REV. JOHN MORGAN
(The man who civilised the Waipa)
Photo about 1864, lent by Mrs. B. Crispe
THE OLD FRONTIER
TE AWAMUTU
THE STORY OF THE WAIPA VALLEY
The Missionary
Early Colonization
The Soldier
The War in Waikato
The Pioneer Farmer
Life on the Maori Border
and Later-Day Settlement
By
JAMES COWAN, F.R.G.S.
COPYRIGHT
Published by The Waipa Post Printing and Publishing Company, Limited
Te Awamutu, New Zealand
1922
[[3]]
PREFACE
This sketch of the history of the Waipa district centreing in Te Awamutu has been written especially with a view to interesting the younger generation of colonists, and the now large population on both sides of the old Maori border, in the uncommonly dramatic story of the beautiful country in which their homes are set. The original settlers to whom many of the events here described were matters of personal knowledge are fast passing away, and a generation has arisen which has but a vague idea of the local history and of the old heroic life on the Waipa plains. The book is designed to convey accurate pictures of this pioneer life and the successive eras of the missionary and the soldier, and to invest with a new interest for many the familiar home landscapes.
Much of the information given herein is published for the first time, and therefore should be of special value to students of New Zealand history. For the story of missionary enterprise the writer has drawn on a MS. journal written by the Rev. John Morgan, the first civiliser of the Waipa country; for the military history use has been made of an exceedingly readable MS. narrative left by the celebrated Major Von Tempsky, of the Forest Rangers. For the rest, it has been a peculiar pleasure to the writer, as one bred on the old Aukati border, to recall scenes in a phase of life which has passed away for ever.
J. C.
Wellington, N.Z.,
September, 1922. [[5]]
CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER I.—[TOPOGRAPHICAL AND LEGENDARY] 7
The beautiful Waipa country. The garden lands of Te Awamutu and Rangiaowhia. Hills of the Maori border. The cone of Kakepuku. Ancient fortresses. Maori tribes of the Waipa basin.
CHAPTER II.—[THE MISSIONARY ERA] 11
In cannibal days. Rev. B. Y. Ashwell the first missionary in Te Awamutu. A feast on human flesh in Otawhao pa. End of the inter-tribal wars. Rev. John Morgan comes to Te Awamutu. His useful mission work. How Mr Morgan sowed the good seed.
CHAPTER III.—[PLOUGH AND FLOUR-MILL] 14
Mr Morgan introduces English methods of agriculture. Maori tribes become industrious farmers. The coming of the wheat. Large cultivations at Te Awamutu, Rangiaowhia, Kihikihi, and Orakau. Grinding the wheat. The first flour-mills. Mr Morgan’s narrative. Clatter of the water-mill in many Maori settlements. Exporting wheat and flour to Auckland. Rangiaowhia flour sent to England. Sir George Grey’s practical sympathy with the Maori.
CHAPTER IV.—[THE GOLDEN AGE BEFORE THE WAR] 18
Te Awamutu and Rangiaowhia in 1852. Mr Heywood Crispe’s description. A land of corn-fields and fruit-groves. The peach-groves of Rangiaowhia. Visit to the large Maori village. Old King Potatau. Hochstetter’s view in 1859.
CHAPTER V.—[JOHN GORST AT TE AWAMUTU] 23
Mr Gorst as Magistrate and Commissioner. The educational institution at Te Awamutu. A newspaper established. Rewi’s raid on the “Pihoihoi Mokemoke.” Mr Gorst leaves Waikato. Te Awamutu re-visited. The last canoe voyage.
CHAPTER VI.—[THE WAIKATO WAR, 1863–64] 35
Fighting on the Waikato. British and Colonial troops invade the Waipa country. Paterangi and Waiari. The Forest Rangers. Von Tempsky’s narrative of the war. Bishop Selwyn at the Front.
CHAPTER VII.—[THE CAPTURE OF RANGIAOWHIA] 40
Von Tempsky’s story. A summer morning invasion. Skirmishing through the village. Siege of a Maori whare. Colonel Nixon shot. Dramatic death of an old warrior. Heroic little garrison annihilated.
CHAPTER VIII.—[THE ENGAGEMENT AT HAIRINI] 48
Sharp action at Hairini Hill. Field Artillery shells the Maori lines. A great bayonet charge. Defeat of the Maoris. Work of the Forest Rangers. Looting Rangiaowhia village. Comedy at the Catholic Church. Von Tempsky and an Imperial Colonel. The return to Te Awamutu. A curious spectacle. “Those rascally Rangers have got all the loot!”
CHAPTER IX.—[THE INVASION OF KIHIKIHI] 55
Rewi Maniapoto’s headquarters. British force occupies Kihikihi village. Burning of the council house. Von Tempsky’s night expedition. A fruitless march. Harmless skirmishing. Redoubt built at Kihikihi. Te Awamutu the army’s headquarters. The first expedition to Orakau. [[6]]
CHAPTER X.—[THE BATTLE OF ORAKAU] 59
Most memorable battle in New Zealand’s history. Brigadier-General Carey’s expedition. Von Tempsky’s narrative. Animated description of the siege. Work of the Forest Rangers. Heroism of the Maori garrison. The last day. A break for freedom. The soldiers in pursuit. Maori narratives. The reply to General Cameron’s message. Incidents of the siege.
CHAPTER XI.—[CAMP LIFE AT TE AWAMUTU] 79
The troops in winter quarters. Description of camp life. The soldiers’ whares. The house-opening dance. Sawyers near Rangiaowhia. The 65th, a model regiment. Soldiers become capitalists. Looting the Maori horses. The romance of Ariana. The hunchback and his flute. A militiaman’s heart and hand, and Ariana’s scorn.
CHAPTER XII.—[PIONEER LIFE ON THE OLD FRONTIER] 84
Perils of the King Country border. An unknown, sullen land. Picture from the north side of the Puniu. The pioneer settlers’ life in the Seventies. The peach-groves of Orakau. A chain of blockhouses and redoubts. The murder of Timothy Sullivan. Grave danger of another war. Te Awamutu Cavalry Volunteers. Patrolling the out-settlements. The return of peace. When Tawhiao came out. “The King of the Cannibal Islands.” The peace-making dance in Kihikihi. The capture of Winiata. Mahuki’s raid on Alexandra. Peaceful pakeha conquest of the King Country.
CHAPTER XIII.—[KIHAROA THE GIANT] 96
A Folk-Tale of the Maori Border. The “Giant’s Grave” at Tokanui. Fortified hills of “The Three Sisters.” The story of an invasion. An army in ambush. The battle of Whenuahou. The death of Kiharoa. Matau, the Giant of the Wairaka.
[APPENDICES] 101
Maori place names. The capture of Winiata. Mr Hursthouse’s adventure in the King Country. Mahuki’s raid on Alexandra, and his capture. The King Country railway. [[7]]
THE OLD FRONTIER
CHAPTER I.
TOPOGRAPHICAL AND LEGENDARY.
For landscape interest conjoined to the traditional and historic I know of no part of New Zealand more attractive than the zone along the old frontier line of the Waipa country of which Te Awamutu may be described as the metropolis to-day. Beauty of physical configuration! fertility of soil, poetic Maori folklore, memories of the heroic pioneer days, tales of sadness and glory of the war years—all these elements combine to invest the border line of the Waipa and the Rohepotae with a singular value, above all to those who have had the fortune to be reared on this well-favoured land. The physiographic charm of the country on the north side of the Puniu and the east side of the Waipa River is produced by the gently-rolling lie of the land with its countless sheltered valleys and its well-sunned slopes, with its leisurely-winding streams, with here and there a small lake; the old Maori garden lands of Te Awamutu, Rangiaowhia, Kihikihi, and Orakau, now covered with pakeha farms and tree-groves, with fat flocks and herds, and wearing all the aspect of a comfortable countryside enriched by the tillage of two generations of white farmers. The south side of the old Aukati line, more recently broken in from the wilderness of fern and tutu, is even more promising as a land of fat stock and good crops, of dairy herds and meat; and it is singularly interesting to the physiographer and the geologist. Pirongia, Kakepuku, the tattooed cone of Kawa, the fort-scarped “Three Sisters” of Tokanui, Tauranga-Kohu and its neighbour hills, the Maunga-tautari Ranges, curve sicklewise along the old-time frontier, a romantically-shaped ceinture of volcanic saliencies which seem to mount guard like giant sentries over the Rohepotae, just as they formed a belt of fiery lava mouths and cones in the remote geological past. Kakepuku, a Ngauruhoe in miniature, is a peak to hold the eye for many a mile. I came to look on that lone mountain with very much the kind of affection in which it is held by the Maori people who live around its base, whose local folklore and poetry enshrine many a reference to Kakepuku. The fair blue hills of boyhood! Once upon a time when we rode in daily from the other side of Kihikihi to school at Te Awamutu the uplift of Kakepuku, [[8]]looming a few miles across the valley to the westward, seemed an enchanted mountain, holding infinite suggestion of mystery and adventure. Pirongia is twice its altitude, building up a noble rugged western skyline, but Kakepuku’s indigo-blue cone, with the crater hollow scooped out of its top, was the peak to capture the imagination. On clear days as we viewed it from the Kihikihi hills every line of the deep ravines which scored its sides stood up as bold and sharp as the singularly scarped terraces of Kawa’s nippled hill. Kakepuku almost seemed shaped and hewn from the landscape by the hands of veritable mountain gods, so regular and symmetrical its outline. Truly a picture mountain. Moreover, it was our weather glass. When Kakepuku put on his fog-cap, and the mists filled the long-dead crater of the volcano and crept down the upper slopes, the countryside knew that rain was at hand. The other mountains, such as Pirongia, might cloud themselves with mist and the sign go unheeded, but Kakepuku’s tohu-ua never failed. Then there is the curious nature-myth which tells how gently-rounded Kawa was Kakepuku’s wife, a story told with much circumstantial detail by the old Maoris of the Waipa and the Puniu, a story over-long to be told here with its tale of battle between the jealous Kakepuku and that mountain Lothario Karewa—now Gannet Island, off Kawhia; one which seems dimly to reveal the geological past of these volcanic peaks.[1]
This singular beauty of landscape setting cannot but enhance the love of one’s native land in those whose lives are cast within sight of the mountains and hills of the border. The Maori loved the country, albeit he made comparatively little use of it, with an intensity which not many pakehas realise. There is a song of Ngati-Maniapoto often chanted in the old days when a fighting column paraded in the village marae before setting out on the warpath. The chief, facing the parade of warriors, uplifted his taiaha and shouted as he pointed to the blue mountain looming near:
Ko whea, ko whea—
Ko whea tera maunga
E tu mai ra ra?
(“What is yonder mountain soaring high above us?”)
And with one voice the warriors yelled, as they burst into the ferocious [[9]]stamp and weapon-thrusting of the tutu-ngarahu or peruperu dance:
’Tis Kakepuku!
’Tis Pirongia!
Ah, ’tis Kakepuku!
Ah, draw close to me,
Draw close to me,
That I may embrace thee,
That I may hold thee to my breast!
A—a—ah!
A similar chant, applying to Mount Egmont, was used by the Taranaki Maoris. In each case the mountain was regarded as a lover, and symbolised nationality and clanship, and a reference to it never failed as a patriotic stimulus.
Now the ancient owners of the Waipa and Puniu plains are but a remnant and their tales and songs are but the faintest memory; but the old volcano-gods remain, graceful nature-carved monuments, and their poetry no less than their beauty of form should inspire even the matter-of-fact pakeha with something of the Maori love and veneration for the high places of the land.
The ancient Maori story of the Waipa plains and downs, as preserved by the word-of-mouth historians, the old men of the tribes, is a record of land-seeking, exploration, and place-naming by the chiefs who came in the Tainui canoe, and by Rakataura the priest; then a succession of tribal feuds and wars, raids, pa-buildings and pa-stormings, ambush, massacre, slave-taking, and man-eating. That warrior tale need not be gone into here; we take up our story of Te Awamutu with the first introduction of the pakeha interest, and in truth the place was savage and rough enough then. Here and there, on the well-settled lands to-day, one finds relics of the old cannibal era, when every tribe’s hand, and often every little hapu’s, was against its neighbours. Round about Te Awamutu, even, the lines of ancient trenched forts remain, particularly on the banks of the Mangapiko, where the numerous crooks and elbows of the river provided pa sites readily made formidable strongholds. The celebrated Waiari, a few miles from Te Awamutu and a mile from Paterangi, is an example. Another excellent specimen of Maori [[10]]military engineering is an old earthwork called Tauwhare, on the Mangapiko, a mile south of Mr Harry Rhodes’ “Parekura” homestead; this is distinguished by a series of enormously deep trenches and high parapets, on the cliffy verge of the river. These forts on the Mangapiko belonged to the Ngati-Apakura tribe. But the King Country, on the south side of the Puniu River, is the land for hill-forts. Every cone, big or little, is trenched and scarped; every eligible river-elbow has its double or triple earthwork. Even on the very top of Mount Kakepuku, crowning the ancient crater rim, are the ruins of two fortresses of the Ngati-Unu tribe.
Te Awamutu was inhabited, when the first pakeha ventured into these parts, by the Ngati-Ruru, a section of the great Waikato tribe. Rangiaowhia was peopled by two other large Waikato clans, Ngati-Apakura and Ngati-Hinetu. Ngati-Maniapoto held all the Puniu country and the land to the southward; their northern outpost was Kihikihi. The Orakau district was held by the Ngati-Raukawa and a hapu of Waikato called Ngati-Koura.
NOTES.
The terms “King Country,” “Rohepotae,” and “Aukati” require a little explanation for those who are unacquainted with the origin of the phrases.
The King Country, embracing a vast area of territory south of the Puniu River and west of the Upper Waikato, with the Tasman Sea as the western boundary, was so called because the Maori King Tawhiao with his adherents took refuge there in 1864 after being dispossessed of Waikato. For some years Tawhiao’s headquarters were at Tokangamutu, close to the site of the present town of Te Kuiti. The name Te Kuiti is an abbreviation of Te Kuititanga, meaning “the narrowing in,” a designation given by the Kingites in reference to the conquest of Waikato and the consequent hemming in of the Maoris in the country south of the Puniu.
“Rohe-potae” means a circular boundary line, literally a boundary resembling a head-covering. The term was applied to the King Country in the early Eighties by Wahanui and his fellow-chiefs, when defining the area within which no pakeha surveys or land-buying or leasing would be permitted.
“Aukati” means a line which may not be passed; a frontier or pale. It was particularly applied by the Kingites to the northern border of the King Country, the Government’s confiscation boundary; pakeha trespass over this line was forbidden. [[11]]
[1] The full name of Kakepuku is Kakepuku-o-Kahurere, or “The Swelled Neck of Kahurere.” It was so named nearly six centuries ago by Rakataura, the priest and magician of the Tainui people. Rakataura and his wife Kahurere explored all this wild new country from Kawhia eastward and southward, giving [[9]]names to the features of the landscape as they travelled. The name alluded to the shape of Kakepuku, but in truth it deserves a more poetical one, as, for example, that of Tauranga-Kohu, “The Resting Place of the Mists,” a beautiful place-description belonging to a mountain a few miles to the eastward on the south side of the Puniu. [↑]
CHAPTER II.
THE MISSIONARY ERA.
It was the Rev. B. Y. Ashwell who chose the site of the mission station at Te Awamutu. This was in 1839. He had made a missionary reconnaissance of Upper Waikato with a view to establishing a station among the savage cannibals of the district, great warriors and apparently irreclaimable man-eaters, and in July of 1839 he returned to Otawhao to carry on the mission. Among Ngati-Ruru there were some who had already gained an inkling of the Rongo-Pai, the Good News, from native teachers, but the majority were pagan. Shortly after his arrival a war party of Ngati-Ruru, who had been away with Ngati-Haua and other tribes raiding the Arawa country, returned from the Maketu and Rotorua districts, under their chiefs Puata and Te Mokorou. The party was laden with human flesh; there were, as Mr Ashwell recorded, sixty pikau or flax baskets packed with the cut-up remains of their slaughtered foes. Then came a fearful feast on cooked man (kai-tangata).
Mr Ashwell induced many of Ngati-Ruru to leave Otawhao and establish a Christian pa, which was built on the ground now occupied by the old mission station and the Church of St. John’s.
Mr Ashwell’s establishment of the mission station at Te Awamutu marked the end of the cannibal wars and the periodical fighting expeditions of Waikato in the Rotorua and Bay of Plenty districts. The grim old warrior Mokorou became a follower of the missionary, and was baptised by the name of Riwai (Levi). Most of the people by this time had become tired of wars; there was a general longing for a more settled state of life and a desire to obtain pakeha commodities other than weapons and munitions of war. So Mr Ashwell soon had large and eager congregations, and his preaching of the Rongo-Pai fell on willing ears.
But it was Mr Ashwell’s successor, the Rev. John Morgan, who truly civilised this Upper Waikato. Mr Ashwell had confined his teachings to the spiritual side. Mr Morgan took a more expansive view of his mission and his responsibilities. He introduced English methods of agriculture, brought in English fruit trees, taught the [[12]]natives to grow wheat, and to grind it in their own water-mills. He it was who by his precepts and personal example made the natives of Te Awamutu, Rangiaowhia, Kihikihi, and Orakau a farming and fruit-growing people, with the result that long before the Waikato War adventurous travellers to this district found to their astonishment a series of eye-delighting oases in the wilds, with great fields of wheat, potatoes, and maize, and dwellings arranged in neat streets and shaded by groves of peach and apple-trees; each settlement with its water-driven flour-mill procured by the community and busily grinding into flour the abundant yield of the cornfields.
Mr John Morgan was a missionary of the London Mission Society, and had had some years’ experience of the hazards of Christianising work on the Waihou, at Matamata, and at Rotorua. He and his brave wife lived in the midst of alarms, and more than once had to abandon their stations. In the most dangerous period of their life at Rotorua they had to take refuge, with the Rev. Thomas Chapman, of Te Ngae, on Mokoia Island, in the middle of the lake. After this sort of missionary pioneering it must have been a vast relief to Mr Morgan to receive orders in 1841 to take over the newly-established station at Te Awamutu. Here he carried on for more than twenty years, the religious teacher and counsellor and technical instructor for half a score of tribes in the Waipa basin. “Te Mokena” was in an infinite variety of ways the benefactor of his Maori flock; never did a missionary take a more liberal view of his duty to the native. In the later troubled days, when the war was looming and it was desirable that the Government authorities should be informed of the exact political conditions among the Maoris, he kept Governor Grey correctly advised of the views and intentions of the Kingites, and so came to be called “the watchman of the Waikato.”
At Wharepapa, the site of a one-time large Maori village on the south side of the Puniu, a few miles from Waikeria, I heard the story of “Mokena” and the “missionary grass.” Here Mr Morgan had a little native church in the days before the war, and on his travels from Te Awamutu through the Maori country he did not confine his sowing of the good seed to the Gospel brand. On his rides from kainga to kainga he took his dog, and to the dog’s neck was tied a little bag filled with English clover-seed and grass-seed, which was allowed to drop out a seed at a time by a tiny hole.
In this way the pioneer missionary scattered seeds of civilisation [[13]]which spread over many a part of this wild countryside. To this day in some of these old villages there is a beautiful sward that goes back to the good parson of Te Awamutu, and to Wharepapa not many years since the natives used to go for the seed of the “mission grass,” esteemed alike by Maori and pakeha for its making of pasture.
“Mokena’s” fame hereabouts rests more, perhaps, on his thoughtful grass-sowing for future generations and on his practical teaching of English agriculture than on his preaching of the Faith to the Ngati-Maniapoto and Ngati-Ruru of the days before the War. [[14]]
CHAPTER III.
PLOUGH AND FLOUR-MILL.
An illuminating account of the growth of agricultural enterprise among these Upper Waikato people and the position about 1850 is contained in an unpublished manuscript journal written by the Rev. John Morgan.[1] The missionary prefaces the narrative of the temporal side of his labours at Te Awamutu with the statement that wheat was introduced among the natives chiefly by the missionaries. The Ven. Archdeacon Williams encouraged its cultivation in his district of Waiapu, East Coast. “It was small in quantity,” said Mr Morgan, “for it was contained in a stocking, but it was sown and re-sown, and at the present time the increase from the little seed contained in a stocking is being sent by the natives to the Auckland market. Much is also ground by the Maoris in steel mills for their own use.
“Shortly after the formation of the Otawhao (Te Awamutu) station,” the missionary’s story continued, “in consequence of the difficulty of obtaining supplies of flour from the coast I procured some seed wheat. After the reaping of the first crop I sent Pungarehu, of Rangiaowhia, a few quarts of seed. This he sowed and reaped. The second year he had a good-sized field. Other natives now desired to share in the benefit, and the applications for seed became so numerous that I could not supply them all, and many obtained seed from Kawhia and Aotea (West Coast), where wheat had been introduced either by the Wesleyan missionaries or the settlers.
“As a large quantity of wheat was now grown at Rangiaowhia, and the natives had not purchased steel mills, I recommended them to erect a water-mill. At the request of Kimi Hori, I went to the millwright who was then building a mill at Aotea. In March, 1846, the millwright arrived, and I drew up a contract for the erection of a mill at a cost of £200, not including the carriage of timber, building of the mill dam, and the formation of the watercourse, all of which were performed by the natives themselves. Seven men [[15]]were set to work, the natives promising to pay the first £50 instalment within a very short time. Instead of leaving immediately for Auckland with pigs to raise the required amount, they began to take up their potatoes and then the kumara to store them for winter use. They then promised to leave for town as soon as the crops were secured. An invitation, however, arrived from Maketu, and the entire tribe left Rangiaowhia to partake of a feast at that place, the millwright threatening to give up the contract. On their return they accepted a second invitation, and went to another distant village. It was with the greatest difficulty that I now detained the millwright. In this manner four months passed away. The millwright demanded compensation for loss of time, and a chief agreed to give him a piece of land of about 200 acres, but for which no Government grant has as yet been made. Still the natives delayed. The required sum (£200) was large for a tribe of New Zealanders to raise. The Aotea mill was now useless, and many feared that this (Rangiaowhia) would also be a failure, and there were several Europeans who had come up to trade in pigs who from interested motives freely gave their opinion that the whole scheme would fail. In this way two months passed away, and it required many personal visits to Rangiaowhia—first, to persuade the millwright, who was several times on the point of leaving, to remain, and, secondly, to urge the natives to take their pigs to town. At length they started. In a few weeks the £50 was raised, and paid into my hands to be paid to the millwright. After this I had no more trouble. The work went forward while the money was being collected, and the last instalment of £50 being paid into my hands, I had the pleasure of handing it to the millwright the day the work was completed.”
This water-driven flour-mill, it may be explained here, was built at Pekapeka-rau, the lower part of the swampy valley between Hairini Hill and Rangiaowhia, through which a watercourse flows toward the Mangapiko. Here a dam was constructed, and a lagoon was formed; the water collected here turned the mill-wheel.
Later, another mill was constructed, on the watercourse called Te Rua-o-Tawhiwhi, on the eastern side of Rangiaowhia village.
Mr Morgan, continuing his story of the new flour-mills, wrote:
“The Rangiaowhia mill was not completed before other tribes became jealous and wished for mills. I drew up two more contracts, one for the erection of a mill at Maunga-tautari, and the other at Otawhao, at the cost respectively of £110 and £120, not including [[16]]native labour. Both of these mills have been erected. A new difficulty now arose at Rangiaowhia, that of finding a miller to take charge of the mill. In the arrangement I experienced more vexations and difficulty than in the erection of the mills. There was a person ready to take charge, but the natives, not knowing the value of European labour, refused to give him a proper remuneration. One old chief offered one quart of wheat per day! At length, after two months, this knotty point was settled. On the following day the miller commenced work. In the year 1848 the natives of Rangiaowhia took down some flour to Auckland, which they sold for about £70. The neighbouring tribes, seeing the benefit likely to arise from the erection of mills, began earnestly to desire them. One was contracted for at Kawhia, and the sum of about £315 has been paid on account. About 1850 a contract was entered into for the erection at Mohoaonui [near Otorohanga], on the Waipa, of the largest mill yet built, at a cost of £300. The natives of Kawhia are anxious for the erection of a second mill, and the natives at Whatawhata and two other villages on the Waipa, and of Kirikiriroa and Maungapa, on the Waikato, and also Matamata, propose to erect mills; at several of these places the funds are being collected.
THE OLD MISSION CHURCHES
ST. JOHN’S CHURCH, TE AWAMUTU
W. Beattie, Photo.
THE ENGLISH CHURCH AT RANGIAOWHIA
“Wheat is very extensively grown in the Waikato district. At Rangiaowhia the wheat fields cover about 450 acres of land. I have also introduced barley and oats at that place. Many of the people at various villages are now forming orchards, and they possess many hundreds of trees budded or grafted by themselves, consisting of peach, apple, pear, plum, quince, and almond; also gooseberry bushes in abundance. For flowers or ornamental trees they have no taste; as they do not bear fruit, it is, in their opinion, loss of time to cultivate them.”
The missionary, concluding his interesting narrative, described a visit paid to the district by Sir George Grey, Governor.
“His Excellency,” wrote the missionary, “spent half a day at Rangiaowhia, and expressed himself much pleased with the progress of the natives at that place. He visited the mill, which was working at the time. Two bags of flour were presented to him for Her Majesty the Queen, and they have since been forwarded to London. The Governor has since that time presented the Rangiaowhia natives with a pair of fine horses, a dray and harness, and a plough and harness. He also requested me to engage a farm servant to instruct [[17]]the natives in the use of the plough, etc.[2] The value of the flour sent down this year from Rangiaowhia and now ready for the Auckland market may be estimated at about £330. Of this sum upward of £240 was, or will be, spent in the purchase of horses, drays, and ploughs. Each little tribe is now endeavouring to procure a plough and a pair of horses, and the people expect during the next year to have at least ten ploughs at work. The rapid advancement in cultivation is the fruit of Sir George Grey’s kind present to introduce the plough at those places. One of the chiefs at Rangiaowhia has erected a small boarded house. He has also several cows, one of which he generally milks in the morning.”
* * *
Such is the story of the very practical missionary work in this district. “Te Mokena” truly tamed the people; old cannibals followed the plough and spent days in discussing the Auckland market prices of wheat and flour. Distant white communities, too, came to depend largely on the Maori farmers of the Upper Waikato for their breadstuffs; and when the great gold rushes began in California and Victoria, in 1849–52, the cargoes of New Zealand produce sent to far-away San Francisco and to Melbourne often contained shipments from Rangiaowhia and other Maori farm-villages.
From a photo., 1906]
THE RIGHT HON. SIR JOHN E GORST
(Died 1916)
[[18]]
[1] MS. journal lent to the writer by Mr E. Earle Vaile, of Broadlands, Waiotapu. [↑]
[2] The old man Pou-patate Huihi, of Te Kopua, told the writer: “Before we procured European ploughs we made wooden ones, and these were sometimes drawn by men—Ko te tangata te hoiho tuatahi (Man was the first horse).”
Pou-patate also said that when wheat-growing was at its height on the Waipa, before the war, his people received as much as ten or eleven shillings a bushel for the wheat in the Auckland market. [↑]
CHAPTER IV.
THE GOLDEN AGE BEFORE THE WAR.
The period from about 1845 to 1860 was the era of peaceful progress and industry among Waikato and Ngati-Maniapoto. It was not until the latter year that the outbreak of the Taranaki War, the forerunner of that in Waikato, interrupted the new and profitable era of wheat-growing and flour-milling and the pleasures of the annual canoeing expeditions down the Waipa and Waikato to the city markets.
These farm-settlements of Morgan’s making were in what may be called their zenith of prosperity in the year 1852, when prices for produce were high. In February of that year a visit was paid to Te Awamutu and Rangiaowhia by a party of travellers from Auckland and Onehunga, among whom was young Heywood Crispe, later a well-known Mauku settler and volunteer rifleman. Describing long afterwards this memorable Waikato expedition, Mr Crispe said, after narrating that the canoe voyage ended at Te Rore, on the Waipa:
“I can well remember the first sight we got in the distance of the steeple of the church at the Rev. Mr Morgan’s mission station at Te Awamutu, for some of the party were getting a bit tired when it came into sight, and it seemed to put new life into them. The natives at Rangiaowhia had made preparations for a goodly party, as they had two days’ racing in hand. They allotted to us a large, newly-erected whare, the floor being covered with native mats, and it was on them that we indulged in sweet sleep. There was a line of whares erected on the crown of Rangiaowhia Hill, from which we could obtain a fine view of the surrounding country, and it all had a grand appearance in our eyes. There was a long grove of large peach trees and very fine fruit on them. Such a waste of fruit it seemed to us, but of course they were of no value there. One never sees such trees of peaches now. We, the Europeans, must be the cause by the importation of pests from other countries. A large portion of the ground round the hill was carrying a very good crop of wheat, for the Maoris believed in that as a crop, and they used to convert it into flour at the various flour-mills they had. It was of a very good quality, and some of the Waikato mills had a name for [[19]]the flour they produced, a good deal of which was put on the Auckland market, being taken down the Waikato, via Waiuku and Onehunga. It had taken our canoe party about three weeks to reach this, our journey’s end, but there was no iron horse then by which to make a rapid journey. Now it is only part of a day’s journey to get to the same spot.
“We spent several days in our camp on the Rangiaowhia Hill, taking walks and viewing the country. We attended the races, which afforded some good sport, all being managed by the natives, assisted by some pakeha-Maoris of the neighbourhood. They were white men living a Maori life. Some of them had been well-brought-up young men, rather wild perhaps, who had drifted away from home and had taken up an idle life among the natives, getting regular remittances from their people at Home.
“The Maoris provided all their pakeha friends with a most excellent meal on the ground, and peaches galore, as well as horses to ride. We rode some distance round to view the country, the Maori flour-mills, and cultivation. There were a lot of good cattle and horses about, and the crops of wheat and patches of potatoes were particularly good, although no bonedust was used in those days. The Roman Catholics had a very nice place of worship at Rangiaowhia, where regular worship was conducted. There were mission stations all up the Waikato and Waipa Rivers in those days, and as far as Te Awamutu.”
Everywhere the Maoris of those days showed the travellers on their six weeks’ trip the greatest hospitality. On the canoe voyage the pakehas called in here and there at native settlements and got a supply of pork, potatoes, and peaches.
When the aged Potatau te Wherowhero was made Maori King (1858) there were great gatherings at Ngaruawahia and Rangiaowhia. At the latter place the Europeans in the district—the mission people, the traders, and artisans—were invited to the festivities. The abundance of food at Rangiaowhia was probably the reason why that large village of Ngati-Apakura was selected as one of the principal gathering places of the Waikato in 1858–60. Rangiaowhia in those days was a beautiful place, with its comfortable thatched houses, shaded by groves of peach and apple trees, dotted along the crown of a gently-sloping hill, among the fields of wheat, maize, potatoes, and kumara, and its flour-mills in the valley. On the most commanding mound was the Roman Catholic Church in front of [[20]]Hoani Papita’s home; a few hundred yards to the south was the English Church, locally greatly admired because of its large stained-glass window, sent out from England by Bishop Selwyn. The Maori congregations have vanished long ago, and the pre-war wharekarakia are used by the white settlers.
A pioneer colonist, Mrs B. A. Crispe, widow of the late Heywood Crispe, the only survivor of the Europeans who witnessed the gathering, recalls some of the scenes in the Rangiaowhia of 1858, when she was a girl at school at Mr Morgan’s mission station at Te Awamutu. She describes the venerable Potatau as a feeble old man with his face completely tattooed; he wore a long black coat and a dark cloth cap with a gold band round it.
Mrs Crispe has memories of the Upper Waikato district as it was toward the end of the Fifties, before the Kingite war had destroyed the prosperous agricultural life of the Maoris, who then constituted the whole population of the interior with the exception of a few missionaries and their families and several traders and other pakeha-Maoris. Mrs Crispe, who was the daughter of Mr Mellsop, a pioneer settler of the Mauku district, was taken up by her father to the Rev. John Morgan’s mission station at Te Awamutu—in those days usually called Otawhao, after the old pa. She was then a young girl, and she was placed with the Morgans to be educated; schooling for children was a difficult problem with the back-blocks settlers in those days. All communication with the Waikato and Waipa country was carried on by canoe, for there were no roads into the interior until the troops opened up the country in the Waikato War. In about 1858 the Mellsops embarked at Waiuku and passed through the narrow and crooked Awaroa Creek in kopapa, or small canoes, the only craft which could navigate this stream, connecting the Manukau harbour with the Waikato River. In the Waikato they transferred to a large canoe, about sixty feet long, well loaded with goods from Auckland for the mission station and the Maori settlements. Their Maori crew paddled them up to Te Rore, on the Waipa; the voyage occupied three days. Two nights were spent in camp on the Waikato banks; the third day was spent in working up the Waipa River from its junction with the Waikato at Ngaruawahia. From Te Rore the party rode across the plain to Te Awamutu. Here Mrs Crispe spent two years at school.
The farming missionary had succeeded in giving the wilds of Te Awamutu a thoroughly settled and home-like appearance, with [[21]]wheat fields enclosed by hedges of hawthorn. The wheat grown by the natives in the Rangiaowhia-Te Awamutu district was ground at the mills, bagged, and sent down to the white settlements for sale. The flour-bags were sewn by the native girls in Mrs Morgan’s sewing class at the mission boarding school; and when the flour was being ground there would be sewing-bees at the mills, where the girls stitched up the bags as they were filled. The flour was carted in bullock drays to Te Rore, where it was loaded into canoes. The cargoes were paddled down the Waipa and Waikato, along the Awaroa to Waiuku, there loaded into a cutter for Onehunga, and finally carted across the isthmus to Auckland town, a journey of over a hundred miles from the Rangiaowhia water-mills. The Maoris would invest the proceeds in clothes, blankets, tea, sugar, and all kinds of European goods, and then begin their homeward journey. Time was no object in those golden years, and a marketing party from Rangiaowhia and Te Awamutu would sometimes spend several weeks on the trip, returning with pakeha commodities to delight the hearts of their families and endless tales of all the sights they had seen in the distant town.
An incident of the visits to Rangiaowhia over sixty years ago is recalled by Mrs Crispe. She and the Morgan girls noticed a peach tree loaded with great white korako in an enclosure near the English Church, and presently they were enjoying a feast of fruit. A Maori woman came up to them in great alarm and told them that they must not touch the peaches; the tree was tapu, and she was afraid that the fruit would kill them as it assuredly would have killed any Maori who ate it. It often happened that the choicest fruit trees were under the ban of tapu for some reason, such as the recent death of the owner.
In front of Mr Morgan’s mission house at Te Awamutu there was a row of almond trees. These almonds—so seldom seen in a New Zealand orchard now—were widely distributed among the natives; hence the remarkably large trees, up to about thirty feet in height, which grew on the old Maori cultivations at Orakau and elsewhere, and survived long after the land had been confiscated by the Crown and settled by white farmers.
Dr Ferdinand von Hochstetter, the famous Austrian geologist, on his expedition through the interior of the North Island in 1859, admired the settled aspect of Te Awamutu and the neighbouring country. He made an ascent of Mount Kakepuku, setting out from [[22]]the Rev. Alexander Reid’s Wesleyan mission station at Te Kopua, and from the summit viewed the valley of the Waipa: “The beautiful, richly-cultivated country about Rangiaowhia and Otawhao lay spread out before us like a map. I counted ten small lakes and ponds scattered about the plains. The church steeples of three places were seen rising from among orchards and fields. Verily I could hardly realise that I was in the interior of New Zealand.”
Now the scene has vastly changed. A far more richly-cultivated country than that which the wandering geologist saw in 1859 stretches in all directions, and the railway engine trails the smoke-banner of the pakeha past Kakepuku’s foot, between him and his hill-wife Kawa. But some relics of Hochstetter’s day remain. The picture-like spires of the English mission church at Te Awamutu and the English and Roman Catholic Churches at Rangiaowhia still rise above the tree-groves, heaven-pointing fingers that carry a suggestion of antiquity all too rare in man’s work in New Zealand. [[23]]
CHAPTER V.
JOHN GORST AT TE AWAMUTU.
The determination of the Maori tribes to establish a King was not in the beginning hostile to the white Government. On the contrary, Wiremu Tamehana, of Ngati-Haua, a man of lofty ideals and altogether admirable character, continually emphasised the fact that the kingdom must be on a footing of friendship with the pakeha; it was simply to govern the Maoris within their own district and to ensure a measure of peace and order which the Queen’s Government could not maintain. The King movement was originated in 1851–52 by Tamehana te Rauparaha—son of the great Rauparaha—who had been on a voyage to England and returned with ideas for the betterment of his race, and by Matene te Whiwhi, of Otaki. The difficulty was to select a suitable chief as King, and one man after another declined the honour, until at last Matene and his fellow-chiefs persuaded the aged warrior Potatau te Wherowhero, of Waikato, to take the position. Potatau, like Tawhiao his son after him, was merely a figurehead; the destinies of the native confederation were decided by the runangas or tribal councils at Ngaruawahia and Kihikihi. Tawhiao succeeded Potatau on the latter’s death in 1860.
A variety of elements, social and political, combined to produce a war feeling in Waikato. Iwikau te Heuheu, of Taupo, on his way to a great Waikato meeting in 1857, stayed at the mission station and gave Mr Morgan his reasons for supporting the King. He contrasted the uncouth and inhospitable treatment of Maori chiefs when visiting the towns with the kindness shown by the Maoris to even the lowest grade of pakeha who came to their settlements. Tamehana pointed to the inability of the Government to preserve peace and order among the tribes; this could only be done by means of a native king, and he quoted Scripture and modern history in support of his argument. The blundering of the Government in offering civil institutions and then withdrawing them without a fair trial, the construction of the military road from Drury to the Mangatawhiri River, and finally the heavy losses of the Ngati-Haua and Ngati-Maniapoto in the Taranaki War had a cumulative effect in hastening the outbreak in Waikato. It was when this feeling [[24]]was simmering in the Waikato that Mr John Gorst—as he was then—was induced by the Government to undertake the difficult task of staying the growing tide of anti-pakeha agitation and of diverting the energies of the Kingite tribes to peaceful industries and crafts. He came several years too late. The institutions and the measure of home rule which Sir George Grey offered to the Kingites in 1863 only to have them rejected would have met with a cordial acceptance had they been put forward five or six years previously. But Grey was in South Africa then, and his predecessor, Governor Gore-Browne, and his advisers went from blunder to blunder in their determination to stifle the natives’ legitimate desire for local self-government.
Mr John Gorst arrived at Auckland from England in 1860, and, being a young man of brilliant University attainments, he attracted the attention and friendship of Bishop Selwyn, Sir George Grey, and other notable people of the day. It was Mr (afterwards Sir William) Fox, then Premier of the Colony, who determined to establish him as resident magistrate in the Upper Waikato, and a house was procured for him at Te Tomo, about half a mile from the centre of the present town of Te Awamutu. (Te Tomo is now marked by an acacia grove in a field south of Te Awamutu, near the Kihikihi Road.) This establishment was built on thirty acres of grass land which had been sold to the Crown many years before the war began. Here Mr Gorst set up his home in the beginning of 1861; later he removed to the mission house opposite the church.
During the first part of his residence in Te Awamutu district Mr Gorst was a magistrate and a kind of intelligence officer for the Government. During the latter part he was styled Commissioner of Upper Waikato, and lived at the mission station in charge of a technical school and hospital. In the early period, as Gorst narrated in after years, he was rather the officer of Mr Fox’s Ministry than of the Government. He was a magistrate, but as a matter of fact his jurisdiction was derided by the Maoris, and he found none except a few pakehas to obey him. “The Maori from the first,” he said, “refused to consent to my exercising any kind of authority among them.” Even his great friend Wiremu Tamehana, though anxious to receive advice and instruction, objected to the admission into the Kingite district of a magistrate who received his authority from the Queen. [[25]]
In 1862–63 Mr Gorst was rather the officer of Sir George Grey than of the Ministry (then Mr Domett’s). The Church Mission estate of about 200 acres, with school buildings and dwelling-house, was lent to the Governor for Maori educational purposes. Describing the establishment then formed, Gorst wrote:
“Everyone in the school was clothed, lodged, and fed in plain but wholesome and civilised style. Clothes and bedding were regularly inspected and kept scrupulously clean. A schoolmaster was appointed, who taught reading, writing, and arithmetic to all, and besides this each young man was employed for five hours daily in one of the various mechanical trades carried out within the school. Thus each had an opportunity, not only of acquiring a sound elementary education, but of fitting himself to gain a livelihood by practising some handicraft taught at the school. The trades carried on were those of carpenter, blacksmith, wheelwright, shoemaker, tailor, and, later on, printer. A few were employed in agriculture and in tending cattle and sheep upon the school estate, some as regular occupations and others as an occasional change from indoor employment. English artisans employed as teachers were chiefly men who had been living in the neighbourhood and were familiar with the Maoris and their language. Most had previously been exercising their trades for the benefit of the district, and the only difference was that they were now more systematically at work and were instructing native apprentices. The Maoris of the district had therefore to resort to the Government establishment for the repair of their ploughs and carts and for their shoes and clothes. The demand for all these services was far greater than the supply, so there was a prospect of being able to supply a great number of Maori apprentices in every department with certain profit. Even Rewi and Tamehana themselves visited the school. The latter extended his patronage so far as to be measured for a pair of trousers, for which he paid £1 in advance, but Te Oriori intercepted them on their way to Matamata, and was so charmed with the fit that he refused to part with them, and told Tamehana he would agree to take them as a present.”
The school establishment certainly did very useful work, and thus far was appreciated by the Maoris; but they could never forget that Gorst was a Government official.
W. Beattie, Photo.]
THE LAST CANOE VOYAGE
Sir John Gorst and party in the “Tangi-te-Kiwi” at Ngaruawahia, December 6th, 1906.
THE REV. B. Y. ASHWELL’S MISSION STATION, KAITOTEHE, WAIKATO RIVER
The site of this pre-war mission station was on the left bank of the Waikato, opposite Taupiri. This picture is a sketch made shortly before the war in 1863, by Lieut. (afterwards Colonel) H. S. Bates of the 65th Regiment, who was an A.D.C. to Sir George Grey and Staff Interpreter to General Cameron. Governor Grey’s camp, on one of his Waikato expeditions, is shown on the river bank (see Note in Appendices, p. 103).
It was presently decided by the Government that a native hospital should be erected on an area of Crown land about three-quarters [[26]]of a mile from Te Awamutu. The position of Medical Commissioner of the Waikato was offered to and accepted by the Rev. A. Purchas, of Onehunga. At the same time Sir George Grey sanctioned the establishment of a Maori newspaper to reply to the “Hokioi,” the Kingite print issued at Ngaruawahia. Mr E. J. von Dadelszen[1] (afterwards Registrar-General of New Zealand) was appointed printer; he had learned the trade on Bishop Selwyn’s printing-press in Auckland.
A press and type were bought in Sydney, and set up in Te Awamutu early in 1863. This was the beginning of the end for Mr Gorst’s establishment.
The Government Maori newspaper was called “Te Pihoihoi Mokemoke i Runga i te Tuanui” (“The Lonely Lark on the House-top”—the Maori having no word for sparrow), and it set about briskly replying to the Kingite propaganda of “Te Hokioi e Rere Atu Na” (“The Soaring War Bird”), which was edited and printed by Patara te Tuhi, afterwards a great friend of Sir John Gorst. The first number of the “Pihoihoi” was published at Te Awamutu on 2nd February, 1863, and was widely distributed over Waikato, arousing intense interest among the Kingites.
The “copy” for the first issue was revised by Sir George Grey himself, and was published under his authority. It contained an article which greatly excited the resentment of Rewi and the more truculent section of the Kingite natives. The article was entitled, “The Evil of the King Movement,” and it criticised a letter from King Tawhiao—or Matutaera (Methusaleh), as he was then generally known—to the Governor, dated 8th December, 1862, which had been printed in the “Hokioi,” and which inquired what evil had been done by the King and on what account he was blamed. The “Pihoihoi” gave an answer to these inquiries from the pakeha Government point of view; Gorst’s leader was translated into forceful and idiomatic Maori by Miss Ashwell, daughter of the missionary at Kaitotehe, opposite Taupiri. The strong criticism of the Kingite aspirations quickly provoked action among Mr Gorst’s neighbours, who asked, “Why is this troublesome printing-press allowed in our midst?” Only five numbers of the “Pihoihoi” were printed before the indignant Rewi intervened with his war-party.
The coup planned by Ngati-Maniapoto in the tribal council-house “Hui-te-Rangiora” at Kihikihi was executed on 24th March, [[27]]1863. A war-party of eighty men and lads, most of them armed with guns, marched into Te Awamutu that afternoon, led by Aporo Taratutu, and accompanied by Rewi Maniapoto, and also by the old Taranaki chief Wiremu Kingi te Rangitaake. (The unjustifiable seizure of Kingi’s land at Waitara by the Government had been the cause of the first Taranaki War.) Rewi and Wiremu Kingi remained at Porokoru’s house, which stood in the middle of the present town of Te Awamutu, while Aporo led his taua down to the mission station, halted them there, and had prayers by way of sanctifying the afternoon’s operations. Young von Dadelszen and a Maori youth were busy at the time in the little printing-office printing the fifth number of the “Pihoihoi Mokemoke.” Mr Gorst was absent; he had ridden over to the mission station at Te Kopua, on the Waipa, to inquire about some bullocks which were being purchased for the Government station. A report had reached him that a taua from Kihikihi would visit Te Awamutu that day, but he treated it as an idle rumour.
The actions of Ngati-Maniapoto are described by Mr von Dadelszen in the following report which Mr Gorst sent to Sir George Grey with his own account of the breaking-up of the station:
“About 3 o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, 24th March, while the newspapers for that day were being printed, a number of natives arrived, about 50 of them armed with guns, and the remainder with native weapons, and stationed themselves in front of the printing-office. I locked the door before their faces, put the key in my pocket, and went a little distance off. After a short prayer, they broke the door open, and proceeded to take the press down, and carry it outside to some drays they had there. While they were doing this, Patene, the Ngaruawahia chief, arrived, and partly succeeded in stopping them, turning about six out of the printing-office (it being then quite full of natives). After some time, however, he came away, and the work went on. Everything connected with the printing was taken away, together with a port-manteau belonging to Mr Mainwaring, and a box containing some of my clothes. When all was gone, they stationed sentinels at the door, and allowed no one inside. Before breaking open the door they had a scuffle with the native teacher, who placed himself before it, and was dragged away after some resistance. They also broke down about twenty yards of the fence between the printing-office and the road. They camped all round the house, but about 6 o’clock [[28]]allowed us to enter and take our clothes from the little bedroom at the back. They did not attempt to touch anything in the main building. In the evening they stationed their soldiers all round the house. About 8 o’clock, Mr Gorst, Mr White, and Mr Mainwaring arrived. There was some talk of setting fire to the place, and one or two fire-sticks were brought, but they determined not to do it in the end. A good many guns were loaded with ball, but none fired. A great many slept in the printing-office that night. During the remainder of the afternoon, Taati, Patene, and Te Oriori on one side, and the leaders of the soldiers on the other, talked a great deal in the road. William King [Wiremu Kingi], Rewi, and a few others stayed some distance off, and gave their orders from there. The mail box, etc., were also taken, with the mail money.—E. J. von Dadelszen.”
The printing-press, the Kingites’ bete noir, was carried out, with all the type, reams of paper, and printed copies of the fifth number of the “Pihoihoi,” and the whole plant was loaded on to bullock drays and carted off to Kihikihi. Nothing else, however, was taken; some private belongings, such as boxes of clothes, were scrupulously returned as soon as it was discovered that they were not part of the printing plant. Then the leader of the war-party surrounded the mission buildings with a cordon of sentries, and awaited Mr Gorst’s return. The Maoris camped on the road and in the adjacent field opposite the church, and their watch-fires blazed as evening came down.
Mr Gorst rode in after dark, and was permitted to pass unmolested. A message was sent in to him that if he refused to go away in the morning he would be shot. Resistance was impossible, for although the youths in the school establishment declared that they would stand by “Te Kohi” there were no arms, and in any case a conflict could only have ended in the victory of Rewi’s veterans of the Taranaki war and in the slaughter of the Government people.
Next morning there were scenes of intense excitement on the gathering road between the mission station and the church where the present main road runs. Mr Gorst was ordered to depart. He replied that nothing would induce him to leave his post but orders from the Governor. Rewi for his part declared that he and his men would not stir from the spot until his object was accomplished. [[29]]
Presently, through the intervention of the Rev. A. Reid, the Wesleyan missionary at Te Kopua, Rewi, at a personal interview with Mr Gorst, agreed to withdraw his men and give the Commissioner three weeks in which to communicate with Sir George Grey. Rewi then in a speech gave his reasons for raiding the station. The Governor, he said, had shown himself hostile to the Maori King movement, and had been ceaseless in his machinations against the confederation of the tribes. Sir George Grey had begun to make a military road to the Waikato, and finally at Taupiri he had made a speech in which he said he “would dig around the King until he fell.” They looked round to see where the spades were at work, and they saw “Te Kohi”; they were resolved to have no digging of that kind in Waikato, and so they had determined to remove him from the land of the Maori.
Rewi then, at Mr Gorst’s invitation, went into the house and wrote the following letter for transmission to the Governor:
(Translation.)
“Te Awamutu,
“March 25, 1863.“Friend Governor Grey:
“Greeting. This is my word to you. Mr Gorst has been killed [has suffered] through me. I have taken away the press. These are my men who took it—eighty, armed with guns. The object of this is to expel Mr Gorst, so that he may return to town; it is on account of the great trouble occasioned by his being sent here to stay and beguile us, and also on account of your words, ‘I shall dig at the sides, and your kingdom will fall.’ Friend, take Mr Gorst back to the town; do not leave him to stay with me at Te Awamutu. Enough; if you say he is to stay, he will die. Enough; send speedily your letter to fetch him in three weeks. It is ended.
“From your friend,
“From REWI MANIAPOTO.”
Mr Gorst also wrote a letter, informing Sir George Grey of the occurrences, and saying that the natives had beaten him utterly, and that Rewi said if the Governor left him it would be to certain death. The letters were sent off to the Governor, who was then in Taranaki. While an answer was awaited, Wiremu Tamehana came to see Mr Gorst, and sorrowfully told him that he and others of the friendly-disposed party could not protect him now. The Governor did not answer Rewi’s letter, but sent instructions to Mr Gorst that in the event of there being any danger whatever to life he was to return at once to Auckland, with the other Europeans in the employment of the Government.
As the Upper Waikato was now inflamed with the war feeling, [[30]]Mr Gorst realised that the evacuation of Te Awamutu was the only possible course. He left the station on 18th April, 1863. It was more than forty years before he set eyes again on the olden scene of his labours for the Maori.
The after-history of the “Pihoihoi Mokemoke” press has been cleared up by dint of many inquiries. Practically the whole of the plant was restored to the Government after Mr Gorst’s departure. It was placed in a canoe and taken down the Waipa and Waikato to Te Iaroa, just below the mouth of the Mangatawhiri River, near Mercer; there Mr Andrew Kay—later of Orakau—had a trading store. The press and other material were handed over to Mr Kay, who sent word to the Government, and carts were sent to take it to Auckland. The press was afterwards used for a time in printing the Government “Gazette.” A legend gained currency, and was repeated by writer after writer, each copying his equally ill-informed predecessor, that the Kingites melted the type into bullets to use in the war. The fact, however, is that the plant was returned to the Government very nearly complete. Sir John Gorst told me (1906) that some of Rewi’s young men helped themselves to a little of the type as curiosities, but there could have been very little missing in that way. As for the “Hokioi” press, the Ngati-Maniapoto informed me that it was taken up from Ngaruawahia to Te Kopua for safe-keeping when the war began, and there it was lying, rusted and broken, when I last heard of it; some of the scattered type was now and again ploughed up on the bank of the Waipa.
Sir John Gorst, re-visiting New Zealand after forty-three years, set foot once more in Te Awamutu on 3rd December, 1906, and renewed his acquaintance with some of his old native pupils and travelled over the old familiar ground. He was welcomed with immense enthusiasm by pakeha and Maori alike, and there was a peculiarly pathetic touch in the speeches made by the few Maori survivors of the old regime in Waikato. Sir John, with Miss Gorst, visited Captain D. Bockett, one of the original military settlers of Rangiaowhia, who occupied the historic mission-house. He went through the old buildings and the well-remembered church. Then, with a large party, he visited Mr Andrew Kay at his farm at Otautahanga, and talked over the old Waikato days; and on the day’s drive passed over the battlefields of Hairini, Rangiaowhia, and Orakau. At a great gathering at Te Awamutu to welcome “Te [[31]]Kohi” one of the speakers was the veteran Tupotahi, one of the heroes of the Orakau defence; he had been a member of Aporo’s war-party which invaded the Government station in 1863. Ngati-Maniapoto greeted with a quite extraordinary enthusiasm the distinguished manuhiri whom they had driven from their midst in the days of the racial quarrels, now happily buried for ever.
There was more than a touch of the poetic in the farewell to “Te Kohi” and his daughter at the railway station, Te Awamutu, when the venerable man bade good-bye for ever to his friends old and new. Two pretty native girls, Victoria and Ngahuia Kahu Hughes, daughters of William Hughes, of Kakepuku—one of Mr Gorst’s old pupils at the mission station before the debacle of 1863—stood hand-in-hand on the platform and sang very sweetly this parting waiata:
Hoki hoki tonu mai
Te wairua a Te Kohi.
Kia awhi-reinga
Ki tenei kiri—ee—ii!
Ka huri koe i Te Awamutu
Ka tahuri whakamuri;
Mokemoke rere a te aroha—ee—ii!
Ka eke ki tereina,
Ka tahuri whakamuri;
Mokemoke te rere a te auahi—ee—ii!
Ka pinea korua
Ki te pine o te aroha,
Ki te pine e kore nei e waikura—ee—ii!
(Translation.)
Return, return, the spirit of Te Kohi,
To greet me once again
In the shadowy land of dreams.
When you look your last on Te Awamutu
Send back your love to us,
To the lonely ones you ne’er will see again!
And as the railway bears you far away,
O backward turn your gaze;
Like the smoke that backward drifts—ah, me!
Farewell, a fond farewell!
We will pin you both to our hearts
With the pin of love,
The pin that will never rust!
It was a pathetic little song with something of the sentiment breathed in Tom Moore’s beautiful old Irish melody: [[32]]
As slow our ship her foamy track
Against the wind was cleaving,
Her trembling pennant still looked back
To that dear isle ‘twas leaving.
So loth we part from all we love,
From all the links that bind us;
So turn our hearts, where’er we rove,
To those we’ve left behind us.
THE LAST CANOE VOYAGE.
Of a picturesque quality, too, was “Te Kohi’s” passage to Auckland down the Waikato River. It had been arranged with Mahuta, the King of Waikato—son of Tawhiao—that Sir John should be taken down the river from Ngaruawahia to Waahi, near Huntly, by Maori canoe, passing the scenes once familiar to him in his before-the-war journeyings and reviving memories of the primitive old days. Ngaruawahia in his era in the Waikato was the capital of the Maori King, and no craft but dug-out canoes floated on the great river. It was a glorious summer morning when Sir John Gorst and his daughter and their party embarked at the green delta in a fine, roomy, white-pine canoe, the “Tangi-te-Kiwi,” 70 feet in length, with a crew of fifteen Maori paddlers, for the voyage down the Waikato to Waahi. The sun drove away the early mists, and the bush-clad range of the Hakarimata “stood up and took the morning,” high above the willows that fringed the low banks of the shining river. Down the long curving reaches the big waka swept with the powerful current aiding the paddles, and the canoe captain, old Hori te Ngongo, standing amidships, gave the time to his crew with voice and gesture, now and again breaking into a high chanted song of the ancient days. One of Hori’s songs was peculiarly appropriate, for it had been composed in 1863 with special reference to Gorst and the Mangatawhiri River, the frontier line of those days. Thus chanted old Hori, the kai-hau-tu, in a long-drawn high song to which the paddlers kept time as they dipped and lifted their blades:
Koia e Te Kohi,
Purua i Mangatawhiri,
Kia puta ai ona pokohiwi,
Kia whato tou
E hi na wa!
In this waiata the Commissioner of Waikato was requested to [[33]]“plug up” the boundary river between pakeha and Maori lands and make it a close frontier, and thus prevent the King’s followers passing below its mouth to trade in Auckland, so that presently, for want of European clothing, their naked bodies might be seen protruding from their scanty native garments.
Now and again as the “Tangi-te-Kiwi” approached a native hamlet on the west bank of the river the crew would redouble their strokes and the captain would chant in a louder, wilder key the old-time song for “Te Kohi,” and from the village women would come a shrill reply and long, wailing cries of “Haere-mai! Haere mai!” The canoe swept past the sites of the old mission station and mission schools at Hopuhopu and at Kaitotehe (opposite Taupiri)—the latter was Mr Ashwell’s station before the war—and Sir John’s eyes lingered with a pathetic interest on the scenes he knew in 1861–63 until a change of course or bend in the river hid them from his view.
| COLONEL WADDY, C.B., 50th Regiment (This veteran soldier was affectionately called by his men “Old Daddy.”) | CAPTAIN H. C. RYDER (Capt. H. C. Ryder, father of Col. H. R. Ryder of Te Awamutu, was paymaster of the 40th Regiment and was stationed at Te Awamutu, 1863–7) |
| SIR GEORGE GREY (From a photograph about 1860) | GEORGE AUGUSTUS SELWYN (First Bishop of New Zealand) |
High-peaked Taupiri, beloved of the old-time Maori, tapu and legend-haunted, was passed on the right; and then, as the canoe glided down the broad, glimmering reach, willow-walled, toward Huntly town, we saw another long Maori waka appear in the distance ahead, its two rows of paddles flashing in the sun with beautiful regularity. In a few moments the two canoes met. The stranger was the royal canoe, “Te Wao-nui-a Tane” (“The Great Forest of Tane”—the Maori god of the woods), which had been sent up by Mahuta to meet Sir John Gorst’s canoe, challenge us in true Maori style, and escort us down to the meeting-place at Waahi. A splendid picture the “Wao-nui-a Tane” made as she swept up under the strong strokes of twenty-six paddlers, all stripped to the waist, their brown shoulders bowing and rising as one. Amidships stood a red-capped captain, the chief Te Paki, giving the time to his crew and chanting the old war-time songs. The crew were all picked men of the Ngati-Whawhakia tribe of Waahi, the best canoe-men on the Waikato. The canoe itself was about 70 feet in length, like our waka, the “Tangi-te-Kiwi.” As the King’s canoe came alongside, Miss Gorst and the Minister of the Crown (the Hon. George Fowlds) who accompanied the Dominion’s guests were transferred to her, and away down the glistening river shot the “Wao-nui-a Tane,” easily distancing our canoe. Down the river she flashed at racing speed, her paddles glinting like wet wings in the sun. Ngati-Whawhakia gave an exhibition of faultless time [[34]]and paddling that day as they swept down far ahead of us to Waahi, their old kai-hau-tu yelling himself hoarse with his boat-songs. It was a perfect picture of old Maoridom revived, bringing once more to the honoured guest’s mind the romantic and adventurous scenes in the days before the war, when hundreds of canoes, large and small, made lively this noble waterway; the days before ever a pakeha steamboat’s paddle-wheel startled the Waikato.
And after the great welcome chants of the powhiri at the crowded marae of Waahi, “Te Kohi” gripped hands once again with the venerable and benevolent-looking veteran Patara te Tuhi, the chivalrous Kingite who edited and printed the “Hokioi” at Ngaruawahia in the Sixties, and who, when Mr Gorst had been ejected from Te Awamutu, gave him shelter one night—the ironical humour of fate!—in the raupo-thatched printing-office of the rebel “War Bird.” [[35]]
[1] Died in Wellington, 1922. [↑]
CHAPTER VI.
THE WAIKATO WAR.
We broke a King and we built a road—
A courthouse stands where the reg’ment goed,
And the river’s clean where the raw blood flowed,
When the Widow give the party.
—“Barrack-Room Ballads.”
The eviction of Mr Gorst from Te Awamutu served to precipitate the Waikato War, but in truth a conflict had become inevitable. There was a widespread feeling that the time had come for a racial trial of strength, and the conflict was due as much to the aggressive policy of the Government and the anti-Maori tone of the newspapers and the politicians as to the martial preparations of the Kingites.
The construction of the military road and the establishment of military posts in obvious readiness for an advance into the Waikato confirmed the natives in their belief that the Government meant to force a way into the interior and shatter their home-rule plans.
The first definite act of war was Lieutenant-General Cameron’s despatch of troops across the frontier, the Mangatawhiri River, on 12th July, 1863.
Te Huirama, with a body of Waikato, barred the way with rifle-pits on the Koheroa ridge, near Mercer, and on 17th July the first engagement took place. The troops under Cameron charged the Maori position with the bayonet, and the Kingites were driven out with the loss of their leader and about thirty others. Numerous skirmishes followed in the South Auckland country on the northern side of the Mangatawhiri; the Lower Waikato and Wairoa and Hauraki war-parties carried gun and tomahawk into their enemy’s country, following their favourite tactics of ambuscade and plunder. There were many bush fights, in which the Forest Rangers and the Forest Rifle Volunteers, as well as Imperial troops and militia, were engaged.
The three principal fortified posts of the Kingites in the early stages of the war were Paparata, Meremere, and Pukekawa. These positions were designed to stop the southward progress of the troops and enable the Maoris to levy war on the frontier settlements. [[36]]Pukekawa is the beautiful round green hill on the west side of the great elbow of the Waikato, where the river bends westward below Mercer; anciently a fortified pa of the Ngati-Tamaoho stood on its summit. When the Waikato War began the Ngati-Maniapoto came down the river in their canoes and selected it as their headquarters, and from Pukekawa as a convenient base they made raids on Patumahoe, Mauku, Camerontown, and other frontier districts. They expected to be attacked there, and entrenched themselves, but General Cameron did not carry the war to the west side of the Waikato.
Presently the arrival of gunboats specially adapted for the river war enabled Cameron to outflank and capture the strongholds on the east bank of the Waikato and to occupy Ngaruawahia, the Maori King’s headquarters, unopposed. His only serious check was at Rangiriri, where in disastrous frontal attacks the Imperial naval and military forces sustained heavy casualties—47 dead and 85 wounded. The pa surrendered next day, and 183 prisoners were taken. The Lower Waikato was conquered, and the General with his steam flotilla shifted the army to the Waikato-Waipa delta for the final blows to the Kingite cause.
PATERANGI AND WAIARI.
Falling back from pa to pa, Waikato and Ngati-Maniapoto at last concentrated their forces in the great series of entrenchments at Pikopiko, Paterangi, and Rangiatea, defensive works intended to block the march of the Imperial and Colonial troops on the principal Kingite cultivations and food stores at Rangiaowhia. The chief fortification was Paterangi; the traces of this elaborate system of earthworks can be seen to-day close to Mr Harry Rhodes’ farmhouse on Paterangi Hill.
General Cameron’s headquarters were at Te Rore, on the Waipa, and there he camped for several weeks early in 1864. The principal engagement during this period of waiting—for Paterangi was too strong for frontal attack—was a lively skirmish at Waiari, on the Mangapiko River. Forty Maoris fell that day (14th February, 1864), and six British soldiers lost their lives.
Here, at Waiari, that free-roving and adventurous colonial corps the Forest Rangers had their first taste of sharp fighting in the Waipa country. We shall hear a good deal of those Rangers in the succeeding chapters. There were two companies of them, each [[37]]fifty strong. No. 1 Company was commanded by Captain William Jackson—afterwards Major Jackson and M.H.R. for Waipa—and No. 2 Company by Captain G. F. Von Tempsky, who as Major of Armed Constabulary fell in the bush battle of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu, in Taranaki, in 1868. The Rangers were armed with Terry and Calisher breech-loading carbines and five-shot revolvers, and Von Tempsky’s men also used bowie-knives, made in Auckland from a pattern supplied by him, somewhat on the model of the bowie-knife of Arkansas and Texan fame.
The Rangers at Waiari were ordered to clear the Maoris out of the scrub which covered the old pa in the river-loop. They dived into the thickets, and soon killed or dispersed the Kingite warriors, and then covered the retreat of the main body of troops to Te Rore and Colonel Waddy’s advanced camp. The Rangers enjoyed the work so much that it was difficult to get them home to camp at Te Rore for their tea. The British dead and wounded had been removed, and as many as possible of the Maori dead were brought across to the north bank of the Mangapiko. General Cameron had ridden up from the main camp at Te Rore in time to witness the defeat of the Maoris in Waiari. The Rangers, covering the return of the troops, came under a heavy fire in front and from both flanks, and returned it with coolness and accuracy from the cover of the manuka and fern.
A veteran corporal of No. 1 Company (Jackson’s) recalls Colonel Havelock’s ire at the indifference of the frontiersmen to the bugle calls. “It was getting dusk,” he says, “and still all our Rangers had not come out of the scrub, and we could hear their carbines cracking in reply to the heavy banging of the double-barrel guns. Captain Jackson was standing alongside Colonel Havelock, A.D.C.—the son of the famous hero of the Indian Mutiny—who asked why the Rangers had not returned. Jackson replied in his blunt fashion that he didn’t know; he supposed they’d come out when they had finished their job. The ‘Retire’ was sounded again, but still our fellows kept popping away in the dusk. At last, Colonel Havelock, swearing that he would turn out the 40th Regiment and fire on the Rangers if they did not obey orders, called up all the buglers that could be found and told them to sound the ‘Retire’ all together. Presently our boys came out of the manuka and joined us, as pleased as kings with their afternoon’s hot work.”
A very few of those hard-fighting Rangers are left to recall the [[38]]incidents of a vanished phase of New Zealand life. Some—like Major Jackson—settled down to pioneer farming, but for others the warpath had attractions irresistible, and long after the battle of Orakau many of the young veterans strapped on their fighting gear again and followed “old Von” to Wanganui and Taranaki to do battle against the Hauhaus. The corps ceased to bear its distinctive name; most of its members returned to their sections of land in the military settlements on the confiscated Waikato land; some joined the Armed Constabulary. And when Von Tempsky fell to a Hauhau bullet before the stockade of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu it was a young officer who had been his subaltern in 1863–64, J. M. Roberts—now Colonel, and holder of the New Zealand Cross for valour—who coolly and competently extracted the rearguard after a terrible night in the forest of death. He had learnt his work well in Von Tempsky’s practical school in many a scout and in many a skirmish in a country where the name of the Forest Rangers is already but a dim legend, so quickly has the work of nation-making marched in New Zealand.
Von Tempsky was a clever artist in water-colours, and had a gift of writing animated narrative. He wrote a journal of events covering his service in the Waikato War, and his story of the fighting at Rangiaowhia, Hairini, and Orakau will be given in the chapters which follow. His account has the merit of being a participant’s direct description of the engagements; moreover, it now sees print for the first time.[1]
Among the notable figures of that day whom Von Tempsky describes in his journal was Bishop George Augustus Selwyn. There is a word-vignette of the great Bishop, riding unostentatiously with the army, his old pack-horse ambling along laden with his tent and simple camp gear. “What comfort the wounded and sick derived from his presence may be imagined,” wrote Von Tempsky. “Often have I followed with my eye his fine, manly figure wending its way on errands for the good of others; and the study of that man’s character, strongly impressed in a face where hard work has stamped its signet on high-bred features, would yield materials for an epic poem. How that man’s being has clung to a preconceived idea of his work in this country! How every fibre of his existence has wrapped itself round that one object, the improvement of the [[39]]aboriginal! Through good and evil times he has stood by his work, strong, fresh, after years of disappointment, unalterable in his purpose, even if in opposition to the good of his own race. There perhaps we find the one flaw in an otherwise almost perfect character.” [[40]]
[1] The original MS. narrative is in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. [↑]
CHAPTER VII.
THE CAPTURE OF RANGIAOWHIA.
The first British soldiers to reach Te Awamutu marched in early on the morning of 21st February, 1864. This was General Cameron’s force, which outflanked the Maori defences at Paterangi and Rangiatea in a surprise night march, and invaded the chief source of food supplies—Rangiaowhia—the decisive strategic movement in the Waikato War.
MAJOR WILLIAM JACKSON
Major Jackson was a young settler at Papakura when he took command of the Forest Rangers in 1863. After serving throughout the Waikato War, he settled at Hairini and afterwards at Kihikihi. For many years he commanded the Te Awamutu Cavalry Volunteers. In the eighties he was M.H.R. for the Waipa electorate.
The following is Von Tempsky’s MS. narrative of the night march and the morning’s hot work at Rangiaowhia:—
“On 20th February, 1864, the bugle at headquarters, Te Rore camp, sounded, ‘Come for orders.’ Everyone, almost, knew what these orders were going to be; and great excitement consequently prevailed. The orders were that about half of the troops were to be under arms, in heavy marching order, at half past ten that night. The rest, with the luggage and so forth, were to follow in the day-time, leaving a sufficient garrison for Te Rore. At half past ten the dense columns of our force were drawn up in silence near headquarters. No bugle had sounded; the tents were to remain standing, and the cover of a moonless night was to hide our circumvention of the wily foe. I had the honour to command the advanced guard, composed of my Rangers and 100 men of the 65th under Lieutenant Tabuteau. Next followed the Defence Force under Colonel Nixon, and the Mounted Artillery, doing troopers’ service, under Lieutenant Rait, an active and energetic officer. The rest of the 65th, 70th, some of the 50th, and other detachments followed, Westrupp, with No. 1 Company, Forest Rangers, bringing up the rear, as Captain Jackson had not yet returned from Auckland. As far as Waiari the road enabled us to march in fours. Thence, however, Indian file had to be the order of the march. The importance of our redoubt at Waiari became now apparent to me, as its existence there served to mask our start. On that point alone was discovery from Paterangi to be apprehended. Once past it, our detour of the fern ridges made us nearly safe until we came close on to Te Awamutu. Mr James Edwards (half-caste guide) rode ahead of us, Captain Greaves, of the staff (70th) by his side, and a better combination of local knowledge [[41]]and military sagacity never led troops on a difficult march. The high fern had to be trodden down, principally by the advanced guard, but we were used to it and knew that honour of position had to be paid for. Ridge after ridge was passed, now and then a gully, but never very steep, so that packhorses and even bullock drays could easily follow our tracks on the morrow.”
MAJOR G. F. von TEMPSKY
(Killed at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu, Taranaki, 1868.)
At dawn (to summarise Von Tempsky’s story) the troops neared Te Awamutu. It was known that at the entrance, by the pass, there was situated an old pa. It was not known whether it was now occupied or had been put into repair. The Rangers scouted on ahead and found it empty. The cocks at Te Awamutu mission station were now crowing, and the steeple of the church came into sight. Bishop Selwyn, and Mr Mainwaring as his aide, galloped along ahead to the mission station, whose native inhabitants “were under a theocratic flag of truce.” The column pushed on to Rangiaowhia. The young troopers of the Colonial Defence Force Cavalry now dashed forward in advance to their first serious work.
“Rangiaowhia,” narrated Von Tempsky, “came soon into sight with a blue ridge of mountains at the back, its straggling houses between peach groves crowning cultivated ridges, with two prominent churches at a short distance from one another. Kahikatea forests straggled up to the village, here and there, and when we approached it nearer a succession of ridges with some swamp intervening showed us that we had been somewhat deceived in the distance. The rapid crack, crack of revolvers and carbines announced to us now that the troopers had not forgotten their spurs in getting ahead of us. We listened eagerly for the sound of double-barrel guns, and that sound also was soon heard. So the conflict had commenced, and that idea lifted our feet with the power of galvanism. We probably got there considerably ahead of the main body, but our blood was up, and we wanted to support our troopers in the arduous task of riding through streets lined with houses whence a desperate foe might have great advantage over mounted men. When, however, we got nearer to the thick of the firing, a mounted civilian, with some artillery troopers, met me and said that in that direction there was nothing for us to do; if we wanted to see a good body of men we should go to the Catholic Church, which was crammed full of armed Maoris. I at once took his advice, particularly as I had heard but few double-barrels lately in the direction of the Defence Corps. In extended order, with 100 of the 65th Regiment in support, [[42]]we advanced past several rows of deserted whares, from which, however, now and then some balls whistled past us. The church being our main object, we paid no attention to these minor matters. I sent Lieutenant Roberts with some men round the right flank of the church, and our circle gradually drew closer. I could see already some black heads at the windows—but of a sudden a white flag went up.
“ ‘Very well, lads,’ I thought, ‘then I shall take you prisoner.’ We advanced still nearer. Roberts’ signal announced to me that the church was surrounded, when I heard Captain Greaves’ voice calling to me from the rear:
“ ‘The General does not want you to press the Maoris any further.’
“ ‘Not take them prisoner, even?’
“ ‘No.’
“ * * * I obeyed, though I was fast consuming my tongue by merciless mastication. But honour is due to the order of a man like General Cameron, so I ordered my men off and marched to where the firing still continued.[1]
“The two churches lay more towards the left flank of the village. The firing continued more to our right near the centre of the village. As we approached that point we got a few long-range shots from distant whares, but took no notice of them.
“In passing a boarded house, however, one more like the building of a European than a Maori, two shots were rapidly fired at us from its verandah. I did not believe my eyes when I saw there a woman coolly sitting on the verandah and hiding a still smoking double-barrel underneath it. She was decently dressed in the semi-European style adopted by influential Maoris. She was oldish, and not very fair to look at, particularly as her time-worn features were bent into one concentrated expression of hatred—such a hatred as Johnson revered and you read of occasionally in old plays.
“I went up to her and had the gun taken away, looking at her all the time, not knowing whether I should laugh or feel pathetic—the coolness, the ugliness, and reckless hatred of this specimen of Maoridom puzzling my choice of sentiment exceedingly. I thought of passing on, just with a warning for future good behaviour, when [[43]]some officers shouted to me that ‘the old wretch’ had also fired at them, wounded a man of the 65th, and been warned already, and that I had better take her prisoner.
“Reluctantly I gave her in charge of one of my men, but accompanied the order with a Freemason’s sign which my man understood, the result of which was that the woman afterwards quietly slipped away unnoticed.
“Just as we started again we heard another couple of shots from the same house, and now thinking that some men might be inside I had the house surrounded.
“Just as Roberts got to the back part, another fairy burst from its door, and, running with the fleetness of a deer, dropped her gun just in time to have her sex recognised and respected. I was glad that her fleetness saved me from another female responsibility, and proceeded onward.
“I met Captain Bower, Adjutant of the Defence Corps, one of the Six Hundred at Balaklava. He looked fearfully excited, and hurriedly told me that Colonel Nixon had just been shot, and that the bullet had gone through his lung.”
Von Tempsky, describing what he then saw, says that a circle of soldiers of all regiments surrounded at some distance a nearly solitary whare with a very narrow and low door; in the open doorway lay the body of a soldier of the 65th, shot through the head. A constant firing of rifles into the house was carried on with little regard to the effects of cross-fire, and the narrator formed his men in a half-circle, in the safe radius of the “dead angle” of the house. It seemed that after the house had been first surrounded Colonel Nixon sent Lieut. T. McDonnell and Mr Mair, the interpreter, to ask the Maoris in it to surrender, assuring them of good treatment. A volley was the concise answer. Then the firing into the house commenced, but as the floor was below the level of the outside ground the Maoris were comparatively secure for some time. Then of a sudden an excited trooper of the Defence Corps dismounted, and dashed, sword and revolver in hand, into the whare. Some quick shots were heard, and nothing more was seen or heard of him. A man of the 65th rushed forward to ascertain the fate of the trooper, but, being covered and hampered by his roll of blankets and other paraphernalia, he stuck in the door and was shot in the head. The firing into the whare now became a perfect cannonade, and even Colonel Nixon could not abstain from firing with his revolver [[44]]at the open door. Stepping incautiously from behind the corner of a neighbouring whare, he received a bullet, fired from that open door.
“When we arrived,” resumes Von Tempsky, “some neighbouring whares had been set fire to with the view to communicating the fire to the all-dreaded one. But somehow this seemed to me an uncertain process, and unfair. So, looking round at my nearest men, I said, ‘We will rush the whare, boys.’
“ ‘Aye! Rush it, rush it!’ was echoed, and with one ‘Forward!’ about a dozen of us were round the door in an instant. Sergeant Carron had got ahead of me, and had poked his head into the low doorway. I stood impatiently behind him, just on one side of the door, thinking that we ought to take the body of the 65th man out of the way first. Carron then drew back his head and said to me:
“ ‘There is only one dead man inside, sir.’
“I could not quite understand this, though I could see that it was pitch dark inside, and so Carron might have been mistaken.
“At this moment Corporal Alexander, of the Defence Corps, had pushed his way between myself and Carron, and, squatting down in the low doorway, commenced to arrange his carbine for taking aim, evidently puzzled by the darkness—I urging him either to make room for us or jump in.
“A double-barrel thunders, discharged from the interior of the house, a bullet knocks through Alexander’s brain, and he drops backward. The doorway was now completely chocked with the two bodies. My men dragged away Alexander, and, after firing five shots of my revolver quickly into the corner from which I had heard the last report, I dragged the 65th man out of the door myself. At that moment, also, one of my men got shot in the hip—a fine young fellow, John Ballender. He staggered forward and dropped, never more to rise, though he lingered for months in hospital. (Note.—A Canadian by birth, by profession a surgeon, he served as a private with me. An excellent shot, and brave to a fault. I had known him first at Mauku. His comrades have erected a handsome marble slab over his grave at Queen’s Redoubt.)
“I now debated within myself whether the rush might not be renewed, as the door was clear now; but I saw that my men, even, had had enough of it, and were pointing significantly and triumphantly [[45]]to the flames that now commenced to lap over from the nearest burning whare to the fatal and now fated house. What the feelings of the inmates of that doomed fortress must have been passes almost the power of imagination. They must have heard by this time the crackling of the approaching fire; they must have felt the heat already. Could human nature hold out any longer in resistance?
“No! Behold, one man, in a white blanket, quickly steps from the door and approaches the fatal circle at some distance from us. He holds up his arms to show himself unarmed; he makes a gesture of surrender; he is an old-looking man.
“ ‘Spare him! Spare him!’ is shouted by all the officers and most of my men. But some ruffians—and some men blinded by rage at the loss of comrades, perhaps—fired at the Maori.
“The expression of that Maori’s face, his attitude on receiving the first bullet, is now as vivid before my mind’s eye as when my heart first sickened over that sight. When the first shots struck him he smiled a sort of sad and disappointed smile; then, bowing his head, and staggering already, he wrapped his blanket over his face, and, receiving his death bullets without a groan, dropped quietly to the ground. (Note.—Had all the men been with their regiments—that is to say, had had their own officers near them—this would not have happened. In that promiscuous crowd no one knew who one belonged to.)
“The flames now caught the roof. Could there be another being yet in that house of death? The roaring sound of approaching destruction inside the house, the certainty of death outside! What man can bear such wrath of fate?
“Behold! There is one such man! Like an apparition he suddenly stands in front of the door—stands bolt upright—and fires his last two shots at us. Defiance flashes from his eyes even as he sinks under a shower of bullets.
‘The house is one mass of flame—it is near falling—when another Maori bursts from it, gun in hand, and drops pierced by bullets while dauntlessly aiming at the foe. As he fell the timbers of the roof bent inward, the house tottered, and with a crash crumbled to pieces on the well-fought ground.
“Seven charred bodies of Maoris and the first Defence Corps man were found among the blackened ruins. That fortress had held ten defenders. What would not ten hundred of such defenders do when properly armed and commanded? Yet I am sorry to say [[46]]that much of this unyielding desperate disposition is based upon one of the worst if the strongest features in Maori character.
“After the fall of the house there remained nothing to do at Rangiaowhia. The General, fearing the results of straggling in such a rambling, extensive community as this, together with the presumed absence of water in the most important military points, decided on returning to Te Awamutu.
“On our way to Te Awamutu I had occasion to observe the peculiar insensibility to wounds in Maoris; the same that I had previously observed in North American Indians. I had seen an immense, brawny Maori lying on the ground covered with blood, Dr. Mouat, V.C., of the Staff, attending him with his usual skill and celerity. I thought that kindly attention but thrown away, for the Maori had a sabre cut over the head, a revolver bullet in his mouth, a shot through the liver, and a sabre cut over the back. He was carried in a stretcher half way to Te Awamutu, when he insisted on getting out, and walked the remainder of the way. I saw him the following day in hospital, sitting up among the female prisoners, chatting in such an unconcerned way and with such equanimity of expression in his features that I doubted the evidence of my eyes that this could be the same man I had seen on the previous day with four wounds, each of which would have prostrated for some time a European.”
A veteran of No. 1 Company of Forest Rangers, Mr Wm. Johns, of Auckland (formerly of Te Rahu), gives the following account of his experiences at Rangiaowhia:
“About a dozen whares were burned in the village. The fight extended from the head of the swamp, where Colonel Nixon was shot, right up to the Catholic Church, whence we drove the Maoris over the crest into the swamps, next the native racecourse. Some shots were fired at us from the English Church; some Maoris were inside the building. It was an open skirmish from then right along. There were not more than 200 Maoris altogether in Rangiaowhia that day, but they fought well, and had plenty of ammunition. After one of our fellows had been shot, my commanding officer said to me, ‘Corporal, take two men and see if there are any Maoris in the whare there,’ pointing to a house about twenty yards away. I posted the two men outside and stooped to enter the house, which was sunk in the ground, with a low entrance. As I entered I was felled by a terrific blow on the side of the neck, but deflected somewhat [[47]]by the edge of the doorway. I lay there stunned for some moments, and when I recovered I saw a Maori weapon, a long taiaha, lying beside me. [It is now in the Old Colonists’ Museum in Auckland; a small piece was nicked out of the blade of it by the doorway edge.] My men told me that the inmates of the whare had escaped by bursting through the thatch at the back, and got clear away. It was a very narrow escape for me, and I took the taiaha as a memento of it. I took no further share in the fight that day, but I was able to march back to Te Awamutu.” [[48]]
[1] Later in the day the Rangers had a skirmish with armed Maoris who occupied the Catholic Church, and drove them out of it, the natives finding that the walls were not bullet-proof. [↑]