lit a match (he carried pakeha matches for this dreadful purpose), and held the bleeding heart over the flame. Immediately it began to sizzle and smoke, he cried in an exultant voice, “Kei au a Tu!” (“I have Tu!”), meaning that Tu, the supreme god of war, was with him, or on his side. Then he threw down the burnt sacrifice, and, clutching his long-handled tomahawk, rushed into the fight again. The captain's heart
For two hours it was desperate work. The Hauhaus charged up to the parapets, and many of them jumped into the ditch, whence they attempted to swarm over the walls, but were beaten off again and again by the little garrison. The endeavour to rush in force through the gateway of the redoubt did not succeed. The impulsive young men, however, disregarded
After the captain's death Gill and McLean took up their posts in one of the angles, and fought there till daylight. Their Terry carbines gave them a good deal of trouble. After a few rounds had been fired the breech-blocks jammed, and were difficult to open and close.
Unfortunately, all hands did not show equal bravery. At least four—
One of the pluckiest men in the redoubt was
When the Captain fell, Tuffin crawled, more than half-dazed with his wound, to one of the angles. There he received four more bullet wounds. In the angle there were five other men; of these two were killed.
Failing in their first attempt to take the redoubt by assault, some of the Hauhaus took post on the rising ground a little distance off, where they could fire into the work, and one after another the defenders dropped, shot dead or badly wounded. The ditch was full of Maoris. Only the narrow parapet separated them from the whites, and they yelled at the defenders and shouted all the English “swear-words” in their vocabulary. The pakehas “talked back” at them, says one of the few survivors of the heroic garrison, and cried “Look out! The cavalry are coming!” but the Hauhaus only laughed and said, “Gammon, pakeha—gammon!” Then, finding that any Maori who showed his head above the parapets was quickly shot down, they started to dig away at the wall with their
Private pakeha bullet, and then retired from the fight.
Here is
“The Maoris surrounded the redoubt and tried again and again to swarm over the wall, and they kept it up till broad daylight. We could not see
wharés outside the redoubt. They were armed with muzzle-loading Enfields and shot-guns, and we could now and then see the ramrods going up and down as they rammed the charges home. Then sometimes we would see the flash of a tomahawk and catch a glimpse of a black head above the parapets. One of our troubles was that there were no loopholes in the parapets, otherwise we could have shot many of the Maoris in the ditch. We were exposed to the fire of the enemy on the rising ground close by, and this was how so many of the men in our angle were hit.
“Then they started to dig and cut away at the parapets with their tomahawks. We could plainly hear them at this work, and I heard one Maori ask another for a match. I suppose he wanted to try and fire our buildings inside the walls. One after another our men dropped, shot dead or badly wounded. I had very little hope of ever getting out of the place alive. But we well knew what our fate would be if the Maoris once got over the parapets, so we just put our hearts into it and kept blazing away as fast as we could load. We had breech-loading carbines which had to be capped. One incident I remember was a black head just appearing over the parapet in the grey light, then came a body with a bare arm gripping a long-handled tomahawk.
“My younger brother was fighting not far from me. He fell mortally wounded, and before he died he told us he believed it was a white man who shot him. I was wounded about the same time. An Enfield bullet struck me in the left shoulder. It took me with a tremendous shock, just as I was stooping down across a dead man to get some dry ammunition. The bullet slanted down past my shoulder-blade and came out at the back. This incapacitated me from firing, or, at any rate, from taking aim, so I had to content myself with passing cartridges to
“Daylight came, and those of us who could shoulder a carbine were still firing away and wondering whether help would ever reach us. We knew they must have heard the firing and seen the flashes of the guns at
Suddenly the Maoris ceased firing and retired into the bush. Their sentries had given them warning that troops were coming. As they dropped back we rushed out of the redoubt and gave them the last shot, and then
The sun had risen before the fight was over. A few minutes more and the Hauhaus would have succeeded in undermining the parapets sufficiently to force an entrance, and the defenders would have fallen to the last man, and the whole of their arms and the post-supplies have been carried off to
The little redoubt was a frightful sight. Dead and wounded men were lying all over the place in pools of blood; two of them were shockingly mutilated with tomahawks. Out of the twenty-one defenders of the redoubt, ten were killed and five were wounded; only six came through the fight without a wound.
Hauwhenua withdrew his disappointed Of this Hauhau Colonel Tekauma-rua, carrying those of their wounded who were unable to walk, and marched back to Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu. The “lion” of Titoko's speech, though sore wounded, had in truth closed his mouth on some of their most daring braves. Takitaki, a
Tekau-ma-rua, was one of those who attacked Captain Journal, No. 59 (Sept. 1906): “Had there been but ten men of the stamp of Takitaki the redoubt must have been taken; but luckily there were not, and therefore a mere handful of men held the redoubt to the end.”
Bent and Kane brought before
When the renegade Wharé-kura. Bent now appears, from his own account, to have wearied of his terrible life amongst the Hauhaus.
The war-chief fiercely questioned “Kingi,” whom he suspected of an intention to return to the European camps.
Then turning to “Ringiringi,” he said:
“E Ringi, speak! Do you ever think of leaving us and running away to the pakehas?”
Bent confessed that he now desired to return to the men of his own colour, adding “But I will never take arms against you.”
marae to enter.
When they were all in the big wharé,
In the gloom of the praying-house the people sat in terrible silence, and the white men trembled for their heads.
pakehas.
“Whakarongo mai! Listen to me. If you persist in saying that you wish to return to the white men, it will be your death! I will kill you both with my tomahawk, now, in this house, unless you promise that you will never leave the Maoris! I will slay you, and your bodies will be cooked in the hangi!”
“Ringiringi,” in real fear of his life, made answer that he would remain with the Hauhaus if Titoko would protect him, for he dreaded some of the chief's fiercer followers. “Kingi,” too, hastened to give the required promise—a promise which he, unlike his fellow-pakeha, broke at the first opportunity.
When the people had left the Wharé-kura, Titoko spoke to “Ringiringi” in a more friendly and reassuring tone, saying that he wished the pakeha to remain with him in the pa, and that, in order to assure his life against the wilder spirits in the tribes
tapu him, as tapu, he explained, was a far more effective and binding one than that of the Opunake prophet; a spell that no man dared break on pain of death.
Not many days later the Irish traitor “Kingi” deserted from the pa, taking with him a watch, a revolver, and some clothing which he had “commandeered” from the natives.
For some little time nothing was heard of him. At length the warriors of the Tekau-ma-rua, while out scouting one day in the direction of Turangaréré, discovered on the track leading to the settlement a note addressed to the white soldiers' commander at
The deserter's letter was brought to the “Bird's-Beak” pa, where it was translated by an English-speaking Maori. “Ringiringi,” questioned, disclaimed any knowledge of it, and as to the incriminating reference to himself, he assured
raupo hut at Te Paka.
They killed him there that night.
Bent was lying half-asleep in a wharé in the settlement when the seven Maoris, who had brought “Kingi” in, entered, in an intensely excited state, sat down, and asked him if he had heard of the judgment on his fellow-white. Then one of them said, “Kingi is dead.”
Another man, leaning forward until his passionate face almost touched Bent's, exclaimed:
“Ringi, had you done as Kingi has done, we would not have killed you in the ordinary way. Your fate would have been burning alive in the oven on the marae!”
Then the seven, after a conversation between themselves in a strange language the white man could not understand, listen as he would—the Maoris sometimes improvise a secret tongue, by eliding certain syllables in words and adding new ones—the executioners rose and left the wharé.
It was not until next day that “Ringiringi” learned the details of the deserter's end.
“Kingi,” after being given a meal, was left alone in his hut, but was watched through crevices in the wall until he sank to sleep, fatigued with his
wharé, and attempted to deal him a fatal blow with a sharp bill-hook. The blow, however, only gashed his nose, and he leaped up and grappled with his assailant.
The Maoris outside, hearing the noise of the scuffle, rushed in. An old man—Uru-anini of the Puketapu —seized the white man by the leg, brought him down, and dealt him a terrible blow with an axe as he lay on the floor.
The other Hauhaus completed the work with their tomahawks, and the dead body of the renegade Irishman, cut almost to pieces, was dragged out and thrown into a disused potato-pit on the out-skirts of the village.
In the midst of dangers—Bent stalked by Hauhaus—Old Jacob to the rescue—” Come on if you dare!”—The white man's new Maori name—Government forces attack and burn Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu—A new use for hand-grenades.
When Bent returned to the “Bird's-Beak” stockade he found himself in a position of extreme peril.
The Hauhaus, excited by the news of Kane's treachery and summary execution, were fiercely hostile in demeanour, and some of the young bloods came dancing about the white man, as he walked into the village, with menacing shouts, emphasised by savage thigh-slapping, pukana-ing, and grimacing with out-thrust tongue and rolling eyes, and similar demonstrations of derision and hatred.
A council of the people was held on the marae, and the killing of Kane was narrated in minutest and barbaric detail. Then several Hauhaus rose in turn and demanded the death of “Ringiringi,” on the principle that all pakehas were unreliable, and that it was a foolish policy to keep one in the camp who might sooner or later betray them. “Let us
pa and shoot him,” proposed one truculent young warrior of the Tekau-ma-rua.
“Kaati!” cried pakeha. I have tapu'd him, and I have told him that his life is safe. If you want to shoot him—well, you must kill me first!”
Then, turning to the white man, the war-chief took him by the hand, led him to his own house, and shut the people out. He told “Ringiringi” that in the present temper of the tribesmen he had better remain as much as he could in the wharé, and that, at any rate, he must not venture far from the door unless he, Titoko, were with him or in view.
Some days later, “Ringiringi,” imagining from the more settled and pacific attitude of the Hauhaus that he no longer ran any risk in taking his walks abroad, wandered a short distance outside the stockade into the forest, and, seating himself on a fallen tree-trunk, filled his pipe for a quiet smoke. Suddenly he heard a cough. He looked about him, but saw no one.
“Who's there?” he called out.
A voice close above him replied, “It is I— Hakopa.”
“Ringiringi” looked up quickly, and saw an old tattooed man named Hakopa (Jacob) te Matauawa, perched on the lowest branch of a rata-tree, with a double-barrelled gun in his hand. Hakopa was a
toas; Hakopa had for a long time exhibited a kindly leaning towards the white man, and had been a firm friend of his all through the troubled days in the pa.
“Quick, quick!” he said, in a low, cautious voice. “Hide yourself, Ringi! When you walked out of the pa I heard two men who were watching you say that they would follow you up and kill you as they had killed Kingi. They went to their wharés for their weapons, and I followed you quickly to warn you. I saw you standing there, and climbed on this branch to see what those men are doing. E tama! Conceal yourself! They are coming.”
The white man hastily selected a hiding-place. He lay down behind a big log near by, a fallen pukatea-tree; the log and the creepers and ferns that grew about it quite concealed him from the view of any one approaching from the pa.
Hardly had he hidden himself than two villainousvisaged young Hauhaus walked quickly along the track from the pa gateway. Both swung tomahawks as they came, and one carried at his girdle a revolver—trophy taken from some slain white officer.
Seeing Hakopa descending from his tree-perch, they stopped and asked:
“Where is the pakeha? Did you see him pass?”
“Why do you ask?” said the old man.
“We have come to kill him,” replied one of the men. “Where is he?”
Hakopa instantly put his cocked tupara to his shoulder and levelled it at the foremost of the Hauhaus, the man with the revolver.
“Haere atu!” he said sharply. “Go! Leave this spot at once, or I will shoot you. ‘Ringiringi’ is my friend.”
The old fellow's determined air quite overawed the pakeha-hunters, and they sulkily and silently returned to the pa.
Jacob watched them off, and when the white man had risen from his hiding-place he escorted him back to the pa, walking in front of him with his gun cocked, on the alert for any attack on his protégé. He took “Ringiringi” to his house, and then reported the affair to
The chief showed genuine anger. He assembled the fighting-men, and sternly ordered them to molest the white man no more. “If you harm him,” he said, “I shall leave the pa and return to my own village. Listen! ‘Ringiringi’ is henceforth my moko-puna—my grandchild—and I now give him another name, the name of one of my ancestors. His name is now Tu-nui-a-moa.”
And behind
“Yes, and if any one attempts to touch the white man, he will have to kill me too! Kill me and
Thereafter Bent was not molested. He went by his new name, and “Ringiringi” he was called no more; at any rate, not by
The “Bird's-Beak” soon received its baptism of blood and fire. Colonel McDonnell, with a force of about three hundred Armed Constabulary and volunteers, under Majors von Tempsky and Hunter, attacked the pa on August 21, 1868. The whites charged right into the village under a heavy fire, and the Maoris fled to the bush, losing several killed.
Bent, fortunately for himself, was not in the pa; he had gone over to the Turangaréré settlement, a few miles away, to procure gunpowder and paper for the manufacture of cartridges, and most of the other men were out cattle-shooting in the bush. wharé and retire. The great house was set fire to by Colonel McDonnell when the pa was captured, and the sacred wharé-kura, where the high-priest had so often exhorted his people and with enchanted taiaha told off the warriors of the Tekau-ma-rua, was soon a
pa, to weep over their dead and the ashes of their great wharé-kura and rebuild their ruined homes.
The troops had placed a number of hand-grenades, small shells filled with powder, in the thatch of the wharés when they fired the village; but some of the houses were not destroyed, and on the return of the Hauhaus, they found some of these grenades unexploded. The dangerous shells were given to Bent to handle. He pulled out the fuses—which the Maoris called wiki, or wicks—and emptied the precious powder into flasks. In this way a sufficient quantity of powder to make eighteen gun-cartridges was obtained from each hand-grenade.
The second fight at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu—
Early one warm spring afternoon in 1868, when the vast forest lay steeped in calm and
The shots came from the mountain side of “The Beak-of-the-Bird,” the opposite one to that by which the white troops had advanced the previous month. Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu was being taken in the rear this time. Colonel McDonnell had set out from the Kupapas, the friendly Maoris from the Whanganui and pakeha before the sun went down in the western sea that day.
McDonnell had hoped by his early start to take the Hauhaus by surprise. But wary old
. . . . .
On the previous night—as the old warrior wharé-kura), which had now been rebuilt. Then, when the Hauhau prayers and chants were over, the chief arose and cried:
“E koro ma, kia tupato! He po kino te po, he ra kino te ra!” (“O friends, be on your guard! This is an evil night—a night of danger, and the morrow will be a day of danger!”)
This oracular warning seemed to the superstitious
Long the grim old chief sat on his sacred mat that night in the wharé-kura, his enchanted tongue-pointed taiaha lying in front of him. Karakia after karakia he recited in a low monotone, incantations and charms, ancient pagan and latter-day Hauhau karakia, for success in the conflict that he felt was to envelop his pa on the morrow in a ring of smoke and blood.
In his own little thatched wharé that day sat pakeha-Maori. He, too, was busy, squatting there on an old flax whariki mat. By his side were a keg of gunpowder and a bag of bullets, and in front of him a pile of old pakeha newspapers and leaves torn from looted books. He was making cartridges for the Hauhaus. Round a wooden cartridge-filler he deftly rolled a scrap of paper, forming a cylinder, which he tied securely with thread or with fine strips of flax; then, withdrawing the filler, he poured in the gunpowder. The cartridges loaded, he slipped them into the cartouche-boxes and holders, a number of which had been brought to the wharé by the men of the Tekau-ma-rua; when the boxes were full, the remainder of the ammunition he stored carefully in a large flax
hamanu the Maoris called them—were primitive affairs smacking of the bush. In size and shape they resembled the ordinary military leather car-touche-boxes, but they were simply blocks of light wood, generally pukatea timber, slightly curved in shape so as to sit well on the body when strapped, and neatly bored with from ten to eighteen holes, each of which held a cartridge. A flap of leather or skin—in the earlier days it was often a piece of tattooed human skin—covered the cartridges; and straps of leather or of dressed and ornamented flax were attached to the hamanu, which were buckled or tied round the waist or over the shoulders. A well-equipped fighting-man usually wore two hamanu, by belts over the shoulders; and at his girdle he carried his pouches for bullets and percussion-caps.
Such was the lone white man's occupation in the forest stockade that day before the looming battle.
. . . . .
Next morning, after the first meal of the day had been set before the warriors by their women and had been quickly eaten, the war-chief came out of his house, taiaha in hand, and walked out on to the village square in front of the sacred praying-house.
“Friends,” he cried, as he stood there on the marae, “I salute you! You have eaten and are content; for the proverb says, ‘When the stomach
Ka ki te puku, ka ora te tangata’). Now, rise up and grasp your weapons, for I wish to see you dance the haka and the tutu-waewae of war.”
When the men were assembled on the parade ground, in their dancing costume of a scanty waistmat,
“Kaore e tu te ra, kaore e titaha te ra, ka tupono tatou kia to tatou whanaunga”—of which the meaning is, “The sun will not have reached its zenith, the sun will not have declined, before we have joined issue with our relatives”—the white soldiers.
“Then,” says Tutangé, “we danced our haka with the fire of coming battle in our hearts, and we hardened our nerves for the fight. For we knew that Titoko was a true and powerful prophet (poropiti whai-mana, tino kaha), and we believed that that day would see blood shed again around Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu.”
momo rangatira, or “blue blood” of Aotea to the black iron-sand
taiaha, most beautiful of Maori weapons, the quick and fatal use of the tomahawk, both the terrible long-handled one and the short hatchet, or patiti, as well as the musket and shot-gun and rifle of the pakeha. So here, now, was young Tutangé on his first war-path.
That morning, when the very air seemed full of rumours of battle and death, Tutangé was girded with the sacred war-mat, the maro-taua.
“My father's sister,” says he, “called me to her, together with certain other young men who were of rangatira rank, and who had not yet fought the white man. She was a chieftainess, by name Tāngamoko; she was of ariki birth in the mana-tapu and of a knowledge of charms and incantations, she was as a priestess amongst the people. She called us to her, and told us that she was about to make us tamariki tapu, that is, sacred children, for the coming battle. She girded us each with a fine waist-garment, the korowai, made of soft dressed and closely woven white flax, with short black thrums, or cords, hanging down it. These flax vestures, falling from our waists to our knees, she had made herself. They
karakia'd over them and charmed them so that the bullets of the enemy should not touch them, and so that we, their wearers, might conquer in the fight. And very proud and confident tamariki tapu we were now, parading the pa in our bullet-proof korowai, and dancing our weapons in the air as we leaped with our elders in the haka and roared out the great chorus of the war-song beginning, ‘Kia kutia—au— au!’ and that other one which our fathers had chanted when first they set up the Maori Land League, ‘E kore Taranaki e makere atu!’ (‘
“One of the songs which we chanted as we wildly danced was this:
The ‘singing of the birds’ was a figure of speech for the voices of the soldiers on the march.
“That maro-taua was all the clothing I wore in the fight. Round my brows I bound a handkerchief, which held in place my tiparé rangatira, my chief-like war-feathers. My weapons were a double-barrelled gun (tupara), and a short-handled E tama! Now I was ready for my first battle.”
Meanwhile, what of the pakeha-Maori in this nest of Hauhaus?
That morning, after he had supplied the men with ammunition, he sat on the marae watching the wardances. The morning went, but there was no sign from the outlying Hauhau piquets. Most of the women and children had been sent away into the bush at the rear of the pa in charge of the old chief Te Waka-tākere-nui, in anticipation of the predicted attack. The pakeha-Maori was also a non-com-batant, but he remained in the pa with
It was well on in the afternoon before the first shots were heard. The Maoris had expected attack from the seaward or
When the first sharp rifle-cracks echoed through the forest, pakeha, with a flax kit in his hand.
“Friend,” said the stern old captain, “take this kété of mine in your charge. It contains some of my tapu treasures; take great care of it, for I may not see you again; I may fall with my tribe. Take it and leave the pa, and join Te Waka-tākere-nui if you can find his camp in the forest.”
The white man took the carefully strapped kit and hurried out of the stockade. Te Waka's camp, he knew, was somewhere away in the rear; the firing was in that direction, and he was in danger of falling into the enemy's hands. However, he struck out into the bush from the rear fence, expecting to steal through the thick timber on the flank of the troops, who, he guessed, were advancing by the track which led in from the east.
He managed to elude his fellow-countrymen as it happened, but it was “touch-and-go” with him. Scarcely had he run out from the stockade and entered the hollow, through which a little creek wound through the bush at the rear of the pa, than the advance-guard of the white column also reached the creek, and crossed it to attack the pa. A heavy fire was at this moment opened on the troops by the Hauhaus, and bullets flew thick around the pakeha- Maori.
Two or three of the Armed Constabulary came
pa.
The Colonial soldiers must have mistaken Bent for a Maori, for they immediately fired at him but missed, and next moment he ducked into the jungle, and on all-fours scrambled down into the creek bed, where he followed down the little stream as hard as he could go.
There was small wonder the A.C.'s took Bent for a Maori, for it would have been difficult in the halflight of that bush, at the distance of a few yards, to have detected much resemblance to a white man in the dark, shaggy-headed, bare-footed fellow with an old and dirty blanket strapped around his waist, a ragged jacket about his shoulders, and a red handkerchief tied round his head.
Scrambling along, stooping low to avoid being hit, the pakeha-Maori went down the creek until he came to a large hollow mahoé-tree standing by the side of the watercourse. He squeezed into the hollow trunk of the tree, and there he remained for a few minutes listening to the cracking of the rifles and the loud reports of the Hauhau smoothbores and the yells of the combatants. Soon the firing came nearer, and bullets began to zip through the leaves
mahoé, in whose hollow heart the white man hid.
“The bullets are finding me out,” said Bent to himself. “I'm in a fix still; anyhow, here goes,” and he cautiously crept out from his place of concealment and took to the jungle-fringed creek again. Following down the creek, crawling, scrambling, running, he presently began to feel his head more secure on his shoulders, for the sound of the firing grew fainter. He left the creek, and, striking through the bush, found a familiar track which led him to the little nook in the forest where old Te Waka and the anxious women and terrified children were camped. There he remained that night.
From Te Waka's people he heard the account of the morning's work. The Government Maori forces, Kepa's men, came upon the camp of refugees and killed two children; one of these, a boy of about nine years of age, was the son of the Hauhau warrior, Kātené Tu-Whakaruru. The other child, a little girl, they most cruelly slew by throwing her up into the air and spitting her on a bayonet as she fell. Another child, a little boy, was captured, but was saved by a Whanganui Maori, who carried him out of the forest on his back. He was a son of Te Karere-o-Mahuru (“The Messenger of Spring”). This boy became a protégé of Sir
. . . . .
For the rest of the story of that battle in the bush, from the Maori side, my chief authorities are
The Government force outnumbered the Hauhaus in the pa by more than five to one. Of this, however, McDonnell and his officers and men were ignorant, otherwise there might have been a very different story to tell. In the obscurity of the dense bush, where the savage forest-men were in their familiar haunts, everything was strange and terrible to the recruits, and the imagination magnified the numbers of the foe, who poured bullets from their well-masked fastnesses.
Yet many of the whites were old and seasoned
“Wawahi-waka,” the
See von Tempsky's sketch, showing General Chute's column setting out on this march.
He was a good shot, a finished swordsman, and could throw a bowie-knife with deadly accuracy. It was in Mexico that he learned the use of the knife, and he never tired of impressing on his men its advantages in bush fighting.
Swarthy of visage, with long, black, curling hair, upon which a forage cap was cocked at a defiant angle, his grey flannel shirt carelessly open at the neck, his trousers tucked into long boots that came nearly up to his knees, a bowie-knife in a sheath and a revolver at his belt, a naked sword, long and curved, in his hand—this was von Tempsky on the war-path, a picturesquely brigand-like figure, upon whom the soldiers' eyes rested with wonder and a good deal of admiration.
Of that disastrous attack on “The
Some of the large rata and pukatea trees growing close to the stockade were hollow, and in several of these the Maoris had cut loopholes, which they used for musketry fire. Some of the trees, too, spat leaden death. Brown figures flitted like forestdemons from cover to cover. At these and at the naked arms and shaggy heads that showed themselves for a moment the coolest and best shots of the Constabulary sent their bullets, and every now and then a Hauhau came crashing to the ground; but for every Maori that was hit five white men fell.
The forest rang with the sharp cracking of the rifles and the bang-banging of the heavily charged muzzle-loaders, and within the stockade the women that remained encouraged their warriors with shrill yells.
” Kill them ! Eat them ! “they screamed, as they waved their shawls and mats. “Fight on, fight on! Let not one escape!”
White men dropped quickly, wounded or shot dead. McDonnell evidently over-estimated the strength of the enemy, for he concluded that it would be impossible to rush the pa or to hold it if it was successfully rushed, for the enemy were now all round him. Had he only known the real state of affairs, that there were barely sixty armed Hauhaus, of whom only about twenty remained within the stockade, the story of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu would
pakeha.
McDonnell, considering the position too strong to be carried by assault, determined to strike out to the left through the forest and retire.
pa, but too good a soldier to disobey orders. With him were most of the men of his two Armed Constabulary Divisions, No. 2 and No. 5, with Sub-Inspectors (Captains) Brown and
Sword in hand, von Tempsky moved restlessly to and fro, regardless of the bullets that hummed about him. He ordered those nearest him to take cover but himself remained erect, angrily cutting at the undergrowth with his sword. And there he was when a Hauhau bullet found him.
Now I will let the Maoris tell their story of how von Tempsky and his comrades fell.
“When the attack on our pa began, two or three of us, including Hotu and Tihirua, climbed up on an old partly hollow rata-tree that grew in a slanting position near the centre of the stockade, in order to see whether it would be a good place from which to fire at the pakehas. A little way up it forked into two large branches, and it was from this fork that we intended to fire. However, we found that it did not suit us, as we could not see anything of the soldiers who were hidden in the thick bush outside the stockade, so we rushed out into the forest, seeking our enemy.
“There were two large rata-trees outside the stockade, but the statement made that von Tempsky was shot from a rata is incorrect. I have seen a picture which purports to show him being shot down by a Maori perched in a tree. This is altogether contrary to fact, as I will explain to you.
“When we rushed out to the rear of the pa the soldiers were rapidly approaching the stockade. We crouched down amongst the undergrowth, close to the little creek, and directed our shots at the thicket which grew between the pa and the creek. Some of the soldiers, crossing the creek, were in this part of the bush, and soon I saw Manu-rau (von Tempsky). Heavy firing was going on all this time,
pakehas, and they were shot down by us and by the other Maoris, until soon there were nine white men lying dead or wounded around Manu-rau.
“When the Government forces had fallen back before a kokiri, a charge, led by Kātené Tu-Whakaruru, the Hauhau leader and scout, I ran out to where Manu-rau was lying dying on the ground. He seemed to be still living when I reached him. I snatched out my tomahawk from my girdle and dealt him a cut with it on the temple, to make sure of him, and killed him instantly. Then I took from him his uniform cap, his revolver and sword, and a lever watch which he had in his pocket.
“The sword, revolver, watch, and cap which I took from the soldier-chief's body I carried into the pa and laid before our war-chief
“That is the story of how von Tempsky was killed. I hope you will, when the opportunity comes, tell the pakehas that the picture which represents Manu-rau as being shot by a Maori who was perched up in a rata-tree is not correct. You pakehas will not regard my action in tomahawking Manu-rau as a kohuru, a murder? Well, then, as you say, it was in the course of war, and it was quite tika and correct. I was but a very young man then, just a boy, and it was my first battle.”
By the side of this I will put Whakawhiria's account. Whakawhiria lives at the big native village of Parihaka, the old-time town of the prophets
Whakawhiria was a young man of eighteen or so at the time of this engagement, but though so young he was already a veteran on the war-path. He had
His estimate of the strength of the garrison in Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu is even lower than Tutangé's, for he says there were not more than forty-five fighting men in the pa when it was attacked.
Te Rangi-hina-kau, Whakawhiria, and a party of others sallied out from the stockade and met their enemy skirmishing in the bush. In the rear of the pa ran a little stream, the Mangotahi. On the banks of the creek the eight Hauhaus took cover, Whakawhiria and his nearest companions crouching under a karaka-tree, and it was from that point that they shot von Tempsky and his men. The eight warriors were Te Rangi-hina-kau, Whakawhiria, Ika-wharau,
“It was Te Rangi-hina-kau who shot von Tempsky,” said Whakawhiria. “He dropped on one knee, and, taking careful aim, fired and shot von Tempsky. He shot him through the head, and afterwards cut out his heart as an offering to the Maori war-gods.” (
During the engagement The following account of Major von Tempsky's death, given in Auckland by Mr. “Our brave old major was walking to and fro with his sword in hand, furious at being caged as he was. I met him and he spoke to me in his kindly, thoughtful way, and asked why I did not take cover. I answered by putting the same question to him. He then said, ‘I am disgusted. If I get out of this scrape I will wash my hands clear of the business.’ He then sent me to take up a position and keep my eyes open, as the bullets were coming thick. I left him to obey the last order he ever gave. I had not gone far when a man of our Company was shot. The major went to his assistance and was shot, the bullet entering the centre of his forehead. He fell dead on top of the man to whose assistance he was going. That was how von Tempsky died. “A Frenchman named Jancey and I went to the major and lifted him up and laid him on his back, and just as we did so a bullet struck Jancey on the side and travelled across his breast-bone, and another struck the cartridge-box he had on his back. I left von Tempsky and picked up Jancey, carrying him out across the clearing. I then met Lieutenant Hunter (of the Wellington Rangers), and when we were about ten paces from von Tempsky's body Hunter was shot dead. I got hold of him and started to pull him back. Then I said to one of our men, ‘Come along for Major von Tempsky's body.’ This man refused, but Captain Buck (Wellington Rifles) came up and asked if I knew where von Tempsky was. I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘Come along, lad, let's get him out.’ When we came to the body I was hit by a bullet on the left thumb, which was shot nearly off. Just as I changed the carbine to my other hand a bullet went through my left hand and struck the carbine-stock, knocking me backwards. Then Buck was shot dead, and as I got up a bullet took my cap off. I got away from the clearing, leaving von Tempsky and Buck dead together. There were four of us who went for von Tempsky's body; Jancey and I were wounded, and Hunter and Buck were killed.”pa, shouting to his men, urging them to continue firing, and yelling such battle-cries as “Whakawhiria! Whakawhiria!” (“Twist them round and round!” or “Encircle them!”) It was from this circumstance that the warrior Whakawhiria assumed his present name.
On von Tempsky's fall, Captain
All through the fighting waiatas to his gods for success in the fight. With him was the priestess Tangamoko, the woman who had that morning garbed the young warrior Tutangé with the sacred war-mat.
When von Tempsky fell and the retreat of the survivors began, kokiri, or charge, in pursuit, which, as Tutangé has mentioned, was led by the warrior Kātené Tu-Whakaruru.
ngeri (war-song) they shouted all together as they leaped in that terrifying tutu-waewae:
The puffy clouds of smoke now drew away from the pa, as the Hauhaus followed their defeated foes into the dark forest. With appalling yells they rushed at their white enemies, tomahawking those who had fallen to make sure of them, as Tutangé had done with von Tempsky.
“Ka horo! Ka horo!” they yelled. “They are beaten!” And thrusting their bloody tomahawks into their belts they recharged their guns, and, leaping from tree to tree, fired heavily and incessantly at the gallant little rear-guard who were
The sun had just set. The ghostly tree-shadows lengthened, and it was already dark in the deeper thicknesses of the bush.
Just after the retreat commenced one of Captain Roberts' steadiest men, Corporal
“Shoot me, boys—shoot me!” he begged his comrades. “Don't leave me to be tomahawked.”
He knew as well as they did that his smashed leg meant death. The rear-guard was already encumbered with wounded and could carry no more.
“No, we can't shoot you, old man,” said a big, tall volunteer sergeant, who was a tower of strength to Roberts' little band, shooting with deadly aim from his post in the rear of the retreat. “Take this,” and he shoved into the wounded man's hand a loaded revolver.
Then the sergeant (
Bursting from the trees, the brown, nearly naked savages came yelling at the rear-guard. Hastily slipping fresh cartridges into their carbines, the
utu for the corporal in anticipation. Then they sorrowfully turned and went on into the dusky forest, leaving their comrade stretched there on the mossy ground, gazing sternmouthed, unflinchingly down the way of death.
Out from the ferns and supplejack leaped the foremost of the Hauhaus, a tattooed, blanket-girded man, with wild eyes rolling in blood-madness. His double-barrelled gun he had shifted from his right hand to his left, and he drew his shining tomahawk from his flax belt.
With an ear-ripping cry and the bound of a tiger he came on, hatchet in air.
The corporal stiffened his back, levelled his revolver, and fired.
The Maori fell, and lay with his face touching the soldier's boot.
A yell of “Patua! Patua!” came from the trees, and more bare figures with crossed cartridgebelts came rushing on, war-axe in hand.
Gripping his revolver hard, his trigger-finger steady, the corporal fired again, and another of his foes fell.
Now they stood off and shot the brave corporal dead, and so, after all, he died like a soldier and not under the frightful tomahawk.
. . . . .
McDonnell's column, the stronger one, was in the
padre of the forces, who had been described only a few weeks before, in a letter written by von Tempsky, as “a man without fear.” Whenever a soldier fell, whether he was Catholic or Protestant, the kind-faced father was by his side in a moment, tending his wounds, and, if dying, soothing his last moments with a prayer. He took his turn, too, at carrying the wounded.
Three holes, drilled by Hauhau bullets, ornamented the padre's old wide-brimmed soft felt hat when he reached the
It was just dark when the snoring Wai-ngongoro was reached, and the bridgeless river, running high and swiftly, was forded with some difficulty under fire. At ten o'clock at night the redoubt was reached, and here it was found that a mixed party of fugitives from the battle-field, numbering about eighty Europeans besides the Kupapas, had already arrived, and had reported all the officers, McDonnell included, killed or wounded and left on the field.
. . . . .
And how fared Captain Roberts' little rear-guard of sixty men?
Extending his force in skirmishing order, the young officer pushed on as well as he could, carrying his wounded—one in every six. When darkness came on he halted, for it was hopeless to try to force a way through the jungle-matted woods in the blackness of the night. It was a cold frosty night, and the wounded were in agonies of pain, which their distressed comrades were helpless to relieve. There on the damp and freezing ground they crouched till the moon rose at two o'clock in the morning. Now, guided by five brave fellows of the Maori contingent, Whanganui and kareao and the densely growing shrubs, stumbling over logs and splashing through little watercourses, they emerged at last thankfully on to the open country, and soon, bearing their wounded and dying comrades across the dark flooded Wai-ngongoro, were greeted by the joyful cheers of their comrades, European and Maori, under
Only then was the full story of the repulse pieced together—a story of a fight that in point of numbers
After the battle—The slain heroes of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu—A terrible scene on the marae—What Bent saw from his prison-hut—The sword of “Manu-rau”—A funeral pyre—Priestly incantations—A soldier's body eaten—Why the Hauhaus became cannibals.
On the morning after the battle,
The news of the repulse of the white troops had spread with incredible swiftness all over the Maori country-side, and the Hauhaus from the neighbouring villages gathered in Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu to hear the story of the fight and to share in the distribution of the loot taken on the battle-field.
The village was crowded with Hauhaus, all in a fearful state of excitement, a delirium of triumphant savagery.
Yelling like furies, shouting ferocious battle-songs, waving their weapons in the air, the victorious warriors were there with their spoils—carbines, swords, revolvers, soldiers' caps and belts.
More frightful still was the sight of which Bent had just a glimpse as he entered the gateway of the pa.
Laid out in a low row in the centre of the marae, side by side, were bodies of many white soldiers, nearly twenty of them, all stripped naked—the fallen heroes of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu.
Just a glimpse the white man had as he entered the blood-stained square. The next moment he was surrounded by a howling mob of Hauhaus, grinning, yelling, laughing fiendishly, shaking their weapons in his face, all in sheer hate and contempt of anything with a white skin.
Two or three of the Tekau-ma-rua men whom Bent knew came bounding up. One of them said to him:
“Tu-nui, you must come with me. It is Titoko's command.” The Maori led Bent to a small thatched hut on one side of the marae. Here he shut the white man in, and fastened the low sliding-door on the outside.
For a little while the white man sat in the gloom of the windowless wharé, listening to the demoniac shouts of the Hauhaus outside, and wondering what would come next—whether, indeed, his own body would not soon be added to the terrible pile of slain soldiers on the marae.
At last, hearing
Discovering a small crack in the reed-thatched walls of the hut, he enlarged it sufficiently to gain a good view of the assemblage on the village square.
There they squatted, men, women, and children, their faces smudged with charcoal or with red ochre, the paint of the war-path. They were seated on the ground in a great half-circle, facing the staring white corpses of the slain pakehas. The frightful clamour of the savages had given place with strange suddenness to a dead silence, as they listened to their war-chief's harangue, and watched him pacing quickly to and fro, with his sacred taiaha in his hand, now carrying it at the trail in the taki attitude, now dandling it high in the air as he intoned a chant to his battle-god Uenuku.
“Bring out my pakeha Tu-nui-a-moa!” cried
A Maori rose, and, unfastening the wharé door, led Bent out on to the assembly-ground.
He was taken up to the corpses of the slain soldiers, and one of the Hauhau chiefs asked him if he knew any of them.
Bent walked slowly past the dead, scrutinising each body carefully. He recognised two of them. One was an old soldier who had been a comrade of his in the 57th Regiment, and who had afterwards joined the Colonial forces.
The other dead soldier he identified was von Tempsky. The major's body lay there naked, with a deep tomahawk cut on the right temple, and the long, curly black hair matted with blood. The other bodies were hacked about the head with tomahawks; this was the work of the Maori women, who delighted in mutilating the dead in revenge for those of their relatives who had fallen.
Before announcing his recognition of the white warrior's remains, he turned to the people and asked if any of them had taken from a pakeha officer a sword with an unusual curve in it, and a cap bound with a brass band.
A Hauhau jumped up and said, “Yes, I have them.”
“Show me which soldier you took them from,” said Bent.
The Maori, with von Tempsky's sword in his hand, pointed to the major's corpse.
“Well,” said Bent, “that is the body of Manu-rau, whom the pakehas called von Tempsky, and that is his sword.”
A great “Ah-h” came from the people, and the exultant possessor of Manu-rau's sword of wondrous mana went bounding down the marae, flashing the weapon above his head, turning his painted face from side to side in the hideous grimaces of the pukana, and thrusting out his tongue to an extraordinary length.
The Hauhaus were in a frenzy of excitement when they realised that the renowned Manu-rau was indeed lying dead before them. Some of them proposed to drag the body out and cook it in the hangi, so that they might have the satisfaction of devouring their most dreaded enemy, and eating his heart, the heart of a tino-toa, a warrior indeed.
But
Bent was now ordered to return to his hut, and the door was again fastened on him. The proposal to cook and eat the bodies of von Tempsky and his comrades was debated in a wild korero. Bent, from his eye-hole in the wall of the wharé, saw Hauhau after Hauhau, the orators of the tribes, jump up, tomahawk or gun or sword in hand, and furiously declaim as they went leaping and trotting backward and forward in the open space between the ranks of the victors and the dead; and the deeds of the battle-field were told again and again in great boasting words.
pakeha-Maori had observed while on the marae, had not been mutilated, except for that tomahawk cut. His heart had not been cut out, though Bent half expected it would have been. The rite of the Whangai-hau, the ceremony of propitiation and burnt sacrifice following a battle, had not, however, been omitted. On the previous night, Tihirua, the young war-priest, had
karakia as he watched the heart of the hated white man smoking in the flames.
“Manu-rau's “famous sword, too, was set apart as a sacred gift to the gods; it was a parakia, or taumahatanga, a thank-offering for victory. It became a tapu relic, and was religiously preserved by the Hauhaus. It is in their possession to this day.
Presently the bodies of the slain—the “Fish-of-Tu”—were ceremoniously apportioned amongst the several tribes represented in the village, as Bent again watched from his eye-hole in the wall.
One of the chiefs paced up and down past the pile of dead, with a stick in his hand. Pointing to a soldier's corpse, he cried:
Pointing to the others, he said:
“This is for
The
Two warriors jumped up and, laying their weapons aside, seized a dead soldier by the ankles and dragged the corpse away. One was
Kātené and his companion dragged the body along the ground across the marae to the cookingovens in the rear of the dwelling-huts, watched in silence by the people. “I could not say whose body it was,” says Bent, “but it was a man in good flesh!”
When the two Hauhaus had hauled their body away to the hangi for a terrible feast, the tribes sat in silence for a few moments, gazing intently on their dead enemies lying there before them. It was a calm, windless day, and the midday sun beat hotly down on that ghastly pile in the middle of the crowded marae.
taiaha in hand. In his great croaking voice he cried:
“E koro ma, e kui ma, tena ra koutou! Tanumia te hunga tapu, e takoto nei; e tahu ki te ahi. Kaore e pai kia takoto ki runga ki te kino. Te mea pai me
tahu ki te ahi!” (“Oh, friends, men and women—I salute you! Bury the sacred bodies of the slain, lying before us here. And burn them with fire! It is not well that they should be left to offend. They must be consumed in fire!”)
At this command the people dispersed to collect fuel for a funeral pyre. They brought logs and branches of dry tawa timber from the surrounding bush and from the firewood piles in the rear of the wharés, and a huge pile of wood was built in the centre of the marae. Even the little naked children came running up with their little hands full of sticks to cast upon the heap.
All the mutilated bodies of the white soldiers—except the one that had been dragged away—were lifted up and placed on the roughly levelled top of the pyre, which was about four feet high and about fifteen feet long.
So the major's body went on first, and then around and above it were heaped the other soldiers. On top of the bodies more wood was thrown.
Bent's hut door was now unfastened, and the
“When I walked out on to the marae, I met two
“The cannibal cooks looked round and asked me savagely what I wanted there. They threatened that if I did not leave instantly they would throw me into the oven too, and roast me alive.
“I returned to the marae, and was sitting amongst the crowd there some time later, perhaps an hour, when I saw a man's hands and ribs, cooked, carried up. The human flesh was placed in front of the two powder-carriers from Hukatéré, who were sitting close to me. The meat was in a flax basket, and a basket of cooked potatoes was set down with it. This present of food was out of compliment to the visitors.
“The two Maoris refused to touch it, saying, ‘No, we will not eat man!’ So the other natives ate it.
“Kātené and hinu, or fat, that was collected in the palm just as if he were drinking water. The hands when cooked curled up with the fingers half-closed, and the hollowed palm was filled with the melted hinu.
“mana tapu, his personal sacredness, would thereby be destroyed.”
The younger people in the pa were rather awestricken by the preparations for the cannibal feast, and stood together some distance away from the hangi. “I stood with them,” says one Te Kahupukoro, who was a boy at the time; “I was afraid to join in the eating, but the savour of the flesh cooking in the ovens was delightful!”
When the warriors, a little later on, were enjoying their meal of man-meat, some of the little children were heard calling out to their fathers: “Homai he poaka mou” (“Give me some pork to eat”). They had seen the meat carried up in flax baskets, and thought it was pork.
Now the white soldiers' funeral pyre was set
tohunga, or priest, walked up to it with a long stick of green timber in his hand, an unbarked sapling with a rough crook at one end. He stood in front of the pile as the flames shot up and chanted a song. Then, when the logs with their terrible burdens were well alight, he began a strange incantation. Using his long stick with both hands he turned over the burning logs, pushed them closer together to create a fiercer heat, and forked the bodies into the midst of the blaze. And as he did so he recited a pagan karakia, the chant of the Iki, anciently repeated over the bodies of warriors when they were being cremated on the battle-field. These were the words of the incantation (the mystic meaning underlying some of the expressions would require many notes to fully elucidate them):
The people sat there on the marae, silently watching the burning of the dead. Far above the trees of the surrounding forest rose the thick black column of smoke from the blazing pile. It went up as straight as an arrow, unswayed by any breath of air, to a great height. To the savage watchers it
Long the Hauhaus gazed at the dreadful crematory blaze on the palisaded marae, replenishing the fire with dry logs as it burned down, until all the dead were consumed, and nothing but a great heap of charcoal and ashes remained.
. . . . .
The revival of the ancient practice of cannibalism was the most hideously savage feature of mana as men and as warriors.
The
Potatau—grandfather of the present “king” of
Te Wherowhero Kai-tangata—“man-devourer”—he was called. Many a time he raided
When the Maori kingdom was first established, the then governor of the colony visited old Potatau, and discussed the Maori aspirations for independence. The governor, according to the Maori story, endeavoured to show the king the folly of opposing the sway of the white man; if it did come to warfare—which was not then contemplated by either side—the British soldiers would soon make a clean sweep of the ill-armed and ill-provisioned Maori.
“You are wrong,” said Potatau; “it will take you many a year to sweep away the Maoris—you will never do it.”
“But,” said the governor, “suppose we fight you, and drive you into the forest, far away from your cultivations, what will you do for food?”
“Why,” replied the old king, “I have plenty of food even in the bush—the berries of the tawa and karaka trees, the heart of the mamaku tree-fern,
nikau, and other foods of the forest. We can live on those.”
“And suppose I chase you with my soldiers, and fight you in the forest, and pursue you so that you cannot even get those things to eat, the berries and the mamaku, what then will you do for food?”
Said old Potatau, grinning, “Then I'll eat you!” “Ko koe te kai mau!”
This half-defiant, half-jocular speech of the venerable warrior of pas of after years; but it was left for Titoko's bushmen of
“
Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu abandoned—On the march again—Skirmishing on the Pakeha in pickle—A new stockade—Bent the pa-builder.
The famous “Bird's-Beak” pa, made so memorable by the terrible scenes enacted around and within its stockade, was soon deserted.
Tekau-ma-rua preceded them, to make sure that the way was clear of the pakeha enemy.
At the village of Turangaréré and at Taiporohenui
For some weeks Titoko and his Hauhaus camped in the Oruatihi pa. Then they shifted to Otoia, near the banks of the
Early in the morning the day after the pa was completed there was a brush with the Government forces. A column of Armed Constabulary and pa in high jubilation, singing war-songs, waving their guns, and bounding about and grimacing like a company of fiends. Then the steaming pork and potatoes, and speech-making and howling hakas around the great camp-fires. From the Maori point of view, quite a pleasant day's sport.
During the two months following the bush fight at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu no serious engagement occurred, but pakeha or two.
One incident of this period illustrates the peculiar ghoulish humour of the Hauhau savage. Two friendly Maoris—Nga-hina and another—who were mail-carriers in the Government service, halted awhile at wharés, and on taking the top off they found it to be a barrel of brine, containing meat—apparently pork.
Anticipating a good meal of salt pork, they fished up some of the meat. They found to their disgust that it was human flesh!—“Long-pig!” Not being Hauhaus or cannibals, they dropped the
The question was, who pickled the pakeha? A Hauhau prisoner some time later enlightened the Government Maoris. A scouting party from Titoko's camp had dodged down to
It would have been an exquisite joke, from the cannibal Hauhau view-point, had the Government soldiers unknowingly helped themselves to a joint of white man!
pa, which should be as nearly impregnable as a Maori fort could be.
So one morning a long line of Hauhaus of all ages and both sexes—the armed men in front and rear—bearing their simple belongings in flaxbasket pikaus on their backs, left the Otoia redoubt, and marched away through the bush to a spot about twelve miles from the mouth of the pa, which had been attacked by the
The position was on partially cleared land, nearly level, surrounded by the forest. The men, after hastily constructing huts, roofed with the fronds of tree-fern and nikau, set to work with their axes to hew out a large clearing. Titoko marked out the lines of the entrenchments and palisades. The forest-trees quickly fell before the practised assault of many bushmen, and the shrubby cover in front of the pa was carefully burned.
Then came the setting up of the stockade. Tawa and other trees of small size were cut into suitable lengths for the palisade-posts. There were two rows of palisades; the outside one was the largest and strongest. For the heavy outside row of stockading, timbers from eight to twelve inches in diameter were sunk solidly in the ground, forming a wall some ten feet high. Saplings were cut to serve as cross-ties or rails to lash across the posts, and with supplejack and aka vines the whole were bound strongly and closely together.
“It was exciting,” says the white man, “but none the less it was slavery. Many a night those times, when I lay down on my flax whariki, though I was dog-tired, I could not sleep—thinking, thinking over the past, and dreading what the future might bring me. Many and many a time I wished myself dead and out of it all.”
What furious, what Homeric toil was that pa-building! Those wild brown men, spurred by the reports of speedy attack, laboured with incredible energy and swiftness. The Moturoa fortified hold—which later became known as Papa-tihakehake, because of the battle which befell here—was completed in three days—stockaded, trenched, parapeted, and rifle-pitted—ready for the enemy!
Behind the strong tree-trunk stockade there were trenches and casemated rifle-pits from which the defenders could fire between the lower interstices in the great war-fence; behind the trenches again was a parapet from which a second line of Hauhaus could deliver their fire over the top of the palisade. It was one of the strongest works yet constructed by the Maoris, and one that was not likely to be stormed except at the cost of many lives.
Kātené's vigil—Attack on the stockade—Major Hunter's death—A Hauhau warrior's desperate feat—Over the palisades—Government forces repulsed—A rear-guard fight—An unanswered prayer—Scenes of terror—Tihirua's burnt-offering—A soldier's body eaten.
This name Papa-tihakehake was given to the place after the fight, in commemoration of the defeat of the troops. Just within the stockade of the Moturoa, or Papatihakehake pa,Papa means a battle-ground; tihakehake refers to the dead bodies of the whites which strewed the ground.taumaihi, or look-out stage, ten or twelve feet above the ground, high enough to allow a sentinel to see well over the sharp-pointed palisades, and scan the approaches to the fort.
In this bush watch-tower there stood, at misty dawn on a grey November morning, the Hauhau scout and warrior Kātené Tu-Whakaruru.
Kātené was cold, and he stamped his bare feet upon the unbarked logs that floored the sentrybox, and he chanted softly to himself a little waiata to Kopu, the morning star, which he had looked
Presently a faint light began to steal over the forest, and Kātené could see the outlines of the black charred stumps and burned trees in front of the pa, then beyond the gloomy woods, through which a narrow winding path led to the open fernlands of the
Suddenly Kātené's murmured chant ceased, and he strained his eyes into the mist. To a Maori forester the slightest sound was enough to set every faculty on the alert, asking suspiciously, “He aha tena!” He had heard a faint sound in the direction of the track beyond the black tree-stumps, a sound that he fancied resembled the striking of steel against steel.
Kātené hardly breathed. His eyes glared fixedly through the mist. In a few minutes his vision confirmed the evidence of his keen ears. He saw, just for a moment, a dark figure, then another, come hazily out of the wet fog where the track from the
That glimpse was enough for Kātené. He dropped from his sentry-perch, and ran from wharé to wharé and tent to tent giving the alarm.
“The soldiers are coming!” he said to those
The fighting-men poured out of their sleeping huts, snatching up their weapons and accoutrements, and ran to their places in the pits and ditches behind the stockade. They hastily loaded their tuparas, their rifles, and their carbines, and, peering eagerly through the defence-works, sought to penetrate the raw, damp morning mist that shrouded their front.
The whole bush-castle was alive and ready. Every man and boy who could shoulder a gun was in the well-hidden firing lines.
The wet mist slightly lifting as the morning light came, the musketeers presently saw dim figures moving out from the dark forest on their front and right and left flanks. Moving quickly, half running, in a cautious, crouching gait, they flitted from tree to tree, and burnt stump to stump, and nearer and nearer to the stockade.
Not a sound came from the breathlessly waiting warriors, nor from the ghost-like figures that now sank to the ground, each behind a log or a great blackened stump, or the butt of a standing tree.
Gun in hand, finger on the trigger, the Hauhaus waited.
The apparitions were picked bush-fighters of the
Advancing silently in skirmishing order through the bush, they took cover, waiting for light enough to fight by. There were detachments of four divisions of the Armed Constabulary, many of them veteran bush-fighters, and men of the
There were two hundred Government men fronting the fort, but the fighting men behind the palisades did not, according to Maori accounts, number many more than half the number.
Amongst pa; the other tribes holding the fort were
All at once, as the Hauhaus crouched behind their palisades squinting for a sight of pakeha, with impatient fingers on their gun-triggers, fifty or sixty
blue and grey figures sprang from cover and charged for the stockade. Some of the assaulting party ran past the corner of the war-fence, looking for some opening or gateway by which they might charge in.
The leading files were within a few paces of the high, solidly set palisading, when suddenly the whole face of the fence flashed fire, and volleys crashed in terrifying reverberations that set flocks of sleepy kaka parrots flying, screaming harsh screams of fright, through the dark forest.
Nearly half the storming party of A.C.'s fell before that fearful fire.
The first man shot was their leader, a brave officer, Major Hunter, whose brother, Captain Hunter, had fallen at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu two months previously. Tutangé says that it was Paraone Tuteré who shot the major; he fired at the leading figure, not knowing then who he was. Colonel Whitmore came running in with the stormers, but, with his usual luck, although in the thickest fighting he was never hit.
Those of the attacking column who were not hit instantly dropped to cover amongst the logs and
pa front. Then they returned the fire as well as they could, but one man after another was hit, without being able to see one Hauhau of the scores that occupied the pa and thrust the muzzles of their guns through the interstices of the palisades.
It was a foolish thing, that blind frontal charge on the strong stockade. Major Hunter was too good a soldier to have done such an insane thing of his own volition. He was obeying Whitmore's orders. Hunter was shot in the femoral artery, when within nine or ten yards of the stockade. He implored those near him to try to stop the gushing blood, and some of his comrades attempted to staunch it; but the wound was too close to the stomach to get at, and he died in a few minutes.
Captain pa in the rear. His line of charge was on Hunter's right flank, and he had good cover, but in spite of that he lost two killed and five wounded.
Now a brisk little fight went on on the flanks of the pa between Kepa's men and a party of warriors who had made a sortie from the stockade. Kepa was furiously assailed by the bushmen, leaping from tree to tree, yelling their frightful Hauhau cries; and it was as much as the plucky Whanganui men
could do to hold their own. Their attempt to take the pa in the rear failed, and they at last slowly
The A.C. supports came doubling up, and a heavy fire was concentrated on the stockade, but to little purpose. It was impregnable to rifle-fire, and in their pitted works the defenders were able to pick off the white skirmishers in perfect safety.
Bullets swept the clearing in every direction, and through the infernal music of the forest-battle the white soldiers heard the loudly yelled war-cries of the chiefs and the shrill voices of the Maori women as they encouraged their warriors, husbands, and brothers, and screamed them on to slaughter with all the fury of brown tattooed Hecates.
The women were gathered in the marae and in the trenches, some armed, all filled with the fire of savage war.
“Ka horo, ka horo!” they shouted. “Kia maia, kia maia! Patua, kainga! Patua, kainga!” (“They fall, they fall! Be brave, oh, be brave! Kill them, eat them! Kill them, eat them!”)
All this time parepare, the inner breastwork, the bullets screaming zssh! zssh! over his head and all about him. The air seemed filled with flying lead, yet very few Maoris were hit. One woman he saw shot dead through the head as she rose to wave her shawl and yell a fighting cry to the men at the palisades.
And here Bent was an eye-witness of the most desperately daring deed he had ever seen.
A fiery old tattooed warrior, by name Te Wakatapa-ruru—the Hauhau mentioned in an earlier chapter as the man who had killed
When the pakeha storming party rushed up at the double, the old man was one of the first to open fire on them with his tupara. And then, when the order “Kokiritia!” (“Charge!”) was given, and the Hauhaus rushed out to engage the Government men who were trying to work round to the rear of the pa, he led the wild charge.
Perfectly naked, except for the broad flax waistgirdle, which held his short-handled tomahawk, and gripping his double-barrelled gun, the tall old savage took a great running jump at the stockade from the inner parapet, and leaped clean over it!
Yelling a Pai-mariré battle-cry as he rose from the ground after his extraordinary leap, he snatched the tomahawk from his belt, and charged straight for the advancing whites.
It was a fit of whakamomori—sheer blind desperation, utter recklessness of death.
Possibly the furious old fanatic imagined that his Hauhau angel and his mesmeric password, “Hapa!
Pai-mariré! Hau!” would avert the bullets of the pakeha. But he was killed in the very charge —the only Maori fighting-man killed that day.
Two white soldiers met him. He was in the act of striking a desperate blow when a pakeha ball took him square in the forehead, and with a huge con-
vulsive bound and a half-choked barking “Hau!” on his lips, the old tattooed brave fell dead amongst the foremost of his enemies.
It was just the death that he desired—face to the foe, with his war-axe in his hand—the death of a true Maori toa!
This savage hero's son, Ratoia—now living in the village of Taiporohenui—a young boy at the time of the fight, saw his father's great leap over the palisade, and saw him killed.
Bent tells of a curious matakité, or prophetic dream, which whariki-spread floor of one of the huts. He dreamed that he saw his face refleeted in a pakeha looking-glass, and that he was combing his hair. This vision disturbed the old man, and deeming it a warning from the unseen world, he asked whakamomori, and ran amok, and so he fell.
Finding it impossible to take such a strong and well-defended position by storm, the white colonel withdrew his forces. There were dead and wounded lying all over the place. The pakehas succeeded in carrying off the wounded and some of the dead, including the gallant Major Hunter. A number of dead, however, had to be left where they were lying, for it was death to attempt their removal from
under the very muzzles of the Hauhau guns.
The rescue of Hunter's body from the Hauhau tomahawks, under a heavy fire, was a gallant piece of work. Captain Gudgeon was one of those who brought the dead officer out; one of his comrades was Captain
The Colonial soldiers retired, fighting a hard rearguard action, out to the edge of the bush. Each division of Armed Constabulary in turn halted, knelt down facing the enemy, and covered the retreat of the other divisions, thus giving time for those of the dead and wounded who had been recovered to
Colonel
. . . . .
A grim story of that hard-fought retreat through the bush is told by
After the kokiri, the rush out in pursuit, had been ordered by the Maori war-chief, one of the pukatea-tree. He had been cut off from his division
The pakeha. He said to one of his comrades, “I don't think that man is dead.” Going up to the Constabulary man, he put his hand on his shoulder, and said in English, “Wake up!”
The white man opened his eyes. He exclaimed, “Save my life! Let me go, and I'll never forget you—I'll repay you for it.”
The
The soldier knelt as he was told, and ejaculated some sort of a prayer.
Playing with his prey, the savage asked, “Well, are you saved now?”
The kneeling soldier looked up, but could make no answer. He stared at his terrible-looking captor, with horror in his eyes.
“Poroporoaki ki to Atua!” (“Say farewell to your God!”) cried the Maori, and swinging his gun round in both hands, he brought it butt down with a frightful smashing blow on the soldier's head.
The man fell backwards dead. His slayer stripped him of his uniform and accoutrements, and a little
haka in front of the stockade, his face blackened with charcoal from the charred tree-stumps, the soldier's cap on his head, and the captured carbine in his hand.
Young tupara (double-barrelled gun) and a revolver. The gun was a muzzle-loader; I preferred it to the breech-loaders used by the pakeha, because something was always going wrong with them. I could load (puru-pu) very quickly; but a quicker man was old
What scenes of horror followed that battle in the bush!
The Hauhaus were in a delirium of triumphant savagery. Like frenzied things they came dancing and yelling back to the pa. They had blackened their ferocious faces with charcoal from the burnt tree-stumps in front of the pa. Singing war-songs, shouting Pai-mariré cries, dancing their weapons in the air, projecting their long snaky tongues and rolling their eyes till only the whites were visible, set in a petrifying glare—the grimace of the pukana—it was a sight that brought fear to the heart of the lone white man, accustomed though he was by this time to spectacles of barbaric ferocity.
The women were as wild and savage-looking as the men—their dark eyes blazing with excitement, their faces black-painted like the warriors, their loosened hair flying behind them, many of them nude from the waist up—waving shawls, mats, tomahawks, in welcome to the returning heroes, shouting, singing, screaming.
. . . . .
Outside the front fence of the pa, just us they fell, among the logs and stumps and on the blood-stained ground, lay the dead men whom the retreating A.C.'s had been compelled to leave on the battle-field. There were seven of them.
Upon these fallen soldiers rushed the Hauhaus. They stripped them of their uniforms. They tied flax-leaf ropes round the necks of the dead pakehas, and hauled them away to the gateway of the pa.
As they dragged the corpses off, leaping from side to side as they hauled in a fury of blood-madness, they shouted out such sentences as these:
“Taku kai! Taku kai! E hara ka kite noho koe taku kai, taku tika, taku he! Nau te kino, naku whakahoki tou kino. Taea hokitia—te mahi o te atua a Titokowaru!” (“My food! My food! Behold my food; behold the right and the wrong of it all. 'Twas you”—addressing the slain—“that wrought the evil work. And I have returned your evil. Behold the work of the god of
A young Hauhau, huge-limbed and naked but
pa.
His tomahawk flashes in the air above him as he steps over the fallen soldier—once, twice, thrice!
He thrusts in a hand into a huge gaping wound in the dead man's breast; he is searching for something. He rises with some object, all bloody, in his horrible red hand. He sticks his tomahawk back into his girdle, he comes bounding from the corpse, waving his dripping trophy in his hand, swinging it round his head. His fiendish yells ring echoing over the forest clearing.
What is it he flourishes so exultingly?
It is the white man's heart!
This is the young warrior Tihirua, the priest of the burnt sacrifice. He has torn out the manawa of the soldier, as a mawé—an offering to the God of War!
At his waist, buckled to his flax girdle, is a leather pouch, such as was generally used for carrying percussion-caps. Out of this he takes matches—pakeha matches! Striking match after match, he holds them underneath the bleeding heart until it is singed, and dark smoke goes up from it—incense to Uenuku, the war-god, who appears to his savage worshippers in the arch of the rainbow.
The heathen rite—the ceremony of the Whangaihau—performed, Tihirua flings down his terrible trophy, and then directs the hauling of the bodies into the palisaded inferno.
. . . . .
Bent, standing just outside the pa gateway, watched the in-bringing of the bodies of his fellow-
whites—prelude, he too well knew, to a cannibal feast.
He turned to enter the village, when an old Maori, tugging away madly at a flax line which he had made fast to the neck of a dead man, caught sight of him, and shouted:
“You, pakeha! Come and give me a hand. Help me to drag in my food!”
“What do you want?” Bent heard a rough
pakeha?”
The Maori replied that he wished the white man to help him haul the soldier's body into the marae.
“No!” cried the chief in his great hoarse voice. “No! you must not call upon my pakeha to help
you. He shall not touch the bodies of his country-men.”
So the war-captain and his cartridge-maker stood by watching the frightful procession of Hauhaus and their prizes. The seven naked bodies were dragged into the pa and laid out in the centre of the marae.
The excited people all gathered in a great circle around the bodies. One after another the orators
pukana glare; they bounded to and fro, and cut the air with their tomahawks as they told the thrilling episodes of the fight.
All the clothes, arms, and accoutrements taken from the dead and wounded were laid before
“Whose was this?” the war-chief would ask, picking up a carbine, or an ammunition-pouch, or a soldier's tunic from the heap.
“Mine,” replied the man who had taken it on the battle-field.
“Take it away, then,” said
“It is mine,” a young man would reply; “it is my first spoils of war, a tanga-ika.”
“Burn it,” was the chief's order.
Then the human bodies lying on the marae were apportioned one by one, to each tribe, as piles of food are served out at a ceremonial Maori gathering.
“
A woman sat weeping on the marae. She was Te Hau-karewa, wife to one Te Rangi-whakairipapa and a sister of
Ceasing her tangi for the dead, when the bodies of the soldiers were laid out on the ground, she rose, and, taking a stick in her hand, she walked along the row of the dead men and struck each a blow on the head.
“Upoko-kohua!” she cried vehemently, with hate flashing in her eyes; “Upoko-kohua! Ka taona koe ki te umu, he utu mo taku tungane kua mate, ko Te Waka-tapa-ruru! Mehemea ko au i tata i taku tungane i te takiwa i mate ai, ka kainga au i te karu o te tangata nana i whakamatea Te Waka!” (“Boiled heads! Cursed heads! Soon ye'll be cooked in the oven, as payment for the death of my brother,
Then, throwing away her stick, she sat down again, and fell to weeping in the very abandonment of woe, for the savage woman of the woods loved her grim warrior-brother greatly.
. . . . .
Some of the Maoris proposed that the bodies of the slain whites, the “Fish of Whiro,” should all be burned or buried.
But up leaped Timoti, wildest of all the wild pukana-ing—only the whites of his eyes showing—and his tongue protruded in derision and defiance. He flashed his tomahawk in the air; he yelled, “We must have one body—one body to cook in the hangi!”
“Yes,” said another of the clan, “the customs of our fathers must be observed. What is the use of killing so many pakehas if we cannot have one to eat?”
No man making objection, several Hauhaus jumped up and ran to the heap of slain Constabulary men. They selected a body, and dragged it off to the cooking-place at the rear of the marae. “He is the fattest of the pakehas,” said the saturnine Timoti.
All eyes watched them, but no man said a word.
Bent, after a while, rose with some of his Hauhau companions, and walked over to the cooking-hangis, and watched the cooks at their horrible work.
They were roasting the white man's body on the great fire of hot stones, in a hollowed-out earth-oven. “It was being cooked,” says Bent, “much as you would roast a piece of mutton; they turned it over and over until it was thoroughly done, and then they cut it up for the feast.”
When the cannibal meal was ready, it was brought on to the marae with much ceremony in flax
hangis at the same time, and these were carried to the assembly-ground, to be eaten with the manmeat. Bent saw the flesh of the soldier eaten. The man-eaters, he says, all belonged to the pakeha, or as much of him as was borne to the marae; the rest of the people did not share in the feast. tapu.
“I noticed,” says the pakeha-Maori, “Timoti and Big Kereopa, each with a basket before them, enjoying the meal of human flesh. Timoti grabbed up his portion of meat from his basket, and ate it just as if he were eating a piece of bread.”
Then marae.
The bundles of clothing from the dead lay on the marae. The Maoris gave Bent three pairs of soldiers' trousers, four shirts, and some boots. “I tell you I was pleased,” says the old pakeha-Maori, who had no inconvenient scruples on the subject of dead men's clothes; “for a long time I had been wearing only Maori-made garments of flax.”
A great pile of wood was collected, heaped up six or seven feet high, and in the evening, as pakehas were placed on this funeral pyre and cremated.
The people squatted round—as they had sat at a similar ceremony in the “Bird's Beak” pa—and watched the flames devour their fallen foemen. And by the light of the great fire roaring away there on the marae, taki'd up and down, addressing his followers, and bounding and parading to and fro, his sacred feather-plumed taiaha in his hand. He recited incantations, and chanted songs, and exhorted the Hauhaus, bidding them be of good heart and fight to the bitter end.
Then marae, with gun and tomahawk by his side. Gazing upon the silent, tattooed features of the dead toa, his comrade in many a wild foray and forest battle, he cried the old farewells to those whose spirits have passed to the Reinga, and he chanted this lament:
And the wild korero went on. Tangi songs were chanted, and there were speeches of savage, boastful jubilation made—” great swelling words.” But from a lone little thatched hut on one side of the crowded parade ground came a long-sustained crying sound, a sobbing heart-breaking dirge, rising and falling like a Highland coronach—a keening for the dead. Te Hau-karewa made lamentation for her slain warrior.
Another fighting pa built—Scouting and skirmishing—The watcher on the tower—McDonnell and
On the edge of the great forest, some miles to the south of the
This old-time village was fixed on by the Hauhau war-chief as the site of his new fighting pa, for he abandoned Papa-tihakehake soon after the repulse of the white forces at that strong stockade. With the wariness of the Maori strategist, he avoided a second attack in any one entrenchment, and sooner than risk another, and possibly disastrous, engagement at Papa-tihakehake, he took the trouble to construct an even stronger fortification, a splendid example of native military engineering genius.
In the building of this new pa, mahoe on its outskirts. Two rows of palisades, high and strong, were erected around the position; the posts, solid tree-trunks, were from six to twelve inches thick and ten to fifteen feet high; the rows were four feet apart. The spaces between the larger stockade-posts were filled in with saplings set upright close together, and fastened by cross-rails and supplejack ties; these saplings did not rest in the ground, but hung a few
pa was pitted everywhere with trenches and covered ways, so that in the event of attack the defenders could literally take to the earth like rabbits, and live underground secure from rifle-fire, and even from artillery. The place was a network of trenches with connecting passages, roofed over with timber, raupo, and toetoe reeds and earth. To any assault that could be delivered by the Government forces then available, the fort was practically impregnable.
At one angle of the pa the Hauhau garrison erected a roughly timbered watch-tower, about thirty-five feet in height. This tower, or taumaihi, was a feature of the ancient pas of Maoridom; on its upper platform a sentinel was posted, day and night, to give warning of the approach of the enemy. In front of the pa, outside the palisades, a tall flag-staff was set up, and on this staff the Hauhau war-flags were hoisted. There were two gateways in the rear stockading, giving access to the bush. In one end of the pa near the rear was a small tent occupied by wharé towards the other end, near one of the gateways.
When the stockade was finished the Hauhaus constructed a tekoteko, a great marionette-like figure of a man, cut out of a pukatea-tree. It was so placed that its head stood about fifteen feet above the ground, well above the front stockade, and it had loose-jointed arms, to which flax ropes were fastened, leading down to the trench below. By manipulating these ropes the arms of the wooden warrior were made to move in the actions of the haka, just as if some painted Hauhau were dancing a dance of defiance on the fortress walls.
When the fort was finished the garrison gathered in their food supplies, saw to their arms, and for many weeks waited for the pakeha. Hauhau scouts and small war-parties daily sallied out from the fort, seeking game in the shape of stray pakehas.
One of these savage man-hunters was a
Down he crouched at once, and stealthily stalked
pakeha. Just as the unsuspecting settler came to the paddock gate, the Maori leaped out from behind the fence, with a furious snatch tore the rifle from the man's grasp, and shot him dead with it. He cut off one of the pakeha's legs with his tomahawk, and brought it home as proof of his success on the war-path as proudly as any Indian ever flourished his take of scalps. Up and down the marae of the pa he bounded, exhibiting the captured rifle and severed limb, yelling his warsong, and loudly boasting that he would that night cook the pakeha's leg and eat it all himself.
But the warrior's braggadocio received a sharp check from pa,” he said, “unless he is one of the Tekau-ma-rua, the war-party sent out by me. Take that pakeha leg back again at once and place it alongside the body.” And soon thereafter the disgusted scout, his ardour for “long-pig” so unexpectedly damped by Titoko's code of cannibal etiquette, was to be seen trudging back along the track to the pakeha farm, with sulky visage and reluctant gait, and a white foot and leg—raw—protruding from a flax basket strapped to his shoulders.
By day the scouting parties of the Hauhau “Twelve Apostles” scoured the country; by night
marae or in the big sleeping wharés, and talked and sang and danced the hakas of which they never wearied. Wild night-scenes those on the stockaded marae, with the crowds of blanketed or flax-cloaked men and women, their wild faces illumined by the leaping flames, squatting in great circles round the camp fires, while more than half nude figures leaped and stamped and slapped their limbs and chests with resounding slaps, and expelled the air from their lungs in wolfish “Ooh's!” and “Hau's!” as they trod the assembly ground in all the fury of the wardance. A warrior orator would rise, weapon in hand, and throwing off his blanket for freedom of action, go bounding along the marae in front of the assemblage, shouting short, sharp sentences as he taki'd to and fro, his athletic figure untrammelled except for a waist-shawl or short dangling mat, fire in his movements, and ferocity in every gesture and in every cry—the embodiment of belligerent Maoridom in its savage prime.
Like defiant replying shouts from some hidden foe in the blackness of the forest that rose in a solid wall above the rear stockade came the clear echoes of the roaring haka choruses.
And so the wild night passed, until the camp fires died down, and the tribespeople sought sleep in their packed wharepunis and their rush-strewn burrows; and the melancholy “Kou-kou!” of the
ruru, the bush-owl, was heard, as the bird-sentry of the night hours cried his watchword from the forest or a perch on some tall palisadepost. Yet not all eyes were closed in the pa, for the Hauhaus, grown wise by much hard experience, did not neglect the posting of sentries, and a sentinel watched from the platform in the angle-tower. At intervals he cried his watch-cry, or raised his voice in a night-song that rose and fell in measured cadences like a tangi wail.
The most dreaded hour in Maori warfare was the dark, dank hour just before the dawn, and then it was well to be on the qui vive, for Kepa's dusky forest-rangers and their white comrades the A.C.'s had a truly unpleasant fashion of attacking their enemies at most unholy, shivery times, when man slept soundest. So the watchmen in the tower were enjoined to extra vigilance in the early morning hours. And, as in the olden Maori days, out rang the voice of the high sentinel, chanting his ancient “Whakaara-pa,” his “All's well” song, to Tarioa and Kopu, the first and morning stars.
This is one of the songs he cried, an old watchchant of the
Late one night, as the Hauhaus lay behind their palisades, Colonel pa wall with his escort, and asked for
Titoko, summoned from his tent, went down to the stockade. “I am here!” he shouted.
The white officer cried: “Titoko, I have been trying to discover your atua, the god which guides you in your battles. Now I have found it—I know the source of your mana. When the wind blows hard from the whakarua (the north-east), I know it is the breath of your god, the wind of Uenuku! But your atua is only a tutua—a low fellow!”
Spoke Titoko angrily, and said: “McDonnell, go! Depart at once! If you do not ride away directly, there will be a blazing oven ready for you!”
McDonnell rode away, and the angry chief returned to his tent. Why McDonnell should have paid this daring night visit to the stockade is not
marae heard the dialogue, and Bent says the old fear struck to his heart when he heard
“The oven is gaping open for you!” was their customary threat. Their tribal history abounds, too, in tales of how some obnoxious neighbours or others, Ngati-so-and-so, had been effectively disposed of by the simple process of surrounding their huts while they slept, fastening the doors, and then setting fire to the wharés. The only objection from the Maori point of view to this summary method of obtaining utu was that it “spoiled the meat!”
Colonel McDonnell was so conversant with Maori tikanga—customs, rules of life, and ways of thought—that he was by way of being a tohunga-Maori himself, and his dramatic twitting of mana was within his (McDonnell's) knowledge was a circumstance that hugely annoyed the old war-chief.
It was just as if so much of his mana-tapu had passed to his white foeman—to the rival maker of strong “war-medicine.”
Occasional skirmishes with the white cavalry patrol-parties enlivened the three months' sojourn
Out scouting one day, Bryce took a party of his men boldly up to the front of the stockade on a reconnaissance. The place was unusually quiet, and a white flag was flying on the flag-staff in front of the pa. One of the cavalrymen, Sergeant Maxwell, leaping a ditch and hedge that intervened between the farm lands and the pa, raced right up close to the stockade, and fired at it. Trooper Lingard, also leaping the obstacles, with the rest of the detachment, rode up past the pa. Lingard, though he could see nothing of the Maoris, raised his carbine and fired a shot. The next instant the whole palisade front—just above the ground, where the interstices were left for musketry—was a blaze of fire, and a storm of lead sang over the little troop. The Hauhaus, hidden in their trenches, and preserving complete silence, had waited till the patrol was within murderously close range. Maxwell was mortally wounded; but he sat his horse till it carried him out of range. Several horses were shot, and fell. One trooper,
The whole pa was now in a roar of battle-excitement. The Maoris, as they fired, raised their fearful yells and war-shouts, an infernal din that almost drowned the cracks of the fire-arms. pakeha. Trooper Lingard instantly put his plunging horse at the Hauhau, and cut at him with his sword. Another trooper, pa nearly as quickly as he had come, yelling “I'm shot! I'm shot!” Lingard, leaning over, got Wright by the hand, and, though almost dismounted himself, succeeded in dragging his comrade from under the fallen horse. Then, noticing a white horse—which was usually ridden by one of the Maori scouts—tethered to a tutu-bush a short distance from the palisades, Lingard galloped at it, cut the tether-line with his sword, and soon had Wright mounted again and riding down the hill out of range, with
. . . . .
An incident of Hauhau life at this period, illustrative of the pitilessly savage character of the olden Maori, is told thus by
“While we were living in the pa at Taurangaika, a Hauhau fighting-man named Taketake quarrelled with his sister. She threatened that she would run away to the pakehas, and tell them of the cannibal practices of the rebels. He warned her that if she did he would shoot her. That evening she left the pa, and started for the white soldiers' camp. Taketake loaded his gun and followed her. Overtaking her on the road, he shot her through the back and killed her. He returned to the pa and reported what he had done. A party of men went out and brought back the murdered woman's body, and that was all there was about it. No one interfered with Taketake, or considered what he had done was a crime. All they said was ‘Kaitoa!’ (‘Serve her right’).”
While the pakeha attack was awaited, Bent and his companions spent much of their time in the forest at the rear of the fort, catching eels in the creeks, hunting wild pigs, and gathering wild honey for the garrison food-supplies.
The passage of the Okehu—A night's vigil—Mackenzie the scout—” Maoris in the bush! “—The watchers in the fern—A race for life.
A clear, bright, moonlight night of summer; a moon that silvered the sharp hill-tops of the broken Maori country, but left black mysterious shadows in the gorges and river valleys that every few miles cut deeply into the rolling fern lands; valleys full of danger and death, for in their depths crept the war-parties of the savage, laying ambushes, planning murder and mutilation. On a gently sloping rise on the open fern lands a hundred white tents, the camp of the pakeha troops, glittered in the full moonlight. The sweet bugle-calls of “Lights out” and the “Last post” rang out for miles across the wilderness, and except for the piquets and sentries the camp was soon asleep. But away on the forest edge, a mile from the safely entrenched camp, a little band of men, half a dozen scouts, crouched hiding in the fern, carbines in their hands, watching, listening. They were the eyes of the army. Their
It was the 17th of January, 1869, nearly three months after the repulse of the Colonial troops at the Moturoa stockade. All this time Tekau-ma-rua had everything their own way on the Kupapas, or friendly Maoris, mostly of the Whanganui tribe, under
This country around the Kai-iwi was mostly open fern land, but some of the river gullies were filled with a dense growth of forest. A short distance to the north of the camp there was a deep gorge, the valley of the Okehu stream. Through this gorge a road had been cut some years before, and the river had been bridged, giving access to Nukumaru and the
That afternoon he selected half a dozen of his most active men, some of them Constabulary, some volunteers, and as soon as night fell despatched them to the Okehu, with orders to spend the night on the fern-covered right bank of the gorge, and find out if the Maoris were laying an ambuscade in the bush below. Trooper
It was the calmest of nights, a still night when sounds travelled far, and in silence the little squad of armed scouts set out from the tented camp in single file towards the dark gorge of the Okehu. They marched as silently as Indians, for they were shod exactly like Indians, in moccasins that felt the ground as soundlessly as a wild cat's pad.
The making and wearing of those moccasins was Mackenzie's idea. This veteran soldier was a man who had been brought out from
The moccasins the scouts wore were made by Mackenzie from the skin of a horse. Immediately the party had been organised the old soldier went out with his carbine and shot one of the numerous ownerless horses that roamed the hills. Cutting out suitable pieces of the skin, he fitted them while still warm to his comrades' feet, with the hair
An old Maori war-track wound through the high fern above the Okehu Gorge. Along this the scouts marched to take up their night's vigil. Two were posted at the end of the gorge nearest the camp, two more about two hundred yards away, and the third couple about the same distance farther on, above the middle of the gorge. The men made themselves nests in the fern alongside the track, and close to the edge of the slope that fell to the impenetrable blackness of the bush below. The leader, as he posted the men, told them to keep a sharp watch and listen for any sounds, and to give a signal if any of them heard Maoris in the gorge. The signal was to be the thrice-repeated sharp cry of the weka, the night-roving wingless bird that haunted these forests and gulches.
After posting his comrades in their several positions, young Lingard rejoined his companion Maling in a little nook in the thick fern just on the gorge side of the narrow foot-track, and stayed a while with him conversing in whispers. In half an
“What are you reading?” asked Lingard, as he squatted down quietly in the fern by Mackenzie's side.
“Look and see,” said the soldier, and Lingard saw, and wondered, for not many a rough old soldier like Mackenzie was seen with such a book. And he wondered still more when Mackenzie, closing the book, asked him to look at it again. There was a clean-cut hole in it, right through one of the covers and penetrating many of the leaves.
“That book saved my life,” said the veteran. And he told the story. It was the comrade who had bowled over the Indian who was about to scalp him that gave Mackenzie the little Bible. “‘You say you will always be grateful to me for saving your life,’ he said. ‘Well, I want you to do just one thing for me; it's a little thing. I won't ask much.’
“He was so insistent,” said Mackenzie, “that I gave him the promise he asked. ‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘just take this little book of mine and read something in it every night; or, if you won't read it, take it out and look at it and open it. And always carry it with you. It will save your life.’
“I did so, and I read it, more to please my old
Then Mackenzie put his hand on his fellow-scout's arm, and spoke in an earnest whisper of a presentiment that filled his mind.
“I feel,” he said, looking straight into his friend's
“Nonsense! “said young Lingard, beginning to feel creepy. “Don't talk like that, old man; you'll unnerve me. You're not going to die.”
“Why should I unnerve you, my boy?” asked Mackenzie very quietly and gently. “There's nothing to be afraid of in dying. I can face death with perfect calmness; and I know I'm to die very soon.”
There was silence for some moments. Suddenly Mackenzie started, turned in a listening attitude, and put up a hand in warning.
“Don't you hear them?” he whispered. “Don't you hear them? There are Maoris moving in the bush below. I heard the pat of a naked foot just now and the breaking of a twig.”
The young leader of the scouts listened with utmost intentness for the next few minutes. The two comrades could hear each other's hearts thumping, so still they crouched. But not another sound came except the occasional call of the melancholy morepork.
After a little while Lingard bade Mackenzie good-bye for the time, and, with his carbine at the “ready,” crept back along the track and visited the other men. Joining Maling, he told him of his strange conversation with Mackenzie.
“He's a real good fellow,” said Maling, “a good
In half an hour's time Lingard went the rounds again, stopping every now and then to listen for sounds of the enemy. He found Mackenzie still reading, bare-headed, by the clear moonlight in his little nook in the fern. Mackenzie's mate was sound asleep.
The old soldier's senses were wonderfully acute. Quietly as Lingard stole up on his moccasined feet, he had heard him. He was listening while he read.
“Lingard,” he said, “I've been reading for the last time. I know it's my last night of life. Today I was so sure of this that I settled my account at the canteen, and paid my last instalment on a horse I bought from
“Lingard,” he went on again, in a whisper, “there are Maoris about! Can't you smell them? They're in the bush below, waiting. But you'll stay, I suppose, till daylight, unless something happens before then.”
In a few minutes Lingard, after vainly listening for sounds in the bush, cautiously rose and walked back along the track. He left Mackenzie sitting there, with the moonlight streaming down on his earnest face, still reading his little book. Returning
Then, all at once, they heard a fearful sound. A rifle shot, followed instantly by a terrific yell, the war-yell of the Maoris from the bush behind them. The bush flashed fire, the flashes of many guns, accompanied by reverberating bangs; then the pattering and thudding of many naked feet along the track.
The ambuscade had been unmasked. One of the scouts—so it was learned afterwards—had cautiously worked his way down the valley, far enough down to see that the bridge over the Okehu had been set on fire, and by its light he saw a large party of armed Hauhaus. He hurried back to give his comrades warning, but before he could reach them some of the prowling natives discovered Mackenzie and Williamson and fired on them, wounding Williamson in the back when he started to run.
The scouts had done their work, but would they ever reach the camp alive?
The whole of the war-party were on the white men's heels, racing through the fern and along the narrow track and firing as they ran. The moon had gone down, and it was too dim to see very far, but the dawn was spreading over the eastern sky.
“They're on us!—they're on us!” exclaimed
The scouts were crouching in the fern within a yard or so of the Maori track. The fern was very high here, over a tall man's head in height, and was very thick and matted, and lying in a slanting direction. The two men, knowing that it was certain death to venture out, for the Maoris were rushing along the track in force, crept underneath the thick masses of ferns, and pushed it up over them so that they had room to move and were perfectly screened from the enemy's eyes in that early morning light. They made ready their Terry carbines, bit their cartridges ready for reloading, and put their percussion-caps in their mouths for instant use. Just before they did so, Maling turned to his companion and said:
“Lingard, old man, promise me if it comes to the worst you won't leave me, and I'll do the same by you. Don't let us leave each other,” and he put out his hand.
The young leader of the scouts gripped Maling's hand. “We'll stick by each other,” he said.
The next moment there was a thundering rush of feet past the very muzzles of their carbines. A mob of Hauhaus, yelling and shouting, raced past them, following up the leaders who had been fired on by the scout, and who had come dashing after the white men.
The two hidden scouts could hear nothing of their comrades, but they well knew the odds were greatly against any of them reaching the camp.
Presently they heard firing from the direction of the camp. The troops had turned out on hearing the shots at the bush edge, and were covering the retreat of the scouts.
Then another thing happened. Maling and his companion heard and felt something now and then swishing and cutting through the fern just above their heads. They were under the fire of their own comrades.
“Maling,” said Lingard, “this is getting too warm! It's not good enough to stay here and be shot by our own men. Let's make a run for it.”
Creeping out from their place of concealment, and giving a quick look backwards to make sure that no more Hauhaus were coming, the two scouts ran along the track in the direction of the camp. Close by on their left they could hear the enemy yelling and firing.
Just as they turned a bend in the path they came upon a terrible sight. Mackenzie lay on the ground, face downwards; his head smashed in and his brains spattering the ground. His carbine and ammunition and Afghan sheath-dagger were gone.
This they saw at one horrified glance, then they dashed on, taking a short cut across the fern to the
The two scouts reached camp safely, and Lingard immediately reported the result of the night's work to the colonel. All the others excepting poor Mackenzie turned up. One of them had fallen shot, wounded in the back, close to the camp, but was rescued by the surgeon, Dr. Walker, who pluckily ran out and carried him in.
Mackenzie, one of the survivors said, was running well, and would have escaped, but he suddenly fell prone on his face without any apparent cause. A Hauhau came running along next moment, and, putting his gun close to Mackenzie's head, blew his brains out.
Then came another strange development of the morning's adventure. Surgeon Walker, on examining Mackenzie's body, said he believed the scout had died suddenly of heart disease, and that he was quite dead before even the Hauhau shot him.
The brave old Gurkha soldier's presentiment of speedy death was only too true a foreword from the Unknown.
It was fortunate that this Hauhau ambuscade had been unmasked. The camp was already astir, and the troops were having their early morning coffee, and in another half-hour would have begun the march by the Okehu Gorge route, when the first
After this little morning skirmish the Hauhaus, numbering probably a hundred and fifty, quickly retired through the bush to the Tauranga-ika pa, taking with them as trophies the dead soldier's arms. The white troops were soon on the move. Four divisions of Armed Constabulary, the Volunteer Cavalry, and the Kupapa Maoris marched through the Gorge unmolested, and took up a position near the great Hauhau pa, which Whitmore now prepared to storm. First he tried artillery in an endeavour to breach the stockade, and
Shot and shell—The fort abandoned—Flight of the Hauhaus—The chase—The fight at Karaka Flat—Mutilation of the dead —The ambuscade at the peach-grove—The sergeant's leg— Rewards for Hauhau heads.
Skirmishing up over the fern slopes of Taurangaika came Whitmore's Armed Constabulary and Kepa's kilted guerillas from the pa front. At the same time Armstrong guns were brought up and posted on the left front of the stockade, and shellfire was opened on the rebel position at a range of five hundred yards.
But most of the Hauhaus were safe in their trenches and their covered ways, and the shells and bullets passed harmlessly over them. A few of the young bloodsdanced and yelled defiance from above-ground. On the stockade was the Hauhau tekoteko, the dummy figure which they worked in pakeha fire, but it had hardly deceived the veteran A.C.'s and Kepa's Kupapas, versed in all Hauhau ways that were dark and tricks that were vain. Bent was underground, listening to the bang of the Armstrongs and the whistle of the shells, and now and again squinting through the palisades at his adversaries.
One Maori, who was standing in an angle of the pa, was wounded in the head by a splinter knocked off one of the palisade-posts by a shot from an Armstrong gun. The same shell, whizzing through the pa, ripped a hole in
When night fell, no appreciable breach had been made by the shell-fire. It was now decided to storm the pa at daybreak. Some of the A.C.'s crept up with their entrenching tools to within fifty yards of the stockade, and dug out sheltertrenches.
The fort was remarkably quiet during the night. It was reconnoitred when daybreak came, and found—empty. The Hauhaus had for some mysterious reason deserted it under cover of darkness, and taken to the bush. So fell to the pakeha the very strong Tauranga-ika pa.
Bent explains this unexpected abandonment of
The eternal feminine was at the bottom of it all.
The chief of blood and fire, with all his manatapu, was vulnerable to the artillery of a dark wahiné's eyes and soft wahiné blandishments. He was detected in a liaison with another man's wife. This misdemeanour was, in Maori eyes, fatal to his prestige as an ariki and a war-leader. He had trampled on his tapu, and his Hauhau angel, who had so long successfully guided his fortunes, now deserted him. His run of luck had turned.
A council of the people was held to discuss the cause célèbre, and many an angry speech was made. Some of the chiefs went so far as to threaten pa—it would be disastrous to make a stand there after their tohunga, their spiritual head and their war-leader, had lost his mana-tapu. This met with general approval, and on the night of the attack the people packed their few belongings on their backs and struck quietly into the forest for the tapu by means of incantations and ceremonies performed by another tohunga. But by that time the war was over.”
So to the forest fled pa was found deserted, came the A.C. scouts and Kepa's Maoris, in lightest marching order for the chase.
The Government troops overtook the Hauhau rear-guard at Te Karaka flat, on the descent to the Kupapas and their white comrades fought the Hauhaus till dark, and had to leave them dead and wounded on the field. Next morning they found the mutilated bodies minus hearts and livers, which the cannibal enemy had cut cut and taken away. The Hauhaus had also beheaded one of the slain, a Whanganui soldier named
The grief of the friendly Maoris at this mutilation of their dead was intense, and was given vent to in weeping and furious threats. Kepa was
This feeling was intensified a few days later, when a strong force of Hauhaus ambuscaded and slaughtered seven out of a party of ten white Constabulary men at the Papatupu peach-grove on the banks of the pakeha game. They at once seized their arms and rushed for their canoe, pursued by two or three score of Maoris, led by Big Kereopa. The rest of the story was told the author lately by
“I was one of the Hauhaus who ambushed the Constabulary men, under Sergeant Menzies, at the peach-grove at Papatupu. Some of them had got into their canoe, and would have escaped, but the others held on to it in an attempt to board it, and so we caught and killed seven of them. The
manuka wood. I snatched up a paddle from the canoe and struck him a slanting blow on the side of the temple with it, the fatal blow called tipi, as delivered in sideways fashion with the edge of a stone mere. The white sergeant fell, and a Maori named Toawairere slashed off one of his legs with a tomahawk. This was done for the sake of getting the boot on the pakeha's foot for one of our men, a one-legged fellow named Paramena, who wanted the boot. The leg was taken away into the bush.”
Next day Colonel Whitmore sent the Kereopa, in the days before the war, had been a pupil at the Kai-iwi mission school.Kupapas— the Maoris of No. pakeha.
It was now that Colonel Whitmore agreed to a request made by Kepa and offered rewards for
Fugitive Hauhaus—Hard times in the bush—The eaters of mamaku—Bent's adventure—Lost in the woods—Rupé to the rescue—The tapu'd eels.
“ The After we deserted Tauranga-ika,” says my old pakeha-Maori, “we led a miserably rough life in the bush. We were as near starvation sometimes as we could well be. Kepa's Kupapas and the white scouts were hunting for us, stalking us like wild beasts, and we were hiding in the forest and living on what we could pick up. We scattered in parties. I and some of the Hauhaus selected a safe spot in the deep bush, built wharés to shelter ourselves, and then went out to the edge of the forest digging up fern-root for food. We scoured the bush for the mamaku fern-tree,mamaku ferntree for the sake of the edible pith. The natives point out one of the olden mamaku grounds just to the north of Keteonetea (near the present township of mamaku forest. The Maoris used to cut off the upper parts of the trees and plant them in the ground, thus making two mamaku grow where only one grew before. The old tree so decapitated always sent out a new head.whara-whara and similar mosses, and the mushroom-like haroré that grew on the tawa-trees, and hakeke, or wood-fungus. We became very weak and feeble for want of food. We did not dare to light a fire in the daytime, for fear the smoke rising above the forest trees would betray us. At night we would kindle a small fire, just enough to keep the pipes going as we sat round and smoked and talked in low voices.”
pakeha matches found its way through supposedly “friendly” Maori hands into the rebel camps.
For three or four weeks the Hauhaus concealed themselves in the forests between the
Not only was Bent in daily and nightly danger of death at the hands of his enemies, the Government men, during this period of hiding and starving in the bush, but in one of his adventures he narrowly escaped the tomahawks of his own companions, the Hauhaus.
Bent and a party of about twenty Maoris set out one day from their camp at Oteka, away inland of the Weraroa, on a food-hunting expedition into the great trackless forests in the rear of their hiding-place. They travelled half a day's journey into the rugged bush-country, a lone region where no booted foot had ever trod. They fished for eels in the creeks, and climbed for wild honey wherever they saw the bees buzzing round their hives in the hollow trees. They carried with them taha (calabashes made from the hué, or vegetable gourd); these they filled with the honey. When they had collected as much as they could carry, they started on their return tramp to the kainga. Bent's pikau, or backload, consisted of about thirty pounds weight of honey in taha and two large eels, all in a flax basket.
When the party left their camping-place the white man went on ahead, and was soon out of sight of his companions. After a while he found that he had missed the route by which he had come the previous day.
He pushed on and on, hoping every moment to
He was lost in the forest.
Night came on while the lonely white man was still toiling bewildered through the dense woods. He spent the hours of darkness crouched up under a tree, sleeping little, and shivering with the cold, for he was thinly clothed and had no blanket, and no matches or flint and steel with which to light a fire for warmth and cooking.
Early next morning Bent climbed a tall rata-tree near his bivouac and scanned the wild country round. Nothing but forest, forest everywhere— vast waves of deep verdure sweeping away and away as far as the eye could see. No sign of human life—no guiding landmark. Somewhere beneath that impenetrable pall of green that clothed everything were his people. But where?
Ah! What is that blue, thin coil rising slowly out of the forest far ahead, westward?
A curl of smoke! A Hauhau camp; perhaps some hunting-party cooking their morning meal.
The white man joyfully descended from his treeperch, and quickly getting into his pikau straps again, set out at as fast a pace as his load
He toiled on and on, breaking through jungles of undergrowth and clinging vines, over logs and through watercourses, until suddenly he found himself at the foot of a rocky wall which rose perpendicularly above him for about thirty feet.
He endeavoured to clamber up the precipice, assisting himself by the forest roots and creepers which hung in trailing coils down its face, but they gave way under his weight when he had ascended but a few feet, and he found himself at the base of the cliff again, debating whether to try the climb again, or make a long detour, and perhaps lose the run of the point for which he was heading.
Suddenly, high above him, a voice cried, “Who's there?”
The startled white man, peering through the tangle of foliage and creepers, saw a man standing on the cliff-top—a Maori girt with a flax mat, a gun in his hand. It was Rupé, his chief and owner.
The Maori was gazing intently down the cliff. With him was a woman, the old chief's daughter Rihi, who was Bent's wife. He had heard the noise made by Bent in his attempt to scale the cliff, and he noticed the shaking of the bush-vines and leaves that screened the lower part of the wall, but the white man was so far hidden from his vision.
Bent called to him: “Don't fire, Rupé! It is I, your pakeha—Tu-nui-a-moa!”
“E tama!” cried the old chief. “I am glad indeed! I came out searching for you, for your life is in great danger.”
The pakeha, changing his position so that Rupé could see him, explained his predicament.
“Remain where you are,” said Rupé, “and I will lower a rope to you.”
In a few minutes a line, made of split leaves of the harakeke flax, knotted together, and strengthened with aka, or bush-vines, was thrown down the cliff to Bent. The upper end of the hastily made bush rope the old man had made fast to a tree on the cliff-top.
“Send your pikau up first, and you can follow,” ordered Rupé.
Bent tied his flax basket of eels and honey to the line. Rupé hauled it up, lowered the line again, and Bent tied it round his body below the arms. Then the chief and his stalwart daughter hauled the light-weight pakeha safely to the summit of the wall.
Rihi and her father both wept as they took Bent's hands, so great was their relief at finding their pakeha safe and sound. Rupé told the white man that he had feared he was dead.
“Why?” asked Bent.
“Why? There are a score of armed Hauhaus
The old chief explained, further, that when Bent did not return to the bush-village the previous night, his fellow-eelers had come to the conclusion that he had given them the slip on the journey home, and had made off to the white men's camp. So at daylight a party set out to scour the forest round the kainga, fully intending, if they found the deserter in hiding, to summarily execute him. Old Rupé, too, had taken to the forest with his daughter—before daylight—but for a different reason: he did not believe his pakeha would desert him, and as he concluded Bent had lost himself in the bush, he had kindled a fire on the most prominent hill-side in the forest, in the hope that the wanderer would see it and make his way towards it. His bushcraft was successful, and no doubt it saved Bent's life, for had he gone wandering on he would most probably have run into the arms of his hunters.
So the three of them—the rangatira and his “tame white man” and the Maori girl—travelled homeward as quickly and as quietly as they could, seldom speaking to one another for fear some prowling Hauhau should hear them. “Even now, if they find you out in the forest,” said Rupé, “I may not be able to save you. Be cautious, for this may be your last day!”
Late in the afternoon the camp of the fugitive rebels was reached, and Bent was safe.
“E tu!” said he; “it was fortunate indeed that Rupé met you in the forest. Had any of the others found you—my young men of the Tekau-ma-rua—then you had been a dead man!”
Now came an illustration of that many-sided law, the tapu. atua, the heathen gods. They were under the ban because they had been borne on the white man's back, which was temporarily tapu; therefore they could not be eaten.
The honey, however, was not wasted. whakanoa'd the honey, that is, he repeated karakia, or incantations, over it, by which the maleficent powers of the tapu were nullified or averted and the food made fit for consumption.
The surprise of Otautu—An early morning attack—Kia tupato!”—A gallant defence—Brave old Hakopa—Flight of the Hauhaus.
A misty morning in the forest. A little Maori hamlet, just a collection of thatched huts, in a small clearing enclosed on all sides by the dense woods. In the rear a deep ravine, jungly with thick undergrowth, then the winding snag-strewn kainga; the fugitive Hauhaus trusted to the tangled forest as their best defence.
Grey dawn. The raw morning fog hung low on the sleeping village—a mist so thick that it shrouded from the view objects even a few yards distant. It lay like the winding bank of smoky mist that marks the course of a forest stream early on a
Not a sound from the slumbering kainga, where some three or four hundred Hauhaus—nikau-roofed huts.
At the edge of the clearing a solitary Maori sentry, a man armed with a revolver, sat, keeping a semi-somnolent guard.
Suddenly, out of the dark forest, appeared a body of armed men. They came in Indian file; they broke into a stealthy run as they left the shadow of the trees; their bodies were bent eagerly forward; they carried their rifles at the trail; they uttered not a sound.
They were the Maori advance-guard of Colonel Whitmore's expeditionary force of four hundred A.C.'s and Kupapas. After weeks of bush-scouting a Government column had at last happened on the Hauhau hiding-place.
The Maori sentinel—he was a man of the Puketapu tribe named Te Wareo—was all in an instant wideawake. The moment he jumped up he was fired on by the advance-guard. Leaping into cover he raced for the village, firing his revolver as he ran.
The discharge of the rifles rolled crashing through the forest. Startled kaka parrots flew from their tree-perches, screaming discordantly at their rude awakening. The clear notes of a bugle rang out
At the first crack of the firearms the kainga was awake; and what a scurry there was! The Maoris poured out of their wharés just as they leaped from their sleeping-mats—some wearing only a shawl or ragged mat; others entirely naked. Some of the women rushed out of their huts without a shred of clothing on, screaming and shouting, and running for their lives. The men snatched up their guns and tomahawks, and their cartouche-belts; and quickly took post to defend their position, and give time for their women and children to retreat in safety.
According to
“The day before this attack,” says Bent, “I had a strange dream, which tiheré. I described this vision to the Hauhau seer. He gathered the people in the meeting-house that night, and after speaking of the dream I had had,
“Kia tupato! He po kino te po; he ra kino te ra!” (“Be on your guard! This is a night of evil and danger, and the morrow also will be a day of evil!”)
“The prophet then said to me: ‘Be ready for flight in the morning! Get your belongings ready packed in your kit, and, if you hear a suspicious sound, fly from the pa at once.’
“So, when the first shots were heard in the early morning, I was ready to make a bolt for it. The moment the alarm was given I jumped up from my sleeping-place in one of the huts, grabbed my kit, and barefooted and with nothing on but my shirt and an old piece of a tent-fly girt round my middle, I ran to the bank at our rear, and jumped down the cliff. I went tumbling and scrambling down to the river, and then travelled up along the banks for a considerable distance as fast as I could go. All I had saved from Otautu was what I had in my kit—some papers, a little money, needles and thread, and so forth. As I ran up along the river banks I fell in with some of our people. We went on until we found a canoe tied up on the bank, and we crossed the
While the unarmed people of the camp were rata-trees and delivered their fire; some extended in bush-skirmishing order on either flank; and both sides— pakeha and Maori—peppered away briskly at each other for half an hour or more.
It was a singular skirmish, for the dense fog still shrouded the hill-top; and the Government men, who were being punished severely by the Hauhau fire, could for a long time see nothing of their enemies. Many A.C.'s dropped, some shot dead.
The Government Maoris, the Kupapas, under the celebrated Kepa, advancing from tree to tree round the edge of the clearing, came to close quarters with the Hauhaus. One of
He was the old man toa—the hero of the war-trail, the brave. He was a curious figure, in his military cap, tunic, and trousers—stripped from a dead Constabulary man after the fight at Papatihakehake.
Hakopa dodged from tree to tree out on the flanks of the clearing, making good use of a recently captured carbine. In the uncertain light it was difficult for the Government men to tell friend from foe, and Hakopa's pakeha uniform seems to have completely deceived some of the Kupapas. As he leaped from tree to tree and stump to stump, he shouted “Raunatia! Raunatia!” (“Surround it!”) to induce the belief that he was one of the Government force.
At last all Hakopa's cartridges but two were gone. A prudent warrior would have retired at this stage—but not Hakopa. He did not like the idea of retreat while he had a shot in his locker, and he determined to bag something in the way of a Kupapa or a pakeha with his last charges. He waited until the leading men of Kepa's party were within close “potting” distance, and, as one of them unsuspectingly approached him, he quickly threw up his gun and put a bullet into his enemy, then turned and bounded into cover, and rejoined his comrades in the defile, unhurt, hugely delighted with his exploit.
“You young men waste your cartridges,” he said reprovingly, after the fight, to some of the youthful braves of
It was a determined, plucky stand, that defence of the Otautu clearing by
At last the fog lifted, swept away from the clearing by the morning breeze, and the sun shone out.
Now for the first time the Government soldiers saw the village. The bugle sounded the “Advance” again, and at the double the A.C.'s swarmed into the empty kainga, to find, to their astonishment, that it was neither rifle-pitted nor parapeted.
The Hauhaus, their resistance broken, took to the forest, racing down the steep gully in rear of the village and up along the banks of the
The skirmish at Whakamara—Hauhaus on the run—Government head-hunters—Major Kemp's white scout—Sharp work in the bush—Barbarism of the Whanganui—Kupapas—Smoke-drying the heads—A present for Whitmore—The heads on the tent floor—End of the war.
The deep and roadless forest was now the scene of sharp, barbaric war. The Hauhaus, after the abandonment of Tauranga-ika, built no stockades, but trusted to their most ancient of refuges, the nehenche-nui, the great woody wilderness. From one hiding-place to another they fled, with the Government bush-fighters on their heels.
“After our surprise and defeat at Otautu,” to continue
“But early one morning the soldiers were on us again. Two of our men, young Tutangé and the warrior Kātené Tu-Whakaruru, who were out scouting on horseback, discovered the troops lying in ambush just outside, waiting to attack the village. They turned and galloped back to us, Tutangé waving his sword and whacking his horse along with the flat of the blade.
“So off we went again, running for our lives, with Whitmore's troops close behind us, firing as they ran.
From Whakamara village the Maoris fell back on a little fortified pa in the rear of the camp. This position they abandoned after a brief skirmish, and then the forest chase began. Whitmore ordered an immediate pursuit, and a flying column of sixty white Armed Constabulary, under Captains Northcroft and Watt, and about one hundred and forty Maori Kupapas, under Major Kepa and Captain
The advance-guard of the pursuing force numbered twenty-five Maoris, about equally divided between the Whanganui and Arawa tribes. Captain Porter was the only European officer with them, but one or two white scouts and bushmen accompanied the Maoris. As the column's march was necessarily in single file through thick and tangled bush, it was difficult to bring a large number of men into action when any skirmish or ambuscade occurred, and the consequence was that practically all the fighting was done by the advance-guard.
It was a picturesquely savage chapter of the war, that chase of
Between the moccasined hero of the war-trail in Fenimore Cooper's and Captain Mayne Reid's romances of Red Indian days, and Kepa's Maori guerilla and some of his white comrades, there was, after all, only this difference: one took the trail hunting for scalps, the other for heads!
As mentioned in a previous chapter, Colonel Whitmore had agreed to a request made by Major Kepa after the fighting on the Kupapa
pakeha by reason of their deadly animosity to the mana of the Government was just the work that delighted them. They were “stripped to a gantlin'” for the bush chase—simply a waistmat or shawl and cartridge-belts and a pouch for their percussion-caps. And some of the white bushmen-scouts were just as eager on the head-hunting trail, and added to their service arms a tomahawk.
With the Whanganui men marched a European scout and bushman about whom some remarkable stories are told. This was pakeha-Maori, a big, powerful fellow who surpassed the Maoris themselves in bushcraft and endurance. He marched barefooted, like his Maori comrades. Another of the white scouts and Hauhau-hunters was a man who, in after years, became celebrated for his pioneer exploration work in the vast wilderness of Milford Sound, an old John-o'-Groat's sailor and soldier named Donald Sutherland, whose name has been given to the immense waterfall that is one of New Zealand's natural wonders.
It was a wild, picturesquely unkempt column, that little armed force of pakehas and Maoris, as it filed off under its active and daring young officers
Through the huge and tangled woods they scrambled—hunters and hunted. Now along some narrow trail, hardly discernible to the untrained eye; now crawling through networks of supplejacks and brambly shrubs and great snaky lianes that looped tree to tree in bewildering coiled intricacies. Down into steep and narrow watercourses, swinging down one after another by the hanging vines and tough tree-creepers; up rocky gorges and jungle-clad cliffs. For endless miles upon miles the great solemn woods covered the face of the rugged land; beneath the shadows of the thick, dark foliage loped the blood-avengers.
In the afternoon of the first day of the chase the column descended into a deep, thickly wooded gorge. Suddenly from both sides a fire was opened upon the centre of the force, the main body of the A.C.'s. “Clear the bush!” was the order. The
Three Hauhaus were shot and decapitated on the first day of the chase. Every man killed, in fact, on this and the succeeding days of the pursuit had his head cut off.
The first Maori decapitated was a young chief, who was shot while in the act of climbing a steep cliff in the bush. Being a rangatira, his was a £10 head. This man was a prominent Hauhau named Matangi-o-Rupé. He belonged to hapu, pakeha camp. Matangi's son, Kuku—now living at the village of Taiporohenui—on learning of his father's fate, swore to have utu—revenge—and vowed to Bent that if he ever encountered the man who beheaded his parent, he would “slice him to pieces like a piece of beef.”
Some years after the war, Bent, while on a visit to a Maori settlement at Oroua, in the Manawatu district, met this pakeha, by way of imparting an interesting bit of news, informed the old warrior of Kuku's threat,
lex talionis were over. That utu account has not been squared; but only because of the inconveniently peaceful rule of the pakeha. Kuku has by no means forgotten or forgiven the man who sold his father's head to the white man.
Later on in the bush chase the advance-guard, hurrying along at the double, came upon a Hauhau family—a grey-haired, middle-aged man, his wife, and two or three children. They had not been able to travel so fast as their friends, on account of the tired children, and so had been left behind. The old warrior was fired on by one of the Arawa Maoris, and was severely wounded. He fell, but struggled to a squatting position, with his empty gun across his knees. The Arawa rushed at him, with tomahawk raised, to finish him off. The old Hauhau sprang up with a great effort, gripping his tomahawk. He was too badly wounded, however, to strike a blow, and the Arawa seized him and his tomahawk. Just at that moment a white man, dressed like a Maori in a waist-shawl, and barefooted, rushed up, tomahawk in hand. He seized the Hauhau by the hair, and, with a couple of furious strokes, chopped off his Head, and dropped it, all bloody as it was, into the flax kit he carried slung at his back, and in which there were already other heads.
The Arawa by no means liked being done out
wahiné and her children, and their heads would have come off also had not Captain Porter, fortunately for them, just come up. The poor, terrified woman clung to his knees, beseeching him to save her and her children. He told them they would be safe, and ordered the white scout forward. The Arawas took charge of the widow and her children, and she was sent to
The Whanganui Kupapas were fully as savage as any wild rebel. No quarter was given to any Hauhau warrior, and no Hauhau thought of asking for any mercy. Of one frightful scene Porter was an eye-witness. After killing and beheading two or three men in a little valley in the forest, the Whanganui Maoris tied flax ropes to their ankles and hung them up to the branches of the trees, eviscerated them and thrust sticks into them to keep them open, just like animals in a slaughteryard. Then they danced round the bodies like fiends, flourishing the tattooed heads of the dead by their long hair and shouting and yelling warsongs, and making the hideous grimaces of the
pukana. They were quite beyond control, mad with the lust of killing.
Porter at last managed to put a stop to this mutilation, but he was powerless to prevent the head-taking, except so far as his own men were concerned. He did not allow any Arawas to decapitate an enemy, much as some of the warriors from the Hot Lakes Country would have liked to. He asked the Whanganui natives to bury the heads, and, if necessary, take only the ears with them if they wished to claim Whitmore's reward. But the warriors answered, “No, Witimoa said ‘heads,’ and if he doesn't get the heads he may not pay us.”
The pursuit of the Hauhaus continued for several days, until
The night before the divisions of the pursuing column separated, Major Kepa ordered one of his tohungas, a wild-looking, tattooed old warrior, learned in all the savage arts of Maoridom, to whakapakoko nga upoko that is, to dry or preserve
The old medicine-man went into the bush and returned with armfuls of branches of the mahoe-tree, and made a fire, which he kept burning until all the wood was reduced to glowing embers. The earth was heaped up around this fire, and the head, neck downwards, was placed over it, and all openings at the sides were closed, so that the fumes from the charcoal oven would pass up into the head. The brains had previously been removed and the eyes stuffed up. As the smoking went on, the old man smoothed down the skin of the face with his hands to prevent it wrinkling and wiped off the moisture, until the head was thoroughly smokedried and quite mummified. For several hours the head-smoking went on, and in the morning the trophies of the chase were packed for the final march.
Half-starved, ragged and weary, the Constabulary and their Maori allies at last reached the open country; from the top of the range of wooded hills they had seen the white tents of Colonel Whitmore's
Captain Porter went to Colonel Whitmore's quarters as soon as he arrived, and reported the result of his expedition. While he was giving the commanding officer an account of the forest chase, the Whanganui men who had taken the Hauhau heads came up in a body and opened the tent door, and poured in head after head upon the ground, exclaiming as they did so, “Na, Witimoa, to upoko!” (“There, Whitmore, your heads!”)
The little colonel was thunderstruck. He stared with consternation in his eyes on the ghastly heads, most of them tattooed, with grinning teeth and long blood-stained hair, strewn about the floor where they had rolled. There were eleven of them, some at the colonel's feet, some beneath the table; some had rolled under the camp bedstead.
He had forgotten all about his promise of a reward for heads. Anyhow, he now told the Maoris, he did not mean that the heads should actually be brought in to him in camp, but that a reward would be paid for each Hauhau killed in the pursuit. But he kept his word to Kepa, and each head was paid for.
The white scouts, too, brought in their kits of
“No more heads,” was the colonel's order. He realised that this barbarous fashion of squaring affairs with the enemy would arouse a howl of condemnation from those who did not understand the sharp and savage necessities of frontier-fighting.
These facts may not please the mild or gentle variety of reader. The idea of a ngaki maté, that is, to seek vengeance, payment, for their dead—blood for blood.
But while it was barbarous, it was thoroughly in accord with the spirit of guerilla warfare that was forced upon the troops, and it served its purpose, for it struck terror into the hearts of
. . . . .
The Hauhau war-chief's mana-tapu was gone, and there was nothing for it but to fly to the depths of the wilderness. He and his men gathered in a few days at Rimatoto, but made a very short stay there. They marched through the forest to the island-fastness in the Ngaere swamp, where they were very nearly caught by Whitmore and his Constabulary, who made a rough tête-de-pont over the quaking morass with hurdles of supplejack and bush-vines. Then they made off for the
“A party of forty or fifty of us,” says Bent, “remained in our little settlement at Rimatoto, always on the alert against surprise by the troops, until the anxiety of our position became too much for us. We packed up our belongings, and swagged them inland to Rukumoana, on the
In this remote valley of refuge, far in the forest, the white runaway and his Hauhau companions—he was still with his chief Rupé—remained for many weeks, living the loneliest life conceivable, hearing
mana in the dust.
The flight from Rukumoana—Retreat to the pa—Life in the Taniwha.
One day two Hauhaus, exhausted and half-starved, entered the little bush-camp at Rukumoana. One of them was Bent's old rangatira, Tito te Hanataua. They had passed through many perils and hairbreadth escapes, and they warned the white man and his Maori comrades that
The old feeling of terror came over Bent and his companions at the mention of Kepa's name. That night Hauhau piquets kept watch on the edge of the clearing, and more than once they imagined they heard stealthy footfalls, the breaking of branches, and the whispers of enemies in the woods. These dangers, however, were things of the imagination. Nevertheless, it was an anxious night in the lonely kainga, and when morning came the people
In a very short time the men and women of the settlement were on the march, laden with their flax pikaus, containing such belongings as they thought worth removing. They took to the forest in a due northerly direction; bound for that Alsatia of rebels and Hauhaus, the remote and rugged
The utmost caution was observed on the march. No fires were lighted. So that there should be no clue to the direction of the flight, care was taken to leave no broken branches or other bushmen's signs; not a leaf was turned or a twig displaced if the refugees could help it until they were well into the ranges. Wherever possible they took to the creek-beds and walked in the running water, so that no trail should betray them. They could have spared themselves that anxiety and trouble, however, for the Government troops had at last abandoned the chase.
Two days Bent and his friends spent on that terrible trail—the roughest, wildest part of the
On the cliff-top where they left the forest there was a little Maori camp. Here the fugitives were ordered to the main Hauhau camp, the Kawau pa, where
The Kawau pa stood in an admirable position for defence, in a great bend of the raupo and nikau thatched houses; between the village and the forest were the cultivations of potatoes, kumara, and taro. On the opposite side of the river, in the direction of the Taramouku Range, wild horses and cattle abounded in the bush. A short distance below the village there was a large pa-tuna, or eel-weir, consisting of two rows of stout manuka stakes set closely together and sunk into the V, at the lower end of which hinaki, or eel-baskets, were set for the purpose of catching the piharau, or lamprey, which abounded in the
As Rupé and his pakeha Bent and their companions marched slowly into the marae of the warchief's camp, their eyes on the ground, they were welcomed with the ancient ceremony of the powhiri. The village women and girls waved green branches and shawls as they retired before them, singing all together the famous old greeting song, “Toia Mai te Waka!” (“Oh, haul up the canoe!”) likening the guests to a canoe-party of visitors arriving from a distant shore.
Then as the women fell back the whole force of Titoko's warriors leaped to their feet, and swinging their firearms this way and that, threw themselves with martial fury into all the thrilling action of the war-dance. The ground shook under the mighty tread of many scores of brown feet, and the forest rang with the chorus of the war-song and the reverberating volleys of many guns. And then, when the dance was ended, the hongi of long-severed friends, the pressing of nose to nose, and the pitiful weeping for the dead. For quite two hours the great tangi lasted. When it ceased one of the headmen of the river-tribes sent the new arrivals to his own camp, close by the Kawau; the village women
tuku-kai song, bearing their baskets of food, steaming hot from the hangi, and the half-starved white man and his friends were soon enjoying a bountiful feast after their long-enforced existence upon the meagre rations of the bush.
. . . . .
hakas; he wore as little clothing as any native in the camp.
Life did not go too easily with the white man during those days on the
Rupé one day ordered his white man to go down to a creek, which ran into the pa, and clear out the little dam in which the household were accustomed to steep their Indian corn, their kaanga-pirau. Bent was working away cleaning out the steeping-pool when his chief came
pa, got out his gun, and loaded it to shoot me. But his wife rushed at him, took the gun out of his hands, and told me to hurry down to the other village, where I would be safe. So I ran to the river-bank, loosed a small canoe, and paddled down the river to the lower pa, where I was kindly received and taken into my old friend Hakopa's house, and I lived and worked there for some months.”
Another incident of those wild old days on the
The war had long been over, and some hapus of the tribes on the upper river talked of selling their lands to the whites. Certain of the chiefs had been down at pakeha; and the difference of opinion led to frequent quarrels.
One day a council of the people was held on the marae of the Paihau village for the purpose of discussing the land-selling proposals. Long and bitter were the speeches; speaker after speaker taki'd up and down the marae, and worked himself up into a fury of excitement.
Two old chiefs, tattooed veterans of the war, their long hair adorned with feathers, weapons of wood and stone in their hands, angrily assailed each other. One was Rupé, the other was Horopapera Matangi. One advocated the sale of surplus lands, the other vigorously opposed it, and insisted on the principle of “Maori land for Maori men.” Then there arose a dispute about the ownership of a tangiwai (greenstone pendant). From argument they came to hurling abusive threats at each other.
At last Rupé furiously hurled his weapon—a sharp wooden spear—at Horopapera, who dodged it, and cleverly caught it near the butt end as it whistled past him. He instantly smartly returned it to its owner, spearing him through the leg.
Next two women went at it. Women of rank these, who considered themselves entitled to equal debating voice with the men-folk. Their powers of rhetoric and invective exhausted, they fell on each other very literally “tooth and nail,” biting, marae.
One of the wild women, a young chieftainess, her long hair streaming behind her, her pendant breasts quivering, her shoulders bleeding, seized a canoe paddle and struck her antagonist a blow across the naked back with it. The other grabbed a tokotoko, or walking-staff, and, thrusting it between her opponent's legs, neatly up-ended her, in the “altogether,” on the green marae.
By this time the whole tribe were into the battle, with sticks, paddles, spears, and any weapon they could lay their hands on—men and women alike. It was a real faction fight. Fortunately, the people had left their guns in their wharés, and were too intent upon their hand-to-hand encounter to run for their firearms.
hangis, and with burning sticks from the ovens set fire to some of the thatched houses in the kainga. Soon there was a pretty blaze, and half the village was burned down in a few minutes.
In half an hour's time the people had cooled down,
. . . . .
Meanwhile, tapu status had been restored by a karakias and invocations. Gathering together a band of his warriors—the remnant of the once ever-victorious Tekau-ma-rua—he paraded them in the marae of the Kawau pa, and farewelling his people, took his old place at the head of the taua and led them off in a grand war-dance. A truly savage figure, that stern old chief, as he leaped to the van of his warparty and danced, his sacred taiaha in the air; his waist girt with a coloured shawl, a rich feather cape of native make fastened over the left shoulder and under the right; his grizzled head decked with white plumes. And with loud cries of “Haere, ra! Haere ra!” the villagers farewelled the great warchief as he marched his armed men out of the pa and struck into the forest of the Taramouku, bound for the open lands of South
. . . . .
The minds of these isolated forest-dwellers were saturated with superstition, with strange beliefs that were a reflex of the vast untrimmed places of nature in which they lived. The white man, too, almost came to believe in the tales of saurian-like taniwhas and water-demons, in the patupaiarehe and maero, the forest-fairies and forest-giants, in the occult malevolence of the tapu and makutu spells.
A story related by Bent is illustrative of the Maori belief, up to quite modern days, in malignant beings which made their homes in lonely waters and in caves—the dreaded taniwha.
The tale of the “Taniwha” of the Kopua:
One day—this was in the early “seventies”—an old man named Te Maire left the Kawau landing in his canoe, and paddled down the rimu-pine for the purpose of making torches to be used in catching piharau
That afternoon five men from the Kawau, including
Bent's Maori companions immediately explained in their own way the mystery of their tribesman's disappearance.
“There is a taniwha there,” they said, “a fearful water-monster that dwells in a deep, still pool under Te Kopua's banks. He has stretched forth his long claws and dragged the old fellow down to his den.”
The Maori canoeists made haste to quit the dead man's craft, and plied their paddles with unusual energy until they reached their destination on the shore below. They told their story, and that wharepuni to discuss the mystery.
For hours the wiseacres of the bush-hamlet solemnly debated the circumstances, and each canoeist in turn had to give his account of the affair and advance his theory. At last it was decided that there was no possible doubt that the taniwha of the river had seized Te Maire and drowned him. There must, of course, be a reason, for no taniwha of any repute would take such an extreme step without some good cause.
The verdict was that Te Maire had violated the tapu of the deserted village; he had in all probability taken some dry rimu from an old house that stood there, and which was sacred because a chief had died in it—goodness knows how long ago. The river-god had very properly punished him with death—it was the penalty of infringing the law of tapu.
The next day and for some days thereafter canoe crews hunted the river for the old man's body, but found it not. At last a woman at the lower settlement, on going down to the river one morning to get a calabash of water, spied the body of the missing man hanging in the branches of a prostrate kahikatea-tree on the opposite side of the river, about four feet above the water.
The question was, how did the body get there, entangled in the branches that height above the
The answer was plain to the mind of the Maori. He summed it all up in two words:
“Te taniwha!”
The river-monster, after grabbing Te Maire from his canoe and detaining him a while in his watery grave, had dragged the body away down-stream and hung it up in the tree-branches opposite the village, so that the dead man's people should have no difficulty in recovering it, and in giving it decent burial.
A truly thoughtful and considerate taniwha!
The return to Rukumoana—The forest-village—Bird-snaring and bird-spearing—Bent the canoe-builder—His third wife.
At last—about the year 1876—the Upper
It was an even lonelier spot than the refuge-camp in the pakeha-Maori lived with his little tribe in Rukumoana.
The ancient customs of the Maori fowler's cult were observed by these bush-dwellers, brown and white. For instance, the first kaka parrot or tui or other forest creature snared or speared in a day's birding was not eaten, but was left, as an offering to the gods of the forest, beside an old tapu canoe which was lying in the bush close to the river-bank. It was a hoary relic, this ancient wakatapu, a carved dug-out covered with long grey moss. It was a small canoe, eight or ten feet long, and had lain there for years and years filled with water. Somewhat similar canoe-shaped troughs, filled with water, stood in various places in the forest; these were filled with water, and were generally placed in spots remote from streams or pools. Above them slip-knot snares were arranged, so that the pigeons and tui and other birds, flying down to quench their thirst after feeding on the miro or hinau or tawa berries, were caught in the nooses, and hung there, flapping and helpless, until the
waka-whangai, or wai-tuhi.
When spearing birds with the long barbed spear of tawa-wood, the hunter would take great care to avoid getting any blood on his hands in withdrawing the weapon from the bird's body. Should blood stain the hands—” kaore e mana te tao “—the spear would lose its bird-killing powers; it would be an unlucky affair altogether, and the forest-man might as well throw it away. Such were the beliefs of the dwellers in those dim forest-places.
At the end of the first harvest season Rupé led his white man out into the forest one day, and, halting before a tall, straight totara-pine that grew near the steep bank of the
“This is my canoe! Hew it down and carve it out! In it we will paddle down the river to pakehas again.”
So now behold Bent the canoe-builder. There above him towered the tree—Tane the Forest-god personified. In his hand was his broad-axe; with it he must make his rangatira's river-boat.
He felled the tree, and, lopping off the upper part, began the laborious work of dubbing out the waka. The upper side of the trunk he levelled off with his axe, and then he gradually cut it into hollowed shape, an art he had learned on the Te Riu-o-Tané lay ready for its crew—the Hollow Trunk of Tané.
Then paddles were shaped out, and Bent and his companions set to work catching and drying eels and gathering wild honey, in preparation for the voyage down the river to Hukatéré village, where the main body of Rupé's tribe resided.
About this time the white man entered upon his third matrimonial experience. His chief's grand-daughter, a good-looking girl of about eighteen, came to the little village with a visiting party of This name tupuna, Rupé, who now gave her to Bent; and the white man and his young Maori wife lived happily there in well-hidden Rukumoana.Rukumoana originated thus, according to the Maoris: About the year 1830 a war-party from the pa in 1868, and later on the
Hiroki, the slayer of McLean—Strange faces at Rukumoana —A forest chase—A meeting and a warning—Hiroki's wild bush life and his end.
More than one outlaw from the white country out- side took refuge in the post-bellum days. One of these was Hiroki, the Maori who killed McLean. Hiroki (“The Lean One”) had quarrelled with a survey-party who had camped on his land away out near the coast in the year 1878; the cause of the trouble, as he said, was the killing of his pigs by McLean, who was the sur- veyor's cook. Hiroki remonstrated with the pakehas, but they jeered at him; and when his last pig had disappeared he sat down and wept, then loaded his gun, went to the survey camp, and shot McLean dead. Wherefore he was a hunted man, with a price on his head.
One day, as the pakeha-Maori (
Bent, always on the qui vive for danger, was dubious about the wisdom of trusting himself alone with a party of strangers, who, for all he knew, might be after his head, for he was still an outlaw. But he dropped into his canoe, and with a few strong strokes sent the dugout across the river. He knelt in his canoe, holding her nose into the bank, and interrogated the strange Maoris. The leader was a tall young half-caste. They were all armed with revolvers, and one or two had tomahawks stuck in their belts.
“Where do you come from, and what do you want here?” asked the white man.
“We have come seeking a man who has committed a crime,” replied the half-caste, speaking, as Bent had done, in Maori.
Bent shoved the canoe a stroke off from the bank and said determinedly, with a hand on his revolver:
“If you have come to capture me I will not be taken; I will spill the blood of the first man who attempts it. I will kill my enemy first and then kill myself.” (“Ka maringi i ahau te toto a te tangata
tuatahi. Ka mate taku hoariri nei, maku e u'hakamate toku tinana.”)
“It's all right, friend, we don't want you,” said the half-caste; “we are looking for a Maori called Hiroki, who has murdered a surveyor's cook, named McLean, out yonder on the plains. We have traced him up here, and we want to know where he is, because there is a price on his head, and we are Government Maoris.”
“Come along, then; I'll take you across,” said Bent. The strangers stepped into the canoe, and the white man paddled them over the
To the old chief and his Maori companions the half-caste explained the mission that had brought his party to lonely Rukumoana.
“We have not seen your man Hiroki,” said Hakopa. “He may have swum the river and passed through here by night. Who knows? If he has passed this way he has no doubt gone to Te Ngaere, which is a very difficult place to reach and a good refuge-place for men like Hiroki.”
“We do not know the trail to Te Ngaere,” said the half-caste. “Will any of you guide us there?”
Bent offered to go as guide, saying he knew the track to Ngaere very well and had frequently been there in the war-days. “But,” he asked, “will
The half-caste laughed. “You're quite safe, pakeha. Not a man of us will touch you. I tell you we only want Hiroki.”
A young man named Pakanga, of the
So Bent agreed to go as guide, and, after a meal of pork and potatoes, set before them by the women of the kainga, the armed party of man-hunters set out along the bush-track leading in the direction of the swamp-defended Ngaere, the place where Colonel Whitmore and his force of Colonial soldiers just failed in surprising and capturing
Bent leading, the party filed along the narrow overgrown trail until they were close to the banks of a small stream, the Mangamingi. A little distance back from the creek the white man asked his companions to halt, saying that he and Pakanga would go on to reconnoitre.
The half-caste and his five men sat down and lit their pipes, and Bent and the
The white man and his friend had gone only a short distance when they came upon a fire burning just alongside the track, in an old camping-place beneath the shade of a giant totara-tree, whose great branches overhung the little dark river that flowed close by. A few roasted potatoes, still warm, lay alongside the fire. Evidently it had been deserted only a few minutes.
“Now,” said Bent to his companion, “let us settle quickly how we shall act. Hiroki—for it can be no one else—must be close by; he must have only just left this spot. Shall we betray him to the Government, or shall we let him escape? He had a just grievance against the man whom he shot. We have heard all about it, and we know that he was a peaceable man, who was provoked into a fit of passion. He is a lonely and a hunted man, and for me my sympathies are with him, for is he not a fugitive like myself?”
“E tika ana,” said the young
“Let me tell you now, friend,” said Bent, “that I have had suspicions for some days that Hiroki has been in hiding near our village. One morning lately, when I went to look in my pataka (
The two men descended the bank to the river. Just where the track entered the slow-moving, muddy stream they saw the fresh prints of naked feet. Wading across, they quickly mounted the opposite bank and set out at a noiseless, easy lope, their bare feet making hardly a sound, along the trail that wound into the glooms of the bush.
Suddenly, at a turn in the track, they came upon Hiroki.
The fugitive was standing there, waiting, for the low growling of his dog, a white, savage-looking animal, had given him warning of pursuit. The hunted man menacingly presented a short-barrelled gun at the pakeha and his companion. He was a fellow of middle stature, lean, as his name implied, but strong and hard-limbed, with a dark determined face and a short black beard.
“Where are you going?” cried Hiroki.
“Oh, nowhere in particular,” Bent replied; “just strolling along” (“ki te haereere”).
The Maori looked puzzled and suspicious, and kept his gun at the ready.
“Listen to me, friend,” said Bent quickly; “you are in danger. There are six Government Maoris close behind you, and they want you dead or alive. Now, go on, and go quickly. And don't venture back, lest you die!”
“Ka pai koe!” (“You are good!”) was all Hiroki said. Turning, he went quickly at a halftrot along the path, with his gun at the trail, and his wild-looking, mongrel dog close on his bare heels, and in a few moments both disappeared in the dark forest.
Bent and Pakanga returned to the pursuing party, who were becoming impatient at the long absence of their guide and were hot with questions.
The white man and his companions managed to quiet the suspicions of the man-hunters. They declared that there were no signs of any one having passed that way, and that it would not be much use going on to the Ngaere, which was a long and very toilsome journey. Fortunately for them, the half-caste and his men had not troubled to go on as far as the big totara on the river-bank, where the tell-tale fire was not yet cold.
After some debate the whole party returned to Rukumoana, and the hunters, giving up the chase in that direction, made out to the open country, and that was the last Bent heard of them.
Three years later Bent met Hiroki in Parihaka, the village of the prophet utu. This Bent promptly refused, saying, “Keep your money, and thank the Atua for your escape, not me.”
Hiroki was a wild figure in Parihaka those lawless days of 1878–81. On meeting-days and feast-days, when the faithful of the Maori tribes gathered to hear the prophet expound the Scriptures after his fashion and prophesy many strange happenings, the Lean One used to head the procession of the tuku-kai, the bringing of the food for ceremonious presentation to the visitors. A double line of gaily
hangi, marched in time to a lively song into the marae, and in front of them paraded Hiroki, stripped to a loin-mat, a loaded and cocked double-barrelled gun in his hands, white feathers stuck in his hair, red war-paint on his cheeks and forehead, leaping from side to side, eyes rolling, tongue defiantly protruded, the embodiment of Maori savagery and ferocity. But when
To this day the Maoris of the rata-tree grew near the top of a high bank; the
Canoeing on the Makutu, or the Black Art—Bent's later days—The end.
All was ready for the voyage, and the pakeha-Maori and his companions loaded their canoe and embarked for Hukatéré—thirty miles down-stream, not far from the sea-coast. The urukehu, or “fair hair.”
The white man and his Maori companions paddled along merrily for seven or eight miles, lightening their labours with canoe-songs. Then, in shooting a rapid, the canoe struck a rock, swung broadside on to the swift current, and immediately capsized.
The crew reached the shore safely, and hauled the canoe up on to a shingly bank. Fortunately
At daylight next morning they embarked again, and another day and a half at the paddles took them down to the Hukatéré kainga, a large settlement of raupo-thatched houses, standing on the left bank of the
The approaching canoe, its four paddles flashing in the sun and dipping again all together, was seen from the kainga while still some little distance up the river, and the men and women of the Hukatéré gathered on the water-side and cried and waved their welcome to the long-absent people of the bush.
“Kumea mai te waka!” they chanted, and the women waved shawls and green branches in the poetic greeting of the powhiri. “To-o-ia mai te
waka! Oh, haul up the canoe! Draw hitherwards the canoe. To the resting-place—that canoe! To the sleeping-place—that canoe! Oh, welcome, welcome, strangers from the forest-land! Urge swift your paddles, for home darts your canoe!”
So, chanting their ancient song, the villagers received the new arrivals, and, still waving their garments and their leafy branches, retired slowly before them as they landed and walked up the sloping banks until the open marae in the centre of the kainga was reached. There the guests from Rukumoana were received by a dignified chief, whitebearded old Nga-waka-taurua (Double-canoe). Now the powhiri was succeeded by the doleful sounds of the tangi, and one after another the Hukatéré tribespeople pressed their noses to those of Rupé and his household; and they wept long and unrestrainedly for the dead, for those who had passed away since they last met.
And then the feasting. The bush-family and their “tame white man” enjoyed a meal of truly huge proportions and variety in comparison with the meagre forest-fare to which they had been confined so long. And when the pakeha tobacco and pakeha grog came out—unwonted luxuries to the mohoao, the bush-people—old Rupé and his household were indeed in the Promised Land for which they had longed for many a month; they had all that the heart of the Hauhau could desire.
The feast over, the dried eels and honey, conveyed with so much toil from distant Rukumoana, were brought up to the marae, and ceremoniously presented to old “Double-Canoe,” who distributed the food amongst the people of the village. The canoe itself was similarly presented to the chief as a gift of aroha from Rupé. In return, the men of Hukatéré placed before the visitors their gifts—£5 in money (representing the sum total of the pakeha cash in the village), and blankets, shirts, and other articles of clothing, of which Bent and his companions were in much need after their rough life in the bush.
“While I was in the kainga,” says Bent, “the local chief went down to the town of paheka-Maori, who had been with the Hauhaus for twelve or thirteen years, was in his kainga, and next day about twenty Europeans rode up to the settlement out of curiosity to see me. We had a long talk, and they gave me some articles of clothing, and told me all about the white man's world from which I had cut myself off. This was about the end of the year 1878.
“After a month's stay we returned to our own village, in a canoe belonging to the Hukatéré natives, loaded with goods and ‘tucker.’ Five days' paddling and poling up-river took us to Ruku-
kainga for ever, loaded our canoe for the last time, and once more paddled down to Hukatéré.”
. . . . .
From Hukatéré the pakeha-Maori and his girlwife went to Taiporohenui—Bent's old home in the war days. There he lived for a year or so, blanketed like a Maori, and working in the cultivations. Here, too, in the long nights he was much with the old men of the kainga, and from such learned men as Hupini and Pokau—true tohungas, or priests, and soothsayers—he learned much of the strange occultism of the Maori. He saw singular ceremonies, the rites of the makutu, the black art. He learned scores of karakias—incantations useful in Maori eyes for all sorts of purposes, all conditions of war and peace time. Some of these were makutu spells by which the wizard could slay an enemy, by witchcraft and the power of the evil eye. Many a case of death from makutu came under Bent's observation during his life among the Maoris. Old Hupini, says the pakeha-Maori, undoubtedly killed men with his makutu—a combination of three factors: projection of the will force, the malignant exercise
makutu'd.
Many Maoris believe that the witchcraft can be wrought by an adept or tohunga by taking some of the hair or clothing or even remains of the food of the person intended to be slain, and pronouncing the appropriate powerful karakias and curses over it. The enemy's hau—his life-essence, his vital force—then lies in the hollow of the tohunga's hand.
A tohunga can take the hau of a man's footprints and thereby makutu him; he can even makutu an enemy's horse so that it will fall sick and not be able to travel!
Amongst the prayers and ceremonies which old Hupini taught Bent were the karakia for combating the evil spell of the makutu and for restoring a bewitched and ailing person to health and safety—to the Land of Light and Life, the Ao-marama.
One of these rites Bent describes in true Maori fashion:
A person is taken seriously ill; it is the makutu. The wise man is called in; he divines that the illness is caused by another tohunga's witchcraft. At daylight in the morning the sick man is carried to the water-side. The wise man then takes three small sticks or twigs (rito)—fern-sticks will do—and sets them up by the side of the river or the pool. One of these sacred wands represents the invalid,
te tangata nana te makutu). A charm is said over them, and then two rito are taken away, leaving only one—that for the wizard —the “wand of darkness.”
An incantation, beginning:
“Toko i te po, te po nui, te po roa” (“Staff of the night, the great night, the long night”), etc., is repeated over this wand. When this is said the priest conducts the sick person to the edge of the water and sprinkles water over his body, repeating as he does so a charm to expel the makutu spirits from his body, ending with a curse upon the malevolent wizard—” Eat that tohunga makutu, let him be utterly eaten and destroyed.”
When this is ended the patient is taken back to his house. He is told that the wise man has, by virtue of his very strong charms, seen the rival tohunga makutu, and that it will not be long before that evil man dies. The curse falls, the wizard is himself makutu'd, and the invalid—perhaps—recovers.
About the year 1881 Bent—now able to venture into the towns of the pakeha again in safety—left
Tawhiao, the Maori King, was then living at Kawhia, and he asked Bent to remain with him and be his pakeha and interpreter. The white man was now, however, wearying to be back in his old home,
“Tawhiao,” says Bent, “insisted on me remaining with his tribe, but I repeated a Maori incantation which I had been taught by the tohungas in karakia used as a charm by strangers (tangata tauhou) who may desire to leave the place where they are staying on a visit and proceed to a new pa, and who fear obstruction. The charm begins:
“When the old king heard me repeat the incantation he exclaimed:
“‘Ha, so you are a tohunga!’
“‘Yes, I am,’ I replied.
“Then the old man said, ‘Kua tuwhera te rori mou’ (‘The road is open to you.’) He permitted me to return to
The last quarter-century of tohunga and wise woman of the bush tribes, the white man now turned to practical account. His fame as a doctor reached Parihaka, the village of pakeha doctors,” says the old man, “for none of my patients died!”
. . . . .
And so the tale of “Tu-nui-a-moa” is told, and we take our leave of the old pakeha-Maori—pa-builder, canoe-carver, medicineman, and what not—sitting smoking his pipe in the midst of his Maori friends. He is still living with the natives; working in their food-gardens, fishing with them, house-building for them. A grey old man, of mild and quiet eye, who might easily be taken for some highly respectable shopkeeper
Bent has reached the age of seventy-three; and now the old man's thoughts go to his boyhood's home in the far-off State of Maine, and he sometimes expresses a wish to reach his homeland again. “If I could only get a berth on some American sailing-vessel bound for pakeha-Maori.
The following interesting supplementary particulars concerning
“It was tikanga Maori was considerable, and during the war he conducted the usual ceremonies to make the war-parties successful.
“The late Rev. Stannard, of Hohepa (Joseph), and I have heard from Tairuakena and others that Tito was one of the young men who accompanied the Rev. Skevington on his last visit to Auckland. (This was long before the Maori War.) They journeyed overland from Te Ka hoki mai matou tangi, haere ki tena kainga, ki tena kainga.’ Mr. Woon succeeded Mr. Skevington at Heretoa, Te
“I had one interview with
“Suddenly we came upon about eighty Maoris, all men, and
“Then Williams spoke, and at the close of his speech a fine man in a piupiu (flax waist-mat) orated, and then came forward to hongi (rub noses) with me. After which there was a little fraternisation, and we came away. Even
Under address and date Downing Street, February 26th, 1869, the Right Hon. Earl Granville, K.G., Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote to Sir
“I see it stated in the newspapers that you have offered a reward of £1,000 for the person of the Maori chief
In the course of his reply to this despatch Governor Bowen said:
“It is contended that this passage implies that the Maoris now in arms… are foreign enemies, or at all
On this,
“I think you would have done well to point out to those who thus argue that my despatch nowhere hints that the Maoris are foreigners, a doctrine which I had never heard of before I perused the Attorney-General's opinion; and that the legitimate inference from my despatch is the direct contrary to that which is drawn from it. … I do not clearly understand how you justify this notice as a matter of law. I understand you to disclaim the application of martial law; and viewing