A Tale of Old Taranaki.

A “White Maori” whom I knew very well over a period of about twelve years, was Kimble Bent, who was of partly North American Indian blood, a fact that accounted to a large degree, I think, for his rebellion against strict Army discipline. He had a very unhappy time in Her Majesty's forces. He had first been in the U.S. Navy, and then when “on the spree” in Liverpool he enlisted in the 57th Regiment, called the “Die-Hards.” He deserted from a Taranaki camp in the second war of the Sixties, and for the rest of his life he lived with the Maoris, nearly all the time in Taranaki. I gathered together his reminiscences of wild life in the bush into a book, “The Adventures of Kimble Bent,” which was published in 1911. The old man lived for six years after I wrote the book, and in that time I heard from him a great deal more about his life as a fugitive from the pakehas. Some of his tales of the true adventure were concerned with his acquired knowledge of the strange mental powers which the people of the bush possess, their esoteric or supernatural wisdom. He came to believe that the Maori tohunga possessed certain branches of knowledge that was unknown to the pakeha, and undoubtedly one of the hidden powers was the ability to exercise mysterious influence over people at a distance, an influence so great as to cause death. Willing to death in fact. I do not think the present generation of Maori is capable of absorbing the secret education which the last of the tohungas could have passed on.

Undoubtedly the last generation could exercise powers of life and death by some process of mental wireless. During his more than forty years of life with the people of the bush and the frontier, Kimble Bent had encountered many proofs of this; and one episode in the Taranaki country I shall narrate, as an example of the practice of makutu, in which he firmly believed himself. It occurred at Taiporohenui, near the present town of Hawera, in 1879, when many Maori communities, especially those people who had been through the war, lived almost entirely in their old native ways.

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