Nelson settlers could send 500 armed men against him. He crossed in his own war canoes, over a stormy strait in wild weather; weary and wet with spray, he landed in the south of the North Island, roused his countrymen by his fervid oratory, to which he gave a fine effect by jingling before them the handcuff’s with which he was to have been led a prisoner to Nelson. A day or two after the massacre, a Wesleyan clergyman went out from Nelson to Wairau and reverently buried those ghastly bodies with the cloven skulls. Not one had been mangled, far less had there been any cannibalism.
3. Effects of Wairau Massacre.—The Maoris were clearly less ferocious than they had been, and more than half of them had become fervid Christians after a fashion, but in some respects they were getting their eyes opened. The missionaries had told them that the white men were coming for their benefit; yet now they began to see that the white men were soon to be the lords of the soil, and that the natives must sink back into the position of servants. If a white man visited a Maori village he was received as a man of distinction and entertained. If a Maori chief went to a white man’s town, he was allowed to wander in the street; or if at all accosted it was with the condescension of a superior race to a race of servants. The Maori blood was firing up. The story of Wairau made them change their mind about the white man’s courage. The whalers had been hearts of daring; these new-comers had run and bawled for their lives. The natives were anxious also as to the result which would happen when all the lands near the shore should have been occupied by white men, and they themselves hemmed up in the interior.
A special interest was given to these feelings when in 1844 Te Whero Whero gave a great feast, only two miles out of Auckland, partly as a welcome to Governor Fitzroy, and partly as a demonstration in regard to the land question. He displayed a lavish bounty; 11,000 baskets of potatoes and 9,000 sharks, with great stores of other provisions, were distributed. But when the settlers saw a war dance of 1,600 men, all well armed with muskets, and drilled with wonderful precision, they felt that their lives were at the mercy of the native tribes. Not one-fourth of that number of armed men with any training for battle could have been sent forth from the settlement for its own defence. This gave a significance to the Wairau massacre that created quite a panic. Fresh settlers ceased to come; many that were there already now left. Those who had taken up farms far out in the country abandoned them and withdrew to the towns.
4. Honi Heke.—And yet the great majority of the Maoris seem to have had no unfriendly purpose. When Governor Fitzroy went down to see Rauparaha he had no more than twelve white men with him, when he entered an assemblage of 500 Maoris. He said he had come to inquire about the sad quarrel at Wairau, and Rauparaha told him his story while others supported it by their evidence. Fitzroy stated that the Maoris had been very wrong to kill those who had surrendered, but as the white men had fired first he would take no vengeance for their death. Indeed, at Wellington and Nelson, Fitzroy openly said that the magistrates were wholly misguided in trying to arrest the native chief; and at Nelson he rebuked all those who had been concerned in the affair. This gave great offence to the white men. They asked if the blood of their friends and relatives was thus to be shed and no sort of penalty to be exacted for the slaughter. Many of the magistrates resigned, and a deep feeling of irritation was shown towards the Governor, some of the settlers petitioning the English Government to recall him.
In the August of 1844 a young chief named Honi Heke, who dwelt at the Bay of Islands, on account of a private quarrel with a rough whaler, entered the town of Kororarika with a band of armed followers. He plundered a few shops and cut down a flagstaff on which the Union Jack floated from a steep hill behind the town. There were then not more than ninety soldiers in New Zealand, and when Heke threatened to burn Kororarika, and do the same to Auckland, there was too good reason to fear that he might be as good as his word, for he had 200 well-armed men at his back, and a comrade of his, named Kawiti, had nearly as many. A chief named Waka-Nene with his men kept Heke in check, while Fitzroy sent to Sydney and received 160 soldiers with two cannon. These landed at the Bay of Islands, but Waka-Nene begged the Governor not to hurry into hostilities. He arranged for a friendly meeting. Fitzroy met nine principal chiefs, who apologised and made Heke send also a written apology. Fitzroy said he would redress some wrongs the natives said they suffered, and having obtained from Heke ten muskets by way of fine and having again set up the flagstaff he returned to Auckland.
But before the year was ended Heke approached the town once more with 100 armed men. He insulted it from the hills, cut down the flagstaff again, and then withdrew to the forests. Fitzroy published a proclamation offering ?100 for his capture, and Heke replied by offering ?100 for the head of Fitzroy. The Governor now caused a new flagstaff to be set up, all sheathed with iron at the bottom, and with a strong wooden house attached to it, in which a score of soldiers were always to keep guard. A block-house or small wooden fortress was set up at a little distance down the hill towards Kororarika. Nevertheless, Heke said he would come and cut down the flagstaff again. Then the inhabitants of Kororarika began to drill in order to give him a warm reception if he came. Lieutenant Philpott, the commander of the
5. Kororarika Burnt.—On 11th March, 1845, at daylight, Heke with 200 men crept up to the flagstaff, surprised the men in the house attached, and when twenty men came out of the lower block-house to help their friends on the top of the hill, he attacked them and drove them down to the town in the hollow beside the shore. Close to the beach was a little hill, and on the top of this hill stood a house with a garden surrounded by a high fence. Behind this the soldiers and all the people of Kororarika took refuge. From the rocky high ground round about the Maoris fired down upon them, while the white men fired back, and the guns of the
Heke’s fame now spread among the Maoris. When the settlers from Kororarika were landed at Auckland, homeless, desperate, and haggard, a panic set in, and some settlers sold their houses and land for a trifle, and departed. Others with more spirit enrolled themselves as volunteers. Three hundred men were armed and drilled. Fortifications were thrown up round the town, and sentries posted on all the roads leading to it. At Wellington and Nelson also men were drilled and stockades were built for defence.
6. First Maori War.—But Honi Heke was afraid of the soldiers, and when Colonel Hulme arrived from Sydney with several companies he withdrew to a strong pah of his, eighteen miles inland. Hulme landed at the nearest point of the coast, with a force of 400 men; these were joined by 400 friendly allies under Waka-Nene, whose wife led the tribe in a diabolic war dance, not a little startling to the British soldiers. The road that was to lead them to Honi Heke was only a track through a dense forest. Carts could not be taken, but each man carried biscuits for five days and thirty rounds of ammunition. Under four days of heavy rain they trudged along in the dripping pathway, all their biscuits wet and much of their powder ruined. At last on a little plain, between a lake and a wooded hill, they saw before them the pah of Honi Heke. Two great rows of tree trunks stuck upright formed a palisade round it. They were more than a foot thick, and twelve feet high, and they were so close that only a gun could be thrust between them. Behind these there was a ditch in which stood 250 Maoris, who could shoot through the palisades in security.
The British slept that night without tents round fires of kauri gum, but next morning all was astir for the attack. A rocket was sent whizzing over the palisades. It fell and burst among the Maoris, frightening them greatly, but succeeding discharges were failures, and the Maoris gathered courage to such an extent that a number under Kawiti came out to fight. The soldiers lowered their bayonets and charged, driving them back into the pah. During the night while the white men were smoking round their fires, the sound of the plaintive evening hymn rising in the still air from the pah suggested how strong was the hold that the new faith now had on the Maori mind. Next day Colonel Hulme, seeing that a place defended on all sides by such a strong palisade could not be captured without artillery, dug the graves of the fourteen soldiers killed, and marched back carrying with him thirty-nine wounded men.
There was dismay in Auckland when this news arrived. What could be said when 400 English soldiers
