THE ADVENTURES OF
KIMBLE BENT

MAP OF TARANAKI, NEW ZEALAND.
(Showing engagements in the Maori War)

THE ADVENTURES
OF KIMBLE BENT
A STORY OF WILD LIFE IN THE
NEW ZEALAND BUSH

By
JAMES COWAN

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

WHITCOMBE AND TOMBS, LIMITED
LONDON MELBOURNE
CHRISTCHURCH, WELLINGTON AND DUNEDIN, N.Z.
1911

PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

[PREFACE]

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 New South Wales escapees from the fetters of a more than rigorous "system" now and again cast in their lot with the blacks. Renegades of every European nationality have been found living with and fighting for native tribes in Africa and America and the Islands of Polynesia. But none of them had a wilder story to tell than has the man whose narrative is here presented—Kimble Bent, the 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 Titokowaru gave him in 1868. When he writes to me, he usually writes in Maori, and he is practically a Maori himself, for he has lived the greater part of his life as a Maori, and he has assimilated the peculiar modes of thought and some of the ancient beliefs of the natives, as well as their tongue and customs.

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 Ngati-Ruanui and Nga-Rauru and of rites of human sacrifices performed in the woods of Taranaki, but this account of Bent's is the first detailed description from an eye-witness of the man-eating practices in Titokowaru's camps. Many of Tito's Hauhaus are still alive; but they are very reticent on the subject of "long-pig."

I first met Kimble Bent in 1903. In that year Mr. T. E. Donne, now the New Zealand Government Trade Commissioner in London, had induced the old man to come to Wellington for the purpose of being interviewed and photographed; and it is these interviews, very considerably expanded during a seven years' acquaintance with Bent, and carefully checked by independent Maori testimony, that are now embodied in this book.

In confirmation and extension of Bent's story, I have gathered data at first-hand both from Taranaki Maoris who fought under Titokowaru, and from soldiers and settlers who fought against him, and these particulars are incorporated with the old pakeha-Maori's narrative.

The 1868-9 portion of the book is, therefore, practically a history of the Titokowaru war in Taranaki; and it embraces a great deal of matter not hitherto recorded.

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 bush-marches 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 Titokowaru's war I am indebted to Colonel W. E. Gudgeon, C.M.G., Colonel T. Porter, C.B., and other old Colonial soldiers. Tutangé Waionui, of Patea, who was one of Titokowaru's most active scouts and warriors, has given me many details concerning the campaign from the Maori side; and the Rev. T. G. Hammond, Wesleyan Missionary to the Taranaki Maoris, has also furnished assistance on the same subject. To Mrs. Kettle, of Napier, daughter of Major von Tempsky, I owe my thanks for permission to reproduce three of the illustrations in this book, copies of water-colour sketches by her celebrated father, representing scenes in the Taranaki campaign of 1865-6. The picture of the fight at Moturoa in 1868 is from a black-and-white sketch by a soldier-artist who took part in the engagement; the original was in the possession of the late Dr. T. M. Hocken, of Dunedin, who allowed me to have it photographed for this book.

J. C.

Wellington, N.Z.,
Feb. 1, 1911.

[CONTENTS]

[LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS]

THE ADVENTURES OF KIMBLE BENT

[CHAPTER I]

THE DESERTER

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 Tasman Sea through the Taranaki Plains a young man in the blue undress uniform of a private soldier sat smoking his pipe. He was dripping with water, and a little pool had collected where he crouched in the fern, a few feet from the bank of the stream. He had plainly just emerged from the river. His clothes were torn, and he was capless. He was a man of about the middle size, spare of build, with sharp dark eyes and a bronzed complexion that told of past life under a tropic sun.

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 Manawapou. Left unofficially, and without his arms, strolling down towards the Tangahoé River as if for a bathe. A "shut-eye" sentry was on duty that morning; and the deserter's tent-mates, too, were sympathetically blind to his departure. The Tangahoé was the border-line between the country covered by the British rifles and the unconquerable bush of the Maori rebels. Towards this rubicon he made his way through the thick, high fern, which soon concealed him from view. He attempted to ford the rapid, muddy river, but it was up to his waist, and almost swept him off his feet. Struggling ashore again, he took to the fern and travelled slowly and with great toil through it, keeping parallel with the course of the Tangahoé, and heading down stream. He forced his way through the thick fern "like a wild pig," to use his own simile. In this way he travelled something over a mile down the river, and then once more attempted to ford across, but it was too deep and swift. He crawled back up the bank again, and quite exhausted, with scratched hands and face and gaping half-buttonless clothes, he sat down to recover his breath and strength. His heart was thumping fearfully with his frantic exertions in the closely matted, entangling fern, and it was some minutes before he could command his trembling fingers to fill and light his pipe.

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 coarse 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 north-west, 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 midwinter 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 Taranaki mountain, which the white man calls Mount Egmont.

Satisfying himself that there was no one in sight and that he was not followed, the soldier squatted down again and smoked his pipe meditatively.

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.

"Kimble Bent," answered the 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.

[CHAPTER II]

KIMBLE BENT, SAILOR AND SOLDIER

Kimble Bent's early life—An Indian mother—Service in the American Navy—Departure for England—"Taking the Shilling"—British Army life—The flight to America—A sinking ship—Rescue, and landing in Glasgow—Back to the Army again—Soldiering in India—The 57th ordered to New Zealand—The Taranaki Campaign—A court-martial—At the triangles.

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.

Kimble Bent's mother was a half-caste Red Indian girl, of the Musqua tribe, whose villages stood on the banks of the St. Croix River, State of Maine, U.S.A. Her English name before marriage was Eliza Senter. She became the wife of a shipbuilder in the town of Eastport, Maine; his name was Waterman Bent; he worked at first for Caleb Houston, shipbuilder, but afterwards had a yard of his own. This couple had seven children, two sons and five daughters; one of these sons was Kimble Bent. He was born in Eastport on August 24, 1837.

The roving wayward element in young Kimble Bent's blood soon made itself manifest. When he was about seventeen, he ran away from home and went to sea. He shipped on a United States man-of-war, the training frigate Martin, and spent three years aboard her, cruising along the Atlantic Coast. He quickly became a smart young sailor and gunner, and from the rank of seaman he graduated to deckman, a sort of quartermaster. It was part of his duty during the last year of his service to instruct the boys who came aboard as recruits in the working of the muzzle-loading 6-pounder and 8-pounder guns.

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 Atlantic, in his head some such unexpressed sentiment as Robert Louis Stevenson long afterwards put into verse in his "Songs of Travel":

"The untented Kosmos my abode

I go, a wilful stranger,

My mistress still the open road

And the bright eyes of Danger."

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. Four months of recruit-drill—then one day Private Bent took a stroll down the Cork wharves and cast his eyes round for a likely craft in which to give the army, drill-sergeants, and all the slip.

A Boston barque, the 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 John Bull's grip. That evening Bent stole away quietly from the barracks, boarded the barque, and was stowed away safely below in the dunnage-hole. He did not show his nose above hatches for two days; the barque by that time had left the harbour on her return voyage to Boston, and the deserter was able to appear on deck, a free man.

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 Atlantic seas came thundering on deck, and more than once washed the men away from the pumps. For six days and six nights they wallowed in the deep, all hands, sailors and passengers, taking turns at the pumps, working for their lives.

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 Boston vessel deep-loaded, from the West Indies, hailed us and stood by, signalling to us to launch our boats. This we did, after hard and dangerous work, and managed to reach the brig's side, where all the sixteen of us were hauled on board safely. About two hours after we left our ship we saw her go down."

To Bent's intense disappointment he found that the brig that had rescued him was bound for the wrong side of the Atlantic. She landed the shipwrecked mariners at Glasgow. Bent was walking about the streets one day, wondering however he was going to get a passage home, for he had no money, when he was arrested as a deserter—recognised by the description which had been posted in every barrack-room and every police-station. He was taken to the military barracks, and then sent under guard to Ireland and down to Cork, where he was tried by court-martial, and sentenced to eighty-four days in prison. When he had served his term he was shipped off to India with his regiment, landing at Bombay, and for some time did garrison duty at Poona.

The 57th spent two years in India, only just recovering from the terrible throes of the Mutiny. Then news came of a serious war with a wild native race in a distant country called New Zealand, far away down in the Southern Ocean, and the regiment was ordered to hold itself in readiness to go route-marching to Bombay, thence to sea. Marching orders soon followed, and the headquarters of the regiment sailed for Auckland; the company in which Bent was a private (No. 8 Company) was one of those left behind to look after the women and children of the regiment. Orders for them also quickly came, and they took the road for Bombay.

The journey from Poona to Bombay took four days, or rather nights, for all the marching was done by night. Part of the way was through a dense jungle in which man-eating tigers swarmed. The troops marched through this jungle by torchlight, winding along a narrow track through the densely-matted vegetation. The growling of the tigers was heard all round at night, but the blazing torches kept them away.

Embarked in a troopship at Bombay, Bent and his fellow-soldiers sailed not unwillingly for a land spoken of by report as a country which, though wild and new, was a pleasanter place to live in than scorching sun-baked India.

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 Taranaki by sea to join the headquarters of the 57th, and went into new barrack life on Marsland Hill, New Plymouth.

Kimble Bent's longing for a free independent life became stronger than ever in this new country. He would gladly have exchanged camp-life for even the perilous occupation of a frontier settler, so that he were free. The parade ground was a purgatory, and the restraint of discipline and the ramrod-and-pipeclay system of soldiering were irksome beyond words. He was sick to death of being ordered about by sergeants and corporals. Fighting would have been a relief, but there was none yet. He endeavoured to get his discharge from the regiment, but without success; and his impatience of discipline led him into various more or less serious conflicts with the regimental authorities.

So opened Kimble Bent's life in the new land, the land in which he was to roam the forests an outlaw for more than a decade.

In those war-days of 1860-70 dense forests covered the wide plains of this Taranaki province, where now most of the dark old woods have been hewn away, and have given place to the pastures and homesteads of dairy farmers. It was a wild but beautiful land. The coast curved out and round in a great sweeping semicircle from Waitara in the north to Wanganui in the south; the intervening region of forest, hill, and plain was the theatre of war. High and central, Taranaki's great mountain-cone, which the pakeha calls Egmont, swelled to a height of over 8,000 feet, its base hidden in the forests, its snowy peak glittering far above the broad soft swathes of clouds, the sailor's landmark a hundred miles out at sea. Remote from all other high mountains it soared aloft—"lonely as God and white as a winter morn," as Joaquin Miller wrote of his beloved Mount Shasta. On all sides Taranaki—the holy mountain of the Maoris—sloped evenly and gently to the plains, and from its recesses sprang the head waters of many a beautiful river. The mountain, huge yet exquisitely symmetrical, was revered by the old-school Taranaki Maori as the mighty symbol of his nationality, and regarded as being in some mystic fashion the source of his tribal mana. Under the shadow of Taranaki began the Ten Years' War; here the Hauhau fanaticism took its mad rise in 1864. From Taranaki's foot set out the Hauhau apostles, preaching a strange jumble of Scriptural expressions and pagan Maori concepts, promising their converts that no 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 slain white soldiers. The relapse into barbarism was more marked in Taranaki than anywhere else, and even to this day the hatred of the white man lingers there, amongst the remnants of the old Hauhau stock. Te Whiti, the Prophet of Parihaka, until his death in 1907, held his court under the shadow of lofty Taranaki, and preached his old mysticism fortified by the towering presence of his mountain-god, cold and immutable, and all unmindful of the pakeha's march through the plains below.

MOUNT EGMONT, TARANAKI.

In March, 1864, the 57th were ordered from New Plymouth to Manawapou (not far from the present town of Hawera), near the Tangahoé River. The fanatic Hauhau faith had just been born amongst the Maoris, whose palisaded 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 Manawapou the regiment went under canvas, and now began the regular round of sentry-go and outpost duty, and all the preparations for an advance on the rebel positions.

A TARANAKI FRONTIER FORT.
(Sketch by Mr. S. Percy Smith, 1865.)

Meantime there was fighting in the northern and western parts of the Taranaki province, between the 57th camp and New Plymouth. There was the disastrous affair at Te Ahuahu, where Captain Lloyd and several soldiers were killed; their heads were cut off and smoke-dried by the Hauhau savages, and were carried away to distant tribes by Kereopa, Patara, and other rebel emissaries, the Hauhau recruiting officers. Another momentous affair which happened soon after the 57th took post at Manawapou was the desperate assault on the British redoubt at Sentry Hill (Te Morere). A large force of Hauhau warriors, deluded by their prophet Hepanaia into believing that his incantations rendered them invulnerable to the white man's bullets, rushed against the redoubt in open daylight one morning, but were beaten off, leaving some fifty of their number lying dead in front of the fort. It was in this engagement that Titokowaru—who was afterwards Kimble Bent's chief and master—lost one of his eyes through a bullet wound.

Kimble Bent's final revolt against constituted authority came one wet, cold day in the Manawapou camp in April 1864. It was pouring with rain, but a corporal, one who took a vindictive sort of pleasure in asserting his authority over those privates whom he happened to dislike, ordered Bent to go out and cut some firewood in the bush. Irritated by the manner in which the order was given, the young "Down-Easter" was foolish enough to argue with his enemy the corporal.

"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 Brown, and Ensign Parker. Bent knew it was useless to attempt a defence, for his offence was an inexcusable breach of discipline. He was found guilty, and the sentence of the court was that he should receive fifty lashes, and serve two years in gaol.

The triangles were then a familiar institution in every military camp in the Waikato and in Taranaki; for those were flogging days, when even slight breaches of military rules brought down the lash upon the soldier's back.

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 red-hot 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 marched 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 against military discipline. Then he was sent back to his hated regiment. The shame of that morning at the triangles, with his comrades paraded to witness his disgrace and agony, was burned into him for ever. He grew morose and desperate. At last he resolved to desert to the enemy. He confided his resolve to his tent-mates, and they, knowing that other soldiers had deserted to the Maoris and had not been killed, did not attempt to dissuade him. "I can't be worse off with the Maoris than I am here," he told them; "if they do tomahawk me, it will end all my troubles. I don't very much care."

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.

[CHAPTER III]

THE CAMP OF THE HAUHAUS

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. It was a secluded, pretty scene, that village with its neat enclosure, its rows of snug wharés which could be seen through the 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 of high standing in the Ngati-Ruanui tribe, and one of the Hauhaus' best fighting-leaders.

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 Te Ua had commanded his followers to erect as a pole of worship in each of their villages. [The Niu was in more ancient times the name of a peculiar ceremony of divination often resorted to by the tohungas 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 singular wild cadence were these words in "pidgin" English: "Big river, long river, big mountain, long mountain, bush, big bush, long bush," and so on, ending with a loudly chanted cry, "Riré, riré, hau!" This meaningless gibberish formed part of the incantations solemnly taught to the Hauhaus by Te Ua, who professed to have the "gift of tongues" of which the 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 Hori Kerei (George Grey), and who could speak English fairly well.

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. Hori Kerei interpreted. The Maoris asked Bent why he had come to them, why had he run away from his own people. The deserter frankly told them that he was tired of being a soldier, that he had been ill-treated and imprisoned, and that he came to them for protection.

"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 Hawera—and he was ordered to go with them, and was set to work felling bush, clearing and digging, gathering firewood, and hauling water for the camp. Tito was his master—not only his master, but in hard fact his owner, with power of life and death over him. Bent divined the Maori nature too well to refuse "fatigue duty," as he had done in the Manawapou camp. There would have been no court-martial in Taiporohenui—just a crack on the head with a tomahawk. So he bent his back to the burdens with what cheerfulness he might, and was thankful for the good things Tito provided, though they took no more elaborate form than a blanket and a flax mat for a bed, and two square meals a day of pork and potatoes.

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 Ngati-Ruanui. One day a messenger from the large village of Keteonetea came to Taiporohenui and announced that he had been sent to fetch the strange 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 their brows; they wore feathers in their hair, their only clothes were flax mats. The lone 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 (Kelly). He told the 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 pole. 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, rolling their eyes and lifting their arms high in the air as every now and again they cried their wild refrain, "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.

[CHAPTER IV]

IN THE OTAPAWA STOCKADE

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 pakeha's hut, while the women were lighting the 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 dinner-mats, he sent them back to Keteonetea loaded with new clothes and baskets of kumara (sweet potato) and taro—another tropic root-food brought from Polynesia by the ancestors of the Maori, but now no longer grown by the Taranaki people.

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 island from the great 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 taken, and finely woven flax mats, patterned in black and white, were spread out for them. Tito rose and addressed the crowd. He explained, with a good deal of pride, as Bent imagined, how he had become possessed of a live white man—a somewhat unusual acquisition amongst the Maoris in that unrestful period, for the impatient Hauhau was, as a rule, too fond of trying his new tomahawk on a 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 as seen here and there among Maori tribes tell their tale of an ancient Melanesian strain in the blood of the Polynesian immigrants. She was tattooed on the chin, and there was a deeply chiselled blue line on the inner cuticle of her lower lip. Her hair hung round her face in a tangled mop. "Well," said Bent to himself, "she is no beauty."

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 dilemma, 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 the less he liked her. Then he glanced at the dour old uncle, and cast his helpless eyes around the crowded meeting-house. The men were glum and scowling; one or two of the young girls seemed to perceive the humour of the situation, for they giggled, and then hid their faces in their shawls.

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 war-chief Titokowaru rechristened him "Tu-nui-a-moa."

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 Ngati-Maniapoto Maoris from the King Country were at that time on a visit to Taiporohenui, where a large war-council of the rebel tribes was held. Tito te Hanataua was one of the Taranaki orators, and as he 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:

"Ki te kai, e Ringi,

Kai poroporo te manawa,

Te iti to hopé,

Whakapai Angoré,"

("Eat away, O Ringi,

Eat your fill of poroporo berries

To make you strong again;

Lest your waist be small and weak,

Eat to become a fine Englishman!")

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.

[CHAPTER V]

TE UA, PRIEST AND PROPHET

Te Ua and his gods—The 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 Kimble Bent became acquainted with a man whose name has passed into New Zealand history. This was Te Ua Haumene, the founder and high-priest and prophet of the Hauhau religion, or, more correctly speaking, fanaticism. Te Ua came riding into the Otapawa village one day with a bodyguard of armed men. Bent describes him as a stoutly built man of between forty and fifty, attired in European clothing, and carrying a carved taiaha—a chief's halbert or broadsword of hardwood, flattened at one end in a blunt blade, and sharpened at the other into a tongue-shaped point, and decorated with tufts of red kaka feathers; in a plaited flax belt round his waist was thrust a greenstone mere.

Te Ua was the man who taught the Taranaki rebels the karakia, or incantations—some of them a curious medley of Maori and English—which they chanted in their wild marches round the sacred 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. Te Ua had succeeded in imbuing his fanatic disciples with an unquestioning Moslem-like faith in the potency of the Hauhau cult and its accompanying charms and magic formulæ. He was the Mahomet of the Taranaki people, and exercised an influence over the bush-fighters of Ngati-Ruanui and allied tribes almost as great as that which Te Kooti, the Chatham Islands escapee, commanded a few years later amongst the warriors of the East Coast.

The absolute faith the Hauhaus reposed in Te Ua's precepts and his pretences to supernatural power has parallels in the records of the Mahdi's wars in the Soudan, and in other campaigns waged under the banner of Islam, and more recently still in the Zulu rebellion in Natal. He assured his followers that when they went into battle the bullets of the white soldiers would be turned aside in their flight if they but raised their right hands as if warding the ball off, at the same time repeating the words "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 Te Whiti, the Prophet of the Mountain, at Parihaka, you will see a picture of Te Ua on the wall of the speech-hall, his right hand raised to his shoulder, palm outwards, as if in the act of invoking his gods to turn the 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 Te Ua had a very good explanation to offer for any casualties—that if the 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 Ngati-Ruanui and Nga-Ruahiné—who fell in a mad attack upon the walled fort in open daylight chanting their "Hapa! Pai mariré! Hau!"—the faith in Te Ua and his charms was but little abated. And, unlike the Moslem warrior, who fought to the death in the certain hope of a speedy translation to Paradise, the Maori fanatic expected no heavenly reward for his faith and his death-despising ferocity. No 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 bare-headed 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 council-house and stood before the prophet.

PATARA, A HAUHAU PROPHET.

"E noho ki raro" ("Sit down"), said Te Ua, pointing to the floor-mat in front of him.

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. Te Ua took a potato from the basket, broke it into two pieces, and gave one piece to Bent and told him to eat it; the other half he ate himself.

"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 Te Ua to Bent, "and you must have a woman to cook your food for you."

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 Te Ua returned to his home at Opunake, on the coast, Bent had further interviews with the prophet, who treated him with kindness, and gave him what was to the runaway a very welcome present—some pakeha tobacco. Though something of a madman, like most Maori prophets, Te Ua was of more benevolent spirit than his acolytes, Kereopa and Patara, and their kin, who had been sent to preach the gospel of 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. Te Ua had fought the white soldiers at Nukumaru about a year before this, when a force of Hauhaus made a desperate attack on the camp of two thousand British troops, under General Cameron, and killed and wounded nearly fifty soldiers before they were driven off with the loss of about thirty killed.

The outward and visible sign or incarnation (aria) of Te Ua's deity was a ruru, or owl. This bird is sacred amongst Taranaki Natives; they will not kill or harm one; they say it is an atua, a god, and has a hundred eyes.

An incident which Bent relates as occurring in another bush settlement where he and Te Ua both happened to be staying is illustrative of the prophet's peculiar respect for his owl-god. Just at dusk, when the evening meal was over, and the night creatures began their roamings, an owl flew softly from the trees and settled above the window of the house in which Te Ua was sitting. "Ha!" said the prophet, when he saw it; "there is my 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. Te Ua said nothing more till the next morning, when he announced that he would leave the place at once, because his owl-god had appeared to him as a warning to return to his home.

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 skin was a Maori. He was not at all happy, however, at the news that his old regiment, the 57th, was expected to march on Otapawa, and he heartily wished himself far away from these scenes of constant commotion and terror. But for the present he was safer with the Hauhaus than with the men of his own colour and tongue.

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 long Hauhau prayers, led by the priest of the pa, old Tukino, who was one of Te Ua's apostles.

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 fern-land; 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 if 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 managed to procure some needles and thread, together with paper and pencil (I kept up a sort of diary now and then), and one or two other little things which I kept in a kit, thinking that, though I had nothing to sew with the needles and thread, and very little to do with the other belongings, they might come in useful before very long. One of my greatest troubles was the want of salt; as for bread, I had not tasted any for many months."

[CHAPTER VI]

THE STORMING OF OTAPAWA

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 midsummer 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 ribbon-wood. 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-Tané," 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 awakening to light and life of the deep and solemn forests of Tane-Mahuta. Pigeons, 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 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. [1] There was abundance of food in the camp—potatoes, maize, potted birds, pork, and dried fish sent as presents from the coast tribes. Early morning, and again in the warm, golden evenings, long, straight columns of pale blue smoke arose from the cooking-ovens of the village, and mingled with the thin vapours that crept about the tree-tops; then little clouds of steam curled up as the women, with lively chatter, uncovered 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 forest in rear of the fort, and told "Ringiringi" to accompany them. News had just been brought in that the scouts out in the fern country had noticed signs of an impending movement in the British camp. The white man and the tribal encumbrances pushed back into the bush for about three miles, and camped in a quiet little nook by a creek-side, with high, forested hills towering around. The weather now became cold and bleak, and there was little food to sustain the refugees, for the principal stores of 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 to a fire from between the palisades, before the open 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 greenstone 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 Wanganui district, under the afterwards celebrated bush-fighter, Kepa te Rangihiwinui (Major Kemp). General Chute commanded the operations. An Armstrong gun was brought to within a short distance of the hill-fort, and several shells were fired into the stockade. Then the general gave the order for the assault.

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 the trenches they ran, and sliding down the bank, they took to the bush, scrambling up along the river-side as hard as they could go. Kepa, with his Whanganui friendlies, pursued the flying Hauhaus and shot two or three.

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 Kimble Bent, but this was mere camp gossip. Gudgeon's "Reminiscences of the War in New Zealand," gives currency to the report, but it is strongly denied, and with every appearance of truth, by Bent. When the 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 "bush-whacking" at night—or, indeed, at any other time—but by Kepa's Government warriors, hereditary enemies of the Taranaki men. Hurriedly packing on their shoulders what few belongings they had managed to save from the pa, they set off in single file through the thick forest, making for the banks of the Tangahoé River, which they reached before daylight, and there halted. The wounded who were unable to walk were carried with difficulty through the tangled bush, where it was often necessary to cut away at the supplejacks and 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, [2] and here, as soon as it was light, the Hauhaus mustered and reckoned up their losses. There were about three hundred and fifty of them now in camp—men, women and children. With wonderful celerity the forest-men cut a little clearing, and built 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 re-entered 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.

[CHAPTER VII]

BUSH LIFE WITH THE HAUHAUS

Wild days in the forest—The Hauhau hunters—Maori wood-craft—Bird-snaring and bird-spearing—The fowlers at Te Ngaere—The slayer of Broughton—Another runaway soldier, and his fate—The tomahawking of Humphrey Murphy.

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 forest-rangers 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 were set in amongst the half-burned stumps and logs. In the meantime the forest was scoured for food, and foraging parties were sent out to Turangaréré and other villages on the outskirts of the forest and returned laden with pork and potatoes, strapped across their shoulders in the usual Maori 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 messengers from the plains; and the white general's great march through the forest from Ketemarae by the Whakaahurangi track around the eastern side of Mount Egmont to Mataitawa and New Plymouth—when the soldiers fell so short of food that they had to shoot and eat their pack-horses—was discussed many a night in the village 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 from the tribe nor shirked the often heavy tasks imposed upon him.