YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

The
EDWIN J. BEINECKE, '07
FREDERICK W. BEINECKE, '09 S
WALTER BEINECKE, '10
FUND

c^ev. George Clarke
Chancellor of the University of Tasmania.

-NOTES

ON

Early Life in Ne<w Zealand.

George Clarke.

HOBART :
J. WALCH & SONS, WELLINGTON BRIDGE.
1903.

^obart :
T. WALCH AND SONS, PRINTERS, 42 MACQUAEIE STREET.
1903.

preface.

This little book is personal and provisional. These Notes
on an early chapter of my life were written ten years
ago for the information of family friends, and were not intended
for publication. They had to be egoistic to serve their purpose,
but I thought they were too much so for general circulation.
They are, however, charged with the historical element, from
one who was not only behind those early scenes, but who took
some effective part in them. They are at any rate the testimony
of a witness at first hand, and it seems a pity to throw them into
the waste basket of general oblivion. They may be of some
little value in the coming years, just as they stand, if the
readers only know that they are a family record. I leave my
children to dispose of them as they please.
GEORGE CLARKE.
' jist March, ipoj.

PUBLISHERS' NOTICE.
Mr. Clarke's little book, "Notes on Early Life in New Zealand,"
was printed for private circulation, but as others besides his
more intimate friends might like to obtain a copy, he has
given us permission to dispose of a limited number as if they
were published. He writes us : — " At eighty, I suppose I am
about the only old man left who can tell of those early days
of Maoriland from direct and personal knowledge."
J. WALCH & SONS.

Early Life in New Zealand*

CHAPTER I.
' Y the time a man has lived in this world
for seventy years, I think he ought to have
become interesting to some one. And if
such a life should nearly all have been
passed in these Southern lands, he ought to
have a story that is worth the telling. And if he happens to
be a minister who has been long in the same place, you need not
suspect him of inordinate vanity, if he supposes that he himself,
more than the public interests with which he had to do, may be
rather interesting to his friends. It is with such a combination
of claims that I venture to give you a very personal address
to-night. In truth, I shrink, as much as most men, from talking
about myself in public, but I am here under a sort of pressure.
The story I am urged to tell cannot be told at all, -in a way to
hold your attention, without making myself the centre of the
narration. I extract it from a selection of notes that were pre
pared to please my own family, and they allow me discretion to
take from them what I think is within the limits of propriety.
Many friends tell me that one who has been at the beginning
of such things as I have seen, may be allowed to say what in
other circumstances might well be kept to the knowledge of
one's more intimate circle, and, therefore, in deference to their
wishes, I have consented to give you an account of what I had
to do with the early history of New Zealand. I do it humbly,
and with no disposition to show myself other than I actually
was, but I know that, for good or evil, I had very much to do
with the making of New Zealand history, and with bringing
Maori and Pakeha to terms of mutual understanding.
The New Zealand of to-day is one 'of the fairest and most
flourishing colonies of the British Empire, and I can simply say

Early Life in 5
New Zealand.
that all we see there now, has grown up within my personal
recollection. I have long been detached from New Zealand
affairs, but in various ways am still bound to the early scene of
my interests by ties, only less strong than those which bind me
to Tasmania. I seem to myself to have lived three lives — one
in New Zealand, one in Tasmania, and one (of shorter duration)
in England. Their associations are altogether separate, and
though I am conscious of personal identity running- through all,
it is difficult for my friends in one place to link on to their
knowledge the associations of the other. Being in for it, I think
I may as well begin at the beginning. You may, if you like,
take the notices of my childhood, as an old fellow's prattle about
things that were once very interesting to him, and which he is
apt to fancy may be nearly as interesting to the second and third
generation of them that follow after him. But still I can hardly
leave them out for whatever they may be worth.
About the year 1800, English whalers and sealers began to
frequent the coast of New Zealand. The Maoris were anxious
to procure firearms, and many of them, fond of adventure, shipped
as sailors, for the chance of getting them. These men visited
Sydney, and, in most cases, were tolerably treated, in some with
great violence and injustice. There was a Bay of Islands Chief,
named Ruatara, who, in the course of his wanderings, visited
England under promise that he should be presented to the King.
On arriving, however, in London, he was shamefully treated, and
thrust ashore without wages, to shift for himself, and he nearly-
died from neglect and illness. By some means passage to Sydney
was obtained for him in the convict transport, the " Ann," and
with nothing but a few rags on his back, he went on board, and
sailed to the far South — that was in the year 1810.
Among the passengers on board the "Ann," was the Rev.
Samuel Marsden, the Chaplain of the settlement at Botany Bay.
Marsden was greatly taken with Ruatara, pitied his misfortunes,
admired his intelligence, "was attracted by his disposition, and
showed him great kindness. On landing in Sydney Mr. Marsden

Early Life in
New Zealand. 7
took him for some time to his own house, a kindness which
Ruatara never forgot, and which stood us in good stead for the
years that were to come. The interest Marsden took in his Maori
friend on that voyage, was in fact the grain of mustard seed that
grew into the New Zealand Mission, and that prepared the way
more than anything else for the peaceful colonization of the
country thirty years afterwards. You never know what will come
out of personal kindness and consideration. It is the most fruit
ful of all seeds that we can sow in the world, and you never know
whereunto the thing will grow. Before Marsden's arrival in
Sydney, apart from the whaling and sealing expeditions that fre
quented the coast of New Zealand, there had grown up the
Kauri trade. Kauri was in very high request at that time as the
best known timber for the masts and spars of ships, and it was
preferred before all other kind of timber, for the use of the
British navy. Kauri was only found in the Northern part of the
island, and it was most plentiful in the district between the Bay
of Islands and the North Cape. Among other vessels in this
trade, was one with a large crew, named the " Boyd." In i8ro
she made a voyage to Wangaroa, a fine harbour to the North of
the Bay of Islands, to procure a cargo of the New Zealand pine.
The " Boyd " had engaged some Maoris in Sydney to help in
procuring a cargo of Kauri timber, and on the voyage the captain
had tied a chief of high rank, named Tara (the sailors called
him George), to the gangway, and flogged him twice on the bare
back, with a cat-o'-nine-tails, because he was too lazy or too ill
to keep on working the ship. To a Maori Chief the disgrace
was worse than death The man vowed vengeance for the insult,
and when the vessel arrived at Wangaroa, the whole crew were
murdered, except a woman and three children, and the ship was
plundered and burnt. Tara's joy over his glut of vengeance did
not last long. Amongst the cargo brought on shore, were a
good many casks of gunpowder, and while Tara was smoking
near the haul it exploded, and he and many around him were
forthwith blown into infinite space.

Early Life in g
New Zealand.
Five English whalers, shortly after the " Boyd " massacre,
visited the Bay of Islands, and under the mistaken impression
that a Chief named Te Paki was concerned with the massacre
(he had really tried to stop it) they armed all their boats and
attacked Te Paki's village, killed all the inhabitants, burnt the
houses and food stores, and smashed up their canoes. Te Paki,
himself, fled severely wounded, and was killed by the Wangaroa
natives because he did not take part in the massacre. Not long
after, a neighbouring tribe, in sheer exasperation at the slaughter
of Te Paki's people, attacked a whale boat, and killed and cooked
several of the sailors. The Bay of Islands now became a very
dangerous place to visit, and only now and then would an
English vessel venture to anchor in the port at all, but they
surprised villages, lured the canoes to come alongside, and then
sunk them, carried off the women, and did such things as have
been reported of the most lawless of traders in the labour traffic
of our day, and which have led to so many murders in the
islands of the Pacific. Among these whalers were not a few
escaped ruffians from the penal settlement of Port Jackson, and
you may be sure that they would not be likely to pay too much
regard to the laws of justice and humanity, in their dealings with
the Maoris. The competition between the ruthless savage, and
the civilized villain ran high, and it was hard to say which had
the best or the worst of it.
" The intercourse of the whalers and the natives for the next
four years was very troubled ; there was much treachery and
bloodshed on both sides, and Governor Macquarie tried by ¦
proclamation and by exacting heavy bonds from all ships going
from Sydney to New Zealand, to stay the horrors that were
done. Mr. Marsden, the Colonial Chaplain, and the founder
of the New Zealand mission, represented strongly to the C. M.
Society the growing evils of the traffic, and commended the
intelligence of the natives and the possibility of teaching them
Christian and civilized ways. In answer to his importunity, two
laymen, Messrs. Hall and King, were at length sent out, and

Early Life in
New Zealand. 9
became the first missionaries who found a resting place at
Rangihou, in _the Bay of Islands. That was the first Missionary
Station, which they founded in the year 1815.
In September, 1822, my father and mother arrived at Hobart,
in the " Heroine," as missionaries, on their way to Sydney, and
from thence to New Zealand. Hopkins, Mather, G. C. Clarke
(well remembered by some of us but no relation of the family),
Walker, Worthy, Barrett, and other well-known Tasmanian
colonists were fellow passengers. My father went on to Sydney
and was detained at Paramatta for over 'a year, no opportunity
offering of getting to the Bay of Islands. During this time he
had charge of the establishment of Aborigines at Black Town,
and it was during his sojourn there, that the speaker made his
first appearance in this troubled world, at Parramatta, 29th June,
1823. There is one dear old friend among us who I know from
hearsay, though I daresay she has forgotten if, used to go with
her mother to see my mother, and, as a very little girl, found
pleasure in occasionally nursing the baby. I refer to Mrs.
Sprent, daughter of Mrs. Oakes, the first-born of Australian
children. Some time in 1824 my father embarked on board a French
corvette, " La Coquine," under the command of Captain (after
wards Admiral) D'Urville, the celebrated circumnavigator.
Many years afterwards I met the first Lieutenant Barrard (I
think then Commodore) at the French settlement at Akaroa,
who told me that I was such a nuisance with my squalling, that
more than once the officers were on the point of pitching me
overboard. He was glad now that they had not done it.
On arrival at the Bay of Islands, the parents and the baby
went up an arm on the western side of the bay, some fifteen
miles long to the Keri Keri, the new station that had just been
formed by Messrs. Buller & Kemp.
At that time there was a population of many thousands of
Maoris on either side of the inlet, where all is silent and
deserted now.

Early Life in
New Zealand. I0
The Keri Keri was the headquarters of the Chief, Hongi, or,
according to his full name, Hongi Ika (" Smell Fish "). There
is a fair summary of this man's character, " ferocious to enemies
and faithful to friends," and of his stormy and bloodthirsty
career in Rusden (Vol. I.) He swept through the island like a
consuming fire. I have a dream-like recollection of being
carried by my nurse into his pah, and of his taking me in his
arms. The Keri Keri was my baby world. It is a circle of low,
bare hills, surrounding a beautiful little basin of water, in which
a river, some forty yards wide, pours over a ledge of rock in a fall
of eight or nine feet into the tidal water. The house stood by
the water-side, a few yards from the fall, and stands there still.
I have a photo, of it as the oldest European house in New
Zealand. It is built of heart of Kauri, and preserved itself well.
My earliest child years were spent there. It now belongs to the
Kemps. None of the hills are more than half a mile off from
the centre of the enclosure, and they framed in nearly all that I
knew from observation of the habitable globe. I could now
throw a stone a quarter of the way across the basin, but it once
seemed to me as great a spread of water as the widest part of the
Derwent between Hobart and the Iron Pot.
I have visited it several times since, and the contrast between
my earliest and latest impressions is like looking at a landscape,
first through one end of a telescope, and then through the other.
I have never heard such music as the sound of the waterfall
near which our house was built. The entrance to this basin
from the sea is by a channel like the three sides of the letter Z,
and you see nothing of the enclosure until you turn the corner
and find yourself in it. Just at the entrance, on the side of the
basin opposite to our house, was Hongi's famous pah Kororipo,
surrounded on three sides by water, and guarded on the land
side by long stretches of mangrove swamp that no enemy could
cross. It was also defended by a deep fosse, and a strong
stockade. There was a perfect network of pits and palisade
ways inside. It is all gone now, except the remains of the

Early Life in
New Zealand. JI
trenches, which I examined as a stronghold, and greatly admired
last time I visited the place, four or five years ago. As I knew
it when a child, it was full of houses, and was impregnable to
any assault of Maori warfare in those days.
Let me try and give you some idea of this Maori fortress, as I
knew it in its strength. It was a double stockade of upright
posts from fifteen to eighteen feet high, with a chain of pits
between the two fences, and another chain of pits inside the
second of them. The posts at the angles, and at certain in
termediate distances, were, in fact, logs about two feet in diameter,
theintervalsbeingsplit logs, andthey were surmounted bygrotesque
and carved hideous human figures, mostly head, with goggle eyes
and protruding tongues, all looking outward as if in defiance of any
hostile approach. So far as the faces are concerned, I have seen
something like them in old English buildings. They have their
counterpart in the gargoyles or projecting waterspouts which the
old monks delighted to carve into contorted and agonised griffins,
and dwarfs, and devils, squeezed down by the roof and struggling
out of the super-incumbent weight that seemed to crush them.
In the centre of the stockade was the ware puni, the Chief's state
house. It was a wonderful specimen of Maori art. The beams
and rafters inside were stained red, and were elaborately carved
throughout after the general pattern of the moko or tatoo on a
chieftain's face. The wooden posts which supported the ridge
pole were human figures after the manner of the osiride pillars in
an Egyptian temple, or the caryatides round the temple of
Poseidon, at Athens, though of course they were in wood, and
far ruder in execution than the works of even the remotest
Egyptian antiquity. I have seen many such chiefs' houses
since, but none at all approaching the ware puni of Hongi for
its elaborate decorations and carvings. Such specimens of
Maori architecture have long since disappeared, and the
fragments of carving that one sometimes meets with in museums
give but a very poor notion of what was common enough in my
early days. I could not have been more than five years old

Early Life in I2
New Zealand.
when all the artistic glory of Hongi's house passed away. I
remember standing in our verandah and watching the con
flagration which consumed it all, and I remember the
comparatively paltry style in which the pah was rebuilt.
I hope you will be tolerant, but my childish recollections of
the Keri Keri must necessarily take the form of prattle, and yet
they are the recollections of such things as go to the making of
every man's particular life. It was a time when fishing for
sprats and eels seemed the noblest occupation of humanity. I
had to do most of my fishing with bent pins which, in those
days were so precious a commodity, that if the stock ran out you
had to send to Sydney for more, and were very lucky if you
could renew your supply within three months of the order.
I had no difficulty at all in believing that " it was a sin to steal
a pin." A real fish-hook was a rare treasure, and it made me as
happy as a king. No prohibition would keep me from the
water. I have a lively recollection of squatting on a stone (it
has been maliciously suggested that it was a Sunday) in the act
of hauling in a small eel, when I was hitched by the slack of my
lower garments behind and pitched head over heels into the
river by a newly arrived priggish old missionary puritan, whom
to this day I have never forgiven, but my dear mother thought
it a shame, and told my tormentor so,, and she gave me more
indulgence in consequence of my ducking.
I have a faint recollection of the death of Hongi. Some time
in 1827 he made an expedition to Wangaroa to settle a quarrel
in which he was involved with a closely related tribe, and was
shot through the lungs in a skirmish. Immediately afterwards
the Wesleyan station at Wangaroa was plundered and burnt, and
the fugitives, among whom were the late Nathaniel Turner and
his wife, came twenty roadless miles, utterly destitute, to the
Keri Keri settlement. Many of you will have a kindly memory
of these good people. They deserved the reverence that they
received among the fathers and pastors of the Wesleyan Com
munion in these Southern lands, and it was they who laid the

Early Life in
New Zealand. ^
foundations of much that has now grown into superstructure in
all these colonies.
I was about five years old, but I can remember joining the
rest of our people, carried on my nurse's back, and crossing the
river to meet the jaded and fugitive travellers, and bring them to
our house. What struck me most was Mrs. Turner — it could
have been no one else — with bare and bleeding feet, and but
poorly and shiveringly clad. I am not sure, but I think Anne
Turner, afterwards Mrs. Harcourt, was the baby in her arms.
The years 1827-8 were times of great peril to the missionaries.
Hongi died. My father and Mr. Kemp determined to hold on
to their post, but made an arrangement secretly to send off the
wives and children to the Bay of Islands. For some days before
my little head had been puzzling over mysterious hiding and
burying of things, and I fancied that if I only had leave to hunt,
I might find all sorts of treasures in secret places. Indeed the
notion clung to me for many years afterwards, and even last
time I was in New Zealand (a pretty oldish man), as I wandered
over the old house, I noted what I long ago used to consider the
most likely places for a treasure quest — under the stairs, down
the cellar, under the hearthstone, in the lining of the walls, and
so on. It is hard to reproduce those old sensations.
I was not much over four years old, but I remember a time
between midnight and morning, being lifted out of my cot and
told to be very still. In the dim light of a lantern I saw my
poor mother enveloped in a cloak, and quietly sobbing, then
father wrapping me in a thick blanket, and taking me in his
arms, they crept stealthily out of the house and made their way
in the starlight to a boat, with muffled oars, under the rock,
Mother, and I and baby Sam, were deposited in the stern sheets.
and we glided silently to the entrance, and passed the sleeping
pah, beyond which I can say nothing of my own knowledge,
though I have been told that we went on to Paihia, in the Bay.
Hongi died commending the missionaries to the care of his
people, and his last words were : " Be brave ! Be brave !" The

Early Life in l.
New Zealand.
crisis was over in a few days, and we came back, and the
disinterring of hidden treasures in the following weeks kept me
in a condition of strained expectation that was altogether a great
delight. I remember it with feeling if no one else does.
I think I began to learn to read very early, and I can still
remember the lesson books I conned when three or four years
old. One was a great favourite, which I learnt by heart, for I
was a child of one book, as most of us were in those times. It
had a fine, clear print, and my favourite lesson began, " Hark !
it is the huntsman's horn," &c. The other, a more advanced
book, would hardly pass with the Board of Education. One
sentence ran : " It is wicked to look at the sun, and to point
at it with the finger," and my conscience was greatly exercised to
find out wherein the wickedness lay. I began learning Lindley
Murray's grammar, and though I hated it, soon learnt it all by
heart. It must have been soon after our flight, on the eve of Hongi's
death (1828), that the Rev. W. Yate joined the Mission and
became for a long time an inmate of our house. I will tell,
hereafter, how, after losing sight or report of the gentleman for
many years, I met him again like a man from the dead, or who
had dropped from the clouds, in the streets of Dover. Shortly
after his arrival at Keri Keri, a sister was born into the family,
who died in three months from whooping cough. An incident,
associated with her death, made a lasting impression upon me.
It always comes back to me with the sight and smell of cabbage
roses, and is a sort of faint musk to my memory. My father had a
short time before got a box of plants from Sydney, among them
some precious cabbage roses, the first I suppose that were grown
in New Zealand. Cabbage roses are best of all roses. 1 have
heard of a thousand diggers in Colorado coming to look at an
English daisy. My father carefully planted and tended them
until the buds began to form. I remember his taking me by the
hand, nipping off a half open bud, and then our walking into
the study and his putting the flower in the dead baby's hand I

Early Life in 15
New Zealand.
cannot be sure, but I should think that was the first of our sweet
English roses that ever bloomed in New Zealand. Then, too,
by way of improving the occasion, I had to learn a hymn
beginning — " Tell me, Mamma, and must I die
"One day, as little baby did?"
that, I don't think I have seen for over sixty years, but I have
not quite forgotten it yet.
In the end of 1828 the first missionary " Huihuinga," or
gathering of their adherents, was held at Paihia. The mis
sionaries of all the stations, their families, and their Maori
followers, all came together and had examinations and services,
and kept high festival. I remember, because the Rev. Henry
Williams — who had fought gallantly at Copenhagen, and on
board the " Endymion " when she took the " President " — an old
navy salt, had planted four carronades on the hill at the back of
the station for show, not for defence, and I was frightened
out of all my little wits by the banging of their guns over my
head in honour of the meeting. The noise ended in grief, for a
young Englishman in his eagerness to keep the guns going,
loaded before the remains of the old cartridge were cleared out,
and he, with his ramrod, was blown down the hill, losing some
of his fingers, burning his face, temporarily blinding his eyes,
and suffering other bodily delapidation.
Our parents did the best they could to keep us out of the
sights and sounds of Maori savagery, and though the knocking
of unfortunate slaves and prisoners of war on the head, and then
putting them in the oven, was an every day occurrence around
us, especially at the pah opposite, and on the return of a war
expedition, I never, as a child, saw an actual murder, but I have
watched the war canoes on their return from fighting
expeditions with loads of baked humanity and crowds of
unfortunate prisoners, who were just as likely as not to be
massacred on landing by any of the fierce men or fiercer women
who had lost father or son, brother or husband, in the battle.
One evening when a fleet of war canoes returned with a score of

Early Life in g
New Zealand.
prisoners in each of them, I was looking across the water at a
scuffle on the landing. Fortunately it was getting too dark to see
plainly, but I did see the poor creatures jump out of the canoe
with their thick mats thrown over their heads — which was
always what a Maori did when he expected a blow from a " mere "
or a tomahawk — and then there was a crowd and a rush, and
yells, and the scream of a single fury rising high above all. I
was sent to bed and kept out of Maori company all the next day,
but managed to find out that the wife of some chief who had
been killed in battle, rushed with a tomahawk upon the wretched
captives and managed to kill eight or ten of them before she
was stopped. She then deliberately strangled herself in a
paroxysm of rage, grief, and despair, and more prisoners were
sacrificed and drowned that night as " utu," or revenge. I once
saw a procession of over twenty women from the canoes pass
through the settlement, each with a heavy basket on her back
containing human flesh.
The murderous expeditions, begun by Hongi, kept up the
supply, and the Maoris had not yet learned to be in the least
ashamed of it. Even in times of peace it was not possible to
escape the sight.
Many of the missionaries' servants were, in fact, war slaves, and
it was often anxious work to keep them out of their owners'
hands. Fortunately, from the very -beginning of their intercourse with
the Maoris, the missionaries managed to keep the interior of
their houses sacred from all intruders. Wild Maoris might
cluster like bees at the windows, and flatten their noses on the
glass in trying to see what was going on within, but they never
entered a room without invitation. I fancy that there was some
superstitious fear of the consequences of intrusion almost
equivalent to a violation of their own tapu ; at any rate, it often
served us in good stead. Many a time when some cannibal
friend was known to be prowling about the village, my mother
has locked a poor slave girl in her room, or put a man

Early Life in 17
New Zealand.
into a cupboard, till the prowler was known to have gone. We
children had to learn to keep secrets at such times from the
Maoris. I remember, however, in one case at Paihia, where a
slave was locked into a room and put under the bed for twelve
hours, when a murderous old fellow named Marupo was after
him, yet though he knew he was there, he did not venture to break
in. One of my most soft spoken, but most gluttonous friends, was
Tareha, the hugest man I ever saw, and whose usual residence
was some miles down the Keri Keri river. Whenever he paid
us a visit there was a scramble to put every slave in the place
out of his way. Fortunately he was so fat and inactive a man,
that he could not run his victims down. He used to try all
sorts of wiles, grim enough, but very amusing, to get some
unsuspecting wretch within the reach of his tremendous arm, for
he knew that he could not pursue him. I once asked old
Rauparaha how he made his way from the banks of the Thames
to the neighbourhood of Otago, and he simply said : " Why,
of course, I ate my way through," which was almost literally
true. In some unaccountable way, two or three of my Hobart
friends have got the impression that it was I who said this, and
not Rauparaha. I do not in the least believe the theory, as far
as the New Zealanders are concerned, that cannibalism had its
origin in their craving for animal food. The Maoris had an
abundance of fish, captured vast numbers of birds and kiores
(indigenous rats), and reared dogs, like the Chinese, for food.
It was simply their half religious notion that it would appease
their ancestors by a complete revenge, and that it was the most
contemptuous settlement of the whole score of wrong, that a
man, or a man's father might have received from another man,
or from his fathers. No doubt in some cases it did develope
into a real unsophisticated appetite for human flesh,^but I think
that such cases were altogether rare and exceptional.
At this time (1828) Maoris of the highest rank did not disdain
to enter into a qualified service of the missionaries, prompted
by the desire of learning our ways. Harriet, the daughter of

Early Life in xg
New Zealand.
Hongi, who was by descent on both sides one of the highest ladies
in the land, and her cousin and future husband, John Heke, were
in the family of the Williams and the Kemps, the one as a house
maid at the sewing class or wash tub, and the other as a general
sort of upper servant. They were very docile, though they
never forgot their high birth. I have often, as a boy, played
with Heke, who attached himself to me up to the end of the war,
and with the full knowledge that I was on the other side. The
rank of these people made it necessary to be polite. In giving
our orders, they were always in the form of invitations, and if
they did wrong we could go no farther than express our disgust and
call them to their senses by appealing to their honour as gentle
men and ladies, or to the dictates of the universal conscience.
My mother used to tell of her first batch of bread at the Keri
Keri. After it was made, she put it into a portable oven and
set a very great young lady to watch it. In due time she told
the girl to take it out and bring it into the pantry. She brought
something like an ill-cooked batter pudding, steaming with an
intolerable odour which made my mother's heart sink. The
explanation was that the girl had a fine fish, half dried and very
odorous, and she thought that " Mother Karaka " would not mind
her putting it on top of this queer stuff, bread, where it would
cook so nicely. What was the use of getting out of temper
about such things ? The missionaries took it merely as all in
their bargain, though they often had to grin over its humour and
inconvenience. In 1830, Mr. Yate had to go to Sydney, about carrying some
translations through the press, and kindly took me with him.
At that time hundreds of blackfellows could be seen in the
streets of Sydney, and one could see at a glance that they were a
lower race than the Maoris by many degrees.
I was a little over six, and stayed with Mr. Marsden and Mr.
Hassall for six months, having a very good time of it, and then
returned home. There is somewhere an effigy of me at this age
with a blue jacket, to which the nether garments were buttoned

Early Life in Tq
New Zealand.
outside, and a frill round the neck. The precocity of collars in
small boys was an outrage on propriety that had not yet come into
fashion, and the frill made me thought rather fast for assuming
such frippery.
It was in the same year, 1830, that the Waimate station was
formed. Hitherto, the mission stations had been by the seaside.
This was the first advance inland. My father and Mr. Hamlin
cut a road — ten miles — for drays, and built several bridges,
and with the steady work of the Maoris, in parties under their
direction, they finished it' in three months. They then built
three small cottages, and when all was ready, two families
emigrated from the Keri Keri, and another from Paihia, and
settled down in the new station. I remember the flitting well.
My mother rode a famous little white pony known as " Lion," the
most vicious and long-lived of all ponies I have known. My
younger brothers and sisters were carried, and I walked part of the
way and rode pick-a-back on a stalwart Maori's shoulder for the rest.
In 1832 Mr. Yate again took me to Sydney, and after a short
stay there I was sent on to Hobart Town by a wretched little
schooner called the " Admiral Gifford." It was a long and
tedious passage. We were half-starved, and when I landed, on
a Sunday in January, 1833, I came to the house in Patrick-
street now occupied by Mr. Charles Walch, miserably weak and
ill after the voyage.
Just a word of explanation as to how this came about. My
dear mother, and my wife's dear mother, were closer friends than
most sisters are. Mrs. Hopkins could not bear the notion of her
friend's child being brought up through all his boyhood with no
better surroundings than those of early missionary life in New
Zealand, and she affectionately pressed upon my mother the
duty of sending me away. She promised, and most sacredly she
kept her promise, that she would be a mother to me if I could
¦only come for three or four years and be educated with her own
¦children, and thus, through her importunity, I got my first
introduction to Tasmania.

Early Life in
New Zealand. 20
On that first Sunday I went to church with the other children.
It was the Scotch Kirk that is now the school attached to St.
Andrew's. I was very ill, and had as hard a time of it to get over
my trouble as in emergencies most stray young boys know. I
remember the old faces — the Walkers, Youngs, Gunns, Facys,
Turnbulls, and the rest. They have all long since passed away,
but their descendants to the second and third generation
are among us still, and for the sake of the old past they
are all very interesting to my feeling. In the beginning of July
I went to school at New Town, at " Summerhome," which has
been for so many years our family nest, and made my first
acquaintance with the forebears of my friend, Mr. Justice
Giblin ; but I need not take note of my early Tasmanian life, as
Tasmania is not New Zealand.
On August 4th, 1836, I left Hobart iTown to meet Mr. Yate
at Sydney, and to return with him to New Zealand. On arrival,
however, at Sydney, things were in great confusion. Charges of
irregularity were brought against Mr. Yate, affecting his clerical
character, which were so serious as to prevent his return to New
Zealand, and he resigned his connection with the CM. Society.
He returned to England, and from that time to 1848 (twelve
years) I never heard a word about him, except a vague rumour
that he was preaching at some obscure village in Wales. I may
as well finish at once what I have to say about this gentleman,
whose faults, whatever they have been, could not quench my
personal love and loyalty. Happily, I knew next to nothing of the
gross charges or of their merits that had been brought against him.
When I went to England, in the "Wellington," in 1848, we were
becalmed in the Straits of Dover, and Mr. Charles Seal, a fellow
passenger, suggested that we had better land and take the train
for London next da)'. We did so, left our traps at the hotel,
and spent our time till evening in strolling over the Castle and
seeing the lions of the place. On our return, when within
twenty yards of the hotel, I heard Mr. Seal muttering over and
over again, as was his wont when anything was on his mind,

Early Life in 2i
New Zealand.
" Rev. W. Yate." " What do you mean ?" I asked. " There,"
he said, pointing with his finger to a brass plate on the next
door, " Rev. W. Yate." While we were getting our dinner I
asked the waiter about the clergyman next door, and he told me
he had only been in Dover a year ; that he was the clergyman of
the Mariners' Church ; and that he was exceedingly popular,
especially among sailors; had a very large congregation; and then
added : " He often comes in, Sir, of an evening, and most likely
he will drop in for a few minutes to-night." I asked where he
had come from ; the waiter did not know, but thought he had
been some time in " furrin parts." And so in the evening Mr.
Yate came in. It was indeed a strange meeting. I recognised
him in a moment, called him aside, and said : " Mr. Yate, do
you know me ?" " No, Sir, I cannot say I do." " I am George
Clarke, the little boy you took to Sydney sixteen years ago." I
thought the poor man would have fallen to the ground, but after
some talk he asked me to go home with him to supper. We
spent some hours in recalling old scenes and old faces. Next
morning I went to breakfast with him, and his sister took me
aside and told me that he had done nothing but pace up and
down his room all night long. After I was settled at college, I
came two or three times to see him. He died about thirteen years
ago, greatly respected by the people of Dover for his consistent
and benevolent character. He was a clergyman who had laid
himself out especially for the help of sailors, and who had been on
several occasions very active in looking after shipwrecked people.
But now to return to the end of 1836, or rather the beginning
of 1837, when I got back to Waimate (age over 14).
I went to school again, and began to take to the Greek and
Latin classics — alas ! I have nearly forgotten them — with so
much interest, that my tutor, Mr. Williams (afterwards Bishop of1
Waiapu), pressed me to go on. I developed a greed for reading
of all kinds, except novels, which were not allowed by our
mentors, though we managed to read them surreptitiously, and
got started in a direction from which I have never wholly swerved
to this day.

Early Life in
New Zealand. 22
Two years after — 1838 — Bishop Broughton visited New
Zealand, and among other things, confirmed all the children of
the missionaries above twelve years old. It was at this time
that my old friend and tutor, Mr. Hadfield, late Bishop of
Wellington, was received into priests orders at Waihia, the finest
missionary in some respects that has ever been sent to New Zealand
Towards the end of the next year Mr. Williams left Waimate to
form a new station at Turanga (Poverty Bay), and persuaded me
to go with him and to have a year's reading. When our vessel
reached Poverty Bay the natives came off in crowds and landed
us at the mouth of the river. After we got on shore the captain
was uneasy about the position of the vessel, and was taking up
anchor to shift to the other side of the roadstead, when somehow
the Maoris got the notion that he wanted to make off with their
missionary's goods. They at once overpowered the crew,
cleared every bit of cargo out of the vessel, and took the whole
on shore in their war canoes. The consequence was that the
ship's copper was some feet out of water, and they had to make
to the north shore for ballast to keep her steady. Fortunately
the weather was fine. We really had nothing to do with it, but
there was a great row, and the charter for the voyage expired in a
storm of abusive slang, that might have unnerved Mark Twain
himself. I spent a very happy year and a half at Turanga. The
natives had built Mr. Williams a large house, nicely thatched, and
with the wallsinside beautifully lined with upright, pencil-like-reeds.
The position was half a mile from a very large Pah, and about
eight miles inland from the beach. We had little peace for the
first week. Hundreds of natives surrounded the house and all
night long kept shouting in unison h-a ha, h-e he, hi, h-o ho, h-u
hu, and so on through half the primer spelling book. I think
they fancied that it was part of the missionary's " karakia " or
worship. We had brought down with us a small primer in sheets,
and had given away half a dozen copies, and this was the result.
It will be readily understood that the elder members of the
missionary families had to take their share in teaching the natives

Early Life in
New Zealand. ^
to read, write, and cypher, as well as to conduct Bible classes on
the Sunday. I have often taught a class in which two generations
sat together. The language of the Maoris, like the other
dialects of Western Polynesia, has sprung from the Malay. Its
alphabet contains only fourteen letters, and every syllable ends
with a vowel sound. It is to Dr. Lee, Professor of Hebrew at
Cambridge, in the early twenties, that we owe the inestimable
boon of Maori orthography. If you know the sound you can
learn the whole art of correct spelling in an hour. The Maoris
never make mistakes in spelling their language, incredible as it
may seem to us, who have to learn our own orthography with so
much labour and patience. The young people, perhaps, would
like to hear the sound and swing of the language. Well, I will
give you a very ancient " haka," or war-song of the Ngatitoa
tribe, as it will not take two minutes to recite. You must take
it, however, as said and not as sung. It is difficult to show the
measure of the rhythm, but you must imagine that it should be
so deliveied as to mark the step and swing of the tribal war
dance- Ka tito au
Ka tito au
Ka tito au ki
A Kupe
Te tangata
Nana-i tope tope
Te wenua.
Tu Ke, Kaputi
Tu Ke, Mana
Tau Ke Aropaoa
Ko nga To hu-Tena
O taku tupuna
O Kupe
Na na-i wakatomene
Titapu-aKa toro ke i au
Te wenua nei.
The subject of the song is Kupe, the heroic and mythical
ancestor of the tribe, who, according to the legend, separated the
North Island from the South by what we call Cook Strait, and
planted the adjacent islets in the ocean.

Early Life in
New Zealand. 24
The words may be thus roughly Englished : —
" I chant a song, I chant a song,
I chant a song of Kupe ;
He was the man
Who sliced the lands,
Apart stands Kaputi,
Apart stands Mana,
Beyond lies Aropaoa,
These are the wonders
Of my forefather
Kupe, He who engulfed
The place of Titapu,
And hither I come,
To fire this land."
The / of course is not the individual but the collective tribe.
Here, too, is an ancient love song that shows the sentimental
side of the Maori character. I will give you the song first in
Maori, and then render it into English as closely as I can. It is
more than fifty years since I learnt it, and I have not heard it since,
but I think it must then have been at least 50 years old. It is
old and genuine Maori, untouched by Christian ideas, or by the
after-thought of following generations, or the corruption of
changing fashions of speech : —
" E to e te Ra ! rehu-rehu ki te Rua,
Ringi-ringi a wai te roimata i aku kamo,
He mea mahue au i te hikoinga wae,
Nou e Tarati e wakangaio atu ana.
Nga Kurae koe, Wai-ohipa ra,
Waka-ahu ahi ana te taraki Slitiwai.
Kei raro taku Atua, e aroha nei au ;
Kati te wairua te mahi te haramai,
Kia mutu ai ranei te rangikanehetanga."
SONG OF THE SETTING SUN.
Go down, O sun, sink away to the Rua,
Thou pourest like water the tears from my eyes,
Belated thing am I in the stepping on of the feet
Of thine, O Tarati, fading from sight.
At the cliffs art thou, on to Wai-ohipa there,
All glowing like fire is the ridge of Mitiwai.
Gone Below is my divine one, whom still I am loving,
Let thy spirit cease from constantly coming,
So perchance may end this passion of longing.

Early Life in
New Zealand. 25
"The Rua" is the under-world tunnel, into which, like the
ancient Egyptians, the Maoris thought the setting sun entered
at dusk, and travelled along through the night, to emerge again
at the Eastern portal in the morning. The play between the
setting sun and the setting love is too delicate to be easily
translated into our language, but I have tried to give a hint of
it in the rendering, which is as literal as even a slavish expert
could demand. We think of the diversity of human nature and
not enough of its sameness. Human nature is, at the heart of
it, the same in all nations, and in all ages. Even a savage song
like this may remind us that " He hath made of one blood all
nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath
determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their
habitation." My fidus Achates at this time was Henry Williams, nephew of
my old friend, the Bishop, and now a member of the New Zealand
Parliament. I am afraid that we boys sometimes presumed on the
deference, not to say, awe, of our savage admirers. The Pah near
by swarmed with lean and hungry curs, who prowled about at night
fall in search of food, and if they could not find a bone, did not
mind walking off with our boots ; and then we had a few poultry
that we had brought with us, and that we could not afford to lose.
We put the case before the chiefs and got their reluctant consent
to kill any offender we could catch on the premises after night
fall. So we constructed a box-trap, and often disposed of three
or four of the marauders in the course of the night. One chief
quietly encouraged us, as he wanted the skins of our prey to
make a fashionable Maori robe for himself, and he often came to
discharge with very good will the office of executioner. One
night he came in great glee and said : " there is a fine fellow in
the trap as black as night ; I don't think there is a white hair
about him, let me knock him on the head." We Said " yes."
There was a blow, the dragging out of the victim, and then the
bitter cry: "Why this is my dog." He was too ashamed to
reproach us. However, that made him reckless, and the creatures

Early Life in ,
New Zealand.
began to disappear at such a rate that we were obliged in
prudence to hold our hand. Turanga was famous at that time
for its innumerable ducks- and water fowl, and we often, after an
hour's sport, brought home a dozen at a time. I bought a small
canoe for duck shooting, and, thinking it as easy to sail as to
paddle, rigged up a mast, and set a sail not much larger than a
pocket handkerchief. The canoe was very crank, and the sail
not very manageable, and though I could swim a little I was once
nearly drowned, and was twice or three times upset.
About four miles from our house, there was a great preserve of
wood pigeons, that was made as tapu as the native chiefs could
devise. At a certain season, the pigeons came in vast flocks to
feed on the white berries of the Ti tree (braccena) and got so
heavy with fat that they could hardly fly from one tree to another.
No gun was allowed in the place. The Maoris, with a long
slender rod and a slip noose at the end, squatted under the leaves
and noiselessly slipped the noose over the necks of the stupid
pigeons as they were feeding. We wanted to have a shot, and
argued for permission, on the ground that we were proof against
all harm from the most dreadful tapu that the " tohunga " could
weave. They did not see it, but they did not positively forbid
us. It was a risky thing to do, but we went. We gave two or
three hours to the sport, and then desisted, because our friends
were getting annoyed. However, we brought away two such bags
of birds as we fairly staggered under. We did not venture to
repeat the experiment upon the temper of the tribe and were
rather ashamed of the rashness and folly of our adventure.
In the early intercourse of the Pakehas and Maoris, many, if
not most, of their quarrels rose from sheer ignorance of each
other's ways.
One very frequent cause was the inadvertent or careless viola
tion of the laws of tapu. The " burial places," or rather "sacred
groves," in which the bones of the dead were deposited, were
carefully guarded against violation. It was death for a Maori to
go into them at any time, except when the funeral rites were being

Early Life in
New Zealand. '
performed, and though the rule was relaxed as far as we (the
missionary families) were concerned, it was easy to give offence
by straying into these grounds, and still more by carrying into
them any particle of food. We had to be very careful about the
approach to these places. To hold a picnic under the delicious
shade would have been as deadly a sin as if we had committed a
murder. Sometimes a chief was under the tapu vow for weeks
01 months together ; during that time he dare not touch any food
or food-vessel with his hand, and whatever he ate or drank was
put by an attendant into his mouth. To touch his person with
any kind of cooked provisions was a mortal insult. To spill a
calabash of water upon him was nearly as bad. Especially the
head of the chief was tapu. To say even in joke : " I will
break your head," was one of the forms of "kanga," or cursing.
Nay, the word for the head of a beast, and the word for the head
of a man, were different, and to substitute one for the other was
a great offence. To burn the hair of a chief when his head was
cropped, would be awful sacrilege. The possessive pronouns as
applied to his limbs or to his property are different. One of the
earliest tragedies of our intercourse with the natives, the massacre
of Captain Furneaux's men, in 1773, arose from an unintentional
violation of the tapu. I heard the story from a very old man
when I was once on a visit to Blind Bay. He said that when
the " Adventure's " boat landed in the cove, the men sat down to
their meal, and one of them refused either to return or to pay for
the stone hatchet of one of the Maoris ; and that the latter
snatched up a piece of bread and ran off. The white man ran
after him with some kind of tin can in his hand, and coming
back to a group of the natives sitting round the boat, he, sailor
like, put the tin, as if it were a hat, on the head of a chief. It
had contained food, and it was to Maori feeling a very gross
insult, and that, he said, was the direct cause of the massacre that
followed. Of course, from our having grown up among this
people, we became acquainted with their superstitions and pre
judices, and we took care not to offend them, if we could help

Early Life in 2g
New Zealand.
jt, by carelessly disregarding them. This was one thing that
established us in their confidence. We became at last recognized
peacemakers, in their inter-tribal quarrels. Even if fighting was
going on, our persons were sacred, and we were allowed to pass
to and fro, between the contending parties, they sometimes
deliberately suspending their fire, that we might pass unharmed.
While I was at Turanga, Mr. Williams projected a tramp to
the East Cape, and on to nearly as far as Opotiki, and asked me
to join him. No missionaries had as yet got a footing along this
coast, but a number of slaves had been released in the North,
and had found their way back to their own tribes. Some of them
were partially instructed in Christian doctrine, and, acting as
teachers, persuaded their people to build places of worship, and
conducted Christian services as well as they could every Sunday.
After several days march we came to Waiapu, a pah near the
East Cape, with a population at that time of two or three
thousand. Mr. Williams was more than a persona grata to these
people who, in fact, almost worshipped him. The reason, I think,
was this : in 1833 a whaler lay becalmed off the East Cape with
twelve of the Waiapu people on board, who had sent their canoe
ashore. In the night the wind suddenly rose, and the ship was
driven northward by a violent gale. The Captain did not know
what to do with his unwilling passengers, but at last landed them
at Kororareka, in other words, into the very jaws of their enemies.
The Northern Maoris instantly seized them, and distributed them
among four chiefs as slaves. The Missionaries appealed to the
Ngapuhi chivalry — and as we shall see by and by they were as
chivalrous a tribe as ever lived — showing how unworthy it was
of them, as gentlemen, to take advantage of an accident that was
equivalent to a shipwreck, and which put these men in their
power. The chiefs proudly admitted the force of the appeal, and
gave up the captives, and Mr. Williams took them back — four
years before this visit of ours to Waiapu — with a score of other
released slaves who were received as those alive from the dead,
and whom no one expected to see again, anymore than we expect

Early Life in 2(.
New Zealand.
to see those to whom we have bidden our last farewell. So it
was no wonder that we should now be received with enthusiastic
welcome. We got to Waiapu on a Saturday afternoon, and pitched our
tent a hundred yards from the pah, on the edge of a deep ravine,
and were hardly able to do it for the throng that pressed upon
us. There were nearly as many dogs as men, and the human
part of the assembly was as noisy and as wild and savage in
appearance, as any crowd I ever saw. As the sun was setting,
Mr. Williams settled that I was to stop in the tent and make
arrangements for our morrow's dinner, while he went to have a
short evening service in the spacious new church that had been
built within the pah. He was very particular in his directions ; we
were sick of pancakes made without eggs, which were our normal
substitute for bread. My chief care was to make a bolster pud
ding, to mix the dough, roll it out with a bottle, spread over it
the contents of our one jar of jam, then roll it over into a bolster
and properly tie and boil it. We were to have it cold for our
Sunday dinner; and I remember it all from the intense disgust
with which my friend regarded the performance when the piece
de resistance came to be discovered the next day. It was beau
tiful and correct in form, that I know, but it was rather black in
colour, and of the consistence of soaked leather. My friend got
out of temper, but could not blame me for the absence of what we
had not got. I learnt the lesson then that you cannot make a
proper bolster pudding without suet.
To go back, however, Saturday evening was closing in when we
were rather startled by the sound of a most melodious bell. It
was simply a musket barrel, hung from the branch of a tree, and
struck with a stone, but the effect was more musical than the
ringing of many a bell I have since heard. One of its most
astonishing effects, however, was that on its first stroke all the
dogs around made for the bush, howling and yelping as if they
were possessed. The explanation was, that the Maoris knew that
the church was no place for dogs, and that the ringing of

Early Life in
New Zealand. 3
the bell was the signal for every man thrashing his cur out of
all desire to follow him ; thus, the association of the sound and
the thrashing became a fixed idea in the canine mind.
You can readily imagine that in these rough tramps we had not
much opportunity for the use of blacking. It was our practice
every night to grease our boots with as much as they would
absorb, and so we kept the leather supple and our feet dry. It
was also our practice to keep a good stout stick at our bedside
for any emergency that might arise. On this particular night
there were some dozen Maoris sleeping round a fire some twenty
yards or so from us, with their thick, thatch-like mats drawn over
their heads. Towards the small hours of the morning we were
disturbed by a shuffle in the tent. It turned out to be a dog
walking off with my friends boots. Mr. Williams sat up, rubbed
his eyes, gathered all his forces together, and with one fell
swoop his stick came down on the head of the unluckly intruder.
The wretch was only half killed, and we were in great fear
lest his moans should awaken the sleepers outside, and let us in
for a row. I advised a second rap,- and then we sat up in our
beds, and considered what we should do. I suggested that in
the circumstances we were not bound to wait and explain, and
that our volatile friends need not know that there was anything
to be explained. So at last I took up the limp, nasty beast, and
stepping stealthily, out of the tent door, I carried him gently away
from the sleepers, and at the edge of the ravine hurled him into
the depths below. It awakened no one, and to our great relief I
got to the tent and turned in again, without any of our savage
friends being a whit the wiser for what had occurred. It was
very amusing, but still we knew that we were among savages, and
that with all their expressions of joy at our visit, a breach of their
laws of hospitality might give us a good deal of trouble. As it
was the wretched dog did not seem to be missed, and we were
relieved from all suspicion of unkindness.
Next day, I saw, perhaps, as wonderful a congregation as ever
assembled for Christian worship. But first a word about theChurch.

Early Life in „
New Zealand.
It was a very fine specimen of Maori architecture, capable of
holding more than a thousand people, unseated, and with few
props or pillars to break the whole view of the interior. All the
beams and rafters, which divided roof and sides into so many
panels, were painted with Kokowai (red ochre) and pricked out
with a pattern of white, the run of the lines being after the
fashion of the tattoo on a Maori's face. A kind of framed pathway
extended from the door to the opposite end, the space on one
side being given up to the men, and on the other to the
women and children. At the extreme end was the pulpit, or
reading desk, resting upon a sort of dais, some two feet above
the general ground floor. The pulpit was in fact the remains
of a large oil barrel, the front left entire, but the back part sawn
half away, the seat resting on the lower half. Like all the other
wood in the place, it was plastered with red Kokowai relieved
by the white Moko pattern. The spaces of the panels through
the whole building were beautifully filled up with reeds, that
looked like thousands of long, white cedar-pencils. An hour
before the Sunday service one could see that great preparations
for the ceremony were going on. Red ochre for the face, and
shark oil for the hair were much in requisition. The least tag
of European costume was utilized. Whether a jacket was worn
as trousers or trousers as jacket, was altogether a matter of taste,
and no one's fashion disturbed in the least the gravity of his
neighbours. Many of them thought it highly proper that they
should be armed with books. It might be an old ship's almanac,
or a cast-away novel, or even a few stitched leaves of old news
papers. What did it matter ? A book was a book, and every
one knew that to hold a book was part of the ceremony in the
new Karakia. Still there were a score or two who could read,
and one of the most touching things was to see their books.
Leaves of cartridge paper folded and stitched like a pamphlet,
but written all through with the prayers of the Liturgy, or a
chapter or two from the New Testament. That was the equip
ment of many an earnest helper of his country in those days.

Early Life in
New Zealand.
It was generally done with some mixture of lamp-black, or
powdered charcoal, for ink, and I was often glad to exchange a
printed book for some of these early relics of Christian labour.
Many of them are lodged among the archives of the Church
Missionary Society in England. Presently a bell began to ring
and the dogs to howl, and on all sides there was a grave and quiet
movement towards the house of assembly. We gave them time
to dispose of themselves before we entered the church. Our
first surprise was to see two grizzly old savages, nearly naked,
plastered with red ochre and reeking with shark-oil from head
to heel, on each side of the door, each brandishing a murderous
club, and as far as looks went, threatening to brain any disturber
of the ceremonies — be it man, woman or child. They were the
door keepers of the Sanctuary, and their main office was to brain
any dog who dared to put his nose inside the door, to frighten
into fits the boys who were disposed to larking, and otherwise to
keep order in the course of the proceedings. I have seen the
guardians of the Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem, and they were
truculent enough, but they were mere babes in ferocity compared
with these Maori custodians. On entering, we found the place
densely packed, more than a thousand people reeking with shark
oil, and dressed, as far as they were dressed at all, in such a
grotesque and fantastic variety of costume as no rag fair ever
presented. The men were on the right side, the women on the
left, and we passed along with all eyes following us, to the dais
at the end, where the native " Teacher " awaited us.
Mr. Williams went into the pulpit, and after a few minutes
gave out the Maori version of " With one consent let all the
earth." It was then a common custom for the " leader " to sing
the first line by himself, and then the people joined in with a
roar ; Mr. Williams struck up the " Old Hundredth," but when
he got to the second line not a soul fell into the tune, and on
all that sea of upturned faces there was a look of blank surprise
and unmistakable disgust. The " Teacher," however, rose to
the occasion, and stepping up to the pulpit, said, " They don't

Early Life in
New Zealand. 33
know that tune, sir, let me start one they can sing." So he
made his start, and every face began to lighten. With a sound
like the bursting of thunder, they took the second line out of the
leader's mouth, and, as it were, carried off in a roar, like the
noise of many waters, all the rest of the singing. It was terrible.
They felt that now or never was the time-to show their friends
what good Christians they meant to be. Man, woman, and child
were on the strain, holding their sides, stooping to the effort,
gasping for more breath, and working till the perspiration made
long brown seams, where it rolled down their red smeared faces.
I saw our two old club friends gesticulating wildly in the distance
(it was getting misty with the steam), and close by me there was
a hoary old sinner, whom I could just hear gasping out " Kia
Kaha, Kia Kaha " (sing louder, sing louder). Poor things they
meant well, and were surely hearty enough, but it was hard to
reconcile it with our notions of the Apostolic precept — " Let all
things be done decently and in order." The rest was compara
tively calm, and Mr. Williams gave them a quiet, sensible sermon,
to which they listened in rapt attention. This was the place,
and these were the people that gave name to the diocese, and
Mr. Williams liked nothing better than to be known in after
years as Bishop of Waiapu. I afterwards took another tramp
with my friend over what was, in a missionary sense, virgin ground,
and we went South as far as Ahuriri, which was one day to be
known as the district of Napier. Before the country was ceded
to the Queen I had thus gone from one camp to another, and,
as a rule, even the hostile natives who accompanied me were
unmolested, provided that they did not carry arms. Of course
things changed very much afterwards, but down to the time of
the British occupation of New Zealand as a Colony, this im
punity had, as far as we were concerned, the force of law. It
was by this sort of training that I got such qualification as I had
to deal with the natives in cases of dispute and difficulty when
I afterwards entered the Civil Service, and it was by this know
ledge of their ways that I succeeded in averting many a quarrel

Early Life in
New Zealand. 34
that might have sprung from inadvertence, and yet have been as
disastrous in effect as though it had arisen from some act of con
scious and wilful injustice.
I was still at Turanga when Captain Hobson arrived in
the Bay of Islands and concluded with the Northern Chiefs
the celebrated Treaty of Waitangi, 6th February, 1840, in which
the natives ceded the sovereignty of the country to the Queen
on certain conditions. The signatures of nearly all the recognized
chiefs in the country were afterwards appended, and Captain
Hobson became the first Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony,
under the general administration of Sir George Gipps, Governor
of New South Wales.

Early Life in
New Zealand.

CHAPTER II.
[N the last chapter I brought down my notes to
the time when I was about seventeen years
old. I was then at Turanga, with the Rev.
W. Williams (afterwards Bishop of Waiapu),
reading Latin and Greek, and travelling with
him among tribes that had been seldom visited, and whose know
ledge of the Pakeha was derived from what they had seen of a
few scare-crow, vagabond specimens of the English people. They
were savages, pure and simple, only knowing the white man in
his roughest character, and, in fact, were rather appalled at our
exceptional decency. It gave me a rare opportunity of studying
Maori character and customs, and proved a good discipline for
the unknown duties and difficulties that were before me. Of
course the mere information one gained about tribal history,
personal acquaintance with the chiefs, and insight into Maori
ways, was something, but the best lesson I learnt was the ability
to put myself mentally in the Maori's position, and to look at
questions through his eyes, as well as through those of the white
man. That helped me much in after years to mediate between
the two races, and to stave off many a quarrel when we were
quite unprepared to support our contention if it came to a trial
of strength, and which, but for careful handling, would have pre
cipitated us into serious peril and disaster, ending, perhaps, in
our weak condition, by simply wiping us out altogether. I could
estimate our perils better than many of my elders, and could
guard against them more carefully than would have been possible
without this experience.

Early Life in
New Zealand. 3°
It was in the year 1840 that Captain Hobson arrived in the
Bay of Islands and concluded with the Northern Chiefs the
Treaty of Waitangi. It is the Magna Charta of the Maoris. By
this Treaty, we on our part agreed to recognize all Maori rights
to property and land, to mete out equal justice to Maori and
Pakeha, and to give the natives the full status of British subjects,
while they on their part agreed to cede the supreme government
of the country to Her Majesty the Queen. The Treaty was
executed on the 6th February, T840, and within a few months the
signatures of nearly all the recognized Chiefs in the country were
appended to the document. So New Zealand became a British
colony, and Captain Hobson was installed as its first Governor,.
subordinate for a time to the general administration of Sir George
Gipps, the Governor of New South Wales.*
It was with great reluctance that the British Government
assumed the responsibility of taking formal possession of New
Zealand, but it is quite certain that they would soon, in any
circumstances, have had to annex the country, not only to save
the natives from anarchy, but for the protection of our own
interests, and to prevent the Islands from being occupied by a
rival power. Two things, however, compelled them to decide at
once what they would do : the secret preparations of the French
to forestall us, and the pretensions of the New Zealand Company
to found an independent State. We know now that while we
were hesitating, Louis Philippe was officially assuring the
Foreign Office that he had no designs on New Zealand, and yet
all the while was secretly pushing on a scheme of French
colonization. There was a French Company of adventurers,
the Nantes-Bordelaise, with a scheme to acquire land in New
Zealand by purchase, and they obtained authorization from the
King, who appointed Admiral Duperrd, Minister of Marine, to
make terms with them, and he promised the Company that he
would sustain their action, by the presence of one or two ships
of war. That was in 1839, and no doubt the Foreign Office
• Sec Treaty of Waitangi. Appendix I.

Early Life in
Neiv Zealand. 37
had some knowledge or suspicion of the move by which Louis
Philippe meant to steal a march upon us. The French Com
pany was formed, and their settlers were conveyed by a French
man of war, but it was too late, and when the war ship reached
the Bay of Islands, it was to see the British flag flying at
Kororareka, and afterwards at the principal harbours in the
Southern Island.
The other thing that precipitated the action of our Govern
ment was the formation of the New Zealand Company, and the
pretensions of their scheme, which they kept secret till they had
started their first vessel, to found an independent State of their
own in any district that they might get the Maoris to cede to
them. This Company was really the project of the Wakefield
family. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the elder brother, was a
man of great ability, and, one may add, of great audacity. He
and Sir Charles Buller had gone with Lord Durham to quell
the insurrection in Canada, and as Justin McCarthy truly says :
" Lord Durham saved Canada but wrecked his own career."
On their return to England, Edward Gibbon started this New
Zealand Company in 1839, making Lord Durham its Governor,
and Mr. Somes the great ship-owner, its Deputy-Governor.
Buller, Molesworth, Stuart Mill and others of the Left-Liberal
wing supported the scheme. Wakefield himself, for personal
reasons, kept his name in the back-ground, but it was well
known that he wrote the very able letters which Somes signed,
and which were far and high above anything that Somes himself
could have done. A capital of ^100,000 was raised, and
100,000 acres were sold in London before a single acre had
been purchased in New Zealand, or even the site of the settle
ment had been determined. The Ship " Tory " was chartered
and put to sea before the Government could stop her, and a
brother, William Wakefield, went on board in charge of the
first expedition.
Among these adventurers were several gentlemen who had
been more or less implicated in the Canadian rebellion, and who

Early Life in
New Zealand. 3°
had a strong feeling of resentment against the Imperial Govern
ment. They formed a very distinct element in the earliest batch
of the Company's emigrants, and gave tone and spirit to the
young community. There were also several retired officers of
the Spanish Legion. In September the " Tory" arrived at Port
Nicholson, and the series of loose purchases began, on the
strength of which the Company claimed a fourth of the Northern
Island, and say, one fifth of the Southern Island. William
Wakefield, the principal resident agent, had been a Colonel in
the Spanish Legion. Another brother Captain Wakefield was
afterwards the agent at Nelson, and young Edward, a son of
Gibbon, came out with his uncle in the " Tory." They are all
gone now and I would not speak otherwise than very gently of
the dead, but this much I may say : William would have been
a master of diplomacy if he had only had art enough to conceal
his art, but he always, in any negotiation, betrayed his subtlety in
scheming, and put the other side on their guard lest they should
concede more than they meant to do. Captain Wakefield, at
Nelson, was a brave straight-forward sailor, to whose nature the
craft of diplomacy was altogether distasteful, and who was always
disposed to take the shortest cut to the end he desired. Young
Edward was very eccentric, and there was a certain strain
of rowdyism in his composition that did more harm to
himself, poor fellow, than to those against whom it was directed-
He could hardly open his lips without uttering some bitter
sarcasm against those he disliked, and he was not at all particular
in whose presence he did so.'
The new settlers, on landing, organized themselves into a
government, and claimed to exercise all rights of sovereignty on
the ground that, with the land, the Maoris had also transferred
to them their functions of chieftainship within the alienated
district. So they elected magistrates, tried cases, and inflicted
fines, conducting themselves in all respects as an autonomous
State. A man named Pearson was arrested on a charge of breach
of contract with someone in Hobart Town, and when he refused

Early Life in
New Zealand. 39
to recognize the court and was rescued by his friends, the
magistrates, as they called themselves, issued an escape warrant,
while their new paper — conducted by a Canadian refugee-
declared in grandiloquent fashion : " We are well pleased that the
first person subjected to an assertion of law is of sufficient standing
and intelligence to raise the question of our right to act under
the sovereign power of the district ; Captain Pearson will find
that the constituted authorities of Port Nicholson have power to
compel obedience." What with the intrigues of the French and
the eccentricities of the Company, to say nothing of the growing
complication of our relations with the Maoris, it was time for the
British Government to determine how it should deal with a
country that lay too near to her Australian Colonies to be safely
disregarded. In September, 1840, six months after the Treaty of Waitangi
was signed, the assembled missionaries, at Captain Hobson's
earnest request, released my father from his duties to the Church
Missionary Society, that he might take the post of Chief Protector
of the Aborigines.
It soon became apparent that the Bay of Islands was in no
way suited for the seat of Government, and my father was in
structed to proceed to the Thames and to treat with the natives,
if possible, for the purchase of a better location. The issue was
that in the end of September he bought a block of forty
thousand acres at Auckland, and afterwards a still larger tract,
and there the British flag was hoisted on a hill on the Southern
shore of Waitemata harbour within the site of what is now
the city of Auckland.
All this had happened while I was still at Turanga. It was
in the last days of 1840 that I returned to the Bay of Islands,
and in January, 1841, I took my stool as probation clerk in the
native department of the Civil Service of New Zealand, age
nearly eighteen. The government establishments were then being
removed to Auckland, and when I got there, the city was repre
sented by three or four rough shanties and a few hundred tents.

Early Life in
New Zealand. 4°
From a little after seventeen I began to form the ambition of
getting qualified to become some day a Minister of Christ's Holy
Gospel. The tumult of my political life for the next few years
never changed my purpose. My duties were thrust upon me by
no will of my own. I could not escape them, but in my heart I
always regarded them as an episode. I can see now that they
were a full preparation for the work that was to come on at last.
My old grind in classics, now so much forgotten, was not
altogether labour in vain. Bishop Williams drilled me severely
in language and logic by the analysis of Greek and Latin senten
ces, after the strict and literal fashion of the old Oxford School.
The exercise has served me well through life, and not the least
in the old complications of Maori affairs, where accuracy was
often of vital importance, and looseness of expression might so
easily lead to misunderstanding. With such a training and
knowing Maori and the Maoris more than most men, I was not
morally free, and could not resist the call to public service at a
crisis when such qualifications were sorely needed in the interests
of both races, though I had little notion of the cares it would
entail. It seemed to spoil my scheme of life but it did one no
harm in the end. My way was hedged in, and I had to face the
pressing and often perilous duties of the passing hour, which some
one must have discharged, at a time of experimental, abrupt and
almost violent transition. It was too exhausting a process to
allow one, while it lasted, the luxury of dreaming disappointed
dreams. Yet through all I never let go the hope that in quieter
times I might have the chance of carrying out the purpose of
my earlier youth. The opportunity was in the end made for me,
and I did not make it for myself. That all should issue in
such a quiet course of ministry as mine has been in Tasmania,
never entered into my imagination or forecast in those harrassing
times, though I often prayed the old Hebrew aspiration : "Oh,
that I had wings like a dove ! for then I would fly away and be
at rest .... 1 would hasten my escape from the windy storm
and tempest."

Early Life in
New Zealand. 4
Whether I deserved it or not, I soon got the credit of being a
clear and careful interpreter, and for so young a fellow I was
thought to have unusual discretion in all dealings with the
Maoris. The time was near to test whatever might be in me.
In November, 1841, news came of an atrocious murder com
mitted by a young Chief in one of the islets off Kororareka, in
the Bay of Islands. The name of the murderer was Maketu
and his victims were a Mrs. Robertson, her two children, and a
little half-caste in the house. The plea which Maketu made in
excuse of his atrocity was always that the woman cheated him,
swore at him, and exasperated him with threats and insults.
Even so, it was a barbarous and terrible revenge. There was
madness in Maketti's family of a homicidal character. His
brother and sister were both deranged, his aunt strangled
herself in a paroxysm of rage, and his father Ruhe was
subject to fits of frenzy, that made it dangerous for his best
friends to go near him._ Ruhe, for instance, had always a great
reverence for my mother, and, in ordinary circumstances, would
do almost anything she told him. But one day he burst into
the room where she was with a loaded pistol, and with an
impulse he could not repress, he determined to shoot her, but,
with the pistol at full cock and pointed across the table to her
breast, my brave little mother did not flinch (I don't think she
ever screamed in her life), but with a few low and quiet words
she said: "Ruhe, put down that ugly thing. I am only a woman
(he wahineau). God is looking at you, and you must put it away."
Twice he presented the weapon, and dropped it at her calm and
steadfast look, and then he withdrew. When the fit of madness
was over, he was full of remorse. He was the Chief of a village
about three miles from our house, and ever after, when my
mother passed his place, he was eager to ask her to his house,
and to show her every kind of attention and respect that he
could think of; putting all he had at her disposal, and at a hint
he was delighted to be at any trouble to serve her. No doubt
there was the same mad strain in Ruhe's son, though I do not
mean to represent it as bad enough to make Maketu irrespon-

Early Life in
New Zealand. 42
sible for the dreadful crime he committed. Maketu made no
secret of the murder when it was done, and the question of
arresting him was a very serious matter to a Government hardly
yet established and that had no soldiers to support its authority
or enforce its laws. It was Maketu's own father who came
forward and gave him up. A meeting of Chiefs was called at
Paihia, and Waka Nene, Heke, Tawai, Patuone and Pomare, all
leading Chiefsof the Ngapuhi tribe, discussed the situation. Heke
was furious at the surrender ; he would not in the least have
minded the Maoris shooting the murderer, but to pass over the
whole adjudication to the British Government, was, he thought,
to give up his independence. But the others insisted that the
young man should be tried according to the law that by treaty
they had accepted, and sent a letter to Hobson, expressing their
loyalty to the Queen and their confidence in British justice.
The trial was fixed for February, 1842, and it was the first
Criminal Sitting of the Supreme Court in New Zealand under
Chief Justice Martin, who had recently arrived from England.
I do not know why, but out of some dozen capable men at hand,
the Government chose me, though the youngest of them all, to
act as Interpreter, on this most critical occasion. It was for
the Government itself a question of life and death. The greatest
care was necessary to make everything clear to the Maoris, and
it was an anxious task to make them understand the meaning of
our antique forms of law. There were many natives in court,
who, of course, had never seen our way of procedure ; they
listened with intense interest, as in the presence of Maori scholars
who could have corrected any mistake I might make — though
they had never once occasion to do so — I explained the principle
that the law assumed a man to be innocent until he was proved
to be guilty; I told them, under the Judge's direction, the functions
of the Jury and of the counsel on either side, and made them
understand what was meant by the technical plea of " not guilty,"
and such forms of oath as " you shall truly try," or " the evidence
you shall give, shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but

Early Life in
New Zealand. "*3
the truth." The contrast was so great between the deliberation of
the trial and the passionate way in which the Maoris were accus
tomed to settle such matters among themselves, that they were
struck with admiration and awe at the formality and patience of
the whole proceeding, and, anxious as the crisis was, it was as a
new revelation of our ways, and went far to inspire them with
confidence in the desire, at least, of the Supreme Court to be
scrupulously just in its administration of the law. They were
much astonished at the grave process of proving a crime that was
already confessed, and greatly impressed with the personal
demeanour of the Judge and the solmenity which I tried to put
into my rendering of his words. Maketu was hanged and his
body buried within the precincts of the goal. It would never have
done to give it to his friends just then, though a year or two
afterwards the remains were handed over. When Justice Martin
afterwards visited the Bay of Islands, the father received him
sadly, of course, but without resentment, and with eveiy mark of
deference and respect. So far as I was concerned, I think poor
old Ruhe liked me better than otherwise for my part in the busi
ness. It was the first trial in the Supreme Court that launched
me into public life. Sir William Martin took kindly to me ever
after, and poor Hobson who was now breaking down with care
and sickness, was greatly relieved, and gave me warm approval
and encouragement, and promised to do his best for my advance
ment. Sir William grew in the estimation of the Maoris, and all
over the country they greatly revered him for his upright and
benevolent character. His associations with Bishop Selwyn
deepened their confidence and respect beyond anything that
they felt for all other officials of the Government. Years after
I had settled my Tasmanian relations, he pressed me pathetically
to throw them up for what he considered the higher duty of
coming to their help in the strait and confusion that had
overtaken the country, but I was much too entangled in
home interests to make the sacrifice. He retired in a few
years from the Bench on account of illness, and returned

Early Life in
New Zealand. 44
to England at about the close of Colonel Gore Browne's
administration in New Zealand. He died at Torquay not long
after his friend the Bishop of Lichfield had passed to his rest.
We are now in 1842. Mr. Spain, a solicitor who had been much
engaged in the electioneering Liberal interest at home, had recently
arrived from England, having been appointed by Lord John Russell
to be Chief Commissioner to adjudicate upon claims to land
through purchase from the Maoris, and he was now preparing to go
to the South to look into the titles of the New Zealand Company.
To my great surprise I was again selected to be the medium of
communication between the Maoris and the Court, first as Inter
preter and soon after simply as Maori advocate. I was made
protector of the natives through all the territory claimed by
the Company. My father had nothing to do with the appoint
ment and feared that the post would be too difficult, but I believe
that the Governor offered it to me on recommendation of the
Chief Justice and the Attorney General, and at the request of
others, and not merely of his own good will. I roughly reckoned
my clients at some fourteen thousand souls, and knew well that a
task of great difficulty and unpleasantness was before me. It
was not at all my duty to make out a claim for the natives, or to
try by any means, fair or foul, to upset the Company's claims,
and nothing could be farther from my disposition ; but I had to
find out the facts of the purchase, to prove them in open court,
and to see as well as I could, that the Maoris were not defrauded
of such lands as they had never sold. I had also to try and
effect a compromise in any case where disputed ground had been
occupied by settlers who had bought their allotments on the faith
of the Company at home. That was almost the hardest task in
all my duty, gave me anxious days and sleepless nights, and
inured me to the perils of a peace-maker when both sides were
too ready to settle everything by a fight.
Before I take you into this part of my work, I should like to
try and explain in as few words as possible, the essential diffi
culties of our position. Setting aside for the present the con-

Early Life in
Netv Zealand. 45
tingent and accidental occasions of dispute, there were standing
causes of complication that were normal and fundamental. No
mistake could be greater than the notion that the Maoris were
without law in their relations with one another, or that there
was any looseness in their notions of the tenure of land. On
the contrary, they had very stringent laws that were not at all
unsuited to their condition and the stage of social develop
ment that they had reached ; they were far more conservative
in observing them than we are in our modern changes of
fashion or conviction ; and so they were the source of great
trouble to us when wye tried to supersede them by our own
advanced civilisation. There was, first, the ( i ) Law of the Blood
Bond, which we see everywhere at a certain stage in the progress
of nations. It is not at all the unreasonable thing that has
sometimes been thought. The idea of separate and individual
responsibility, or of separate possession of every kind of property,
is a late product of civilisation that has no place in the earlier
condition of society. What the Blood Bond was with our
remote ancestors, is well explained in the opening chapter of
" Green's English People," and the explanation will do just as
well for the modern Maoris as for the ancient Britons.
Green says : " Order and law were made to rest in each
little group of English people upon the Blood Bond, which knit
its families together ; every outrage was held to have been done
by all who were linked to the doer of it ; every crime to have
been committed against all who were linked by blood to the
sufferer from it. From this sense of the value of the family
bond as a means of restraining the wrong doer by forces which
the tribe, as a whole, did not as yet possess, sprang the first
rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his kinsman's
keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, and to suffer with and
pay for him if wrong were done. So fully was this principle
recognized, that even if any man was charged before his fellow
tribesmen with crime, his kinsfolk still remained in fact his sole
judges, for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or his

Early Life in ,
Neiv Zealand. 4°
guilt that he had to stand or fall." No words could more
exactly describe the Maori law of Blood Bond, and you can see
how full of difficulty it was likely to be to us in our dealings
with the race, and as it came into collision with our principle,
that every man must be held accountable for his own actions
alone, and not for the actions of his kinsmen as well.
A second fundamental Maori law was the law of (2) Tribal
Possession. The private, separate, and exclusive ownership of
land was not recognized among them, though I have seen this
denied. There might be gradation in personal claims, but the
consent of the tribe as a whole, or of some subdivision or group
of its families, was necessary for the alienation of any part of the
tribal territory. No Chief, however high his rank, could dispose of
a single acre without the concurrence of his tribe. Without such
a law, no tribe could be sure of its integrity, and any number of
wedges might be driven into its territory. Throughout the
Northern Island, and through the greater part of the Southern,
the divisions of land were accurately known, and on no subject
was there greater jealousy than on the invasion of each other's
boundaries. It was fatal to the tribe to allow the individual, on
his own mere motion, to admit a stranger to get foothold on its
land. Long before the white man showed his face in New
Zealand, there was a proverb among the Maoris : " He wahine
he wenua, e ngaro ai te tangata," which may be rendered in
English: " For land or wife, man stakes his life," meaning that a
man, who is a man, will fight with all his life rather than be forced
to surrender either land or woman. The depth of this feeling about
their land, to say nothing about the wife, was greatly underrated
by Europeans, and their disregard of it was, and has continued
to be, the source of most of the trouble that we have had with
the Maoris.
The third and last Maori law that I will notice, was the law
of (3) Possession by Conquest. Most of the land held by the
tribes was held by right of inheritance — but not a little was
claimed to have been wrested from its original owners by force

Early Life in
Netv Zealand. 47
of conquest. To establish this force into a right, it was never
enough to invade and overrun a given district, and even to drive
out for a time the inhabitants if the invading force were then to
retire from the raid. Permanent occupancy was the condition of
permanent possession, and it was expressed by building pahs,
making tracts of actual cultivation, or exacting a yearly tribute
of the produce from the remnant of the original holders.
Obviously claims of this character might be very indeterminate,
and they, in fact, raised the most complicated questions with
which we had to deal.
Now, anyone who carries these three laws in his mind — the
law of the Blood Bond, the law of Tribal Possession, and the law
of Possession by Conquest- — will have the key to all our great
troubles with the Maoris, from the Treaty of Waitangi to the
present hour.
Our only hope of keeping peace between the races, was by
gradually modifying their system until it should be merged into
our principles of possession, and I am very-strongly of opinion,
that nearly all our contention with the Maoris has arisen from
our disregard of these fundamental considerations, or from
the attempt to abolish them too suddenly, and with too high a
hand. Mr. Commissioner Spain was a man of solid intelligence, but
with a good deal of legal pedantry about him. He was somewhat
slow in thinking, very wooden in his apprehension of ways of
dealing with new emergencies, steady and rather plodding in his
ways, thoroughly honest in intention, and utterly immovable to
threats, though he might have been softened by flattery.
The agents of the company could have got more out of such a
man if they had not begun by shaking their fists in his face,
grimacing to their utmost power of contortion, and defying his
authority in a very larrikin sort of manifestoing.
We were not very welcome to the community of Wellington.
No Government officials were at that time. Many of the
settlers were sore at the course that things had taken. The

Early Life in
New Zealand. 4°
leaven of the old Canadian rebellion was still working in some
of their leading men. They had founded the settlement before
the British Government had annexed the country, and to some
extent in defiance of the Foreign Office. They were very
jealous of Auckland, they laughed at the Treaty of Waitangi, at
its engagement to respect Maori rights in property and land, and
at its concession to the natives of the status of British subjects.
They were vexed that the little self-governing state they hoped
to found, had, as such, been brushed away by the Queen's
authority, and that what they called the " sovereignty of the
district" was not only hailed with inextinguishable laughter, but
had been taken out of their hands, and they resented with fear,
as well as anger, the appointment of a Commissioner to examine
into their purchases, and possibly, to question their titles. So
there was a great deal of inner trembling, and of outward
bluster and protest at the opening of the Court, objections to
its jurisdiction, to its constitution, and to its forms of procedure ;
above all, to its demand of evidence and its summoning of
Maori witnesses. That was what no one could abide, and
those who insisted upon it were put down at once as faddish
enemies to British rights and liberties. Spain bitterly offended
Colonel Wakefield at the outset, by requiring proof that the
signers of the Company's deeds had the right to convey the
lands that were claimed to have been purchased. It was
considered as altogether superfluous, and young Edward, his
nephew, made himself rudely conspicuous by interrupting the
proceedings with outbursts of wrath, and with open sneers at
the preposterous and ridiculous character of the demand.
One of the first witnesses called was Dickey Barrett, the
Interpreter, through whom Colonel Wakefield had negotiated
his purchases. 'Barrett was a shore whaler who had married
a native woman ; he was a decent fellow enough among
men of his class, but he was very ignorant, and I soon made
him show in the course of his evidence that he did not
even understand the English meaning of the deeds he

From a Photo, by Aligns.

HONE HEKE.

Early Life in
New Zealand. 49
professed to interpret. He admitted, too, that instead
of telling the natives, as the deed set forth, that one-tenth
of the surveyed lots should be reserved for their use,
he had simply put it that one lot of the alienated land
should be kept for the Maoris, and one for the Pakehas, and so
on through the whole — that is, that half the land should be kept
for their use. He admitted, further, that he had taken no
account of many natives who were unwilling to sell. It soon
became clear that Barrett's qualification to interpret, was that he
spoke whaler Maori, a jargon that bears much the same relation
to the real language of the Maoris as the pigeon English of the
Chinese does to our mother tongue. The whole transaction had
been of a very hasty and hugger-mugger character. Of course
my exposure of all this greatly exasperated the agents of the
Company, and made even the settlers who had bought
allotments on the faith of the Company, look at me as if I was
trying to oust them from their possessions. I was really most
anxious to get them, in any case, out of their difficulties, but I
suppose they could not see it. It was rather hard to bear, but
it was my duty to see all the facts of these transactions
thoroughly sifted, and I knew that the occupying settlers could
never have peace until the Maoii rights were fairly extinguished.
Young Wakefield now attacked me in the local paper, asserting
broadly that I knew nothing of Maori ; that I was always prowling
about the pahs ; that I was helping the natives to concoct false
evidence ; and finally, by way of climax, he suggested that I
was deliberately perjuring myself as Interpreter to the Court.
That last hit was going too far. I insisted at once that the charge
be disposed of, and the court refused to move another inch until
it was settled. To bring the matter to an issue, I then
threatened the paper with a prosecution unless they retracted and
apologised, and they came out with both in the next number,
but not without giving me a parting kick for my youthful
presumption. The fact was that there could be no mistake
about what I did in Court, for every question and answer was
D

Early Life in
New Zealand. 5°
painfully written down by me both in English and Maori. My
head aches now at the thought of the reams of paper I wrote
to fulfil this requirement. The attack now became puerile and
personal. I was a " raw-boned boy," " a nigger youth," " an
uneducated stripling," " half civilized," and the " son of a
gunsmith," which, if true, was surely of the smallest account, but
I suppose it sounded like " son of a gun." Any stone is good
enough to hurl against a man you do not like, and this
particular missile would do to express contempt. Such a
fashion of dealing with me only stiffened my resolution. So far
as the Court, or the Government, or I, myself, was concerned,
it was all like pouring water on a duck's back, and really did me
more good than harm, though it was unpleasant enough at the
moment. No doubt it made me very reserved and wary in my
talk, and I suppose some people set it down to " sulkiness,"
which I am sure it was not, but it was my only safety, in
ordinary conversation, to measure my words. It is awful to live
on perpetual guard and distrust. There was in the town of
Wellington, at this time, a collection of three native pahs, from
which the Maoris refused to budge. One of them, Te Aro, was
in the most valuable part of the town, and it was of course very
desirable that it should come into the Company's possession.
In fact it had all been sold in London, but the Company could
not give possession to the buyers. It was notorious that the
people of this pah had refused from the very first to have any
thing to do with Colonel Wakefield's negotiations, and the
Colonel had settled the matter to his own satisfaction by
proclaiming that this particular pah really never had any
land rights to dispose of, and that it was in fact a mere collection
of fugitives, vagabonds, and slaves. When, before I came,
Captain Hobson and my father visited the place, the Te Aro
natives at once stated their case, and Colonel Wakefield was
greatly annoyed that the Governor should have given them
audience, and that my father interpreted their complaints.

Early Life in
Neiv Zealand. 51
Some time after my work was done in the South, when things
were going on badly with the Company in England, as well as
in the Colony, Colonel Wakefield sent his nephew home, and on
arrival in London young Edward set himself to write a book in
defence of his uncle and of the Company, and professing to
recount the proceedings of the Government after they assumed
the sovereignty of the country. It was a very clever and a very
savage book, but its sarcasm was so unrelieved, and its animus
so apparent, that it did no one much harm. Some of his facts
are hard to recognize, and it may be said, generally, that they
take shape and colour from the spectacles through which he
looked at them. Everyone who in any way had checked the
Company's agents was presented in unredeemed lamp-black, and
everyone who supported them was made beautiful as an angel of
light. The young man spared no one on the other side from
the lash of his scorn. The successive Governors, the Chief
Justice, the Commissioners, the Police Magistrates, the Bishop,
the Missionaries, with the single exception of Mr. Hadfield, the
protesting Maoris, and even the captains of the English ships
of war, were all included in his satire. But George Clarke,
junior, the Maori advocate and protector, was very specially his
bete noir, and he never missed a chance of giving me a cut as he
passed me in his narration. Now and then he drew finely on
his imagination, as when he told that I was on one occasion "pale
and frightened" because I would not head an unruly mob who
wanted to force on a row in the pah. However, I am not afraid
that any of you would take young Edward's picture for a portrait.
As the examinations of the Company's titles proceeded, Mr.
Spain found himself in a position of very serious difficulty. He
could soon have given his decision, and as far as the Company
was concerned, it could only have been that none of their pur
chases was completed, and that the original negotiations had
been of the loosest description, but then there were the unfortu
nate settlers who had purchased in good faith from the English
Company in London.

Early Life in
New Zealand. S2
A precipitate decision might have raised Maori expectations
and demands to the point of danger. I had to repress the Maoris
as well as to keep back the Pakehas. In fact I had to stand as a
buffer in madly contending interests. It was not possible to turn
the settlers out of their allotments. It would have been cruel to
punish them for the sins or the blunders of the Company. Mr.
Spain, therefore, determined to spin out the proceedings, so as to
give time for some workable compromise that ¦would at least
leave the settlers in secure and legal occupation of their lands.
He simply indicated in which direction compensation was due.
The native side of the business was left in my hands, and
Colonel Wakefield was to act for the Company. If we could
not agree on terms of compensation, we were to refer the matter
to Mr. Spain as umpire, and his decision was to be final. A long
and troublesome correspondence passed between the Colonel
and myself. I could not bring him to terms. The preliminary
condition I laid down, that the Maoris should not be ousted
from their pahs, burial places, and cultivations, he would nevei
frankly accept, and, for the most part, our negotiations about
compensation fell through. He refused to refer our differences
to the umpire, and it was not till the arrival of Captain Fitzroy,
the new Governor, that he was compelled to give compensation
in some of the cases that were most pressing, and that could not
be left open any longer without peril to the community.
Besides my duties in the Land Court, I had to watch, with the
greatest care, the general course of Maori affairs throughout the
Southern district, and that involved many tedious journeys along
the West Coast, as far north as Wanganui and Taranake. There
were personal dangers enough everywhere, but I was never very
anxious, except in Wellington itself. Things were in such an .
inflammable condition in that town, that it would have taken very
little to bring on serious disturbances at any moment between the
settlers and the Maoris. There were foolish, hot headed
people enough who were bent upon forcing on a conflict between
the races. They thought that the natives could be intimidated

Early Life in
Neiv Zealand. S3
by demonstrations, or cowed by bullying, and that a magistrate
with a posse of special constables could over-awe any collection
of " niggers " who might be disposed to give trouble. It was also
a fixed notion with them that a company of British soldiers might
march from Port Nicholson to the North Cape against any
combination of Maoris to oppose them. There was never a
more ignorant, extravagant, and dangerous exhibition of the
folly of despising your enemy. The native Chiefs on their side
dreaded a collision, not from personal fear of an encounter, but
because they knew that it would be like the letting out of water
from a dam, and that there was no measure of the destructive
consequences, if once the flood were let loose. I saw clearly
that our people were living in a fool's paradise, and that with
the first serious appeal to force, the eyes of both parties would
be opened tovour relative strength, and it would be harder than
ever to stave off disaster. Many a row have I nipped in the
bud, with small thanks for the risk and trouble, and, indeed, to
do our people justice, with little knowledge on their part of the
crisis that was averted. I went from one side to the other with
my life in my hand. I went daily about the town with the
feeling that I was a sort of portable fire engine, ready at any
moment for the cry of fire, and for a rush to put it out before it
made any way. It was a pretty lively experience for a young
man's nerves. Our military force in Wellington was represented
at one time by less than a company of soldiers, and I remember
that on one occasion the alarm was raised that there was a row
at Pipitea, the pah on the North West side of the town. It
afterwards turned out to have been a squabble between a white
man and a Maori, in which the Pakeha struck the first blow,
when the Maori turned upon him and gave him a good thrashing
with his fists. The man ran into the town, yelling that the
Maoris had set upon and nearly killed him ; a mob was collected
and the soldiers were called out, and I hastened to the spot.
The soldiers drew up, with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets,
on the edge of a bank, which half surrounded the pah, and from

Early Life in
New Zealand. '4
whence they could look down into the yards and houses at their
feet. I rushed into the place, and to my intense disgust found
that the noisiest of the Maoris who was capering about, musket
in hand, and calling on the rest to follow and show fight, was
my own scallywag of a boy, whom I at once knocked down,
wresting the musket from his hands and kicking him into the
nearest house. While this little scuffle was going on, the
soldiers made ready to fire, but luckily held their hand. Some
of them told me afterwards that, thinking I had something to
do with stirring up the row, they meant to pot me first. I
persuaded the Maori to appear at the Police Court next day.
The case was dismissed in a few minutes, on clear proof that the
other man had begun the assault, and, after a few words of
caution to the Maoris from me, the natives retired well pleased,
and the Pakehas as intensely disgusted. That was the sort of
work I had to do, and you can easily understand that it was not
pleasant or popular work at all.
There were other land claims of the Company that we had to
investigate, at Porirua, at Manawatu, at Wanganui, at Taranake,
and on the southern side of the Strait. It was difficult to get
the Colonel now to attend the court, and Mr. Spain was often
kept waiting, and had to threaten that if he did not attend, the
examination must go on without him. The Colonel was always
privately very kind and friendly to me however fiercely we might
be opposed in our political contention. He went with us to
Wanganui, where the Commissioner decided (I quote his words)
that " the Company's claims to that district were defective to the
extent of millions of acres. They only established a claim to
land on one side of the river," and even for this, they had still
to compensate owners who had never been paid.
I come now to one of the saddest tragedies connected with
these miserable land squabbles that made an old man of me
when I was just turning twenty one. There were districts in the
Southern Island that were as much disputed between the Company
and the Maoris as any in the North. Some seventy miles from

Early Life in
New Zealand. ->5
Nelson there was a fine tract of country, known as the Wairau,
and which the agents were anxious to appropriate. When we
were to hold the Court at Porirua, Colonel Wakefield excused
himself from attending, and sent his nephew in his place. There
we met Rauparaha and Rangihaeata, who had cultivations at
Wairau, and who stoutly denied that they had ever sold or dreamt
of selling a foot of the ground. Mr. Spain afterwards reported :
" no evidence of the purchase has been adduced by the Company's
agent ; there is no proof in any way that the district was ever
alienated to the Company by the parties from whom that body.
asserts, through its agent, that it has been purchased, and I
entertain no apprehension that a candid and impartial perusal of
the evidence will ever lead to any other conclusion." That was
before the Wairau massacre. In March, 1843, Captain Wakefield,
the agent at Nelson, had offered payment to Rauparaha and
Rangihaeata for the " Wairau " lands, and in spite of their refusal
to part with them, sent a party of surveyors to cut the district
into blocks. The Chiefs said plainly to Captain Wakefield, and
afterwards to Mr. Spain and Edward Wakefield, at Porirua,
that if the company wanted to take the land, they must first take
their lives, or handcuff them and reduce them to slavery. The
Colonel's brother, Captain Wakefield, at Nelson, howeverpersisted.
The natives pulled up the Surveyor's ranging rods, and at last,
after first removing their personal goods to the boats, they burnt
down the temporary hut which Mr. Cotterell, the Surveyor, had
built. The goods they said belonged to the Pakeha, and they
would not touch them, but the material of the hut was their own
and they did not choose that the surveyor should have it. Mr.
Cotterell went back to Nelson, and laid an information at the
Police Court, against Rauparaha and Rangihaeata for arson. It
was the maddest of mad things that people dealing with Maoris
could have done. The Company's friends seized upon the chance.
Captain Wakefield, Thompson the Police Magistrate, Cotterell
the surveyor, and Richardson the Editor of the local paper,
with a party of about fifty started together, equipped with

Early Life in
New Zealand. 5°
an assortment of handcuffs to execute the warrant, which even
people in England would have considered of the most technical
character. Thirty five of these poor people were armed. It is
a dismal story of ignorance, rashness, hide-bound formality, and
foolhardy contempt of Maori rights and Maori powers of re
sistance. The end was, that the natives resisted the arrest, then
our people opened fire, and the issue was that nineteen of those
unfortunate special constables, including Wakefield, Thompson,
Cotterell and Richardson were killed. Some fell in the fight,
others were captured, and when it was found out that Ronga,
Rauparaha's niece, had been shot with three other Maoris in the
fray, the prisoners also were killed. When the firing began and
death seemed inevitable the old Chief shouted out, " Hei kona
e te ra, hei kona e te ao marama — haere mai e te po haere mai
e te mate." " Farewell, O Sun, farewell thou world of light ; —
Come on O night, come on O death." That was a cry of utmost
stress, and no Maori loyal to his Chief could resist the appeal
even to the very death. The day was the r7th June, 1843. Mr.
Tuckett, one of the surveyors, escaped as soon as the firing began,
and crossing the Strait on the second day after the fight to
Wellington, told us as much as he had seen. The massacre of
the captives was not then known. A large party of us, some
seventy, immediately armed for the rescue, and went on board
the Government brig, "Victoria." Mr. Spain and I were among
the number. Fortunately for us it came on to blow a heavy
gale that evening before we came out of the port, and we had to
anchor inside the Heads. It was a terrible night with the rain
and wind and heavy sea, and the brig pitching bows under with
both her anchors down and a long stretch of cable out, and I
have since wondered that we weathered the gale that night at
all. In the course of the next day the gale abated, and we sailed
across the Strait to Cloudy Bay. There we fell in with the
Rev. Samuel Ironside, the Wesleyan Minister whom many of
you know. He told us all. He had met Rauparaha crossing

Early Life in
Neiv Zealand. "
back on his way to Kaputi, and, with the Chief's consent, Mr.
Ironside had hastened off to Wairau, and had collected and
buried the dead. We went on to Wairau, buried another body
or two, and then returned to Wellington.
Things were getting very dangerous now for all of us. The
Maoris were exasperated at what they considered our treachery,
and our own people were thirsting for revenge. Happily there
was a gentleman living at Waikanae, who had great influence
with the Maoris allied to Rauparaha, and was equally
respected by both races, the Rev. Octavius Hadfield, now the
revered Bishop of Wellington. At the risk of his own life and
after a severe struggle with the Chiefs, who were almost mad at
the sight of the handcuffs which Rauparaha brought with him,
Mr. Hadfield managed to stop the old man's projects of
immediately marching upon Wellington. I got away from
Wellington as soon and as quietly as I could, and had an inter
view with the angry Chief, pledging all that I could to assure
him that the Government would not attack him without first
hearing his side of the question, and begging him to try and
keep the natives quiet, until the case was investigated. Then
Mr. Spain went to see him, as one who was known to be a high
official, and who was deputed by the leading magistrates to give
the same assurance in a more public and formal way. In
September, 1843, that is, three months after the fray, Sir Everard
Home came to Wellington in the " North Star," and I went with
him and Major Richmond, the Superihtendent of the South, to
a conference with the natives, the first of many cruises that I made
with Sir Everard. We held the meeting at Waikanae. Rauparaha
then said that he was doing his best to allay irritation, but the
natives were kept disturbed by threatening rumours of what the
Wellington people, or the Government, were going to do, and
Sir Everard told him not to believe in idle reports of our intended
movements against him, but always to apply to Mr. Hadfield,
Major Richmond, or myself, and he might be sure that we
would tell him the truth.

Early Life in _
New Zealand. 5°
In January, 1844, Sir Everard Home again came to Wellington
in the " North Star," bringing with him this time the new
Governor, Captain Fitzroy. By arrangement, Major Richmond
and I again went to Waikanae, and summoned the natives to
meet the Governor. On landing from the " North Star" several
hundreds of the Maoris were there to receive him, and the
conference began. A chair was provided for the Governor, and
Rauparaha sat down at his side. I interpreted the Governor's
speech of enquiry for their version of the Wairau affray, but the
natives remained silent. The Governor told me to ask Rau
paraha if he had nothing to say. The old man then rose, and
minutely related the whole of his story. When he had finished
the Governor told them all to be quiet, while he thought over
the decision that he would announce. For nearly an hour no
one moved or spoke, but all eyes were intently fixed on us.
Fitzroy wrote out in pencil what he had to say, read it, and then
handed me the paper to interpret. It was to the effect that he
thought the English in the wrong for having provoked the con
flict by trying to take forcible possession of disputed land, while
the case was actually under debate in the Commissioners Land
Court ; that they were to blame in sending an armed party to
arrest the Chiefs on such a pretext as burning down a temporary
surveyor's hut ; and because at the last moment they had been
the first to fire. He, the Governor, was deeply grieved, especi
ally at the slaughter of the English prisoners when Ronga was
killed, but looking at all the circumstances he felt that it would
not be just to use the British power merely to avenge the death
of those who had fallen.
After this business, I accompanied Mr. Spain to Wanganui,
and then to Taranake, and the Commissioner made his award.
To the surprise of Colonel Wakefield himself, and to the con
sternation of all who knew anything about the Maoris, Mr.
Spain declared that this was the fairest of all the Company's
purchases, and that they were entitled to 60,000 acres of land.
The Chief, William King, at once rose, and protested that the

Early Life in
Netv Zealand. 59
decision was against all Maori law, and that he and his people
would never submit to it. They would rather die first. For
tunately the Governor was not obliged to give effect to the
Commissioner's award, and mainly at my urgent remonstrance,
Captain Fitzroy set it aside. Mr. Spain was, of course, greatly
mortified, and, rather ungenerously, he tried to shift the blame
of his decision on me, because, he said, I had called only one
witness in support of the absentees, who declared that they had
never lost their rights or sold them, and, still in a very illogical
way as regards his excuse, Mr. Spain to the last protested that
to recognize these claims was to establish a most dangerous
doctrine. Many of the witnesses, whom I did not call for the
purpose, stated in their examination that the rights of the
absentees could not be extinguished by the act of their brethren
who still held to the pah at Ngamotu ; and, besides, Mr. Spain
knew well my opinion and that of Mr. Forsaith, the Interpreter,
as to the Maori law on the subject, and, what was of greater
authority than ours, he knew the opinion of Mr. Hadfield. We
had told him often enough, but he would not accept our judge
ment as binding upon him. I did call one witness expressly on
this point, but Mr. Spain snubbed him, saying he did not believe
his testimony, and adding that he could not recognize the rights
of men who had been driven out of the district by war, and who
did not come back to resume possession until after the actual
residents on the land had sold the district to the Company.
No doubt it was altogether a difficult and complicated case to
adjudicate upon. It came under the Maori law of possession
by conquest, and the real question was : whether or not the
Waikato tribes who laid waste the country also took possession
of it. They returned home after their campaign, building no
pahs and cultivating no lands in the desolated country. The
only remnant of the Taranake tribes who held their ground were
the handful of people of the stronghold of Ngamotu, who sold
to the Company. But the fugitives flocked back to the district
as soon as the Waikato invaders retired, and they protested that

Early Life in
New Zealand.
the Ngamotu remnant had no right to dispose of the lands of
their brethren, because they were not at that moment occupying
them. Mr. Spain would not allow the protest, and I warned
the Government that it would take an army to enforce his
decision, and that it foreboded nothing but strife and bloodshed
in the coming time. My argument prevailed for the time, but, a
few years after, it was the attempt to force the natives to
surrender a portion of this very land that brought on the
Taranake War, in which the Waikato tribes joined their former
enemies against us, and this again led on to the "King" movement
which has not been put down to this day, though we employed
12,000 British soldiers besides the Colonial forces to suppress
it. Rusden has given a fair account of my action in getting the
award set aside, in the first volume of his History of New
Zealand. In June, 1844, I received instructions to go to Otago, and to
assist in the purchase of a large block of land for the Scotch
settlement that was then being projected. Colonel Wakefield
was to act for the Company, and I for the natives, while Mr.
John G. Symonds, the Police Magistrate of Wellington, was to
superintend and endorse the whole transaction on the part of
the Government. We took Mr. Spain with us part of the way,
and dropped him at the French settlement of Akaroa, in Banks
Peninsula. This settlement had been projected by a French
company in 1839, after secret negotiations with Louis Phillipe,
and promises of his support, while he was formally assuring the
British Government that he had no designs on New Zealand.
When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, the French frigate
" L'Aube " called at the Bay of Islands, and Captain Hobson
entertained her officers with cordiality.
Somehow the secret leaked out that she was on a voyage to
support a company of French colonists on their way to Akaroa.
H.M.S. " Britomart " was in the harbour, and Captain Stanley,
a brother of the late Dean of Westminster, was sent off in the
night with instructions to sail for Akaroa with the utmost

Early Life in ,
New Zealand. x
despatch, and to hoist the British flag. Stanley at once did so,
and when four days after his arrival at Akaroa, Captain Lawasd,
in the " L'Aube," put in an appearance, he found the British flag
flying and a Court of Magistrates sitting, though they had no
case before them. Thus you see how narrow our escape was
from having a French colony in the Southern Island. The
French immigrants, under one Langlois, the captain of a whaler,
arrived the next day in the " Comte de Paris." The settlers
planted gardens under the guns of the block house, but made
no homes. Most of them were soon removed to the French
Marquesas. We found a French ship of war in the harbour.
The poor remnant of the people looked very listless and
unenterprising. The Nantes-Bordelaise Company sold their
interests (a grant of 30,000 acres) to the New Zealand Company
about the time of our visit, and befoie long the French colony
had passed away.
When we got to Otago we anchored a mile or two inside the
heads, off a native village on the eastern side of the harbour.
The natives appeared to be in a miserable condition. More than
in any other part of the country they had suffered by their in
tercourse with the very roughest of whalers and sealers, and
altogether they were in a more pitiable state than any of the
tribes in the Northern Island.
In numbers, in physique, and in morals, they had greatly gone
down. The very jargon they spoke in their common talk with
Europeans was a strange medley of bad French, bad English
and low Maori. We found them ready to sell, but a good deal
out of temper. The irrepressible Tuckett, known familiarly in
our expedition as " Bill Sykes," who had learnt nothing by his
escape from the Wairau massacre, would insist upon cutting his
survey lines over anything that came in his way, and took not the
least notice of the remonstrance of the Maoris. The Government
and Colonel Wakefield together had to make him stop, and until
he did so, Mr. Symonds refused to begin any negotiations. So
the gentleman was not in very good humour when we arrived.

Early Life in ,
New Zealand.
With Symonds's consent, as well as Colonel Wakefield's, I
started with the understanding that the whole negotiation with
the Maoris should pass through my hands, and I told the natives
that 1 should be answerable for no conditions or promises what
ever, except what I myself should tell them. We pulled up in a
boat to what is now Port Chalmers. It was then a little
forest of Kahikatea trees, and we pitched our tents on the edge
of it. The wood swarmed with pigeons, and I shot as many as
we could eat, from the tent door. It is all a nest of warehouses
now. The first hitch in the business was the question of native
reserves. The Maoris knew too much about the Company's
purchases in the North, and did not believe in making over the
whole block and then leaving it to us to say what portions
should be assigned to them, nor would they hear of parting with
their village cultivations and burial grounds. 1 had a hard fight
with Tuckett and Wakefield to make the reserves and put
them into the deed. These proposed reserves lay almost wholly
in the Peninsula on the eas'ern side of the bay, white, naturally
enough, Colonel Wakefield was as anxious to buy the Peninsula as
the Maoris were to retain it. I believe that in after years they
did part with most of it. There were at this time some two or
three hundred men on the ground, most of them were from
different parts of the coast ; there were also a few miserable
looking women and hardly any children. The principal Chiefs
were Tuhawaiki and Taiaroa. Contact with the whalers and
sealers had taken much of the dignity out of them, and their
bearing was nothing like that of their Northerly countrymen.
There were some twenty heads of septs a little lower in rank.
One day we crossed over with them to look at the ground which
they wished to retain, and, walking to the top of a hill, Tuhawaiki
asked the Colonel, Mr. Symonds and myself to sit down.
Stretching out his arm and pointing with his finger, " Look
here, Karaka," he said, " here, and there, and there and yonder ;
those are all burial places, not ancestral burial places, but those
of this generation. Our parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters,

Early Life in
Neiv Zealand. 3
children, they lie thick around us. We are but a poor remnant
now, and the Pakeha will soon see us all die out, but even in my
time, we Ngailaki were a large and powerful tribe, stretching from
Cook Strait to Akaroa, and the Ngatimoe to the south of us were
slaves. The wave which brought Rauparaha and his allies to the
Strait, washed him over to the Southern Island. He went through
us, fighting and burning and slaying. At Kaikoura, at Kaiapoi,
and at other of our strongholds, hundreds and hundreds of our
people fell, hundreds more were carried off as slaves, and hundreds
died of cold and starvation in their flight. We are now dotted
in families, few and far between, where we formerly lived as
tribes. Our children are few, and we cannot rear them. But
we had a worse enemy than even Rauparaha, and that was the
visit of the Pakeha with his drink and his disease. You think
us very corrupted, but the very scum of Port Jackson shipped as
whalers or landed as sealers on this coast. They brought us
new plagues, unknown to our fathers, till our people melted
away. This was one of our largest settlements, and it was be
yond even the reach of Rauparaha. We lived secure, and feared
no enemy ; but one year, when I was a youth, a ship came from
Sydney, and she brought the measles among us. It was winter,
as it is now. In a few months most of the inhabitants sickened
and died. Whole families on this spot disappeared and left no
one to represent them. My people lie all around us, and now
you can tell Wide-awake (Wakefield) why we cannot part with
this portion of our land, and why we were angry with Tuckett
for cutting his lines about here."
The next question we had to settle was the exact boundary of
the block of land that the natives were -willing to sell. Except
the Maori occupants of the Eastern Peninsula, and one or two
small stations on the coast, there were no inhabitants in the
whole district. The nearest white settlement was a decayed
whaling station, about thirty or forty miles away. What is now
the city of Dunedin and its surrounding farmsteads, was only a
run for wild pigs. On the Eastern side of the block there was,

Early Life in
New Zealand. 4
of course, the ocean ; on the Western there were the distant
ridges and peaks pointed out to us and named, and beyond
which it was practically no man's land. On the North the line
was well known and sharply defined, but the Southern line was
vague, and might easily be the occasion of dispute hereafter.
I refused to take this line on the mere description of the tribe
or the word of the surveyor, and, to the disgust of all but my
friend Mr. Symonds, insisted upon seeing it with my own eyes,
and having it carefully pointed out by a selection of the Maoris
formally deputed to do so. It was midwinter, and very cold,
and the prospect of more than a fortnight's tramp through the
snow, carrying all our provisions with us, was not at all inviting.
However, we agreed at last to make up a party comprising
Symonds, Wakefield and myself, with a number of delegated
Maoris, and started to mark the Southern limit. We pulled
from Port Chalmers to what was then a bare and silent waste,
but which is now, Dunedin.
Then we pushed on, striking first across country, and coming
down to the coast.
The ground was undulating, covered with snow, and almost
bare of trees, except that some miles before us we could see a
small island of forest. A curious spiky plant stood out above
the snow in tussocks, with points as sharp as needles, that made
it wary walking for the shivering Maoris, and clumps of aniseed
grew thick upon the downs. The whirr of innumerable quails,
almost kicked up by our feet, would have been tempting to
sportsmen, but we had to push on for shelter, and we felt too
cold to shoot them. We reached the island of forest late in the
afternoon, and pitched our tents on its edge. The forest was
infested with wild pigs, that made it unsafe to wander alone,
and the trees were alive with wood-pigeons, which we shot in
sufficient quantity to supply all our party for two days. Next
day we emerged on the beach ; it was backed by a sweep of flat
table land, which broke off like a low wall, and where the water
trickled over the edge there hung great icicles, sometimes as

From a Picture by A?igas,

TAMATI WAKA NENE.

Early Life in
New Zealand. °5
thick as a man's body. At length we reached the mouth of the
Taieri river, where we found the remains of an old whaling
station, and a couple of houses, in one of which was a Maori
woman and a half-caste child. Her husband was away, but we
got from her a supply of potatoes, and the loan of a large boat,
in which we pulled to the head of the Taieri Lake. We had a
strange craving for meat in the intense cold, and the want of it
made everybody savage.
Just after we entered the lake the word passed that a quarter
of a mile ahead there was a vast flock of wild ducks that were
evidently not accustomed to be disturbed. Silence was ordered
and I was sent with my gun to the bow. The crew paddled
gently, and when near enough I gave the signal to stop, and we
glided gently to within two boat lengths of them.
I fired both barrels, and to our great satisfaction brought
down nearly a dozen. We at once pulled on shore, lighted
fires, half picked and half roasted our game. It all disappeared
in less than an hour after the ducks were alive ; we were well
supplied so long as our boating lasted. Leaving the head of the
lake, after hauling the boat ashore, we struck towards the
south-west, dragging wearily over long rolling downs, with here
and there a small clump of stunted trees, often miles apart.
We always pitched our tent near one of these clumps, for the
sake of shelter and firewood. Sometimes it would rain in the
night and then freeze, so that the packing of the tent next
morning was like folding a sheet of tin, and made it rather an
unpleasant back-load for the unfortunate Maori who had to
carry it.
So we went on until we reached the boundary, and then
returned by the same track, luckily killing three or four wild pigs
on the journey. They were in fair condition, but with very
thick skins, and had to be flayed before we could eat them.
Back to Otago, I prepared the Maori deed. The block we
acquired must have been, I think, a good deal over 400,000
acres. The original deed is in Maori in my hand writing,
E

Early Life in , ,
New Zealand.
signed by Symonds, Tuckett and myself. I wrote and certified
the English translation, and no dispute has ever come out of it.
The document was signed by Symonds, Tuckett and myself, and
by twenty-five of the leading Chiefs. The consideration was
under ^3,000, and the date of execution the 31st July, 1844.
There have been complaints among the Maoris about subsequent
arrangements, but so far as this negotiation was concerned, I
have never heard from that day to this, of a single Maori putting
in a claim to be compensated for rights that I had not fairly
extinguished. My father purchased the site of Auckland, and
several hundred thousand acres around, and the Maoii deeds of
transfer are in his handwriting, and in no case has any dis
satisfied Maori impugned the validity and completeness of the
bargain, and, considering how easy it is to muddle such transac
tions, I am not in the least ashamed of the part I took in
negotiating for a district which was then a silent waste, but
which is now the head and centre of the fair, flourishing and
populous province of Otago.*
Things were now quieting in the. South. Some of the
worst and most dangerous questions in dispute between us and
the Maoris were settled, or in the way of settlement. Some
questions still remained, formidable enough, but insoluble for
the present, and such as only time and patience could set right.
The last two years of incessant care and heavy responsibility
had taken a good deal out of me. I was very weary, and told
Governor Fitzroy that I thought myself now due for a rest, little
dreaming of the fresh troubles that were waiting for me in the
North. The Governor was very kind. In a few weeks he summoned
me to Auckland, and sent down a gentleman to take my place
in the South.

* Translation of Deed of Sale. Appendix II.

Early Life in
New Zealand. "7

CHAPTER III.
jN the last chapter I gave you a sketch of my
official life down to the time when I negotiated
the purchase of Otago from the natives.
That was at the end of July, 1844. Things
were now quieting in the South. The titles of
the New Zealand Company had been carefully sifted. Some of
the most pressing difficulties had been arranged by compensa
tion, and though there were still dangerous questions awaiting
solution, nothing could be done with them for the present, and
it would be a work of time and patience to dispose of them.
For more than two years, all my powers of endurance had been
strained to the utmost. It had been a time of incessant care
and heavy responsibility, and I was getting very weary. I told
the Governor that I thought myself due for a rest, and he very
kindly recalled me to Auckland, and sent a gentleman to take
my place. A rest was what I asked for, and little dreamed of
the new troubles in which I was soon to be entangled.
There had been very little difficulty about the land question
in the North, nor indeed was there serious disaffection on this
subject anywhere except such as grew out of the loose purchases
of the New Zealand Company. The rising of Heke and his
followers was not at the beginning a question of Land Titles at
all, but simply a revolt against the British Government, as such,
for its assumption of power over the natives, which Heke declared
to go far beyond what was contemplated in the Treaty of Waitangi.
The land question did, however, come in before the final breach,
in a way that no one had anticipated, and was, in fact, the last
consideration that determined Heke to commit himself to war.

Early Life in
New Zealand.
Heke was a young and highborn Chief of the Ngapuhi Tribe,
in the Bay of Islands, a little over thirty years of age ; and his
wife and cousin Harriet was the daughter of Hongi, and, perhaps,
the greatest Maori lady in the land. They were both in their
way as proud of their descent as any blue-blooded grandee of
Spain. Before Captain Hobson's arrival, Heke had been much
in the company of American visitors and residents. From them
he learned the story of the American struggle for independence,
and became a great admirer of Washington, and there slowly
grew up in his mind a feeling of habitual distrust of the British
power, and a dread of all our masterful ways.
It was with some hesitation that he was induced to sign the
Treaty of Waitangi. He was enraged at the surrender of the
murderer Maketu, and thought that to hand him over for trial
by an English jury and not by his own people, was simply to
efface the standing law of the Maori Blood Bond, which makes a
man's own tribesmen the judges of his crime, and the execu
tioners of his sentence. The quarrel with us was altogether
impersonal. The object of his hostility was the British Govern
ment as an institution, and he expressed his resentment by
cutting down the visible symbol of our sovereignty in his
district, the Custom house flag-staff at Kororareka. In July
1844, while I was in the far South effecting the purchase of the
Otago block, Heke, with a party of one hundred young men,
cut it down by way of protest and defiance.
The Bay of Islands was at the time of the cession of New
Zealand, the great resort of whaling ships, French, English and
especially American. There were often as many as twenty
whalers anchored at Kororareka at the same time, and of course
there was a large trade between them and the natives.
The proclamation of British sovereignty changed it all. The
immediate result of imposing Customs regulations, was to
destroy this local commerce, and the Ngapuhi tribe, from being
the richest and most prosperous in the country, sunk rapidly into
poverty, The port was deserted, and the flag-staff and what it

Early Life in
New Zealand. 9
meant was the visible cause of the evil. To add to the com
mercial depression of the tribe the seat of Government was
removed to Auckland, the centre of their Waikato enemies, and
nearly all the resident traders of the Bay of Islands, who could
get away, very naturally migrated to the capital. Heke's notion
was first to free his own district from the control of Government
officials, and when he had restored the independence of his
tribe, to march upon Auckland. Then he hoped to effect a
general rising of the Maoris throughout the country, and finally
he had some dream of securing his victory by entering into an
alliance with the Government of the United States. When the
flag-staff of the Customs was cut down, Fitzroy at once sent to
Sir George Gipps for soldiers, and a detachment of, I think, the
99th Regiment was sent to Auckland. H.M.S. " Hazard " was
at hand, and she proceeded with the troops to Kororareka.
Waka Nene, the great Hokianga Chief, who had been the
leading spirit in effecting the Treaty of Waitangi, now interposed,
urging the Governor to avoid a conflict and to keep the troops
at Auckland, while he, Nene, pledged himself to guard the new
flag-staff. The guns and tomahawks that the Governor de
manded from the tribe in token of apology and submission, were
given back, and at Nene's earnest entreaty the Bay of Islands
was at once proclaimed a free port. It was too late. Though
Fitzroy wrote to Gipps " the disturbance was caused by the false
assertions of bad and designing men, mostly English, and by the
land question, and above all by the Customs' regulations, which
have almost destroyed the traffic of the Bay, without producing
any considerable amount of revenue. By removing the Custom
house officers from this port, the root of the mischief will be, I
think, extracted."
In this statement 1 think the Governor was mistaken in attri
buting any weight as yet to the land question, which, as I have
said, was the source of disturbance only among the Southern
tribes. Things seemed to be smoothed down ; but now there
came tidings of the report of a select Committee of the House

Early Life in
New Zealand. 7°
of Commons on the Maori tenure of land that worked irreparable
mischief, and filled the minds of the native Chiefs throughout
the country with the suspicion that we did not mean to keep
faith in our engagements with them. The majority of this
Committee impeached the Treaty of Waitangi, impugned the
rights of the Maoris to what they called " wild lands," and
recommended that " lands not actually occupied by the natives "
should be vested in the Crown. The report was passed by a
majority of the House, but Lord Stanley refused to act upon it,
or to annul a solemn Treaty that had been made in the name
of the Queen of England, and on the faith of which we had
been allowed to assume the peaceful sovereignty of the country.
The news of all this came in the end of September, r844, just
before my return to Auckland, and greatly agitated the native
Chiefs. It gave Heke his chance, and it sealed the disaffection
of the Maoris. What mischief such a Committee ignorant and
inflamed with party passions can do ! On the ioth of January,
1845, without a word of warning to any one outside his special
following, Heke made a rush with a few of his men upon the
flag-staff, and cut it down the second time, but without disturbing
the residents of Kororareka. Two hundred soldiers of the 58th
were now sent on from Sydney, and Nene came on to the Bay
with 300 men to sustain the English Government. Heke again
declared that if we persisted in erecting the offending flag-staff
he would at all hazards cut it down.
The staff was again set up, and to guard against surprise, it
was sheathed this time with iron for several feet from the ground,
a block-house was put up at its foot, trenches cut round the hill,
and two or three guns mounted. A guard was put into the
block-house every night, and a military camp formed in the
town below. The " Hazard" was anchored close off the town,
and the residents were drilled in arms.
In the beginning of February, after I had been in Auckland a
week or ten days, the Governor, who was in great trouble, and in
some doubt about what was really going on in the Maori mind,

Early Life in
New Zealand. 71
asked me to go to the Bay of Islands, and quietly find out how
the Chiefs in the North would be likely to range themselves if,
as he feared, conflict with Heke was inevitable.
So I visited the Bay, and spent a week in sounding the
principal Chiefs, and listening to the common talk of their peo
ple, and having satisfied myself as to the course things were
likely to take, I returned to the Governor and reported.
My impression was that Heke, Kawiti, and half a dozen other
Chiefs were determined this time to fight, and, if possible, destroy
the flag-staff, against any opposition of the garrison ; that
Nene, Patuone, Taewai, Repa and all the Hokianga branch of
the tribe would support us ; and that Pomare, Tareha, and
Mauparaoa, the resident Chiefs in the Bay itself, and Ruhe, at
Waimate, would be doubtful, sympathising indeed with Heke,
but afraid to commit themselves openly to his cause. These
men all round were close blood relations. They meant to
watch events and take the winning side. On the nth of March
the crisis came. It was known that Heke might attack at any
time that week, and on the day before his band was collected at a
pah a few miles off. Heke divided his force on the night before
his attack into three parties, two of them were to enter the
Township at different points and engage the soldiers of the
Garrison, the third he meant to lead himself against the block
house. During the night the assailants took up their positions
without disturbing any of our sentries, and before daylight, Heke
with his detachment had crept to within a hundred yards of the
flag-staff. It was full daylight when they rose from their ambush
and rushed for the block-house. The guard was taken by sur
prise, and after a short struggle was driven down the hill, and in
less than half an hour the staff came down with a crash to the
ground. Meanwhile the two other detachments of the enemy sprang
from their lair and made for the town, the largest one under
Kawiti. They were met at the entrance and gallantly repulsed
by the marines and sailors of the " Hazard," who were stationed

Early Life in
New Zealand. '
on shore. It was for the most part a hand-to-hand fight, cutlass
against tomahawk.
A good many Maoris were killed, the rest were driven back,
and Captain Robertson, who was in command, and who engaged
Kawiti hand-to-hand, fell covered with wounds, from which, I
am glad to say, he afterwards recovered.
Desultory firing went on till noon, when the Maoris at the
block-house hoisted a flag of truce, and brought down a woman
and our wounded men into our lines ; among them, the signal
man of the block-house, who stuck to his guns when, the rest re
treated, and was badly wounded before he would surrender.
A few minutes after, our powder magazines on shore blew up,
and then it was determined to evacuate the town. It was aw
ful blundering throughout.
Under somewhat wild, but heavy firing from the " Hazard,"
the English men, women and children were brought off, without
any interference from the natives.
The American corvette, the " St. Louis," could not, of course,
take part in the fight, but she manned all her boats, took off the
families, and received a great crowd of fugitives on board. Next
morning all the vessels left for Auckland, and the Maoris
plundered and burnt the deserted town.
Much to the annoyance of Heke, not only the wives and
children, but most of the men of the old missionary families,
joined the fugitives in their panic. He thought that they ought
to have known him better.
Mr. and Mrs. Williams remained at Paihia, Mr. Burrowes at
Waimate, and Mr. Kemp at Keri Keri. Some of the young men
also had not gone away ; but H., who was the Maori Protector of
the district and the official agent of the Government in all dealings
with the natives, joined the flight in great trepidation. He had
known Heke intimately all his life, but had taken fright and
gone with the rest. He was an intelligent, well meaning man,
and one of the best Maori scholars in the country, but he listened
too much to alarmist reports, and could not keep his head in a
time of any calamity or danger.

Early Life in
New Zealand. '3
I had told the Governor before, that I thought in any case
Heke had no disposition to meddle with any of the missionaries'
families if they conducted themselves with common prudence.
Fitzroy was annoyed at this gentleman, H, having come away
in such haste, though he would not blame him. He sent for me,
and bewailed the absence of any Government agent, who might
at least rally our Maori allies and keep up communication with
head quarters. Not a solitary representative of the Government
had dared to stick to his post. He was afraid, as every one was,
that Heke's next move would be to march on Auckland, unless
we could get our Maori friends to hold him to the North. I at
once told him that I did not think Heke would touch me, and
at any rate I was ready to go, if there were any way of sending
me, and I would do what I could to hold Heke back from any
advance towards Auckland.
Fitzroy was pleased, and said he would not order me into so
much risk, but if I volunteered, the United States corvette was
going to look in at the Bay, and he had no doubt that Captain
McCleilan would oblige him by giving me a passage and landing
me. So it was arranged, and the next day I sailed in the " St. Louis."
My instructions were to make my way if possible to Waka
Nene's camp, and to do all in my power to block the threatened
advance of Heke upon Auckland by keeping him employed in
his own district. My duty was to watch and strengthen what
was at first the very shaky alliance of our Maori supporters ; to
report the movements of the Northern Tribes ; to keep the Govern
ment in touch with the friendly natives ; and to be the organ of
communication between them and the authorities of Auckland.
They put me on shore at Paihia, and after ascertaining from
Archdeacon Williams that Waka Nene was at Waimate, and
Heke at Waitangi, I started by myself for the inland tramp of
fifteen miles. At the landing place near the Waitangi falls of
Haruru, I came upon a group of Heke's people, Heke himself
being among them.

Early Life in
Next) Zealand. '4
He was rather surprised to see me, as he thought I was still in
the far South, looking after Maori rights at Wellington. He
knew well how hard I had fought, almost single handed, to get
justice for the Maoris, and so he was prepossessed in my favour.
I told him that I had left because I was tired almost to death,
and when I had no idea of the trouble in the North ; that I had
come up in the " St. Louis " by the kindness of the American
Commander; and that I wanted to get on to Waimate. " Oh,"
he said, " I suppose you want to see Waka Nene and the
Hokianga people. I do not know what they are going to do,
but you can go on if you like. I am disgusted with H. for
going away. You know that he and you and I were old play
mates together, and unless you came upon me, sword in hand,
I should not hurt either of you. Though you are a Government
officer, you are an officer for the Maoris also according to your
lights. You are not a stranger, and so long as you do not turn
soldier, or policeman, or collector of customs, I do not mind
if you are the only representative here of the Government in
Auckland, but you must give up any letters you have on your
person." I told him I had none. He then asked the news from Auck
land, what the Governor was going to do, and enquired how the
fugitives were disposed of. He said that the Pakehas who were
not in arms need not have fled from Kororareka, and that he
would not have molested the women, or plundered and burnt
the town, if they had remained to look after their property. He
enquired especially about Captain Robertson; said they admired
his pluck; that in the encounter with Kawiti, he cut through the
handle of the chief's tomahawk and nearly cut him down ; and
that he was the only very brave officer in the fight. Then he
complained that the " Hazard" had not treated him well, but
that after his people had ceased firing, she kept discharging her
guns at the church, which was rather sacrilegious, and behind
which the wounded were lying, though, as it happened, none of
the people about the building were killed or even hurt.

Early Life in
New Zealand. '5
I told him I was quite sure that they knew nothing of the
wounded there, or they would not have made the church their
mark. So we parted for the present, and I went on my solitary road.
Within a few miles of Waimate, I came upon Waka Nene's
scouts, and soon reached his camp. Nene was very glad to see
me, but as several Chiefs were present of whom he was evidently
doubtful, he whispered to me that I had better reserve my
confidences till they were gone. So I sat down and talked
gossip, and purposely made very idiotic comments now and then
about the state of political affairs. I hung about the place,
laughed at the display of the war-dance, and chaffed the young
men about their brave talk, reminding them of Ahab's proverb,
" Let not him that girdeth on his harness, boast himself as he
that putteth it off." In the evening when Nene was alone, I
dropped in " promiscuous like," for a smoke and a chat.
Here I may explain that Waka Nene and his followers
belonged to the Western branch of the Ngapuhi tribe, who had
their seat in the district of Hokianga. Hokianga was neces
sarily the base of Nene's operations, while the region about
Waimate was the centre of the Eastern branch of the tribe which
was closely allied to Heke. Nene told me that of the five
hundred people I saw around him, there were only two hundred
of his own men that he could trust, and that, therefore, he had
secretly sent to Hokianga for a contingent of two hundred more,
who would arrive next day.
The people about AVaimate were wavering, and, apart
altogether from the cause of quarrel, they were drawn to Heke
by blood relationship.
I found that though Heke and Nene were watching one
another, no shot had as yet been fired on either side, and I was
anxious that our friends should commit themselves. So I
persuaded Nene to send off a troop of skirmishers next day, to
the river Waiaruhe, half way to Heke's camp, to make a show
of opposing the passage of the river. He did so, there was a

Early Life in ,
Neiv Zealand. '
desultory skirmish in which a few were wounded on both sides,
but it was all I wanted to commit our friends to an act of war.
Heke and Nene now came to an understanding as to the way
in which the contest should be carried on.
The two divisions of the tribe were so entangled by marriage-
relations, that they could not afford to carry on war in the old,
savage, and indiscriminating way. The actual fighting was to be
kept as much as possible to the ground between and about the
opposing camps. Women, children, stragglers, and unarmed
whites were not to be meddled with when they were off the
fighting ground.
They were not to intercept each others supplies, or to make
raids on distant and defenceless villages, and they were to treat
with humanity and kindness any of each others wounded who
might fall into their hands.
And here I may anticipate, that when our troops came
upon the scene, Heke had many a chance of capturing our
convoys of food and ammunition and of cutting off detached
parties in the rear, but he never attempted it. He even allowed
one or two resident contractors to supply our soldiers with fresh
meat, and let them go within his lines to drive up the cattle we
needed for our support. There was no glory, he said, in fighting
half starved men, who after all were serving their government,
and between whom and himself there was no personal resent
ment. There was hard fighting in this war ; but Heke always said,
"if fight we must, let us fight like gentlemen," and, from begin
ning to end, I never heard of a single act of treachery on either
side, and only of one reported, but doubtful, act of wanton
cruelty. This was after our repulse at Ohaeawae, when we left
our dead and dying at the foot of the stockade we had vainly
tried to storm ; the cries of some poor wounded fellow were heard
in the camp, and the soldiers got the impression that he was
being tortured, but the enemy afterwards denied it, though they
confessed that some of the dead had been hacked and mutilated

Early Life in
New Zealand. ' '
after they had fallen. I was never in the least afraid of going
for a moderate distance within Heke's lines, though not into
his pahs, so long as I was unarmed and had no troops behind
me ; and, though everyone knew that I was the channel of com
munication between Nene and the Auckland Government, I was
fairly safe until I took actual part in the fray.
Nene soon found his position at Waimate very uncomfortable.
He was really in the heart of Heke's country. Even the best
disposed of the Waimate people gave him a grudging and half
hearted support, and the great majority sympathised with the
enemy. There was nothing now to keep Nene so near the Bay of
Islands. Kororareka had fallen, the Bay was deserted, and
there was no settlement to protect.
Nene was twenty miles from Hokianga, which was the proper
base of his supplies. So he determined to give up his Waimate
camp, and to build his pah some eight miles nearer to his own
district. He would be out of the range of doubtful adherents,
there would be nothing then in his rear, and it would not be
difficult to feed his force.
The road from Waimate to Hokianga is about twenty miles
long, and runs in a north westerly direction. About three
miles from Waimate it skhts a remarkable volcanic hill, from the
top of which there is a wide view of the surrounding district.
Beyond Puke Nui, or " the great hill " as it is called, there is a
deep lake six miles long and a mile or two across, caused by the
subsidence of the land in some not very remote eruption.
Just under the hill, at the point where the road touches the
edge of this lake, and with a network of impassable swamps on
flank and rear, Heke built his stronghold of Okaihau.
Four miles farther on the road was Nene's pah. A stream
crossed the centre of the intervening space and divided the
hostile lines.
On Heke's passing through the Waimate to build his pah, I
met him and had a few words of talk.

Early Life in
New Zealand. 7s
He was rather sulky at the opposition of Nene, which held
him to the district, when he would fain have been marching on
Auckland, but though he would not say much, he was not at all
uncivil. I knew I had nothing to fear from the bulk of his followers,
and that the safest place was always where they were congregated
in the greatest number, but on this occasion he had a contingent
of wild Maoris from the interior, to whom I was not so well known.
I was quietly looking on at a war dance near the road, when a
file of these wild rascals finished there capering by levelling their
muskets at me at some ten paces off, I suppose to frighten me.
To move would have been to invite a volley, so I stood still,
when a man in the ranks, who had been an old servant of ours,
rushed forward and beat their guns aside.
When the two pahs were finished, there used to be a skirmish
every two or three days, and the passing of a challenge from
one to another to let the young men " play," as the old fellows
called it, in the open.
The house I was living in was three miles to the rear of
Heke, and his force lay across the direct road to Nene's pah,
which I could only otherwise reach by taking a circuit of some
ten miles.
There were wild larrikin lads about Waimate, as nearly related
by blood to one side as to the other, and who of course did not
care a rush for the cause of battle, but they looked upon a
scrimmage much as we do at a game of football.
I generally knew a day or two beforehand, when anything
important was coming on, and I was often amused to see a group
of four young scamps sitting round their evening fire, and making
up their minds which side they would severally take in the
skirmish of the morrow. Sometimes they would even borrow
cartridges from one another, and before daylight half would go
to Heke and half to Nene.
Next day, perhaps, they would change about. The fight over,
the friends would find their way back before midnight, and spend

Early Life in
Neiv Zealand. 79
the time till morning in bragging about their respective exploits.
Now and then one or two of them came home with a wound,
but no worse than to disable him perhaps far a week or ten days.
I remember one particular day when there had been a
sharper brush than usual, some had been killed and there were
a good many badly wounded on both sides. The news came to
me that they were torturing the poor wretches by laying rags
soaked in rum upon their wounds, which they had been told by
some quack Pakeha was the best thing to do for speedy healing
and recovery, and I thought, for mere humanity's sake, I ought
to try and stop it. So I rode to the outside of Heke's pah,
and persuaded them to use no other treatment but washing with
cold water, and then laying a green leaf upon the orifice. They
were doing the same barbarous thing at Nene's pah, and so
Heke allowed me to go through and stop it.
I had a quiet talk with Nene about the position of affairs,
and he told me that if they continued to burn powder at the
rate they had been doing in these skirmishes, he was a little
afraid that their ammunition would run short. His object was
not to fight a decisive battle at a heavy cost of life, which, even
if he won, would not politically be of much service to our
Government. It was necessary that Heke should be crushed by a force of
British soldiers, and not by people of his own race.
His own duty, he (Nene) thought, was to hold Heke back
from the least advance towards Auckland until we had gathered
a force, and the best service he could render us was just to keep
harassing the enemy by frequent skirmishes, until we were ready
to encounter him ourselves.
I told him that I would give his message to the Governor,
and ask him to arrange time and place for delivering the ammu
nition. I thought we could only land it at the head of the Keri
Keri, and Nene would have to send an escort to bring it on to
the camp.

Early Life in _
New Zealand. °°
On my return, towards evening, I came upon Harriet (Heke's
wife) and a group of attendants outside Heke's pah. We talked
about the wounded, and I told what I had seen of them, though
they did not need the information, and at last Harriet said with
an air of innocence, " How many letters did Nene give you for
the Governor ? " I said, " I am not a postman, and you don't
-suppose I should be such a fool as to carry despatches through
your lines ! No, the only letters I have brought are in my
head." She laughed and said, " I know you don't tell lies, but
let me feel," and so she passed her hand lightly on the outside
of my pockets and said, "That will do, good night." The
letters came to hand in the evening.
In due time the supplies of ammunition came to the Keri
Keri, in charge of my brother, and he came on with the escort to
Nene's camp, and gave the messages with which he had been
charged by the Governor.
Early in May, 1845, that is two months after the fall of
Kororareka, the Governor sent a force under Colonel Hulme to
Nene's aid. It consisted of detachments of the 58th and 96th,
and some sailors and marines from the " Hazard " and the
" North Star," a little over four hundred in all.
They landed near the mouth of the Keri Keri and marched
some fourteen miles to the old missionary station at the falls.
Two days after they tramped, with an escort of friendly
natives, some sixteen miles to Nene's pah.
After a day's rest Colonel Hulme determined to attack, much
against Nene's advice. I went with a few others to the top of
Puke Nui to watch the day's events.
The ground lay before us like a map. Heke's pah, some
hundred yards from the edge of the lake, was close at our feet.
Four or five miles before us was the slope up to Nene's stockade,
and we could see the troops in the distance, with two or three
score of Maoris, slowly approaching. We could see also the
preparations that Heke had made to receive them.

From a Drawing by A". L. Sutherland. TE RANGIHAEATA.

Early Life in „
Netv Zealand.
As the troops came on and neared the pah, there was on
their right flank a considerable force of the enemy under
Kawiti, ready to attack if the soldiers should try to storm the
pah. We could see them plainly enough, though they were
hidden from the approaching troops by a rise in the ground.
We thought it looked dangerous, when suddenly we noticed a
force of sailors and marines and a score or two of Maoris detach
themselves from the main body, and making a sweep to the
right they came round on Kawiti's flank, and, after a volley,
charged with the bayonet. There was a struggle for a quarter
of an hour or so, and then we saw Kawiti's people scattering in
every direction.
They were badly beaten, a good many fell, and among them
were two of Kawiti's own sons.
The troops before the pah fired a rocket or two into the
enclosure, and, rushing forward with fixed bayonets, they drove
in the stragglers, and then lay on the ground close in to the
palisades. Colonel Hulme saw at once that the place was
much too strong to be stormed by the bravest men without
artillery, and he withdrew his men without the Maori garrison
attempting to molest their retreat.
We had lost fourteen killed and over forty wounded in the
fight with Kawiti ; a large number out of four hundied men.
Nene's men covered the rear till all were back in the friendly
camp. Our dead were hurriedly buried, and a day or two after, Heke
ordered the graves to be deepened, and the poor fellows to be
more decently laid to their rest, and then he himself read over
them the Maori version of the burial service.
Colonel Hulme returned with his force to Keri Keri, and
re-embarked for Auckland. He expressed himself grateful for
the care and tenderness with which Nene's men carried the
wounded over that thirteen miles' of bush road, and praised the
loyalty of our allies.

Early Life in R
Neiv Zealand.
Heke now found that apart from the British troops, Waka
Nene alone was too much for him, and that if he could not
manage to crush him before we mustered for the next attack,
his cause would be lost.
He would not wait for another expedition at Okaihau ; it was
getting more difficult to draw his supplies ; and he had to be in
a position from which, if worsted, he could retreat to where our
soldiers could not follow him. He removed his pah to the
other side of the Mawe Lake.
A day came when Heke knew by his spies that Nene's pah
was nearly empty. Two thirds of his men were absent, getting
supplies from Hokianga, and now, Heke thought, he had got
Nene at last. He attacked him with a force of about five to
one. This roused the old warrior at last. He not only held
his own, but watching some movement of hesitation or confusion
in the enemy, he fiercely charged them, and drove them head
long before him. Many were killed, Heke himself was badly
wounded, and very nearly captured. Heke was now thrown
entirely on the defensive. He never ventured to attack Nene
again. He now built a new pah at Ohaeawae, some five miles
to the west of Waimate.
There was a model either of this pah or of Ruapekapeka in
our Hobart museum, and I suppose it exists still. The pah was
very strongly built, with a double row of palisades, the posts of
which were thick enough for our round shot to stick in them,
and they were so ingeniously fastened by traverse rafters, that it
was very difficult to bring them down, even when they were cut
through. For some eight feet from the ground there was a thick
thatched screen of green flax, and there were two or three
embrasures with the muzzles of some ancient six-pounders
peeping through. The interior was a net work of palisades and
pits and covered ways. A fosse surrounded the whole work,
and it was held by a garrison of about three hundred men.
In the month of June, that is nearly four months after the fall
of Kororareka, Captain Fitzroy received fresh reinforcements, and

Early Life in
New Zealand. 83
a new expedition of six hundred men was organized under the
command of Colonel Despard of the 99th, and went on to the
Bay. He had but four field guns, a rocket-tube, and about eight
old mortars. With much toil one of the " Hazards " thirty-two
pounders was afterwards dragged by the sailors to the camp.
The first camp was pitched at Waimate, and a good deal of time
was spent in bringing up stores and ammunition. When all was
ready, the troops marched five miles more to Ohaeawae, and the
camp was pitched under the shelter of a low bank about three
hundred yards from the front of the pah.
Nene, with two hundred and fifty men, accompanied the
troops and pitched his camp on our right, a little to the rear.
On our right front there was a low hill, backed by scrub, which
commanded the inside of the stockade, and there we established
a battery, and fired in a desultory way on the palisades.
I left the camp before the work was finished. My brother
Henry was on the Colonel's staff as interpreter. On the 30th
of June I happened to be on board the " Hazard " for a day at
the mouth of the Keri Keri river, and a little after daylight the
next morning I started alone on a tramp to Ohaeawae. I first
-walked 10 miles to the Keri Keri station, then 10 miles to the
Waimate, and then five more miles to the camp. Two miles be
fore I reached my destination I met a friendly Maori with the
unpleasant news, " O Hori Karaka your brother Henry has fallen
this morning, shot through the head." Presently I met another,
whose version was that he was shot through the lungs, but was
still alive, and I might see him if I hurried on. A third said,
" he is badly but not fatally wounded, and you will find him all
right." When I got to the camp, I learnt that during the night
a party of the enemy had worked round to the rear of the battery,
which commanded the works inside the pah, and watching their
opportunity had carried the battery with a rush in the early
morning, driven out the guard and spiked the guns with wood,
and they in their turn had been driven out by a bayonet charge
of the 99th. At the moment when the enemy made their rush

Early Life in _
New Zealand. 4
my brother Henry was standing at the parapet, looking down on
the pah. There was a shout that it was the Colonel, and as my
brother turned to face them, a volley was fired and he rolled
from the top of the hill to the bottom. He had only one serious
wound however, through the upper part of the thigh, but happily
the femoral artery was not cut, and the bone not broken. I
found him in the Hospital tent, and then sought out Lieutenant
Phillpotts (son of the Bishop of Exeter) for whom I had a
message, and found him and others ready to storm.
Before Kororareka was taken it was Phillpotts who drilled the
civilians, and, on Captain Robertson being wounded, he had
taken command of the " Hazard." It was afterwards said that
he had been too precipitate in his surrender of the place. It
galled him terribly, and the poor fellow took it as a reflection on
his courage, and was very sore about it. It made him reckless,
and he joined the camp with the foreboding that he should
never return. There were three of us brothers who were free
and open guests to the company of officers on board the
" Hazard," and, as it happened, two of the officers bore the same
distinguished name of Clarke. One day we were all five at
dinner, and as you can imagine our several personalities got
rather mixed. The two Lieutenants were distinguished by their
familiars, one as " Polly '' and the other as " Jemima " Clarke,
and at Phillpotts suggestion we were nicked off, I, as " Prophecy,"'
Henry as " Litany," and William as " Gospel." Prophecy, Litany
and Gospel were our current designations in the fleet to the end
of the war. Gospel was a special chum. One day Phillpotts
said, " Gospel, I am writing my will, what shall I leave you ? "
Of course William thought it a joke, and said, " Oh, leave me
your Manton," and a month after, to his great surprise and sorrow,
the gun was handed over to him, and I believe he has it to this
day. A day or two before the flag-staff was cut down, Phillpotts
took a walk by way of reconnoitring the enemy, and had been
captured by Heke, disarmed, and escorted back to our lines
when he gave him back his sword.

Early Life in
Netv Zealand. °5
The Maoris knew him everywhere as Toby Phillpotts, and
liked him for his good humour. Once at Ohaeawae, a little after
dusk, Phillpotts crept up to the palisade, and began slashing
with his cutlass at the flax screen, when, of course, nothing could
have been easier than to strike him down, but instead of that an
awful voice came from the ground at his feet, not five yards
off: " Go away Toby, go away Toby," and he went away.
The battery had been firing all day, and Colonel Despard
fancied that there must be a practicable breach, and gave the
order, " prepare to storm." Nene told him that there was no
breach, and that the bravest soldiers in the world could not find
a passage for two abreast, and the Senior Officer of Engineers
supported him. But Despard was not to be moved. Late in
the afternoon the bugle sounded the assault. The storming
party consisted of two hundred men, under the command of
Major Macpherson and Lieutenant Phillpotts. Phillpotts was
in flannel and carrying a seaman's cutlass instead of the regula
tion sword. It was not a rush of more than one hundred yards.
The poor fellows went on bravely, and might as well have run
their heads against a stone wall. There was not a breach wide
enough for a single man to enter. Phillpotts tried to do it ;
two officers and ninety six men out of the two hundred were
struck down before they gave up the hopeless task.
We found out afterwards that with all our bombardment, the
second, or inner palisade of the stronghold was hardly scratched,
and many of our round shot were sticking in the posts of the
outer palisade.
Two days afterwards a flag of truce was flown from the pah,
and we were invited to bury our dead. We laid thirty four
together in a single pit. Captain Grant of the 58th, and
Lieutenant Phillpotts were among the killed.
We afterwards laid these officers in the quiet little churchyard
at Waimate.*
But to go back to the assault : just as it was at its height, and
they were dragging the wounded in, 1 made my way through a
* See Appendix III.

Early Life in „,
New Zealand.
nasty fire to the hospital tent. There my brother was lying,
while all around were the sights and sounds of the surgeon's
work, and I felt that at any risk I must get him out. I ran
round through a cross fire to our right flank, and got hold of
two Maoris to help me, and so we carried him on his blanket
through the hurtle and sputter of bullets till we got him to a
place of comparative safety. At one point one of the two
bearers dropped him, but we managed to drag him somehow
over a low plantation wall and let him lie ; then I made off in
pursuit, and by forcible words and other persuasions I brought
the fugitive Maori back to his duty. Then we rigged up a sort
of litter, and, as night came on, we started with our burden for
a five mile tramp to Waimate. It was very dark and rain came
down in torrents. Part of our way lay through a thick forest,
and the only passage through it had been cut and churned into
a slough of glue mud, nearly up to our knees. The soil was a
most tenacious clay, and in struggling through it I got one foot
into a hole, and had to leave my boot there, for by no effort could
I get it out ; it was enough to get one's foot out. So I stumped on
with one boot till I got to the house. I lit a fire, made the patient
a basin of slops, and laid him on a mattress upon the floor.
After midnight a dray load of weary, drenched, and groaning
men came into the settlement, among them Major Macpherson,
who had led the storming party.
The rain and the jolting had been bad enough for the poor
fellows, but in the dark the bullocks had managed to take a
stump and upset the dray.
I took the old Major in charge, and made him a bed on the
floor by the side of my brother, to his very great content. The
Major was very stout ; he had been struck down by a bullet
which flattened on a snuff box in his breast, and while in the
act of falling another shot had gone through the thickest flesh
it could find in his body.
I was desperately tired, but my patients were feverish and
restless, and I was perfectly stupid with sleepiness. They

Early Life in
New Zealand. 7
wanted water, or that I should pull the toes of the one, or help
the other to turn over. At last I gave them each a stick and
told them to stir me up when they wanted me. I fell into a
dead sleep, and suppose I got up often, but do not know, only
at different points over my ribs I felt uncommonly sore the next
day from the poking of my friends.
After the repulse, Colonel Despard was naturally depressed,
and began to talk about withdrawing the force. Again Nene
remonstrated, telling him that it would be ruinous to the public
interest, and would make the last error worse than the first. At
last he said, " Well, Colonel, if you go, I mean to stay."
It came on now to rain heavily for several days, and the
trenches inside Heke's pah became so full of water that they were
no longer tenable.
On the night of the 10th of July the enemy silently evacuated
the place, and no one knew it till next day, when they were
already in the forest. We blew up the guns and burnt what we
could of the place, and a few days after returned to Waimate.
There the troops entrenched themselves, and remained in that
position till the arrival of Captain Grey to assume the Govern
ment. Heke had retreated far inland, and it was impossible for us to
follow him.
Nene remained near Waimate, and for some time there was
practically a suspension of hostilities. Heke and Kawiti parted
early in September, and Kawiti built his new stronghold at
Ruapekapeka, far away from what had hitherto been our fighting
ground. The new pah was some ten miles inland from the
head of the Kawa Kawa, on the south eastern side of the Bay of
Islands. Active operations, as I have said, were suspended, and
towards the end of October I went back to Auckland. I had
been eight months in the very focus of the rebellion, and for
most of the time I was the only representative of the Govern
ment in the district. I came, knowing that our only chance of

Early Life in R
New Zealand.
avoiding serious disaster was to hold Heke to the Bay of
Islands, and give him no chance of marching on Auckland.
Waka Nene was not strong enough to crush him, but he could
make it impossible for him to go out of the district.
I could watch the course of affairs and do something to rally
our Maori friends, and could be the channel of communication
between them and the Government of Auckland. I found that
my safety, until I joined the troops, was in being somewhat
ostentatiously defenceless and unarmed. I never even tried to
get out of Heke's way, if he had chosen to hurt me. He always
said, frankly enough, that I might do anything except fight in
battle. I never saw the interior of Heke's defences as long as
he occupied them, and it was understood, as a point of honour
between us, that I should not try to do so.
I never carried arms until the attack on Ohaeawae, and after
wards when before the stronghold of Ruapekapeka. But it had
been an anxious time and I was glad of a short respite.
When I was in Auckland Governor Grey arrived, and he
assumed the administration on the 18th November, 1845, and
at once attached me to his personal staff. He was anxious to
have done with the war; he had 1,100 available men on shore
at his disposal ; and there were four ships of war at anchor in
the bay. Grey directed Despard to move with all his force to
the head of the Kawa Kawa, which was within ten miles of
Kawiti's stronghold at Ruapekapeka, and which Kawiti held
with a garrison of a little over two hundred men.
The Governor and I joined the expedition, and took our
passage in the frigate " Castor," which had just come from the
China Station, commanded by Captain Graham, brother of
Sir James Graham.
In a conference with the friendly Chiefs, I wrote instructions
at the Governor's dictation as to the plan of proceedings.
Mokoare was to be detached from the main body of Nene's
people on special service. He was to make his way into the
difficult country behind Kawiti, and to do his best to prevent a

Early Life in „
New Zealand. 9
junction between him and Heke. The two pahs of Heke and
Kawiti were now twenty miles apart. Makoare was to cut their
line of communication, not to risk a serious battle, but avoiding
anything beyond skirmishing, he was to block the way, and if
Heke got past him, to hang on his rear and embarrass him as
much as possible.
Our friend did his work well, and Heke was not able to send
any considerable aid to his beleaguered ally. We had' to cut a
road from the Kawa Kawa to the front of Ruapekapeka.
Nene and his people pushed on in advance, and kept the
work of road making clear of interruption.
Soon after Christmas Day we pitched our camp in sight of
the stronghold and half a mile from it ; we were separated from
Kawiti by a deep wooded ravine. It was the strongest place we
had as yet encountered, though it had a smaller garrison to
defend it than that which occupied Ohaeawae.
On our right front, a narrow ridge swept round the head of
the ravine to the pah, and we were able to place a formidable
battery of heavy guns within a hundred and fifty yards of the
palisades, while we had another battery in the front of our
camp. Nene's men were in high spirits at having the Governor
at hand, and they built their stockade at the left rear of the
advanced battery. Once only were we thrown into a few
minutes confusion by a sally from the pah. There was a
difficult way by which a bold enemy might sneak through the
forest to our left front, and it had been left by us too slightly
guarded. Suddenly our sentries on that side were driven in, and
the alarm was sounded. Things looked likely to get mixed, and
there was danger lest we should fire by mistake upon our own
natives. Nene saw it in a moment; he was at the time with the
Governor, the Colonel, and myself in the Governor's tent.
He at once begged the Colonel to order his men on no
account to fire, and he (Nene) would soon account for the
assailants. Calling to his men, he rushed at their head into the
forest. There was a sharp skirmish, several on the other side

Early Life in
New Zealand. 9°
were killed, and Nene returned in an hour and laid their arms
at the Governor's feet. Fighting went on. We were very much
struck with the tenacity with which, under the heaviest fire of
our great guns, the garrison kept to their posts. Once we shot
down their flag-staff, and there was a general cheer in the camp ;
it was answered back by a cheer in the pah, and the flag-staff
was up again, and the flag flying in defiance before sunset. I
remember standing at our battery with the Governor, and seeing
him much moved. We were throwing shot and shell into the
place, and could see the splinters flying from the stockade every
time it was struck, but through it all we saw a young girl,
apparently about twenty, and a man sitting quietly on the
roof of a bomb-proof house, calmly watching us and quite
undisturbed by the bursting shells and crashing timber around
them. We, with our great guns, mortars, and rockets, including our
allies, numbered about two thousand men in arms.
The garrison of the pah never reached three hundred. On
Saturday, the 25th of January, we opened fire from all our guns
at daylight, every shot being directed to the same part of the
stockade, so as to make a breach, and we continued the bom
bardment till evening.
Colonel Despard seemed to have learnt nothing from our
repulse at Ohaeawae, and was actually preparing to storm a
stronger place.
Mohi Tawai vehemently remonstrated against the madness of
the attempt, and at length the Colonel gave way.
All through the coming night a gun was fired into the breach
every half hour or so to prevent its being repaired, till at length
daylight broke and there was a lull.
That Sunday morning the Governor and I were at breakfast
in our tent when Nene came in. He said things were very
quiet in the pah, and he was going to send one of his young
men to find out what it meant. He asked that with as little
noise as possible a few men should be got to the advanced

Early Life in
New Zealand. 91
battery, where he had posted some friendlies, to be ready to act
at a moment's notice. A hundred men were immediately sent,
and the Governor and I went with them. On arrival at the
battery perfect silence was ordered, and we watched the pro
ceedings. Stripping themselves of nearly all their clothes, and
with gun in hand, two young fellows made their way from stump
to stump, crawled to the breach, and disappeared inside. Pre
sently one of them showed out again, waved his musket over his
head as a signal, and with one wild rush we poured in. The
defenders were all on the outside farthest from us, sitting under the
shelter of the palisades, never expecting such a move on our part.
For a long time they held their ground, and fired in upon us
through the spaces of the stockade from the fosse outside, but at
last they were driven off. They retreated through the wood in
splendid style, and a fine body of young men checked the pursuit
whenever a stand was possible. The fight lasted for four hours ;
we had twelve killed and thirty wounded. What the loss of the
enemy was we never heard. They carried off all their wounded
but one, and some of their dead. I went over the ground when
the firing ceased, and came here and there upon the dead.
Behind one log crossing the road of retreat, where we had been
kept at bay for more than half an hour, I found nine stalwart
young men lying side by side.
In his official report to the Governor, Colonel Despard said :
"Your Excellency has been an eye witness to all our operations,
and, I may say, actually engaged in the assault ; " which was so
far true that we were in with the first party who rushed into the
breach, and had to stand the fire of the enemy from outside.
Despard had good reason to rejoice that he had not repeated
the blunder of Ohaeawae.
The pah turned out to be much stronger and far less injured
than we thought. We had made a practicable breach through
the outer palisade, but the inner works were not seriously broken.
The inside was a network of covered ways, and the houses were
all bomb-proof.

Early Life in
Netv Zealand. 92
The Maoris afterwards said that on account of its being
Sunday morning, they thought they were safe from an assault,
and so they were taken by surprise. It took us many years to
learn how to attack a Maori stockade, and in after wars we
suffered terribly from our rashness and ignorance.
The capture of Ruapekapeka virtually closed the Northern
war. There were negotiations by letter between the Governor on
one side and Heke and Kawiti on the other, that passed through
my hands. At last peace was declared. Very wisely, in the
circumstances, the Governor did not put Heke to open shame
by insisting upon the re-erection of the flag-staff at Kororareka.
It remained where it had fallen till both Heke and Kawiti were
dead. The natives themselves who had been fighting against
ns set it up again in 1858.
Heke never got over the hardship of the war. He broke
down in health and died in r85o, about forty, from pulmonary
disease. His widow Harriet was re-married to Arama Karaka, one of
the leading Chiefs of Nene's tribe, who had fought against her
former husband in the war. She, too, died only a few years
ago. While Heke was ill, Grey sent him many presents, which
he gratefully acknowledged. A lingering remembrance of past
suspicions haunted him, and, taking a sovereign from a number,
he turned it over and said with a grim smile : " As it comes from
Governor Grey I am looking whether there is any hook in it."
He wrote to Grey : " I am very ill, but do not grieve about that.
This body is not our everlasting habitation." He died pro
fessing the Christian faith, and kindly attended by his wife, the
daughter of Hongi.
1 Heke's war stands quite alone in the history of our struggles
Iwith the Maori race; alone in its magnanimity, its chivalry, its
(courtesy, and, I dare to say, its control by Christian sentiment.
I did my best, with a good conscience, to frustrate Heke's
plans, and to thwart his ambitious aims, for his success would

Early Life in
New Zealand. 93
have ruined the country. Heke knew I was there to do it, but
he never shewed the least sign of personal resentment; nor did
he treat me with such harshness as he might have done with
very good excuse.
Personally we were always on terms of kindness, and I should
be the last man to grudge him his meed of honest praise.
We had other wars afterwards that were bitter with all the
elements of personal resentment ; on the native side wars in
which, I fear, there has been almost always more or less of excuse
that we had provoked them to do their worst.
In the years to come we were to fight a people who for the i
most part had given up Christianity, and relapsed into their '
ancient ways, and who thought murder, treachery, cruelty, and, ;
indeed, anything short of actual cannibalism, only fair reprisals
in such a conflict of races.
There were many noble exceptions, but even with the best of '
them, they did not approach the chivalry of our first antagonists.
On our side, too, I am afraid that our hands, since that first
war, were not always clean, and the feelings of our later wars
took on a character of exasperation, that had no place in the
conduct of the first.
I may here, too, say all that is necessary about our friend Nene
and our relations with him, and the part he played among his
countrymen. At the time when New Zealand was ceded to the
Queen, I roughly calculated the Maori population at about
60,000. Since the beginning of the century perhaps as many
more had been carried off by war and disease, and everything por
tended that they were among the vanishing peoples that could
not stand for long against the forces of what we call civilization.
It had been a race amongst the tribes which should be the
first to arm themselves with the European rifle, and Hongi
began that series of exterminating wars before which thousands
and thousands disappeared.
We brought them epidemics against which we have been
partially fortified by the innoculation of many generations, but

Early Life in
New Zealand. 94
which found in the Maoris fresh and virgin soil, in which the
seeds of destruction grew with rapid and fatal luxuriance. This,
I think, and not the oppression of white men at all, is the main
cause of their fast diminution.
For a short time there was a rage among them for intoxicating
liquors, which was a kind of defiance to the legal prohibition of
their sale to the Maoris. That madness, however, has very
much passed away, though intemperance is far too common a
vice among them, as among ourselves.
The four greatest Chiefs of the country in my time were Waka
Nene of the Ngapuhi, Whero-Whero of Waikato, Heu-Heu of
Taupo, and Rauparaha of the Ngatitoa. They were all great
warriors, but they were also men of exceptional ability in the
diplomatic management of what we should call civil and inter
tribal affairs. Waka Nene was strong all through, in mind as in
body. He had a singularly open, honest, and benevolent
expression of face, and though, if needs were, he could be stern
enough, there was little of cruelty or vindictiveness in his com
position, as there could possibly have been in one whose youth
was spent in such surroundings. He was the bravest among the
brave ; a splendid Maori general ; averse to fighting until every
way of conciliation was exhausted ; and, though he never heard of
Polonius, with him, too, it was a maxim : " Beware of entrance to
a quarrel, but being in, bear't that the opposed may beware of
thee." He was impressed with the abiding feeling that the only
chance for his Race was to keep peace with the Pakeha ; to accept
loyally the supremacy of the Queen ; and to bear themselves
patiently through the slow and difficult transition from Maori
custom to British law. His bare word was trusted through all
the country as the most binding writing would be trusted among
ourselves, and he had the power of attaching followers to his
person with a devotion which made them ready to stand by him
in life or in death.
If I remember right, he was the first to sign the Treaty of
Waitangi ; at anyrate his influence was paramount, and but for

Early Life in
New Zealand. 95
him the Maoris would never have signed the Treaty at all. His
proper home was the banks of the Hokianga River, on the
western side of the country, opposite to the Bay of Islands.
He had for many years been a convert of the Wesleyan
Mission, and received at his baptism the prefix "Thomas Walker,"
to his old Maori name of Nene. From beginning to end he
never swerved from his pledge of loyalty to fhe Queen. When
he died he was buried in the little churchyard of Kororareka,
having solemnly adjured his friends not to allow the Maori
custom of disposing of his bones, but to let him lie at peace in
a Christian grave ; and over his grave the Government raised a
stone monument with an inscription in both languages, expres
sive of their gratitude, and purporting that that was the resting
place of one who was alike steadfast in his friendship for the
English, and in his labours to secure the best interests of his
countrymen — a chief of men, as wise in counsel as he was brave
in war.
For once in a way, this was an epitaph of severe and simple
truth, and there was not a word of flattery in its praise of the
dead. He had been one of Hongi's lieutenants, and had
traversed with his war parties the whole of the Northern Island
to the neighbourhood of Cook Strait. But it was for his
wisdom as a councellor, and his influence as a peace-maker,
that he was specially famous. No one could set down his con
ciliation to weakness or fear. In his ordinary bearing he was as
gentle as a child. In conversation his voice was soft as a
woman's, but in the shout of battle it was said to be terrible, and
it could be heard above all the clash of arms and the din of the
conflict. He was hardly ever defeated, and it was his way before
he fought, to look beyond the victory, and to determine the
move by which it should be followed. He was half a life older
than Heke, and, indeed, he regarded the action of that Chief
very much as the escapade of a petulant boy. In their case,
too, the struggle had none of the bitterness of personal resent
ment, and, when Heke made his somewhat sulky submission,

Early Life in
New Zealand. 9°
Nene advised the Government to treat him with kindness and
consideration, and, the war being ended, not to add to his
disappointment anything that would hurt his sense of personal
dignity. We owe Nene's memory, more than to any other of the
Maori race, a real debt of gratitude and respect, for at many a
crisis he threw himself into the breach, and averted dangers that
might have been fatal to us in those early days. As a father he
was a man of tender feeling. He had but one son, eighteen
years old, whom my mother nursed in his illness, and after the
boy's death, when Nene came to our house, he could not speak
of his loss without tears, or thank her too much for the kindness
that seemed to him to have been all in vain.
I saw him last during Colonel Gore Browne's administration,
when I paid a visit to New Zealand.
The Taranake war was then at its height, and the old man told
me mournfully, that his heart was darker than it had ever been,
when he thought of the issue of the struggle, whether to ourselves
or to the people of his own Maori race. Of this I am sure, that
throughout that first Maori war we were opponents who thoroughly
respected each other, not only as the brave respect the brave,
but as they admire the honour, the courtesy, and the humanity
that may redeem even a war of races from sinking into a mere
brutal struggle for existence, or a base and greedy struggle for
our ruder neighbour's goods. I need not carry you farther.
After the war was over I accompanied Governor Grey to the
Southern settlements, and we secured a good deal of the disputed
/ land at Wellington, Nelson, and elsewhere, by compensating the
i unsatisfied Maori owners.
In the upper valley of the Hutt new disturbances broke out in
which the natives were aggressive, and, I think, almost wholly in
the wrong. There was a splutter of hostilities for a few months,
with considerable loss on our side, but the aggressive natives
were driven back to the mountains, and their principal leader
died.

From a Drawing by A*. L. Sutherland. TE RAUPARAHA.

Early Life in
New Zealand. 97
Things continued outwardly quiet for some years, though all
the while the storm I had distinctly foretold was brewing, till it
broke out in the Taranake war, and the series of struggles that
followed in its train.
Before this, however, the time had come when I was wanted
elsewhere, and much against the advice of the Governor, and
many friends, I tendered my resignation and closed the Maori
chapter of my early life.
A fit of prostration had brought me very low, and I knew that
neither body nor mind could bear the strain much longer. It
was a sort of living martyrdom to one not over robust in health
and constitution, and to be always in the storm was not at all
suited to my temper. I longed for a quieter scheme of living,
and it did not trouble me to give up the splendid prospects which
the Governor held before me, if I could only fulfil what had been
all through my peaceful ambition — to be a plain and simple
preacher of Christ's Holy Gospel. It was not the mere peril and
care and worry of the life which made me give it up, but the
change was hastened on because I was vexed by some things
which the Governor had lately done in the South, and I thought
they were not as straightforward as in our dealings with the
Maoris we should have been. I was very unwilling to be an agent
in a policy against which my private conscience revolted, or to be
entangled in a business that I could not stomach in the way of
morality. So I cut the knot, and definitely withdrew from active
service, much against the wishes of the Governor with whom all
along I had been' on the most pleasant terms of intercourse. In
fact the Governor would not accept my resignation when I
tendered it, and I left with the arrangement that I should have
six months leave of absence, and that if at the end of that time I
still persisted in resigning, my service should be closed. Nothing
could have been kinder than the way in which the Governor
treated me, though I am afraid he thought me rather a fool for
my decision. My brother Henry suceeded to my post and
became a much trusted judge of the Land Court, who was often
G

Early Life in _
New Zealand. 9°
called by the Government to decide upon difficult cases after his
retirement from official service, and who died only a few
months ago.
It was not easy at first to break with such a past as is described
in these notes, and, " forgetting those things which are behind,"
to subdue oneself to the yoke of a simple college student, but
I did it and have never regretted it. The issue has been the
long, happy, and, I hope, not quite useless life of a Congregational
minister in this fair land.
The story I have tried to tell you is a story of the beginning
of things. My recollections go back to a time before the forma
tion of a single town in New Zealand, and the point to which I
have brought you is still as far back as fifty years ago. You
know what those fifty years have done. The New Zealand
Company with all its good and evil passed away. Nearly all the
territory that it claimed, and large tracts of land besides, have
been acquired by purchase from the natives. Many a wilderness
and solitary place has been made glad, and the desert has
blossomed as the rose.
We have had many a disastrous conflict between the races ;
and at great expense of blood and treasure, and still more of
labour and thought, the dangers and difficulties of the earlier times
have been overcome. Not only in numbers, but in all other
ways, the British colonists are in the ascendant.
It seems that slowly but surely the Maori race is passing away,
or at least hanging in the balance, as their own native birds,' the
Kiwi, the Weka, the Tui, and the Korimako, are vanishing
before the pheasant, the partridge, the sparrow and the linnet
It seems as if in God's providence, our English speaking race
were destined to gain a supremacy in the world's affairs of which
there is no example in the history of the past. But it is sad to
think how much goes down before us. Let us hope that
we may put something better in its place. Forty years hence
those who look back at our time will think of it as the day of
small things. It is in all these colonies the day of beginnings ;

Early Life in
New Zealand. 99
and we have this advantage, that every true man among us can
leave his mark upon the coming future as the man equally true
cannot hope to do in long established communities.
For the rest — my Tasmanian friends know for themselves the
manner of life I have had among them for fifty years. The
foregoing story may, perhaps, help to account for it.
June iSpj.

Early Life in
New Zealand.

APPENDIX I.
THE TREATY OF WAITANGI,
6th FEBRUARY, 1840.
" Her Majesty, Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland, regarding with her Royal favour the native Chiefs and
Tribes of New Zealand, and anxious to protect their just rights and property,
and to secure to them the enjoyment of peace and good order, has deemed it
necessary (in consequence of the great number of Her Majesty's subjects who
have already settled in New Zealand, and the rapid extension of emigration
both from Europe and Australia which is still in progress) to constitute and
appoint a functionary properly authorized to treat with the aborigines of
New Zealand for the recognition of Her Majesty's sovereign authority over
the whole or any part of those islands. Her Majesty therefore being
desirous to establish a settled form of civil government, with a view to avert
the evil consequences which must result from the absence of the necessary
laws and institutions, alike to the native population and to her subjects, has
been graciously pleased to empower and to authorize me, William Hobson, a
Captain in Her Majesty's Navy, Consul and Lieutenant-Governor over such
parts of New Zealand as may be, or hereafter shall be, ceded to Her Majesty,
to invite the confederated and independent Chiefs of New Zealand to concur
in the following articles and conditions : —
"I. The Chiefs of the Confederation of the united Tribes of New Zea
land, and the separate and independent Chiefs who have not become members
of the Confederation, cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England, absolutely
and without reservation, all the rights and powers of sovereignty which the
said Confederation or independent Chiefs respectively exercise or possess, or
may be supposed to exercise or possess, over their respective territories, as
the sole sovereigns thereof."
" 2. Her Majesty the Queen of England confirms and guarantees to the
Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand, and to the respective families and
individuals thereof, the full, exclusive, and undisturbed possession of their
lands and estates, forests, fisheries, and other properties which they may
collectively or individually possess, so long as it is their wish and desire to

Early Life in
New Zealand. I01
retain the same in their possession : But the Chiefs of the united Tribes and
the individual Chiefs yield to Her Majesty the exclusive right of pre-emption
over such lands as the proprietors thereof may be disposed to alienate, at
such prices as may be agreed upon between the respective proprietors and
persons appointed by Her Majesty to treat with them in that behalf,"
" 3. In consideration thereof, Her Majesty the Queen of England
extends to the natives of New Zealand her Royal protection, and imparts
to them all the rights and privileges of British subjects."
This short treaty was duly signed by Captain Hobson, and by the
assembled Chiefs, and attested as " Done at Waitangi, this 6th day of
February, in the year of our Lord, 1840 ;" with the following addition :—
" Now, therefore, we, the Chiefs of the Confederation of the united Tribes of
New Zealand, being assembled in congress at Victoria in Waitangi, and we,
the separate and independent Chiefs of New Zealand, claiming authority
over the Tribes and territories which are specified after our respective names,
having been made fully to understand the provisions of the foregoing treaty,
accept and enter into the same in the full spirit and meaning thereof, in
witness of which we have attached our signatures or marks at the places and
the dates respectively specified."
Of the forty-six who signed the treaty at first, twenty-six had signed the
Declaration of Independence in 1835. In both cases they had been stirred
by desire to keep the French from their land, and to obtain English pro
tection. In both they had the sympathy of their English resident friends.

APPENDIX II.
TRANSLATION OF DEED OF SALE.
Know all men by this Document, We, the Chiefs and Men of the
Ngaitahu Tribe in New Zealand, whose names are undersigned, consent on
this Thirty-first day of July, in the year of our Lord 1844, to give up, sell,
and abandon altogether to William Wakefield, Principal Agent to the New
Zealand Company of London, on behalf of the Directors of the said Com
pany, all our claims and title to the lands comprised within the under
mentioned boundaries ; the names of the said lands are Otakou, Kaikarae,
Taieri, Mataau, and Te Karoro ; these are the boundaries, the northern
boundary line commences at Purehurehu, runs along the sea shore, crossing
the entrance or Otakou (Harbour), to Otupa, thence along the coast to
Poatiri ; the eastern boundary is the ocean from Poatiri to Tokata ; thence
the southern boundary runs along the summit of the Kaihiku Range, and

Early Life in
Neiv Zealand. 102
crosses the Mataau River, thence along the summit of Wakari to Mihiwaka
and Otuwararoa, then descends to Purehurehu on the coast. We also give
up all the Islands, Kamautaurua, Rakiriri, Okaiha, Moturata, Paparoa,
Matokeioke, Hakinikini, and Aonui ; excepting the following places, which
we have reserved for ourselves and our children, that is to say, a certain
portion ot land on the eastern side of Otakou, called Ornate, the boundary
line commences at Moepuku, crosses over to Poatiri, and thence along the
coast to Waiwakaneke, then crosses to Pukekura, and runs along the side of
the harbour to Moepuku. Also a certain portion of land at Pukekura, the
boundaries of which are marked by posts, containing one acre more or less ;
also, a portion of land at Taieri, the boundary of which commences at
Onumia, and runs across in a, straight line to Maitapapa, the Taieri River
forms the other boundary ; also a portion of land at the Karoro, bounded on
the south by the Karoro River, on the east by the ocean ; the northern
boundary includes the Kainga of that place, and extends inland about one
mile ; which said Reserved Places we agree neither to sell or let to any party
whatsoever, without the sanction of His Excellency the Governor of New
Zealand. We have received as payment for the above first-mentioned lands
the sum of two thousand four hundred pounds in money, on this day.
John Tuhawaiki, Kahuti,
Karetai, Kurukuru,
Taiaroa, Mokomoko,
Pokene, Te Ao,
Koroko, Koroko Karetai,
Kaikoarare, Tutewaiao,
Takamaitu, Papakawa,
Te Raid, Te Kaki,
John Tuhawaiki on behalf of Topi, Rakiwakana,
Kihau, Te Raid (the second),
Solomon Pohio, Poliki,
Pohau Pohata.
Taiaroa for Pokihi,
In the presence of these Witnesses -.
John Jermyn Symonds, P.M.
Frederick Tuckett.
George Clarke, junior, Protector of Aborigines.
David Scott.
A true translation of the original Deed,
George Clarke, junior, Protector of Aborigines.

Early Life in
Neiv Zealand. I03
I, William Wakefield, the Principal Agent of the New Zealand Company,
do undertake to select one hundred and fifty thousand acres, to which the
Crown's right of pre-emption has been waived in favour of the said Company,
from the block of land specified in the Deed to which this is annexed, as soon
as such land shall have been surveyed, leaving the unappropriated residue to
to be dealt with in such manner as His Excellency the Governor shall
deem fit.

APPENDIX III.
THE REV. H. WILLIAMS AT OHAEAWAE.
The memory of Archdeacon Henry Williams has suffered
much from wild reports and ignorant or malicious slanders.
The worst thing said against him, an old naval officer, is that he
was the instigator of the mad assault on Heke's pah at Ohaeawae.
How the report could have sprung up I do not know, but he
had detractors who would believe anything. The following
letter from his son to the Curator of our Museum, effectually
disposes of the imputation, but it is a pity that for want of
knowing better, we should have appended to our model of
Heke's pah a note that the assault was on the Archdeacon's
advice. I knew better, and ought to have corrected it, but it did
not come under my serious notice. Henry Williams had more
influence over the Maori Chiefs than any man in the country,
and was thoroughly trusted. His nine years in the navy were
not thrown away. But for his earnest recommendation and
assurance, the Treaty of Waitangi would never have been signed,
but he put his whole heart into the business, and we of both
races owe him the tribute of our respect and veneration, and
ought not to let his name be spattered by the guessing of
malignant gossip, when in fact, he was as simple and robust a
Christian, and as loyal and brave an Englishmen, as ever
pioneered our way in dealing with a race that he wanted to lift
up to our own civilization. Such a man can make enemies as
well as friends,

Early Life in
New Zealand, io4
¦ Pakaraka, Kawakawa, Bay of Islands,
Auckland, N.Z.
October 28th, igoB.
Alex. Morton, Esq.,
Curator and Secretary Museum,
Hobart, Tasmania.
Re Model of the Ohaeawae Pah.
Sir, — I thank you for your letter of the 1st October last, in which you
say you will be glad to get a clear account of what I have, relating to the
taking of the Pah, to lay before the Trustees.
I will quote from an impartial witness — a military officer — who was
present on the occasion. The following is an extract from " The Story of
New Zealand, Past and Present, Savage and Civilized," by Arthur S.
Thomson, Surgeon-Major 58th Regiment (vol. 2, page 115) : —
'• One day the enemy made n sortie from the Pah and attacked Walker
Nene's (our Maori ally) position. So sudden and unexpected was this
sally, that a British flag was taken, and Colonel Despard and some senior
officers only escaped by a ridiculous flight. This token of success was
hoisted inside the fortification under Heke's flag. After twenty-six shots
had been fired from the thirty-two pounder, Colonel Despard thought the
palisades sufficiently broken in two places for an assault, but Captain Mar-
low, the Senior Engineer Officer, did not consider either breach practicable.
In defiance of this professional opinion, Colonel Despard ordered a storming
party of 160 soldiers, under Majors Macpherson and Bridge, and 40 seamen
and volunteers under Lieutenant Phillpotts, R.N., with hatchets and ropes
and ladders, to be ready at 3 p.m. on 1st July. All the troops told off for
this awful service paraded at the hour named, save one man of the 99th Regi
ment, who was taken prisoner in the morning. . , . When the advance was
sounded, the stormers rushed on the breach at 80 yards, and for ten minutes
tried to enter the Pah by pulling down the palisades, but the inner fence
being unbroken, and two officers and half the men having gone down, the
party fell back baffled from an impregnable stockade. The whole force
then withdrew to a position 400 yards from the Pah."
On page 118 — " Colonel Despard was justly blamed by soldiers and
civilians for sacrificing men's lives in attacking a half breached Pah, and il
was whispered in military circles in London, that the Duke of Wellington on
reading the dispatch, stated, that distance alone prevented him bringing
Colonel Despard to a Court-Martial."
Moss' Book " School History of New Zealand," page 90, says : — " On
the 1st July, in spite of the adverse opinion of the officer in command of the

Early Life in
New Zealand. I0S
Engineers, and of the very emphatic and explicit warnings of Waka Nene,
and other Maories, Colonel Despard ordered an assault. . . . Waka
Nene, denouncing the assault as foolery, and sending the men to certain
death, refused to let his Maories have anything to do with it."
In " The Life of Henry Williams,'' by Hugh Carleton (vol. 2, page
no), is the following : — "When the troops returned this time, under
Colonel Despard of the 99th, they were directed against Ohaeawae.
According to preconcerted arrangements the rebel forces concentrated,
throwing themselves into Pene Taui's Pah. The attempt to breach, main
tained for a week, was ineffectual. On the 1st July a. sally was made from
the Pah, which resulted in the temporary occupation of the Knoll on which
Waka had encamped, and the capture of Waka's colours — the Union Jack.
The position was gallantly recovered by a party of the 58th Regiment under
Major Bridge, but the Union Jack was carried into the Pah. There it was
hoisted, upside down, and half mast high, below the Maori flag. This was
the cause of the disaster which ensued. The sight was too much for Colonel
Despard's temper, and he ordered an assault upon the Pah. The point
selected for attack was the only angle double flanked. The hopelessness of
success was perfectly well known to the storming party ; they were marching
to certain destruction. They did their duty to the utmost, some of them
even firing into the Pah through its own loop-holes ; but within five minutes
one third of their number lay stretched upon the earth. The men returned
to the bugle call, but 1 not till then. One officer only, Captain Westropp,
escaped unhurt.''
On page 113, the following extracts from letters and journals supply
details. From Archdeacon Henry- Williams's Journal : — "July 1st, 1845.
Mr. Burrows (Rev. R. Burrows) and I rode out to Ohaeawae. On our
arrival observed much firing, and soon learnt that the natives had made an
attack on Waka's people on a hill overlooking the camp. The hill retaken
by the soldiers under Major Bridge in noble style. Henry Clarke (in
terpreter to the forces) was wounded in the thigh. At 4 o'clock the troops
marched to storm the Pah, and in a short time a heavy firing was opened. It
was a fearful moment. I moved on to the camp and found numbers of
wounded brought in. The troops were repulsed with serious loss. Captain
Grant and Lieutenant Phillpotts killed, with 22 seamen and soldiers, and
upwards of 70 wounded — some mortally, many seriously. I assisted in
dressing the wounded. Towards sunset, at the request of the Colonel, I
attempted to go to the Pah to recover the bodies of the slain, but as soon as
I came in sight, was ordered back by the people of the Pah."
" July 3'd — Returned to the camp to endeavour to recover the bodies.
On my arrival, learned that a flag of truce had been hoisted at the Pah, and

Early Life in
New Zealand. IO°
that enquiry had been made for myself and Mr. Burrows that our boys
might fetch away the bodies. I proceeded to the Pah on my arrival, but
the Natives would not give up the body of Captain Grant. Found the
people disposed to be insolent. Returned to the camp. Attended the
funeral of the soldiers, 30, including the seamen — a mournful sight. The
troops were all present."
See also " Plain Facts relative to the late war in the Northern District
of New Zealand," printed by Philip Kunst, of Auckland, 1847, pages 21 and
22. Archdeacon Williams, for he is the Mr. Williams referred to, had for
more than twenty years been a Minister of the Gospel of Peace amongst the
Maoris, and is it at all probable that he would have interfered in military
matters and advised an assault on the Pah, or that a military commander
would order an assault on the advice of a civilian ?
Archdeacon Williams had served for nine years in his youth as an
Officer in His Majesty's Navy, and was too good a disciplinarian to interfere
in matters outside his own calling.
It will be seen from the above extracts from Archdeacon Williams's
Journal that he did not see Colonel Despard until after the assault, having
only arrived at Ohaeawae whilst the assault was being made.
I trust that your Board of Trustees, after verifying the above quotations,
will be satisfied that it would be only just and proper to remove the statement
which is attached to the Model. I remain, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
H. WILLIAMS.

J. Walch & Sons, Pkintkks, 42 Macquakih Street, Hodart.

3 9002 00557 0438

'.'.: